The Lake Shore Limited (30 page)

"We'd help."

"A likely story," he said. He had started toward the kitchen. "Want a snack? A nightcap?"

"I'm pretty beat," Mark said. "But tell you what. I'll take you out for lunch tomorrow."

This was kind, and Sam felt that, as he felt how surprisingly adult Mark had sounded saying it:
tell you what
. But it made him suddenly, heavily sad. He had the awareness of himself as a possible burden for Mark, maybe for all three boys. Did they talk about it?
Who's going to be with him at Thanksgiving?

Well. Somebody better go
.

"Fair enough," he had said to Mark.

Now he turned off the hall lights and headed alone in the dark up the grand staircase.

----

There was no call from Billy on Tuesday, or on Wednesday. He was tempted to call her, but he didn't, partly because it was her turn, partly because he didn't want to rush her, to push her. It was pretty clear she was not someone who liked being rushed or pushed.

But on Wednesday night at about nine, feeling that he couldn't spend another full day without human company, he called a friend, Jerry Miller, and asked him if he wanted to have dinner the next evening. Sam had known Jerry for years. They'd been in a support group organized by the clinic where their wives were both being treated for cancer. Jerry's wife had survived.

A smaller group of these husbands, six of them, had gone on meeting on their own after that, usually once or twice a year; and Sam still saw two of that group even more often. One, Brad Callender, he played tennis with regularly. Jerry, he talked to. Not because Jerry was a psychiatrist, though he was, but because their wives had liked each other, and because he and Jerry, too, had felt comfortable with each other, almost from the start.

But Jerry was busy. He and his wife were going to see the Celtics. The tickets had cost him a fortune.

"Clearly you have your priorities," Sam said.

"You bet your ass," he answered.

He called Sam back less than an hour later. Why didn't they meet ahead of time, before the game? He could get to someplace near the Common by maybe five-fifteen or so. Afterward he could catch the green line to the Garden.

Sam suggested an old bar just around the corner from the Athenaeum.

He was early. He settled in with a beer at the long wooden bar. The room was deep and noisy, full of mostly young people just getting off from work in offices in the Back Bay or downtown. As a young man, Sam had worked in an office, doing the kind of scut work--repetitive drawing--that computers did now. He'd liked it--not the job, but the people he worked with and the sense of himself as an adult person, out in the world. Occasionally he had stopped at just such a bar as this after the workday was over, but he never stayed long. He was always conscious that Susan would be waiting for him, that he should be home, helping out.

Sam looked around. Pretty girls, handsome men. The not-so-pretty ones must not venture out, must not want to risk it. Though looking more closely, Sam saw one here or there, appended to a group of more attractive coworkers or friends--someone homely or awkward, someone fat, like the girl at the end of the bar, talking too loudly, feeling a pressure to be funny, maybe. The other girls she was with, three of them, were laughing with her--or at her--but their attention was elsewhere, their sly eyes were shifty, in constant motion, appraising the room, the men. Sam, of course, was invisible to them.

He was thinking of this, his invisibility--the invisibility of age--when Jerry came in, surveying the room, unbuttoning his coat. He saw Sam, and his face, which when unanimated seemed closed in and dull, came to life. He moved through the crowd and bent over Sam, bringing the wintry, fresh air with him as he gave him a little half hug.

Sam shifted the coat he'd been using to save the stool next to him, and Jerry settled on it, complaining of the weather. The bartender came over, and he said he'd have a beer. He turned to Sam. "What are you drinking?"

"Guinness. On tap."

"Yeah, I'll have that."

By the time the beer came, he was already launched, telling Sam about his grandchildren, who were coming for the Christmas holidays, and then about a course he was almost finished teaching at the psychoanalytic institute, a course that had taken up all of his free time this semester.

When it was Sam's turn, he said he thought he'd met someone.

"Uh-oh," Jerry said.

"Hey, it's not as if I do this all the time."

"You don't do it enough. Who is it?"

"A playwright. A friend of Leslie Morse. Do you remember her--Leslie?"

"Leslie. I think I do. She's the one you were in love with after Claire and did nothing about. The married one."

"Good memory. But why do you say 'the one'? You make it sound as though there had been thousands of others."

"I don't know. 'Cause there should have been more?"

"Well, there were more. I just didn't tell you about all of them." And they blipped by quickly in his mind. Pleasantly, except for a little stab of remorse about the Cape.

"So, Leslie?"

"Well, she called."

"Aha."
His hand hit the wooden bar. "It begins to happen like this at our age. Her husband died."

"No, listen. Listen for a while." And he told him. That Leslie had invited him to a play and to meet the playwright for a drink afterward. How surprised he'd been by the invitation. How strange the evening was. He tried to give Jerry a sense of it. The awkwardness of not recognizing Leslie and Pierce at first, the surprise of the playwright's being a woman, then his realization of who she was as he looked at the glamorous photo in the program. "She'd been with Leslie's brother," he said to Jerry. "And ... I don't know if you recall any of this, but he died on 9/11. He was in one of the planes."

"I didn't know. I don't remember it, anyhow."

"Well, he did. And it just seemed
off
to me that Leslie had invited me without saying anything about who this person was. First, not telling me that she was a woman, so that this introduction was, possibly, different from just an ...
introduction
, if you see what I mean."

"I see exactly what you mean."

"But then, second, that she was a woman who'd been involved with her brother. Her dead brother."

"It is strange. There's something ... unkind about it, I think."

Sam started to explain the rest. The events in the play, the way they affected him.

Jerry was shaking his head as Sam spoke. When he was done, Jerry said, "That's just not the way it was with you and Susan."

"But it
is
, in a way. I wanted it done with. I did wish her dead. I ..."

"But it's not the same. She was ill. Painfully ill, for a long time. We talked about this over and over in group.
She
probably wanted it done with."

Sam was remembering; he was silent for a moment. Finally he said, "She might have, by the end."

She had. But the kids were still so young then. She'd wanted to hold on, for their sakes, as long as she could. And she was scared, too. Scared of dying. He knew that from waking in the night to her terror, holding her as she wept. Weeping with her.

"All I'm saying is, the play really ... got to me. And all the time, here's Leslie, here's this diminished version of Leslie, sitting next to me, wrung out by it, too." That was how she had seemed, wasn't it? Diminished. "The whole thing was kind of crazy."

"So the play is over, you get up, and ... what?" Jerry drank some beer, looking at Sam over his glass.

"We go to a restaurant down the street, to meet this ... Billy person."

"Billy." He looked confused.

"The playwright. It's short for Wilhelmina. I guess."

He made a face, shaking his head. "Sorry, chum. No one is named Wilhelmina."

"One person is. Apparently. This ... this tiny, sort of funny, little person."

"Oh, you mean small! I take it she was small."

He smiled at Jerry. "Yes, she was. And wired. Because the play, apparently, went really well. Something new, something special happened in it in a critical moment that really,
changed
it for her, I guess. For the better. And that excited her. Because ... well,
partly
because she'd slept with the guy, the main guy, the actor playing him."

There was a long silence. Jerry had hung his face forward toward Sam, squinting at him in disbelief, or confusion. "You're not telling this right," he said, after a moment.

Sam laughed. "No. I know. I'm not. The point is, I liked her. That's all. And then on Monday, this past Monday, we went for a walk. She has a dog. A large dog. We took her large dog for a walk at the Arnold Arboretum."

Jerry sat back. "See, that's better. That is pleasant. That's a nice story, about taking a walk, taking it slow."

Sam smiled at his friend.
Shut up, Sam
, he thought. "Yeah," he said. "Anyway, I'm smitten." That was it, wasn't it? As simple as that.

"Well, congratulations. On having what must be one of the best feelings in the world."

"It sure is." He had a swallow of beer and set his glass down. "But why is it, do you think?"

"I'm sure it's chemical. Brain stuff. But don't knock it." He'd been fooling around with the cardboard coaster, and now it rolled a little way down the bar toward Sam. Jerry looked up quickly. "You've slept with her?"

"No. Not yet."

"Ah!" He nodded, sagely. "Well, wait and see."

"I think I know."

"Yeah, wait and see."

Sam watched the bartender for a few moments as he mixed a drink, then poured it from his shaker, green and foaming, into a martini glass. A tall young woman in a mannish business suit carried it off. He turned to Jerry again. "What do you think it is--are we crazy?--that we can still be talking about this stuff, about dating and infatuation, at fifty, going on fifty-five? It seems wrong, somehow."

"Why?"

"It doesn't seem ... adult."

"You're a guy who worries about that too much."

"Is that a diagnosis?"

"I don't think you can fall in love if you're worried about it, that's all."

"Maybe I don't want to fall in love."

"Why wouldn't you? Are you kidding me?"

Sam didn't answer.

"You're kidding, right?"

"I am. Kidding. I think." And then it occurred to him--was this why he had wanted to talk to Jerry?--"I don't think
she
does, actually."

"She doesn't want to fall in love?"

"Yeah. She was saying something to me about not having wanted me to come to her house, or to come to mine. Something about just not wanting to get that close."

"Funny thing to say to a new lover."

"I'm not a lover."

"Yeah, well. You know what I mean." Behind him at the bar, a couple of girls were shrieking with laughter. He looked over at them. He turned back to Sam again and frowned. "It could be it's the 9/11 stuff. The boyfriend that died."

"Gus, you mean?"

"Is he the guy?"

Sam nodded.

"That could certainly do it," Jerry said. "You love someone and he dies. Violently. Notoriously. Conspicuously. That could make you a bit ... hesitant, one would think, about intimacy."

They pondered this. Sam had been trying to avoid his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar, but the bartender had moved away now, and there he was, looking back at himself, a middle-aged guy.

"I'm thinking maybe she didn't love him," he said.

"What would make you think that?"

He turned away from himself to Jerry again. "She said they had, I think,
difficulties
. And then there's the play." He shrugged. "The guy who isn't sorry that his wife might be dead."

"A play is a play. You think Shakespeare killed everyone who died in his plays? Or wanted them dead?"

"No. Okay."

They moved on, they talked about the Celtics game Jerry was about to see. They talked about Leona, his wife, who ran special programs at the BPL and was mad at the mayor and the city about funding. They talked about the mayor, they tried to remember how long he'd been in office. They tried to figure out who might run against him in the next election. When was the next election? Neither of them knew.

They finished their beers, and Jerry said he had to go. As they were pulling their wallets out, Sam said, "I think I'm right about the intimacy thing, though."

He walked Jerry to the subway at Park Street, and they embraced, whumping each other on the back, an embrace that was also a parody of an embrace. He watched his friend go down the stairs, and then he turned and made his way west on Boylston Street. He was going to walk a bit, he'd told Jerry. At Charles Street, he went right, and halfway up the block, he turned in at the gateway to the Public Garden.

It was dark and still, the flower beds barren, put away for the winter. The grand trees loomed heavily, even bare of leaves. He moved unhurriedly through, listening to his own footsteps, passing only two other walkers. He crossed the bridge over the duck pond where they'd taken the kids on the Swan Boats when they were still small enough to find that exciting.

He came out through the gate onto the busy street, facing the Ritz. The Taj, it was now. He crossed Arlington and started down Newbury Street. He was thinking over the conversation with Jerry, the part about Billy.
Unkind
, he'd called what Leslie did. Maybe he meant the fact that she did it without warning him, without explaining to him what she was doing.

But would he have gone if she had? Wouldn't he have thought it sounded like a bad idea, wouldn't he have invented some excuse? He passed the storefronts, the bars with their perpetual Christmas lights, not looking, lost in thought.

He would have found a way to say no, if he'd been warned, he was pretty sure of that. He would have chosen not to meet Billy.

Sam circled twice by the Delta baggage area, and then there he was, Jack, tall, too thin, his mother's long, lovely face translated into something gaunt and hollowed on him. His grin was a surprise in this face; it transformed him--added pounds, made him merry. He had one bag, familiar to Sam, a worn old L. L. Bean thing he'd been hauling around for years.