The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller Page A

talking about." Her voice quavered. She dropped her arms.
    They were all quiet for a moment. Then she said softly, pleadingly, to Alex, "Your mother."
    He turned a little away from her, almost a flinch.
    She looked at Gabriel and said, "Your wife."
    They were frozen in this tableau for a few seconds. Then the doorbell rang. As one, they turned in that direction, then looked back at each other--a kind of wild, frightened expectancy in their faces. The stage blacked out. The curtain fell.
    The room filled with applause that ended quickly as the house lights came up.
    Leslie bent over to pick up her purse. Over her back, in the sudden hubbub of people talking and getting up, she heard Sam say to Pierce, "Well, quite an ending--for the first act, in any case."
    "Yeah," Pierce answered. They were all standing now. They moved into the aisle among the others inching back to the lobby. Pierce kept his hand on her elbow--a kind of sympathetic connection, she felt. She was grateful to him, but she was far away. She felt confused. Around her, she could hear others talking, speculating, commenting on the actors, on the arguments.
    Some weren't. Some had shed the play quickly, were on to their own lives. She heard a voice say, "I wish I'd known it was going to rain today. I didn't bring an umbrella to work."
    In the lobby, Pierce went to get the drinks this time, just for him and Sam. Leslie didn't want anything. She and Sam stood together.
    "Is it hard, watching this?" he asked. His face was kind, concerned.
    She dipped her head from side to side, equivocating. Then she said it. "Yes. Yes and no."
    "The yes I get. The no is ...?"
    She shrugged. "It has its own complexity. Its own ... life, I suppose." She paused. "But of course, it makes me think of Gus. Mostly of that time before we knew for sure that he was on the plane. When we still had hope, even though we pretty much knew."
    "But even then, the husband's--the father's--ambivalence is so unlike anything you might have felt."
    "Well, of course."
    "Or the playwright either. Billy, right?"
    "Yes. Billy. No, she wouldn't have felt that either." But where did it come from, then? This is what Leslie didn't get. So much in this play, as in the others she'd seen, came from things she knew about Billy, about her life. Why would she have imagined a thing like this? It seemed so ugly, so awful, really.
    "Still, it's well done," Sam said. And they talked about this for a bit, about the actors, about certain moments they'd liked, others they hadn't quite believed. Leslie made her point about the liquor, the glasses, and Sam agreed. Pierce came with the drinks, and Sam asked about Pierce's work, and then hers.
    She tried to make a joke about it, about not having work. The truth was, she didn't want work anymore. She hadn't wanted it since Gus died. She had been stopped for more than a year after that. All she could manage was to stay at home and grieve. And then, when her grief had eased a bit, she wanted just to concentrate on each day--to see friends and play in the garden and read. To make a kind of closed-in, sheltered life for herself and Pierce.
    Oh, she did a kind of work, a little. She filled in from time to time at the real estate office when things were busy--doing a showing, managing a closing. And she'd gone back to doing the other things she'd always done--volunteering at the public school, working on the zoning board in their town, swimming almost every day in the Dartmouth pool. This seemed to be her life. It was just the way it had happened with her, to her. It was what she had chosen because of what had happened. Or it had chosen her.
    She and Pierce had talked about it occasionally, about whether this was all right, whether she should be doing more. She was remembering this as the men chatted. Whether she ought to try to get a job, whether she was too young for this kind of life. "Maybe we should buy some old inn and run a B and B," she had suggested once, only half joking. He