While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  Then why are you drawn to me? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to presume to name Dana’s feelings about me.

  Larry was the one I felt most comfortable with from the start. He taught history at Harvard and was a political activist. He was out a good deal of the time, “rousing the rabble,” as he called it, mocking himself more than the rabble. His room was small, the smallest in the house. He had an enormous poster of Ho Chi Minh on the wall, and all the floor space not taken up by the bed was occupied with a bench press and scattered weights. He was short and powerfully muscled. He wore his hair in a DA, with a tumble of slicked curls trained to fall forward in the middle of his forehead, like Gene Vincent, like Jerry Lee Lewis. He liked the incongruity, he told me once, of being a commie body-building greaser hood. He had the only car in the house and didn’t mind being thought of as a chauffeur. “We could get Larry to take us,” we’d say, and he always would if he could. We’d cram in, rearranging the stacks of flyers, shoving the posters up on the ledge under the rear window, and he would drive us—to the North End for Italian food, to the Cape, to the movies, to the Square.

  Sara and John were much as described by Dana. She’d forgotten to mention, though, that Sara was a lawyer. She’d graduated high in her class from Harvard Law School and now worked in a poverty-law office for a piddling wage. She supported them both. It was understood that John was writing a novel, but I knew, since I was home through much of the day, that he was doing no such thing. “His work habits aren’t really the kind that lend themselves to the long haul,” I told Dana. “In that he has no work habits.”

  Eli was the handsomest man in the house, and yet he left the least impression on me at the time. And I would guess that this was true for all of us. He was quiet, of course. Shy. He seemed content, most of the time, simply to observe, to watch the action, whatever the action was. And he was gone a good deal of the time, running experiments that required his presence for long hours at a stretch or at odd times of the day or night. And probably my assumptions about him—our assumptions, for I think we all shared them: that he was unimaginative, a little dull, certainly less free, less wild, less fascinating than we were—these made it even harder to see what he might truly have been like. I remember one night after dinner we were playing a game in the living room. It was Dana’s invention. We’d all written down one adjective for each person in the house, and John collected our scraps of paper. His job was to read all the adjectives about one person aloud. The appointed guesser had to say who was being described and why she thought so. Sara was the appointed guesser, because, as Larry put it, she was the only one with “no agenda.”

  “What does that mean, no agenda?” Sara had cried with alarm.

  “It means saintly, Sar,” said Dana. “It means sweet.”

  “It means perpetually stoned,” said Duncan.

  Sara laughed. “Mean, Dunkey. For you, my adjective would be mean, mean, mean.”

  “You only get one, baby.”

  For Eli, the adjectives were gentle, quiet, mysterious, gray, aloof, and pellucid.

  “Objection,” Sara said. She lifted a legal finger. “How can someone be both mysterious and pellucid?”

  “And who’s doing these color things?” Duncan asked. One of Larry’s adjectives had been red.

  “Shh. No questions from us. It’ll give everything away.”

  “Come on. Sara’s so out of it she’d never put two and two together.”

  “Besides, red, in Larry’s case, might not be a color but a political persuasion,” I offered.

  “Maybe this person is apparently mysterious while being pellucid, or apparently pellucid while being mysterious.” Larry was smoking a cigar, and it chimneyed violently as he relaxed his draw.

  “Did Sara ask for clues?” Dana said. “Are we supposed to be giving her these clues?”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” Sara said. “I know it’s Eli.”

  “Jesus, the chemically altered brain proves superior after all!” said Larry. “How did you know?”

  “I knew. I just knew,” Sara said. “No.” She squinted in concentration. There were blurry finger marks all over the lenses of her glasses. “No. Because of gray and pellucid. They are . . . les mots justes.” She said it again, contemplatively: “Les mots justes.”

  “Who said gray? Was it the same person who said red? Is someone doing colors?”

  “I said gray,” Eli said. “Not red, though.”

  “Eli!” cried Dana. “Why, why did you say gray about yourself? That makes me so sad.” And in fact, her face was anguished. She was sitting on the floor by the couch Eli was sunk into, and she leaned forward now to touch his knees.

  “I don’t think I’m gray, actually,” Eli said. He was quite serious, and blushing slightly at all the sudden attention. “But I was trying to imagine how all of you thought of me.”

  “But we don’t, Eli,” Dana said. “Look at your beautiful adjectives. I hope I get such adjectives. Read them again, John. All but the gray.”

  “Gentle, quiet, mysterious, pellucid, aloof.”

  “Well, all but the aloof too. The rest are heaven!” Dana said. “I’d give my right arm for stuff like that.”

  “Who said mysterious?” Sara asked.

  “I did,” I said. I was thinking of a moment earlier in the week when I’d come out from the living room in my bare feet after two or three of us had sat up late, talking, and I’d nearly smashed into Eli, who was standing utterly immobile in the hall, standing there and, evidently, just listening to us. Before I could speak, he raised his finger to his lips—don’t say a word—and then turned and went upstairs. It was the first time I considered that he might be less comfortable with his role in the house than he’d seemed. More complicated, somehow, than we’d guessed.

  “And pellucid?” Larry asked.

  “C’était moi.” Dana smiled at Eli. “Eli the pellucid.”

  “Pellucid is a very interesting word,” Sara said. “If you didn’t know what it meant, you’d think it meant, like . . .” There was a long, long silence. Her eyes had gone out of focus.

  John poked her. “Pellucid,” he said. “You’d think it meant . . . ?”

  “Oh!” She giggled. “Like really smelly, wouldn’t you?”

  My adjectives were reserved, sexy, curious, fragile, blue, and opaque.

  “Who is it with the colors?”

  “It could be sad,” Sara said. “That this person is sad. Blue. Not a color.”

  “Who said opaque?” Larry asked. “Opaque is hostile.”

  “To be opaque is hostile?” I asked him.

  “To say someone else is opaque is hostile. It’s like saying someone is gray.”

  “No one said that about anyone else. Eli said it about himself.”

  “Sara, I know that. I know that.”

  “It’s either Duncan,” Sara said, “or Licia. The fragile is confounding.”

  “Confounding.” Larry’s head nodded two, three times in deep appreciation. “That’s a great adjective. Someone should have used that on someone else.”

  “I want a clue,” Sara said.

  “It will cheapen your victory,” John said.

  “Still, I want to know who said fragile.”

  “I did,” Eli said. He looked at me quickly and then looked away.

  “Hmm. Well. Well, I’m certain Eli doesn’t think Duncan is fragile, so it must be Licia. Is it?”

  Noises of assent, bobbing heads.

  “Sara, you’re nothing short of amazing,” Dana pronounced. Her hands lifted in one of her extravagant gestures, and she offered: “Amazing, perspicacious, intuitive—”

  “Orange,” John interrupted.

  “You were the color guy?” Duncan pointed his cigarette at John.

  “I’ll never tell.”

  “There was no color guy. Eli called himself gray, someone called Larry a commie, and someone else thinks Licia is sad.”

  “That’s your theory. Only the Eli p
art is established as fact.”

  “Who said sexy?” Larry asked. “Who’s hot for Licia?”

  “Licia is sexy,” Duncan said. “I said it.”

  I was astonished. So far as I knew, Duncan had never even noticed I was female. He wasn’t looking at me now, either, yet he appeared to be completely unembarrassed to confess this.

  “Who said opaque?” Larry asked again.

  There was a beat of silence, just too long. “I did,” Dana said.

  “But you’re best friends with Licia,” Sara protested.

  “Still, she is opaque. To me anyway. Licia has secrets.” Dana smiled a bright smile at me, a smile that seemed suddenly false, too toothy.

  “See, that’s what makes her sexy,” Duncan said. “A little discretion goes a long, long way.” Dana looked at him sharply, visibly hurt.

  “What did you say, Licia? About yourself?”

  “Reserved.”

  “Same as opaque,” Sara said.

  “Nothing like,” Larry said.

  “I would still like to know this color asshole,” Duncan said.

  “Speaking of hostility.”

  Later Dana came to my room and apologized for calling me opaque.

  I told her not to be crazy, that I wasn’t the one who found it offensive.

  “I do, though,” she said. “I don’t want you to think I’m pushing you, or bugging you, or anything.”

  I looked over at her, my beautiful friend, and my heart felt thickened abruptly with love. How could she imagine there was something she could give me that I wouldn’t want, something she could ask of me that I wouldn’t try to give?

  I had been in the house for over a month at this point, and I felt transformed and opened out—so altered it seemed nearly chemical to me, as though I were the one taking drugs. It was so much what I had wanted that I was sometimes frightened by it. By how fast it was happening. By how happy I could sometimes feel. By how radically different I seemed to myself from the good girl who’d moved so dutifully through high school and college and marriage. Whose friendships and deepest loves had all been, it seemed to me now, bland matters of convenience—someone who lived three doors down, someone in my sorority, someone I was sleeping with.

  Now when I turned the corner onto Lyman Street after work and saw our lights glowing in the darkness from the first-floor windows of the house, I sometimes broke into a run, I was so eager just to be there.

  I loved the fact that there was always someone awake, even at one or one-thirty. At that hour, intimacies sprang up easily. With Larry, for instance, one night over coffee in the kitchen. He was reading late and pleased to be interrupted, by what he called “a long, blond column of concentrated nicotine.” We sat for several hours under the intermittent flicker and buzz of the bare fluorescent ring on the ceiling, and he told me his story, all about his patrician, cultured background. His parents, he said, were at the opera, the ballet, the symphony, several nights a week, “while understanding dogshit about any of it.” He would inherit a town house on Marlborough Street eventually, and he’d made it his personal goal to look as though he didn’t belong there. “I want to be the kind of person that people are always coming up to and saying, ‘May I help you?’ when what they really mean is, ‘What the hell are you doing here, lowlife scum?’ ”

  Duncan often arrived home close to the time I did, but because I found him so difficult, Dana began to wait up for me, or to stop in at Red Brown’s and walk home with me. So there were often several people talking in the kitchen or the living room until two or three in the morning. I loved that.

  I loved even the house chores, which worked to bring people closer. One afternoon Eli came back from the lab for a few hours to eat—he had to return later to watch some experimental results. It was my night off, so I was in the kitchen, cooking. Eli helped me chop green peppers and celery and onions for chili. After only a few minutes, we were both weeping from the pungent fumes. We began to invent reasons we would offer if someone came in and asked us what was wrong: we had discovered we were the wrong zodiacal signs for each other; we had discovered that worker bees could not have sex. Eli had a wonderful, incongruous laugh, loose and high-pitched and infectious.

  We argued, too, that afternoon—about books, and then about a film we’d both seen a couple of years before—Blowup. Eli had been offended by the characters’ passivity, by what he saw as their indefensible amorality. I took their side. I argued that you couldn’t get hung up about guilt or responsibility for what had already happened. That what mattered was the moment, who you were now, how you lived in this place, at this time. I remember that I felt he was being unimaginative, uptight. I remember that I felt I was defending my life and the choices I’d made.

  The nights I went to bed early, I sometimes lay in the darkness with my door open, listening to the noises of the others. Often Duncan was making music in his room. He played so well that I couldn’t always tell if it was a record or Duncan, until—if it was Duncan—the heavenly stuff broke off abruptly, to profane muttering, and then began again. I could hear Dana’s hoarse voice cracking at the end of a sentence down in the living room, or Sara’s sweet murmur somewhere, or her faint cries of sexual happiness, or Eli, talking earnestly.

  I was sometimes miserable, often bitterly lonely with the distance my situation imposed. At the same time, I was happier than I’d ever been. I felt I’d come to see and understand, finally, that there was a way to live among others that didn’t require falsifying yourself. Somehow all the lies I’d told didn’t figure in this vision. Or were canceled out by what I saw as its deeper truth.

  It wasn’t that I had been conscious of falsifying myself when I was living my other life. I’m sure I hadn’t. I think, in fact, that I was barely conscious of having a self in that world. My mother tells me that I was a willful little girl, but I don’t remember that. What I remember is later, when I wasn’t willful anymore: the inner calm of knowing I was satisfying expectations, I was pleasing. The self isn’t important in such a feeling. It was only as I began to startle and disappoint others that I was aware of myself at all—that I came to understand, slowly, that I wasn’t who I had pretended to be. And now, when I was pretending to be someone completely other than myself, I felt, for the first time, at home in my skin.

  How much of my feeling about the house, about my new life, connected to Dana I wasn’t sure. I wouldn’t have joined the house without her, I knew that. I would have settled for a very different kind of place, one where I could have had privacy, solitude. A place where everyone separated after dinner and shut the doors to their rooms. Or a place where people didn’t eat together at all but kept their food in separate labeled containers in the refrigerator and pantry. One of the houses where I’d been interviewed was such a place. The labels said things like Hands off! This is Sheila’s! and featured skulls and crossbones, Poison signs.

  From the start, Dana had actively sought me out, nearly daily. She helped me paint my room a sort of lilac pink the third day after I moved in. She’d been sunbathing in the driveway when I carried the paint and roller and tray past her, and she appeared in my doorway a few minutes later, still wearing her faded blue bikini. “Need help?” she asked. “I’m good at this.” She gestured at my supplies.

  I said yes, gratefully.

  Over the afternoon, her lush, solid body, freckled everywhere but on her rounded belly and long thighs, became dotted and smeared with the pink paint. She chattered as she worked, a frantic, edgy quality to her hard voice that I realized only later was there because she wanted so much for me to like her. She was offering herself to me—her history, her affection. She told me about a man she’d dated two years before—this was when she was living alone, she said—who broke her nose. She turned her face so I could see the slight bump. “They did a really good job setting it, didn’t they?”

  “But that’s so awful!” I said.

  “Oh, I hit him first,” Dana said. “I hit him in the face. Many times, actual
ly, as hard as I could.” She made a fist and imitated her punch, a repeated steady downward bludgeoning. “I don’t blame him at all. And he was incredibly apologetic. He took me to the emergency room himself.”

  She told me that she’d slept with two of the house members—Eli and Duncan. That the rule about having sex within the house had been made with her in mind. “I think Larry proposed it, in self-defense,” she said, laughing. “But they all agreed I was a disruptive force.” She shrugged. “I actually didn’t mind. It was messing me up, thinking about Duncan all the time, about when we’d fuck again. And I kind of liked the idea of being a force.”

  “You didn’t think about Eli? About . . . fucking him?” I wasn’t yet accustomed to this casual use of rough language or to talking so openly about the behavior it described.

  “Eli was eons ago,” she said. “It didn’t mean anything. We were both just lonely. We’re good friends now.”

  She told me about a period of time after she’d dropped out of college when she and a friend made their living singing in T stations up and down the Red Line. About spending a winter on the Cape with a lover, breaking into isolated, boarded-up summer houses. “We lived mostly on that leftover, condimenty kind of stuff, you know? Ketchups and jams. Chutney. And then, just every now and then, there’d be, oh, oatmeal or dried-up spaghetti or something. We loved that, we thought of it as a banquet. I got so thin! I was beautiful! Almost as beautiful as you!”

  But she wanted something from me too. My story. My sense of self. She asked me directly where I’d grown up, where I’d lived before coming to Cambridge.