While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  “This was after you were lovers, or before?” I was confused. “When, exactly, were you lovers?”

  He laughed, and I could feel my face lift in response. “Yes,” he said. “Let me tell you my story. I guess I do have a story, after all. A complicated story, in fact.”

  He sipped from his drink and set it back down. He’d met her, he told me, at the Peabody Museum. He felt so socially awkward at that stage of his life that he ate there regularly in order to avoid having to eat with or talk to anyone from his lab or his department. Dana was there one day, moving behind the glass cases, a beautiful tall woman with thick blond hair reaching halfway down her back. She was alone, sketching the animals, their strange skeletal structures. “The slow loris,” he said, with a peculiar emphasis. “The honey possum.”

  I smiled again, I’m not sure why.

  She saw him watching her. She waved to him: he imitated her gesture, a slow curling in of separated fingers. A day or two later she was there again, and she came up to him this time and they talked. “She talked,” he said. “I was overwhelmed.” She said if he came often for lunch she’d see him again, that that’s when she usually came in too. And so she did. Once, twice. And by the next week, she’d invited him back to the house with her and they’d made love in her room.

  He paused, watching his hands move the glass again. “I don’t know that she was much interested in her own pleasure. My later experience tells me she might: not have been.” He looked up at me. “But she loved giving pleasure, in ways that were to me, then . . . astounding.” He grinned. “And even now, thinking back, certainly most accomplished. But she wanted, I think, to be amazing. I don’t know. She wanted to do everything, every time. To use up all of herself, all of you. To a person like me . . .” He lifted his hands. “I hadn’t known such feelings could exist. I stopped being able to work, which for me . . .” He shook his head. “I became obsessed. I would say temporarily deranged, in fact.” He smiled, sadly.

  For a few weeks they met daily, he said, sometimes several times a day. She came to the lab once at night, and they made love on a counter, and then in a closet after they heard someone in the corridor. They made love, fully clothed, Dana astride him, on a bench in the Cambridge Common.

  “And then, poof!” His hand made a gesture of explosion, of vanishing. “She met someone else and I must suppose was busy about the very same things with him.” His voice exaggerated the pronunciation of these words. His smile was ironic. “And quite finished with me,” he said.

  “That must have been hard,” I said. “To have someone like Dana quite finished with you.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “And yet she wasn’t, actually. No, not quite. Because she still wanted to be friends, to have coffee, to talk, to go to a movie with me sometimes.” Each time she called, he said, his hopes would rise. And then he’d feel foolish, exposed—but also crass, in the wrong somehow—that he’d expected anything more than her sweetness, her company. He said that her inviting him to join the house was the last straw. After he moved in and realized that nothing was going to change between them, they had a terrible fight, a scene in which he accused her of tormenting him deliberately.

  She wept, freely. She was astonished, sympathetic. Didn’t he know she was involved with Duncan?

  No, he said. “And I told her I wouldn’t have believed it anyway.” He shook his head. “That self-satisfied jerk.”

  I laughed, and he smiled back fleetingly.

  He said the scene went on for a while. He was accusatory. She kept calling him darling, honey, she held him. He’d wept, finally, “for the first time since I was a kid.”

  After this, she came to his room occasionally if he seemed upset. Once or twice she actually tried to jerk him off, or suck him off—as though, he said, it was just a physical pressure he was feeling, one she could relieve at no cost to herself, or him. Once, in despair, he’d let her. “I remember looking down at her, at her head with that great sweep of wonderful hair lying across my legs, covering me, sort of rippling as she moved, and thinking, How can she be doing this and not loving me?”

  I blushed in embarrassment at this, I could see it so clearly.

  “I just didn’t know what to do with my feelings: that was the problem. I was such a kid. I wanted to marry her, I was so in love. Anyway, finally I got her to agree that we’d talk about it again, in a year.

  “She said to me, ‘A year. You’ll see. By the time a year is up, you’ll have some wonderful new woman.’ And after that, she was always bringing people over to meet me. And of course, when you moved in, she wanted me to fall in love with you. I think that’s part of why she wanted you in the house, actually. I remember her coming to my room, oh, several times. Talking about you. I pretended to listen. I pretended to take her seriously.” He looked at me intently. “God, how I wish I had.”

  I could feel myself blushing again. “Do you?”

  “Of course.” His hands moved forward on the table, as if to touch me. And then stopped. He looked away, took a breath. “This is all so hard to talk about.”

  “Oh, I know. I think the only person I’ve ever discussed it with was Daniel. It’s so impossible to explain her, for one thing. How powerful her . . . lovingness was. Like some kind of blessing. Like a heat or light you could feel.”

  He looked intently at me. “Yes,” he said.

  “It must have been . . . I can imagine how hard it was to feel it go away.”

  “To me it was like dying,” he said.

  I reached over quickly and touched his hand.

  He was watching me. His eyes tightened thoughtfully. “It seems, doesn’t it? that you and I were somehow meant to meet each other again.”

  I laughed. I was delighted. Nervous. “Careful,” I said gaily. “You’re beginning to sound like a religious person.”

  “God forbid.” He smiled. “Some entity or other forbid. Please.”

  And now he pointed at my empty glass. “Will you . . . ?” He left the question dangling, as if he were asking about much more.

  Yes, I said, I would.

  He raised his hand for the waiter, signaled for two more drinks. Then he leaned back and looked at me once more, hard. “I felt then—and I feel now, too—that if I hadn’t been so overwhelmed by my feelings about Dana, I would have fallen in love with you. I remember wishing I could. I admired your generosity so much, your sense of morality. I thought of you as an adult. I was so rigid, so . . . inflexible in my own judgments. So juvenile. And you seemed compassionate and grown up.”

  I made a soft noise of protest.

  “No, I mean it, Jo. Then, and now. People don’t change that much, you know. Or they change, but some central core remains there. I felt it, I felt familiar with it—with you—when you put Arthur away.”

  “Euthanized him.”

  “Yes, euthanized him. I think I said to you what a strange bond I feel it is.”

  The waiter came over with the drinks and a little dish of nuts. We waited while he picked up our empty glasses. He saw the drawing Eli had made on his napkin and paused. “Do you want this?” he asked. Eli shook his head, and the waiter crumpled the napkin and put it on his tray.

  When he left, Eli leaned forward again. “That’s part of why I was so glad when you called,” he said. “I was worried you wouldn’t. But I decided to be fatalistic. I wasn’t going to call you if you didn’t call me. And then this might not have happened.” His big hand opened in the air between us. All this.

  “But I did,” I said.

  “You did.” He smiled the warm smile that made his eyes all but disappear. “Shall we talk about that night?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure, really, what he meant, but because I meant yes, yes to everything, I said it: “Yes.”

  “That was the night, the year-end night.”

  “What year-end night?”

  “That was the end of my waiting period.”

  “Oh, with Dana.”

  “Yes, exactly. I reminded her of
it a week earlier.” He sat back and looked out the window quickly at a pedestrian walking by close to the glass. Then at me again. “I suppose I should have foreseen what would happen when she came up blank. No memory of it whatsoever. And then, when she did remember, she was dismissive: Yes, fine, we’d talk. Whatever.” His voice had hardened.

  What he was speaking of was only slowing dawning on me. “So this was that night? You saw her that night? The night she died?”

  “Yes. I’m getting to that.”

  Why hadn’t this come out before? I was wondering thickly. Why hadn’t he said this at the time to one of us? Or told the police?

  “I came back to the house at the time I’d mentioned to her—the time I thought we’d agreed on—and there was no one there. I guess . . . well, you were at work, weren’t you?” I nodded. “And Duncan, too, I suppose. And John had moved out by then.”

  “And Larry and Sara had gone to a movie together,” I volunteered, impatient now.

  “Right,” he said. “Anyway, I sat there in the kitchen for half an hour or so—that’s what we agreed on: meet you in the kitchen at nine o’clock. Actually, I went to the foot of the stairs, too, and called up a couple of times. I was getting really upset. Upset with Dana. Upset with myself, for being such a loser. I didn’t know what to do, I felt so powerless, so . . . forgotten. I’d put my coat back on by now, my gloves. I was actually at the back door, in one of those frenzies of indecision—you know what I mean—not knowing whether to stay or go, and so frustrated I wanted to do something: throw things around, break stuff. Anyway. Suddenly, I don’t know why, I had the notion she was upstairs, in her room, ignoring me. So I charged up there and banged on her door. And she was. Not ignoring me so much, but actually asleep, with the radio on. That’s how unimportant it all was to her.” His voice was forlorn and bitter at the same time, and I remembered that young Eli and what I’d mistakenly thought was his devotion to all of us, to the house itself, the feel and spirit of the place.

  Dana told him to go downstairs, she’d be there in a minute, and he went back down into the kitchen to wait. He was, he said, beside himself by now, pacing back and forth. “That’s what I felt, actually. That I’d somehow taken leave of myself. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I did.

  Dana took her time, he said. She used the bathroom—he heard the toilet flush—and finally appeared, sleepy-looking and barefoot, in the kitchen doorway.

  He turned on her the moment she came in—very controlled, he said, but very angry, determined she should hear him out, should understand the wrong she’d done him.

  She was smiling, trying to pacify him, cajole him. He thought her tone was condescending, he thought she wasn’t taking him seriously. She came over to him, patted his cheek. He pushed her away, went on talking. He wasn’t even sure anymore, he said, what he was saying, some combination of accusation and rage and profession of love and proposal of marriage. And through it all, Dana stayed serene, dreamy. As though he were a little boy. As though she could manipulate him.

  He’d remembered the blow job then, he said, that sense of feeling managed by her. He realized that she was just trying to quiet him now too. She touched him again, smiling. “Smiling,” he said, “when I was in agony.” He hit her, in the face. He didn’t even truly realize he’d picked up the knife, it was just to get her to stop smiling, to stop saying sweetie, honey, to stop coming at him with her hands, her mouth, her body, to stop her. He didn’t know what he’d done until blood leapt to the place where he’d struck her, leapt and flowed all at once.

  When he stopped talking for a moment, I was aware of my breathing.

  He spoke slowly now. He said she frowned and looked suddenly perplexed. “It was as if she didn’t realize it either, what had happened. She touched herself.” His hand imitated her gesture, his large hand brushing his cheek with Dana’s hesitant delicacy.

  She looked at her hand, her bloody hand, he said, and then back at him. “And she said, ‘Oh, Eli,’ in this terribly, terribly sad and . . . disappointed way.” Then she’d stepped toward him again, and he hit her—that’s what he said, he hit her—again and again, in the breast, the chest, the side. Just trying, trying to stop her.

  I can’t say what I was feeling beyond horror at this point, but Eli must have read some sympathy in my face, and thinking it was for himself, instead of for Dana’s beautiful pierced body and face, he leaned forward, toward me, and he shook his head.

  “I was just so desperate. So . . . wounded.”

  And suddenly, shrilly, inadvertently, I laughed.

  At what? Clearly at the use of the word wounded to apply to himself. But at everything else, too, I think: at my own misunderstanding of what I was doing here, at my stupidity. And at the horror, the way a child laughs, I suppose, when he sees a grown-up in pain. The laugh that expresses the wish that everything that’s so terrifying could be made funny, that everything frightening really were a joke.

  Eli looked startled. Offended, even.

  And I apologized. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. A kind of hysteria, I suppose.”

  He nodded, then, and shook his head. Sudden fatigue, like the radical pull of some emotional gravity, weighted his face.

  We sat for a long moment. I felt frozen, I could hardly bear to look at him.

  “So you left her?” My voice cracked as I asked it. I hadn’t realized how dry my throat was. Terror had parched it.

  “I know it seems like it, yes. But what happened was she left. She had this sort of stunned look on her face, and she walked out of the room, she just walked out, like that.” His hand swept her away. He seemed actually puzzled, momentarily. “And then I left too. It was . . . it was like we’d had this terrible fight and we both just . . . walked out or something.”

  “But you knew you’d stabbed her!”

  He stared at me as though surprised by my failure to grasp something important. “I did. Of course I knew it. But you have to understand what happens to people in these circumstances. In effect, I was in shock. There was that part of me that saw that she was hurt, yes. And there was a part that didn’t. That denied it. That . . .” His hand circled. “Chose to disbelieve. That said, over and over, she walked out. It’s a classic stress response, actually. So on the one hand, I did these self-protective things: I went back to the lab, I washed up, I disposed of the gloves and coat. I started to work again. And on the other hand, when the police came and told me, I was genuinely grief-stricken.” He shook his head. “I was appalled. It was as though I understood it, or felt it, for the first time, really. Dana, Dana was dead.” His face had twisted.

  I felt my throat clog, as though I were hearing it now, too, for the first time. After a long silence, I found my voice. “But . . . you disposed of the coat?” I said.

  He looked startled, just for a moment. “Yes. Yes. That was easy enough to do in a chemistry building.” He cleared his throat. “All kinds of bagged wastes—toxic, radioactive—are disposed of routinely, unquestioningly, by the janitorial staff daily.” He was explaining, teaching me something again, and he seemed almost relieved. “There was some tension about whether it would be gone in time if the police began to suspect me, if they searched the building, for instance. But that seemed unlikely. And then they focused their attention on Duncan for a while anyway.”

  We sat silent, our drinks in front of us. “How fortunate for you,” I said at last.

  Eli’s face changed quickly. He sat up straighter. “You seem to think I took this lightly. Maybe you haven’t understood me. This . . . event shaped my life. I loved Dana. I mourned her for years. And I’ve worked the rest of my life to assure that who I am has some meaning, some value beyond this part of my past. Look.” He hunched forward onto the table. “Remember once, back then, when you and I talked about accepting what’s happened in the past? About the need to define oneself by what one gets up and does every day?”

  I saw this suddenly, this discussion in the ki
tchen, the young Eli and me, sweet, stupid children, chopping onions and peppers and arguing, with tears streaming down our cheeks. But I remembered it differently. I remembered using these ideas to excuse myself for the pain I had caused the people I was closest to.

  He was still talking. “And I have lived my life that way: making sure every day”—he slapped the table twice, lightly—“of its usefulness, of its meaning. I wrecked one life, yes. Dana’s life. There’s nothing I can do now to change that. But I’ve given, I’m giving now, to thousands, to hundreds of thousands, of other lives.”

  I had been made stupid by Eli’s confession, unable, really, to focus on any one idea, any one thing he was telling me. But now, oddly, a thought came clear. “Does Jean know about this?” I asked abruptly. “About Dana?”

  He shook his head. “No. I saw no need to tell her. It has absolutely nothing to do with who I am now, with the person she married.”

  I was relieved somehow.

  And then more confused. “But . . . so why did you tell me?”

  “You don’t understand?”

  “No. No, I don’t at all.”

  “Because you know me, Jo. Because by now you know me again, for who I’ve become. And you knew me then. Because you knew Dana. Because you saw how agonized I was by her death. Because it was—it is—an opportunity for me to talk about this with someone I have found wise and sympathetic. Completely balanced, actually, in the past. Because . . . well, as I said”—he dropped his head and smiled almost shyly—“it seemed nearly fated, that you should arrive in my life at this point, perhaps the one person, finally, to whom I could tell the whole story and put it behind me, once and for all. Because of what I’ve done with my life. What I’ve made of it after that . . . episode.”

  Suddenly I was struck, irrelevantly, with the oddity of the phrase put it behind me. I was remembering Eli on the front porch the day the taxi took me away, the yawning doorway behind him. The cheese who stood alone.

  “And what is it you expect me to do with this?” I asked, after a moment.