by Sue Miller
She went to stand by the window. From here she could look down at the people walking along Boylston Street or disappearing into the Public Garden under the trees, bare trees for the most part—the oaks were still thick with leaves. The moving figures were anonymous, sexless. Just dark shapes, full of mystery for Leslie.
A woman from housekeeping interrupted her dreamy state. Leslie took the vase from her at the door. She filled it with water in the little bar sink, and then unwrapped the bigger bouquet. When she’d arranged the flowers, spreading them in a wide arc, she set the vase on the desk. Then she took the cellophane off the rosebuds, too. It had occurred to her she couldn’t take them wrapped as they were to the play—they would make too much noise.
Pierce emerged in the hotel’s white bathrobe, his flesh slightly pinked from the heat of the water. He stopped at the lily arrangement. “Ah,” he said. “So this is where you were. Lovely.” He smiled at her. Then he picked up the bouquet. “And what’s this?” He waggled it. “Someone getting married?”
It was true, she thought. It did look like the kind of bouquet a bride would carry. Had she been thinking such a thing? She could feel herself blushing. “It’s just something for Billy, to congratulate her—on the play, you know.”
“That’s more than generous of you.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“It is. Don’t argue.” He was going through the bureau drawers, getting out clean underwear, a fresh shirt, dark socks.
“I do argue. It’s just … courteous, really. A new play opening, that’s something to celebrate. And we’re old friends. We should probably do more, when you think about it.”
“When you think about it.”
“You disagree?”
“Ah, Leslie, I don’t know. I don’t care, in fact. It’s generous. It’s like you. And it seems unnecessary to me. Maybe it’s time you … let her go, as it were.”
He unfurled his shirt. The creases where it had been folded were sharp on the expensive fabric he liked the feel of. Odd, the things Pierce cared about and didn’t care about.
“I’m not holding on to her.” Her voice sounded childish and defensive, even to her own ear.
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Well, that would be the opposite of ‘letting her go,’ wouldn’t it?”
He looked over at her, his face not unkind, but distant. How clearly he saw her! How well he knew her! Sometimes she hated him.
“There are all kinds of possibilities between holding on and letting go,” he said.
“Oh, ‘possibilities,’” she said.
He looked at her again, and then away.
She watched him as he shed the robe, dropping it onto the bed. He was so casual about revealing his body, so offhand! But he could afford to be. He took good care of himself. He was tall and big-boned with a handsome, hawkish face and hair barely touched with gray, and though his flesh, like hers, was creased and stippled here and there, underneath it he was still firmly muscled. He worked out several times a week.
“Wouldn’t you say asking Sam along is a way of letting go?” she said.
“I thought you said you’d asked him along because you wanted to see him after all this time. Because you thought he’d enjoy the play.”
“Well, and also I thought it might be a kind of signal from me, if Billy needed one.”
“What do you mean? What kind of signal?”
She shrugged. “Just that it would be more than okay by me if she got involved with someone else. Not that I’m fixing her up, just that I would understand if she were interested in someone else. It might be time.”
“Time!” He snorted. “I suspect she’s long since been ‘involved,’ as you put it, with someone else. Multiple someones, would be my guess.” He was buttoning his shirt, looking at himself in the mirror. “I don’t think she needs your permission for that.”
“Still, she might need my permission to acknowledge it to me, or publicly. And I suppose that is part of why I asked Sam. And I thought he’d like the play. And I wanted to see him myself.”
“Okay,” he said. He disappeared into the bathroom, but left the door open.
“How was the show?” she called.
He stuck his head out around the door frame. He was grinning. “Very interesting. Very.” He waggled his eyebrows up and down. “I’m sorry you weren’t there. Though first I had to make my way past more kimonos than you could shake a stick at.”
She smiled.
As she started to change her own clothes, she was thinking about Billy. She was nervous, a little, about seeing her. That was always true, for reasons she didn’t care to examine too closely. But this time she was also nervous about seeing her play. Pierce had said something about it—that he was surprised she wanted to see it, given the subject matter.
Oh, she would see anything of Billy’s, she had said. And this was a different setting, a different idea entirely.
The last time she’d seen Billy had been more than a year earlier, in New York. A year. So much for holding on to her. She should have reminded Pierce of that, of just how long it had been.
Billy had gone to the city for an awards ceremony, and Leslie had taken the train down from White River Junction to have lunch with her the next day, to congratulate her. She’d won a prize for her writing. Not, she’d said at lunch with Leslie, for any particular play, but for a body of work. She’d given this a funny emphasis, she’d smiled at Leslie as she’d said it.
“But what’s the joke?” Leslie had asked. “You do have a body of work.”
“I suppose so.” She sat back, frowning. “But that’s just so not the way I think of it. To me it’s always just … the next play, and the next, and the next. Each quite separate from the last. It’s strange to think of them as being part of any kind of a whole.” She had looked off, down the quiet street. “I can’t imagine it, actually—thinking that way about your own work.” They were sitting at one of three tables on the brick sidewalk outside a little restaurant in the West Village. She lifted her shoulders. “Though maybe that comes along, when you’ve done enough. You sort of look back and say, ‘Oh, so that’s what I was up to, all along.’”
“But it’s never just one thing you’ve been up to, is it?”
Billy laughed. She had a nice laugh, Leslie had always thought this about her. She remembered the first evening she’d met her, when Gus brought her up to Vermont. They were sitting outside in the backyard. Pierce had told a joke, and then Gus and Billy had each told several, and part of the pleasure of listening to them was hearing Billy’s surprised-sounding, delighted laughter after each one. It seemed generous to Leslie. It made her like Billy even before she knew anything about her.
“Well, I don’t think so,” Billy said now. “But it seems the critics may. ‘Oh, here she comes, doing that again.’ When for me each one feels completely different.”
“But I suppose what you expose is your … your temperament, in the end.”
Leslie had startled herself, saying this. She hadn’t quite realized that that’s what she thought. But as she spoke, she understood it, that she’d recognized something about Billy, something that surprised her, when she saw the plays. In fact, she’d only seen two before the one they were to see tonight, but they definitely had shared some quality. Hardheadedness, she’d said to Pierce later. Toughness, he thought. Surprising, they both felt, when Billy in person was so accommodating, so easy.
Oh, every now and then with Gus you caught a glimpse of it—a flash of irritation at something he said, a cool withdrawal for a while after he offered an opinion that she apparently found questionable. And there was that one time when they were talking about movies they’d seen lately and he was describing one he’d liked. Where had they been? Some restaurant, she thought. Probably in Hanover, one of the times Billy and Gus came up to see them.
Gus’s face was lively as he talked, but Leslie noticed that Billy seemed not to be responding to him. She looked impatient, actua
lly. When he had finished, she said, “You should probably provide attribution for remarks like that, dear heart.”
Gus’s face changed. Closed up.
After a moment, Leslie asked, “Remarks like what, Billy?”
Billy turned to her, cheerful, even impish. “Remarks lifted wholly or in part from someone else’s brain,” she said.
After his death, though, there hadn’t been anything like that. She’d been stunned, nearly dumbstruck, in her grief. And her grief had seemed never ending. Even at their lunch last year she had spoken of it. They had almost finished, the table’s white paper was dotted with red wine stains and translucent circles where drops of olive oil had fallen on it. Leslie could feel sharp crumbs under her arms where she rested them.
She had reached over and touched Billy’s hand, lightly. “How are you doing?” she asked. They came to this point each time they saw each other.
“Oh, I’m fine,” Billy said with a carelessness that seemed deliberate to Leslie.
“I’m so glad,” Leslie had answered. (You see, Pierce? Even then she had wanted to give Billy permission. Move on, she had been about to say, hadn’t she? Something like that. Live your life.)
Then Billy had said, “But I will never get over it. I won’t.” Her voice was fierce. Angry, even. Leslie was startled. Billy had raised her hand then to hold off whatever she might have said in response.
Well, of course Leslie would never get over it either, but at this point she could finally think of Gus without the anguish she’d felt for years. In fact, she often thought now that the pleasure she’d come to take again in her own life had brought him back to her, somehow. This play tonight—she could imagine how thrilled he would have been to be going. And where that thought would once have been a cause for the bitterest grief on her part, now she felt it as connected to her enjoyment of the evening—she felt she was going for him and, therefore, in a sense, with him. She stood in front of the mirror, holding her necklace in her hands, not seeing her own reflection. She was thinking of Gus, of how vital, how alive he’d been. Her own return to life, to aliveness, was in honor of him, she felt. Everything she noticed, everything she did, he was part of.
Pierce didn’t understand this. He thought she was being morbid when she continued to speak of Gus so often two years, three years, after his death. He had said she was dwelling in it. She’d stopped trying to explain that it had changed for her, that she felt it differently. But by now she’d stopped talking about him at all to Pierce unless he brought up Gus’s name first.
Now Pierce began to sing again, breaking the spell. She raised the necklace to her throat, held it in place. Would it draw attention to her neck, or deflect it? Pierce crossed behind her, and she asked him.
He paused, gazed critically at her, tilting his head. “Wear it,” he said.
Completely avoiding the question. How like him! She fumbled with the clasp, finally got it, and then went into the bathroom to apply her makeup. As she used the eyeliner, the shadow, the words to Pierce’s song were running through her head. “Little old Sal was a no gal, as anyone could see. Look at her now, she’s a go gal …”
“Do you want to walk?” Pierce asked from the other room.
“No. There are those brick sidewalks, and I’m wearing high heels.”
“So?”
“So they get stuck between the bricks. You risk falling. Let’s take a cab.” She ran the lipstick over her mouth and blotted it. There. She was done. She looked at herself critically. It helped, she thought. A bit.
In the elevator, she asked him, “Are you looking forward to this?” She was watching his reflection in the shiny brass doors.
“I’m sure it’ll be good, but you know how I feel about the theater.”
She did. She’d heard it many times. Practically every time they went to a play. They were all over the top, too much. What he hated, basically, was that the theater was theatrical. He preferred movies, their naturalism, the fact that people could speak as softly as they did in real life. And there was no spittle flying around either—that was very important to him.
“And I’ll be glad to see Sam, of course.” He turned to her and smiled. “And Billy.” The doors had opened, and they were crossing the lobby again.
Outside, the doorman signaled for a cab, and she and Pierce got in. At the corner, they turned right, into the theater district, such as it was. But these were the big theaters, the ones for touring musicals, or The Nutcracker at Christmas. Billy’s play was at a new, small theater in the South End. Leslie looked out the window, turned away from Pierce. It was nice of him to have said he looked forward to seeing Billy. She knew he had mixed feelings about her, feelings he’d been more honest about before Gus died. Afterward, her obvious pain had silenced him.
The cabdriver said something, something she didn’t understand. She looked at Pierce, frowning, questioning. He gestured, shook his head, and she looked back at the driver just as he spoke again. He was wearing one of those earpieces that were telephones, she saw it now.
The language he was talking was unrecognizable to her. Another foreign tongue. As she relaxed back in the seat, she thought of how small, how parochial, their world was, hers and Pierce’s. A New England village, forty-five minutes from a New England university town. Far, far away from this new, polyglot version of America.
They turned down a dark, narrow street in the South End. Leslie looked up at the lighted windows in the old bowfront town houses they passed. Billy lived here, in this neighborhood, in a parlor apartment with high windows like these. It was just about as different from the place she had lived in with Gus as it could be. But Leslie thought that was probably the point. Some of it, anyway.
The cab pulled up at the curb outside the restaurant. After Pierce paid, they got out and crossed the glistening brick terrace to its entryway.
Inside it was light and warm, a haven against the dark rainy night. The walls were a buttery yellow, the wood trim everywhere a dark green. Leslie had a sense of familiarity and comfort whenever they came here, and they always came here for dinner on their infrequent trips to Boston. There were dozens of newer restaurants that she routinely clipped reviews of, that she attempted to persuade Pierce to try, but he always insisted on Hamersley’s. In this case, though, it made practical sense—it was only steps away from the new theater, the one where Billy’s play was being performed. And now that they were here, she was glad, as usual, that they’d come.
It was early for dinner, so early that the tables were only about a third full. They nursed their before-dinner drinks—dry vermouth on the rocks for Leslie, vodka for Pierce. Always the same. They’d joked more than once that between them they had the fixings for one terrible martini.
She started to try to explain to Pierce the feeling she’d had in the cab, listening to the driver speaking a language she didn’t recognize on his cell phone. She mentioned the women talking in their slightly-more-familiar-sounding-but-still-unidentifiable foreign language in the hotel hall.
“Your point being?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. How insular our lives are, I guess.”
“In some way, I suppose.” He sounded begrudging.
“How are they not, Pierce?”
He looked down at his vodka. After a moment he said, “Well, don’t we know very well a kind of economic cross-section of people? More than you would in a city, I think. I mean because it’s a village. Because we haven’t sorted ourselves out economically by neighborhoods. And we also know very well a lot of people across the generations for the same reason—the kids running around, plus our ancient neighbors, too.” He shrugged. “It’s a kind of trade-off, I suppose. I’ll take it.”
Case dismissed. She felt a little rise of irritation at him.
But now, as if to apologize—or maybe to remind her of her attachment to the world they lived in, he asked about the Christmas book sale she was organizing at the town library.
This was sweet of him, and in response
to that, she made him laugh by describing how the old ladies on the committee had whisked away the donated books they were most interested in. But she had taken one, too, she confessed, and started reading it. Was liking it. A novel about the life of the office, told, amazingly, in the first person plural.
They talked about how unlikely a subject for a novel this was, office life. Pierce mentioned a Joseph Heller book that he’d admired years earlier, another office book. Then he started talking about what he was reading now, a book predicting economic disaster looming for the country.
All the while Leslie was intermittently thinking about the evening to come. The play, of course, but then the drink with Sam afterward, Sam and Billy. Billy had said she’d probably be a little late. The play was still in previews, and she had told Leslie on the phone that if there were notes the director wanted to go over, she’d want to sit in on that. So she’d arrive last, most likely. Leslie could imagine it, seeing her again across some room, so small, so lost-looking and waiflike.
“A waif with a spine of steel,” Gus had said. Of course that was true, too. She was driven, she was competitive.
But Leslie had seen the other side of her at Gus’s memorial service—her white skin almost gray, her lips bitten—actually bleeding at one point. Leslie had given her a Kleenex to blot the blood. She hadn’t cried, at least not that Leslie saw, but she was so silent, so inheld, that it had frightened Leslie. She hadn’t wanted to leave her alone. She had asked her to come up and stay with them for a while, but Billy had said no. She said she needed to stay in Boston, to work. She needed to settle into her new apartment. Leslie had seen it a week or so before the service—a big empty space. She had only a bed, and a desk to work at. She hadn’t taken anything from Gus’s apartment. She said she couldn’t, she wanted to start over. Leslie had hated to think of her there, alone, but Billy was absolute. The spine of steel, indeed.
