While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  But then Tony Z came up to me again. I was resting by the waitress station. My tables were happy.

  “So I suppose you didn’t talk to Judy.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You don’t have any idea where she is.”

  “I told you. No.”

  “What bullshit,” he said. He pointed his finger at me. I saw the cords stiffen in his neck. “What complete bullshit that is, Jo.”

  She’d run away, of course. She’d vanished. And now, now that she was gone, we began to get the explanations. Every day, there was new gossip. Tony Z was so jealous that she couldn’t even go shopping with a friend. He’d monitored her phone calls. He’d had her followed. He’d sometimes parked all night outside her house; when she looked out she could see his cigarette glowing in the car. He’d hit her a few times.

  And now she was gone. She’d escaped.

  This was like sirens singing me away. It was, suddenly, all I could think of. The job at the Ace of Spades had been a foot out the door of my ordinary life, but I saw now what it could lead to. All of me out the door.

  I wanted to go as much as I’d ever wanted anything. Suddenly I saw the paltriness, the temporizing quality, of everything I’d done so far. At night I’d lie awake next to my innocent, dreaming husband and imagine it: where I’d vanish to, the note I’d leave behind.

  You might have thought I’d worry about him, about causing him pain or at least embarrassment. I simply didn’t. I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy. That makes you unkind. When I described myself as I was at that time to Daniel, I often said to him, “You wouldn’t have liked me then.”

  He’d shake his head. “Not possible.”

  “I wouldn’t have liked you,” I said once, just to startle him, to show him how mean I might have been.

  It worked. His face shifted, a hurt he was trying not to show. And then he said, “Well, that’s different, isn’t it?”

  I think, too, that by then, by the time I was getting ready to leave, I understood how shallow, how inconsequential, Ted’s and my attachment to each other was. We had married through innocent stupidity, through a pure lack of imagination. We had gone to college together and had furtive sex for a year. He was accepted to medical school. We wanted to go on having sex, we wanted to live together, but in the world we’d grown up in, you couldn’t do that without love, without marriage. So, trapped already by our desires, we made it happen—we fell willfully in love, we got married.

  It seems to me that Ted was probably not unhappy. He had his work, which he liked, and which kept him too busy to think about the shape of his life, his destiny—as I did, constantly. And my strange job gave his life a certain kinkiness that the other medical students couldn’t claim. They came home to wives who were teachers. Or social workers, or nurses, or graduate students. Or to their dorm rooms—a bed, a desk. They came home to dinner, to studying deep into the evening, the night. Ted might have felt he was unusual, having a wife with such an intriguingly unwholesome job. I think I imagined my disappearing as something he might even, in some sense, be grateful for. Another story he could tell to make himself interesting.

  I left on a Monday. I’d called Anita a day or two before and told her that my mother was ill, that I had to go to Maine and didn’t know when I’d be back. I told Ted I was going to Washington for a few days to see a friend from college who’d ended up there. I got on a bus for Boston with a one-way ticket. I was familiar with the city from college visits, but I wasn’t aware of knowing anyone who actually lived there. I thought I could find my way around easily and also be completely anonymous.

  I didn’t see my husband again for seven months.

  I arrived with one bag on a rainy evening in May. Within three days, I was sitting in a bright, sparsely furnished living room in Cambridge, being interviewed by four people as a potential roommate for a group house. One of them was Dana, whom I came to love. One was Duncan, another was Larry. And one of them, a tall, slightly slouched man in his mid-twenties, with worried brown eyes and curling dark hair that came down just over the rim of his collar—I remembered him clearly now—was Eli Mayhew.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The first lie I told was my name. “Felicia,” I said. And then, because this was, I suddenly realized, a seriously ridiculous name, I also said, “As in ‘happy to be here,’ and dipped my head slightly. “But my friends call me Licia. Or Lish.” I don’t know where any of this came from. I certainly hadn’t planned it. It just seemed suddenly the wisest course, to be someone else.

  After that, the other lies seemed easy. Seemed to be not so much lies as the story of Licia Stead. And some of it was true. I had just gotten a job at Red Brown’s Blues, a bar in Inman Square. I was living temporarily at the YWCA. And if I wasn’t from Montpelier, if I hadn’t gone to school at the University of Vermont, well, Licia Stead might have.

  I’d found the house advertised on the bulletin board at a dusty bicycle repair shop I’d gone into, searching for cheap transportation. It was next to ads for used furniture, typists, and three or four other housing options. I tore off one of the little fringed tags with a phone number and made my appointment, along with several other appointments, from a pay phone at the Y.

  The room I was sitting in for my interview was large and squarish—the living room. It was a sunny day, light was pouring in at the two tall windows that ran from ceiling to floor on the wall that faced the street, and lying brightly across the bare floor, which was stained dark toward the corners of the room and worn to a scratchy grayish white in the traffic patterns. There was a large mantelpiece, whose fireplace, if there had ever been one, was plastered over. There were two sagging couches covered with Indian-print spreads, facing each other over a wooden box that seemed to serve as a kind of combined coffee table and footrest. My interviewers were sitting on these couches—had the air, actually, of having been swallowed by them. For this reason I had perched myself on one of the two metal folding chairs set up next to them, facing the mantel. As I talked, I felt awkwardly and intensely visible, and very tall.

  The girl asked most of the questions. Dana. At first glance I’d been startled by her—she could have been my twin. Like me, she was big-boned, with straight blond hair worn long, below her shoulders, the way everyone wore it then. The way I was wearing mine. It’s true she was more solid than I was, more bosomy. Still, I thought, there was even a facial resemblance: the long oval, the just-slightly-too-big nose, the dark brows. But Dana had freckles, which I didn’t. And she frowned earnestly in concentration when she spoke—or smiled, or grimaced; whereas my face, I knew, was more masked, more careful.

  Did I smoke? Oh. How much? (The house allowed smoking; I had checked, because I did smoke then, sporadically.) What would my hours at work be? While I was talking, she smiled steadily at me, an extraordinary, warm, encouraging smile. And then she’d fire away again. Did I like to cook? Did I like movies? What movies?

  Every now and then after one of these questions, one or the other of the men in the room would groan audibly, or say, “Jesus, Dana.” Once, one of them—Duncan—said in a singsong voice, “What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite food?”

  Dana gave him the finger, then turned to me. “I know they’re dumb questions, but we just need to hear you talk. Maybe you have questions for us?”

  I had been to two other houses before this. The gravity of my interviews in them had intimidated me. Now I realized that I just hadn’t liked the people I met.

  I liked this. I liked the ease these people had with each other. In particular I liked Dana, her generosity, the warm attentiveness that I felt like a bright light falling on me. What I wanted to ask—all I wanted to ask, really—was, “Will you take me?” I didn’t think I could ask that. Instead I framed a few questions, as fatuous, nearly, as hers.

  Rules?

  There weren’t many. No smoking in the bedrooms, for fear of fire. Everyone cooked a grou
p meal once a week. You had to sign up for any given dinner two days before so the chef would know how much to prepare. You couldn’t have someone sleep over more than once a week or you had to pay extra rent. No sleeping with other house members, unless you were officially living together. There was much throat-clearing among the men over this, and Dana blushed richly under the freckles.

  What would my room be like?

  Dana would show me.

  It was a neat room, lots of light, Dana said, leading me up the stairs. A conversation had started among the men as soon as we left the living room, and I could hear a muffled laugh below us now. Dana was saying she wished my room had been available when she moved in, but now she was all set up in her space and didn’t want to switch.

  The stairs opened onto a large central hallway. I quickly took in three or four rooms opening off it. We turned left and then left again along a narrow walkway between the stair rail and a wall, toward a door at the front of the house.

  “It’s kind of down here by itself,” Dana said, turning back to me, smiling again.

  The room was small, but it had windows on two sides. One looked out over the driveway, the other across the street to the similarly exhausted-looking houses there. It had three pieces of furniture—a bed, a bureau, and a nicked desk. One of the drooping parchment-colored window shades was torn. Both had faint white lines in them, lines that leaked tiny stars of light here and there.

  “Duncan’s room is next to you. You’re lucky. You’d be lucky, I mean. He’s quiet. I have John and Sara. They’re not here right now. I love them both, but they make an astonishing amount of noise.”

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Well, they have to laugh a lot, ’cause they’re big dopers. Most any drug will do. It’s a kind of principle with them, ‘the expansion of their brains.’ ” Her fingers made nervous quotation marks. “You could offer them anything, acne medication or anything, and they’d take it.” She tilted her head back, pretending to swallow. “Glug, glug, glug.” Then she looked at me, her eyes wide. “But also,” she said, “they screw a great, great deal.”

  She had a funny voice, I thought. Harsh and staccato, and somehow touching. “I am quiet as a mouse,” she announced. “And you?”

  “I never really thought about it. I’ve never lived with anyone.” The words were out before I even realized that I was lying again. But this time it felt like the truth, I think because I hadn’t considered my marriage truly living with someone. Ted and I had moved in such different worlds from the start that I’d learned nothing about myself even as a roommate, much less as a wife, from being with him. “Actually, though,” I said now, “I think I am. Quiet. But if I owned a record player, I wouldn’t be.” I was remembering the long days I spent alone in the attic apartment in Philadelphia. Often I’d played music and danced by myself, danced until my hair was lank with sweat.

  “Yeah, well, that’s another rule. We can’t play music in our rooms after eleven. In point of fact, Duncan is the only one who even has one—a record player. Eli did, but he gave it to the house, so it’s downstairs. We all use it.”

  “Nice of him,” I said.

  “Eli can’t help being nice,” Dana said.

  I was sent outside to the porch while they decided. I sat on the front steps and watched a group of children in the playground next door. They were tough-looking, older. Too old, it seemed to me, for the forlorn swing set and teeter-totter. In fact, they seemed to be doing something secret and possibly delinquent in the huddle they made in the corner of the play area—starting a fire, maybe. Or passing a joint. One of them glanced furtively over at me, and I turned quickly away. I busied myself looking at the house. My house.

  It was sided in pale-green asphalt, with water or mildew marks of blackish gray drooping like dirty aprons under many of the windows. A wide, worn porch bent around its front half. There were gaps in the rails and splintering floorboards. The railing along the front steps had been replaced with wrought iron.

  Though I tried not to, I couldn’t help wondering what the people inside the house might be saying about me. I hadn’t talked enough, I felt. They’d think I was depressed. Which was only fair, of course. I was depressed, wasn’t I? Certainly quiet as a mouse, at the very least. But apparently this was just what you wanted in a neighbor. My good luck, perhaps. I tried to visualize them then, talking, but found that the only face I could conjure up was Dana’s. I searched in my bag, found my cigarettes, and nervously smoked one.

  I had just put it out and was about to light another, when Dana came out on the porch. I turned to her. “You’re a yes!” she cried. “Oh, I’m so pleased, Licia.”

  I stood up, grinning back at her. “Me too,” I said, and then realized how true that was. How relieved I was. My limbs felt longer suddenly, looser.

  Dana was doing a little barefoot dance, twirling. Her hair swung skirtlike around her shoulders. “Oh, I had my merry way with them!” she crowed as she spun.

  “Ah,” I said. “Was there resistance?”

  Dana stopped. “Oh, no! You mustn’t think that! None!” she cried. “None! I just meant that I was the only one who really cared that much.”

  It struck me suddenly that I’d recognized this, that I’d known all along that she wanted me in the house. “Why did you care?”

  Dana shrugged. “I was desperate for another woman, for one. I mean, besides Sara. Who’s really more like one of John’s vestigial organs. I feel so outnumbered all the time.” And then a wide grin opened her face—you could see nearly every strong white tooth in her mouth. “And the moment I saw you, I thought, She could be my friend.” Her hands lifted elaborately, palms up, in a dancer’s gesture. It was as if she were holding something ceremonially to give to me.

  I looked away quickly, I was so embarrassed.

  When I moved in the next day, there was a coffee can set on the battered old desk, filled with spry white daisies.

  All this happened early in the summer of 1968, when dozens of houses like ours had sprung up all over Cambridge, all over Berkeley and Chicago and Philadelphia and San Francisco. Some were more political than ours or had a theme of sorts—everyone was into organic food or political action or alternative theater or an arts magazine. Some were, like ours, mixed, a little bit of everything. You found rooms in these houses through bulletin boards, as I had, or through friends, or political organizations, or underground streams of information. They coexisted, often uneasily, with houses belonging to mostly working-class neighbors. People who took care of their yards, who repaired their railings, who had combination screens and storm windows, who kept their doors locked at night.

  Not us. The door stood open round the clock. Music blared into the street from the windows—Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Pablo Casals, the Stones, Julian Bream, the Beatles, Brahms, Janis Joplin. Bikes were parked all over the porch and the scrubby front yard. Unlocked, it goes without saying.

  I lived that summer like a happy dream. I worked late at the blues club every night and often stayed up several hours later than that, talking to one or another of my housemates. Slowly, I felt, I came to know them all better than I’d ever known Ted, or anyone, in my other life. The house generally rose late through those summer months—no one but Sara had normal working hours—and often two or three of us did something together in the daytime. Drove to Singing Beach, took a picnic and a Frisbee down to the river. On a rainy day, we went to the movies. Or played long, cutthroat games of Scrabble in the living room, with the windows open to the porch and the steady racket of the rain on the porch roof or dripping down on the leaves of the leggy lilac bushes.

  Nearly every weekend through the summer we had a party. I remember a moment at one of them when the living room was so crowded with people—people someone knew or had brought along, people who’d just heard the noise and wandered in—that the whole room seemed to move up and down as one, a slow stoned humping to “Go Ask Alice.” I felt I had lost myself in it, l
ost that embarrassed sense of how I looked, how I seemed to others, that earlier I would have said was a permanent part of who I was.

  There were six other members of the house. Duncan was a guitarist. He was tall, elegant. Often he seemed bored by all of us. He had a girlfriend on the West Coast, an actress. Two of her publicity shots were tacked on the wall beside his bed. In them, her mouth with its shiny dark lips was open and her eyelids were lowered thickly, as though she were about to sneeze. I had trouble believing this was a person anyone would know, but Duncan spoke of her easily, casually, as though she were living among us too. Sheree.

  He was studying composition at Berklee. He made his living giving music lessons and playing nightly in a Spanish restaurant—flamenco and, occasionally, when he could get away with it, classical pieces. He had a small, thin mustache. He reminded me of a generic movie star of the forties, handsome and rakish. I actually spent a lot of time with him, because he and I generally arrived home at almost the same late hour, usually wound up from work and not ready for bed. But he was so hard to talk to that I was always glad when someone else was awake, too, and the conversation could be more relaxed. I remember one night I saw him approaching me from the opposite end of the block as I was coming home, a tall, dark shape carrying a guitar case. I knew, even from a great distance, who it was, and the pressing question for me became: At what point do I call out a greeting? In the end, I didn’t, for fear he’d be somehow offended, or contemptuous. We actually turned into the driveway simultaneously and had begun to walk up it toward the lighted house before I said, “Good night?” He shrugged in response. I didn’t much like Duncan, he made so little effort socially.

  When I heard him play, though, my thinking about him shifted entirely. “That’s really what it was with me too,” Dana confessed to me. We were sitting in the kitchen very late one night, talking. She had waited up for me after work. Duncan had come home late, and sat with us for a beer, then gone upstairs to call Sheree, collect. “I’m crazy about his music. Those fingers!” He did have beautiful hands, I had noticed them. The fingernails were carefully shaped and shone with clear polish, to strengthen them for the guitar. She frowned. “I don’t know why I always have to do this—fall in love with people who do something beautifully. And it hardly matters what, really. It’s the competence. It’s the devotion to something. It just makes me hot.”