The Lake Shore Limited (2 page)

She thought of her mother, of taking care of her in her old age. When she'd gone to visit her, to take her for a walk or a drive or out to lunch, her mother would have dressed herself carefully, she would be wearing makeup, her eyes done heavily and with an unsteady hand that made her look, Leslie always thought, like the David Levine cartoon of the elderly Colette.

Clearly the point of all that effort was to look attractive, and, most of all, to look attractive for Leslie. She wanted to be pleasing to her daughter. She imagined that they'd reconciled, she assumed that Leslie's thoughtful caring for her was a sign of that.

She was wrong. Leslie held every small kindness she performed for her mother against her. Every single generous act was a kind of dagger. A
shiv
, Leslie thought.

How mean she was, really! She didn't have the courage to act on it, but she was. She didn't like it in herself.

Now she went to the closet by the door to the hall and got her coat. She had to search the room's surfaces for the plastic key card. It was on the bureau, under her purse. She would buy some flowers. A big bouquet for the room, to make it feel more theirs. Pierce would like that--she could picture his surprised face, opening in delight. And then it occurred to her that she should get something smaller, too, something she could easily take with her tonight--perhaps rosebuds, she thought. Rosebuds for Billy, for after the play.

She stepped into the thickly carpeted hall and pulled the door shut after her. Silently she made her way to the elevator, every noise muffled. You could kill someone in here, and no one would hear it. The notion made her smile.

Downstairs, though, the lobby was busy, noisy, and alive. Over its bustle, Leslie could hear the tinkle of the cocktail piano floating in from the room where people sat having tea or drinks. Someone was playing "Mountain Greenery."

The cool dampness struck her as soon as she stepped outside. She loved this--the heaviness of the air in Boston, the smell of the sea. Tonight there was a fine mist of rain not so much falling as floating in the air. It was fully dark now, the early dusk deepened by the weather.

She walked slowly down Newbury Street, congested with people getting out of work or shopping, stopping for a drink. She had to weave her way around them sometimes, the groups of three or four walking abreast. The storefronts threw their beckoning light onto the glistening brick sidewalks. The bars were full, their soft lights warm, inviting. Leslie walked past them slowly, trying to imagine what such a life would be like. To sit, as she saw a woman doing now, perched on a bar stool in a crimson suit, turned sideways, her long legs on display, chatting to the two men who stood behind her, each in a suit, a tie. How did it feel? The woman threw her head back to laugh, either in pure pleasure or in the wish to convey pure pleasure, and the men shifted slightly, or so Leslie thought. It seemed to her they looked, for a moment, predatory. But then she was past the window.

The flower shop was in the next block. Leslie came down the short flight of stairs from the street and opened the heavy glass door.

It was cool, almost as cool as outside, and full of the fresh scent of greens, of flowers. There were several outsize bouquets set out on tables, but most of the flowers were separated by type in tall galvanized buckets staged around the room. There was no concession to the season--she saw tulips, delphiniums, hyacinths, long arching branches laden with lilacs. The two girls working in the shop were busy, one talking to a woman, leading her from one cluster of flowers to another, naming them. The other shopgirl was wrapping some amazing long-stemmed fringed tulips for a man. Leslie met her eye and the girl nodded very slightly, acknowledging that she'd seen Leslie, that Leslie would be next.

She moved around the room by herself. Lilies, she was thinking. They had yellow and pink ones, but also a bucket of immense, fragrant Casa Blanca lilies, and those were her favorites. So, for the hotel room, lilies, and maybe this bell-shaped blue flower clustered on a long stem--she thought it might be a kind of campanula.

And then what for Billy? In the refrigerator she saw roses, tall ones in every shade except blue and black, it seemed, but her eye was caught by the smaller ones, sprays of tightly held little flowers just beginning to open, several in a pink so pale as to be almost flesh colored. Almost exactly what she'd imagined beforehand.

When it was her turn, she announced her choices. The girl, very pretty in a plain gray sweater and black skirt, pulled the lilies and campanula--Prichard's variety, she said--out of their buckets and held them up, dripping, in a loose arrangement for Leslie to see.

"Yes," Leslie said. "They're beautiful."

She had to wait while the girl wrapped them, while she cut the rosebuds slightly shorter and inserted each stem into its little plastic water holder. Then she tied their stems with a broad green grosgrain ribbon and wrapped them, like the larger bouquet, in clear, shiny cellophane.

Walking back, Leslie had a sense of largesse, of generosity, enriched by the heady scent she carried with her. When she passed the bar where she'd seen the girl in the red suit, she looked over. One of the men was sitting next to her now, and their heads were close together, talking. The other man, the one who'd lost, as she thought of it, had disappeared.

In the hotel she stopped at the concierge's desk to ask for a vase to be sent up to the room, and then she got into the elevator with two women, possibly her own age--she wasn't good at guessing that anymore. They were expensively dressed, perfectly made up and coiffed. They both had hair of almost the same color, the ashy blond that women going gray or white often chose. They cried out at the flowers' beauty and bent over them to breathe their perfume.

The women got out on the third floor, and Leslie rode up the rest of the way alone. She walked to the room down the broad, empty hall. The crinkling of the cellophane was the only sound.

When she opened the door, she could hear Pierce in the shower. The air in the room felt humid. She laid the flowers down on the bureau top. She hung up her coat and then his, which he'd thrown across the bed. His shirt he'd draped over a chair back. His pants were neatly folded over that. He was singing tunelessly in the bathroom, though she thought the song might be "Shipoopi." He'd been whistling it at home earlier today. He'd said he couldn't get it out of his brain for some reason, though he'd never even liked it.

She went to stand by the window. From here she could look down at the people walking along Boylston Street or disappearing into the Public Garden under the trees, bare trees for the most part--the oaks were still thick with leaves. The moving figures were anonymous, sexless. Just dark shapes, full of mystery for Leslie.

A woman from housekeeping interrupted her dreamy state. Leslie took the vase from her at the door. She filled it with water in the little bar sink, and then unwrapped the bigger bouquet. When she'd arranged the flowers, spreading them in a wide arc, she set the vase on the desk. Then she took the cellophane off the rosebuds, too. It had occurred to her she couldn't take them wrapped as they were to the play--they would make too much noise.

Pierce emerged in the hotel's white bathrobe, his flesh slightly pinked from the heat of the water. He stopped at the lily arrangement. "Ah," he said. "So this is where you were. Lovely." He smiled at her. Then he picked up the bouquet. "And what's this?" He waggled it. "Someone getting married?"

It was true, she thought. It did look like the kind of bouquet a bride would carry. Had she been thinking such a thing? She could feel herself blushing. "It's just something for Billy, to congratulate her--on the play, you know."

"That's more than generous of you."

"Oh, I don't think so."

"It is. Don't argue." He was going through the bureau drawers, getting out clean underwear, a fresh shirt, dark socks.

"I do argue. It's just ... courteous, really. A new play opening, that's something to celebrate. And we're old friends. We should probably do more, when you think about it."

"When
you
think about it."

"You disagree?"

"Ah, Leslie, I don't know. I don't care, in fact. It's generous. It's like you. And it seems unnecessary to me. Maybe it's time you ... let her go, as it were."

He unfurled his shirt. The creases where it had been folded were sharp on the expensive fabric he liked the feel of. Odd, the things Pierce cared about and didn't care about.

"I'm not holding on to her." Her voice sounded childish and defensive, even to her own ear.

"I didn't say you were."

"Well, that would be the opposite of 'letting her go,' wouldn't it?"

He looked over at her, his face not unkind, but distant. How clearly he saw her! How well he knew her! Sometimes she hated him.

"There are all kinds of possibilities between holding on and letting go," he said.

"Oh, 'possibilities,'" she said.

He looked at her again, and then away.

She watched him as he shed the robe, dropping it onto the bed. He was so casual about revealing his body, so offhand! But he could afford to be. He took good care of himself. He was tall and big-boned with a handsome, hawkish face and hair barely touched with gray, and though his flesh, like hers, was creased and stippled here and there, underneath it he was still firmly muscled. He worked out several times a week.

"Wouldn't you say asking Sam along is a way of letting go?" she said.

"I thought you said you'd asked him along because you wanted to see him after all this time. Because you thought he'd enjoy the play."

"Well, and also I thought it might be a kind of signal from me, if Billy needed one."

"What do you mean? What kind of signal?"

She shrugged. "Just that it would be more than okay by me if she got involved with someone else. Not that I'm fixing her up, just that I would understand if she were interested in someone else. It might be time."

"Time!" He snorted. "I suspect she's long since been 'involved,' as you put it, with someone else. Multiple someones, would be my guess." He was buttoning his shirt, looking at himself in the mirror. "I don't think she needs your permission for that."

"Still, she might need my permission to acknowledge it to me, or publicly. And I suppose that is part of why I asked Sam.
And
I thought he'd like the play.
And
I wanted to see him myself."

"Okay," he said. He disappeared into the bathroom, but left the door open.

"How was the show?" she called.

He stuck his head out around the door frame. He was grinning. "Very interesting.
Very."
He waggled his eyebrows up and down. "I'm sorry you weren't there. Though first I had to make my way past more kimonos than you could shake a stick at."

She smiled.

As she started to change her own clothes, she was thinking about Billy. She was nervous, a little, about seeing her. That was always true, for reasons she didn't care to examine too closely. But this time she was also nervous about seeing her play. Pierce had said something about it--that he was surprised she wanted to see it, given the subject matter.

Oh, she would see anything of Billy's, she had said. And this was a different setting, a different idea entirely.

The last time she'd seen Billy had been more than a year earlier, in New York. A year. So much for holding on to her. She should have reminded Pierce of that, of just how long it had been.

Billy had gone to the city for an awards ceremony, and Leslie had taken the train down from White River Junction to have lunch with her the next day, to congratulate her. She'd won a prize for her writing. Not, she'd said at lunch with Leslie, for any particular play, but for a body of work. She'd given this a funny emphasis, she'd smiled at Leslie as she'd said it.

"But what's the joke?" Leslie had asked. "You do have a body of work."

"I suppose so." She sat back, frowning. "But that's just so not the way I think of it. To me it's always just ... the next play, and the next, and the next. Each quite separate from the last. It's strange to think of them as being part of any kind of a whole." She had looked off, down the quiet street. "I can't imagine it, actually--thinking that way about your own work." They were sitting at one of three tables on the brick sidewalk outside a little restaurant in the West Village. She lifted her shoulders. "Though maybe that comes along, when you've done enough. You sort of look back and say, 'Oh, so
that's
what I was up to, all along.'"

"But it's never just one thing you've been up to, is it?"

Billy laughed. She had a nice laugh, Leslie had always thought this about her. She remembered the first evening she'd met her, when Gus brought her up to Vermont. They were sitting outside in the backyard. Pierce had told a joke, and then Gus and Billy had each told several, and part of the pleasure of listening to them was hearing Billy's surprised-sounding, delighted laughter after each one. It seemed
generous
to Leslie. It made her like Billy even before she knew anything about her.

"Well,
I
don't think so," Billy said now. "But it seems the critics may. 'Oh, here she comes, doing that again.' When for me each one feels completely different."

"But I suppose what you expose is your ... your temperament, in the end."

Leslie had startled herself, saying this. She hadn't quite realized that that's what she thought. But as she spoke, she understood it, that she'd recognized something about Billy, something that surprised her, when she saw the plays. In fact, she'd only seen two before the one they were to see tonight, but they definitely had shared some quality. Hardheadedness, she'd said to Pierce later. Toughness, he thought. Surprising, they both felt, when Billy in person was so accommodating, so easy.

Oh, every now and then with Gus you caught a glimpse of it--a flash of irritation at something he said, a cool withdrawal for a while after he offered an opinion that she apparently found questionable. And there was that one time when they were talking about movies they'd seen lately and he was describing one he'd liked. Where had they been? Some restaurant, she thought. Probably in Hanover, one of the times Billy and Gus came up to see them.