Free The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller Page A

Emily, drink in hand, the state of his marriage, the complicated reasons for his calmness in the face of the terrible news his son has just brought him. Or the potentially terrible news.
    What he says is that he and his wife have withdrawn from each other over the years. He says that neither is really fully alive or real to the other. "Maybe you know how it is when you're tired and don't feel like having sex," he says to Emily. "You know, you undress carefully, you expose only a little flesh at a time, so as never to be fully naked, never to seem to be issuing some kind of invitation with your body, God forbid. Maybe"--and Rafe had smiled here--"you don't know how that is. Lucky you. But even so, maybe you can imagine this: that there's a later stage you can reach when you don't bother with even that formality because there's no possibility either one of you could ever feel invited by the other's nakedness." He had paused. "Well, there's a parallel thing that happens emotionally after you've lived too carefully around each other too long, always hiding some part of yourself. You stop caring." He'd dropped the smile here, let his whole face fall. "In just the way your bodies are dead to each other, so is everything else. There's nothing you can say that will charm the other or, for that matter, hurt the other, because nothing you say is ever of any importance at all. Your conversations remain polite, fully clothed , as it were, at all times. And in the end, with us, they were so pointless that we literally stopped speaking."
    He had shrugged. "I remember having friends drop in on us in the summerhouse in Massachusetts. I remember that we were laughing and talking up to the minute they left. Elizabeth had told a story about a student of hers who would come to office hours and start to cry the moment she crossed the threshold into her office. It was a victory, she said, when by midsemester the girl got halfway through a conference before the waterworks started.
    "I remember watching her talking about this and thinking how lively she was, how attractive. She has a way of telling stories--well, you know it--a way of saying, ' "Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum,"... says she , "Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum," ... says I .' That nice inversion that makes it seem that you're listening to an old familiar tale. A nursery rhyme. Or even a song. I remember thinking ... I guess just thinking her name: Elizabeth . Startled by her, you know, as though she'd just come back from a long trip away. Or maybe as if I'd just come back from a long trip away.
    "Anyway, we stood by the car saying good-bye, and then we stood in the driveway waving." He'd been smiling a big false smile as he said this, and waving, a monarch's regal slight turning of the hand this way and that. "And the moment the car turned into the road"--he dropped the smile, made his voice hard, brisk--"she turned one way and went inside, and I turned the other way and went in the other direction." He gave a short, mirthless laugh: "Back to our corners." He held his hand up, palm forward. "'Show's over, folks.'"
    They'd liked this. They'd asked him to read a few other shorter speeches. He was hired, amid the jokes about his name.
    In the car on the way home, he let himself start to worry about Lauren. He'd been around most evenings for a while--ever since Vanya closed, actually. He thought she might miss that--his getting dinner for her, helping her with it, getting her to bed.
    But if she had a moment's pang, he didn't see it. What she said was that it might actually be easier for the Round Robin to make time for her in the evening than it was for them in the day.
    The Round Robin was what they called the group of friends who had, for the moment, taken on Lauren's care. Later they would need to pay for someone, later they would need professionals, but for now one of Lauren's friends, Carol, had summoned these others, friends of Lauren's or friends of Carol's who knew about Lauren, and they made her