Read Online The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller - Free Book Online Page A

you."
    "In the past."
    "Yes. Past tense."
    She got up and moved around. She looked teary, about to say something. Then, abruptly, she was in motion. She grabbed her bag. She went quickly upstage. She stopped. Slowly she said, "You're one, stupid, fucking son of a bitch."
    He nodded, over and over.
    She left, slamming the door even harder than Alex had.
    Gabriel sat motionless for a long moment. He was facing the audience. He was faintly smiling--a sad smile, it seemed to Leslie. But why? She didn't understand him, what he was feeling. He got up and slowly moved around the room, straightening books on the tables, picking up a glass, that strange half smile still on his face. He carried the glass back to the liquor shelf and set it down. He was frozen for a long moment, standing there, looking down at his hands. He turned and went back to the window. He stood with his back to the audience, looking out.
    And then there appeared on the stage, at the back of the stage where the door was--the door that Leslie couldn't quite see--a gray-haired woman, a woman Gabriel's age. There were vivid bruises on her face. She was wearing a coat over her shoulders, a coat that she shrugged off onto the nearest chair. Now they could see that her arm was in a cast.
    She saw Gabriel and stopped. She spoke his name softly, a question. "Gabriel?"
    He turned quickly, startled. His mouth opened slightly. They were frozen this way for a long moment. Then his head dropped back and his hands rose to his face and covered it. You could hear a ragged intake of breath. Another. Finally, he lowered his hands; they dropped to his sides. His face was twisted. Tears gleamed in his eyes, on his cheeks. "Elizabeth," he whispered in a choked voice. They stood like that, facing each other. He began to step toward her, his hands rising, just as the curtain fell.
    After a beat or two of silence, the applause started.
    I should be clapping, too , Leslie thought.
    The curtain rose again. There were the actors, in a row onstage. They held hands, they stepped forward. They were smiling, except for the Gabriel figure. The applause roared on, and now Leslie was part of it, though she wasn't sure what she felt. The actors stepped back, they dropped one another's hands. The Gabriel figure, Leslie saw, used this moment to wipe his eyes. Then the two men, Gabriel and Alex, stepped forward and bowed, first to the audience, then to each other. They gestured back at the three women, who came forward and bowed with them again.
    They all held hands again, they bowed once more in a row and were backing up together as the curtain came down. Just before it touched the floor, you could see their line break up--their legs, their feet, moving away from one another. The applause continued for a few more seconds, and then, when the curtain stayed down, it stopped.
    They were silent for a moment. Pierce leaned toward her. "You're okay?"
    "Of course," she said. "Yes." But she could feel that her heart was beating heavily. Something in the ending, in Elizabeth's safe return, or in the way the Gabriel character had said her name, had moved her, she didn't quite understand why.
    But the play had been unsettling to her generally--the complications, the ugliness in it. She didn't understand what Billy was saying, what she intended. She had been thinking she might say afterward to Pierce and Sam, There was not one person on that stage you could like , until those last moments when she felt sympathy--was it sympathy?--for Gabriel. Or even before, she was thinking now, before, when he tried to explain himself to the woman. Anita. She closed her eyes for a moment. Pierce held her coat up for her, and she turned away from him to put her arms into the sleeves. She was facing Sam. He was looking at her, a worried, kind look. He said, "So, what do you make of the ending?"
    She shook her head. She didn't know. She wasn't ready to talk about it.
    "He stays," Pierce said, in his big assertive voice. "That's