The Lake Shore Limited (24 page)

Her last serious relationship had been almost three years earlier, with another playwright--probably, as she thought about it later, reason enough for its not working out. But for a while she had thought it was possible it would, she had thought that her string of bad choices--God! her husband; all those gloomy, demanding Chicago guys; and Gus, poor Gus--that all that might be over.

The relationship had been five or six months old, and they were talking about living together, when Leslie called. She wanted Billy to take some of the money, the money the government had given to the families. It was a lot, Leslie said, much too much, and she didn't need it. She was going to give most of it away to charity, but she thought Billy should have some. Gus would have wanted it, she said. And it would make a difference in Billy's life, as it wouldn't in hers. "That seems right to me," Leslie said. "That it should go--at any rate that some of it should go--to someone where it would make a difference. Someone Gus loved."

Billy said no, and she and Leslie argued on the phone, awkwardly, politely. Finally, Billy agreed to think about it, just to end the conversation. And she
would
think about it, she told herself--she would think about how to say no in a way that Leslie wouldn't argue with. That she couldn't argue with.

When she told David about Leslie's call, she treated it as something so out of the question as to be sadly, horribly funny. She thought he would laugh ruefully with her, that he'd help her figure out how to manage getting out of the situation.

"What are you talking about?" he said. "Of course you should take it. It would change your
life
. It would change our lives, together."

Billy was so startled that she could barely respond, but over the next few days, they argued about it, over and over, increasingly bitterly. It was he who spoke the line about
fucking Henry James
in one of these long, drawn-out sessions, the line she used in the play. She'd been silent in response. She didn't think of the answer, of Gabriel's answer, until much later, when she was writing it, when David was long gone. Her characters were always quicker than she was--the advantage of living their lives in the slow motion of her imagination.

It was in the course of these arguments that she understood that things weren't going to work out with her and David, that it was over. Another bad choice, another messy ending.

Since then her specialty had become the occasional one-night stand, and that only when she felt secure that the other person understood the rules, didn't want anything more complicated either. Rafe, for instance.

With Sam, this would be an impossibility. There would be no rules with him. This was something she just knew.

She groaned aloud and rolled over onto her side.

She lay there and imagined him here, in her house, or her bed, and understood instantly how much she didn't want that. She didn't want to go to his house, either, to see the way he lived. She didn't want to learn about him, to accommodate him. To feel him learning about her, accommodating her. And he brought with him, again, all the complexity of the connection with Leslie, the memory of Gus. At some point, with him, there would have to be the discussion about Gus. She didn't want to discuss Gus with him. She didn't want to discuss Gus with anyone. The closest she came to doing it now was the sort of thing she and Rafe had talked about, and that was as much as she wanted to say to anyone ever again about that part of her life. She couldn't go back there again. That way monsters lay.

"It's over, Rube," she said in the dark. He was still.

In the morning, she worked on her own stuff. Then she had some student scenes to critique and a grant application she'd been putting off finishing for days.

Around one, she walked Reuben for the second time that day. When she came back, she went to the kitchen and got some takeout soup from Whole Foods from the refrigerator. While it heated, she played the message from Sam again. She thought about what to do.

Actually, she talked aloud about what to do. Like many people who live alone, she often talked to herself. And almost as often, she pretended to be talking to Reuben--speaking to him about what she was doing in the moment, or about the characters she was writing, or about her life. Her voice now was subdued and meditative. "I'm going to have to manage this, Rube." She stirred the soup, set the wooden spoon down on the counter. "I'm going to make him be my friend. My pal." She scratched behind the dog's ears as he stood next to her, looking up into her eyes. "I can do that, don't you think? I have lots of friends. Guy friends. Why not Sam?"

There were many reasons why not, but Billy ignored them. She called the number he had left, and he picked up after two rings, his voice neutral but somehow exciting to her. She ignored this, too. She suggested, instead of dinner or a drink, that they go for a walk with Reuben on Monday afternoon, at the Arboretum. "I never get to go there because I don't have a car."

"Well then," he said, "I'm happy to accommodate you."

She saw the squirrel just before Reuben did, and she knew, even as he took off, that it would be bad. Why hadn't she just let go of the leash? She didn't. She gripped the plastic handle even tighter--what a fucking idiot!--and braced herself.

Reuben weighed almost as much as she did. When he hit the end of the extendable line, he was up to full speed. She felt herself yanked forward, she felt herself falling. Here she must have let go of the handle, because as the ground leaped up to meet her, she could see Reuben across the field disappearing into the woods. Her arms were in front of her, her hands scraping the ground, but still she landed hard on her belly, and her chin whacked something. She cried out, she was crying out, even before the impact.

And then lying there, no dignity left at all, she started truly crying, it hurt so much. Sam was by her side almost instantly, crouched next to her. "God, Billy," he said. He was stroking her back. After a few moments, when she'd calmed down a little, he helped her to a sitting position. She turned her face away from him. She could taste blood, she could feel it in her mouth and leaking down her chin. Her tongue touched the inside of her upper lip. It was already swelling. Her wrist hurt in an ominous and ridiculously painful way. "Damn it!" she said.

Sam was wiping at her face with something--his scarf, his expensive, probably-cashmere-it-felt-so-soft scarf. "Okay. Okay," he said soothingly, as if to a child, and she realized she was making little grunts of pain.

She made herself stop. She rested her face against the scarf, against his hand holding the scarf. He was sitting down next to her on the ground now, she saw. Her own legs were straight out in front of her, the knees of her jeans smeared with black earth, her hands resting on her thighs, filthy. One of them held the other one, the broken one. Was it broken?

"You'll get all dirty," she said to Sam after a moment. It was hard for her fat lip to say the word.

"I'm not worried about that," he said.

They sat together, not talking. He had his arm around her. "Oh!" she said after a minute. "I'm just so
depressed
about this."

He laughed. She looked up at him--even sitting down he was so much taller than she was--and suddenly she was laughing, too. "God," she said, resting her head against his jacket, his shoulder.

She saw Reuben emerge from the woods, prancing sideways, trying to avoid the handle of the leash as it kept retracting toward him, as if it wanted to wrap itself around his legs, as if it were alive. "There he is, that criminal," she said. "I'm going to sue him." She started to stand.

"Here, let me help you up." Sam reached for her arm.

"Careful, careful, careful, careful!" she cried, turning her body away from him. "I think my wrist might be broken."

She held it out, supporting her hand. It was swelling, turning red. She couldn't believe how much it hurt.

He bent over her, taking her other elbow, and helped her as she gracelessly rose to one knee and then heaved herself all the way up. When she was upright, he began to brush off the front of her coat, the knees of her jeans. She stood, letting him, holding the scarf against her mouth.

Reuben had come close by now and was watching them dubiously. "It's all your fault," she said to him. She pronounced it
fawt
. "You asshole."

"Think he gets that?" Sam asked. "Think he's experiencing remorse?"

"Oh, it's all right if he's not," she said. "I have enough for both of us." The plastic handle to the leash was dancing and jumping on the grass. "Could you grab that, Sam?" she asked. "I don't want him taking off again."

Sam picked up the handle, and Reuben turned his sober gaze on him.

"Will you be able to walk?" Sam asked.

"Yes. It's just my face and my hand. My wrist, I mean. My knees hurt, but they're fine."

"I think we should head back, then, and find an ER, or your doctor. Someone to look at your hand, at least. Maybe your lip."

"My lip is that bad?" But she could feel it was. Her tongue went there again. In the middle of the swelling, there was an open slice. The impact of her chin hitting the ground must have shoved her lower teeth into her upper lip, hard. Yes, her jaw felt achy.

"It's not good," he said.

They started back down the hill. With every step, every jolt, her wrist hurt. Sam was ahead of her on the path. He was wearing jeans today, as she was. It made him look less formidable. Lankier.

Had she thought he looked formidable in his elegant suit? Apparently so.

She watched his long, loping stride. Reuben moved eagerly alongside him, his new best friend, every enthusiastic step a betrayal of her.

They had to wait in the urgent care wing of her HMO. The intake person, a handsome, fat black woman, smoothly coiffed, bejeweled, thoroughly in charge, thought it might be half an hour. "Take a seat," she said. "They'll call your name."

There were two other people waiting ahead of Billy, one a Hispanic child with his father, looking listless, almost gray, and breathing phlegmily, probably contagiously. Billy settled herself as far away from him as she could, which meant she was very near an old man who sat almost doubled over, rocking rhythmically, as though to soothe some terrible internal pain. Sam sat next to her. They talked in near whispers. She felt compelled to apologize for perhaps the fourth time.

"Don't be boring, Billy. We've been through that. You'd do the same for me."

"I'm not sure I would. I might try to weasel out, somehow."

"There is no weaseling in an emergency. You'd do the same."

"Yeah, I suppose so." They sat. Glumly, Billy said, "This is making me so sad, being here."

"Because it hurts?"

"Not that. Just ... the humanity." She rolled her eyes.

"Yeah. There's no escaping that." After a minute, as if to change the subject, he said, "I talked to Leslie."

"Did you?"

"Yes. She was the one who gave me your number.
Since you hadn't."

Ignoring the pointed quality in his voice, she asked, "And was she pleased you were going to call?"

He was silent for a moment, as if considering this. "I think so," he said at last.

"Why? What did she say?"

"She said that she hoped we'd be friends, anyway."

"No more?"

"'Anyway,' she said."

"No, I mean, no more about me."

"Oh. A bit. Yes. She talked about you and Gus."

"I think I can assure you that Leslie knew almost nothing about me and Gus."

"But you were together a long time."

"Not so long. A year, more or less. But we mostly didn't live together."

"What she said was that Gus loved you. Wasn't that true?"

"Gus thought he did."

"If he thought he did, then he did, surely."

She said nothing for a long moment. She was suddenly remembering all her reservations about Sam, about getting to know him. She said, "I don't want to talk about Gus with you, Sam."

He looked at her, coolly, she thought. "I was just answering the question."

Billy felt awash in confusion. Finally she said, "You're right. I asked. But let's talk about something else now."

Perhaps he wanted to change the subject, too. Perhaps he saw how badly she needed to be distracted from her throbbing wrist. At any rate, he launched himself into his history with emergency rooms--the story of taking his kids to various hospitals over and over when they were young. He said she was lucky to be in the care of a pro like him--he'd seen it all. There was the time when they'd opened the back of the station wagon too fast, and Mark, the youngest, had tumbled out headfirst onto the pavement. "Concussion. Plus twelve stitches." Once Charley had chased Jack through a closed sliding glass door. Forty stitches in all. Mark had been showing off for a little girl in his class, jumping from a swing at the high point of its arc, and broke his leg. There were two broken arms, a dislocated shoulder, one fever so terrifyingly high he'd brought whatever child it was that had it into the hospital. And those were only the emergencies. There was lots of ordinary blood and gore, too.

Billy kept him talking, kept asking questions. She liked his voice, she liked not thinking about her own pain. She liked the sense of him as a parent, taking care of other people, having survived it all, being able to joke about it.

Finally her name was called. She went into an exam room and sat on the padded table, the paper crinkling under her. The technician, a short, plump, cheerful young woman wearing a terrible perm and a flowered hospital top, took her temperature and her blood pressure--125 over 82. Billy always wanted to know, even though she had no idea what the numbers meant in terms of her health. "Is that good?" she asked. The technician said it was okay.

After she'd been alone for a few minutes, a very young man in a white jacket came in and greeted her. Dr. Cramer, his name was. He couldn't have been more than twenty-five.

"I don't usually look like this," she said, pointing to her face.

"That's a very good thing," he said. He listened to her sad tale while he washed his hands. Then came over to her and, without asking her, flipped back her upper lip in what she thought was kind of a rude way. He looked at it for a minute and said he thought there was nothing much to do about
that
. Ice, he suggested, though he added that it was probably already too late.