The Lake Shore Limited (33 page)

These people, these things that you love and care about, that you make your life out of--and then they leave, they change, they die. They have no need of you in the end.

The cold gathered slowly around the car, seeped in. Sam slouched down and thrust his hands into his pockets. In the left one were his gloves, in the right, his scarf. He pulled it out now. As he started to drape it around his neck, he felt something hard against his skin. He lowered the scarf, looked at it. Just before the sensor turned itself off, he saw, glittering in its bright light, an earring. A delicate mercury-glass earring, carried on a silver stem.

Billy's earring.

"YOU FORGET HOW DARK IT GETS," she said softly. They were in their own bed, in Vermont.

He didn't answer. She thought he might have fallen asleep. She knew he was tired. He never slept well in hotels, and almost as soon as they got home, he'd gone over to the hospital to check on patients and stayed there for a long time, until midevening.

Finally he spoke. "I don't forget it," he said. "I'm glad to be home." His hand ran up and down her arm. "I like it dark. Dark and quiet."

"Like a grave," she said. She was resting her head against his chest and shoulder. He smelled Pierce-like. Sweat. Soap. Semen, too--she smelled it on him and probably on herself. Also a familiar, Pierce smell.

This was their secret, their improbably intense sexual life together. Perhaps someone might have guessed it of Pierce--he had so much energy to burn, it might have seemed he would bring it to this part of his life, too. She was more unlikely, she knew. But she'd been a wild girl, what was thought of as a
bad girl
when she was a young woman. Marriage had domesticated her, but she still loved what was transformative about sex, what lifted her out of herself--and Pierce was her match in this, and her deliverer. They usually made love two or three times a week. They always had. She knew from remarks dropped by friends--friends who would have liked more sex as well as friends who would have liked less--that this was unusual. Also unusual was how generous, how careful and prideful, he was about giving her pleasure.

"Is that what you think? That it's like a grave?" His voice sounded hollow, deeper than usual under her ear.

"No. I was joking. I love the house. I love how dark it is at night, you know that. But I love a hotel room, too. The sense of life all around."

He sighed, and they readjusted themselves so they were lying next to each other. She had a sudden imaginary picture of what they would look like from above, the two long figures side by side on the bed, not touching.

It was moonless, that was some of why it was so dark. They had no curtains on their bedroom windows--there was no need of them, since they faced a wooded hill that rose up behind the house. Leslie saw the windows as rectangles of a lighter black than the room. Or maybe you'd describe them as the darkest possible gray, she thought.

She turned her head to look at him, a blurry form on the light sheet. His body still radiated heat from making love. "I talked to Sam today," she said.

"Your friend Sam."

She wasn't sure of his tone, of what he meant. She said, "Your friend, too."

"Mmm," he said.

And abruptly she was wondering again, as she did from time to time, how much he had ever guessed at. Sometimes it seemed to her he knew nothing of her inner life, and sometimes it seemed he might know all of it.

He cleared his throat. "He was calling to say thanks?"

"Yes. And to get Billy's number."

"Aha. Your magic trick worked." His voice had changed. It sounded as if he was smiling.

"Apparently." She sat up now and pulled the covers over both their bodies, arranging them so they had equal amounts. She lay down again. After a moment she said, "If it had really worked, though, she would have given him the number herself, don't you think?"

"I suppose."

He sounded distant, maybe sleepy. She wondered if he was even interested in any of this. She wondered what had kept him so long at the hospital, what he was preoccupied with. He seemed preoccupied. She said, "I was awful on the phone."

After a pause he said, "I bet you weren't."

"I was. I said I thought the play was about Billy and Gus. That it revealed how she felt about Gus."

He was quiet for a long time. "Well, that'll break the spell, all right." His voice was dry.

Is that what she'd been trying to do? Break the spell?
Undo
giving him to Billy? Take it back? Take
Sam
back?

But she couldn't take Sam back. She didn't have Sam. She hadn't had Sam, hadn't had him for ages.

No
, she thought. She'd never had him. She was a wish of his, a dream, at a time when his marriage was coming apart. That was all. She knew that. A younger wish at that, she reminded herself. She'd been pretty then. Her hair was dark brown; she was slender.

Well, not slender, but not like now.

And she supposed Sam had been a momentary dream of hers, too, one she allowed herself from her place in a marriage that was never going to fall apart.

Abruptly she was thinking of the play again, of the man, Gabriel. Of his marriage. He had seemed fond of his wife as he spoke of certain things. What had changed for him in his marriage, how, in order for him to feel as he did? In order for him to be glad, at least for a moment, that his wife might be dead.

Leslie looked up at the invisible ceiling. She was trying to imagine how it would be if Pierce died, how her life might change. Maybe it would open out somehow, maybe she would turn away from all the practiced routines they shared. Maybe she'd get a job. A real job.

She thought of the conversation they had with Sam at the intermission last night. He had asked her about work, and she had tried to make light of the fact that she didn't have any anymore. Standing in the lobby with the two men, she had said, "One needs love and work, isn't that what Freud said? Anyway, I guess I'm down to love." She looked at Pierce when she said this. She supposed she'd wanted him to do something. Defend her choice somehow. Say in front of Sam that he loved her. That love alone was enough.

No, she couldn't have wanted that. She knew that was nothing Pierce would ever say in front of anyone else. She had wanted something from him, though.

But he'd ignored her signal, if she'd even given one. He started talking about Freud, about the odd things one remembered he was supposed to have said. "There was the cigar, of course. Altered forever now because of Monica Lewinsky. By God, it isn't just a cigar, after all." He had grinned, beckoning Sam's smile. She had probably smiled, too, he looked so goofy, so eager.

Then he told a joke, one Freud was supposed to have liked. The old couple, talking. "'When one of us dies ... I think I'll move to Paris.'" He'd laughed, loudly.

Well, it was funny, but it was painful, too.

Therein
, Pierce would have said,
lies the joke
.

But that's what the play was about
, she was thinking abruptly. At least in part. The wish to imagine what life could be, how it could change, if you were unencumbered.

Now there was a peculiar word.
Unencumbered
.

Pierce's breathing had thickened. He was asleep.

Did everyone who was married do this from time to time, imagine an unencumbered life? She wondered if Pierce did. If she died first, he could move to Paris. She saw him there, walking--no, loping--down a narrow street, looking around avidly, taking things in, asking strangers questions in his terrible accent. He would have the energy, the vitality, to do that.

She wouldn't. If he died first, she might shed their routines, yes, but she wouldn't be able to do what he would do--start anew, make a new life.

Of course, there was grief. Pierce might be changed by grief if she died, as she had been when Gus did. Grief might waylay him.
Belay
him.

She thought of Billy again. Billy and the play. Billy and Gus. She'd been wrong to say that to Sam. Why should it matter to him whether or not Billy had for a moment--for some moments, for days even, or months--wanted to be free of Gus? Wanted to imagine that.
That
was what Billy had a right to. Whatever that feeling was. The feeling of
wanting more
, as Gabriel had said. Wanting to be free of everything too familiar in life. Wanting something new.

"We want," the man had said. "When we stop wanting, we feel dead and want to want more." Something like that.

All her life, she had tried not to want. To be content. To be at peace. Safety lay that way, she had thought. You couldn't be hurt.

Then Gus had been murdered and his death had opened a way for her to want even less, to make her life even smaller. She didn't know anymore whether she was content. Whether she was at peace.

But all she wanted was right here. Here was where she felt safe. Next to Pierce. In their bed. Here, where she lived--safe and quiet and dark.

THE EVENING AFTER RAFE WEPT onstage for the first time, Edmund came to his dressing room before the show to talk to him. He sat down in the other uncomfortable chair there, groaning a little as he settled his weight on it, his legs splayed wide, his feet in their immense sneakers turned out: first position. Rafe wondered what size his shoes could possibly be--was there such a width as a quintuple E?

"Guess why I'm here," he said, his hands already busy in his beard.

"I know why you're here."

"Okay. Then you know what the big question is.
Are
you going to be able to do it again?"

"I think so. Or it'll be close enough."

"The tears, too? I assume they may be the iffy part."

Rafe looked at his own impassive face in the mirror. "They may not be as tough to produce as all that."

Edmund nodded several times. "That's the good news and the bad news, I guess. Handy for us that that's the case. Maybe too bad for you that you have a reservoir to call on. As it were."

"Yeah."

"Okay then." He heaved himself up. More groaning. "I'll go talk to Faith and tell her that's how it's going to be." Faith was the actress with the ten-second Elizabeth part. "And maybe Serena." Anita. "The conversation you had with her was a little different, too. You must have had a notion about what was coming up for you at the ending."

"Yeah." He was looking at Edmund in the mirror. "I felt a little bad, springing it on everyone. But I thought she responded great. I thought it really worked, whatever Serena was doing. Both of them, actually."

"Yeah, it did." He turned at the door. "Well, onward. The last preview. And then we'll all talk tonight, after the show."

As promised, Rafe had done it again that night, and he knew that it wouldn't ever be a problem after that. It was true that it didn't surprise him, it didn't sweep over him the way it had the first time, but it worked. He made it work.

He made it work by thinking of Lauren. He imagined Elizabeth as Lauren, and his betrayal of Elizabeth became his betrayals of Lauren, all of them, thought and word and deed--and then, too, the very thing he was doing at that moment on the stage, the betrayal of using her to make himself cry. He thought of her long, slow dying and how grateful he would be if she could just come back and stand before him as Elizabeth did--as Faith did--at the end of the play. Just a little bit damaged. Only slightly wounded. And the tears came.

Afterward they all sat onstage in the living room, closed in by the lowered curtain, and Edmund gave them the pep talk for opening night. They were in great shape. This last preview had been terrific. The audience had been incredibly responsive. He said that with Rafe's new version of the final scene, "the last piece has fallen into place. It's going to be a fantastic show." He stood up and did a little jig for them. He was surprisingly graceful and light in motion, but everything wiggled absurdly, and they all laughed. When Rafe followed him backstage, he could hear Edmund's heavy breathing, the air sibilant and ragged in his nostrils.

For three weeks, for the play's run, he did it every night, summoned up his dying wife and his sorrow over his life with her. And then, almost as soon as the curtain dropped, he changed back into his jeans and T-shirt and sweater and went home.