The Lake Shore Limited (3 page)

Gus's face was lively as he talked, but Leslie noticed that Billy seemed not to be responding to him. She looked impatient, actually. When he had finished, she said, "You should probably provide attribution for remarks like that, dear heart."

Gus's face changed. Closed up.

After a moment, Leslie asked, "Remarks like what, Billy?"

Billy turned to her, cheerful, even impish. "Remarks lifted wholly or in part from someone else's
brain,"
she said.

After his death, though, there hadn't been anything like that. She'd been stunned, nearly dumbstruck, in her grief. And her grief had seemed never ending. Even at their lunch last year she had spoken of it. They had almost finished, the table's white paper was dotted with red wine stains and translucent circles where drops of olive oil had fallen on it. Leslie could feel sharp crumbs under her arms where she rested them.

She had reached over and touched Billy's hand, lightly. "How are you doing?" she asked. They came to this point each time they saw each other.

"Oh, I'm fine," Billy said with a carelessness that seemed deliberate to Leslie.

"I'm so glad," Leslie had answered.
(You see, Pierce?
Even then she had wanted to give Billy permission.
Move on
, she had been about to say, hadn't she? Something like that.
Live your life.)

Then Billy had said, "But I will never get over it. I won't." Her voice was fierce. Angry, even. Leslie was startled. Billy had raised her hand then to hold off whatever she might have said in response.

Well, of course Leslie would never get over it either, but at this point she could finally think of Gus without the anguish she'd felt for years. In fact, she often thought now that the pleasure she'd come to take again in her own life had brought him back to her, somehow. This play tonight--she could imagine how thrilled he would have been to be going. And where that thought would once have been a cause for the bitterest grief on her part, now she felt it as connected to her enjoyment of the evening--she felt she was going
for
him and, therefore, in a sense, with him. She stood in front of the mirror, holding her necklace in her hands, not seeing her own reflection. She was thinking of Gus, of how vital, how alive he'd been. Her own return to life, to
aliveness
, was in honor of him, she felt. Everything she noticed, everything she did, he was part of.

Pierce didn't understand this. He thought she was being morbid when she continued to speak of Gus so often two years, three years, after his death. He had said she was dwelling in it. She'd stopped trying to explain that it had changed for her, that she felt it differently. But by now she'd stopped talking about him at all to Pierce unless he brought up Gus's name first.

Now Pierce began to sing again, breaking the spell. She raised the necklace to her throat, held it in place. Would it draw attention to her neck, or deflect it? Pierce crossed behind her, and she asked him.

He paused, gazed critically at her, tilting his head. "Wear it," he said.

Completely avoiding the question. How like him! She fumbled with the clasp, finally got it, and then went into the bathroom to apply her makeup. As she used the eyeliner, the shadow, the words to Pierce's song were running through her head. "Little old Sal was a no gal, as anyone could see. Look at her now, she's a go gal ..."

"Do you want to walk?" Pierce asked from the other room.

"No. There are those brick sidewalks, and I'm wearing high heels."

"So?"

"So they get stuck between the bricks. You risk falling. Let's take a cab." She ran the lipstick over her mouth and blotted it. There. She was done. She looked at herself critically. It helped, she thought. A bit.

In the elevator, she asked him, "Are you looking forward to this?" She was watching his reflection in the shiny brass doors.

"I'm sure it'll be good, but you know how I feel about the theater."

She did. She'd heard it many times. Practically every time they went to a play. They were all
over the top, too much
. What he hated, basically, was that the theater was theatrical. He preferred movies, their naturalism, the fact that people could speak as softly as they did in real life. And there was no spittle flying around either--that was very important to him.

"And I'll be glad to see Sam, of course." He turned to her and smiled. "And Billy." The doors had opened, and they were crossing the lobby again.

Outside, the doorman signaled for a cab, and she and Pierce got in. At the corner, they turned right, into the theater district, such as it was. But these were the big theaters, the ones for touring musicals, or
The Nutcracker
at Christmas. Billy's play was at a new, small theater in the South End. Leslie looked out the window, turned away from Pierce. It was nice of him to have said he looked forward to seeing Billy. She knew he had mixed feelings about her, feelings he'd been more honest about before Gus died. Afterward, her obvious pain had silenced him.

The cabdriver said something, something she didn't understand. She looked at Pierce, frowning, questioning. He gestured, shook his head, and she looked back at the driver just as he spoke again. He was wearing one of those earpieces that were telephones, she saw it now.

The language he was talking was unrecognizable to her. Another foreign tongue. As she relaxed back in the seat, she thought of how small, how parochial, their world was, hers and Pierce's. A New England village, forty-five minutes from a New England university town. Far, far away from this new, polyglot version of America.

They turned down a dark, narrow street in the South End. Leslie looked up at the lighted windows in the old bowfront town houses they passed. Billy lived here, in this neighborhood, in a parlor apartment with high windows like these. It was just about as different from the place she had lived in with Gus as it could be. But Leslie thought that was probably the point. Some of it, anyway.

The cab pulled up at the curb outside the restaurant. After Pierce paid, they got out and crossed the glistening brick terrace to its entryway.

Inside it was light and warm, a haven against the dark rainy night. The walls were a buttery yellow, the wood trim everywhere a dark green. Leslie had a sense of familiarity and comfort whenever they came here, and they always came here for dinner on their infrequent trips to Boston. There were dozens of newer restaurants that she routinely clipped reviews of, that she attempted to persuade Pierce to try, but he always insisted on Hamersley's. In this case, though, it made practical sense--it was only steps away from the new theater, the one where Billy's play was being performed. And now that they were here, she was glad, as usual, that they'd come.

It was early for dinner, so early that the tables were only about a third full. They nursed their before-dinner drinks--dry vermouth on the rocks for Leslie, vodka for Pierce. Always the same. They'd joked more than once that between them they had the fixings for one terrible martini.

She started to try to explain to Pierce the feeling she'd had in the cab, listening to the driver speaking a language she didn't recognize on his cell phone. She mentioned the women talking in their slightly-more-familiar-sounding-but-still-unidentifiable foreign language in the hotel hall.

"Your point being?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know. How insular our lives are, I guess."

"In some way, I suppose." He sounded begrudging.

"How are they
not
, Pierce?"

He looked down at his vodka. After a moment he said, "Well, don't we know
very
well a kind of economic cross-section of people? More than you would in a city, I think. I mean
because
it's a village. Because we haven't sorted ourselves out economically by neighborhoods. And we also know very well a lot of people across the generations for the same reason--the kids running around, plus our ancient neighbors, too." He shrugged. "It's a kind of trade-off, I suppose. I'll take it."

Case dismissed. She felt a little rise of irritation at him.

But now, as if to apologize--or maybe to remind her of her attachment to the world they lived in, he asked about the Christmas book sale she was organizing at the town library.

This was sweet of him, and in response to that, she made him laugh by describing how the old ladies on the committee had whisked away the donated books they were most interested in. But she had taken one, too, she confessed, and started reading it. Was liking it. A novel about the life of the office, told, amazingly, in the first person plural.

They talked about how unlikely a subject for a novel this was, office life. Pierce mentioned a Joseph Heller book that he'd admired years earlier, another
office
book. Then he started talking about what he was reading now, a book predicting economic disaster looming for the country.

All the while Leslie was intermittently thinking about the evening to come. The play, of course, but then the drink with Sam afterward, Sam and Billy. Billy had said she'd probably be a little late. The play was still in previews, and she had told Leslie on the phone that if there were notes the director wanted to go over, she'd want to sit in on that. So she'd arrive last, most likely. Leslie could imagine it, seeing her again across some room, so small, so lost-looking and waiflike.

"A waif with a spine of steel," Gus had said. Of course that was true, too. She was driven, she was competitive.

But Leslie had seen the other side of her at Gus's memorial service--her white skin almost gray, her lips bitten--actually bleeding at one point. Leslie had given her a Kleenex to blot the blood. She hadn't cried, at least not that Leslie saw, but she was so silent, so inheld, that it had frightened Leslie. She hadn't wanted to leave her alone. She had asked her to come up and stay with them for a while, but Billy had said no. She said she needed to stay in Boston, to work. She needed to settle into her new apartment. Leslie had seen it a week or so before the service--a big empty space. She had only a bed, and a desk to work at. She hadn't taken anything from Gus's apartment. She said she couldn't, she wanted to start over. Leslie had hated to think of her there, alone, but Billy was absolute. The spine of steel, indeed.

Pierce was talking happily about a patient of his, an eight-year-old boy whom he'd been treating for Ewing's sarcoma. He'd been in a cheerful mood for weeks because of what was pretty clearly this child's remission. They spoke now, as they occasionally did, of the strange serenity and maturity of kids with cancer, of the way it changed them and their families. Of the gift it could sometimes seem--unsought, unwelcome of course, and yet real and remarkable.

When she had met Pierce, he was already well along in his residency in a field--pediatric oncology--that she would have tried to dissuade him from if she'd known him earlier. It seemed too sad, too hard, to her. And as she began to think of him more seriously, to imagine being married to him, she worried about how this work might affect him--and therefore her--over time. How could he do it every day, she'd asked him. Accept the fact that so many of them, these beautiful little children, would die?

At first he had explained his choice to her in ways that seemed simply logical, reasonable. He talked about the children who survived and the extraordinary satisfaction they gave him. And even with the ones who didn't, he said, there were the rewards of giving the families as much time with their kids as possible.

Only later, when he knew her much better, did he speak of what he saw as the beauty of the whole experience. He said that:
beauty
. He seemed almost shy, talking about it--big, jovial Pierce. She was touched by that. He spoke of the sense he had of being witness, over and over, to something spiritual in its nature, even when the children died. He said that it seemed to bring forward all that was brave and selfless in everyone involved, even the children themselves. He said he felt privileged to be any part of it.

They had this conversation at his parents' vacation house in Maine. The two of them had been swimming briefly in the unbearably cold water. They were lying on the warm wooden planks of the dock in their wet suits. Pierce was turned to face her. He was squinting into the sun as he spoke--frowning, searching for words. The dried salt water had whitened in the creases by his eyes. She had never seen him so serious. She hadn't known that he could be.

And even sometimes now when Pierce irritated her with his jokiness, what seemed his unwillingness to take almost anything seriously, she had only to call up the way he had spoken of his work that day, how he had looked--or to think of the way he was sometimes emptied, silenced for days after a patient's death--to be reminded of her deepest feelings for him. She'd seen him then as wise, as deep. She'd had a sense of his having a greater understanding of death, of the price of love, particularly parental love, than she had. And of course all that was true of him.

But he was also only Pierce. That was the thing she'd had to learn. He was the person he seemed to be--dismissive, flippant--as well as the person who understood how pain can change you. The surprise of this two-sidedness was something that still, always, had the power to wound her. She guarded herself against it, she supposed, the way she guarded herself against everything difficult or painful--by being loving, by being solicitous.

But how she had counted on him after Gus's death! To understand her grief, to allow it, to come into it with her. His compassionate, dispassionate sense of the familiarity of what she was going through--in spite of all that was extreme about the circumstances--was what she leaned on. Maybe she had even counted on him to expect her to emerge from it eventually, in the same way he emerged from his sorrow each time one of the children he had come to love died.

As she had. Hadn't she?

She was sitting on a little banquette against the wall, facing Pierce and the room behind him. While they talked, she'd been watching it slowly fill up, the well-dressed couples being led in, the parties of businessmen, sitting, looking at the menu, chatting.