by Sue Miller
“Sure.”
“Movie? Music? What. I’m in your hands.”
“Want to see a play?”
Now what the hell was that about?
Not to see Billy. She probably wouldn’t even be there. She had told Sam that the reason she was in the audience the first time he went was because the play was still in previews then, because there might be shifts, corrections, little alterations in the dialogue she might be required to make. Or want to make.
No, he just wanted to see it again. He was thinking about it as he got ready for bed, listening with simple animal pleasure to the sounds of Jack down the hall, getting ready for bed, too—the doors opening and shutting, the radio playing softly. His footsteps passed Sam’s bedroom door. He was singing under his breath.
He wanted to see the play again because he knew Billy now. The first time around, his responses to it had been colored by everything not-Billy. Now he imagined he might see her in it, he might understand her better. He supposed this was a kind of acknowledgment that there was something about her he didn’t understand. Actually, many things about her.
Certainly Leslie had thought she understood new things about Billy from the play—that was clear from what she’d said on the phone when he called to ask for Billy’s number. He hadn’t thought that was fair of her at the time, but now he found himself wondering what might open for him, how it might alter his thinking about Billy if he sat through the play again.
He was curious, that was all.
Jack was a little tipsy, coming from the cocktail reception. His cheeks were pinked on account of that, or maybe on account of the walk through the cold from the hotel where the conference was held. He ordered coffee, black, and a sandwich. They were at the same restaurant where Sam and Leslie and Pierce had met Billy after the play. Jack had noticed the food on display in the refrigerators as soon as he came in. “Entrails galore, I see,” is what he’d said as he sat down, gesturing in their direction.
Now he looked over at them again. “Do you suppose we’re meant to be reading them or something?”
“Is that something commonly done with entrails?” Sam asked. “Like tea leaves?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “You sacrifice a bird, or a goat, maybe, and pull its entrails out. I think the Etruscans started it.”
“Jesus, Jack, how do you know things like this?”
“You mean useless things?”
“I suppose. Yeah.”
“If you remember, Dad, I was your dorky kid. I spent a lot of time reading dorky books in which ancient rituals were cool. Or so I thought.”
He did remember Jack then, before Susan’s death. The innocence of it! Dinosaurs. Then dragons. Then knights in shining armor, noblemen, imaginary kingdoms. All those passions. Everything that had just disappeared after she died. It was as though some sweet, younger version of Jack had been killed, too. But here he was now—kind, funny, smart. Remade, maybe. If a bit disheveled after his long day and his one or two too many drinks with colleagues, talking, no doubt, about the regeneration of neurons, or something like that.
While they ate, Sam asked him about that, about the conference. And with almost the same enthusiasm he’d evinced in the past for things like the reading of entrails, he cataloged and described the possibilities for a cure, the ideas about ways they might get the body itself to get rid of the plaques destroying the Alzheimer’s brain.
“Maybe even in time for me,” Sam said. “Before I start making my imaginary trips down the Nile.”
“That won’t happen, Dad,” he said in the firm voice of the child who’s watched his other parent die.
“We hope.”
They arrived at the theater just in time to use the men’s room side by side—now there was a weird thing, Sam thought, zipping up—and then to slide into their seats with less than a minute to spare before the lights went down.
Sam had expected to see the play differently, but not in the way he did. It was true that it seemed less about his own life—that sense of being ambushed by hard truths about himself was gone. But it didn’t take him into Billy’s life either. What opened for him were the characters themselves, particularly Gabriel, of course, and his way of looking at the world, especially in the second act. Sam gave over to it more completely this time. He admired it. He was compelled by the moral issues at the heart of it, and almost as deeply intrigued by the consciousness Gabriel had of the alternate possible roles available to him—in fact, by the notion of roles one played in life.
He was pleased by all this. He was pleased at the intermission, too, when Jack said he liked it, and then at the end when he heard his little intake of breath at Elizabeth’s appearance.
“That was terrific,” Jack said as they sat applauding.
“I’m glad you thought so,” Sam answered, feeling a bit proprietorial, a bit smug.
As they were coming up the aisle, carrying their coats, Sam saw Billy standing in the middle of an almost-empty row, waiting, it seemed, for the crowd in the aisles to thin before she moved. He was surprised to feel his body react to the sight of her, a jolt of physical excitement. She was wearing a loose big sweater—black, of course—over bleached-out old jeans. Very bohemian, which he was thinking he might point out to her. He turned to Jack and said, “I want you to meet someone.” He took his son’s elbow, and when they came to the emptied row in front of the one where Billy was already starting to move toward the aisle, he guided him in.
A mistake, he could tell from the way her face changed the moment she saw him.
“Are you stalking me, Sam?” she asked. She flashed a chilly smile.
“I hadn’t thought so, no. I … This is my son. I brought him to see the play.” He could see Jack trying to make sense of this exchange, looking with intense curiosity first at her and then at him. Sam said, “I didn’t expect you to be here, actually.”
But she had turned to Jack, she was holding her hand out. “Billy Gertz,” she said. “I hope you enjoyed it.” There was a kind of professional warmth to her manner, but she was excluding Sam even from this. She didn’t—wouldn’t—look at him.
“Billy wrote the play,” Sam explained to Jack.
“Oh, my God!” Jack said. “Oh, congratulations. It was really, really great.”
She demurred, and he persisted. Sam could see that she was softening, Jack was so sincere in his enthusiasm.
If Sam had been alone with her, he would have asked her what was going on, he would have tried to make a joke of it, whatever she was doing. What the hell was she doing?
But she and Jack were chatting politely, uninterruptibly. Billy was asking Jack where he lived, what he was doing in Boston, and Jack started to tell her about the Alzheimer’s stuff. Her face was animated, interested. Jack grew expansive—he was talking about something called tau, some gunk in the brain. Sam might as well have been invisible. He stood there, feeling foolish and shifting his weight from time to time.
When finally she started moving sideways down her row toward the aisle, she was still talking to Jack, saying how nice it was to have met him, saying she was sorry she had to get going. Just as she reached the aisle, she looked back at Sam. “See you,” she said, in a voice that promised just the opposite.
He and Jack were silent filing out of the empty row and up the aisle to the lobby. Only a few people were still inside, perhaps waiting to be picked up. As Sam and Jack stood at the big glass doors buttoning their coats, Jack looked over at him. “I’m not going to ask what that was about unless you want to talk.”
“Fuck if I know what it was about. I wouldn’t mind talking about it, but”—he raised his shoulders—“I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“She’s someone you, what, went out with or something?”
“Something.”
“What. You slept with her?”
“No. Not that. I went out with her.”
“And then what?”
“Then nothing.”
“Well, you must have done so
mething wrong.”
Sam laughed. “Yep,” he said. “No doubt about that.”
Jack seemed willing to drop it, though Sam could feel his son’s eyes on him from time to time as they walked the cold blocks to the subway stop. He was relieved to get on the rattling, screeching Green-Line car, not to be able to talk.
“I wish I were getting on a plane, or just going somewhere,” Sam said, though he couldn’t think where he might like to go.
“I’m not so sure I’m going anywhere,” Jack said. He gestured outside, where a light snow was falling on the huddled pedestrians moving quickly through it, trying to get home. It was cold, too. Several people passing by had scarves wrapped around the lower half of their faces. Stick ’em up.
“This is nothing,” Sam said. “You’re too used to Washington. Everyone flies through this stuff.”
And the snowfall was light, and predicted to end by midnight. But the temperature was supposed to drop through the evening. Before he’d left to pick Jack up at the hotel where the conference was being held, Sam had dug out his warm gloves, found his scarf in the pocket of his leather jacket, and slid them all quickly into the pockets of the coat he was wearing, his wool overcoat.
They were sitting now in a restaurant almost as far south in the South End as you could get before you were on the road to the airport. It was quiet tonight, a Sunday. They were at a table in the bar area, where there were only two or three couples. In one case, each was texting someone else. Jack pointed this out to Sam by rolling his eyes. There was a Celtics game on the television set over the bar, the volume off, and they’d been watching that on and off and talking about it. Ray Allen was going crazy, and Jack said, “I love that guy, the way he just, shoots.”
“It’s pretty,” Sam said.
They’d also been talking about some alternative energy stuff Charley was doing in California—he’d sent Jack a brochure about small urban-rooftop wind turbines. And about the Democratic candidates, the chances any of them would have against a Republican, the dirty tricks any of them would be vulnerable to. Clinton, they agreed, would have more stuff they could toss at her than either Obama or Edwards would. She underestimated how much the Republicans hated her, Jack said, and how much material they had to work with around the big issue of Bill, “or alternatively, the issue of Big Bill.”
“Right,” Sam said. He thought about Billy, about the disapproval she’d expressed of Hillary the night they talked about politics with Pierce and Leslie. But he’d been thinking about Billy all day, actually. About why she might have behaved as she did at the theater, about what must have been his grave misunderstanding of how things stood between them. He’d been unable to answer any of his own questions about it all. He was as confused and preoccupied by her as he’d been after the night she walked away from him outside the Butcher Shop, and even more uncertain of what he could do about any of it. Maybe nothing, he thought. Maybe it was over, whatever it was, before it began.
Jack had started to talk about the presentations at the conference today, about a guy working on a vaccine. When he was excited, as he was, thinking about this, Jack stammered a little, as he’d always done. Listening to him, noticing this, Sam felt a sweet, sad combination of admiration for the adult Jack and tenderness for the boy he remembered.
A man came on the television, standing in front of a weather map, making a sweeping circular gesture over the ocean and back to the coast, the universally recognized sign for a nor’easter. Jack called the airline on his cell to find out about possible delays, but everything was going as scheduled so far.
Sam handed the waitress the valet ticket and asked for the check. Once he’d paid, they stood by the door, looking out at the storm, waiting for the car.
It was warm when they got inside it, one of the nice things about valet parking, as Jack pointed out. The radio was on almost inaudibly, turned to the NPR station Sam liked.
“Will you call the playwright?” Jack said as they drove through the dark streets. As if he’d been reading Sam’s mind.
“I don’t see how I can,” Sam said, keeping his voice as careless and easy as he could. “She pretty much blew me off.”
“Yeah, she did.”
“As Dick Cheney was to Patrick Leahy, so she was to me.”
Jack laughed. After a few seconds, he said, “The analogy makes you so much … nicer than her.”
“I feel I am. I feel I deserve better.” That was it, too, wasn’t it? He was angry about it, in part, anyway.
“No, you’re right, Dad. She must have some other … something, going on.”
They were in the tunnel. The faint conversation on the radio turned to static. Sam said abruptly, “It’s unseemly, talking about this stuff with you.”
“What stuff?”
“This … dating stuff.”
“Why?”
“I’m your father. I’m supposed to be wise. At the least, not in need of your consolation. And I sure don’t want you wasting any thought on this issue.”
“I won’t. But you’ll let me know any breaking news, I trust.”
When Sam looked over at Jack, he was staring out the window, his face turned away, but he thought he could see the edge of a smile playing around Jack’s mouth. He supposed it was better that Jack found it amusing than that he worried about it.
He got out at the curb and came around to hold his son for a moment as they said good-bye. The snow swirled around them suddenly.
“I’ll see you at Christmas,” Jack said as he stepped back. The plan was for Sam and Jack to go together to Mark’s house for a few days. Mark’s in-laws would be there, too. Frannie, Mark’s new, young wife, liked to surround herself, and Mark, too, with family. Sam was glad Mark had this with her—it was nothing Sam could offer him.
He sat for a moment or two in the car before he pulled away, watching Jack disappear into the moving mass of people in the ticketing area, just another dark figure among the many.
In the car on the way home, Sam turned the volume up on the radio. Terry Gross was talking to someone, a woman from South Africa who’d written a memoir, it seemed from what Sam gathered—a memoir about apartheid, and somehow also about the Iraq War. There was a grave quality in her whole way of being, and the combination of that and her accent, the alternately plummy and pinched enunciations, was fascinating to Sam. Near the end of the interview, she said, “I left the only home I’d known and came to America because I wanted to live in a country where the use of torture would simply never be a possibility.”
Tears sprang to Sam’s eyes. He was surprised to feel this about America—this sudden sense of loss, of pain. About his America, apparently.
There was a little silence, and then Terry Gross said, “Yeah. Well.”
When the interview was over, the news came on, and Sam turned the radio off. There were hardly any pedestrians out now, and once Sam got to his neighborhood, the streets were empty. The snow was almost invisible except when the wind took it suddenly. It had started to stick, to turn even the road and the sidewalks white. It’s too early for this, he thought. The cold, the snow.
He pulled into his own driveway and cut the engine. The motion-sensor light had come on, and the snowflakes seemed suddenly thicker and more substantial in its glare.
Sam had no wish to go inside. He had no wish to go anywhere. His own life seemed to him a small thing. He had been of no use to anyone. Not in his work. Not in himself. Not to Jack certainly, who’d made his own long way back from harm, as far away as he could get from Sam. Not to Charley, who was never in touch, or to Mark, who’d found a new family in his wife’s big clan. Not to Susan, or to Claire, either.
These people, these things that you love and care about, that you make your life out of—and then they leave, they change, they die. They have no need of you in the end.
The cold gathered slowly around the car, seeped in. Sam slouched down and thrust his hands into his pockets. In the left one were his gloves, in the right, his scarf. He pu
lled it out now. As he started to drape it around his neck, he felt something hard against his skin. He lowered the scarf, looked at it. Just before the sensor turned itself off, he saw, glittering in its bright light, an earring. A delicate mercury-glass earring, carried on a silver stem.
Billy’s earring.
“YOU FORGET HOW DARK IT GETS,” she said softly. They were in their own bed, in Vermont.
He didn’t answer. She thought he might have fallen asleep. She knew he was tired. He never slept well in hotels, and almost as soon as they got home, he’d gone over to the hospital to check on patients and stayed there for a long time, until midevening.
Finally he spoke. “I don’t forget it,” he said. “I’m glad to be home.” His hand ran up and down her arm. “I like it dark. Dark and quiet.”
“Like a grave,” she said. She was resting her head against his chest and shoulder. He smelled Pierce-like. Sweat. Soap. Semen, too—she smelled it on him and probably on herself. Also a familiar, Pierce smell.
This was their secret, their improbably intense sexual life together. Perhaps someone might have guessed it of Pierce—he had so much energy to burn, it might have seemed he would bring it to this part of his life, too. She was more unlikely, she knew. But she’d been a wild girl, what was thought of as a bad girl when she was a young woman. Marriage had domesticated her, but she still loved what was transformative about sex, what lifted her out of herself—and Pierce was her match in this, and her deliverer. They usually made love two or three times a week. They always had. She knew from remarks dropped by friends—friends who would have liked more sex as well as friends who would have liked less—that this was unusual. Also unusual was how generous, how careful and prideful, he was about giving her pleasure.
“Is that what you think? That it’s like a grave?” His voice sounded hollow, deeper than usual under her ear.
“No. I was joking. I love the house. I love how dark it is at night, you know that. But I love a hotel room, too. The sense of life all around.”
