The Lake Shore Limited Read Online Free PDF

Pierce already knew this. He'd been careful to establish this when she proposed coming down to see the play and Billy. But she said no. Again. "No, thank goodness. She didn't write it that close to the bone."
    No. She hadn't written about Gus.
    When they were through, when Pierce had paid, they gathered their coats from the girl in charge of the coat check and went outside. It was raining now, and Pierce raised the umbrella over them. She took his arm. You could see the theater almost as soon as you stepped out of the restaurant. It had a silvery, space-age front, from which an unattractive dark blue marquee projected. In white letters, Billy's play was announced: THE LAKE SHORE LIMITED. They walked slowly down the wide brick sidewalk toward it.
    There were people milling around under the marquee. The glass doors opened and shut, opened and shut, as the couples, the groups, drifted inside. Standing still in the midst of this activity there was a man--no raincoat, no topcoat--a tall man, in a grayish suit, with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched. From half a block away, holding on to Pierce's arm, walking carefully so as not to catch her heels between the bricks, Leslie could tell it was him, it was Sam, and she felt the little jolt of pleasure that seeing him always brought her. A frisson , she thought.
    There was a time when she'd been half in love with him. She remembered--she often remembered--an afternoon when they'd taken a walk together, when he'd kissed her. The only time he had. They'd been picking blackberries, and he tasted of them. When she'd sat down for dinner that night with Pierce, he'd asked about the long scratches on her arms, scratches from the blackberry canes. She'd lied to him. She said she'd been pruning the roses. She didn't want him to know about any part of it. It was hers alone. She was almost sad when the scratches healed.
    She had met Sam when he and his wife Claire bought twenty acres of farmland in Vermont to build a house on. Leslie sold them the property. She was working as a real estate agent then, one of a variety of jobs she had held over the years.
    She'd gotten into this pattern in her midtwenties, early in her marriage--just after they moved to Vermont. Her first job had been running the office of a local small press, but then pretty quickly she was also doing some editing for them. After that she managed a bookstore. For a few years she was a kind of glorified secretary and bookkeeper for a local opera company, then she worked in an art gallery. But what she was really doing all of that time was waiting for the life she'd envisioned for herself to start--a life of motherhood, of family. By the time she'd given up that hope, she seemed to have made a habit of changing her job every four or five years, and she'd decided she liked that. She liked the variety. She thought of it as a way to come to know a good deal about the smallish world immediately around her, to know people in its various corners.
    By the early nineties, she'd more or less backed into real estate. A friend of hers who had her own small agency was shorthanded and suggested that Leslie get a license and join her, so she had. This was the way things happened with jobs, with work, for Leslie.
    She enjoyed selling real estate, she found. She took pleasure in meeting new people, in helping them. And she discovered that she was curious about houses--how they were built, how they'd been renovated and decorated. Many of the homes that she was dealing with were old, they had interesting histories, colorful past owners. She liked researching this kind of thing, and it made her a good salesperson, not surprisingly.
    When Claire called, she asked Leslie about prices, about the differences among the small towns in the area. She and her husband were interested in land, she said, a minimum of ten acres so they wouldn't have to think about neighbors. Her husband, Sam, was an architect. He would design the house. It would be a