Free The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller Page B

life--and his, too, he recognized--possible.
    They didn't all come into the house. One shopped for them, one took Lauren to the hospital and to doctors' appointments. But most of them helped her--helped them--in more intimate ways: cooking for them, feeding Lauren, taking her to the bathroom, getting her to bed at night when he was working.
    She had welcomed this, because her main wish was that he be freed of all these tasks so that he could see her as a woman still, not an invalid. This is what she'd said to him, weeping, one night early on after the diagnosis was made, when they were still trying to ignore the symptoms--the broken dishes, the orange juice that slopped onto the table as she poured it. The trembling, the falls, the bruises. She said that she didn't want to become an illness to him. That she wanted, most of all, to stay real to him as a person, as a woman, as his wife.
    "As my sexy wife," he'd said. He'd brushed her hair back off her face, thumbed away the tear sliding down her cheek.
    Later she didn't weep anymore. Later she joked about it. "Don't you think it's weird, this newfangled business of naming everything? Megan's Law. Amber Alert. Lou Gehrig's disease."
    "But there's Halley's comet," he pointed out. "Maybe it was ever thus."
    "Still. A disease," she said. "If it's his disease, why do I have to have it. 'Lou! Lou! Come back! You forgot your dis ease !'"
    By then they weren't making love anymore.
    They'd met in college, when Rafe was, as he put it later, "basically priapic." It's what had drawn him into acting as an undergraduate, he'd told her all those years later. He assumed the women would all be beautiful and sexually liberated.
    He was wrong in this assumption. Some were beautiful, some were not. Some were liberated, some were not. But most of them had no desire to sleep with him, a lowly sophomore. They were interested in the older actors, in the directors, in their teachers.
    Lauren was his lab partner in biology, and she was interested in sleeping with him. Very interested. For a few weeks in their sophomore year they had frantic sex together through long late afternoons in his dorm room, the noise of his roommates' lives on the other side of the door the background to their marathons. She was then still a little chunky, she wore glasses that she ceremonially removed before their exertions began.
    They tried everything they could think of. She was the first person who ever gave him a blow job, who ever licked his balls, put her finger up his ass, let him do the same to her. She showed him how to flatten and widen his tongue to give her more pleasure, she corrected the way his mouth pulled at her nipples. Finally he had found her almost mannish, as he thought of it, in her willingness to experiment, her seemingly coldhearted enthusiasm to try the next forbidden thing. He tired of her. He tired of it. It was as though she were working from a text, he told her later when he met her again, when he fell in love with her.
    Oh, she had been, she assured him. It was the way she'd done everything then. By the book.
    Their second meeting happened twelve years after their first, when their real lives had begun. Though sometimes he thought now that perhaps they hadn't yet begun, even at that point. Perhaps the present was the real part, the true test, and all the rest of it mere preparation.
    Either way, they were both happy in their work then, single, in their early thirties, still living in Berkeley, which is where they'd met the first time around, where they'd gone to college. She came to a benefit for the repertory company he was with, after a performance of their ongoing play, Bosoms and Neglect . Rafe was Scooper, and he was still in costume and makeup, as were the other two players, so that they could easily be recognized by patrons who might want to schmooze with them, whose asses they had been instructed to kiss as enthusiastically as possible.
    At first he'd taken her for one of these patrons.