The Lake Shore Limited (25 page)

He asked who Sam was. Then his face turned suddenly grave, which made him seem even younger. "Do you feel safe with him?" he said.

Yes, Billy said. She did. It hadn't occurred to her how it would look--as if she'd been knocked around. They should go after Reuben, she thought. Reuben, who was probably sound asleep in the car out in the parking garage.

He moved her wrist, and she cried out. He sent her to X-ray. Sam came with her and waited for her to be called, and then waited longer with her for the film. He'd been reading an old
Newsweek
, and both times they sat together, he reported to her on whatever obsolete article he'd just finished. They talked about what the appropriate punishment for Michael Vick might be. They discussed their recently discovered ability to make new neurons as adults--who knew? Sam talked to her about his middle son, who probably
had
known--he was doing research on Alzheimer's disease.

When they got the films from the X-ray guy, they headed back to urgent care with them. By now Billy could feel that her knees were stiffening up. "I'm getting older by the second in here," she said, shuffling down the corridor.

"We all are," Sam said. "It's what hospitals are meant to do to you."

Nothing was broken, the young man said, showing her the picture of her own intact, shadowy bones lighted from behind. He gave her a splint that closed with Velcro straps and told her to keep her wrist elevated and iced. She asked for and got a prescription for painkillers, and she and Sam sat together in the pharmacy while it was being filled. She asked him why he was free on a Monday, a workday, and he explained the shape of his life to her--that he worked alone now, he made his own hours. That he'd had a partner for years, but they'd split up when the partner got more interested in developing projects on his own. "More speculative stuff. He's braver than I am. Or more entrepreneurial, I guess you'd say. It was a bit like a divorce, but without the rancor." He'd taken his jacket off and he was slouched in the waiting room chair. He seemed entirely comfortable.

"'Rancor,'" she said. She looked at him. "Was there rancor in your divorce?"

He thought for a moment. "Not quite rancor. Something a little more like ... disappointment, maybe."

"Who was disappointed?"

"We were both disappointed, I think."

"In equal measure, would you say?"

He laughed. "What's it to you?"

She shrugged. "I'm interested in narrative," she said. "How it went. How it was. What happened next."

"Well, I would say yes, in just about equal measure."

"That's a good thing," she said.

He didn't answer.

"Right?" she asked.

"A better thing is no disappointment."

"Well,
yeah
. But do you think that's possible?"

"Don't you?" It was in part his glasses, she thought, that made his gaze look so intense when he asked a question.

"No, I don't," she said. "I've managed to disappoint everybody."

"And been disappointed?"

She smiled at him. "In about equal measure, I would say."

They sat looking across at the pharmacy counter, where everyone--five or six people in white jackets--seemed very busy, but no one was being called.

"Who's 'everybody'?" he asked.

"You don't want to know."

"But I do. I'm interested in narrative, too," he said.

"Well. That's not part of the walk-in-the-Arboretum deal. That information."

"But neither is urgent care," he said.

"Point taken."

"Point
scored."

Finally her name was called, and she went up and got the pills. She took one immediately, bending over the water fountain in the corridor and then tilting her head back to wash it down. Sam admired her technique, called it birdlike.

By the time they pulled over to park, a half block from her apartment, it was getting dark. Billy was slouched against the window on the passenger side, already feeling more comfortable. "Oh drugs," she said. "I love them so."

"They are a blessing," he answered.

She thought suddenly of his wife, of how much serious pain he must have witnessed and had to help with. And failed to help with, finally. And yet here he was, indulging her, trying to make her feel better too. She had a pang of apologetic shame for her whining. "You've been swell today," she said. "Nearly as good as a drug yourself."

"That's almost the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me." They were getting out of the car. He opened the door to the backseat and attached Reuben to the leash.

"What was the nicest?" she asked. She felt afloat, detached from her body as she leaned against an elaborate little iron fence circling someone's front garden. The streetlamps were on. They started to walk, their footsteps seeming loud in the twilight.

"I wouldn't want to be immodest," he said.

"Oh, be immodest."

"Nah," he said.

Inside she hung her coat up and turned on the lamp on her desk and then the one by the couch. She flopped down on the couch. Reuben came and set his immense head in her lap. "Sweet boy," she said. She leaned over and smelled his fur. "I could kill you. I could kill you, my darling. You are a darling I could gladly kill." She leaned back, and a wave of sleepiness rolled over her. She felt it as that: a wave.

Sam was in the kitchen, out of sight. She heard things clunking around. This was exactly what she hadn't wanted, this intimacy, this invasion. "Want tea?" he asked. "Coffee? Wine? What else is here." He was being nice; she gave him that. She heard a cupboard open. "Cognac?"

"Sam, stop it," she called. "You're off duty."

"I have stopped," he said. "I'm going to have a cognac." He appeared in the doorway holding the bottle and a glass. "Want some?"

"I better not," she said. "I'm already a little tipsy from my drug."

"What about tea?"

She looked at him. She should tell him no. She should tell him she wanted to sleep. She said, "Tea would be awfully nice."

He went back into the kitchen. She heard the water running, then the clash of the kettle on the burner. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them, he was setting a cup down next to her. The windows were completely dark. Steam wisped off the teacup. "Whoa," she said. She licked her lips. "I was asleep."

"I know," he said. "You were snoring a little."

"No, I wasn't."

He lifted his hands. And his eyebrows. "As you wish," he said.

"What about the dog?" he asked, sitting down across from her.

"What about the dog?"

"Does the dog need feeding?"

"I'll do it," she said. "I'll do it later. He's flexible, poor thing. He's had to be, since I'm his owner. And you need to stop being so ... solicitous."

"I'm being mostly solicitous of me. I'm having a glass of terrific cognac." He stretched his long legs out. They reached half the distance between them. His face was in shadow, his head tilted up, resting on the chair back.

Billy leaned back, too, on the couch. "You're probably going to get a ticket."

He waved his hand:
Who cares?

"Which I will pay," she said. "It's the price of living where I do, where nobody can park. I wouldn't have friends if I didn't pay their tickets."

"We won't argue about it," he said.

She tried some of the tea. Almost too hot, but not. She set the cup back in the saucer, her hand circling the warm china. After a minute she said, "I didn't want you to come here today. It's why I suggested a walk. Neutral territory."

"Why not?"

"Oh." She gestured around her. "It's all so kind of personal a place."

"Isn't every place where someone lives personal?"

"Not yours, I bet. I bet yours is lovely in a tastefully neutral way. Big. Gracious. Guest hand towels in the bathroom. In the lavatory. Monogrammed. Many bedrooms. Et cetera."

He was silent a moment. She closed her eyes. He said, "You're kind of a snob, you know it?"

"Am I?" She couldn't really see his face, how he meant it.

"In a sort of reverse way."

"But you're the one who thought I was too bohemian or something. That was snobby of you."

"We're both snobs, I guess."

"Perfectly suited to each other. Let's call Leslie."

She could see he was smiling. She closed her eyes again.

Later she would remember that he said something else--a few other things--and that she swam up several times from wherever she was sinking to say something back, but the next time she rose to full consciousness, he was gone. She was covered with the quilt he'd taken off the bed, and Reuben was asleep on the floor by her dangling hand.

She groaned and got up. She went into the bathroom. Bent over the sink, she splashed warm water on her face. She stood straight, grabbing a towel, and looked at herself as she dried off. Her lip was immense, fat, as though she'd been shot with an elephant-sized syringe of collagen. She leaned forward to the mirror and lifted it slightly to look at the cut inside. Standing back again, she saw that she'd lost an earring during this adventure. One of her favorite pair of earrings. This seemed important, somehow.

She felt tired, suddenly. Sad. Emptied out. Reuben was standing in the bathroom doorway, waiting for her. "Come on, old Rube," she said. "Let's get you some supper."

He turned and loped to the kitchen. She followed, more slowly.

Sam's glass and her cup and saucer were rinsed and set in the sink. Reuben's leash lay coiled on the counter. Under it there was a note. She picked it up.
I walked the dog, but I couldn't spot his food. Sam
.

She made a noise. "What am I gonna do with this guy, Rube?" she asked. She suddenly remembered something that he'd said as she was dropping off. She thought she remembered it. He had been speaking again of how different they were, but this time he said, "I thought, Why not? Why not let someone so different into my life?"

Hadn't he said that?

She didn't want to be in Sam's life. How could she be? She didn't want to be in anyone's life but her own.

She picked up Reuben's dish from the floor. Her wrist hurt. She crossed the little galley. She knelt on the floor on her sore knees to reach under the kitchen sink for the bucket that held his dried food. Her view now was of the disorder, the mess hidden under here--the old rags, the dark, irregular shape of some dried-up liquid she'd spilled months ago, a stiffened rubber glove, palm up, supplicant, its yellow browning around the edges.

She felt suddenly teary. "I can't," she said aloud. "I can't do
any
of this."

"SAM!" SHE SAID ON THE PHONE, before he could tell her who was calling. It was Wednesday, late in the afternoon, the day after the play. He had tried earlier, but she and Pierce weren't back home yet. "It was so lovely to see you. Thank you for joining us last night."

"No, I was calling to thank you. You were kind to ask me."

"Well, we were both eager to see you after all this time."

"It was ... it was good to catch up."

"It was."

"And to see Billy's play." It felt strange to speak her name to Leslie. Maybe just to speak her name to anyone for the first time.

"Yes." She seemed hesitant. Or equivocal in some way.

"Though it was tough. Tough for you, I'm sure." They'd talked about this briefly at the intermission. "Tough in some ways for me, too."

"Well, it was just a play." Her voice seemed subdued. "Billy has a right to whatever ... topic. She wants."

"Of course," he said. "When I say it was tough, I don't mean she shouldn't have used it."

There was a moment of silence. She said, "Used Gus, you mean?"

"Actually, no. I wasn't thinking of Gus." He was confused. "I didn't particularly see Gus in there. I mean that she used 9/11. What she might have felt about living through 9/11."

"Ah!"

He thought she was about to say something more. When she didn't, he said, "You did see Gus." It was a question.

"Well, not right away. Not last night. Though I was, bothered, I guess you'd say. And then the more I thought about it, yes. I saw Gus, and I saw Billy. I saw how she must have felt about him--at least at some point. It made me very ... sad."

He waited, but she seemed to be done. "I'm sorry, then," he said.

"Yes. But as I say, she has every right." There was something pinched in her voice.

"It came around though, didn't you think? The play?"

"How do you mean that--'came around'?" she asked.

He was sitting in his kitchen, in his house in Brookline. For some reason, he hadn't turned the lights on in here, so there was just the faint illumination from the hall coloring everything a twilit gray--the chairs and table, the countertop, the dishes from this morning standing in their rack. Outside, it was already dark, at four-thirty.

"Just that the character," he said, "the Gabriel guy, begins to remember his wife. Didn't you think that, in the second act? He remembers the way she was before things ... soured between them. He remembers her, and he more or less,
decides
to love her again."

It was about me, of course
, he wanted to say. As a joke.