The Lake Shore Limited (18 page)

But he brought it up so often that she said yes, finally.

They drove up to Vermont on a Saturday in late July in Gus's old yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the windows open because you couldn't turn the heater off. As they slowed down to drive into the little town where Leslie lived, Billy looked around and thought how preposterously perfect it was--the sunlight filtering through the tall maple and oak trees on the town green, the white houses arrayed around it. Billy saw children playing on the green as they pulled into Leslie's dirt driveway.

The house itself was old and quirky and sweet, its windows wide open to the soft air moving through it. Inside, the floors tilted, the ceilings were low. They stood for a long moment in the front hall. Billy watched the curtains at the living room windows lift and fall. When no one appeared, Gus leaned into the stairwell to the second floor and called Leslie's name.

"Oh!" someone said. They heard rushing footsteps above them, and then Leslie came down the narrow staircase, emerging into their view feetfirst on the steep ladderlike stairs. Billy was startled as she descended by how different Leslie was from Gus--soft, almost plump, where he was buff, dark where he was blond. And there was something grave, something serious, about her, which you couldn't have said of Gus, though when she turned from embracing him to hold out her hand to Billy, her face opened in a smile of dazzling warmth. "Billy," she said. "I think I would have known you anywhere." Her hand itself was warm, her grip firm. Billy liked her immediately, just as Gus had promised she would.

They sat in the side yard, and Leslie brought out a tray with a pitcher and served them lemonade. Just as she finished pouring their glasses, one of the children across the road called loudly to another, "That's not the rules." And another answered, "Yeah, well, the rules stink."

"So true," Billy said, and Leslie laughed.

The shade around them was dappled, shifting when the breeze moved the trees. From where she sat, Billy had a view in one direction of the green and the playing children, in the other of the garden--wide swaths of tall, arching plants in pale colors. Leslie peppered her with questions about herself, about where she'd grown up and how, about how she started writing plays. But she talked about herself, too, about her family and Gus's. Late in the afternoon, she got up "to do something about supper," she said, though it would turn out she'd already done a great deal about supper. She came back after a minute or two, the screen door smacking shut behind her, and handed Billy and Gus two small tin buckets. She asked them to pick a few cups of raspberries from a patch she had in the backyard, behind the flower garden.

When Pierce came home from the hospital, he served them gin and tonics under the trees, and Leslie came and sat with them again. Billy didn't quite
get
Leslie and Pierce together, they seemed such an odd pair. Leslie fell almost silent around him, and he seemed entirely comfortable about that, about occupying center stage. Gus kept him going, too, asking him questions, almost teasing him sometimes. They told jokes for a while, in turn, and Pierce laughed loudly after each one, even his own. Billy liked that, someone who laughed at his own jokes.

They moved indoors for dinner, just in time to escape the bugs that had started to descend. There was cold soup to start, a minty puree of peas, and then sliced lamb and potatoes. The dark slowly gathered around the house. About halfway through the meal, Leslie lighted the candles on the table. There was something lovely, something ceremonial, in the concentrated, graceful way she did it. When Billy looked away from her, the windows were suddenly black. The reflection of the candles swayed and leaped in the warped, uneven old panes of glass.

Leslie cleared off the dinner plates--Gus got up and helped her--and then brought out pound cake, with ice cream and a seedless raspberry sauce.

After dinner, Pierce went up to his study to do some work. Gus and Leslie and Billy carried the dishes to the kitchen. Leslie wouldn't let them help her wash them, so Gus took Billy for a walk,
to spy on the neighbors
, he said. They made a slow circuit of the green. Amazingly to Billy, no curtains were drawn. She and Gus could look freely through the windows at what seemed the mild and pleasant activities of the townspeople: television, reading. Some families were still sitting around tables in their kitchens or dining rooms. As Gus and Billy walked, a group of boys on bikes swooped past them several times in the dark, doing wheelies, yelling at one another, their white T-shirts all you could see of them at a distance. The air smelled green and fresh.

They lay down on the grass of the town green. It was cool and dampish against Billy's back. Above them, more stars than she would have thought possible glimmered and shone. A distant cluster was so thickly strewn that it looked like spilled powder. Someone called for a child to come in, a faint call that sounded full of grief to Billy: "Louey. Lou-ey."

A car drove past, its headlights raking over the white houses, the trees--and then it was gone and everything was dark again. Billy said, "I know why you wanted me to meet your sister."

"Yeah? Why?"

"Because you wanted to append this whole scene, and Leslie, too, to yourself. To add this ... dimension, whatever it is--sweet Americana--to my sense of who you are."

"I'm not so devious as you think I am. I just thought you'd like her."

"I do. What's not to like?"

When they got back, the house was silent. There was just one lamp on in the living room. Leslie and Pierce had gone to bed.

Gus and Billy turned the light off and felt their way up the creaking, narrow stairs to the bedroom that had been Gus's when he was in college. It had a ceiling that sloped radically. Over the bed was a skylight. Looking up, Billy could see the moon just appearing. The stars were made faint by its bright light, and the night sky looked blacker behind it.

She took the first turn in the bathroom and then slid between the cool sheets. She could hear Gus brushing his teeth, peeing. He came back and stretched out next to her. He smelled of peppermint and a flesh smell unique to him, faintly grassy. He started to touch her breasts, but Billy said, "No. Gus."

After a moment, he asked, "Why?"

"They'll hear us."

"We'll be quiet. We'll make stealth love."

"I can't, Gus. It's too close. They're too close." Was that it? Billy wasn't sure.

They lay there, whispering in the silvery light. After a while, from across the hallway, through the walls, they faintly heard a light, repeated crooning--Leslie's voice. Pierce joined her after a few moments, first a soft rhythmic call under her song, then getting louder, rising above it, as they each--both--swam toward a climax. A definitive climax, though all of this had been muted, perhaps out of the polite hope that they wouldn't be heard. Slowly they subsided into silence. After a minute or two Billy heard their voices in sleepy conversation, a few low alternating murmurs.

"Hmm!" said Gus, when all had been quiet for a while. She could see that he was grinning. His teeth looked dangerous in this light.

"Interesting," she answered.

"Kind of a precedent, wouldn't you say?" He turned on his side to her again.

"Gus, no. I mean even more now I'd feel self-conscious. It would seem so ... competitive."

"Oh, and that's something you never indulge in."

"I just can't, Gus."

She lay awake a long time after Gus had dropped off. The moonlight moving across the bed kept her from sleep, but she was also conscious of a slight discomfort she was feeling about him; she wasn't sure why.

No, here's what it was. Gradually, over the course of the afternoon and evening, he had come to seem
young
to her. Too young. Not grown up. It had to do with Leslie, with the way he was around Leslie. He seemed so easily to take from her. He had described her to Billy as being like a mother to him, but this was something you'd grow out of in the back-and-forth struggle with a mother, she thought.

In the car the next day, driving home, she said, "I would pay money to have someone adore me the way your sister adores you." She had her bare feet propped on the dash to escape the warm air pumping steadily in from below it.

"You don't need to. Ta-da! Here I am."

"Not the same. You are aware of certain, shall we say, flaws."

"I can't think of a one," he said.

"You see? You have to joke about it."

Over the next year, they went up to Vermont frequently, usually once a month or so. Often Billy and Leslie sat up late together after Pierce and Gus were asleep. In the warm weather they sat on the screened porch off the dining room; and then--in August and September, as the nights grew rapidly cooler, and then cold--they were inside, in the low-ceilinged living room. They moved easily from one thing to another in these conversations--plays and movies, books they liked, cities they'd traveled to. Leslie asked about her awful first marriage, about her childhood as the daughter of a distinguished man.

"A great man," Billy said. "Or so we were instructed. By our mother, poor invisible woman. And, of course, by him, himself." She felt at ease talking about this with Leslie, though she'd never discussed it with Gus. "A bigger narcissist I never met. The Great Pooh-Bah, I called him. Behind his back, of course."

Leslie in her turn talked about Pierce and the way they met, about her and Gus's ugly growing up. About their mother's irrational anger--once she'd seen scratches on Gus's face, she said, and he'd told her it was nothing, that their mother had slapped him because he'd left his bedding on the sofa after he'd gotten up, and her ring had caught in his flesh and torn it.

"Nothing
, he called it." Her voice was full of pain. Her mouth tightened as she shook her head.

She spoke of how amazed she always was by Gus's lightheartedness. "I feel as though we divided up the way to respond or react to our family along very tidy lines. I took in all the hard, mean stuff. I noticed it. And I know that's made me the kind of person I am," she said. "I also know what kind of person that is. I know how I like things--orderly and calm--and I understand what's not very brave about that, what frightens me when that feels threatened."

They were having this conversation outdoors, on the porch. It was dark, and their voices seemed almost disembodied in the night air. Perhaps they wouldn't have said so much otherwise.

"Honestly, though," Leslie said, "I don't know where Gussie's temperament comes from. He's so ... carefree, really. My father might have been a bit that way when he was younger, but by the time Gus would have been aware of him, he wasn't much of anything but a drunk."

When work started for Billy and Gus in the fall--Gus at the suburban prep school where he taught, Billy at BU--they were so busy that they agreed they wouldn't see each other at all during the week. Billy was teaching two courses that were new for her, and Gus, of course, had classes every day, and lessons and papers to go over most weeknights. They usually spent a day of every weekend together, though, sometimes in the big apartment Billy was subletting in Brookline, occasionally at Gus's smaller place in Somerville. They explored the city or slept late; they cooked together and saw plays and movies, they listened to music. They made love. They drove up to see Leslie and Pierce. All of it seemed easy, unfraught.

Almost all of it.

Occasionally Billy would feel Gus's attentiveness to her as stifling, his willingness to change his mind about anything she had a strong opinion on as weak. Where were his own feelings? His own passionate convictions? She'd withdraw from him then, and sometimes be silent, sullen, disliking herself for this but unable to control it. Or she'd stay away from him for a couple of weeks--once, for almost a month--making up some excuse having to do with her need to work. Which was always true, there was so much she was trying to get done.

Every now and then, too, she would have the uncomfortable awareness she'd experienced the first time she'd seen Gus with Leslie--the sense of him as undeveloped, little-boyish. And seeing that, feeling that, would make her conscious of her distance from him, conscious of the way in which she was almost using him.
Passing the time
, as if with a pleasant, momentarily engaging diversion--the equivalent of the popcorn and ice-cream dinners she sometimes indulged in when she was alone.

But then he'd do something winning, say something funny. Or she'd remember his terrible childhood and excuse him for everything. Or she'd suddenly be turned on by his physical beauty and they'd spend an afternoon or an evening in bed, making each other come over and over.

She didn't love him. She knew she wasn't going to love him. She knew, too, that it was different for him. Once he had said to her, "I think I'm falling in love with you, Billy Gertz."

She had felt almost sorry for him then, it had seemed so adolescent to her--the claim of someone who wants reassurance that his feeling is returned before he'll truly announce it. She had made her voice light, though, when she answered. She said, "Oh, don't do that. It's more fun the way it is."

When there were problems, it was mostly a matter of this kind of thing, Billy aware of her distance from Gus and reacting to that by being irritated with him for pushing in closer or with herself for not taking her own life more seriously, for wasting her time and, therefore, as she reminded herself occasionally, his time, too.

Occasionally though, very occasionally, Gus would find something about Billy or her life that bothered him. Sometimes he complained of the way she disappeared into her work, the way she was distracted and only half there when she was in the midst of some project. He didn't like it when she went out with other men, which she did every few weeks, sometimes in a group, sometimes with just one person. These were colleagues, she pointed out to him. Other writers, people she was getting to know as she moved more into the Boston theater community.

Once it was because she used a private joke of theirs in a play she was working on--the little shriek she'd given when he kissed her for the first time. She was sitting next to him during a reading of this play, an evening of staged readings of faculty work. She thought to turn and watch him when the moment arrived. He laughed, but his face fell quickly. She could tell he was hurt.