by Sue Miller
Pierce was talking happily about a patient of his, an eight-year-old boy whom he’d been treating for Ewing’s sarcoma. He’d been in a cheerful mood for weeks because of what was pretty clearly this child’s remission. They spoke now, as they occasionally did, of the strange serenity and maturity of kids with cancer, of the way it changed them and their families. Of the gift it could sometimes seem—unsought, unwelcome of course, and yet real and remarkable.
When she had met Pierce, he was already well along in his residency in a field—pediatric oncology—that she would have tried to dissuade him from if she’d known him earlier. It seemed too sad, too hard, to her. And as she began to think of him more seriously, to imagine being married to him, she worried about how this work might affect him—and therefore her—over time. How could he do it every day, she’d asked him. Accept the fact that so many of them, these beautiful little children, would die?
At first he had explained his choice to her in ways that seemed simply logical, reasonable. He talked about the children who survived and the extraordinary satisfaction they gave him. And even with the ones who didn’t, he said, there were the rewards of giving the families as much time with their kids as possible.
Only later, when he knew her much better, did he speak of what he saw as the beauty of the whole experience. He said that: beauty. He seemed almost shy, talking about it—big, jovial Pierce. She was touched by that. He spoke of the sense he had of being witness, over and over, to something spiritual in its nature, even when the children died. He said that it seemed to bring forward all that was brave and selfless in everyone involved, even the children themselves. He said he felt privileged to be any part of it.
They had this conversation at his parents’ vacation house in Maine. The two of them had been swimming briefly in the unbearably cold water. They were lying on the warm wooden planks of the dock in their wet suits. Pierce was turned to face her. He was squinting into the sun as he spoke—frowning, searching for words. The dried salt water had whitened in the creases by his eyes. She had never seen him so serious. She hadn’t known that he could be.
And even sometimes now when Pierce irritated her with his jokiness, what seemed his unwillingness to take almost anything seriously, she had only to call up the way he had spoken of his work that day, how he had looked—or to think of the way he was sometimes emptied, silenced for days after a patient’s death—to be reminded of her deepest feelings for him. She’d seen him then as wise, as deep. She’d had a sense of his having a greater understanding of death, of the price of love, particularly parental love, than she had. And of course all that was true of him.
But he was also only Pierce. That was the thing she’d had to learn. He was the person he seemed to be—dismissive, flippant—as well as the person who understood how pain can change you. The surprise of this two-sidedness was something that still, always, had the power to wound her. She guarded herself against it, she supposed, the way she guarded herself against everything difficult or painful—by being loving, by being solicitous.
But how she had counted on him after Gus’s death! To understand her grief, to allow it, to come into it with her. His compassionate, dispassionate sense of the familiarity of what she was going through—in spite of all that was extreme about the circumstances—was what she leaned on. Maybe she had even counted on him to expect her to emerge from it eventually, in the same way he emerged from his sorrow each time one of the children he had come to love died.
As she had. Hadn’t she?
She was sitting on a little banquette against the wall, facing Pierce and the room behind him. While they talked, she’d been watching it slowly fill up, the well-dressed couples being led in, the parties of businessmen, sitting, looking at the menu, chatting.
And all along a group of people was slowly assembling at the large round table directly in back of Pierce, calling greetings to one another as they drifted in by ones and twos, embracing, catching up. As their mass grew, Pierce turned several times in his chair to give them hard looks. He didn’t like it—their noise, their obliviousness of how it might be affecting others.
Even as she and he ordered their meal, as their first course was brought to them, these people were all still standing, moving around their table to talk. Their voices were loud and cheerful.
She leaned toward Pierce and said, “It’s a family reunion, don’t you think?”
“What luck!” he said. Or she thought that’s what he said. It really was quite noisy.
They didn’t try to talk for a while. Gradually the party sorted itself out, sat, and began to quiet down, talking now in twos and threes; and she and Pierce began to talk again too.
But as she had watched the family gather together, laugh together, she was thinking about Pierce, about his family—three older brothers and a younger sister. His parents were still alive, too, as ridiculously lighthearted, as willfully oblivious of difficulty as ever, jolly stereotypes straight out of the sentimental Dickens. The reason Pierce could be so irritated by this family’s noise was that he was just that privileged, too, she thought. Because he had such a family—welcoming, loud, traditional.
Oh, there were wrinkles. His next older brother had had four wives, and one of his divorces was so messy and drawn out that it resulted in his losing almost all contact with his kids until they were grown. And no one was exactly certain of the parentage of either of his sister’s two children—probably including herself, Pierce thought.
But his family’s ease together, their fondness for one another, these were things he took for granted. A big family such as this one next to them—such as Leslie had wanted to make with him—this was not the miracle to him it was to her. It didn’t seem a precious gift to him or seemingly to any of the others in it. They were all, like him, offhanded in their generosity and inclusiveness, so much so that the first time she’d visited, she had trouble sorting out the multiple guests from Pierce’s siblings. And she herself was welcomed just as carelessly and warmly as those guests were. As Gus had been, too, eventually.
Gus. She thought of their own sad growing up—the loneliness, especially for him. The long bitter silences between their parents.
Now Pierce was asking her what she’d read about the play.
“Well, they say it’s not as experimental as her earlier work.”
“Ah,” he said. “Good.”
She waved her hand and pushed her plate slightly away. She’d finished. Or she’d eaten all she could. If they were at home, she would have asked for a doggie bag. Just as well. Pierce made fun of her for that, for her frugality.
“And the story is this terrorism stuff,” he said.
“Right. Actually I tried not to read too much about it. I like a little sense of not knowing what’s coming. Just what I told you—a wife maybe caught in a terrorist attack, and the family sorting out various issues, I guess you’d say”—she made a face—“whatever they might be, while they wait to hear.”
“But it’s not 9/11.”
This was not a question. Pierce already knew this. He’d been careful to establish this when she proposed coming down to see the play and Billy. But she said no. Again. “No, thank goodness. She didn’t write it that close to the bone.”
No. She hadn’t written about Gus.
When they were through, when Pierce had paid, they gathered their coats from the girl in charge of the coat check and went outside. It was raining now, and Pierce raised the umbrella over them. She took his arm. You could see the theater almost as soon as you stepped out of the restaurant. It had a silvery, space-age front, from which an unattractive dark blue marquee projected. In white letters, Billy’s play was announced: THE LAKE SHORE LIMITED. They walked slowly down the wide brick sidewalk toward it.
There were people milling around under the marquee. The glass doors opened and shut, opened and shut, as the couples, the groups, drifted inside. Standing still in the midst of this activity there was a man—no raincoat, no topcoat—a tall man, in a
grayish suit, with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched. From half a block away, holding on to Pierce’s arm, walking carefully so as not to catch her heels between the bricks, Leslie could tell it was him, it was Sam, and she felt the little jolt of pleasure that seeing him always brought her. A frisson, she thought.
There was a time when she’d been half in love with him. She remembered—she often remembered—an afternoon when they’d taken a walk together, when he’d kissed her. The only time he had. They’d been picking blackberries, and he tasted of them. When she’d sat down for dinner that night with Pierce, he’d asked about the long scratches on her arms, scratches from the blackberry canes. She’d lied to him. She said she’d been pruning the roses. She didn’t want him to know about any part of it. It was hers alone. She was almost sad when the scratches healed.
She had met Sam when he and his wife Claire bought twenty acres of farmland in Vermont to build a house on. Leslie sold them the property. She was working as a real estate agent then, one of a variety of jobs she had held over the years.
She’d gotten into this pattern in her midtwenties, early in her marriage—just after they moved to Vermont. Her first job had been running the office of a local small press, but then pretty quickly she was also doing some editing for them. After that she managed a bookstore. For a few years she was a kind of glorified secretary and bookkeeper for a local opera company, then she worked in an art gallery. But what she was really doing all of that time was waiting for the life she’d envisioned for herself to start—a life of motherhood, of family. By the time she’d given up that hope, she seemed to have made a habit of changing her job every four or five years, and she’d decided she liked that. She liked the variety. She thought of it as a way to come to know a good deal about the smallish world immediately around her, to know people in its various corners.
By the early nineties, she’d more or less backed into real estate. A friend of hers who had her own small agency was shorthanded and suggested that Leslie get a license and join her, so she had. This was the way things happened with jobs, with work, for Leslie.
She enjoyed selling real estate, she found. She took pleasure in meeting new people, in helping them. And she discovered that she was curious about houses—how they were built, how they’d been renovated and decorated. Many of the homes that she was dealing with were old, they had interesting histories, colorful past owners. She liked researching this kind of thing, and it made her a good salesperson, not surprisingly.
When Claire called, she asked Leslie about prices, about the differences among the small towns in the area. She and her husband were interested in land, she said, a minimum of ten acres so they wouldn’t have to think about neighbors. Her husband, Sam, was an architect. He would design the house. It would be a large, gracious place, a place to which both of them could bring their almost-adult children from their previous marriages.
They arranged a time to get together a week or so off. This would give Leslie a chance to look around for what they wanted. Claire knew Woodstock, so they agreed to meet there for coffee before they went exploring.
Leslie was sitting on a bench outside the restaurant when they drove up in a pickup truck with a long aluminum stepladder rattling in the back. They both got out at once, swinging themselves down from the high seats.
Claire was so striking, with her white-blond hair pulled cleanly off her face into a bun at the back of her head, that Leslie hardly noticed Sam at first. She was looking at Claire’s high, rounded forehead and strong features. Her face was very lined, but this only accentuated the drama of her sculpted head, her deep-set, almost-hooded eyes. She was arresting, Leslie would have said, describing her to anyone else.
She extended her hand, saying her name, and Leslie took it. Of course, her grip was firm, cool. She turned to introduce Sam, who was standing behind her. When Leslie looked at him, her first thought was that he must be quite a bit younger than Claire. He was tall, a nice-looking man with a long, slightly crooked nose, a narrow face, and floppy brown hair just going gray. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, a scholar’s glasses. She had always considered these an affectation. Later she would learn from him that it was the weightlessness of them he liked. That the pressure of any other kind of glasses on his nose gave him a headache.
He had a lively face. There was something avid in it—eager for life, ready to be amused. He and Claire were dressed alike, as if in a uniform—crisp jeans and light khaki jackets with multiple pockets.
They drank their coffee, and Leslie told them about the properties they would look at. Two were old farms, their fields growing over with pine and maple saplings and thick brush. The third was mostly in woods, which would offer a great view if cleared. “Of course,” she said, “the trees are almost all second growth up here, so even the woods were once somebody’s farm.” She was aware of a kind of pride in talking about this: her world. “In the middle of what seems just forest, there are stone fences crisscrossing everywhere. Somebody’s ancient field, somebody’s property line. Some claim we don’t know anything about anymore.”
“So much for the illusion of ownership,” Sam said.
Leslie laughed. “Well, precisely. But I’m in the business of selling that illusion.”
Leslie paid, though Sam had taken his wallet out. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “This is part of my job.”
Claire came in Leslie’s car—the noise of the ladder had bothered her all the way up, she said—and Sam followed in the truck. While Leslie drove, they talked. Leslie learned a great deal about Claire, about her life. She and Sam had been married for two years. Claire taught some combination of ethics and political science at Harvard; Leslie couldn’t quite figure it out. She talked about her children, about living in Cambridge. Leslie was dismissive about her own life, and Claire didn’t seem inclined to press her for details. In the rearview mirror, Leslie could see the green truck behind them, sometimes dropping back, sometimes pulling closer at turns, at stop signs. Sam’s face retreated, then approached, sober and blankened in his solitude.
At the first farm, they all got out to walk the boundaries. But the ground was muddy—it had rained the night before—and Claire wasn’t wearing boots. They’d only gone a hundred yards or so when she turned back.
Sam and Leslie hiked on together, Leslie going ahead in the wooded parts, pointing out the fallen limbs they’d have to step over, holding back the branches, the thorny whips that might have caught at them. Sam asked questions, mostly about the land—the old farm, its history—but also about her. Leslie found herself talking easily about her life, her “pickup life,” she called it.
When they got back to where they’d parked, in the open field next to the tall stand of lilac bushes that marked the location of the original house, Claire got out of Leslie’s car, where she’d been waiting. Sam went to the truck and got his stepladder out. He told them he’d be a little while; he wanted to check some of the possible sight lines.
They watched as he lurched away, bent a little to the side carrying the ladder. Claire said, “Ah, Sam. This is what he believes in.”
“What?” asked Leslie. She looked over at Claire, at her stern, noble profile. There was a little smile playing on her lips.
“That it actually makes a difference—what you look at, the space you live in, where the windows are.” She said this last with a heavy emphasis, as if Leslie must of course agree with her that it made no difference at all where the windows were.
This was odd, Leslie thought. It made her uncomfortable.
After a few minutes of standing around, shuffling their feet with their hands in their pockets, Leslie suggested they get in the car. She ran the engine for a while every now and then to warm them up. Their conversation seemed suddenly desultory and empty to Leslie. She was struck by how much easier it had been to talk to Sam. They could see him out in the overgrown field from time to time, his head and upper body appearing above the apple trees or the spindly maples, the short scrubby pi
nes. He seemed to have a small camera with him—at any rate, he occasionally lifted his hands in front of his face and turned this way and that, as if to frame a picture or a view. Sometimes he seemed to write something down.
Sam came by himself the next time, to look at the place he’d liked best once more, and then two other new ones she thought he should see. When he and Claire made an offer, Leslie dealt with him exclusively. When they negotiated back and forth a bit, he was the one she called. He came alone to the closing, with a power of attorney to sign Claire’s name. Leslie didn’t see Claire again for a year and a half, until the house was almost finished.
As they were leaving the closing, Sam asked her to have a drink with him to celebrate. She was charmed and agreed, and then was even more charmed that he was talking about a bottle of champagne that he’d brought along with him in a cooler in his truck. They drove to the site, and he opened the bottle and poured them each a glass—he’d brought these along, too, tall, expensive glasses that chimed when they touched them together. They sat in the truck and sipped champagne and talked easily and loosely, jumping from the names of builders Leslie knew of, their strengths and weaknesses, to his neighbors up and down the dirt road, to his kids and Claire’s, to Pierce and his work. They finished the bottle as the sky turned the chilly purple of a quick winter dusk. He took her home as it grew dark—she was too tipsy to want to drive. He stayed for dinner with her and Pierce.
After that, though, when he came up to walk the land, to interview contractors, to supervise the building of the house, Leslie saw him mostly by herself—for lunch, for coffee, for a walk through the house as it took shape. He did come over to her house for a drink or dinner with her and Pierce several times—Pierce enjoyed him, and Leslie would have said they were all becoming good friends. But occasionally she would be aware that she hadn’t mentioned seeing Sam when she could have, perfectly easily. And when Sam told her that he and Claire were going to divorce—this just months after they’d moved their furniture into the finished house—she didn’t tell Pierce about it for several weeks. She held on privately to some sense of excitement, of possibility, in the news, even while she knew nothing would change in her life because of it, or in Pierce’s.