by Sue Miller
“You don’t need to tell me that.”
“Well, it didn’t.”
“I mean, I think I know that. Or at any rate, it seems—it would seem—unlikely to me that Leslie would be unfaithful to Pierce.” She gave a little snort. “Talk about codependency.”
“Aka love.”
“I take your point.” She was enjoying this. Him. “It is a hideous word, isn’t it? ‘Codependency.’” She took some bread from the plate Pierce had ordered and spread it with some soft, blue-veined cheese. “Wordlet,” she said. She pushed the plate toward him. “Phrase. How long were you married?”
“That time? About four years, total.” He started to help himself to some bread and cheese, too.
“‘That time.’ There were other times?”
“One, other time.” He looked up at her quickly. “My first wife died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Again. “That will shut me up.”
“No. It was a long time ago. And you?” He sat back, bread in hand. He seemed relaxed, physically. He’d turned his body to the side, his legs stretched out. And out and out, she thought.
“Marriage?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“One. Young. Disastrous. A bully.” Her husband’s face went by, sneering. “I thought it was romantic, fool that I was, to be married to a complete jerk.”
“You would have to explain the romantic part of that to me.”
“Oh.” Billy remembered herself then quickly, the way she had thought about it, getting married to Steve. It was hard to believe she’d been so dumb. “The difficult man. You know. Women have been sold a bill of goods about difficult men. Heathcliff. Rochester. Marlon Brando in Streetcar. Well, Marlon Brando in anything. On the Waterfront. God.” She took a bite of the bread and cheese. “One-Eyed Jacks,” she said with her mouth full.
“Your character tonight was difficult.”
“Gabriel?” she said. She shook her head and lifted her hand to tell him to wait. When she’d chewed and swallowed, she said, “I think his wife may be more difficult, actually. That he’s become difficult partly in response to her. Or so I saw it.”
“Well, you’re the writer. Isn’t the way you see it necessarily the truth of the matter?”
“Yes. But also no. I mean, I write it a certain way. I think of it a certain way. But then it can change depending on who the actors are, how they say things. How they feel them. Depending on who’s directing it, even. Maybe especially that.” She thought of Edmund, his face, frowning at her about sleeping with Rafe. She thought of Rafe. Suddenly she wanted to explain this to Sam, what had happened on the stage, how miraculous it had seemed to her.
“Like tonight.” She leaned forward a little, elbows on the table. He shifted slightly, as if in response to her. “Like the way Rafe—the actor, the guy playing Gabriel—said that last thing: Elizabeth. It was, to me, fantastic. I mean, I wrote it, of course. I even wrote how I wanted him to say it. But in the end, it’s just a word.” He was watching her attentively. “Not even a word, actually. A name. And he said it … perfectly. Wonderfully. It was …” She gave a little half laugh, an expulsion of breath, and his face lifted. “I felt, ‘So that’s what I meant.’ It was so clear to me all of a sudden. A revelation.” Suddenly, absurdly, she felt almost tearful. This embarrassed her, and because of that, she made her voice tough and said, “Maybe I should sleep with him before every performance.”
Sam’s face changed. He sat up straighter. “Well,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Yes. I guess you should.”
“Oh, Christ,” she said. She reached over and almost touched his sleeve. “I shouldn’t have said that.” Her lips tightened. I will grow old and die, she thought, still doing this foot-in-mouth thing. She thought of Edmund again. “I said it earlier tonight, too, to someone else. Apparently it’s a line I’m trying out.”
He looked at her for a moment, and then he smiled. A tentative smile, at best.
And she realized that he thought she’d been joking. Joking about the whole thing. She couldn’t let him think that. “I mean, it is true. I did sleep with him.” She watched as his face changed again. “Not that it meant anything.” She sighed, and shook her head. “I mean, it did mean something, but it didn’t … change anything, for him or for me.” She met his eyes, neutral behind the glasses. Waiting, it seemed. She lifted her hands, slightly. “We were lonely. We slept together. Once. But I made my little unfunny joke because I really, truly am so grateful for the way he said that line, the last line, tonight. It seems to me it’s what I meant, but without knowing that I meant it. That he was able to make it contain … so much. Love, yes. But capitulation, giving up, giving in. Loss.” She was remembering the moment again, she saw Rafe’s face. “Sorrow for himself and for her. And relief. Love. Did I say that? A kind of joy.” She shrugged. “I don’t know.” She stopped. After a moment, she asked him, “Didn’t you think all of that was there?”
“I did, yes. I think so. But I would have thought … you intended it. All that.”
“Well, now it seems so clear, I must have. Or I would have wanted to. But it was Rafe who saw it. Who read it that way. Who made it contain that.” She brought her hand down on the table. “God, I love the theater.”
After a moment, he said, “Well. We certainly seem to have covered a lot of territory here.”
“Mea culpa. You’ve been a model of restraint.”
“I’ve been an open book. Not that I wanted to be.”
“Not so! You’ve told me the bare minimum. The number of marriages and the way they ended.”
“And Leslie.”
She waved her hand. “Leslie.”
“No, actually I think I was too dismissive of it to you. Since you’ve been so honest …”
“So excruciatingly honest,” she said.
He nodded. “I guess I should say about Leslie that what I felt, for a while—for a long while, actually—was that I loved her.”
She looked at him. “Oh,” she said. Surprise, surprise.
“While knowing I wouldn’t do anything about it.”
She kept her voice light. “Well, who wouldn’t love Leslie? I love her. There’s nobody gooder.” Was she jealous? She couldn’t be jealous. She didn’t even know him, this too-tall man.
“That’s what I felt at the time. How good she was.”
“Look, if that’s the worst thing you’ve done …”
“That’s not what I meant, of course.”
“Of course it’s not.” A silence fell. Behind Billy someone was talking on a cell phone, too loudly, about an argument she had with someone, reporting each side. Now she was saying, “So I’m like, ‘I don’t think so.’ And he was like, ‘Do I care? Do I even care?’”
Billy said, “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
He laughed.
“No, what?”
“Really?”
“Sure. Why not? While we’re covering territory. While we’re embarrassing ourselves. You should do your share.”
“I suppose it would have to do with my kids.”
“Aaah! Kids.” But why was this news? It was always like this. People and their complicated stories. Anyone over thirty or so. Hers, after all, could rival his.
“Yeah. Three boys. Men, I should say. Who … they had, in various ways, a hard time with their mother’s death. My first wife’s death. Not surprisingly. And then with the marriage to Claire. And then with the end of that.” He dipped his head on the word in emphasis. “I think it’s why I’ve … I’ve tried to keep my life simpler since then. Though of course it doesn’t matter at this point. Now that they’re grown. But I would say that I just … I didn’t know how to help them when they were younger. And what’s worse, I’m not sure I’d be any better now.”
“Mmm. But they survived.”
“Of course. They’re fine, in that sense. But scarred, I think. Damaged.”
“Oh, who in this wide world worth their salt isn’t? Why would you wish oth
erwise for them?”
“I don’t, really. But I think what I wish is that I had made it easier for them, that’s all. That I’d been more, attuned to them, or useful to them somehow.”
His face was so thoughtful that she felt bad, she felt she’d been cavalier. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was glib. Again. I’m a little nuts tonight, I think. Wired. For many complicated reasons.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, I know—or I assume—that it must be hard, to feel that way about them.”
“Well, I almost never do. Only occasionally.” He turned forward in his chair. He smiled, suddenly. It made him younger. “But enough about my sins. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Many possibilities arose, and she was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “Oh, my life is a bottomless pit of worst things. I slept with the actor. And he’s married.”
“Well, he’s in charge of that.”
“Mm,” she said. She thought of the way Rafe had looked, slouched next to her on the couch. The way he’d moved on her in the half dark of the bedroom. “I kind of seduced him.”
“I say it again: he’s in charge of himself.”
Billy looked at her wineglass. She had some wine. She looked at him. He met her glance, steadily. After a few seconds, he said abruptly, “Why are we talking like this? I don’t know you. I don’t even know you.”
“Well, I have a theory about that. Naturally.”
“Do you.” He smiled, expectantly.
“I think it’s because of at least two things. One, that you saw the play, so in fact you think you do know me. People always think that.”
“Do they?” he said.
“They do. They extrapolate. And I’m sure you have, too.”
“I’ll never tell. And the second thing?”
“The second thing is that I told you that I fucked Rafe. That broke the ice, all right.”
“Don’t say that.” He made an odd face, displeased, as though he’d smelled something off.
“What? That I fucked him?” She was surprised.
“Yes.”
“Why? It’s how I think of it. And would say it. I do say it. So please, don’t be fastidious because”—she drew herself up—“you think I’m a lady, or something. It’s my business, after all, not to be a lady. To know how people speak. All the very unladylike things people say. How they think.”
“I suppose it is,” he said. And after a moment, “You’re a little … difficult, yourself, for me.”
“Why?”
“Oh, your life is so different from mine. Mine is … has been, I guess you’d say, regulated. The kids, the marriages, the house, the office. Those things.”
“Well, that is different from mine, yes. Lots. But, why does that make me difficult? Maybe you’re the difficult one.”
“I might well be.” They were quiet for a minute. “I think all I meant was that you’re used to a more … to a wilder life, I think. Less regular.”
“Ah.” She laughed. “La vie bohème.”
“Well, yes. Compared to mine.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong. I wouldn’t be up to it. It’s more la vie boring, I’m afraid. Most nights I’m in bed by eleven with my dog and a cup of tea.” She had a sudden fond image of her bedroom, Reuben lying on the quilt, the pretty old gas lamps out in back. “Up at seven. Alone, all day long.” She shook her head. “It’s pathetic, really.”
“But then there’s being in the theater, being with other people.”
“Yeah, once every couple of years.” Then she nodded. “But you mean sex, don’t you? That kind of being with other people.”
“Probably. Probably I do.”
“Everyone has sex. You don’t need to be a bohemian for that.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do.” They sat silent for a moment. He was moving his hand over the tabletop. Now he leaned forward, one elbow on the table. “You and Gus seem an unlikely pair,” he said.
“Did you know Gus?” This possibility hadn’t occurred to her.
“Not really. I met him once. At Leslie’s. But … wasn’t he much younger than you?”
She laughed. “Oh, I wouldn’t say much.” Then she remembered what a child he had often seemed to her. “I don’t know. Maybe I would. But after all, I’m six years older now than I was then. And he would be, too.”
“But he also seemed … I don’t know. Well, you seem like you’re very different … types.”
“We were very different. It was … it sometimes made things not so great between us. There were times …” She looked out the window at the dark, at the lighted marquee down the street.
“Times?” he prompted.
She looked back at him and met his steady gaze. “Oh, nothing.”
“Right. I suppose we should save some information for next time.”
“Oh. There’s going to be a next time?”
“Well, I’d like it.” When she didn’t answer right away, his eyes behind the glasses changed. “And we more or less owe it to Leslie to have, say, coffee together, or dinner or something.”
She sat still for a moment. What had she been doing here? Was she incapable of conversation without inviting someone to put the moves on her, even someone she had no intention, no possibility, of getting involved with? She pushed her glass away. There was a half inch or so of wine in the bottom of it. “I have to go, actually,” she said. She slid off the seat.
“Oh, look,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be pushy, or make assumptions …”
“No,” she said. “No, let’s. Let’s have coffee or something. It’s just, you know, I have to get home. I have a dog.”
He stood up, too, to get his wallet out of his back pocket. He was signaling for the check.
The waitress came over right away—she had probably been waiting for them to leave so she could finish up her shift—and he gave her Pierce’s money, and his own. Billy was beginning to rearrange her possessions. “Do you need change?” the waitress asked.
“No, that’s fine,” he said. “Keep it.”
He stepped behind Billy to help her on with her coat. There were a few awkward moments when she couldn’t find the sleeves—she could feel him moving the shapeless thing around, trying to help. Then there he was. She slid her arms in.
Outside the rain had stopped. It was colder.
He asked if he could walk her home, but she said she was fine, that she was just steps away, really. He talked about the time when it wouldn’t have been fine in this neighborhood. He was trying to hold her there, she could tell. He said he’d call. She nodded and extended her hand. They shook. She smiled up at him. “Well, then,” she said, and turned and walked away.
She felt certain he was watching her go, but she didn’t look back.
She had a headache the next morning. She lay in bed for a while feeling sorry for herself, remembering the things they’d talked about the night before. The line about sleeping with Rafe. God. Twice she’d said it. Why? Why, Billy? In particular, why the second time, with Sam? Had she been trying to attract him? To repel him?
Both, she supposed, she was in such an agitated state.
And maybe because she’d drunk the second glass of wine. The wine she’d had to calm herself down. The wine she’d felt she needed because she’d been a little crazy, a little vulnerable, after the play. Because it always upset her to see Leslie anyway, and here she was being presented by Leslie with a new man. Clearly, yes, being introduced. Because she’d liked him, the new man, and wanted to resist that.
But why had she wanted to resist liking him?
Because she didn’t want to sleep with Rafe and then a few nights later with someone else. Because he seemed ready to like her, and she didn’t want a “nice, age-appropriate man,” as she remembered him calling himself, in her life. She liked being alone. When she wanted company, she could usually find it in people she met at work.
Because it was so complicated, with Leslie’s having set it up, with all that would mean in te
rms of Leslie in her life. Gus.
Because she needed to be alone. It was better for her to stay alone.
Because of Gus. Because of Gus.
——
Billy still had a picture of Gus somewhere in her desk. Correction: of Gus and Leslie. It had been taken long before she’d met him, actually. He was probably only about twenty-five in it, so Leslie would have been about forty. Her hair had been dark then, and it fell thick and straight to her shoulders. She wore a sundress with wide straps. Gus’s arm was around her waist. He was barefoot, in khakis. He was grinning at the camera unselfconsciously. Leslie was looking at him, at his profile, looking at him in the way Billy had seen her look at him dozens of times in life—lovingly, admiringly. Behind them the flowers of Leslie’s garden made a deckled blur in the sun. Billy knew the exact spot where they were standing.
She liked to think of Gus as he was in the photograph—admired, adored. She liked to think of Leslie as she looked in the photograph too: young, pretty, happy.
This was the picture she’d chosen to keep when she put everything else into a big plastic bag—all the other photos and the letters and the odd things he’d given her—and set it out on the curb along with the other stuff she left behind when she moved out of Gus’s apartment.
Billy had never started an affair with anyone in quite the way she did with Gus. Effortlessly, she would have said. Maybe thoughtlessly. Certainly quickly. She was surprised, even delighted, by the ease of it. This, perhaps, should have been a danger signal, but she ignored it. Maybe it’s my turn for something unanguished was what she thought.
Her specialty before had always been sunless men. Dark, punishing, punished men. Men full of ambition and bitterness. She had fled Chicago, in fact, from such a man. Oh, certainly, there were professional reasons for the move, too. The job she’d gotten at BU, her feeling that she needed to leave the city she’d always lived in in order for anything big to happen to her, the sense that she was mired in familiar patterns in her work. She was not without ambition herself. But she was also very happy to escape from Tom, from his stalker-like unwillingness to let her go. He had wept; he had cursed her. He had telephoned her as many as fifteen or twenty times a day. He had appeared on her doorstep at two in the morning, angry, bitter, pleading.
