The Lake Shore Limited (8 page)

The restaurant was small, the walls dark, a warm cave in the rainy night. Around them, the hubbub of talk, of clinking silverware, and under it all a plaintive voice singing to a regular, bluesy beat.

Another waitress came and took their drink order--they served only wine, to Pierce's annoyance. She left menus for them. Pierce started telling Sam about the erotic Japanese prints. He was funny, describing the Tuesday afternoon art patrons, women mostly, moving decorously around, seeming to consider with equal studiousness the prints of women in elaborate robes moving through formal and stylized gardens or theaters, and the ones that involved people screwing in inventive and unlikely ways, their faces impassive. "There weren't many," he said. "Only five or six. But all of them very ...
convincing
, I'd say. Very thorough." He raised his eyebrows for Sam's benefit. "And just where everything came together,
as it were
, there was always just the subtlest drop or two of some clear, shiny substance
so
carefully painted on." He grinned, widely. "Hotcha!"

Sam laughed, shaking his head at Pierce, at all that was predictable, she supposed, about his energy, his enthusiasm.

They started to talk about the difference between erotic art and pornography, what the line was. The wine came and they clinked the glasses,
To friendship
, and drank. They talked about their first experiences of porn, at what age, how it had affected them. Leslie tried to do her part in the conversation, and she was amused by them, and interested, but she still felt far away. She was aware, too, of waiting for Billy, of the usual anxiety about that, mixed with something indefinable left over from the play. Uneasiness, she supposed. That was probably it. What you didn't understand made you nervous. That was all.

They talked about contemporary movies, how close to porn some were, and yet finally, Sam said, the closer they got without crossing that line, the more dishonest they seemed. She was watching him, his face, the slight squint of his eyes behind his glasses as he thought through his point. She was feeling tender toward him.

And then she saw Billy outside, a small figure all in black, her face a white circle under her umbrella. She stood on the corner opposite, waiting to cross. She had a huge bag slung from her shoulder, big enough to carry her life's work, it was so enormous. She
had
cut her hair. Her face shone beneath the straight, thick bangs. A car passed, two, and then she started across the street.

"Here's Billy," Leslie said, gesturing at the window. The men turned and just then she remembered: the flowers! She'd forgotten them back in the hotel room when they left, her gift to Billy--she could see them in her mind's eye, the tight, perfect, fresh bouquet, lying on the bureau.

But then the door opened, and as she got down from her chair to start toward it, Billy saw her and her grave face was suddenly transformed by her open, surprisingly sweet smile.

THE JOKE WAS THAT THEY'D FOUND AN ANGEL to play another angel, though he told them that his name was just plain Rafe, not Raphael.

"And those guys are both archangels anyway," the director said. Edmund. "Gabriel, Raphael. They're both archangels." They were sitting onstage, most of them at a big table, some in scattered chairs around the periphery.

"Pardon my French, but what the fuck are archangels?" This was somebody whose job he wasn't sure of. A sound guy, maybe. Or electrics.

"The head honcho types in heaven, I think," Edmund said.

"Just one plain old angel would be good enough for me, thank you very much." That was the stage manager, Ellie. She had her computer set up on the table and was typing into it, even while she was talking, notes on what needed to get done.

Edmund had laughed. "An angel. One would do. Yes indeedy. But where, oh where is he?"

Rafe sat and listened to the horsing around, feeling mostly relief. He'd gotten the part. He needed the part. He needed to stay busy, to stay away from the house. He needed to be in this world, where everything else fell away. Where only this was real--what happened on the stage and how you made it happen--and reality was irrelevant.

It was Edmund who had asked him to read. They'd worked together years earlier, but Edmund had seen him recently in
Uncle Vanya
and liked the rueful quality he projected. This is what he'd said on the phone.

"Yeah, well, I'm your go-to guy for rue," Rafe had said.

Edmund was short, fat, balding, seemingly mild. Everyone knew better. He was in control always. He shaped everything by asking his gentle, persistent questions. He had a full beard, and his hands' almost-relentless attention to it was part of how he talked. He stroked it, pulled at it, twirled its ends. He had done all of these things while Rafe was reading, and Rafe had found it hard to ignore.

Among the other slacker-looking people who had been sitting around or drifting in and out while Rafe was reading--costume people and sound people and set designers and builders, gofers of one kind or another--was a person so small he took her at first for a child, and almost made a remark. It would have been one of his usual pointlessly sarcastic things: "Is someone here
baby
sitting?"

But he didn't, unaccountably. And luckily, he supposed, as she was, of course, the playwright, though he didn't find that out until a week or so later.

So, rue. Well, the passage he'd read was from the first act, a section in which his character, Gabriel, is explaining to his daughter-in-law, Emily, drink in hand, the state of his marriage, the complicated reasons for his calmness in the face of the terrible news his son has just brought him. Or the potentially terrible news.

What he says is that he and his wife have withdrawn from each other over the years. He says that neither is really fully alive or real to the other. "Maybe you know how it is when you're tired and don't feel like having sex," he says to Emily. "You know, you undress carefully, you expose only a little flesh at a time, so as never to be fully naked, never to seem to be issuing some kind of invitation with your body, God forbid. Maybe"--and Rafe had smiled here--"you don't know how that is. Lucky you. But even so, maybe you can imagine this: that there's a later stage you can reach when you don't bother with even that formality because there's no possibility either one of you could ever feel invited by the other's nakedness." He had paused. "Well, there's a parallel thing that happens emotionally after you've lived too carefully around each other too long, always hiding some part of yourself.
You stop caring."
He'd dropped the smile here, let his whole face fall. "In just the way your bodies are dead to each other, so is everything else. There's nothing you can say that will charm the other or, for that matter, hurt the other, because nothing you say is ever of any importance at all. Your conversations remain polite,
fully clothed
, as it were, at all times. And in the end, with us, they were so pointless that we literally stopped speaking."

He had shrugged. "I remember having friends drop in on us in the summerhouse in Massachusetts. I remember that we were laughing and talking up to the minute they left. Elizabeth had told a story about a student of hers who would come to office hours and start to cry the moment she crossed the threshold into her office. It was a victory, she said, when by midsemester the girl got halfway through a conference before the waterworks started.

"I remember watching her talking about this and thinking how lively she was, how attractive. She has a way of telling stories--well, you know it--a way of saying, ' "Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum,"...
says she
, "Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum," ...
says I
.' That nice inversion that makes it seem that you're listening to an old familiar tale. A nursery rhyme. Or even a song. I remember thinking ... I guess just thinking her name:
Elizabeth
. Startled by her, you know, as though she'd just come back from a long trip away. Or maybe as if I'd just come back from a long trip away.

"Anyway, we stood by the car saying good-bye, and then we stood in the driveway waving." He'd been smiling a big false smile as he said this, and waving, a monarch's regal slight turning of the hand this way and that. "And the
moment
the car turned into the road"--he dropped the smile, made his voice hard, brisk--"she turned one way and went inside, and I turned the other way and went in the other direction." He gave a short, mirthless laugh: "Back to our corners." He held his hand up, palm forward. "'Show's over, folks.'"

They'd liked this. They'd asked him to read a few other shorter speeches. He was hired, amid the jokes about his name.

In the car on the way home, he let himself start to worry about Lauren. He'd been around most evenings for a while--ever since
Vanya
closed, actually. He thought she might miss that--his getting dinner for her, helping her with it, getting her to bed.

But if she had a moment's pang, he didn't see it. What she said was that it might actually be easier for the Round Robin to make time for her in the evening than it was for them in the day.

The Round Robin was what they called the group of friends who had, for the moment, taken on Lauren's care. Later they would need to pay for someone, later they would need professionals, but for now one of Lauren's friends, Carol, had summoned these others, friends of Lauren's or friends of Carol's who knew about Lauren, and they made her life--and his, too, he recognized--possible.

They didn't all come into the house. One shopped for them, one took Lauren to the hospital and to doctors' appointments. But most of them helped her--helped them--in more intimate ways: cooking for them, feeding Lauren, taking her to the bathroom, getting her to bed at night when he was working.

She had welcomed this, because her main wish was that he be freed of all these tasks so that he could see her as a woman still, not an invalid. This is what she'd said to him, weeping, one night early on after the diagnosis was made, when they were still trying to ignore the symptoms--the broken dishes, the orange juice that slopped onto the table as she poured it. The trembling, the falls, the bruises. She said that she didn't want to become an illness to him. That she wanted, most of all, to stay real to him as a person, as a woman, as his wife.

"As my sexy wife," he'd said. He'd brushed her hair back off her face, thumbed away the tear sliding down her cheek.

Later she didn't weep anymore. Later she joked about it. "Don't you think it's weird, this newfangled business of naming everything? Megan's Law. Amber Alert. Lou Gehrig's disease."

"But there's Halley's comet," he pointed out. "Maybe it was ever thus."

"Still. A
disease,"
she said. "If it's his disease, why do I have to have it. 'Lou! Lou! Come back! You forgot your dis
ease
!'"

By then they weren't making love anymore.

They'd met in college, when Rafe was, as he put it later, "basically priapic." It's what had drawn him into acting as an undergraduate, he'd told her all those years later. He assumed the women would all be beautiful and sexually liberated.

He was wrong in this assumption. Some were beautiful, some were not. Some were liberated, some were not. But most of them had no desire to sleep with him, a lowly sophomore. They were interested in the older actors, in the directors, in their teachers.

Lauren was his lab partner in biology, and she
was
interested in sleeping with him. Very interested. For a few weeks in their sophomore year they had frantic sex together through long late afternoons in his dorm room, the noise of his roommates' lives on the other side of the door the background to their marathons. She was then still a little chunky, she wore glasses that she ceremonially removed before their exertions began.

They tried everything they could think of. She was the first person who ever gave him a blow job, who ever licked his balls, put her finger up his ass, let him do the same to her. She showed him how to flatten and widen his tongue to give her more pleasure, she corrected the way his mouth pulled at her nipples. Finally he had found her almost mannish, as he thought of it, in her willingness to experiment, her seemingly coldhearted enthusiasm to try the next forbidden thing. He tired of her. He tired of it. It was as though she were working from a text, he told her later when he met her again, when he fell in love with her.

Oh, she had been, she assured him. It was the way she'd done everything then. By the book.

Their second meeting happened twelve years after their first, when their real lives had begun. Though sometimes he thought now that perhaps they hadn't yet begun, even at that point. Perhaps the present was the real part, the true test, and all the rest of it mere preparation.

Either way, they were both happy in their work then, single, in their early thirties, still living in Berkeley, which is where they'd met the first time around, where they'd gone to college. She came to a benefit for the repertory company he was with, after a performance of their ongoing play,
Bosoms and Neglect
. Rafe was Scooper, and he was still in costume and makeup, as were the other two players, so that they could easily be recognized by patrons who might want to schmooze with them, whose asses they had been instructed to kiss as enthusiastically as possible.