Free The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

far away. She was aware, too, of waiting for Billy, of the usual anxiety about that, mixed with something indefinable left over from the play. Uneasiness, she supposed. That was probably it. What you didn't understand made you nervous. That was all.
    They talked about contemporary movies, how close to porn some were, and yet finally, Sam said, the closer they got without crossing that line, the more dishonest they seemed. She was watching him, his face, the slight squint of his eyes behind his glasses as he thought through his point. She was feeling tender toward him.
    And then she saw Billy outside, a small figure all in black, her face a white circle under her umbrella. She stood on the corner opposite, waiting to cross. She had a huge bag slung from her shoulder, big enough to carry her life's work, it was so enormous. She had cut her hair. Her face shone beneath the straight, thick bangs. A car passed, two, and then she started across the street.
    "Here's Billy," Leslie said, gesturing at the window. The men turned and just then she remembered: the flowers! She'd forgotten them back in the hotel room when they left, her gift to Billy--she could see them in her mind's eye, the tight, perfect, fresh bouquet, lying on the bureau.
    But then the door opened, and as she got down from her chair to start toward it, Billy saw her and her grave face was suddenly transformed by her open, surprisingly sweet smile.

 

THE JOKE WAS THAT THEY'D FOUND AN ANGEL to play another angel, though he told them that his name was just plain Rafe, not Raphael.
    "And those guys are both archangels anyway," the director said. Edmund. "Gabriel, Raphael. They're both archangels." They were sitting onstage, most of them at a big table, some in scattered chairs around the periphery.
    "Pardon my French, but what the fuck are archangels?" This was somebody whose job he wasn't sure of. A sound guy, maybe. Or electrics.
    "The head honcho types in heaven, I think," Edmund said.
    "Just one plain old angel would be good enough for me, thank you very much." That was the stage manager, Ellie. She had her computer set up on the table and was typing into it, even while she was talking, notes on what needed to get done.
    Edmund had laughed. "An angel. One would do. Yes indeedy. But where, oh where is he?"
    Rafe sat and listened to the horsing around, feeling mostly relief. He'd gotten the part. He needed the part. He needed to stay busy, to stay away from the house. He needed to be in this world, where everything else fell away. Where only this was real--what happened on the stage and how you made it happen--and reality was irrelevant.
    It was Edmund who had asked him to read. They'd worked together years earlier, but Edmund had seen him recently in Uncle Vanya and liked the rueful quality he projected. This is what he'd said on the phone.
    "Yeah, well, I'm your go-to guy for rue," Rafe had said.
    Edmund was short, fat, balding, seemingly mild. Everyone knew better. He was in control always. He shaped everything by asking his gentle, persistent questions. He had a full beard, and his hands' almost-relentless attention to it was part of how he talked. He stroked it, pulled at it, twirled its ends. He had done all of these things while Rafe was reading, and Rafe had found it hard to ignore.
    Among the other slacker-looking people who had been sitting around or drifting in and out while Rafe was reading--costume people and sound people and set designers and builders, gofers of one kind or another--was a person so small he took her at first for a child, and almost made a remark. It would have been one of his usual pointlessly sarcastic things: "Is someone here baby sitting?"
    But he didn't, unaccountably. And luckily, he supposed, as she was, of course, the playwright, though he didn't find that out until a week or so later.
    So, rue. Well, the passage he'd read was from the first act, a section in which his character, Gabriel, is explaining to his daughter-in-law,