by Sue Miller
She dropped her head to the side. “I know.” She nodded several times. “I know. It’s grandiose, actually. My own secret little psychopathology.”
“Not so secret. Not so little, either.”
She smiled, quickly.
“But who knows,” Rafe said. “Maybe it even helped me—the difficulties. Kind of … helped me feel my way into the part. So I should probably be grateful for them, too. Even though I’m not.”
“You know, I felt something like that, actually.” A frown line of concern etched her forehead and disappeared. “That something had happened that let you feel things differently on the stage. Of course, I was just guessing. But that next time was when it was so different, I thought it might have had to do with … with what happened.”
“What happened, yeah. And its aftermath. And all the things we had talked about that night, and earlier—what you said about the play, about your life. All of it, all grist for the proverbial mill.”
After a moment, she said, “Everything is, isn’t it?”
“For me.”
“For me, too. But it’s a funny way to live, don’t you think?”
“Well,” he said, “you use everything. There’s that to be said for it. You use everything up, pretty much.”
She looked sad. Then her face did that waking-up thing again, and she said, “The environmentally sound school of human interaction. No waste, no mess.”
“I don’t know about the mess part.”
She laughed.
Suddenly Edmund was upon them, throwing an arm around each of their shoulders, looking from one of them to the other. “A drink, my lovelies?” he said. “We’re moving on, per closing time.”
Rafe shook his head. “I’ve got to get going.”
Billy said, “I’ll have one, Eddie, if you’ll promise to carry me home afterward.”
“Since you are the exact size you are, Wilhelmina, it’s a deal.”
Everyone was standing around, pulling on coats, mittens, hats, scarves. There were four or five of them going on. Others were making arrangements for rides with Rafe, with Serena, with Nora Fine, one of the backers—all of whom had cars.
“Oh, I’m just so sad this is over,” Annie kept saying, until finally Edmund said, “Life goes on, dear.”
“And on, and on,” Rafe said.
Outside, they stood around a little longer in the cold night, saying more good-byes, vowing to stay in touch. The usual. Across the vast empty lot where their cars were parked, Rafe could see the traffic moving along briskly on the elevated expressway, looking like so many Matchbox cars and trucks. He went over to Billy, bent down, kissed her cheek. She smelled winey. Just as he started to move away from the group toward his car, Edmund caught him and embraced him. “What pleasure this was,” he said, patting Rafe’s back.
“Mine,” Rafe said. “The pleasure was mine.”
Now Rafe is sitting in his car outside the dark triple-decker, the engine off—not ready to go in, not ready for it to be over, though he’s also glad it is. He’s living it again, the way he felt night after night.
“Beginners!” This is what Ellie, the stage manager, calls out backstage when it’s time for Rafe to take his place on the set—Rafe, the actor who begins it all. Waiting for her call in his dressing room, looking in the mirror, he can never decide what he feels about what he’s about to do. Is it the most cynical thing possible? Or is it the best use he can make of his life, of Lauren’s life, of what’s happened to them?
Gabriel looks back at him from the mirror, the man he’s made, and made his own, the man whose grief drinks from his own grief, whose joy eats his joy, but whom he uses, over and over, to escape his grief and joy, to make them commodity, currency. For better or for worse—he doesn’t know—to make them art.
FOR A WHILE, THERE WAS SO MUCH TO DO. The end of the semester, with the last student work to go over, then a public staged reading of the student play that had won the Dorland Prize—she had spent the better part of a week in late November reading through the submissions. Then there was an end-of-semester party at the grand Cambridge house of one of her students, a fortyish married woman. After the first few moments, Billy wasn’t surprised at its size and splendor, actually. There had been something noticeably moneyed about Angela, about the quality of her chicness, that Billy had picked up on early in the semester, though she had no idea of the source of the dough. She hadn’t gotten to know the students as well as usual this year because the play was so time-consuming.
The party was boozy and cheerful—the students were relieved to be finished—and Billy felt some envy of their flirty connections as she stood at the edge of one conversation and then another. She tried to move around, to be sure she talked to everyone a little, though she doubted anyone really cared, but she ended up spending too much time with Patrick, Angela’s husband. It turned out that he had made his money developing unhackable security systems for businesses. More and more, Billy felt, people were having lives, making livings, in ways that were incomprehensible to her. This would only get worse, surely, and then she’d have to start setting her plays in the nineties, the eighties, the seventies even, which she remembered very little about. In any case, she stood at the edge of the room for a while with this Patrick, asking her boneheaded questions about his work.
Then she got stuck with a student, Maddie—Maddie of the invariably tragically isolated dramatic characters. She quoted to Billy a number of remarks that she said Billy had made in class, remarks Billy had no memory of at all.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. You know, it was John’s scene, that first one he wrote?” She was a pretty, nervous woman. After every classroom break, she returned to their seminar room reeking of nicotine. “You also said his character spoke like a ‘superannuated Valley Girl.’”
“I did?” Billy asked.
“Yes. You said no one Amelia’s age would keep saying, ‘Oh. My. God!’ all the time. You said, ‘One would hope with age comes maybe not wisdom’—or it might have been ‘perhaps not wisdom’—‘but at the least an enhanced vocabulary.’” A little smile played around her mouth offering these words back to Billy—she was apparently pleased to be showing Billy her attentiveness. Her devotion, it would seem.
But Billy wasn’t sure of her intention, actually, her tone. It felt hostile, in some way she couldn’t identify. As soon as she could decently break away, she did.
She talked for a while to the wife of one of the students, a lawyer who had just left her job to study religion at Harvard’s Divinity School. She had no idea what she’d do with it, she said, but she felt a need to look at her religion and her religious impulses in a disciplined way.
“But how wonderful, to be starting over,” Billy said.
“Well, it’s very American, I’m afraid.”
“Not the way you’re doing it, I wouldn’t think. The American way would be just to announce Jesus as your personal savior, your best friend, and then go on precisely as you would have anyway, in the assurance that he blessed every single thing you ever did.”
“Ah, no politics now,” the woman said. Her name was Louise.
Billy rounded her eyes in innocence. “Oh, I wasn’t speaking of Mr. Bush.”
Louise laughed.
Later she sought out John, to whom she’d apparently made her various insulting comments, and was pleased at what seemed his lack of any lingering resentment. Maybe she’d said what she’d said in a better way than Maddie had repeated it back to her.
By now, a couple of hours into the party, dancing had begun in a large room off the immense entrance hall, dancing to music Billy didn’t recognize. She took this as her cue. She found Angela and said good night.
She spent the next evening going over the comments she’d made on the students’ work and concocting grades for them. She sent them in by e-mail the following morning, and that was that. Semester over.
Two nights later, the last performance of The Lake Shore Limited. It seeme
d a little undercharged to Billy, but it got a standing ovation. This didn’t mean much, really, since everything these days did, but still, she was pleased. And afterward, the cast party at a restaurant, with everyone connected to the show along for the fun of it.
Billy had been a little concerned about Rafe the last weeks. He’d seemed to be avoiding her, and the others, too—leaving almost as soon as the curtain descended each night, turning down invitations to have a drink. But they talked easily at the party, near the end. She was able to tell him at last how pleased she’d been about what he’d done with the part.
He’d seemed stronger, tougher, refreshed by having finished, and perhaps, too, by having done so well. He’d had wonderful reviews.
Edmund came up to the two of them as they were talking, proposing they all move on to a place nearby that stayed open later. Rafe said no, he had to get going. Most of them were going to get going, it turned out, but Billy was worried about Edmund, so she told him she’d come along.
When they divided up outside, those leaving, those going on, Rafe came over to her, bent forward, and quickly kissed her on the cheek, then moved off with a small entourage he was giving a ride to. An easy good-bye, then. But as he walked away, for some reason she thought of the way his face had looked the night she saw him float past the restaurant where she sat with Leslie and Pierce and Sam—so solitary, so ghostlike.
They walked down the street to the next place, the four of them who weren’t ready to go home, and Billy. Like the last restaurant they’d been in, this one was in one of the renovated old factory buildings that studded this part of the South End, the last section of the neighborhood to be developed. The streets here were still dark at night, dark and empty and a little scary. Billy was glad for the company of the others.
The bar was half full. She and Faith and Edmund sat on stools, turned around to face Larry and Annie, who were standing. They gossiped about those who’d left earlier, they talked again about the last performance, and then about what each of them was doing next.
Billy talked for a while to Faith, who’d had the tiny Elizabeth part, so tiny that she hadn’t been at most of the rehearsals and didn’t come to the theater until around the intermission. It was the first real exchange they’d had. Billy liked her.
She got into a longer conversation with Larry. He was short and stocky, the build of a little guy who’d consciously decided to change his body through weight lifting. She knew him from other plays—of hers and of friends. He lived with an actress Billy liked, too. Karen Blackmun.
He asked how it felt to be done with the play.
“It’s too soon to know,” Billy said. “I usually do have a little postpartumy thing. A couple of times in the process, actually. Once when I finish writing it, and then again, like now, when it closes. But I just can’t tell with this one.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I worked for a long, long, way-too-long time on it.”
It had been years, in fact.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, of Gus’s death, she was sure she would never write about it. How could she? To write about it would be to claim it in some way, and she had no claim. In fact, she had what felt like the very opposite of a claim. But then on the first anniversary of 9/11, Leslie asked her to come to a little service in Vermont, and Billy felt she couldn’t say no. It was mostly just hymns and readings, but somehow it touched Billy, and she really broke down in Leslie’s presence for the first time. She wept for Gus, for Leslie, for everyone who had gathered in New York on the same day at the large memorial service there. She wept for all that had happened to the country afterward, for the terrible uses that were being made of this sorrow.
The afternoon seemed endless with the reception after the service and the introductions to people who’d known Gus. Over the course of it, the feeling of living a lie Billy had had the year before rose in her again, compounded. As she spoke to people, she had the sense that her weeping had in some way glorified her in her grief for them. It had become essentially who she was to them. It gave her life a meaning for them, a particular meaning.
It made her a terrible fraud in her own eyes.
When she came home, she sat down and, in a kind of fury at herself, wrote out something she thought might become dialogue for a character in her position, a man, incapable of any true action that wouldn’t also betray his dead lover. She put it aside, but kept coming back to it over the next years. She worked on it around and between other things that she finished more quickly—worrying at it, changing it, trying to find the right conflict, the right way to resolve it.
Elizabeth, the wife figure—she’d had several other names along the way—had died in several versions. In one of those versions, Gabriel’s decision to stay with his lover, Anita, was understood by him as a kind of punishment. In another, he sent Anita away and was alone at the end.
What became clear to Billy as she struggled with the material was that a happy ending wasn’t possible for Gabriel if Elizabeth died. Occasionally she wondered whether that had any meaning for her, for her own life. She’d remind herself that what she wrote wasn’t predictive, wasn’t reflective, of anything that might happen or had happened to her, but she couldn’t help feeling that what was true for Gabriel in his dilemma might also be true in some altered way for her.
She began to try out situations in which Elizabeth lived. In one, she survived but was injured. Gabriel was told this, and he went off at the end to find out how badly, how much a nursemaid he was going to have to be to her.
But that was too Ethan Frome–ish, she decided, and rejected it.
It had taken her a while to find the ending the play had, but when she’d written it, when that part of it was done, she had a little depression. She saw her shrink for a few sessions; she got some pills. And now the next part was done, too, the part where it came to life, where it had its own life and was changed again by that—by Edmund and Rafe and Serena—into another story.
So it was all over, after all these years of living with it. Billy had no idea what this would mean.
She had felt … what? Released, perhaps, by seeing it onstage. By what Rafe had made of Gabriel’s choice, what he gave to it. But did that have anything to do with her anymore? Could Rafe’s tenderness, his sorrow, speak for her? She didn’t know. Maybe it was nothing she would ever have been capable of—as much a lie as the one that had been thrust on her in the first place, the one she’d felt forced to enact for Leslie’s sake. For Gus’s.
At the bar now, she said to Larry, “What I’m feeling at the moment is just relief, to be done. Not the usual little drop.” She flopped slightly to the side momentarily. “So I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what it will be like.”
The restaurant began to close down.
Edmund had told her he would carry her home—she’d made this her joking condition to moving on to the next place with the small group—but by now he was drunk. They all had to put him in a cab, in the end. It wasn’t easy. He kept climbing out to embrace someone else, braying about how much he loved them, asking over and over after those who had left already. After the third attempt to make him sit, to make him stay sitting, Billy leaned in and told the cabbie he should start his meter now and gave him twenty-seven dollars, all she had in her wallet. Finally Larry and Faith got him into the cab next to Annie, who was going in his direction and would drop him off.
“God bless her,” Larry said as the cab pulled away down Harrison Avenue. “I hope she can get him out when they get there.”
Billy went home by herself, wending her way the few blocks north on the dark, silent streets. She took Reuben out for his walk and then she lay in bed, too wound up to sleep. Wound up by the play, of course, and its last performance. By the end of the kind of shipboard intimacy it produced among the people who worked on it. But that was always there. Even the affair was there, more or less, with Rafe. Often it lasted a little longer if the man was unclaimed, but usually not. So that was p
art of it.
But she thought it had mostly to do with what she’d talked about with Larry—the amount of time the play had taken out of her life, the years she’d been living with it, working it out. Her closeness to it. There was something in it she didn’t want to relinquish this time. Something she didn’t want to give up. This surprised her.
When Billy woke up the next morning, her first thought was of Sam. Not a thought, really. A memory. She was lying on her side, her view was through the opened pocket doors into the living room, and she imagined him as he’d looked setting the cup of tea down for her. She remembered him sitting in the chair opposite her, stretching his legs out in front of him. He hadn’t called since she’d seen him with his nice son. And before that. He hadn’t called since the day of their walk.
That was good, she told herself. It was good that somehow he had finally picked up on her wish not to start anything with him. She’d had to be a little cool to him to bring it off, but she hadn’t been rude, she didn’t think. In fact, having his son at the theater had been perfect, had been a godsend. He had made politeness necessary. It was her politeness to the son that had let her signal Sam her lack of interest.
The only reason she was thinking of him now, she told herself, was that she had so much time stretching out ahead of her. But she’d been waiting for this, waiting for her life to get back to normal after the play. She’d even anticipated the emptiness she felt beginning to descend on her, she’d made plans to stave it off. She was going to a concert at Jordan Hall tonight—the Emerson Quartet doing Mendelssohn. She was having dinner with a friend from BU later this week. There was a Christmas party for the faculty on Friday, and she was having drinks on Saturday with Edmund. She’d go to her sister’s in New Jersey for Christmas, and then, just after Christmas, she was going to Chicago to stay with a friend and see everyone she used to know.
