The Lake Shore Limited

by Sue Miller

  “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.

  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 ever
ything 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 babysitting?”

  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 disease!’”

  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.