The Lake Shore Limited (26 page)

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 anger 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 beauty 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."

He didn't respond. He was tired of this, he realized--this thing they did: constructing a review of each social occasion immediately after it, always pointed, always critical. It seemed abruptly a kind of folie a deux to him.

She was smiling now. She wanted things to be okay. "The point, my love, was you and me."

She waited. He could see without looking over at her that she was watching him, wanting to have charmed him back into her orbit. He felt sorry for her, suddenly. He felt sorry for both of them. He said, "You don't have to try so hard all the time, Claire."

"For us to have fun?"

"Right." They were coming across the bridge over the Connecticut River into Hanover. The river was black below them. "And actually, I don't mind the occasional dull evening."

She faced forward, her profile beautiful and exacting. "There's the difference between you and me. I do. I mind it very much."

After a moment, he said, "But actually--again--I didn't find it dull."

"Hn. Another difference then."

They barely spoke as they got ready for bed at the inn, as she pulled on a black, sliplike nightgown he hadn't seen before. One she'd bought, perhaps, for this very night--a night in a hotel with no children around. It might have been an invitation, but if so, it was one she no longer wanted to make. This was clear by the way she was facing away from him as she put it on, the way she slid quickly under the covers and turned away from him in bed.

But it was an invitation he would have had trouble responding to, anyway. Because lying there next to her, breathing in the scent of her perfume, of her flesh, listening to the occasional braying of a group of Dartmouth students passing by the hotel, he was thinking back over the evening and seeing it as a series of images of Leslie. Leslie, as she turned to invite them into the living room, her arm extended. Leslie, as she leaned over the table to set a plate in front of him. Leslie, as she looked across the table at him, her soft mouth open a little, her eyes melting in the candlelight.

What was willed?
What just happened? He
didn't know. He couldn't tell if these experiences made something in him shift, or if he used them to shift things. Things changed, though. After this point, it seemed to him that an agreement had been somehow reached between him and Claire that they would turn away from each other into their own separate lives.

Oh, they were courteous to each other. They continued to have a full life together--the children, the evenings listening to music, the dinner parties, their active socializing, which he'd loved at first; he and Susan had been so limited for so long by her illness. But Sam felt more and more that there was no room for him to be who he really was with Claire. And he felt he'd lost a sense of who she was underneath that bright, poised exterior. Perhaps because of this, they no longer turned to each other after these evenings, or even during them, for confirmation of the other's pleasure--or the other's critical response. There wasn't the folie a deux that Sam had felt suddenly constricted by, but there was no longer the sense of their twoness, either.