by Sue Miller
She was naked except for high heels. She was older—she might have been about as old as his mother. She walked back and forth on the elevated platform, lifting up her breasts, pretending to squirt her nipples at one man or another, putting her hand between her legs, clearly sticking her fingers up into herself. Meanwhile the huckster standing on the ground in front of the platform was talking about what went on in an interior tent for more money. It was as shocking to Sam as anything, the secret words said aloud by an adult: suck, fuck, asshole, cunt.
Sitting with Pierce and Leslie, Sam was suddenly remembering it all: the dim light, a bare bulb or two suspended from the top of the tent. The smell of the men’s sweat and of the stirred-up dirt under their feet. The woman turning away from them, bending over, holding her cheeks and cunt open. He remembered that she set a bottle on the stage and balanced a coin on it, that she squatted over it, that the neck of the bottle and the coin went up into her, that she stood and reached into herself, pulling the coin out slowly, licking it off.
He’d come out afterward stunned into daylight, sunshine, the crowded fairgrounds. He was still nearly speechless when he met his parents at the agreed-on place. They took him home early. His mother thought he was getting sick.
But he said nothing about this to Pierce and Leslie. Instead, when his turn came to talk again, he was making some lofty, theoretical remarks about the venality of soft-core stuff in the movies, when Leslie said, “Here’s Billy!” and turned to go to the door.
So all that was in the air when Billy arrived, small as a child. And though it slowly fell away over the course of the conversation he had with her, it came back at the end of the evening when she got down from her chair suddenly and said she had to go, she had to walk her dog. Her face, which had been so animated only seconds before, had changed, had gone flat, dead. Three minutes later, standing alone on the rainy street, he watched her walk away, her small dark form seeming to disappear into the night from one moment to the next.
Did she even have a dog? he wondered. He felt that stupid about what had just happened.
But he thought about it, he argued with himself about it, and the next day he called Leslie and got Billy’s number, and then on the Friday of that week he called her, and when she called him back, they agreed to meet, to walk her dog together.
As Sam stepped out into the night air, he felt how shockingly much colder it was than when he and Billy had started their disastrous walk, much colder even than when they came back to her house from the offices of her HMO. He pulled the collar of his jacket up as he walked along the brick sidewalk. From halfway down the block, he could see that he had a ticket on the windshield of his car—the ticket Billy had assured him he would get, the ticket she had said she would pay.
When he got to the car, he lifted it from under the windshield wiper and pocketed it. He had no intention of mentioning it to her. As he started the engine, it seemed to him that the interior of the car still smelled faintly of dog, a not-unpleasant odor, actually.
The car had only just started to warm up inside by the time he got home. He came into the front hall and set his keys and wallet on the stand there. Looking up, he saw that the message light on the telephone in the living room was blinking red. Billy, he thought, and was surprised at how boyishly happy he felt.
But even crossing the room, he was preparing himself to be disappointed. She wouldn’t have called, he told himself. She couldn’t have. She was still asleep. She was drugged.
The voice on the machine was Jack’s, his middle son’s, saying he was coming to Boston for a conference the next weekend, could he stay with Sam? “I’m sorry to call so late. I was just assuming I’d crash with you, but then I realized I really should check it out first, the way real people do. I think I haven’t seen you since early summer. Too long, however you slice it. But let me know.”
Sam was disappointed. And then was angry at himself for that. This should have lifted his spirits. Normally it would have. What was wrong with him that it didn’t now? What kind of father was he?
He called Jack and got his recorded message, of course. He left a warm, enthusiastic response on it. Yes, come. Yes, it will be great to see you.
As he hung up, he was suddenly aware that the house felt chilly. On his way to the kitchen, he stopped and turned the hall thermostat up. He could hear it trigger the switch, then the faraway roar in the basement.
Though he wasn’t hungry, he fixed himself dinner. Pasta. Pasta with olive oil and some tarragon he found in the refrigerator and chopped up. He made himself do this, cook for himself, three or four nights a week. A form of moral instruction. A way to stave off the sense of fecklessness he sometimes felt waiting to claim him. While he sat at the kitchen table eating, he heard the wind rise outside. One of the dining room windows rattled. He got up and went into the dark room to latch it. He stood for a moment with his hand on the cold metal, lost in thought, seeing Billy pitching forward, feeling again how frightened he’d been, watching it.
But it had changed things—the accident. Things had been too polite before then, slightly strained. Their conversation, everything, was unforced and easier afterward.
Was he glad it had happened then?
He was, he supposed. In a way. He had liked taking care of her. Helping her. This abruptly struck him as worrisome. As a habit, really—a way of being with women, with people generally—that he fell into just a shade too easily. And hadn’t she been irritated, a little, at his fussing? Even at his being there? She had told him so, for Christ’s sake. Why hadn’t he left once he got her safely home?
Because things changed again after that. She was funny, she relaxed.
Of course she relaxed, he told himself. She was drugged.
Still, he had liked sitting across from her in the big, underfurnished parlor, talking about nothing, talking about his house and hers, teasing each other. What he felt about her, he realized, was that she had a moral sense, a solidity, that existed apart from any of the irregular details of her life.
Could he know that about her, based on one afternoon?
And an evening, he reminded himself, looking out the window. And a play.
He thought of the way her face had looked when he asked her idly after the play what the worst thing she’d ever done was. You would have thought homicide by looking at her. He saw again the pain in her face as she looked around at the other sad occupants of the waiting room at the HMO. He remembered the moral complexity of the Gabriel character’s response to his situation, a complexity the Anita character had likened to Henry James’s work.
He could know it, he thought.
Outside the window, the branches of the trees bent and swayed in the wind. He went back to the kitchen and finished his meal. He carried the dishes to the sink and rinsed them, loaded them into the dishwasher.
He moved restlessly around the house. He sat blankly in the living room, not seeing the family photographs on the mantel, the worn upholstery on the couch and chairs, unchanged since the boys’ punishing childhood. He went upstairs and turned the television on, but nothing drew him, not even sports. He pulled on a sweater and went back downstairs and through the passageway to his office, an addition at the side of the house with its own outside entrance, too, constructed after Susan died. He’d built it because he wanted to be able to work at home, to be on call for the boys after school.
Now he sat at his desk and fooled around with the detail he was figuring out for the windows in the library job. His mind emptied out, free of Billy, of himself, of his history and his life. At some point he looked up to see what time it was. Unbelievable: midnight. This is why we have work, he thought. He got up at about one and went back into the house.
He checked the message light on the telephone—steady green. And then he stood for a long moment in the entry hall, looking around at it.
This was the grandest space in the house, really. The staircase opposite the front door rose up, took a turn to the right across the wide l
anding, and disappeared. The windows on the landing reached all the way up to the third floor and, in the daytime, flooded this whole area with light. The furniture here—the hall stand, the bureau that had once held everyone’s mittens or winter scarves—these were antiques, from Susan’s family.
He thought of what Billy had said about his house. Big, tasteful, neutral. He supposed that was true in some ways, though it was more worn than she might have guessed.
And then he was remembering coming into this hallway with his youngest son, Mark, home from college for some holiday visit. Mark, trailing him, had said out of the blue, “You ever think about moving, Dad?”
Sam had turned back to his son, startled.
Mark was looking around this very space as though really seeing it for the first time. He raised his shoulders, almost in apology, it seemed. “It’s just so big.”
“And empty, I know. I think of it from time to time, I guess. And then I think of all the crap—my stuff and you kids’ stuff—and I lose heart.”
“We’d help.”
“A likely story,” he said. He had started toward the kitchen. “Want a snack? A nightcap?”
“I’m pretty beat,” Mark said. “But tell you what. I’ll take you out for lunch tomorrow.”
This was kind, and Sam felt that, as he felt how surprisingly adult Mark had sounded saying it: tell you what. But it made him suddenly, heavily sad. He had the awareness of himself as a possible burden for Mark, maybe for all three boys. Did they talk about it? Who’s going to be with him at Thanksgiving?
Well. Somebody better go.
“Fair enough,” he had said to Mark.
Now he turned off the hall lights and headed alone in the dark up the grand staircase.
——
There was no call from Billy on Tuesday, or on Wednesday. He was tempted to call her, but he didn’t, partly because it was her turn, partly because he didn’t want to rush her, to push her. It was pretty clear she was not someone who liked being rushed or pushed.
But on Wednesday night at about nine, feeling that he couldn’t spend another full day without human company, he called a friend, Jerry Miller, and asked him if he wanted to have dinner the next evening. Sam had known Jerry for years. They’d been in a support group organized by the clinic where their wives were both being treated for cancer. Jerry’s wife had survived.
A smaller group of these husbands, six of them, had gone on meeting on their own after that, usually once or twice a year; and Sam still saw two of that group even more often. One, Brad Callender, he played tennis with regularly. Jerry, he talked to. Not because Jerry was a psychiatrist, though he was, but because their wives had liked each other, and because he and Jerry, too, had felt comfortable with each other, almost from the start.
But Jerry was busy. He and his wife were going to see the Celtics. The tickets had cost him a fortune.
“Clearly you have your priorities,” Sam said.
“You bet your ass,” he answered.
He called Sam back less than an hour later. Why didn’t they meet ahead of time, before the game? He could get to someplace near the Common by maybe five-fifteen or so. Afterward he could catch the green line to the Garden.
Sam suggested an old bar just around the corner from the Athenaeum.
He was early. He settled in with a beer at the long wooden bar. The room was deep and noisy, full of mostly young people just getting off from work in offices in the Back Bay or downtown. As a young man, Sam had worked in an office, doing the kind of scut work—repetitive drawing—that computers did now. He’d liked it—not the job, but the people he worked with and the sense of himself as an adult person, out in the world. Occasionally he had stopped at just such a bar as this after the workday was over, but he never stayed long. He was always conscious that Susan would be waiting for him, that he should be home, helping out.
Sam looked around. Pretty girls, handsome men. The not-so-pretty ones must not venture out, must not want to risk it. Though looking more closely, Sam saw one here or there, appended to a group of more attractive coworkers or friends—someone homely or awkward, someone fat, like the girl at the end of the bar, talking too loudly, feeling a pressure to be funny, maybe. The other girls she was with, three of them, were laughing with her—or at her—but their attention was elsewhere, their sly eyes were shifty, in constant motion, appraising the room, the men. Sam, of course, was invisible to them.
He was thinking of this, his invisibility—the invisibility of age—when Jerry came in, surveying the room, unbuttoning his coat. He saw Sam, and his face, which when unanimated seemed closed in and dull, came to life. He moved through the crowd and bent over Sam, bringing the wintry, fresh air with him as he gave him a little half hug.
Sam shifted the coat he’d been using to save the stool next to him, and Jerry settled on it, complaining of the weather. The bartender came over, and he said he’d have a beer. He turned to Sam. “What are you drinking?”
“Guinness. On tap.”
“Yeah, I’ll have that.”
By the time the beer came, he was already launched, telling Sam about his grandchildren, who were coming for the Christmas holidays, and then about a course he was almost finished teaching at the psychoanalytic institute, a course that had taken up all of his free time this semester.
When it was Sam’s turn, he said he thought he’d met someone.
“Uh-oh,” Jerry said.
“Hey, it’s not as if I do this all the time.”
“You don’t do it enough. Who is it?”
“A playwright. A friend of Leslie Morse. Do you remember her—Leslie?”
“Leslie. I think I do. She’s the one you were in love with after Claire and did nothing about. The married one.”
“Good memory. But why do you say ‘the one’? You make it sound as though there had been thousands of others.”
“I don’t know. ’Cause there should have been more?”
“Well, there were more. I just didn’t tell you about all of them.” And they blipped by quickly in his mind. Pleasantly, except for a little stab of remorse about the Cape.
“So, Leslie?”
“Well, she called.”
“Aha.” His hand hit the wooden bar. “It begins to happen like this at our age. Her husband died.”
“No, listen. Listen for a while.” And he told him. That Leslie had invited him to a play and to meet the playwright for a drink afterward. How surprised he’d been by the invitation. How strange the evening was. He tried to give Jerry a sense of it. The awkwardness of not recognizing Leslie and Pierce at first, the surprise of the playwright’s being a woman, then his realization of who she was as he looked at the glamorous photo in the program. “She’d been with Leslie’s brother,” he said to Jerry. “And … I don’t know if you recall any of this, but he died on 9/11. He was in one of the planes.”
“I didn’t know. I don’t remember it, anyhow.”
“Well, he did. And it just seemed off to me that Leslie had invited me without saying anything about who this person was. First, not telling me that she was a woman, so that this introduction was, possibly, different from just an … introduction, if you see what I mean.”
“I see exactly what you mean.”
“But then, second, that she was a woman who’d been involved with her brother. Her dead brother.”
“It is strange. There’s something … unkind about it, I think.”
Sam started to explain the rest. The events in the play, the way they affected him.
Jerry was shaking his head as Sam spoke. When he was done, Jerry said, “That’s just not the way it was with you and Susan.”
“But it is, in a way. I wanted it done with. I did wish her dead. I …”
“But it’s not the same. She was ill. Painfully ill, for a long time. We talked about this over and over in group. She probably wanted it done with.”
Sam was remembering; he was silent for a moment. Finally he said, “She might have, by
the end.”
She had. But the kids were still so young then. She’d wanted to hold on, for their sakes, as long as she could. And she was scared, too. Scared of dying. He knew that from waking in the night to her terror, holding her as she wept. Weeping with her.
“All I’m saying is, the play really … got to me. And all the time, here’s Leslie, here’s this diminished version of Leslie, sitting next to me, wrung out by it, too.” That was how she had seemed, wasn’t it? Diminished. “The whole thing was kind of crazy.”
“So the play is over, you get up, and … what?” Jerry drank some beer, looking at Sam over his glass.
“We go to a restaurant down the street, to meet this … Billy person.”
“Billy.” He looked confused.
“The playwright. It’s short for Wilhelmina. I guess.”
He made a face, shaking his head. “Sorry, chum. No one is named Wilhelmina.”
“One person is. Apparently. This … this tiny, sort of funny, little person.”
“Oh, you mean small! I take it she was small.”
He smiled at Jerry. “Yes, she was. And wired. Because the play, apparently, went really well. Something new, something special happened in it in a critical moment that really, changed it for her, I guess. For the better. And that excited her. Because … well, partly because she’d slept with the guy, the main guy, the actor playing him.”
There was a long silence. Jerry had hung his face forward toward Sam, squinting at him in disbelief, or confusion. “You’re not telling this right,” he said, after a moment.
Sam laughed. “No. I know. I’m not. The point is, I liked her. That’s all. And then on Monday, this past Monday, we went for a walk. She has a dog. A large dog. We took her large dog for a walk at the Arnold Arboretum.”
Jerry sat back. “See, that’s better. That is pleasant. That’s a nice story, about taking a walk, taking it slow.”
