The Lake Shore Limited (7 page)

The lights dimmed once, and Pierce and Sam threw their plastic glasses away. They started to walk back into the theater. Sam was telling them about another play he'd seen here earlier in the fall, a one-man show, "Which usually I hate. That it's done at all is really the point. You know, you're called upon to find it amazing. But this was different."

Pierce asked how, and Sam kept talking, but Leslie, who was ahead of both of them, couldn't hear him. They sat down. She opened her program and was partway through the bio of the actor playing Gabriel, a man named Rafe Donovan, when the lights dimmed.

The curtain went up on the scene exactly as they'd left it, the three actors standing frozen, looking at one another. Then Gabriel broke away to answer the door, and the other two moved closer together, as if to face whomever, whatever it was, as man and wife. As a couple, at least.

It was a woman. She burst in just as Alex had, full of recrimination about Gabriel's not answering the phone, and then froze, seeing the other two. Leslie recognized the voice--it was the woman who had called and left the message earlier. She was younger than Gabriel by at least a few years, and attractive, if not really pretty. Dramatic in her looks--long thick hair, dark coloring.

Gabriel introduced her as a friend, Anita. There followed a scene of awkwardness and growing embarrassment, of slowly dawning awareness on the part of Alex and his wife that Gabriel was somehow involved with this woman. Again, there was something amusing about this, and laughter here and there in the house.

When Gabriel finally acknowledged the relationship, Alex smiled bitterly and said, "So this part of your life is not so theoretical, right, Dad?"

Then he turned to the other woman, to Anita. He said, "Well, then ... Anita, is it?"

She nodded.

"What have you come calling for, then? At this particular time. On this particular day. Are you here to celebrate with him when he gets the news: he's free! Or to commiserate with him. 'Ah shit! She's alive.'"

Anita looked in confusion from one of them to another. Gabriel lifted his shoulders. He couldn't help her.

She turned to Alex. "To be with him," she said. "Whatever the news is, to be with him."

Her voice was so raw and honest that Alex was silenced for a moment. But then he jerked into motion, picking up his coat, coming around the couch to take the younger woman by the elbow, talking all the while, saying, "Fine, fine, you be with him, someone should be with him, let it be you. For Christ's sake not me, not me anymore. No matter what happens, not me, ever again." They were at the back of the stage, by the door. He turned briefly to look at his father, said nothing, and they were gone, the door slamming behind them.

Gabriel and Anita stood looking at each other, a little shamefacedly. Then he came around from behind the couch and sat down on it.

"I'm ... I'm sorry," Anita said. "I shouldn't have come."

"No, you shouldn't," he said.

She drew her breath in sharply. She was wounded.

"What if Elizabeth had been here?" he asked gently.

"I said I was sorry," she said.

After a moment, he said, "So, what did you think of my boy Alex?"

She half smiled. "Somebody should have taught him better manners."

"At the very least," he said.

She came and sat on the couch, close to him. He turned his body to her, making a distance between them.

He looked at her. "I think you should go," he said.

"I want to be with you."

He shook his head, his face hardened. "I can't have you here with me. I have to do this alone."

"You don't. Have to." This was a plea, Leslie thought. Whining. She didn't like this woman.

"I
want
to do this alone, then."

"I don't believe you."

"You should."

She sighed. She looked away. Then back at him. She said, "Just answer me one question."

He shifted on the couch, impatient, not looking at her.

"Gabriel? Just one."

"All right," he said.

"Tell me honestly. When you heard, didn't you feel any sense of ..." She stopped. After a moment, she shook her head. "Forget it."

"Joy? Possibility? I felt that. A sense of release. Is that what you're asking?"

She nodded.

"Of course. Of course I did. Instantly. 'It's over. She's gone.'"

He stood up and started walking toward the back of the stage. "'I'm out of it. I'm out of it without hurting her. I can be bereaved:
Oh, it's so terrible, what happened to Gabriel. Did you hear? Oh, poor Gabriel. Poor man
.' All of that." He made a fist and struck the frame of the window. Anita started. She looked frightened for a moment.

"While my son was here, telling me what an awful, unfeeling person I am, I was being that person. That unfeeling. No. Worse than unfeeling: that
calculating
a person. And I'll have to live with that. That that is what I am, who I am. That I was, at least for a moment, glad that Elizabeth--a person I used to love better than I loved myself, a person I still care for and respect--glad that she wouldn't be around anymore." He laughed, horribly. "The first stage of grief:
'Oh, goody.'
"

"Gabriel. It's only human. To want ... to ..."

"Anita, please, don't. Don't ... excuse me. Don't forgive me. You need to, to want to go on. But that doesn't help me, don't you see? It doesn't matter to me, honestly. Your forgiveness. It's of a piece with my own greed for ... freedom. A new life."

"It's not greed, what I feel."

"It's what we all feel. We want. Then we want more. It's the human condition. And when we stop wanting, we feel dead and we want to want again."

"But that's what you said you felt with Elizabeth. Dead."

"Yes."

"And with me, you felt alive again. You said so."

"Yes. But it was wanting. Wanting what I didn't have."

"Me!" she cried.

He came forward again, not looking at her. She was waiting. Finally he did turn to her. His face was sad, kind. "Ah, well," he said.

"Me!" she said, with anger this time.

"The idea of you anyway, Anita." And then, compassionately, "Anita."

"Don't say my name! Don't say my name that way."

"I can't help it. It's the way I feel your name now."

She sat very still for a long moment. Then she said in a small voice, "You're letting me go, aren't you?"

"How can I keep you?" His voice was strained, but gentle.

"Why can't you keep me?"

"Because I want Elizabeth. I want Elizabeth to be alive."

"It's not a deal. An exchange. It doesn't have to be one or the other." He didn't answer. "You said you wanted to end it. You wanted to be free."

"I can't be free unless she sets me free."

"But if she's dead ..."

He moaned, loudly, and turned to face her. "If she's dead, then I'm Gabriel, the widower. That's who I am. That's who I'll be. I have to ... enact that, for her. I have to honor her. I can't be free. I can't be glad. She was my wife. She is my wife."

"And if she's alive?"

"If she's alive, I'm glad for her life. I have to be glad for her life. I have to be a person who is glad ... that she's alive. I will be glad she's alive." He sat down again, but in one of the chairs this time. Not near her. "I can't be ... that other person. The person Alex thinks I am."

"This is ridiculous," she said suddenly, angrily. "This is like fucking Henry James."

A sad little smile moved on his face. "I don't think you'd have much of a chance at that." A few people laughed.

"It's not funny, Gabriel."

He looked exhausted all at once. "No. It's not. Really."

She watched him. Then she said, "And what about me?"

He shook his head. "I'm sorry."

"But you said you loved me."

"I'm sorry, Anita. I am sorry. But the terms have shifted. You see that, don't you? Everything has changed. My life. Life itself."

"But you said you wanted me."

"I wanted you."

"In the past."

"Yes. Past tense."

She got up and moved around. She looked teary, about to say something. Then, abruptly, she was in motion. She grabbed her bag. She went quickly upstage. She stopped. Slowly she said, "You're one, stupid, fucking son of a bitch."

He nodded, over and over.

She left, slamming the door even harder than Alex had.

Gabriel sat motionless for a long moment. He was facing the audience. He was faintly smiling--a sad smile, it seemed to Leslie. But why? She didn't understand him, what he was feeling. He got up and slowly moved around the room, straightening books on the tables, picking up a glass, that strange half smile still on his face. He carried the glass back to the liquor shelf and set it down. He was frozen for a long moment, standing there, looking down at his hands. He turned and went back to the window. He stood with his back to the audience, looking out.

And then there appeared on the stage, at the back of the stage where the door was--the door that Leslie couldn't quite see--a gray-haired woman, a woman Gabriel's age. There were vivid bruises on her face. She was wearing a coat over her shoulders, a coat that she shrugged off onto the nearest chair. Now they could see that her arm was in a cast.

She saw Gabriel and stopped. She spoke his name softly, a question. "Gabriel?"

He turned quickly, startled. His mouth opened slightly. They were frozen this way for a long moment. Then his head dropped back and his hands rose to his face and covered it. You could hear a ragged intake of breath. Another. Finally, he lowered his hands; they dropped to his sides. His face was twisted. Tears gleamed in his eyes, on his cheeks. "Elizabeth," he whispered in a choked voice. They stood like that, facing each other. He began to step toward her, his hands rising, just as the curtain fell.

After a beat or two of silence, the applause started.

I should be clapping, too
, Leslie thought.

The curtain rose again. There were the actors, in a row onstage. They held hands, they stepped forward. They were smiling, except for the Gabriel figure. The applause roared on, and now Leslie was part of it, though she wasn't sure what she felt. The actors stepped back, they dropped one another's hands. The Gabriel figure, Leslie saw, used this moment to wipe his eyes. Then the two men, Gabriel and Alex, stepped forward and bowed, first to the audience, then to each other. They gestured back at the three women, who came forward and bowed with them again.

They all held hands again, they bowed once more in a row and were backing up together as the curtain came down. Just before it touched the floor, you could see their line break up--their legs, their feet, moving away from one another. The applause continued for a few more seconds, and then, when the curtain stayed down, it stopped.

They were silent for a moment. Pierce leaned toward her. "You're okay?"

"Of course," she said. "Yes." But she could feel that her heart was beating heavily. Something in the ending, in Elizabeth's safe return, or in the way the Gabriel character had said her name, had moved her, she didn't quite understand why.

But the play had been unsettling to her generally--the complications, the ugliness in it. She didn't understand what Billy was saying, what she intended. She had been thinking she might say afterward to Pierce and Sam,
There was not one person on that stage you could like
, until those last moments when she felt sympathy--was it sympathy?--for Gabriel. Or even before, she was thinking now, before, when he tried to explain himself to the woman. Anita. She closed her eyes for a moment. Pierce held her coat up for her, and she turned away from him to put her arms into the sleeves. She was facing Sam. He was looking at her, a worried, kind look. He said, "So, what do you make of the ending?"

She shook her head. She didn't know. She wasn't ready to talk about it.

"He stays," Pierce said, in his big assertive voice. "That's clear. He's made his choice."

"Then why is he weeping?" Sam asked Pierce.

She looked back at Pierce. He shrugged. "I don't know."

"Maybe he doesn't know," Sam said.

"Relief, maybe," Pierce said. "That she's alive."

They filed out, Leslie ahead of both of them. She could hear that they were speaking to each other, still about the play, she thought, but she kept her head bowed; she watched her feet make their way up the tilted floor.

As Sam leaned over her to hold open the glass door to the street, the cool, moist air enveloped her. It was still raining. She took a deep breath.

"Where to?" Pierce asked. "This place we're meeting Billy."

She pointed out a little corner restaurant about half a block away. Pierce opened the umbrella, and they started in that direction.

After a minute Sam said, "He didn't look glad. He looked ... tormented."

Back to the ending.

Pierce was looking at her, worried, so she smiled at him. She knew she needed to shake this off, she needed to talk.

"Here's what it is," Sam said. He paused, and then said, "'He asserted modestly.'"

"You can assert immodestly to us all you want," Pierce said. "For all the good it'll do you."

"It's that he doesn't know what he wants."

"Then why is he crying?" Leslie asked. Why was he? But now they had to go single file to get out of the way of a man walking three dogs, and when their line reformed, neither of them took up her question. It seemed to have vanished. Maybe they hadn't heard her. She wasn't sure she wanted to listen to them offer their notions about the play anymore anyway. It was something she needed to think through for herself.

They crossed the street to the restaurant. Pierce held the door open for her, and she stepped in, into another world: background music, loud voices. Instantly she was worried about Pierce, his reaction. Was it too loud? Would he be irritated? They had to stay. It was the place Billy had suggested.

A tall blond waitress came, dressed all in black but for a big white apron that fell from her waist to her ankles. She led them to a high table facing out the window toward the dark street and the rain. Pierce and Sam sat at the short ends of the table, and Leslie sat at the long side, looking back the way they'd come, toward the theater. The chair for Billy sat empty next to her. She could see that a few people were still standing under the marquee, waiting for rides, perhaps, or maybe just talking.