by Sue Miller
“No, I wasn’t.”
He lifted his hands. And his eyebrows. “As you wish,” he said.
“What about the dog?” he asked, sitting down across from her.
“What about the dog?”
“Does the dog need feeding?”
“I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll do it later. He’s flexible, poor thing. He’s had to be, since I’m his owner. And you need to stop being so … solicitous.”
“I’m being mostly solicitous of me. I’m having a glass of terrific cognac.” He stretched his long legs out. They reached half the distance between them. His face was in shadow, his head tilted up, resting on the chair back.
Billy leaned back, too, on the couch. “You’re probably going to get a ticket.”
He waved his hand: Who cares?
“Which I will pay,” she said. “It’s the price of living where I do, where nobody can park. I wouldn’t have friends if I didn’t pay their tickets.”
“We won’t argue about it,” he said.
She tried some of the tea. Almost too hot, but not. She set the cup back in the saucer, her hand circling the warm china. After a minute she said, “I didn’t want you to come here today. It’s why I suggested a walk. Neutral territory.”
“Why not?”
“Oh.” She gestured around her. “It’s all so kind of personal a place.”
“Isn’t every place where someone lives personal?”
“Not yours, I bet. I bet yours is lovely in a tastefully neutral way. Big. Gracious. Guest hand towels in the bathroom. In the lavatory. Monogrammed. Many bedrooms. Et cetera.”
He was silent a moment. She closed her eyes. He said, “You’re kind of a snob, you know it?”
“Am I?” She couldn’t really see his face, how he meant it.
“In a sort of reverse way.”
“But you’re the one who thought I was too bohemian or something. That was snobby of you.”
“We’re both snobs, I guess.”
“Perfectly suited to each other. Let’s call Leslie.”
She could see he was smiling. She closed her eyes again.
Later she would remember that he said something else—a few other things—and that she swam up several times from wherever she was sinking to say something back, but the next time she rose to full consciousness, he was gone. She was covered with the quilt he’d taken off the bed, and Reuben was asleep on the floor by her dangling hand.
She groaned and got up. She went into the bathroom. Bent over the sink, she splashed warm water on her face. She stood straight, grabbing a towel, and looked at herself as she dried off. Her lip was immense, fat, as though she’d been shot with an elephant-sized syringe of collagen. She leaned forward to the mirror and lifted it slightly to look at the cut inside. Standing back again, she saw that she’d lost an earring during this adventure. One of her favorite pair of earrings. This seemed important, somehow.
She felt tired, suddenly. Sad. Emptied out. Reuben was standing in the bathroom doorway, waiting for her. “Come on, old Rube,” she said. “Let’s get you some supper.”
He turned and loped to the kitchen. She followed, more slowly.
Sam’s glass and her cup and saucer were rinsed and set in the sink. Reuben’s leash lay coiled on the counter. Under it there was a note. She picked it up. I walked the dog, but I couldn’t spot his food. Sam.
She made a noise. “What am I gonna do with this guy, Rube?” she asked. She suddenly remembered something that he’d said as she was dropping off. She thought she remembered it. He had been speaking again of how different they were, but this time he said, “I thought, Why not? Why not let someone so different into my life?”
Hadn’t he said that?
She didn’t want to be in Sam’s life. How could she be? She didn’t want to be in anyone’s life but her own.
She picked up Reuben’s dish from the floor. Her wrist hurt. She crossed the little galley. She knelt on the floor on her sore knees to reach under the kitchen sink for the bucket that held his dried food. Her view now was of the disorder, the mess hidden under here—the old rags, the dark, irregular shape of some dried-up liquid she’d spilled months ago, a stiffened rubber glove, palm up, supplicant, its yellow browning around the edges.
She felt suddenly teary. “I can’t,” she said aloud. “I can’t do any of this.”
“SAM!” SHE SAID ON THE PHONE, before he could tell her who was calling. It was Wednesday, late in the afternoon, the day after the play. He had tried earlier, but she and Pierce weren’t back home yet. “It was so lovely to see you. Thank you for joining us last night.”
“No, I was calling to thank you. You were kind to ask me.”
“Well, we were both eager to see you after all this time.”
“It was … it was good to catch up.”
“It was.”
“And to see Billy’s play.” It felt strange to speak her name to Leslie. Maybe just to speak her name to anyone for the first time.
“Yes.” She seemed hesitant. Or equivocal in some way.
“Though it was tough. Tough for you, I’m sure.” They’d talked about this briefly at the intermission. “Tough in some ways for me, too.”
“Well, it was just a play.” Her voice seemed subdued. “Billy has a right to whatever … topic. She wants.”
“Of course,” he said. “When I say it was tough, I don’t mean she shouldn’t have used it.”
There was a moment of silence. She said, “Used Gus, you mean?”
“Actually, no. I wasn’t thinking of Gus.” He was confused. “I didn’t particularly see Gus in there. I mean that she used 9/11. What she might have felt about living through 9/11.”
“Ah!”
He thought she was about to say something more. When she didn’t, he said, “You did see Gus.” It was a question.
“Well, not right away. Not last night. Though I was, bothered, I guess you’d say. And then the more I thought about it, yes. I saw Gus, and I saw Billy. I saw how she must have felt about him—at least at some point. It made me very … sad.”
He waited, but she seemed to be done. “I’m sorry, then,” he said.
“Yes. But as I say, she has every right.” There was something pinched in her voice.
“It came around though, didn’t you think? The play?”
“How do you mean that—‘came around’?” she asked.
He was sitting in his kitchen, in his house in Brookline. For some reason, he hadn’t turned the lights on in here, so there was just the faint illumination from the hall coloring everything a twilit gray—the chairs and table, the countertop, the dishes from this morning standing in their rack. Outside, it was already dark, at four-thirty.
“Just that the character,” he said, “the Gabriel guy, begins to remember his wife. Didn’t you think that, in the second act? He remembers the way she was before things … soured between them. He remembers her, and he more or less, decides to love her again.”
It was about me, of course, he wanted to say. As a joke.
He smiled to himself for a moment, but almost instantly he was recalling also the sudden absorption he’d felt in the events playing out on the stage, the sense of a complicated set of his own emotions being laid bare. During the last part of the play, the exchange between the Gabriel character and his lover, when he was acknowledging being relieved for a moment that his wife might have died—when he spoke of his shame about that—Sam had thought of his first wife, of Susan. Of how impatient he was sometimes in her long illness and dying, impatient for it to be over, just to be over, so that whatever would follow it—his life, he felt—could begin. He’d grown tired of pretending that all was well, that she wasn’t incapacitated, that they weren’t asking anything of the boys by going on as usual. For a long time after Susan’s death, Sam wasn’t able to let go of the memory of having those feelings. He simply didn’t like himself.
But even earlier in the play he’d felt implicated. Watching the son’s a
nger at his father on the stage, he had flashed on Charley, his oldest son, his face distorted with contempt, saying about Claire, “What do you have to marry her for? Just fuck her. Don’t involve the rest of us.”
“Didn’t you think that?” he asked Leslie now. “That it turned? That that’s what the ending meant?”
“It would be nice to think that.”
“Well, if that part was in any way about Gus and Billy, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Wouldn’t it be … loving?”
“If it was, yes.” He heard the reluctance in her voice.
“But that’s what I thought you said, that you felt it was about them.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Sam.” Her voice was lighter suddenly, dismissive. “I’ve no idea what I’m saying, really.” She laughed, a small pant of sound oddly amplified by the telephone. “The whole thing probably just went right over my head.”
He wanted to help them both out of this. “We’ve gotten mighty serious here, wouldn’t you say? When I was calling just to say thanks, and to ask for Billy’s phone number, or e-mail.”
He heard an intake of breath, quick, almost inaudible. “So you’re going to call her.”
“Isn’t that what you intended?” He tried to make his voice genial, light.
“Of course it is.” But he could hear her hesitation. “No. Yes. I hoped you would be friends, anyway. She was …” There was a little silence. “Gus loved her, I think, very much.” She said, “Just a minute, I’ll get it,” and set the phone down, with a clunk.
When she came back, half a minute later, she sounded like herself again—calm, affectionate. “God, I wish I were more organized,” she said. “But here it is. I finally found it. Ready?” She read the number off. She said, “And of course I’ll be interested to hear, whatever happens.”
“Of course,” he said, though he couldn’t imagine reporting in to her.
“Give Billy my best.”
“I will.” He thanked her and they said good-bye.
After he hung up, he sat there for a minute or two in the half dark, thinking of her moving around in the house—crossing the hall into the living room, turning on the lamp by Pierce’s chair, bending over to stir the fire in the fireplace. And then he realized he was imagining her as she’d been when he first knew her—tall, brunette, graceful—not the white-haired, almost-stout woman he’d seen the night before.
Like Billy, Sam had an image of Leslie that he held on to. Not a picture—a memory. A memory from a snowy day when he made the long trip up from Boston to check on the progress in the house he’d designed for Claire. He’d gotten within a mile of the site, driving on what was a dirt road for half the year but now was a gravelly strip of icy, brownish snow running between the white fields that fell sharply away on one side and the thick woods on the other. Almost as soon as he started up the last section, the point where the road lifted most steeply, he could feel the car losing traction.
Then it had none. The wheels spun uselessly. Within a few seconds, he had started to slide slowly backward.
He had a moment of anger, at himself mostly, for not having snow tires. He’d actually thought about putting them on, but no new snow had fallen in Vermont for the last few days and he’d assumed he could get by without them. So much for that notion.
He shifted into reverse and backed carefully down the hill until he could turn around in a neighbor’s driveway, then continued down facing forward. When he got to where the road flattened out, he parked carefully just off to the side of it and called Leslie on his car phone.
She was there, in the real estate office. Her voice on the line was warm. She said yes, of course she had snow tires. Yes, of course she’d be glad to come and drive him up to the house.
She was walking ahead of him when they came into the living room. She stopped directly under the groin vault, the place where the two barrel vaults came together. Slowly she turned in a circle, her arms flung out, her mouth open. Her breath plumed like smoke around her. There were still snowflakes in her dark hair.
She faced him. “I see what you’re doing,” she said. Her eyes were excited. “This beautiful space. You sculpted it. It’s just … spectacular. It’s wonderful.”
That was it. That was the moment, that look stamped on her face.
Claire couldn’t have looked at him that way. She couldn’t have said that, or anything like it. She was by then barely interested in him, let alone the house he was making for her, and every time he was with Leslie, it made him more aware of this, of how deep and unbridgeable the differences between him and Claire had come to be.
Leslie stood for the possibility of another kind of woman. She was another kind of woman. Over and over Sam found himself watching her, listening to her, and thinking how different she was from Claire—Claire, who was so much cooler in temperament, so much more critical in her approach to everything. He once used the word “creamy” to describe Leslie to a friend—a problematic word choice, as he knew. But he thought of her that way. Her skin had a white softness, a welcoming, pillowy kind of softness that seemed expressive of this quality in her generally.
It might have been that moment, then, when Sam began to fall in love with her. It might have been that image that triggered the period in his life during which he thought of her on and off through the day if he wasn’t fully occupied with something else. Leslie: the default mode.
But there were other possible starting points. It might have begun earlier, maybe on the night when he was driving back to the Hanover Inn with Claire after they’d had their one and only meal as a foursome with Leslie and Pierce. She’d come up with him from Boston because he was getting ready to draw the kitchen cabinets, and she decided she wanted to look at the space for them, to have some say about their arrangement. When he’d told Leslie that Claire would be with him this time, she responded by inviting them both for dinner.
“Not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, are they?” Claire had said in the dark car, her voice heavy with irony.
He didn’t say anything. It had been a long, hard evening, though Claire had been at her most poised. But this was part of the problem for him—he felt this poise as a kind of absence. It was connected to the public persona she could call up effortlessly, and it was this Claire, the public, remote version of her, who had stridden into the little low-ceilinged hallway where Leslie stood waiting, smiling and extending her hand.
In contrast to her, everything about Leslie seemed slow and soft. She talked a little nervously as she took their coats and hung them up, as she told Claire, who’d asked, how old the house was, who had built it.
“And how long have you lived in it?” Claire said, smiling.
“Twenty-five years,” Leslie answered. “Practically as long as the house is old.” She smiled, lifting her shoulders in a helpless shrug. “Apparently we can’t be budged. But come in, please.” At her beckoning gesture, they’d stepped into the living room.
Just at this moment, as if on cue, Pierce entered it, too, from the kitchen. He carried a tray with glasses, with napkins and crackers and cheese. No bottles. He had already set those out on a long table between the two windows facing the town green—two bottles of wine and an array of hard liquor. There was a blue bowl there, too, filled with ice. It had been the same routine the five or so times Sam had come without Claire. Most of those times, though, he’d had just a drink or coffee before he drove back to Boston. Only twice before had he stayed for dinner.
Pierce, as always, seemed too big for the room, his voice too loud in the small space, too enthusiastic. He told Claire that he’d begun to believe she didn’t exist, that she was someone “old Samuel here imagined, dreamed up out of whole cloth, as it were.”
“As you can see,” Claire had said, sweeping her hand in front of herself, down and then away in a dramatic gesture, “I’m very real.” It made them all look at her, of course, at how beautiful she was in her austere way, at how long and supple her body was.
It was that bea
uty that had compelled Sam. He’d seen her at the twentieth-anniversary party of some friends, sitting at a table, talking animatedly, laughing, and he resolved he wouldn’t leave until he’d at least met her. And here he was tonight, looking again at the curve of her cheekbones, at her shapely head, her long legs—everything they’d been beckoned to notice. But instead of feeling the impact of all that, Sam was seeing her in a new light. A part of him wanted to laugh, to cry out, But you’re not real. Not real at all.
And as the evening went on, every exchange seemed a confirmation of this, even the small ones. At the dinner table, when Leslie started to talk about her garden, Claire plied her with questions, as though she knew something about gardening, as though she cared, when Sam knew how contemptuous she was of intelligent people wasting their time, as she saw it, in this way—she’d said these very words to him. She laughed too heartily at Pierce’s humor, his jokes. She explained her own work to them—right now, a series of public lectures she was giving on the ethics of debt and exchange—in a tone that seemed to Sam just slightly condescending. She was indulging Pierce and Leslie, tolerating them in a self-consciously gracious way that Sam knew he was meant to notice.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Claire said in the car. “I know they’re your friends. I don’t mean to dis them.”
“Of course you do,” he said quietly.
She let a moment pass. It was October, the Vermont night had turned sharply cold, and the car’s heater revved and paused, revved and paused. Then she said, “Well, okay. I do. But you know what I mean.”
“I don’t, actually.”
“Sam,” she protested in annoyance, as though he were being childishly uncooperative, silly.
“I don’t. You wanted to dis them.” He looked over at her. “That’s exactly what you did want.”
She sighed in exasperation and crossed her arms on her bosom. The slide of her blouse, silk on silk, made a light, whispering noise. She looked out the window for a moment, and then she turned back to him. “No, it isn’t.” Her voice was flat. “What I wanted was for us to have a little fun together after a rather dull evening. Maybe, yes, at their expense, but that wasn’t the point.”
