The Lake Shore Limited (6 page)

"Oh yeah. Work. The thing you do instead of living."

"It
is
living."

"To you, it is. Only to you."

The son started to pace, railing against his father--how absent he'd been in the young man's childhood, in spite of the fact that he was home most of the time. The things he'd missed--performances, recitals, sports events. The Great Pooh-Bah, he called his father. The Wizard of Oz. He stopped behind the couch, bent a little forward, his hands resting on its back. "The
nothing
behind the screen," he said bitterly.

Then he stopped. He seemed to gather himself. After a long moment, he came forward and sat down at the other end of the couch from his father. He started to tell a story, a story about how, as a boy, he used to love it when he got a splinter, because he was allowed then to interrupt his father at his desk, and his father would get out his kit, his tweezers and his needle, and hold Alex's hand, or his foot, and speak to him in a loving voice while he extracted it. He said he sometimes ground a splinter in deeper when he got one, so it would be harder to get out, it would take longer, and he would be able to believe for that much longer that his father actually cared about him, that he loved him.

Leslie remembered this story. This was Billy's story, Billy's story about her own father, the academic, the great man. She had called him that same thing once:
the Great Pooh-Bah
.

Onstage they all sat silent for a moment. Then Gabriel said, "Well, I did, love you." He sounded sad, as if he were mourning a precious thing lost long ago.

"Bullshit, Dad. I was calling you today, and you were screening my calls." The son laughed. "Let that be a metaphor. Let that be a metaphor for the way things are between you and I."

"Me," Gabriel said, distractedly, almost under his breath.

"What?"

"'Between you and me.' Is correct."

The young man laughed again, bitterly. "Jesus," he said. He got up, pulling his cell phone out of his pocket. "Know what? I'm going to call around some more and see what I can find out. I'll take it to the bedroom so I don't
bother
you." He exited by the door on the left side of the stage, the one Leslie could see.

Gabriel and the woman sat for a long moment. He finally said, "Want another?" raising his glass.

"No," she said.

"No, I don't either," he said.

"Why isn't it you? Calling," she asked after a minute. She had such a small voice. Feathery, slightly nasal.

He shrugged. "Alex will find out what there is to find out. He's better at that than I am, anyway."

"But you're so ... detached."

"No, I'm not," he said.

"But you seem to be. You seem so ..." She was frowning. Her hands rose a little, then dropped. "You know, I've always defended you to Alex. Because I felt like I understood you. It seemed to me that you and I were a little bit like each other. Quiet." She smiled, a wistful, Sandy Dennis smile. "Quieter than Alex and Elizabeth, at least. Though that's not so hard, I guess." She gave a quick little laugh. "Less ... overtly passionate." She paused a moment, then went on. "I remember once when we were all in Massachusetts, and they were having one of their long, great intellectual arguments, about ..." She waved her hand. "Something. Nothing." She made a face.
"Gender
identity. Something like that. Or the Iraq War." She shook her head. "Something where you've heard both sides of the argument so often that it sets your teeth on edge. And of course Alex was being provocative, and Elizabeth was amused and above the fray, both of them loving it, almost ... feeding lines to each other. And it just, exhausted me. Their commitment to it. It was so, stupid, really. And I remember going out onto the porch, and you were there, and we sat for a while just watching the water, with their voices rising and falling, and you said to me, just, 'More of same.' Do you remember? 'More of same.' And we both laughed. It didn't seem necessary to talk, even."

It was an offering, Leslie saw. An offering of love to him. The young woman wanted him as her father. Perhaps also, without recognizing it--that would have to be the case--as a kind of lover, too.

"But now I wonder ... is it that you don't care about her?" She was leaning toward him. Her face was earnest, open. "About ... anyone?"

"No, that's not it," Gabriel said, softly.

"Not what?"

"It's not the reason I'm so ... calm, if you will."

Now he got up and went to the back of the stage to set his glass down. He turned, faced forward, and started talking. Elizabeth, he said, wasn't at all sure she wanted to stay married to him. Nor he to her, "in all candor." He kept talking as he walked slowly forward until he was standing at the back of the couch, speaking to the young woman, but looking over her head, straight at the audience. He talked about their slow withdrawal from each other over the last years, describing scenes of absence, of emptiness. He called up a time at the Massachusetts house when they had guests, and each of them, but particularly Elizabeth, was lively, was charming and talkative; and then the moment the guests' car was out of sight, they turned silently away from each other. He smiled, a strained smile. "Back to our corners. 'Show's over, folks.'"

He said the reason she'd gone off by herself to the summerhouse now was to think about all this. "And my assignment was to think about it also. Which I've done."

"And?"

"And what?"

"And your decision?"

"My decision ... doesn't much matter now, does it?"

"But you must have felt, like,
one
way or the other."

He smiled. Laughed. It sounded like
Heemp!
to Leslie. "As you've said, I'm not a decisive man."

"But this is ... your life. You have to know what you want."

"That's your take. Your version. In my version, I can do either thing. I can stay with Elizabeth, if that's what she wants, or I can leave."

"If that's what she wants."

"Yes."

"But what do
you
want?" Her arms lifted slightly. She was frustrated. He was irritating in his chilliness. Leslie didn't get him either.

"I don't see that it matters, now."

"God!" She spun away. "I see why Alex gets so infuriated." She picked up her glass and took a quick swallow.

"Good."

"Good! Why?"

"Because Alex needs you to see that. He needs you on his side. And I don't, my dear."

She was suddenly angry. "No, you don't need anyone on your side."

"That's right."

"Not even Elizabeth."

"I would be in trouble if I needed Elizabeth on my side. She's not. She hasn't been for a good long while."

"So it doesn't matter to you if Elizabeth is dead, it doesn't matter to you."

Leslie saw that Alex had come to stand in the doorway to the living room. He stopped there. Neither of the other two had noticed him.

"It would matter enormously to me. Enormously. But it might not change my life--what would have been my life." He paused for a moment, then said, "It might not change my theoretical life, let's say."

Alex stepped forward. "That's the only kind of life you have, Dad--theoretical."

Gabriel started, and turned to him. He smiled, sadly this time. "This would be your mother's perspective, too."

The younger man snorted, began to talk again, but the woman interrupted, wanted to know what he'd learned.

He turned to her. He said they'd started pulling out the dead and seriously injured, that more people had arrived at hospitals, either in ambulances or on their own, that they weren't releasing names. They'd set up an information center for the families.

Everyone was silent for a moment. Then Gabriel went to the back of the stage and turned on a small television set wedged into the bookshelves. There was a man talking, interviewing someone you couldn't see. The voices were speaking of who might have done this. The younger couple moved back and stood watching too. They listened for a few moments to the speculation. There had already been several claims of responsibility.

"Imagine wanting credit for it," the young woman said. She shook her head. "What a world."

Alex began to talk about their intention, their motivation. Trains, the Midwest: new territory, new methods. "Fuckers," he said.

"But perhaps this is how it's going to be," Gabriel said. He turned the television off. "It will be something that just
happens
from time to time." He brought up John Kerry, he said maybe he had been right when he said during his failed campaign that terrorism was like crime, something ineradicable, something to be managed, rather than eliminated. He described being in Paris with Elizabeth the fall after the Metro bombings. "We traveled everywhere together by subway--by Metro." He paused for a moment, and Leslie thought that he must have been remembering Elizabeth as she was then--perhaps even tenderly, it seemed for a half moment; but then he cleared his throat and went on to say that 9/11 wasn't different from that, really, except in scale. Alex and he began to talk about it in the abstract, theorizing about the likelihood that these terrorists had actually intended to blow up the station, too, the possibility of their being from Morocco, like the Madrid bombers, and the reasons for that; or Pakistani. Or Al Qaeda. There was something comical in this easy turn to theorizing on the part of the men, and the audience seemed to recognize this--there was mild laughter here and there.

While they were speaking this way, the woman was walking slowly back and forth across the stage, her face full of reaction to each of them, now bitter amusement, now disgust. She sometimes tried to interrupt with a phrase or two, but they paid her no real attention. They had moved to the front of the stage as they talked, facing each other for the most part, and she claimed the back of the stage, watching them. Finally she came to a halt, dead center, in front of the big stage window. "For God's sake!" she shrilled, hands on her hips. They both fell silent and turned to her. "This is Elizabeth we're talking about." Her voice quavered. She dropped her arms.

They were all quiet for a moment. Then she said softly, pleadingly, to Alex, "Your mother."

He turned a little away from her, almost a flinch.

She looked at Gabriel and said, "Your wife."

They were frozen in this tableau for a few seconds. Then the doorbell rang. As one, they turned in that direction, then looked back at each other--a kind of wild, frightened expectancy in their faces. The stage blacked out. The curtain fell.

The room filled with applause that ended quickly as the house lights came up.

Leslie bent over to pick up her purse. Over her back, in the sudden hubbub of people talking and getting up, she heard Sam say to Pierce, "Well, quite an ending--for the first act, in any case."

"Yeah," Pierce answered. They were all standing now. They moved into the aisle among the others inching back to the lobby. Pierce kept his hand on her elbow--a kind of sympathetic connection, she felt. She was grateful to him, but she was far away. She felt confused. Around her, she could hear others talking, speculating, commenting on the actors, on the arguments.

Some weren't. Some had shed the play quickly, were on to their own lives. She heard a voice say, "I wish I'd known it was going to rain today. I didn't bring an umbrella to work."

In the lobby, Pierce went to get the drinks this time, just for him and Sam. Leslie didn't want anything. She and Sam stood together.

"Is it hard, watching this?" he asked. His face was kind, concerned.

She dipped her head from side to side, equivocating. Then she said it. "Yes. Yes and no."

"The yes I get. The no is ...?"

She shrugged. "It has its own complexity. Its own ... life, I suppose." She paused. "But of course, it makes me think of Gus. Mostly of that time before we knew for sure that he was on the plane. When we still had hope, even though we pretty much knew."

"But even then, the husband's--the father's--ambivalence is so unlike anything you might have felt."

"Well, of course."

"Or the playwright either. Billy, right?"

"Yes. Billy. No, she wouldn't have felt that either." But where did it come from, then? This is what Leslie didn't get. So much in this play, as in the others she'd seen, came from things she knew about Billy, about her life. Why would she have imagined a thing like this? It seemed so ugly, so awful, really.

"Still, it's well done," Sam said. And they talked about this for a bit, about the actors, about certain moments they'd liked, others they hadn't quite believed. Leslie made her point about the liquor, the glasses, and Sam agreed. Pierce came with the drinks, and Sam asked about Pierce's work, and then hers.

She tried to make a joke about it, about not having work. The truth was, she didn't want work anymore. She hadn't wanted it since Gus died. She had been
stopped
for more than a year after that. All she could manage was to stay at home and grieve. And then, when her grief had eased a bit, she wanted just to concentrate on each day--to see friends and play in the garden and read. To make a kind of closed-in, sheltered life for herself and Pierce.

Oh, she did a kind of work, a little. She filled in from time to time at the real estate office when things were busy--doing a showing, managing a closing. And she'd gone back to doing the other things she'd always done--volunteering at the public school, working on the zoning board in their town, swimming almost every day in the Dartmouth pool. This seemed to be her life. It was just the way it had happened with her, to her. It was what she had chosen because of what had happened. Or it had chosen her.

She and Pierce had talked about it occasionally, about whether this was all right, whether she should be doing more. She was remembering this as the men chatted. Whether she ought to try to get a job, whether she was too young for this kind of life. "Maybe we should buy some old inn and run a B and B," she had suggested once, only half joking. He had pretended to gag. It was only then that she realized she had been asking him whether he would come with her into what she thought of as this new life--and that he was telling her no. No. He needed work he cared about, he needed to be in the world, to feel his life mattered in that way.