The Lake Shore Limited (11 page)

After that there were more tests, and then late in the fall the terrible diagnosis. The doctor was kind and patient. He answered everything honestly and said three or four times how sorry he was.

"It is fatal, yes, invariably," he said, in answer to Lauren's question. "But there is variability in the length of time it takes. Look at Stephen Hawking."

They didn't speak going to the car, starting to drive home. It was a sunny day, a beautiful day. Irrelevant gold and red leaves blew across the street in front of them. She said abruptly,
"Look
at Stephen Hawking."

"Swanee ...," he started.

"No. Shut up. Stephen Hawking is like a ... disembodied
brain,"
she said. "Stephen Hawking has a mechanical voice. I am ... I
am
my body. I can't live without a body." She was sobbing. "I don't want to live without my body."

He spotted a parking space. He pulled over and reached across the console and the stick shift to her.

He held her awkwardly, spoke to her: he loved her. It would be all right. He was with her. He was aware of the stick shift poking his side. He would stay with her. There was nothing that could happen to her--to them--that would make him love her less.

"And sex?" she whispered. "What about sex?" Her eye makeup was streaked down her face. Her mouth was twisted.

"As long as you want me to make love to you, I will want to make love to you."

A lie. The first of many.

The little playwright was in the first row, watching him and Serena Diglio, who was playing Anita, go through their scene at the end of the second act.

"I have to do this alone," Rafe said.

"You don't, have to."

"I want to do this alone," Rafe said.

"Hold it," Edmund said. They both looked over at him. "Does he? Does he want to? Is he telling the truth here?"

There was a silence. Then Rafe said, "So, less conviction?"

"Well, maybe he's mostly trying to convince himself," Edmund said. "Okay, sorry. Go ahead."

"I want to do this alone," Rafe said, more slowly.

"I don't believe you," Anita said.

"You should."

"Just ... answer me one question."

Rafe turned away, impatient, as he and Edmund had agreed he would be.

"Gabriel? Just one."

"All right."

"Tell me honestly, when you heard, didn't you feel any sense of ..." She paused, shook her head. "Forget it."

It seemed to Rafe that Serena was overdoing this a little, that she was too desperate, too pleading, too early on. But Edmund said nothing, so he said his line, and they moved on.

When he came to the self-pitying lines, "'Oh, poor Gabriel. Poor man,'" his voice was thick with contempt for himself, and for her. Maybe
he
was overdoing it, he thought. But Edmund was still just watching.

She went on. She blew a line, and Edmund gave it to her.
It's not greed, what I feel
.

"Oh, right," she said. "That's a funny one to forget."

"Yup," Edmund answered.

She took a breath, her face changed. She said the line.

He answered with his lines about wanting as the human condition, about feeling dead without it.

"But that's what you said you felt with Elizabeth.
Dead."
Her voice was shrill.

"Yes," he said.

"And with me, you felt alive again." She was begging him:
You
said
so
.

He hadn't thought of it this way. He had heard her being more assertive. So he said his line more sorrowfully. "Yes. But it was ... wanting. Wanting what I didn't have."

"Me!" she said. Now assertive.

He took a step back from her. He could see Edmund nod. "Ah, well," he said. He had his distance again.

"Me," she insisted.

And then he began his long, slowly developing explanation, something he wanted to be discovering as he went along, in just the way he and Edmund had talked about it--they'd agreed that he was actually feeling his way into his position as he spoke. When he got to his passionate declaration at the end, that he would enact whatever he was called up to be--the widower, the glad husband--at that point, they had agreed, he
had it;
his feelings had caught up to what he was saying. He'd caught up to himself.

Then her cry, "But you said you loved me."

Edmund stopped her. He didn't like it. "You sound like a spoiled little girl, Serena." He pitched his voice high and whining: "'You
said
I could have some candy.'"

She was nodding, looking sheepish. "Yeah, I hear that. But I'm not sure how I should say it."

Rafe sat down while Edmund and Serena talked about it. He looked over at the playwright, sitting in the second row of seats. Billy Gertz, her name was. Wilhelmina, she'd told him. Yes. That had been their exchange at the meet and greet.

"Billy," he'd said. "Short for something, I bet."

"Wilhelmina," she'd said back, in a stern voice with a German accent, pronouncing the
W
as a
V
.

Now she was slouched deep in her seat, making notes. She had her glasses on. Her head barely rose over the back of the seat. She could have been a precocious fifth grader with a thick bowl haircut.

She looked up at him, and he met her eyes. She smiled, raised her hand for a moment, and then went on writing.

"Okay, Rafe," Edmund said.

He stood up and took his place, and they went over their last lines together. He liked the way Serena said her last line, yelling at him. It sounded full of rage, but you could hear her sorrow, too. She overdid slamming the door, in fun. The set shook. Someone backstage protested: "Hey!"

"Sorry. Joke," she called, coming back onstage.

They sat down and talked for a while with Edmund, who had suggestions for both of them. Gestures. Emphases. Praise, though, too. He knew how to balance these things, crafty old Ed.

When he was done, he looked down at the playwright. "Anything for these guys, Billy?"

She shook her head. "I might give a few things to you for them tomorrow."

"Okay then," Edmund said, turning back to them. He clapped his hands. "Be off with you."

Serena went backstage, where she'd left her stuff apparently, and Rafe came down into the house to get his jacket. Billy was standing up, shoving things into the big bag she seemed to carry with her always.

"I'm a bit at loose ends," he said to her.

"Are
you now?"

"Do you fancy a drink?"

She slung her bag up onto her shoulder. "Hmm. I think so. Yes. I think that's the very thing I fancy."

----

"You smell boozy," Lauren said. "Brewer-y."

"Ah! You're awake."

"I woke up when I heard you come in."

Garbled gook, they called it, the way she spoke, but he understood every word. He'd grown into it with her. He leaned over and kissed her. "I had a drink--several drinks, not to put too fine a point on it--with the playwright after work."

"Fun?"

"Yeah, I guess you'd say. She's nice."

"What did you talk about?"

"Actually, Swanee, we talked a lot about the play."

This was true, surprisingly.

Or not surprisingly. Though Rafe often stayed out in the evenings, away from Lauren, what he did then was drink and talk. He had the perfect life, he often thought, for someone married to an invalid. There was a semisteady supply of fresh blood to listen to his tale of woe. Or of fresh ears. Ear after ear after ear. Just when everyone might have been getting tired of him and his sad story, the play would be over and the faces--the ears--would change.

Not that he always told the sad tale. Tonight, for instance, he hadn't mentioned it. They had, in fact, talked about the play. And then about Billy. Her life, her history. Why she'd left Chicago, which was, he pointed out, a great theater town.

"Yes, but the problem with Chicago is that what happens in Chicago stays in Chicago."

"Boston's not so different."

"Boston's different."

"How is it different?"

"Because this play is leaving Boston."

"Hey, can I come, too?" he'd asked, and she had laughed. She had a good laugh--snarky, quick.

He asked her about the play--where the idea had come from.

"Oh, I dunno. Worcester?" she said. She was drinking Stoli, neat. He was having beer.

"No, really."

She shrugged. "I guess I was thinking about 9/11. You know."

"So this is really a 9/11 story?"

"Well, another version thereof. The train version. They seem to like trains, don't they, those nutty old terrorists. Trains and buses and subways." She made a little moue. "It seemed ... I don't know. A way to reinvent it."

"And changing it to Chicago?"

"Oh, I guess that was my imaginary way of"--she gestured--"bringing it home, as it were.
My
home. I grew up there. Sweet home Chicago."

"Inflicting it on the Second City."

She nodded.

"Though we've got a pretty small sampling of Chicagoans here," he said.

"Well, but isn't
two
what it always comes down to? Isn't that where things are felt? In drama. And in life, for Pete's sake?
Chekhov"
--she drew herself up--"'The center of gravity residing in two, he and she.'" She slumped a little, back to normal. "That's it, don't you think? The question we all ask of the big event? How am
I
affected? How are
you
affected? 'Where were you when you heard?'" She'd made her voice breathless, avid. "Or 'I knew someone who knew someone whose husband died.' And then there's
'My
husband died.' Or 'my wife.'"

"Thus, Gabriel and Elizabeth."

"Yes, that particular he and she."

"And who are you, in that story?"

She turned away. She tipped her glass this way and that, and then she looked up at him. "That's their story, it's not mine." She lifted the glass and had a tiny sip.

"But you made it up."

"I imagined it, yeah. But please, please, give me some credit. Give the imagination some credit. No one really does. No one believes in it anymore. Everything always has to be autobiographical, somehow."

He thought of Lauren, working on her memoir. Kept alive, as he saw it, by recording her own slo-mo death as it happened to her. She wanted to make use of it in some way, she said.

"So this isn't autobiography," he said now to the playwright. "You're not either one of them."

"Nor Alex or Emily or Anita. No. Or, I am, but maybe about equally all of them." She grinned quickly and looked about ten years old. "Which means I'm also none."

"And you just imagine what it would be like, each situation and each character."

"That's my job. Imagining them, imagining what they say and why they say it and how they say it."

He took a swallow. "So how do you imagine it was on 9/11, for the people who were waiting?"

She was silent for what seemed to him a long moment before she answered. Finally, she said, "Well, that all depends, doesn't it?"

"On what?"

"Ah. Well, I guess how ... you know, how some people embrace disaster. Zoom right into the worst scenario: Oh God, it's my wife! And others think, Well, she could have gotten out. Or, Maybe he was late to work. Or, She could have missed the train. She'll call."

"Denial."

"I suppose." She took another tiny sip of Stoli.

"Like, I guess ... yeah," he said. "I'm remembering all those posted notices, you know?" She looked at him. "Sort of as though the victims might be
lost
somewhere. Might just be having a tiny bit of trouble remembering how to get home. What was that but evidence of the way people can just find reasons, or ways, not to believe a terrible thing?"

"So do you think that's part of Gabriel's response?" Billy asked.

"No. Actually I don't, no. I think he believes she's dead, right away. Because I think that's the kind of guy he is."

"Well, then, if you think so, that's who he is. So, what difference will that make in how you play him?"

"Well, it's not quite like
The End of the Affair
, is it? Did you see that?"

"I saw it, I read it. But I don't know what you mean."

"Well, Gabriel's not like the woman in that story. He's not about to pray for her return, the way she did for her lover. To make a deal for her return. He just ... it's just something that makes him examine himself--his own responses. What he wants, most deeply." He lifted his shoulders. "Maybe that's the contemporary version of religious conversion--
self
-examination."

She laughed, and he did, too.

"So how would
you
say the last line?" he asked.

"The last line being 'Elizabeth'?"

"Yeah. What are my choices, as you see them?"

She made a funny face and lifted her hands.
How would I know?

"I mean, is he glad? Is he ... feeling trapped? What?"

"Sure." She dragged the word out. "All of the above."

He grinned. "You're no help, are you?"

"You're the actor, dear heart." She was smiling now, too.

He lifted his glass. "Indeed I am," he said.

"Ah, you're married," she said. She was pointing to the ring on his finger.

"Yes. Very."

She exhaled through closed lips, a dismissive noise. "There's married and there's not married. No such thing as
very."

"You're wrong there."

"Well, if you're so very married, why are you here, having this drink?"

She didn't say
having this drink with me
, he noted, but that's what she meant. And he didn't know the answer to that. But he said, "I often have a drink after work. My wife goes to bed early."

"Ah."

And that was as close as he'd come to the sad tale, tonight. A little bit later, she'd swung down off the bar stool and said she had to get home to walk her dog. He'd watched her out the window as she crossed the street, a little figure, all in black, disappearing quickly into the dark of Union Park, the fanciest of the little private parks studding this neighborhood of Boston. He'd stayed on by himself, talked a bit to the bartender about the Red Sox--who they might sign, who they'd let go--and then he drove home.