While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  “It’s a big, very complete animal hospital in Boston, where they do this kind of thing. I do more or less just routine surgeries here. But it’s not anything I’d recommend now. At this point, I’m afraid it really wouldn’t make any difference.”

  “So what you’re saying is the damage is done.”

  “I’m afraid so.” She looked shocked, defeated. I made my voice gentle. “This was a tough, tough call for you to make, because of the arthritis. That meant you were balancing pain against mobility, and it’s always harder on us when an animal’s in pain, so we’re relieved when it stops. But in this case, unfortunately, it’s the absence of pain that’s the bad sign.”

  She sat still a moment, looking at Arthur. Then her fists balled and she punched her thighs. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” she said fiercely.

  I had stepped over closer to her, and now I put my hand on her shoulder.

  She leaned back and looked up at me. “No, I’m okay,” she said. She smiled wearily. After a few seconds, she sat up and said, “So where do we go from here?”

  I stepped back and rested my hands on Arthur. “Well, I’m afraid that in the end you’re probably going to have a choice of whether to keep this guy alive in a pretty compromised way or not. And there’ll be a lot of care if you do, cleanups and changing bedding and whatnot.” I could see she was pained. “We could, if you want to, try a round of steroids,” I offered.

  “Would that help?”

  “It’s a very long shot, actually. But there’s a possibility. Remote, but possible.”

  “Well, I want to do whatever I can. So let’s. Let’s try them.” She clutched her hair back from her face, held it there. “Christ, I feel so guilty.”

  “You shouldn’t.” I tried to make my voice reassuring. “When a dog is so incapacitated anyway, it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s going on.”

  She released her hair—it burst out around her face—and shook her head. “No. No, I think it’s more what you said earlier. That I was just relieved he wasn’t in pain.” Her lips firmed bitterly. “Cowardly,” she said.

  “So we’ll try the steroids,” I said gently. I didn’t really think they would help the dog, but I felt they might help her—or at least give her time to adjust to what had happened.

  She seemed to pull herself up taller. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, let’s go ahead with that, certainly. And then, if it doesn’t work . . .”

  “Then we’ll talk about what comes next,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. She stood up. “Poor old Arthur indeed.” She reached over and patted him, so I let my hands fall away.

  She frowned suddenly and looked at me. “Actually, the thing is,” she said, “you won’t be talking to me. It won’t even be my decision.”

  “Oh?”

  “No. Arthur’s my husband’s dog.” She produced a low, throaty, sorrowful laugh, her face stricken. “They’ve been married much longer than we have. I’m handling all this just for now while he’s traveling a lot—or not handling it, I guess I should say. But he should be home by Friday. So he’ll have to decide, if a decision becomes necessary. And in fact”—she pointed—“you should probably change the name on the folder. Take mine off. He’ll be the one you’ll need to contact about anything that happens.”

  I picked up a marker and crossed out her name. My hand was poised. “So he’s . . . ?”

  “Mayhew. Eli Mayhew.”

  It took a second or two to register. Then I looked up at her. “Really!” I said. “Eli Mayhew?”

  She nodded.

  “I knew someone with that name once.”

  “Did you? It’s kind of an unusual name.”

  “Yes. It is.” I wrote it now on the folder, under the crossed-out Jean Bennett. I looked at her again. “I wonder if it could be the same Eli Mayhew. This guy went to graduate school at Harvard. We lived together. I mean, in a group. In a kind of commune, I guess.”

  “This is so strange.” She shook her head, and the mass of her wild hair swayed slightly. “I think it probably is. My husband did go to Harvard. He did do his graduate work there. He was a biochemist.”

  “That’s it. It was a lab science anyway, I know that. Though I was pretty out of it at the time. He’d be maybe in his mid-fifties now?”

  She smiled quickly. “Amazing! The world is a smaller and smaller place all the time, isn’t it?”

  “Well, please tell him hello from me. I’m Jo. Joey Becker. Give him my warm greetings.” I looked at Eli’s name on the folder, the big black letters, trying to call up his face. Instead I was seeing others in the house—Dana, and Larry. And then it occurred to me: “Actually, he knows me as Licia, come to think of it. Felicia. I suppose what you should tell him is that Licia Stead said hello.”

  “Oh!” she said. She looked quizzical. “A nom de plume?”

  “It’s complicated.” I looked up at her and smiled ruefully. “More like . . . a kind of alias, I guess. Another life anyway.” My hands were trembling, I noticed. I reached over and stroked Arthur’s head to steady myself as much as to comfort him. “What’s he doing now?” I asked. “Eli.”

  “Well, right now he’s on a sabbatical. We’ve both just left jobs on the West Coast, but he hasn’t started his new one yet. He’s got the semester off, so he’s in and out of town, lecturing. But he starts in January at Beth Israel in Boston, teaching and doing research. He’s mostly a research scientist. Sort of well known in his field, actually. I thought for a second maybe you were recognizing his name because you’d heard of his work.”

  “No. To me he’s just old Eli.” Arthur lay passive under my hands. I felt almost dizzy with the rush of memories.

  “Well, I’ll certainly tell him I ran into you,” she said.

  “Do. Please,” I said.

  I picked up the folder for a moment, I made a note or two on Arthur, mostly to gather myself in, to make myself think again about him. Then I turned back to Jean, and we talked about how to handle the steroids. She wanted to administer the pills at home. “It’s the least I can do for Eli,” she said. We agreed that I’d start him on an IV injection right away, that she’d bring him in the next day and leave him for two shots, and that he’d be home then for the oral sequence. I explained to her that he was basically incontinent now and showed her how to express his bladder, instructed her on keeping him clean. They had a crate “somewhere in the house,” she said, and I told her Arthur would need to be confined except when she carried him outside.

  When she seemed comfortable that she knew what to do, I went into the hallway and prepared the steroid shot under the boarders’ watchful eyes. Jean Bennett was bent over Arthur’s head when I returned, and I felt the pang I always did at a client’s pain. I injected Arthur quickly—he was uncomplaining—and we agreed on a time for her to drop him off in the morning. I followed Jean to the front door and opened it for her. I followed her to her car, too, and held Arthur while she got her keys out. There was an old flowered bedspread in the back seat, and she set him gently on it. I told her to call if anything came up in the night.

  “I will,” she said. And then she shook her head again. “See you tomorrow,” she said finally.

  I nodded and went back to the office as she started the car.

  Inside, I slowed down. I felt numbed. I had two last patients, and then I told Beattie to go home, that I’d close up. Ned, the lanky high-school student who cleaned the cages and fed the animals morning and evening, had come in and led the boarders out. Now he was bagging all the garbage and trash, wailing occasionally along with whatever was playing on his Walkman. I refiled the last charts, sprayed and wiped the examining table. I reviewed my list of routine surgeries for Wednesday. All the while I was thinking of Eli Mayhew, and of Dana and Larry and Duncan and me, and our lives in the house. Of the horrible way it had all ended. Did Jean Bennett know any of that? It seemed not.

  I tried again to call up Eli’s face. And thought suddenly of a moment at dinner one night when he was laughing and tel
ling all of us about a dream he’d had in which he was a component of a machine—a machine whose function was to excrete small, square, metallic turds. We were laughing with him because we recognized Eli’s orderliness, his anality, in the dream, and this was kind of a joke among us, a joke he was playing to.

  We all had our roles in the house. The rest of us were bohemians of one sort or another, lefties, druggies, deviants, artistes. This, anyway, was how we understood ourselves. Eli was the only scientist, gone for long hours daily in the lab. We saw him—and he saw himself—as straight, as rigid. Unfairly, we poked fun at him, often in his presence. We imagined great things for ourselves, other things. For Eli, we imagined simply more of the same. And yet he seemed grateful to be among us. He sat, usually silently, listening as we floated our theories—about life, about art, about music, about politics. He watched as we flirted with each other, as we danced. And very occasionally he said something, he risked something, as he did that night, by playing the nerd.

  We had set candles out, as we often did for these group meals, scented candles whose sweet vanilla smell I can still recall. Friends were over, so there was a crowd, all the young faces circling the table in the mellow light. Sara was stoned—she usually was, from the time she arrived home from work—and Dana and Duncan had smoked some too. Eli’s dream made them shriek with laughter until their faces were red and wet with tears, until Sara had to stand and pace the room to calm down. Eli, meanwhile, elaborated, went on in his earnest, pressured voice, trying to keep the laughter going, even imitating the way his dream machine worked, his elbows squared up, his head sunk between his shoulders, weird mechanical noises emerging from him—“Kkkkkk, punk! Kkkkkk, punk!”—as he stiffly moved.

  I remembered being surprised by him that night, surprised and delighted by his willingness to laugh at himself, by his evident pleasure in making us laugh. And I remembered that when I saw him for the first time after Dana’s death, he wept. His face—which I recalled now was quite handsome—crumpled up like a child’s, and he wept.

  I met Eli—Eli and Dana and the others—during a time when I was running away from my life. I had never done such a thing before, and I haven’t since, which makes it hard to remember what it was to be me at that time. Another me is how I think of it. Another life.

  I was in my first marriage then, an auspicious marriage, actually, to a medical student. Ted. Ted Norris was his name. I could have been said to be doing quite well. I was going to be a doctor’s wife and a high-school teacher. But here’s how I saw my future: a long, narrow tunnel. A house. Children. Dogs. Money. Lovingly furnished rooms. Everything I’d wanted, of course, when I got married. Everything that made me happy when I actually had it years later, with Daniel. But at this time the thought of it felt like the end of hope, like the closing down of all expectation. I think I realized I couldn’t do it the first day I was practice-teaching in high school, when someone—I can still remember his pimply, hangdog face, but not his name—raised his hand and called out, “Mrs. Norris?” He was all of three or four years younger than I was.

  That was me. Mrs. Norris. Josephine Norris. Josephine Becker Norris. He might as well have taken out a gun and shot me. “Yes?” I said, but I was thinking, Get me out of here.

  So that was step one, quitting my hard-won teaching job.

  Step two was taking the first job I spotted in the help-wanted ads: as a waitress in a seedy bar in a marginal neighborhood near our apartment in Philadelphia. I wore a kind of third-rate Playboy bunny costume to work in: very high heels, mesh tights, a short tunic over a leotard. When I peeled all this off at the end of the evening, it reeked of nicotine. I reeked of nicotine, too, though I rarely bothered to shower before bed. It was late, too late, when I got home, one-thirty or two in the morning. Ted was usually asleep anyway, and I was always tired from teetering on those heels all night. I turned my face into my long, teased, stinking hair and tumbled heavily into dreams haunted by liquor orders.

  You might have thought I was slumming, taking such a job, and of course, in a way, that would be fair. I was a college graduate, from a good school. I’d taken courses after college to prepare myself to teach high school. I’d married my promising husband. He certainly thought I was slumming. But he saw my job as a kind of perverse joke, too, and took a malicious pride in it. That was fine with me. Whatever he thought. Whatever anyone thought. The point for me was that for once I didn’t have any idea what it would lead to. Some of the point anyway. The job was also a claim on my time from five or so in the afternoon until well after midnight nearly every day, time I might have spent cooking a nice meal, grading papers, making curtains, talking to my husband. All the things I’d prepared myself to do and promised others I would do.

  The Ace of Spades was a world I didn’t know. A side step. It was sexualized, exciting. On a busy night, the waitresses were always brushing past each other, touching each other, like lovers, a casual kind of touching among women that I’d never experienced. It thrilled me. And there was a thing I loved that used to happen just after we’d closed. It would be twelve-thirty or one o’clock. The customers would all be gone. We’d finished our workday, we were ready for a little fun, but everyplace else in town was closed, too, so we’d sit around and have a drink with the owners, the boys in the band. Nobody wanted to go home. The drinks were on the house. Everybody was a little bit on the make. Like me, most of them had husbands or wives waiting in bed, but it didn’t matter for the moment. A lot of fingers were busily trailing over wherever there was bare flesh. I stayed clear of it, I always left alone, but I loved to feel the tension in the air, to watch the shifting couples form and re-form over the months.

  The attraction was that none of the rules from my world applied. With everything I saw, everything I did, I felt that doors were opening. My life had been so orderly, such a careful, responsible progression, one polite step leading logically to the next. In this crummy, second-rate world, I had a sense of liberation, of possibility, and I embraced even its most tawdry aspects. I once complained to the genial, barrel-bodied bartender, Eddie, about the language a few of my customers were using in addressing me. He was silent a minute, pouring my shots, filling my chaser glasses with ice in a fixed and elegant rhythm. When he handed me back my check, he met my eyes and said, “Grow up, sweetheart.” I was shocked for only a few seconds, and then I laughed—Of course! I thought—and he grinned back at me.

  There was a fight at the bar one night just as we were closing. I’d never witnessed a fight among adult men before. I was handing over the last of my checks at the cash register when it started. From time to time as the evening had worn on I’d noticed the raised voices among the men sitting to my left. Now there was a kind of explosion over there, and someone slammed into my back. Eddie dropped his shaker and was on top of the bar within a second, pulling at a huge man who was bent over the harmless old regular we called the Judge. It was he who had fallen against me, and he was lying on the floor now, under the big guy—you could hear the dull wet whumps as he hit the Judge’s head over and over.

  Almost as soon as it had begun, it was finished. The men were in motion everywhere, violently pulling the big man away and out of the bar, bending his arms behind him with unnecessary force. Eddie was helping the Judge up, then getting him ice as he sat bleeding on a barstool in cheerful drunken amazement. Already everyone was laughing, talking excitedly. It was becoming a story.

  I stood there dumbfounded for a minute, and then I felt I had to sit down immediately. When I looked at myself in the mirror in the ladies’ room, I saw that I was covered with dark, spreading freckles. It took me a moment to recognize them as blood, the Judge’s blood, sprayed all over me when he got hit.

  I was perversely excited. I decided to wear it home. I wanted to scare my husband, to make him see something—I couldn’t have said what—about the world I was moving in now. I wanted a witness. I hoped a policeman would notice me and stop me.

  But it was dead in the city. At a
red light, a car pulled up beside mine. A couple. She looked over. She turned to him. He bent forward and looked over too. Then the light changed and they took off, speeding to cut in front of me on the narrow street.

  Ted was asleep when I got home. We had pink bathroom fixtures in that apartment, and I remember watching the blood purl an odd rusty color in the water against the pink basin as I washed it off.

  It was there, at the Ace of Spades, that I got the idea to leave. Step three. I was substituting on a Wednesday for another waitress, Judy. Anita, the headwaitress, had called me that afternoon and asked me to cover as a favor. She’d pitched her voice dramatically low on the phone: “If anyone asks, you don’t know anything about why Judy’s not there.”

  I was about to point out to her that as a matter of fact I didn’t know anything about why Judy wouldn’t be there, but I checked myself, as I often did with my coworkers, afraid I might sound snotty or smart-ass. Afraid I might sound like myself.

  The night was easy and slow. So slow that the band barely bothered to perform, instead sitting around in the bar, “drinking their paycheck,” as Eddie said. At ten-thirty or so, Tony Zadra—Tony Z, we called him—arrived. He was one of the owners and also Judy’s lover. He saw me and came right over. “Where’s Judy?” he asked.

  I was standing at the bar, filling chaser glasses. Ginger. Soda with a twist. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. I looked at him. He was a small man with a thick neck and a big pompadour. He needed to be smiling to be attractive in any way, and he wasn’t smiling.

  “She call you?” he asked. I noticed a little dab of shaving foam on the curve of his ear.

  “No.” I gestured toward the back of the bar. “Anita asked me to fill in for her.”

  He turned and went toward the kitchen, where Anita was taking a cigarette break.

  They were in there awhile. I had to cover a couple of Anita’s tables for a round or two, and I was relieved enough when she emerged to be incurious for the moment.