by Sue Miller
“No, for me, too,” he said. He kissed her, and her arms came around his waist. She rested her head on his chest. He cupped it there for a few seconds, liking the way the smooth cap of her hair felt.
“And that’s that,” she said softly. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes, it has to be,” he said. “Thanks. Thank you for saying that.”
She stepped back and curtsied.
As he opened the door to the hall, he looked back at her. She was standing with the dog just beyond the slant of hall light that fell in. She looked like a child, but a mythical child, a child in a fairy tale, guarded by some large wild animal—a black bear. A griffin. She raised her hand as he left.
The night air was cold, and the streets were empty, except for the occasional cab and a pedestrian here and there. His car had a ticket, which he shoved into the glove compartment. There were several others in there—he’d have to pay up soon, or he’d get booted.
He drove up Mass Ave, almost the lone car. Every single light turned red for him, all the way. He didn’t mind. He wanted it to take forever, getting home. He knew what was awaiting him—the sense of shame, the sense of having wronged Lauren. But as long as he was in transit, only on his way, he could hold that off, he could be just here, his body awake to itself for the first time in more than a year, his vivid sense memories—of Billy’s body opening to him, moving in response to him—not yet what he mustn’t allow himself.
At the Mass Ave bridge, he looked over at the lights of the city, the purple spokes of the Zakim Bridge, its reflection doubled, spangled in the choppy water of the river. He drove past MIT. He turned south on Pearl. The streets of Cambridgeport closed around him, sleeping, silent. At home, the porch light had gone off.
Inside, he took his shoes off. Marsh came to him and leaned against his leg. He bent down and stroked him. In the dark kitchen, he washed his face. He took off his shirt and washed his upper body, too, shivering in the cold. The bones of his bare feet clicked against each other as he moved into the living room. He left his jeans on a chair.
But when he opened the bedroom door and felt the weight of the warm, moist air, heard the noise of the humidifier whirring, he didn’t want to go in, he didn’t want to lie down next to the motionless form that was Lauren. Gently he closed the door again and went to stretch out on the couch, pulling the old afghan from Gracie around himself.
At five, Lauren called out, her voice panicky.
She was angry, he could tell as he helped her out of bed. She didn’t even grunt hello, she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
When he helped her lower herself onto the toilet, she said, “You have to come home.”
“I was home,” he said. “I came home. I didn’t want to wake you, but I was here.” Even though this was true—partly true—he felt like a liar saying it. He was a liar saying it.
“But I didn’t know that.” She started to cry. She hadn’t cried in a long time. “I have to know I’m not alone,” she said.
He bowed his head quickly. “Yes, you’re right,” he said. He fumbled for a Kleenex. He wiped her eyes, her nose. “I’m sorry, Lauren. I’m so sorry.” He was imagining how it must have been for her, the physical terror of abandonment as well as the other, the idea of what he might be—must be—doing. What he’d done, for Christ’s sake. And always the possibility—could she think it?—that he simply wouldn’t come back, ever. Probably she could think it, yes. And that’s what he deserved.
When she had peed, when he’d wiped her, he supported her back to bed and lay down next to her. Marsh came in and jumped up onto the bed, walking back and forth across them until he found a good spot, curled against Lauren’s side.
Rafe told her a long story about barhopping with Edmund and Serena.
She said she was sorry. She shouldn’t have let herself think about him the way she had. But she’d been so alone, so scared.
He stroked her hair, her face, he held her hands. He felt the quick-flickering memories of Billy’s body, of his hands on her, but he kept the same hands slow and comforting on Lauren. He whispered to her, saying her name, saying he loved her, over and over, until they both fell back to sleep. They didn’t wake again for more than two hours.
That evening, friends came over for dessert and coffee and brandy. This was how they’d solved the problem of entertaining now that Lauren could no longer cook—or for that matter really even eat in public. It also made the evening shorter and less tiring for her.
They talked about the Sox, about Ben Affleck’s new movie, set in Dorchester. The topics jumped around. The problem was that even these good friends—and Mary was one of the people in the Round Robin: she saw Lauren once every two weeks or so—even they had trouble understanding her speech now. Mary knew enough to keep her eyes on Lauren while Rafe translated, but Victor openly turned to him every time Lauren started to speak. Gradually she stopped trying.
It was amazing to Rafe, given Lauren’s immensity in his own life, how quickly she was simply erased socially, even for him. They talked on without her, around her, as though she weren’t there.
Once she said something clearly. They were speaking of Norman Mailer’s death, and she said, “He was an asshole.”
They all laughed, and Rafe felt a pang, looking at her face, to see how pleased she was to be understood, to have amused them, even with this minimal, crude remark. Lauren, one of the most amusing people he knew.
“How can you say that?” Victor said. “He wrote at least a couple of really great books.” Victor taught literature at BU.
“I don’t care,” she said, and Rafe began to translate again. “He emerged in an era when most men were assholes about women, and he didn’t bother to notice that about himself. Just the opposite. He embraced it. He argued for it.”
But after this moment in the conversation, they moved on. Mary asked about Rafe’s play, and he told her that it seemed to be starting off well. No, it hadn’t been produced elsewhere, but it was going out after this run.
“Ah, so will you go with it?” Victor asked.
“No.” He shook his head, and looked over at Lauren quickly. Her eyes were unmoving on him. “No, I stay put. I have a couple of other things in the works.”
They talked a bit longer. Lauren was completely silent now, and finally Mary looked at her and said, “It is getting late. Work for all of us tomorrow, no?”
They stood up. They gathered their things. They both bent to kiss Lauren good-bye, and Mary said, “See you next Thursday, right?”
Lauren nodded, and Mary and Victor ambled conversationally with Rafe to the door.
He came back and got her into bed. She was exhausted. He cleaned up. Then he had another brandy and read through the second act of the play, thinking of what Billy had said about her reasons for writing Gabriel as he was, thinking about what Gabriel felt and what he didn’t.
He thought of Lauren. The memories Gabriel had of Elizabeth, he thought—bright, funny, difficult, exciting—must be a bit like his memories of Lauren. Submerged, but always there, under the Lauren he lived with, the Lauren he took care of, or tried to. Just as Gabriel’s remembered Elizabeth was somewhere under the distant woman he lived with.
It had taken him this long to see that the play was about him. Denial, indeed.
He set the script down and allowed himself to think about Billy. Her conversation. He remembered, too, the way she came, the way her small strong body moved convulsively in the dim light of her bedroom. He reached up for the lamp next to the couch and turned it off. He was aroused, but he didn’t touch himself. He told himself it wasn’t likely they’d sleep together again. He didn’t think he could. He had felt too awful about Lauren. Admittedly only afterward, not during, but he knew he couldn’t bear another morning like this last one—the way she’d felt, the way he felt.
Billy had seemed to sense those feelings rising in him just before he left. She’d been kind, given everything. He shook his head: what a lugubrious fuck he’d become. In several pos
sible senses of the phrase.
He sighed and got up. He undressed. He went into the bedroom and got into bed next to Lauren. She didn’t stir.
The next evening, when he came into the living room to say good-bye, Lauren said, “We shouldn’t try anymore.” He must have looked startled, because she said quickly, “Socially.”
He sat down. “Look,” he said, “I know it wasn’t good last night. But that was my fault. I let it happen. I should have made it easier for you to be part of it.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t say that. It’s too much for you to manage it all.” She turned in her chair a little, as though she were uncomfortable. “After all, I have friends. I can talk to them.” Her head moved slightly, a gesture toward the kitchen, where Carol, who’d come to spend the evening with her, was washing dishes, the water running steadily. “I can make it work, one on one. And that’s the way I want to see people from now on.”
“I don’t agree with you.”
She smiled. “That’s too bad. ’Cause that’s the way I want it.”
“I think we should keep at it. Keep trying.”
She gave an exasperated moan. “I don’t want to keep trying. That’s just it.”
“Okay,” he said. He stood up, looking at her. After a moment, he said, “If you change your mind, though …”
“I won’t,” she said.
He put his coat on.
“Poor you,” she said. She was smiling again, a smile that almost worked, and reminded him of her as she’d once been.
“Not,” he said, smiling back.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s such hard work, being Lauren’s hubby.”
“I love you.”
Tears sprang suddenly to her eyes. “It must be awful, then, to sometimes wish me dead.”
He was shocked. He came over to her, knelt by her chair, and reached up to her face. “I never wish you dead.”
“Ah, liar,” she said clearly. “I sometimes wish me dead, so I know you must.”
The answers came to his mind, all the things he had said so often. That no matter what, she was always the same to him, that he loved her, that he loved her no less now. That he cherished every moment with her. That, as he had just finished saying, he never wished her dead.
He didn’t say any of them.
After a moment, he said, “None of that is important.”
She seemed almost startled for a few seconds. Then she said, “I know.”
When he turned at the door, leaving, she said, “Do well tonight.”
They seemed a little off, a little slow in the first act. The day away from it, maybe. For himself, there was a sense of bringing new information to Gabriel, Billy’s information. And somehow—he felt this in an inchoate, unreasoned way—all of his own experience these last few days, with Billy, yes, and with Lauren, too.
In the second-act argument with Anita near the end of the play, the long argument over what Gabriel felt he should do and feel, he was hearing the exchange differently, responding differently. It changed her responses. It could have been bad, but he experienced it as a kind of clicking, the moment he always looked for in acting, with each role—when he felt the full meaning of the play in every line. Like a mathematical proof, he’d sometimes said of this feeling, trying to explain it to a friend. Or a piece of music. It was of a whole to him, like that. He felt as he said Gabriel’s lines that he was truly understanding them. He had the sense of being Gabriel—Gabriel, accepting the implications for him of Elizabeth’s fate, whatever it was to be. Accepting the randomness of terror’s reach into her life as his fate. Choosing this—acceptance—over what suddenly seemed paltry in the possibility of his own action: the mere saying yes or saying no to his marriage. And he was experiencing this not as passivity, but as a kind of daring risk taking, necessary to him. He was excited, speaking the lines.
He could feel Anita’s surprise and confusion, but that, too, seemed real to him, the best reading possible.
After she left, he moved slowly, almost wonderingly, around the set, as if all of it were new and remarkable in some way. As if he were a new Gabriel, looking freshly at everything—his hands, the empty glass, the books he touched. He stood staring blankly into the blinding light behind the window upstage, smiling slightly to be feeling it—what he felt.
When he heard his name spoken, he turned and had the shock of seeing Elizabeth, Elizabeth come back to him—hurt, but alive. It was like a blow: the news of his life, of his own fate, arriving. He could feel the tears starting. He wasn’t ready for them, he hadn’t known they would come. He covered his eyes for a few long moments.
Then he realized what he had to do. He dropped his hands to let her see his weeping face—this was, after all, his gift to her. He stepped forward, toward her, and in a voice barely above a whisper, said his last line. Her name. Elizabeth.
WHEN THE CURTAIN FELL, Billy sat unmoving though the applause and its gradual fading, through the audience’s getting up and starting to talk, through the beginning of their slow shuffle out. Her heart was thudding heavily in her chest, it had been all through the last moments of the second act. She was nearly breathless at the end. She felt she was seeing Gabriel, exactly who he was, who she’d wanted him to be in that moment. As she watched him, she understood what she’d intended in a way she hadn’t before, even when she was writing it.
The stage direction next to Elizabeth’s name—the last spoken word of the play—had been “Joyously. Sadly.” Rafe had managed to convey both those things tonight, joy and sorrow, and as the scene unfolded in front of Billy, she felt intimately connected to what he was making of it—as though he’d understood not just the character, but also, somehow, her.
She shut her eyes and saw his face again in the moment when he dropped his hands to show Elizabeth what he was feeling—his head tilted back, the tears running down his cheeks, his mouth opening to speak. It was Gabriel up there. She hadn’t seen Rafe at all. She hadn’t thought about what he was doing or not doing.
The spell was broken when the curtain rose for the applause: there was Rafe, his face still wet with tears. She felt almost stunned with gratitude to him. She wanted to see him, to speak to him. To say thank you. To offer him her pleasure in what he’d done. Maybe even to say she was sorry.
Sorry for what?
She wasn’t sure.
The way he’d looked as he’d left her the other night came to her—the untransformed Rafe. She had sensed that he was already heading into guilt and sorrow, feelings that probably always lay in wait for him in his sad life with his wife. Instantly she’d thought that it was a mistake to have slept with him—that they shouldn’t have done it.
They: no way. She was the one who had made it happen. It was she, she, who shouldn’t have done it.
But now she was glad she had. She had been glad doing it, too, but that had been private, purely sexual. She’d been lonely, sexually lonely. It had felt like water to her thirst. But she was glad now because it had brought her—and him—this moment on the stage, she was sure of it. Something had opened in him, had changed. Something that made Gabriel say his wife’s name as though it were a blessing and a penance at the same time—to be welcomed, to be suffered.
She stood up. She threaded her way through the last stragglers, heading toward the front of the theater. She mounted the steps and pushed the curtain aside. As she moved backstage, she heard voices and, turning, saw Edmund and Nasim, one of the lighting guys, onstage, talking. For a moment she was almost startled to see anyone else there, in Gabriel’s living room. She spoke Edmund’s name.
He looked over to her, and instantly his wide face opened in a grin. His head had already started moving up and down: yes.
“Did you see it?” she asked him. He nodded more. “Wasn’t it fantastic?”
“Yep,” he said. “It sure was.” His hand rose and caressed his beard in pleasure.
“Where is he? Where’s Rafe? I wanted to speak to him.”
“Gone. Abse
nt. He must’ve left about the second the curtain came down. He was so out of here.”
“Hey,” Nasim said. “I’m gonna check out this lightboard problem, see what’s going on.”
Edmund turned to him. “That’s the ticket,” he said.
Billy had come onstage, too, and now she sat on the arm of the overstuffed chair. “Why?” she said to Edmund. “Why did he leave?”
“I think he was … upset by it in a way.” Edmund lifted his shoulders. “I suppose he sorta stunned himself, too.”
“You told him how amazing it was, I hope. Before he took off.”
“I did. We all did.” They sat for a moment, smiling foolishly at each other.
“God, I was just so … moved,” she said finally.
“It was fantastic.”
She let a little silence gather. Then she said, “I should have slept with him much, much sooner.”
His face changed. “Billy, you didn’t!”
“Nah.” She was shamed, suddenly. “Nah,” she said. “Just kidding.”
“Good! ’Cause, you know, his life is … really complicated.”
“I know. I know. He told me about it.”
Edmund watched her. She knew he couldn’t tell whether she was lying or not. He shook his head. “It could really do some … bad, bad stuff to him,” he said.
“I know. I was kidding.” But his face was stern. The scary Edmund, the one they all dreaded. “It was funny, Edmund,” she insisted, trying to make him happy again.
“Only mildly funny,” he said.
“I apologize then.” She put her hand on her heart for a moment. “I only said it ’cause I was just so … thrilled. It’s actually almost embarrassing, I’m so happy. For him, and for me.”
“For us.”
“Right. For all of us.”
Now Edmund set his bulk down on the couch, grunting a bit. Here they were, the two of them, relaxed and happy in Gabriel’s sad world. Incongruous.