The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller Page A

in the house Lauren might conceivably want.
    They drove back to Boston. They were mostly silent. He helped her into a rest stop on the Mass Pike and waited anxiously outside the women's room.
    When she emerged and spotted him, she laughed. "You look like a mole-ster, hovering there," she said, using her own favored pronunciation of the word. But he'd seen her inching along the wall, and when he reached for her, she almost fell into his embrace. She leaned hard on him all the way back to the car.
    After that there were more tests, and then late in the fall the terrible diagnosis. The doctor was kind and patient. He answered everything honestly and said three or four times how sorry he was.
    "It is fatal, yes, invariably," he said, in answer to Lauren's question. "But there is variability in the length of time it takes. Look at Stephen Hawking."
    They didn't speak going to the car, starting to drive home. It was a sunny day, a beautiful day. Irrelevant gold and red leaves blew across the street in front of them. She said abruptly, "Look at Stephen Hawking."
    "Swanee ...," he started.
    "No. Shut up. Stephen Hawking is like a ... disembodied brain," she said. "Stephen Hawking has a mechanical voice. I am ... I am my body. I can't live without a body." She was sobbing. "I don't want to live without my body."
    He spotted a parking space. He pulled over and reached across the console and the stick shift to her.
    He held her awkwardly, spoke to her: he loved her. It would be all right. He was with her. He was aware of the stick shift poking his side. He would stay with her. There was nothing that could happen to her--to them--that would make him love her less.
    "And sex?" she whispered. "What about sex?" Her eye makeup was streaked down her face. Her mouth was twisted.
    "As long as you want me to make love to you, I will want to make love to you."
    A lie. The first of many.
    The little playwright was in the first row, watching him and Serena Diglio, who was playing Anita, go through their scene at the end of the second act.
    "I have to do this alone," Rafe said.
    "You don't, have to."
    "I want to do this alone," Rafe said.
    "Hold it," Edmund said. They both looked over at him. "Does he? Does he want to? Is he telling the truth here?"
    There was a silence. Then Rafe said, "So, less conviction?"
    "Well, maybe he's mostly trying to convince himself," Edmund said. "Okay, sorry. Go ahead."
    "I want to do this alone," Rafe said, more slowly.
    "I don't believe you," Anita said.
    "You should."
    "Just ... answer me one question."
    Rafe turned away, impatient, as he and Edmund had agreed he would be.
    "Gabriel? Just one."
    "All right."
    "Tell me honestly, when you heard, didn't you feel any sense of ..." She paused, shook her head. "Forget it."
    It seemed to Rafe that Serena was overdoing this a little, that she was too desperate, too pleading, too early on. But Edmund said nothing, so he said his line, and they moved on.
    When he came to the self-pitying lines, "'Oh, poor Gabriel. Poor man,'" his voice was thick with contempt for himself, and for her. Maybe he was overdoing it, he thought. But Edmund was still just watching.
    She went on. She blew a line, and Edmund gave it to her. It's not greed, what I feel .
    "Oh, right," she said. "That's a funny one to forget."
    "Yup," Edmund answered.
    She took a breath, her face changed. She said the line.
    He answered with his lines about wanting as the human condition, about feeling dead without it.
    "But that's what you said you felt with Elizabeth. Dead." Her voice was shrill.
    "Yes," he said.
    "And with me, you felt alive again." She was begging him: You said so .
    He hadn't thought of it this way. He had heard her being more assertive. So he said his line more sorrowfully. "Yes. But it was ... wanting. Wanting what I didn't have."
    "Me!" she said. Now assertive.
    He took a step back from her. He could see Edmund nod. "Ah, well," he said. He had his distance again.
    "Me," she insisted.
    And then he