The Lake Shore Limited Read online

  It was an offering, Leslie saw. An offering of love to him. The young woman wanted him as her father. Perhaps also, without recognizing it—that would have to be the case—as a kind of lover, too.

  “But now I wonder … is it that you don’t care about her?” She was leaning toward him. Her face was earnest, open. “About … anyone?”

  “No, that’s not it,” Gabriel said, softly.

  “Not what?”

  “It’s not the reason I’m so … calm, if you will.”

  Now he got up and went to the back of the stage to set his glass down. He turned, faced forward, and started talking. Elizabeth, he said, wasn’t at all sure she wanted to stay married to him. Nor he to her, “in all candor.” He kept talking as he walked slowly forward until he was standing at the back of the couch, speaking to the young woman, but looking over her head, straight at the audience. He talked about their slow withdrawal from each other over the last years, describing scenes of absence, of emptiness. He called up a time at the Massachusetts house when they had guests, and each of them, but particularly Elizabeth, was lively, was charming and talkative; and then the moment the guests’ car was out of sight, they turned silently away from each other. He smiled, a strained smile. “Back to our corners. ‘Show’s over, folks.’”

  He said the reason she’d gone off by herself to the summerhouse now was to think about all this. “And my assignment was to think about it also. Which I’ve done.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And your decision?”

  “My decision … doesn’t much matter now, does it?”

  “But you must have felt, like, one way or the other.”

  He smiled. Laughed. It sounded like Heemp! to Leslie. “As you’ve said, I’m not a decisive man.”

  “But this is … your life. You have to know what you want.”

  “That’s your take. Your version. In my version, I can do either thing. I can stay with Elizabeth, if that’s what she wants, or I can leave.”

  “If that’s what she wants.”

  “Yes.”

  “But what do you want?” Her arms lifted slightly. She was frustrated. He was irritating in his chilliness. Leslie didn’t get him either.

  “I don’t see that it matters, now.”

  “God!” She spun away. “I see why Alex gets so infuriated.” She picked up her glass and took a quick swallow.

  “Good.”

  “Good! Why?”

  “Because Alex needs you to see that. He needs you on his side. And I don’t, my dear.”

  She was suddenly angry. “No, you don’t need anyone on your side.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not even Elizabeth.”

  “I would be in trouble if I needed Elizabeth on my side. She’s not. She hasn’t been for a good long while.”

  “So it doesn’t matter to you if Elizabeth is dead, it doesn’t matter to you.”

  Leslie saw that Alex had come to stand in the doorway to the living room. He stopped there. Neither of the other two had noticed him.

  “It would matter enormously to me. Enormously. But it might not change my life—what would have been my life.” He paused for a moment, then said, “It might not change my theoretical life, let’s say.”

  Alex stepped forward. “That’s the only kind of life you have, Dad—theoretical.”

  Gabriel started, and turned to him. He smiled, sadly this time. “This would be your mother’s perspective, too.”

  The younger man snorted, began to talk again, but the woman interrupted, wanted to know what he’d learned.

  He turned to her. He said they’d started pulling out the dead and seriously injured, that more people had arrived at hospitals, either in ambulances or on their own, that they weren’t releasing names. They’d set up an information center for the families.

  Everyone was silent for a moment. Then Gabriel went to the back of the stage and turned on a small television set wedged into the bookshelves. There was a man talking, interviewing someone you couldn’t see. The voices were speaking of who might have done this. The younger couple moved back and stood watching too. They listened for a few moments to the speculation. There had already been several claims of responsibility.

  “Imagine wanting credit for it,” the young woman said. She shook her head. “What a world.”

  Alex began to talk about their intention, their motivation. Trains, the Midwest: new territory, new methods. “Fuckers,” he said.

  “But perhaps this is how it’s going to be,” Gabriel said. He turned the television off. “It will be something that just happens from time to time.” He brought up John Kerry, he said maybe he had been right when he said during his failed campaign that terrorism was like crime, something ineradicable, something to be managed, rather than eliminated. He described being in Paris with Elizabeth the fall after the Metro bombings. “We traveled everywhere together by subway—by Metro.” He paused for a moment, and Leslie thought that he must have been remembering Elizabeth as she was then—perhaps even tenderly, it seemed for a half moment; but then he cleared his throat and went on to say that 9/11 wasn’t different from that, really, except in scale. Alex and he began to talk about it in the abstract, theorizing about the likelihood that these terrorists had actually intended to blow up the station, too, the possibility of their being from Morocco, like the Madrid bombers, and the reasons for that; or Pakistani. Or Al Qaeda. There was something comical in this easy turn to theorizing on the part of the men, and the audience seemed to recognize this—there was mild laughter here and there.

  While they were speaking this way, the woman was walking slowly back and forth across the stage, her face full of reaction to each of them, now bitter amusement, now disgust. She sometimes tried to interrupt with a phrase or two, but they paid her no real attention. They had moved to the front of the stage as they talked, facing each other for the most part, and she claimed the back of the stage, watching them. Finally she came to a halt, dead center, in front of the big stage window. “For God’s sake!” she shrilled, hands on her hips. They both fell silent and turned to her. “This is Elizabeth we’re talking about.” Her voice quavered. She dropped her arms.

  They were all quiet for a moment. Then she said softly, pleadingly, to Alex, “Your mother.”

  He turned a little away from her, almost a flinch.

  She looked at Gabriel and said, “Your wife.”

  They were frozen in this tableau for a few seconds. Then the doorbell rang. As one, they turned in that direction, then looked back at each other—a kind of wild, frightened expectancy in their faces. The stage blacked out. The curtain fell.

  The room filled with applause that ended quickly as the house lights came up.

  Leslie bent over to pick up her purse. Over her back, in the sudden hubbub of people talking and getting up, she heard Sam say to Pierce, “Well, quite an ending—for the first act, in any case.”

  “Yeah,” Pierce answered. They were all standing now. They moved into the aisle among the others inching back to the lobby. Pierce kept his hand on her elbow—a kind of sympathetic connection, she felt. She was grateful to him, but she was far away. She felt confused. Around her, she could hear others talking, speculating, commenting on the actors, on the arguments.

  Some weren’t. Some had shed the play quickly, were on to their own lives. She heard a voice say, “I wish I’d known it was going to rain today. I didn’t bring an umbrella to work.”

  In the lobby, Pierce went to get the drinks this time, just for him and Sam. Leslie didn’t want anything. She and Sam stood together.

  “Is it hard, watching this?” he asked. His face was kind, concerned.

  She dipped her head from side to side, equivocating. Then she said it. “Yes. Yes and no.”

  “The yes I get. The no is …?”

  She shrugged. “It has its own complexity. Its own … life, I suppose.” She paused. “But of course, it makes me think of Gus. Mostly o
f that time before we knew for sure that he was on the plane. When we still had hope, even though we pretty much knew.”

  “But even then, the husband’s—the father’s—ambivalence is so unlike anything you might have felt.”

  “Well, of course.”

  “Or the playwright either. Billy, right?”

  “Yes. Billy. No, she wouldn’t have felt that either.” But where did it come from, then? This is what Leslie didn’t get. So much in this play, as in the others she’d seen, came from things she knew about Billy, about her life. Why would she have imagined a thing like this? It seemed so ugly, so awful, really.

  “Still, it’s well done,” Sam said. And they talked about this for a bit, about the actors, about certain moments they’d liked, others they hadn’t quite believed. Leslie made her point about the liquor, the glasses, and Sam agreed. Pierce came with the drinks, and Sam asked about Pierce’s work, and then hers.

  She tried to make a joke about it, about not having work. The truth was, she didn’t want work anymore. She hadn’t wanted it since Gus died. She had been stopped for more than a year after that. All she could manage was to stay at home and grieve. And then, when her grief had eased a bit, she wanted just to concentrate on each day—to see friends and play in the garden and read. To make a kind of closed-in, sheltered life for herself and Pierce.

  Oh, she did a kind of work, a little. She filled in from time to time at the real estate office when things were busy—doing a showing, managing a closing. And she’d gone back to doing the other things she’d always done—volunteering at the public school, working on the zoning board in their town, swimming almost every day in the Dartmouth pool. This seemed to be her life. It was just the way it had happened with her, to her. It was what she had chosen because of what had happened. Or it had chosen her.

  She and Pierce had talked about it occasionally, about whether this was all right, whether she should be doing more. She was remembering this as the men chatted. Whether she ought to try to get a job, whether she was too young for this kind of life. “Maybe we should buy some old inn and run a B and B,” she had suggested once, only half joking. He had pretended to gag. It was only then that she realized she had been asking him whether he would come with her into what she thought of as this new life—and that he was telling her no. No. He needed work he cared about, he needed to be in the world, to feel his life mattered in that way.

  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 gr
eed 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.”