Monogamy

by Sue Miller

“Hmm,” she says, looking steadily at him. “Because you seem a bit . . . preoccupied.” He can hardly stand it, this solicitude toward him, a solicitude that only compounds his guilt. She knows something is bothering him, which makes him ever more evasive. Which worries her the more. Don’t, he wants to say. Don’t be concerned. Don’t care about me.

“I’ve tried. I’ve tried to be honest.” John smiles. “I know. I know.” Graham does know. He’s not honest. He wants too much for everyone to like him to be honest.

Annie had persisted for a while, even as she understood how judgmental, how small, she sounded. (“So Protestant!” Edith said to her once, and laughed.) But over the weeks and months, she came to accept Edith’s position, and finally, to admire her for it, for her generosity. As they began to know each other well in the aftermath of Edith’s marriage, Annie slowly understood that this generosity, this kindness, was part of what drew her to the other woman.

Consoled to think that life isn’t just one damned thing after another. That it has sequence and consequence.” She smiled at Edith. “I think it was more or less the idea that fictional narrative made life seem to matter, that it pushed away the meaninglessness of death.”

But the residue of that friendship lingered for Annie, lingered especially in the newly sharp eye with which she regarded her own family—that gift that often comes in adolescence, when you’re suddenly old enough to be conscious of how another family works, of the possibility of other rules, other ways of living, from those you grew up with. The gift that can open a window, a door, into the world. Let air in. Let you out.

What she had said exactly—and Sarah never forgot this—was “Love isn’t just what two people have together, it’s what two people make together, so of course, it’s never the same.”)

“Oh, yeah, we all know about that,” Sarah said. “Recovered memory. As in, Catholic priests.” She frowned. “But here’s what’s interesting, I think. Why is it always the bad stuff? Everything you recover.” “Interesting,” Peter said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Yeah. Why don’t we ever work on recovering memories of the good stuff?” “Because you don’t forget the good stuff,” Edith said. “Sure you do,” Sarah said. “There are people who specialize in that. Only the memory of everything awful. Gloom and doom.”

He’d taught her something tonight, taught her almost painlessly. Almost. She’d thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not.

What an impossible match they were! She could never have surrendered enough of herself to make it perfect for him. She sees that. And perhaps in some way that was part of what happened. That he needed too much, too much stuff, because of who he was. And that she couldn’t give him enough, because of who she was. He had understood that, it seems to her, and she hadn’t.