While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  “No, I’m just wondering,” I said. “What?”

  Now Dana turned to look at me. “Well, like at work they call you Jo at least half the time.”

  “I told you.” Had I told her? “My Social Security card says Josette Felicia. I hate Josette. I like Felicia, I use Felicia, but they saw Josette first. Thus . . .” I held my hands up, empty.

  She turned back to the front. After a moment, she said, “And then there’s the fact that you’re from Vermont, and then suddenly you also have this family in Maine.”

  “What the fuck is this, Dana?” Larry slapped the steering wheel. “Maybe we’re all made up. Maybe I grew up in . . . Louisiana, or Mississippi or something. What difference would it make?”

  “I want to know Licia. I keep thinking I do know her, and then I don’t.”

  “Don’t talk about me in the third person, Dana.”

  She spun around. “I want to know you, okay?” Her voice was pressured. “I love you, and I want to know you. That’s not a crime, is it?”

  “This is too fucking weird for me.” Larry was shaking his head.

  “I think you do know me, Dana.”

  “So everything you’ve said is true.”

  “You may not have all the factual information, but you know me.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Jesus, an inquisition!” Larry said. He was driving faster now, down the last block before our turn.

  “Are you married? Was that true or a lie?”

  “You know me.”

  “God, let me out of this fucking car.” Larry spun into the driveway. The tires threw gravel.

  “How can I know you if I don’t know what’s true and what’s not true?”

  “This is so crazy, Dana.”

  “It’s not crazy.”

  Larry had cut the engine, and now he turned to us. “I’m leaving now. You two can stay here forever discussing this issue, but I’m splitting. Please lock up when you leave.” He got out, slammed the door closed.

  “I’m coming in too,” I said, and started to open my door.

  “No!” Dana reached over toward me. “Stay,” she said, more quietly.

  I turned back to her. “Dana, I’ll say it again. I did lie. About some things. Some facts. But I’ve never pretended feelings, or thoughts, that I didn’t have.”

  “Are you on the run?”

  “What?”

  “Did you do something? Some . . . political act or something? Something illegal?”

  I sighed and sank back. “No. Nothing so dramatic.”

  “Then why did you lie? Why do you lie?”

  “I don’t know.” But she didn’t turn away, she didn’t stop looking at me. Finally I said, “Because I wanted to escape from myself. From my life. Because I was afraid.”

  “But afraid of what?”

  “Afraid . . . of everything catching up with me. Afraid that you might not have let me in the house if you knew the real story. I never thought it through very well. I think I was afraid of you.”

  She made a noise. “No one is afraid of me.”

  “That’s not for you to say, Dana.”

  We didn’t speak for a long moment. Dana’s hands had appeared over the back of the seat, gripping it, and I could see her jagged, bitten nails, whitened at the tips under the pressure.

  “Will you ever tell me the real story?” she said at last.

  “I probably will. I will. But you’ll be disappointed, it’s so banal.”

  “Nothing about you could be banal to me,” she said fiercely.

  “Oh, Dana. I’m just a sorry, confused person. Please. That’s all I am. Just . . . I’m not nice. I lied. I’m sorry. I’m not truthful. I’ve messed up my life.” I started to cry, loud, embarrassing gulping sounds for a minute, and then I got control and was able to breathe, to weep normally.

  “I’m sorry,” Dana whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m too devouring. I eat people. Duncan said it, and it’s true. I know it’s true.”

  “No, it’s what’s wonderful about you, Dana, how much you want. How much you give. But it’s a kind of high standard. For a person like me.”

  “I feel I’ve ruined everything.”

  I shook my head. I fished in my bag for a tissue and blew my nose.

  “Can you forgive me?” She was still stretching toward me over the seat.

  “Oh, Dana, stop.” She bit her lip. “Please,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No, I mean it. I need you to say you forgive me.”

  “Only if you turn around and stop looking at me. I look terrible.”

  She spun around in the front seat and we sat for a minute or two, both facing forward, as though we were traveling somewhere. I blew my nose again.

  Finally I said, “Someone should tell Larry we’re ready to behave better now.”

  “Hah!” she cried in surprised delight, and then giggled. “Yeah, that it’s safe to come out.”

  “Oh, Larry,” I pretended to call, keeping my voice soft. “Oh, Larrreee, you can come out now.”

  “We’ve put away our horrrmones,” Dana called.

  I looked over at the house. Lights everywhere, as usual. “Let’s go find him,” I said.

  “Let’s get him,” she said. “He should be ashamed, the scaredy-cat.”

  We got out of the car, slamming the doors. Halfway to the kitchen door, I remembered he’d wanted us to lock the car. Which seemed, when we tried it, first the hardest and then the funniest thing in the world to do. We were convulsed with the laughter of relief, at those buttons that kept popping up, at the endless slamming of the doors, like the sound track of a kind of vehicular farce.

  There was no one in the kitchen or the living room as we crashed through the house. We found him upstairs in his bed, bare-chested, reading. He didn’t look up when we came in. I sat at the foot of his bed and Dana nestled next to him and rested her chin on his muscled shoulder. He put his book down finally, and we talked in whispers until three or so, the house ticking silently around us, the sleepers dozing through our laughter.

  In mid-September, the pace of things shifted. First Duncan and Dana, then Larry, started school again. Duncan’s guitar students drifted back from vacation and camp, and we all began taking messages for him from the mothers trying to arrange his time at their convenience. The house emptied in the daytime except for me and John, and the oddly timed visits home of Eli.

  It was hard for me. The summer had been better because of everyone’s loose schedule. There was always company—someone to suggest a trip to the beach, or a bike ride, or an afternoon movie. Now I was alone most days, and the time stretched out painfully. I stayed up later, slept later. I tried to discipline myself to read in structured and yet arbitrary ways. All of George Meredith. All of Wallace Stevens. I didn’t want to think of Ted or of my mother, both of whom I felt I’d betrayed. I’d written each of them once. A postcard to Ted, saying just that I was safe, that I needed some time alone. A letter to my mother, trying to explain why I was doing what I knew she would think of as a foolish and cruel thing. I hadn’t sent either of them my return address, and I’d asked them both not to try to find me.

  I didn’t want to think of myself either, of what I would do next, after this. Since it suddenly seemed there might be an after this. Instead I tried to keep busy. I haunted bookstores, sat in cafés, drinking coffee and smoking. As the weather got colder, I went often to the Gardner Museum—for the humidity, for the scent of jasmine in the courtyard.

  But of course, the truth was that I was depressed, and that waiting for me the moment I stilled was a sorrow that filled my time amply with its emptiness, that kept me very busy even as I lay open-eyed on my bed or sat at my desk staring out at the houses across the street. I tried my hardest never to still.

  One day I woke touched by morning sun after sitting up too late talking the night before and then reading in my room. My mouth tasted of every cigarette I’d smoked. I’d left my window open, and it had gotten chilly in the
night. I lay now tented to my nose, glad for the damp heat of my own breath. Someone was whistling downstairs. Probably John, making his elaborate ritual breakfast before slowly reading the New York Times all the way through. I was wishing for flannel pajamas, for an electric blanket, for heavy woolen layers like the ones I’d slept under as a child. I was wishing I didn’t have to get out of bed to shut the window. I hugged my knees to my chest. The flesh of my legs felt smooth and cool.

  Finally I found the grit to do it. I threw back the covers, stepped to the window, and slammed it shut. I pulled on a T-shirt and headed down the hall to the bathroom. I pushed the door open into humid warmth. Eli turned to me slowly, drying himself. He was naked. His body was slender and pale, hairy only on his chest and below his knees, and then the dark pubic patch. His thighs were long, the muscle a beautiful shape, and his penis swung heavily as he turned in my direction. The wet coils of his hair just touched his shoulders. He seemed merely puzzled by my sudden appearance.

  “Oh! Sorry!” I cried. I pulled the door shut again and ran back through the chill to my bed. I slid once more down into the warm spot I’d left behind and closed my eyes. And saw his slow turn to me over and over, his hand ceremonially opening out the towel as though that were a form of greeting, the weighted dark of his penis moving over his white thighs.

  Another morning, late in the fall: Duncan pissed off. I had just come downstairs to have breakfast in a T-shirt and jeans, and bare feet in spite of the chill, and he announced this before he said hello. It was fucking ridiculous, he said.

  “What? What’s the problem?” I asked.

  He was bitterly pleased to explain. There were two dollars in the kitty with which to shop for his cooking day, and he had no money—“Zed,” he told me, drawing deeply on his cigarette—to kick in.

  Everyone in the house lived from week to week or month to month, and whatever the last few days of anyone’s cycle, that person was usually utterly threadbare. People borrowed from one another in a complex sociogram of debt, and the elaboration of the payback schemes was often strained. (“Look, just give me twenty of what you owe me and the other twenty to Sara, ’cause I borrowed from her last week.” “But Sara borrowed from me yesterday.”) Only I, with my steady influx of tips, always had some cash. Most of it in ones, to be sure, but cash. Daily. Duncan hadn’t yet realized this. The others had. Now I told him.

  “How much?” he asked.

  “Enough,” I said. “Unless you’re planning on champagne or caviar or something.”

  He shook his head. “Spaghetti and meatballs.” This was no surprise. He always made spaghetti and meatballs. “Salad. Sara Lee for dessert.”

  “Which Sara Lee?”

  “You can pick, since you’re putting up the dough.”

  “Cream cheese cake.”

  “I concur.”

  “Can I drink my coffee? Are you in a rush?”

  He made a magnanimous gesture, and I sat down. But morning chat seemed suddenly hard to make. Duncan was not the sort of person who felt compelled to fill a swelling silence. He was staring at a spot of sun on the linoleum floor now, smoke from his cigarette trailing slowly upward.

  Finally I made my offering. “How are classes?”

  He grimaced and swatted my words away with a light flip of his hand. I was reminded of how much I’d disliked him at first. I drank some more coffee.

  “Okay, your turn,” I said, after a minute or two.

  “My turn?”

  “Your turn to ask a question. Isn’t that the way human intercourse works?”

  “Don’t be cute,” he said.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” I answered. I had learned to say such things.

  After a moment, he said, “Well, now that we’ve got that out of the way.” And another ponderous silence fell.

  I broke it at last. “Ask me one question,” I said. “Just one, or I won’t give you any money.”

  He looked at me and then smiled. Then he laughed, a rarity for Duncan. It was seductive, I granted Dana that mentally.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “What would I most like to know about you, Licia Stead?” He examined me unblinkingly with his cold eyes, and I felt sorry, suddenly, that I’d started this. He leaned forward and drew again on his cigarette. Abruptly he said, “Okay, who’s your other self?”

  I set my cup down. I could feel the thickness of the blood in my ears, my chest. I willed my face to be unrevealing. “Why, whatever do you mean?”

  “Your other self. You know. Everyone here has another, better self. Not just what you see, for Christ’s sake. Dana the world-renowned sculptress. And courtesan. Larry the . . . president of the brave new world, I suppose. I’m really a famous recording artist women can’t get enough of. Et cetera.” Pause. “Licia the waitress doesn’t cut it. So who are you, really?”

  “Ah, well,” I said. “Ah. As it happens, I am but a waitress, an ’umble waitress, sir.” I was flirting, I realized, flirting in the lightheartedness of my relief that this other self he wondered about was merely the self of ambition, not some secret past he’d guessed at. “And therefore”—I fluttered my eyelids—“probably the only honest person in this house.”

  “Honest, eh? So you say, so you say.”

  “You too? Everyone around here doubts my word.”

  He shrugged and looked away again, not interested suddenly. Turned off.

  I didn’t like it, I realized, this abrupt fading of his interest. This must be how he did it with women. On, then off—the charm of a cold person who warmed just for you, momentarily, and left you yearning for more.

  It only made me angry. I stood up. “Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s get the money.”

  He stabbed out his cigarette and followed me through the living room, up the stairs, across the wide upstairs hallway. The other doors stood this way and that, some open, some shut: Larry’s room tidily on display, Sara’s and John’s messy. Someone was in the shower—the one-note tune of the pipes, the humid, soapy smell in the air.

  Duncan followed me to the doorway of my room, and I went to my desk and opened the drawer. I’d had a good weekend, and I hadn’t made a bank deposit for several days before that. There must have been around three hundred dollars in mostly single bills, here stacked, there just shoved in.

  “What do you need?” I said. My back was to him. He couldn’t see the drawer or its abundance.

  “I don’t know. Give me what you can.” He sounded so bored, so contemptuous of all this, that I was suddenly jumpy with irritation, with the impulse to jolt him, or to bend him. I reached into the drawer and scooped up handfuls of bills. Turning, I tossed them high in the air and then spun slowly around in the fluttery rain the green paper made. I came back to the drawer, scooped and tossed and danced again. And again. And then I stood grinning at Duncan across the littered floor. A dollar slid from my shoulder, fell lightly down between us.

  “Please.” I gestured grandly around me. “Take what you need.” As I walked toward him over the whispering bills, I could see his surprise, and his pleasure at being surprised. He was staring at me, and I could tell he would have responded to any gesture I made. We could have kissed, we could have made love there on the floor, lying on my money, messing it up. But I walked by him with the tiniest turn away of my shoulder as I eased past. I could feel a dollar bill sticking to my foot, but I didn’t bend to peel it off until I’d made my grand exit and was halfway down the stairs.

  Larry’s department was revamping its message-taking system, and he brought home a box of discarded pink tablets that bore the words WHILE YOU WERE OUT and a series of blank lines for the caller’s name and message. We did leave one pad by the downstairs telephone for general use, but the others disappeared into private stashes, and soon little notes began to whisper under doors, or appear stuck onto the bathroom mirror or taped to the underside of the toilet lid.

  WHILE YOU WERE OUT, the Nobel Prize Committee called to say you were this close, but you didn’t make it agai
n this year.

  WHILE YOU WERE OUT, God called. Message: Prepare to meet me. Let’s say, by the clock in front of the Coop.

  WHILE YOU WERE OUT, a whole bunch of little aliens arrived in the playground on a spaceship and said they were looking for you.

  WHILE YOU WERE OUT, Mick Jagger called. He’s mightily pissed you weren’t here. Says he can’t get no satisfaction.

  Nietzsche called. God is dead. Forget the meeting, forget the Coop.

  Albert De Salvo called. Said he was sorry you weren’t here and he’d try another time.

  Santa called. Wants your list, pronto.

  I came into your room and looked at all your really private stuff.

  We decided to change all the locks on the doors.

  “I’d feel hurt by this,” Larry said—this note had been waiting on his pillow, and he’d brought it down to dinner—“if we ever used the fucking locks in the first place.”

  The sound track to Hair was on at top volume, making the speakers buzz on the bass notes. John was sunk into a sofa, stuporously watching Dana and Duncan. Duncan sat draped in a striped sheet in an upright chair while Dana danced slowly around him, legs apart and bent, her quick hands making the scissors flicker and gleam around his head. I stopped to watch, too, for a moment, and she saw me and waved the scissors. She wore thick woolly socks against the cold of the floor. It was dark out already at five o’clock. I was due at work in a little over an hour. There was a steady cold drizzle outside, and I dreaded going back out into it.

  Now Dana leaned toward Duncan and said something only he could hear in the din, and he threw back his head and laughed. She looked so pleased with herself momentarily, so happy, that I could suddenly imagine them making love, the long, handsome bodies working together, swinging muscularly around each other—up to do this, turning to do that. I felt jealous of both of them. She moved now to stand behind him, and he bent forward submissively and bared the nape of his neck to her to let the scissors work.

  I went upstairs to change, to soak my feet briefly in a few inches of hot water in the tub. I washed my face and put my makeup on—carefully. It made a difference in tips. I pinned my hair up behind my ears, so it fell down my back but was held away from my face. The music downstairs stopped. Someone put on something by Vivaldi, and the volume was radically reduced.