by Sue Miller
Billy thought of Gus, of course, but she thought, too—as almost everyone else must have—of the Towers, gone, the blank spot on the skyline where they’d been. That, that was how absolute his death was. All of their deaths. “The place thereof shall know it no more.”
The noise of weeping spread around the room—that choked sound—and people blowing their noses. Then a hymn was announced, the words printed in the program. The piano played an introduction as they all stood. It was an evening hymn, “Now the Day Is Over,” in a minor key. Billy knew it from the churchgoing days of her youth. The verses had been chosen carefully—no mention of Christ. The verse asking for comfort for “every sufferer, watching late in pain,” was still there, though, and it made Billy think of Leslie. She felt her own tears starting, but stopped herself. They were sentimental tears, and she wouldn’t allow herself them. The last verse they sang was about dawn:
When the morning wakens
Then may I arise,
Pure and fresh and sinless
In Thy holy eyes.
Gus. It seemed made for him. Leslie must have chosen it. The last note of the “Amen” floated in the air and then disappeared. Everyone sat down again.
The headmaster got up and asked everyone to come to a reception in the meeting room off the dining hall. The piano started once more, and the first few rows stood and began to file out. And then everyone was standing, the same noise as the rustling hubbub of a theater audience. There was a gradual increase in volume as they all began making their way out of the pews and down the side or the middle aisles, talking, greeting others, some of them simply wiping their eyes.
Billy stepped outside onto the steps in the bright sun by herself. Leslie came up to her. “Billy, dear,” she said. “You’re bleeding. You’ve bitten your lip.” She fished in her bag and brought out a packet of tissues, from which she extracted one for Billy. Billy took it, touched her lip, held it out. A bright stain.
“So I have,” Billy said. She was glad for it, and somehow glad, too, to have Leslie see it.
“Oh, Billy,” Leslie said. “I wish there were some way I could help.”
“I do, too,” Billy said. The truth, for once.
Leslie kissed her, and then Pierce joined them as they started across one of the paths toward the dining hall.
The reception was in a smaller, more elegant room off the enormous student dining area. Tables had been pushed back against the walls, and an array of food was set out, mostly square sandwiches, the crusts cut off, and various desserts and fruits. One table had pitchers and several big, institutional urns—coffee and hot water, and probably decaf, too. Billy wanted nothing, but others were loading plates, and some were already holding them as they stood around, talking and eating.
Peter’s wife, Erin, came up and launched herself into a conversation. She liked to talk. Billy had complained about it to Gus after their evenings with her and Peter, but now she was grateful. She felt at ease, briefly. Surrounded by Erin’s gentle chatter, there was no need to speak. But then she moved off and Billy was alone.
“So, how did you know Gus?” someone asked her, politely. He had a plate of cookies he had held up to her by way of saying hello.
“I actually met him on a ferryboat,” she said, ignoring the larger question behind the small one: Who are you in relation to him? “And you?”
He was a parent of someone on the soccer team Gus coached. He’d come to the games regularly and struck up an acquaintance. He spoke of Gus’s drive to win, his pleasure in using his body.
“Yes,” Billy said sadly, remembering the uses he’d made of it with her.
The head of the English department came up to her and said, “So you’re the famous Billy we all heard so much about.”
“I suppose I am,” she said. “At least, I don’t think there were other Billys.”
“Gus spoke of you so often,” he said.
“Thank you. Thank you for telling me,” she said.
Always she felt she should be saying more, that her silence, her failure to have been part of the service, were things that people would have noticed, would be thinking strange. But then she also told herself that this was self-important, that no one was thinking of her, that they were thinking of Gus—only of Gus.
She met two of Pierce’s brothers, with their wives. Leslie introduced her to several old friends of hers, people who were there mostly for her, it seemed, as Billy spoke to them. Who hadn’t known Gus all that well. They asked her about him, and then about how she thought Leslie was doing.
When Pierce touched her back and asked if she remembered what Leslie had done with her shawl—“Did she take it with her out of the car?”—Billy seized on this as an excuse to escape.
“I’ll go look. Maybe she left it in the chapel.”
“That would be nice of you. Thanks, Billy.”
As she stepped out into the cooler air and started walking back across the green to the parking lot, Billy wondered if Pierce had noticed how out of it she was and was rescuing her. More likely Leslie had noticed and had sent Pierce over. Either way, walking alone for the first time today, she felt her body ease. She breathed in. The sky was so blue, as blue as it had been on 9/11, though the air was cooler, a kind of presentiment of fall in it. She started to think about what she might have said about Gus, if she’d spoken.
But no, she was only glad she hadn’t. There were many good things she could have offered, of course there were, but she would have offered them to make things seem okay, and not because of the wish to honor him, to remember him.
But of course she would remember him. She would remember good things about him as well as the trapped feeling she’d slowly come to have living with him. She would remember him perhaps longer and with more pain than someone whose feelings were less ambivalent, less knotted. She would remember him every time she walked the dog, every time she saw an airplane glide through an azure sky, every time she saw Leslie, every September 11 of her life. She swore to herself she would. She would remember him, she was sure, long after she’d forgotten exactly what he looked like, or exactly why she’d felt she couldn’t live with him anymore.
The shawl wasn’t in the car. She retraced their steps to the chapel and went inside. It seemed enormous once more without people filling the pews. The pictures of Gus were scattered everywhere, even on the floor. She went to the pew Leslie had been sitting in. She could see the scarf, the brilliant blue corner of it, sticking out from under the bench. She gathered it in. It carried Leslie’s perfume with it and, somehow, the sense of Leslie. She had loved her better than she loved Gus; she knew this. And she was as sad about Leslie, she realized, as almost anything else—sad that she would always dread seeing her, being with her, even while she missed all of that. She folded the shawl neatly and carried it out into the bright sunlight.
A couple was walking toward her as she crossed back over the pathway. It was Peter and Erin, she saw as they got closer. Erin was carrying her shoes. They stopped when they met. Erin explained she just couldn’t stand up anymore. She pointed to her feet. Billy looked down. They were shapeless, unfootlike. “I need to get home and elevate them, ASAP,” she said.
On an impulse, Billy asked if they could wait. They lived in the Back Bay, just a few blocks north of Billy’s new neighborhood. It would be easy enough, then, for them to drop Billy in Copley Square. She could walk home from there in fifteen minutes. “I need to take Leslie her shawl, and let her know I’m going, but I’ll be right back.”
They said they’d wait by their car.
The crowd at the reception had begun to thin. Leslie was talking to two of the students. Billy held the shawl out to her, and Leslie turned from them.
“Where was it? Thank you so much!”
Billy told her. Then she said, “I’m going to excuse myself now, Leslie. I just need to get home, and Peter and Erin said they could drive me.” She knew how Leslie would take this, her announced need to leave, and she felt a certain sorrowful
anger at herself for using the feelings she didn’t have, but might have had—should have had—in order to make a getaway.
“This was hard, I know,” Leslie said, sympathetically.
“Yes,” Billy said. “And for you, too,” she said. It felt lame, pathetic, whatever she said.
Leslie lifted her hand, dismissively. “I’ll call you tomorrow, shall I?” she asked. “I want to be sure you’re all right.”
“I’ll be all right,” Billy said. “I am all right. I’m just, tired, I guess.”
“Of course you are. And of course you’ll be all right. I just … I miss you.”
She was engulfed again in Leslie’s embrace.
Peter and his wife let her sit in the backseat. They didn’t seem to mind her silence. They talked to each other about Gus for a while, about the service, about 9/11, but then moved on to other things. She had a doctor’s appointment coming up. She was going to ask about her feet. Their voices dropped. She said something about bleeding. Billy opened her window a crack and let the breeze and its rushing noise shelter her.
Instead of dropping her off in Copley Square, as she’d suggested, they insisted on driving her home. It wouldn’t be a problem, an extra five minutes, Peter said. When they pulled up in front of her building, he got out and came around. Billy was out of the car, was bent over Erin’s opened window saying good-bye. When she stood straight, Peter held out his hand. She took it, and he folded his other hand over hers and said earnestly, “If there’s anything we can do, Billy, you’ll let us know.”
Billy was sure he meant it, but it was also an easy, perfunctory thing to say, and her answer—to thank him, to say she would—was easy, too. They both knew she wouldn’t call.
The parlor was quiet when she opened the door—no frantic greeting from Reuben. For a moment she was frightened—where was he? what had happened?—but then she heard him shift in his crate, and an anxious small whimper. As she came closer, she saw he was sitting all the way at the back of the crate, pressed against that wall. Then she noticed the smell and saw the turd heaped in the front corner. He hadn’t been able to wait.
She went quickly into the bedroom and took off her suit and heels. Wearing just her slip, in stocking feet, she went into the bathroom for a roll of toilet paper and a towel. From under the kitchen sink, she got paper towels and rags and the bucket. She filled the bucket with soapy water and carried everything with her to the crate.
When she opened the door, Reuben didn’t move to come out. She knelt on the floor. The smell from within the crate was awful. She made two wads of the toilet paper and picked up the turd, set it on the floor on some paper towels. Then she reached in, curled her fingers under Reuben’s collar, and pulled him forward. She saw that he’d gotten shit on his haunch and leg, probably because the crate really was too small for him now. As soon as he was out, he crouched down to the floor in apology, looking carefully away from her, ashamed. His ears were flat. He turned over on his back, a supplicant for forgiveness.
She reached out and stroked him on his face, his enormous head. “It’s not your fault, sweet boy. You’re good. It’s my fault. You’re good. You’re a good boy.” Something in these words made her throat ache, brought tears up. Why? She didn’t know. “It’s my fault,” she said. “You’re a good boy. A good, good Reuben.”
With tears blurring her vision, she dunked a rag in the soapy water and began to clean him up.
Sam called on Friday, three days after they’d met. The message was waiting when she got back from the theater. She stood for a moment listening to his voice in her dark living room, looking out the window at a couple moving past under the streetlight. Their voices were pitched loudly—a little flirty, a little drunk. Reuben was whining at the door. Come on.
“I wondered about our having the coffee we’re supposed to,” Sam said. “Or maybe lunch. Or dinner, for that matter—on Monday. I think that’s the day theaters are famously closed. Let me know.” He left several numbers.
She got Reuben’s leash and took him out. The fountains in the private park at the center of the street were turned off now, so there wasn’t that steady, pleasant sound—nature disciplined, as she thought of it. It made a kind of emptiness. The leaves were gone from the trees, and her view into the parlors and the ground-floor apartments was unimpeded. TV and more TV for the most part. There was one dinner party still in full swing, though, a group of men around a table, their faces alive in the glowing candlelight, their chairs pushed back or turned sideways, their voices a faint murmur from the street.
They met one other dog, coming their way, much smaller than Reuben but unintimidated by him, and friendly. As the dogs circled and sniffed at each other’s private parts—easier for the small dog than for Rube—she and its owner, a young man, passed the leashes back and forth to avoid their getting tangled. There was a kind of absurd intimacy to this teamwork, their anticipation of each other’s next move for the sake of what amounted to terribly rude dog behavior, but it made Billy feel accomplished in some small, pleasant way. “Have a nice night,” the man said as they parted.
Outside the restaurant on the corner, the patio chairs and tables, which had been stacked up and chained together through the fall, had been removed. The end, she thought. The season of ease was over. She stopped walking. This was as far as they went at night. She gave the leash a little tug. “We’re going home, Rube,” she said, and he turned back, trailing her now. He stopped to sniff again at all the places he’d stopped on the way out, occasionally feeling it worth his while to lift his leg again and make a claim.
As they dawdled home, she was thinking about Sam. She was surprised he had called, actually. She had felt his interest in her as they talked in the restaurant—and hers in him, for that matter—but she thought she’d sent a signal at the end of the evening that she wasn’t interested. Or that she wasn’t very interested, anyway. Of course, Billy, maybe the fact that you were interested jammed that signal.
She remembered that awkward moment when he’d suggested they see each other again and she didn’t know what to say. She remembered his face changing, looking surprised, then quickly almost blank, as he registered her withdrawal.
Inside, she got ready for bed without turning the lights on. She liked moving around in the dark. It wasn’t really dark anyway, with the faded glow from the gas lamps. Reuben was already lying on top of the quilt on his side when she slid into bed. “Good night, sweet prince,” she said. He sighed. His tail whacked the bed twice.
She lay looking out the windows at the bare trees, at the shadows they cast inside. She wasn’t sure what to do about Sam’s invitation. He came from Leslie, and Leslie was the last person she wanted closer in her life, it had taken her so long to pull away to the extent that she had, to establish her distance. But she was drawn to Sam, as she hadn’t been to anyone in a long time. As she had chosen not to be in a long time.
Her last serious relationship had been almost three years earlier, with another playwright—probably, as she thought about it later, reason enough for its not working out. But for a while she had thought it was possible it would, she had thought that her string of bad choices—God! her husband; all those gloomy, demanding Chicago guys; and Gus, poor Gus—that all that might be over.
The relationship had been five or six months old, and they were talking about living together, when Leslie called. She wanted Billy to take some of the money, the money the government had given to the families. It was a lot, Leslie said, much too much, and she didn’t need it. She was going to give most of it away to charity, but she thought Billy should have some. Gus would have wanted it, she said. And it would make a difference in Billy’s life, as it wouldn’t in hers. “That seems right to me,” Leslie said. “That it should go—at any rate that some of it should go—to someone where it would make a difference. Someone Gus loved.”
Billy said no, and she and Leslie argued on the phone, awkwardly, politely. Finally, Billy agreed to think about it, just to end the co
nversation. And she would think about it, she told herself—she would think about how to say no in a way that Leslie wouldn’t argue with. That she couldn’t argue with.
When she told David about Leslie’s call, she treated it as something so out of the question as to be sadly, horribly funny. She thought he would laugh ruefully with her, that he’d help her figure out how to manage getting out of the situation.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “Of course you should take it. It would change your life. It would change our lives, together.”
Billy was so startled that she could barely respond, but over the next few days, they argued about it, over and over, increasingly bitterly. It was he who spoke the line about fucking Henry James in one of these long, drawn-out sessions, the line she used in the play. She’d been silent in response. She didn’t think of the answer, of Gabriel’s answer, until much later, when she was writing it, when David was long gone. Her characters were always quicker than she was—the advantage of living their lives in the slow motion of her imagination.
It was in the course of these arguments that she understood that things weren’t going to work out with her and David, that it was over. Another bad choice, another messy ending.
Since then her specialty had become the occasional one-night stand, and that only when she felt secure that the other person understood the rules, didn’t want anything more complicated either. Rafe, for instance.
With Sam, this would be an impossibility. There would be no rules with him. This was something she just knew.
She groaned aloud and rolled over onto her side.
She lay there and imagined him here, in her house, or her bed, and understood instantly how much she didn’t want that. She didn’t want to go to his house, either, to see the way he lived. She didn’t want to learn about him, to accommodate him. To feel him learning about her, accommodating her. And he brought with him, again, all the complexity of the connection with Leslie, the memory of Gus. At some point, with him, there would have to be the discussion about Gus. She didn’t want to discuss Gus with him. She didn’t want to discuss Gus with anyone. The closest she came to doing it now was the sort of thing she and Rafe had talked about, and that was as much as she wanted to say to anyone ever again about that part of her life. She couldn’t go back there again. That way monsters lay.
