The Lake Shore Limited

by Sue Miller

  “My little noise,” she corrected herself.

  He looked up quickly. “Our noise, I would have said.”

  “Meaning you felt it was … private. Between us.”

  “Yeah, I sure did.” He nodded many times, rapidly. He was unsmiling.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “But it was private, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Well, it still is.”

  He expelled his breath sharply, a mock laugh. “Explicate.”

  “Well, you are not Jay, you are not a guy who makes his living gambling, a guy who’s betraying his wife. And I’m not Elena. I’m not … dependent upon the kindness of strangers.”

  “But you gave them something that happened between us. Something private.”

  “But for them to do it makes it something else.” She had leaned forward on the table, but he still wouldn’t look directly at her. “It’s different with them. It means something different. It’s not our noise when they make it. When she makes it. It’s transformed.”

  “Not transformed enough.”

  “What. You think people are going to say, ‘You know, I bet that happened between the playwright and that cute boy she was sitting next to’?”

  “I don’t care what they say. I care about me, about us. About you not using us.” Gus, angry. A surprise.

  But she was angry right back. “I use me, Gus,” she said. “I use me up. I need all of me, and if you’re with me, that means I use you, too. I use everything. How could I not? And what I don’t use, I don’t use because it doesn’t work. Not because it’s sacred.” Her voice had risen. “Nothing is sacred. That’s just the way it is.”

  They sat in silence for a minute. Billy could hear that her own breathing was a little rapid. She consciously slowed it down. She changed her voice, made it playful. “If you can’t stand the heat, as they say …”

  He looked at her. He smiled suddenly. “Ah, Billy,” he said. “Spoken of course by a woman wearing an apron. You came with props. Not fair.”

  Was it fair? The use she made of everything? Billy thought about this often. In her first play she’d used her miserable youthful marriage, in particular the mocking way her ex-husband used to speak of their domestic life. “Mr. and Mrs. Married, and their little married apartment and all the little married things they’re accumulating.” Within a few weeks of their wedding, he seemed bitter with regret, he was incapable of kindness to her. There was virtually no loving gesture she could make that didn’t beckon his irony. Having suffered through that for three years, she felt she’d earned the right to make use of it however she wished.

  In particular she’d used a fistfight they’d had.

  She’d started it, actually. She’d punched him first, a downward chop with her fist on his moving mouth, intended simply to stop the ugly, ugly words emerging from it. Purely by reflex, he punched her back, with all his strength. He had sixty pounds on her. She actually rose up into the air before falling, crumpling against a wall. It was like living through a cartoon scene. All that was missing, she told a friend later, were stars and planets circling around her head.

  The fight choreographer had a good time with it, and it was convincing onstage. The actress wore a black eye for the rest of the play and told a series of cheerful and increasingly loony lies about its origin, lies she was meant to be believing, at least in part. It was a kind of absurdist work, one act, about self-deception, and it ended with the couple singing “Tea for Two” in pretty, closely entwined harmony.

  She had written it in a rage once she got started, and she couldn’t have argued to Gus that she transformed things very much in that particular case. Maybe the tone, maybe the humor, which had been entirely absent as she lived through it.

  But it wouldn’t have made any difference to her ex-husband. He had moved away by then, to work in Phoenix. It was a certainty that he hadn’t seen it, since its only performances were in a small experimental theater on the North Side of Chicago. The sad fact was that almost no one saw it.

  The second play was nearly as directly drawn from life, and it did make a difference to other people in Billy’s life. It was about a family gathering, a Thanksgiving holiday, five grown children returning from their lives to stay in their childhood home for a few days. The father was a professor, retired, reduced almost to invisibility by his wife, a woman with a need to be at the center of every situation, it didn’t matter how. Whatever method was at hand—knowing more than anyone else, being more sexually provocative than anyone else, talking more than anyone else. If necessary, being more wounded than anyone else—in one scene the turn from dripping contempt to anguished tears was accomplished within seconds by the actress playing her.

  In the course of the play, each of the adult children in turn was sucked into the orbit of this monstrous character and changed. The oldest brother, a doctor, got into a futile and increasingly childish argument with her about tuberculosis, in which she would not concede that he might know anything more about it than she did. One of the daughters was called upon to comfort her about his cruelty in arguing with her at all. She got drunk and was seductive with the youngest son. Together the two of them made fun of the second daughter, who pretended not to be hurt, who actually laughed at herself with them. And through it all, the father’s polite blindness to the cruelty and manipulation involved provided a kind of cover for the mother’s behavior, asserted the lie that this was a normal, perfectly pleasant family gathering.

  And of course this had been Billy’s family, with the gender of the parents reversed—in her case it was her father who was the narcissist, and her mother who receded so much as to be invisible. But the change didn’t fool anybody in Billy’s family—all of whom were then alive except her mother, three of whom lived in Chicago and came to the play. The result was that she was estranged from them for a long time afterward and still not reconciled with her father when he died some years later.

  He had called her after he saw the play to offer a critique of it. She had defended it, defended herself. At one point he said, “You know what your problem is, Billy?”

  Well, Billy knew what some of her problems were—she’d been in therapy enough through the years—but she doubted her father had any of these in mind. “No,” she said.

  “Your problem is, you think you’re better than everyone else.”

  Billy laughed. “Doesn’t everyone?” she said.

  He hung up.

  She hadn’t worked so closely to her own life since then, not through a fear of wounding people or losing them, but because she was just less angry. As a result of this, her plays were less angry, too—less accusatory, she supposed. She worried about this a little. She had felt that what made her work interesting, what made her interesting, was her rage. She was concerned that without it she would become ordinary. That’s what she saw as having happened to her siblings. The strain of pretending things were all right in their family had made all of them less than they might have been. She’d escaped that by being angry, and it made her wonder what would happen to her and to her writing as that anger dwindled.

  Basically, she discovered, what happened was that her plays became less eccentric. More conventional, anyway. “Deeper,” “wiser,” the critics said. She began to have a wider audience. More success. Sometimes, though, she missed those early, angry plays and especially the heat with which she’d written them. She had to work harder now—at the writing itself, and at figuring out why she was writing. She would never have acknowledged that to Gus, but she knew, even as she was making her passionate argument to him about her need to use everything, that her anxiety about all this was connected to the ferocity of her defense of herself to him.

  Starting in March, ten months after she met Gus and three months before the owners of her sublet apartment were due to return and claim it, Billy began to look for another place to rent. The sublet had been cheap because she’d had cat-sitting responsibilities for two unfriendly, sneaky white cats who were completel
y uninterested in her until they heard the whine of the electric can opener. Now as she went through the listings at BU, as she read the ads in the Sunday papers, she was appalled by how expensive housing with no strings attached was in Boston—far more so than Chicago had been. By June she hadn’t found anything she liked that she could afford.

  In the end, she let Gus persuade her that she should move in with him for the summer. Her idea was that she’d keep looking, that she’d find something for September, which was the next big turnover date in this academic town. Gus’s idea was that he could convince her to stay on, which she knew but pretended not to know. In any case, on a sunny Wednesday in early June, he and a friend of his drove over to Brookline in an Econoline van, loaded it with Billy’s worldly possessions—mostly books and papers and clothes—then drove to Somer ville and carried everything up to Gus’s apartment, to the room he’d cleared out for her to work in.

  She spent the first few days, while Gus was still teaching—gone from early in the morning to dinnertime—fixing this space up, setting up her computer, laying out her notebooks and the plays she liked to have around to look at while she worked. Then she had a couple of days where she did work, and worked well. This could be okay, she was thinking. She actually liked the room, which looked directly into a lush tree. And she liked the noise of the kids playing in the street in the afternoons. The street in Brookline had been expensive and empty and silent. If there were kids, they were somewhere else, taking lessons.

  At the end of the week, Gus persuaded her to come with him to his prep school’s graduation ceremony. “It’s pretty,” he said. “You’ll like it.”

  It was pretty. It was held outside, on a stage erected on the vast green at the center of the campus. The audience sat in rows on folding chairs set up on the grass. The women—mothers and grandmothers and sisters—wore big hats in straw or white, in bright colors, to protect them from the sun. “It’s like finally getting to go to the Kentucky Derby,” Billy said to Gus. “It makes me miss the horses, though.” The graduating girls, dressed in white, each carried a red rose, and the boys with their white jackets had roses in their lapels. Billy actually got teary as they were given their diplomas and loped across the stage so triumphantly, so hopeful and unaware of what was coming at them.

  Afterward, while Gus went to congratulate his students, she moved around anonymously, eavesdropping, as she loved to do in any crowd, making mental notes for herself. She kept catching glimpses of Gus through the milling people. He was talking to different groups of the graduates, joking around—teasing the girls, jockeying with the boys, punching the odd kid’s arm, laughing and completely at ease.

  And then, at one point, looking across the lawn through the thinning crowd, she saw him and didn’t recognize him. It took her more than a second to realize the kid she was looking at was not a student. Was Gus. She stood there, staring at him. He was moving his head around in a strange way, clearly imitating someone, and then he laughed. The boys around him laughed, too; their little group broke up for a moment, and then reassembled.

  Why, he’s a boy! she thought. He’s their age.

  She had a moment of shock, followed quickly by revulsion. But the revulsion was at herself, for not having known this before. Or for not having let herself know it. She’d seen it, she’d been aware of it—she acknowledged this to herself now—but she had gone along, even so. Because it was easy, because the sex was good, because she was busy in the rest of her life and Gus was someone she didn’t have to think about.

  What a terrible thing to do, to use someone in this way. To use someone’s love.

  And Gus loved her, she knew that. Whatever love meant to him, that’s what he felt for her. It was there in his admiration, his attentive noticing of whatever she did. It was there in the way he watched her responses to things, echoed her opinions. All the things that irritated her, if she were honest. Which she hadn’t exactly been, had she?

  She felt stunned by it all, and overcome with anger at herself. In the car on the way home, she barely spoke. Gus was high on the event, though, so it didn’t matter. And then when he fell quiet—in response to her, she supposed—she turned the radio on and the Red Sox were playing, and he was happy enough listening to that.

  After this, all the things that had sometimes charmed her about Gus—that he was good and kind and considerate and sweet, that she liked making love to him, that she liked looking at him, that he was funny and smart—didn’t matter much anymore. Or didn’t matter enough. What she saw now were the things that bothered her, that had always bothered her. But new things, too. She saw that he had no deeper dimension, no darker side. Or none that was available to her, anyway. For instance, it was as though he’d simply pushed away from himself any awareness of what was troubling about the way he’d grown up. Billy had gotten a more honest picture of this from Leslie in the long late evenings they sat up talking than she did from Gus. And the fact was that Leslie had cared to look at it, painstakingly. Had tried to try to understand it. She recognized that her own need to be kind, to be calm, was an almost-conscious response to what had been difficult and ugly in her growing up. And she understood that her response was a limitation as much as it was a strength.

  Gus didn’t see his growing up as sad. Or he wouldn’t see it that way. He once called it “irregular” to Billy.

  “Irregular, as in ouch,” Billy said.

  It got worse after the graduation. Gus was on vacation. Billy wasn’t. She needed to work, but Gus wanted her company, he didn’t see why she had to be at her desk every single day. It was summer. Why wouldn’t she come with him to the Vineyard? To Vermont? To western Massachusetts? To a play, for God’s sake? To Williamstown, to see a play, the very thing she cared about most.

  She came to feel that in some way he didn’t think of what she was doing as work. Oh, he admired the plays—or said he did. But he didn’t seem to make the connection between them and her need to be alone at her desk for four or five hours a day.

  She started to go to her office at BU to write. It was kind of a dump. It looked out over an air shaft; it had unpleasantly bright fluorescent lighting. The paint was old, and there were water stains on the ceiling. But it was private. It was quiet. Very quiet now in the summer, when most of the faculty disappeared from the warren of offices around hers that housed them in the academic year.

  Most of all, there was not Gus.

  It was on the way there on her bike one morning that she realized she had to end it. It wasn’t just that she needed to find her own place, to move out. She needed to tell him it wasn’t going to work at all, ever. That it wasn’t working now. It was early, around six-thirty. Traffic hadn’t yet thickened, and there was hardly anyone out besides the joggers. She was pedaling along the river, watching someone in a scull moving smoothly upstream, watching the steady quiet lap of the water into the tall grasses on the riverbank. She stopped her bike. She looked up at the Boston skyline and the graceful cable ribs of the Zakim Bridge. This is what she loved, this, being alone, being sentient only for herself. She didn’t want Gus noticing her noticing things, admiring her, ignoring all that was unpleasant about her, insisting on his version of who she was.

  She would tell him. She would.

  Not now, though. It would be better to wait until she had her own place—it would be too awkward living with him once he knew, too hard for both of them. But she would tell him.

  The relief she felt at acknowledging this, at making a plan, was sharp and clear, as though some months-long fog she’d been living in had lifted. The gulls above the treetops wheeled and cawed, white against the blue sky, and Billy had a sense of almost-giddy happiness for a moment. When she got to her ugly office, she sat down eagerly and started to read through what she’d written the day before. She would have her life back.

  As though he sensed this—and surely it must have made some difference in the way Billy behaved, she felt so much lighter—Gus seemed to want to draw closer. Only a few week
s after this, she arrived home one afternoon and opened the door to find him sitting on the living room floor playing with a puppy, a medium-sized black puppy, but one with enormous paws. It was for her, he said. A present.

  He’d clearly been planning it for a while—he had a crate set up in a corner of the living room, and he said he’d hired a dog walker who would come each day mid-to-late morning. He would walk the puppy early, he said, before he left for school, and again when he got back—long walks. Billy would only have to come home around two or three, as she did every day anyway, and walk him then. Just a short walk.

  As she sat down, silenced by surprise, he went on, nervously. He introduced the dog. He was a mutt, Gus said. His mother was a Newfoundland, owned by another teacher at school. She had no idea what the father was.

  Billy looked at the puppy. He was chewing on a large rawhide toy Gus had bought for him. He was, of course, completely, heartbreakingly winning. Gus was smiling at him. She felt a pang of deep anger at Gus, and then pity, too. She wondered whether he was at all aware of what she had instantly felt were the complicated motivations behind this gift.

  She knew she should tell him no, and she knew that saying no to the puppy was part of the larger no she needed to say to him. She looked at him. She could tell by his face that he was at least a little ashamed he’d given the dog to her. Ashamed, because it was such a terrible way to try to keep her attached to him, to try to make her stay.

  The puppy stood, wobbling a bit, and frolicked unevenly over to her. She held out her hand, and he lowered his hind quarters and started licking it.

  “What shall we call him?” Gus said, and she sighed and gave in.

  That was in August. Billy was still looking at apartments when Gus was getting ready to start back to school. She had a lead on one in Cambridgeport, another sublet, but it wouldn’t be available until January, when the family, academics, was taking a leave, so she was still scanning the housing lists at BU almost daily, checking the Sunday notices in the paper.