The Lake Shore Limited (29 page)

Across the street a row of storefronts took up the ground floors of the old brick town houses and, above them, like so many lighted stage sets, the apartments, one to a floor, it seemed. There were characters visible in several of them.

Around him the theatergoers arrived and milled. Sam watched them, too--another of the pleasures of being early. A group of what seemed to be students was assembling in front of the doors, almost all of the men sporting the little goatee that had become so inexplicably popular now--a half dozen Lenins. They were calling to one another as they gathered, they were talking loudly in twos and threes. One of the young women, a beautiful redhead with very white skin, said to the man standing with her, "Yeah, seventy-two hours at the max. And even then, sometimes ..."

Family visits, Sam thought. He'd put money on it. Staying with parents, having your parents stay with you. It made him think of his oldest son, Charley, and his wife, whom he visited once a year or so for a weekend--
max
--by what seemed like mutual consent. At least they never pressed him to stay longer, and he didn't ask to, in spite of the fact that Charley lived the farthest away--San Francisco--and was the one child of Sam's with little children of his own, Sam's only grandkids.

It was suddenly quiet under the marquee when the group went inside. Sam saw an old couple coming up the sidewalk toward the theater in the deep shadow of their umbrella. They were both tall, the man bent a little over the white-haired woman. They walked slowly and cautiously. It was perhaps seven or eight seconds before he recognized them--a world of time. He felt shock when he did, and then the effort of trying to make the quick adjustment. He started to move in their direction just as they arrived under the marquee and Pierce swept the umbrella back and away to close it.

"Ah!" Sam said, stepping up to them. He felt confused by his mistake, by how changed Leslie was, but he held her face and kissed it, twice--remembering, at the moment he did it, that this was exactly the way he had held her the one time he truly kissed her, standing in a field in Vermont.

So that started it. A sense of discomfort that set things in motion, that was at work through the evening. Certainly he felt awkward talking to Leslie and Pierce for a little while after that, though Pierce, as usual, made everything easier with his energy, his loud voice.

Then there was the play, the way in which it stirred his shame about himself. It seemed to affect Leslie, too, nearly silencing her for a time. It must be hard for her, he thought during the first act. There must have been such a time for her, a time like the one in the play, when she was waiting without knowing whether Gus was alive or not.

And then after the play, just before Billy arrived at the restaurant, they were having their strange discussion about pornography, sparked by Pierce's account of a show at the MFA that he'd gone to see that afternoon. It occurred to Sam that Pierce might have introduced the subject to distract Leslie, to pull her back from wherever she'd gone in response to the play. But maybe not. You couldn't always tell what Pierce was aware of, what he just stumbled into.

Pierce had said that his first porn experience was with photographs of his father's that one of his older brothers had found and showed to him. "Beauties of the twenties or thirties," he said, "with the great blurry, silvery lighting and the makeup of that day,
comporting
themselves in various ways I would have thought shameful. But no. They were all smiling pleasantly--happily, I'd venture to say--while they diddled themselves or looked back at the camera over their handsomely displayed buttocks. And
'splayed'
is the operative part of that word. That was what dazzled me most. That it wasn't shameful." He frowned momentarily. "That was, I suppose, the real revelation involved for me."

Sam had offered a movie he'd seen at college. "Pretty formulaic. The stud arrives at the door. A milkman, I think. Or a postman. Or an iceman."

"The iceman cometh," Pierce said.

"Well, exactly. The missus, without much to-do, lies down on the kitchen table, and, yep, the iceman cometh. Amply."

And though Sam had seen such a movie, this wasn't his first experience with porn. He couldn't have spoken of that, wouldn't have spoken of it in Leslie's presence. That had happened at a state fair when he was about fourteen or fifteen. He'd told his parents he was going to play some games, and instead he'd gone directly to the girlie tent, holding out the entrance fee, not looking at the man taking his money--worried that he'd be turned away because of his age.

Inside, a group of twenty or thirty men were standing around, waiting, in much the same way they stood around when they were about to look at cattle or hogs, but without the pointed interest money brought to such things. When the woman came out, their faces, like his own, he supposed, went thick and stupid.

She was naked except for high heels. She was older--she might have been about as old as his mother. She walked back and forth on the elevated platform, lifting up her breasts, pretending to squirt her nipples at one man or another, putting her hand between her legs, clearly sticking her fingers up into herself. Meanwhile the huckster standing on the ground in front of the platform was talking about what went on in an interior tent for more money. It was as shocking to Sam as anything, the secret words said aloud by an adult:
suck, fuck, asshole, cunt
.

Sitting with Pierce and Leslie, Sam was suddenly remembering it all: the dim light, a bare bulb or two suspended from the top of the tent. The smell of the men's sweat and of the stirred-up dirt under their feet. The woman turning away from them, bending over, holding her cheeks and cunt open. He remembered that she set a bottle on the stage and balanced a coin on it, that she squatted over it, that the neck of the bottle and the coin went up into her, that she stood and reached into herself, pulling the coin out slowly, licking it off.

He'd come out afterward stunned into daylight, sunshine, the crowded fairgrounds. He was still nearly speechless when he met his parents at the agreed-on place. They took him home early. His mother thought he was getting sick.

But he said nothing about this to Pierce and Leslie. Instead, when his turn came to talk again, he was making some lofty, theoretical remarks about the venality of soft-core stuff in the movies, when Leslie said, "Here's Billy!" and turned to go to the door.

So all that was in the air when Billy arrived, small as a child. And though it slowly fell away over the course of the conversation he had with her, it came back at the end of the evening when she got down from her chair suddenly and said she had to go, she had to walk her dog. Her face, which had been so animated only seconds before, had changed, had gone flat, dead. Three minutes later, standing alone on the rainy street, he watched her walk away, her small dark form seeming to disappear into the night from one moment to the next.

Did she even have a dog? he wondered. He felt that stupid about what had just happened.

But he thought about it, he argued with himself about it, and the next day he called Leslie and got Billy's number, and then on the Friday of that week he called her, and when she called him back, they agreed to meet, to walk her dog together.

As Sam stepped out into the night air, he felt how shockingly much colder it was than when he and Billy had started their disastrous walk, much colder even than when they came back to her house from the offices of her HMO. He pulled the collar of his jacket up as he walked along the brick sidewalk. From halfway down the block, he could see that he had a ticket on the windshield of his car--the ticket Billy had assured him he would get, the ticket she had said she would pay.

When he got to the car, he lifted it from under the windshield wiper and pocketed it. He had no intention of mentioning it to her. As he started the engine, it seemed to him that the interior of the car still smelled faintly of dog, a not-unpleasant odor, actually.

The car had only just started to warm up inside by the time he got home. He came into the front hall and set his keys and wallet on the stand there. Looking up, he saw that the message light on the telephone in the living room was blinking red.
Billy
, he thought, and was surprised at how boyishly happy he felt.

But even crossing the room, he was preparing himself to be disappointed. She wouldn't have called, he told himself. She couldn't have.
She was still asleep. She was drugged
.

The voice on the machine was Jack's, his middle son's, saying he was coming to Boston for a conference the next weekend, could he stay with Sam? "I'm sorry to call so late. I was just assuming I'd crash with you, but then I realized I really should check it out first, the way real people do. I think I haven't seen you since early summer. Too long, however you slice it. But let me know."

Sam was disappointed. And then was angry at himself for that. This should have lifted his spirits. Normally it would have. What was wrong with him that it didn't now? What kind of father was he?

He called Jack and got
his
recorded message, of course. He left a warm, enthusiastic response on it.
Yes, come. Yes, it will be great to see you
.

As he hung up, he was suddenly aware that the house felt chilly. On his way to the kitchen, he stopped and turned the hall thermostat up. He could hear it trigger the switch, then the faraway roar in the basement.

Though he wasn't hungry, he fixed himself dinner. Pasta. Pasta with olive oil and some tarragon he found in the refrigerator and chopped up. He made himself do this, cook for himself, three or four nights a week. A form of moral instruction. A way to stave off the sense of fecklessness he sometimes felt waiting to claim him. While he sat at the kitchen table eating, he heard the wind rise outside. One of the dining room windows rattled. He got up and went into the dark room to latch it. He stood for a moment with his hand on the cold metal, lost in thought, seeing Billy pitching forward, feeling again how frightened he'd been, watching it.

But it had changed things--the accident. Things had been too polite before then, slightly strained. Their conversation, everything, was unforced and easier afterward.

Was he glad it had happened then?

He was, he supposed. In a way. He had liked taking care of her. Helping her. This abruptly struck him as worrisome. As a habit, really--a way of being with women, with people generally--that he fell into just a shade too easily. And hadn't she been irritated, a little, at his fussing? Even at his being there? She had told him so, for Christ's sake. Why hadn't he left once he got her safely home?

Because things changed again after that. She was funny, she relaxed.

Of course she relaxed, he told himself. She was
drugged
.

Still, he had liked sitting across from her in the big, underfurnished parlor, talking about nothing, talking about his house and hers, teasing each other. What he felt about her, he realized, was that she had a moral sense, a solidity, that existed apart from any of the irregular details of her life.

Could he know that about her, based on one afternoon?

And an evening, he reminded himself, looking out the window. And a play.

He thought of the way her face had looked when he asked her idly after the play what the worst thing she'd ever done was. You would have thought homicide by looking at her. He saw again the pain in her face as she looked around at the other sad occupants of the waiting room at the HMO. He remembered the moral complexity of the Gabriel character's response to his situation, a complexity the Anita character had likened to Henry James's work.

He
could
know it, he thought.

Outside the window, the branches of the trees bent and swayed in the wind. He went back to the kitchen and finished his meal. He carried the dishes to the sink and rinsed them, loaded them into the dishwasher.

He moved restlessly around the house. He sat blankly in the living room, not seeing the family photographs on the mantel, the worn upholstery on the couch and chairs, unchanged since the boys' punishing childhood. He went upstairs and turned the television on, but nothing drew him, not even sports. He pulled on a sweater and went back downstairs and through the passageway to his office, an addition at the side of the house with its own outside entrance, too, constructed after Susan died. He'd built it because he wanted to be able to work at home, to be on call for the boys after school.

Now he sat at his desk and fooled around with the detail he was figuring out for the windows in the library job. His mind emptied out, free of Billy, of himself, of his history and his life. At some point he looked up to see what time it was. Unbelievable: midnight. This is why we have work, he thought. He got up at about one and went back into the house.

He checked the message light on the telephone--steady green. And then he stood for a long moment in the entry hall, looking around at it.

This was the grandest space in the house, really. The staircase opposite the front door rose up, took a turn to the right across the wide landing, and disappeared. The windows on the landing reached all the way up to the third floor and, in the daytime, flooded this whole area with light. The furniture here--the hall stand, the bureau that had once held everyone's mittens or winter scarves--these were antiques, from Susan's family.

He thought of what Billy had said about his house. Big, tasteful, neutral. He supposed that was true in some ways, though it was more worn than she might have guessed.

And then he was remembering coming into this hallway with his youngest son, Mark, home from college for some holiday visit. Mark, trailing him, had said out of the blue, "You ever think about moving, Dad?"

Sam had turned back to his son, startled.

Mark was looking around this very space as though really seeing it for the first time. He raised his shoulders, almost in apology, it seemed. "It's just so big."

"And empty, I know. I think of it from time to time, I guess. And then I think of all the crap--my stuff and you kids' stuff--and I lose heart."