The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

Author:Sue Miller [Miller, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-59355-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

After this, all the things that had sometimes charmed her about Gus—that he was good and kind and considerate and sweet, that she liked making love to him, that she liked looking at him, that he was funny and smart—didn’t matter much anymore. Or didn’t matter enough. What she saw now were the things that bothered her, that had always bothered her. But new things, too. She saw that he had no deeper dimension, no darker side. Or none that was available to her, anyway. For instance, it was as though he’d simply pushed away from himself any awareness of what was troubling about the way he’d grown up. Billy had gotten a more honest picture of this from Leslie in the long late evenings they sat up talking than she did from Gus. And the fact was that Leslie had cared to look at it, painstakingly. Had tried to try to understand it. She recognized that her own need to be kind, to be calm, was an almost-conscious response to what had been difficult and ugly in her growing up. And she understood that her response was a limitation as much as it was a strength.

Gus didn’t see his growing up as sad. Or he wouldn’t see it that way. He once called it “irregular” to Billy.

“Irregular, as in ouch,” Billy said.

It got worse after the graduation. Gus was on vacation. Billy wasn’t. She needed to work, but Gus wanted her company, he didn’t see why she had to be at her desk every single day. It was summer. Why wouldn’t she come with him to the Vineyard? To Vermont? To western Massachusetts? To a play, for God’s sake? To Williamstown, to see a play, the very thing she cared about most.

She came to feel that in some way he didn’t think of what she was doing as work. Oh, he admired the plays—or said he did. But he didn’t seem to make the connection between them and her need to be alone at her desk for four or five hours a day.

She started to go to her office at BU to write. It was kind of a dump. It looked out over an air shaft; it had unpleasantly bright fluorescent lighting. The paint was old, and there were water stains on the ceiling. But it was private. It was quiet. Very quiet now in the summer, when most of the faculty disappeared from the warren of offices around hers that housed them in the academic year.

Most of all, there was not Gus.

It was on the way there on her bike one morning that she realized she had to end it. It wasn’t just that she needed to find her own place, to move out. She needed to tell him it wasn’t going to work at all, ever. That it wasn’t working now. It was early, around six-thirty. Traffic hadn’t yet thickened, and there was hardly anyone out besides the joggers. She was pedaling along the river, watching someone

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