by Sue Miller
When he was done, he looked down at the playwright. “Anything for these guys, Billy?”
She shook her head. “I might give a few things to you for them tomorrow.”
“Okay then,” Edmund said, turning back to them. He clapped his hands. “Be off with you.”
Serena went backstage, where she’d left her stuff apparently, and Rafe came down into the house to get his jacket. Billy was standing up, shoving things into the big bag she seemed to carry with her always.
“I’m a bit at loose ends,” he said to her.
“Are you now?”
“Do you fancy a drink?”
She slung her bag up onto her shoulder. “Hmm. I think so. Yes. I think that’s the very thing I fancy.”
——
“You smell boozy,” Lauren said. “Brewer-y.”
“Ah! You’re awake.”
“I woke up when I heard you come in.”
Garbled gook, they called it, the way she spoke, but he understood every word. He’d grown into it with her. He leaned over and kissed her. “I had a drink—several drinks, not to put too fine a point on it—with the playwright after work.”
“Fun?”
“Yeah, I guess you’d say. She’s nice.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Actually, Swanee, we talked a lot about the play.”
This was true, surprisingly.
Or not surprisingly. Though Rafe often stayed out in the evenings, away from Lauren, what he did then was drink and talk. He had the perfect life, he often thought, for someone married to an invalid. There was a semisteady supply of fresh blood to listen to his tale of woe. Or of fresh ears. Ear after ear after ear. Just when everyone might have been getting tired of him and his sad story, the play would be over and the faces—the ears—would change.
Not that he always told the sad tale. Tonight, for instance, he hadn’t mentioned it. They had, in fact, talked about the play. And then about Billy. Her life, her history. Why she’d left Chicago, which was, he pointed out, a great theater town.
“Yes, but the problem with Chicago is that what happens in Chicago stays in Chicago.”
“Boston’s not so different.”
“Boston’s different.”
“How is it different?”
“Because this play is leaving Boston.”
“Hey, can I come, too?” he’d asked, and she had laughed. She had a good laugh—snarky, quick.
He asked her about the play—where the idea had come from.
“Oh, I dunno. Worcester?” she said. She was drinking Stoli, neat. He was having beer.
“No, really.”
She shrugged. “I guess I was thinking about 9/11. You know.”
“So this is really a 9/11 story?”
“Well, another version thereof. The train version. They seem to like trains, don’t they, those nutty old terrorists. Trains and buses and subways.” She made a little moue. “It seemed … I don’t know. A way to reinvent it.”
“And changing it to Chicago?”
“Oh, I guess that was my imaginary way of”—she gestured—“bringing it home, as it were. My home. I grew up there. Sweet home Chicago.”
“Inflicting it on the Second City.”
She nodded.
“Though we’ve got a pretty small sampling of Chicagoans here,” he said.
“Well, but isn’t two what it always comes down to? Isn’t that where things are felt? In drama. And in life, for Pete’s sake? Chekhov”—she drew herself up—“‘The center of gravity residing in two, he and she.’” She slumped a little, back to normal. “That’s it, don’t you think? The question we all ask of the big event? How am I affected? How are you affected? ‘Where were you when you heard?’” She’d made her voice breathless, avid. “Or ‘I knew someone who knew someone whose husband died.’ And then there’s ‘My husband died.’ Or ‘my wife.’”
“Thus, Gabriel and Elizabeth.”
“Yes, that particular he and she.”
“And who are you, in that story?”
She turned away. She tipped her glass this way and that, and then she looked up at him. “That’s their story, it’s not mine.” She lifted the glass and had a tiny sip.
“But you made it up.”
“I imagined it, yeah. But please, please, give me some credit. Give the imagination some credit. No one really does. No one believes in it anymore. Everything always has to be autobiographical, somehow.”
He thought of Lauren, working on her memoir. Kept alive, as he saw it, by recording her own slo-mo death as it happened to her. She wanted to make use of it in some way, she said.
“So this isn’t autobiography,” he said now to the playwright. “You’re not either one of them.”
“Nor Alex or Emily or Anita. No. Or, I am, but maybe about equally all of them.” She grinned quickly and looked about ten years old. “Which means I’m also none.”
“And you just imagine what it would be like, each situation and each character.”
“That’s my job. Imagining them, imagining what they say and why they say it and how they say it.”
He took a swallow. “So how do you imagine it was on 9/11, for the people who were waiting?”
She was silent for what seemed to him a long moment before she answered. Finally, she said, “Well, that all depends, doesn’t it?”
“On what?”
“Ah. Well, I guess how … you know, how some people embrace disaster. Zoom right into the worst scenario: Oh God, it’s my wife! And others think, Well, she could have gotten out. Or, Maybe he was late to work. Or, She could have missed the train. She’ll call.”
“Denial.”
“I suppose.” She took another tiny sip of Stoli.
“Like, I guess … yeah,” he said. “I’m remembering all those posted notices, you know?” She looked at him. “Sort of as though the victims might be lost somewhere. Might just be having a tiny bit of trouble remembering how to get home. What was that but evidence of the way people can just find reasons, or ways, not to believe a terrible thing?”
“So do you think that’s part of Gabriel’s response?” Billy asked.
“No. Actually I don’t, no. I think he believes she’s dead, right away. Because I think that’s the kind of guy he is.”
“Well, then, if you think so, that’s who he is. So, what difference will that make in how you play him?”
“Well, it’s not quite like The End of the Affair, is it? Did you see that?”
“I saw it, I read it. But I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, Gabriel’s not like the woman in that story. He’s not about to pray for her return, the way she did for her lover. To make a deal for her return. He just … it’s just something that makes him examine himself—his own responses. What he wants, most deeply.” He lifted his shoulders. “Maybe that’s the contemporary version of religious conversion—self-examination.”
She laughed, and he did, too.
“So how would you say the last line?” he asked.
“The last line being ‘Elizabeth’?”
“Yeah. What are my choices, as you see them?”
She made a funny face and lifted her hands. How would I know?
“I mean, is he glad? Is he … feeling trapped? What?”
“Sure.” She dragged the word out. “All of the above.”
He grinned. “You’re no help, are you?”
“You’re the actor, dear heart.” She was smiling now, too.
He lifted his glass. “Indeed I am,” he said.
“Ah, you’re married,” she said. She was pointing to the ring on his finger.
“Yes. Very.”
She exhaled through closed lips, a dismissive noise. “There’s married and there’s not married. No such thing as very.”
“You’re wrong there.”
“Well, if you’re so very married, why are you here, having this drink?”
She didn’t say having this drink with m
e, he noted, but that’s what she meant. And he didn’t know the answer to that. But he said, “I often have a drink after work. My wife goes to bed early.”
“Ah.”
And that was as close as he’d come to the sad tale, tonight. A little bit later, she’d swung down off the bar stool and said she had to get home to walk her dog. He’d watched her out the window as she crossed the street, a little figure, all in black, disappearing quickly into the dark of Union Park, the fanciest of the little private parks studding this neighborhood of Boston. He’d stayed on by himself, talked a bit to the bartender about the Red Sox—who they might sign, who they’d let go—and then he drove home.
Now he lay next to Lauren in the dark. She was motionless, quickly back in her deep sleep. Dreaming, maybe. Dreaming of the way she used to be.
A few weeks ago he’d been getting something for her from her desk, and he’d read the top page of her memoir in progress. She was describing a dream she’d had, a dream of running. “In my dream, my body worked perfectly. My breathing was unstrained and full and slow. My legs were weightlessly muscled. My knees rose high in front with each step, my heels kicked high behind me, everything was smooth and effortless. I woke to the sound of my own laughter, as grateful and happy as we are when we conjure some long-dead friend or lover in our sleep and get to talk with them or touch them once more.”
Now she lay propped up on her pillows in her drugged sleep next to him, her body immovable as a dead woman’s—only her labored, thick breathing attesting to the life it still held, captive.
A month or so after they got the diagnosis, Grace had called and asked them if they’d take her cat. The house had sold, and she was moving, but she couldn’t take the cat with her. Belle-Vue had a no-pet policy. She’d tried giving him to a younger friend, but the woman’s son turned out to be allergic.
Rafe’s first impulse was to say no. He and Lauren were still in a fragile state, one or the other of them likely at any time to begin to weep—though Lauren had already begun, too, to sometimes make a quick, biting joke about it. But he said to Grace that he’d talk to Lauren and get back to her.
Lauren wanted to take him. She would be home more of the time, and Marsh—short for Marshmallow—would be nice company. They decided Rafe would drive over and get him, and while he was there, break the news to Grace that Lauren had ALS. Lauren said she knew this was a rotten thing to ask him to do, but that she couldn’t possibly do it herself: “I’d just as soon take a knife out and stab her about a dozen times.”
So Rafe set out on a Monday morning in mid-December. It was snowing, but the really heavy stuff wasn’t supposed to start until nightfall, by which time he’d be at Gracie’s, safely off the road. And by the time he headed back, after breakfast on Tuesday, the roads would have been cleared.
There was something hypnotic about the drive. There was almost no traffic on the Pike, so Rafe didn’t have to think much about what he was doing. The snow came at the windshield steadily, and the wipers kept a constant rhythm. The road gradually turned white. He stayed in the one lane where there were tire tracks. Occasionally he passed a plow, throwing up wet clumps of brownish slush. He was relieved to be away from Lauren. He had the sense mostly of that, of being on the road, going away. He listened to music, he kept his mind empty.
Route 9 across Vermont was slow, busy with local traffic and occasionally slippery. Twice he scared himself with a long skid. When he got to Bennington, he stopped and had a drink in a bar. There was a giant television mounted high on the wall in the corner with the volume turned off. Men in football uniforms ran this way and that. There were two couples lingering at tables, having finished lunch a while earlier, he supposed. The snow fell steadily on the empty street outside the plate-glass window. He had another drink. He wanted nothing more than he wanted to stay there and have one after another until he was shit-faced, but after those two, he paid up. He stopped at a liquor store in town and bought a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, and then he drove to Grace’s.
The field around her house was unreasonably beautiful. The day was still, no wind, and the snow had collected evenly on every branch of the twisted old apple trees, of the swooping birches bent low under it; it had settled thick and white on the dark green of the mammoth pines at the bottom of the meadow. He sat for a while after he cut the engine, thinking about missing this, thinking about losing it, about losing Lauren, losing Grace, losing Pete and Nat. It seemed more than he could bear, this beauty, and all this loss.
He saw Grace’s face, blurry and white, moving across the living room window. He got out of the car. The snow was about a foot deep, soft, light. He retrieved his overnight bag from the backseat. As he came up the walk, she opened the door.
“My favorite son-in-law,” she said.
“Hello, Gracie.” They kissed, she held him and patted his back heartily, as if she were burping a baby. She was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. Her hair smelled a little oily.
While he went to hang his coat up, he looked around. The rooms were nearly bare, but he’d expected this—she’d given away or sold everything but what she was taking with her to the retirement place, and they’d been consulted every step of the way. Earlier in the fall, before Lauren was diagnosed, he had come over in a rented van with a friend and taken some stuff back to Boston—an old chair Lauren liked, books, china and linens, boxes of photographs, silver, candlesticks, the worn quilts she’d grown up with.
Now their voices ricocheted around the rooms, their footsteps sounded hollow and ominous on the naked floors. Grace had some boxes she wanted him to bring downstairs, and he did that. Then he got the snowblower out of the garage and cleared the front walk and the porch—Tim Holloran would come by when the snow stopped, late tonight or early tomorrow, to plow the driveway out.
When he came back in, it was already getting dark. He could smell meat cooking—roasting beef or pork. He went into the kitchen. He’d resolved to tell her before dinner. He couldn’t sit across the table from her and eat and make small talk and then spring it on her.
She was peeling potatoes at the sink, her back to him, her arms and hands in steady, tight motion.
“Come have a drink with me, Gracie,” he said.
“Can’t,” she said without looking up or stopping what she was doing. “I want to get this stuff going. Then I’ll get looped.”
“I need to talk to you. Come on and have a drink now.”
She looked sharply at him and set the peeler down at the sink. “I don’t like the sound of this,” she said.
“No, it’s not good.”
She wiped her hands on a dish towel and came over to the table. She sat and he poured a tumbler full for each of them. She had a swallow, and then she said, “You’re not splitting up again, are you?”
“No.” They were almost at right angles to each other. “No, this is about Lauren.” He didn’t look at her. “She’s been diagnosed with a disease.” He heard a little intake of breath. “A wasting disease.” He’d decided on these words a few days ago, after Lauren asked him to do this.
“A wasting disease? What disease?” She pushed her glass away.
“It’s ALS.”
She shook her head.
“Amytrophic lateral sclerosis.” He pronounced it slowly. “ALS. Lou Gehrig’s disease. Remember when she was having trouble getting around last summer? When I had to carry her?” Her eyes were unwavering on his face. He tried to meet them. “Well, that was a sign of it.”
“I’ve heard of this disease,” Grace said. “But I don’t know what happens to you. What will happen?”
“She will get weaker, progressively. She will need … help. She may, in the later stages, even need help eating, or breathing.”
Gracie’s mouth opened. Then she said, “So, she’s going to die from this.”
“She will.” He was looking down at his hands.
“How long does she have?”
He shrugged. “I guess it’s different from case to cas
e, and for that reason the doctors won’t say, at this point. But we’ve read about it, and it could be three years. Maybe five years. It’s certainly a few years off. She’s still able to do most everything now.”
“But … this is so terrible.” Grace’s face was awful to look at.
“It is,” he said. He reached over to take her hand.
She drew in a deep breath now, and expelled it. “I believe I’ll go upstairs for a bit.” She shoved her chair back.
“Take this.” He filled her glass almost to the brim, and handed it to her.
She took it. At the door, she turned partway back. “You might get the potatoes on, sliced, in boiling water.”
“Okay,” he said. He was near tears. He wanted her to go, so he could cry. For her, for Lauren, for himself.
She must have sensed this. Or maybe not. At any rate, she said, “I’m so sorry for you, dear, having to tell me this.”
“Well, I’m … sorry, too.”
But when she left, he didn’t cry. He drank some more scotch, he peeled the potatoes and put them on to boil, he checked on the roast. He saw the baster sitting out on the counter next to the stove, so he basted it, just in case. This was how he’d been functioning for weeks now. Oh, this foot? You put it down in front of the other one. Now he moved his chair over by the window and sat, his drink in his hand, watching the slow fat snowflakes descend.
He didn’t hear Grace come down, but suddenly music blared forth from the living room—horns and voices from the thirties or forties.
He turned, and she was in the kitchen, the cat trailing her.
“We’re not having any vegetables,” she announced. “The hell with them. Just meat and potatoes, that’s all I feel like doing tonight.” She went to the oven and opened it.
“Then that’s all I feel like eating,” he said.
She took the roast out of the oven and set it on the counter. “And we’ll drink.”
“I’m ahead of you there,” he said.
“Have you been drinking?” she asked. She was at the sink pouring the steaming water off the potatoes. “I mean, in general?”
