Sitting here at his desk, he suddenly remembers that in the midst of all that, when he was most besotted, she told him that she’d slept again with an old lover—Jeff, it was. Jeff, the guy who’d brought her to the bookstore party. Jeff, and then, unbelievably, another guy too, someone she’d been fixed up with by friends, friends who didn’t yet know about Graham’s presence in her life. How astonished he’d been that she wasn’t, like him, feeling the overwhelming sense of a beginning—a beginning that would have made even the idea of sex with someone else impossible.
He remembers now that she said the impulse was born, in fact, exactly from being with him—the sense she had because of that of being wildly fuckable. Of wanting everything. “Really, almost everyone,” she said. She laughed then, before she saw his face.
He’s stopped by this memory.
And then he understands what he’s up to. Oh, blameless, blameless Graham—because she did it too. That’s what this is, he thinks.
But she did it before we were a couple.
For a while, this checks him. He types in the changes he’s made to the introduction to Jamie, and reads it through, speaking it aloud once more. He looks over the monthly figures from the store.
Then it begins to nag at him again: isn’t it possible, might she not have amused herself with someone else, maybe even after they were a couple? After they were married?
Amused herself, he thinks. A little amuse-bouche. He thinks of going down on her, his own amuse-bouche. How he loves it. A time back then when he felt he wanted to enter her, swim into her, headfirst, mouthfirst.
These images, these thoughts, arrive and disappear as he finishes at the desk. He gets up finally and goes into the bathroom, into the lingering scent of her shampoo, of her soap—but something else too, something elemental to her.
The sun from the skylight above the shower warms him even before he turns the water on, and he stands gratefully under it and the spray. When he’s finished and steps out, the air is cool on his wet body. He dries off, inspecting himself as he works the towel—the diminishing number of white hairs at the top of his chest, the sling of his belly, the fattish penis below it, his burden, apparently. He sighs and goes to the bedroom to get dressed.
Standing in front of the closet, he slides the hangers along. The light brown linen suit, he thinks. An off-white shirt. The soft leather shoes just a shade darker than the suit.
All this—these expensive clothes and his love for them—was a later element in his transformation. It happened at about the time he bought the bookstore, just before he met Annie. He had wanted to mark the end of his catch-as-catch-can life—the blue jeans, the secondhand tweed jackets, the thick Frye boots. He wanted, he supposed, to look more like a man of substance. A burgher. The spring the bookstore opened, he’d bought two suits, one seersucker, one a pale gray linen. Then, in the fall, two more suits, light wool ones.
He’d actually talked to his shrink about these choices, these decisions.
The shrink was part of his old life. An éminence grise, Graham was given to understand later, who didn’t seem to feel the need to play by what Graham had always understood to be the rules for shrinks. He talked freely about himself to Graham, he shared anecdotes from his own life. He did have a couch in his office, but he and Graham sat opposite each other at a wide desk—like colleagues, Graham thought, working on some shared project. Sometimes his flatulent old dog scratched at the door, and Dr. Fielding got up and let him in. Their conversations on those days were punctuated by Boogan’s occasional prolonged farts.
He had started seeing Dr. Fielding after he and Frieda split up. First about his guilt over that—over Frieda and Lucas—and later about everything else: his family background, his sexual life, the store and how it was changing everything for him. And then, after she’d entered his world, Annie.
But from the beginning they had also talked every now and then about clothing, talked about it as an expression of Graham’s wish to be changed, somehow. To be a better person. Or at least a different person.
He’d stopped seeing the shrink by the time his interest intensified, by the time he began to really know about the quality of the clothes, to care about it—the fabric, the leather, the cut, the stitching. By the time he became, as Annie calls him occasionally, “something of a fop.”
Those early clothes are all gone now. Even the clothes he’s putting on today are old enough to be a bit worn, but he finds them the more beautiful because of this.
He looks at himself in the full-length mirror before he leaves for lunch. He’s thinking of how much it would amuse his friend John if he were here, watching Graham costume himself.
Rather like Karen, he thinks.
Only different.
He laughs, quickly. “Enough,” he says aloud, and heads down the narrow, tilting staircase and out the door into the perfect early-summer day—the sky the blue of a child’s bright crayon. The humid air a kiss.
3
As she stepped out of the house, her hair still damp from her shower, Annie paused to look over at Karen’s yard, thinking that she would speak to the old woman if she was still outside, that she’d comment somehow on the possibility—yea, the desirability—of getting dressed before going out to meet the world. But Karen was back in her house, apparently. Sam, her fat orange cat, sat alone and imperturbable at the opened gate between her yard and theirs, looking back at Annie in his bored, slightly contemptuous way. She gave him the finger and continued down the driveway past the Caldwells’ dark dining room windows and to the curb, where her car sat waiting.
Her car. Annie loved this car. It was an old green Citroën van that she’d kept alive at great expense. She could have bought several newer cars for the money she’d spent over the years getting it ready to pass inspection—always a dicey call. She even loved the guys who’d repaired it for her over and over, who groaned dramatically whenever she called to make an appointment. At one point they’d had to replace its entire underside—it was so laced with rust that when you drove through a puddle, water splashed up under your feet.
As she got in and started the engine, she was swept anew by her sense of deep friendship for it—a pleasure in its smells, in its improvised elements: the radio that turned on and off via a doorbell installed on the dashboard, the seat covers she’d made out of a bright-orange-and-pink-striped Sunbrella fabric when the old plastic covers had cracked and worn through.
It had served them so well through the years, in so many ways. She had a sheet of plywood and a mattress she could install in it, and in their impoverished early life together, she and Graham had driven up and down the East Coast several times, sleeping at state parks and the occasional rest stop, pulling the curtains across the windows when they wanted to have sex. When the children were young, in the days before mandatory car seats and seat belts, Lucas or Sarah and sometimes a friend or two had sat in folding chairs in the open back space, chairs that occasionally slid sideways, to their delight, if she or Graham took too sharp a turn.
And if she took the seats out of the back entirely, the space was more than ample to transport her equipment when she traveled to take pictures. Or to haul framed work here or there, which would be her task today.