While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  Eli laughed. “I doubt it, but I’ll bite,” he said. “What do you mean?”

  Daniel shrugged. “I felt compelled, I took courses, I got more interested. I went on to graduate school and got my degree. There’s not much else to do once you have a D. Min.”

  Eli nodded. Then he leaned forward, elbows on the table. “See, it’s the feeling compelled in the first place that I find fascinating. That really interests me. How does that happen?”

  Daniel set down his knife and fork and looked over at Eli. “You’re asking about a call or a revelation, I think.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Sorry to disappoint, but I had none. No scales falling from my eyes.” Daniel’s tone was dismissive, but Eli didn’t hear that. It occurred to me for the first time that he might be a little obtuse about people.

  “Well, what then?”

  “Nothing very dramatic at all. Just a slowly increasing sense of belief, of myself as a believer, as someone who wanted to make that central in his life.”

  “But belief in what? That’s what I wonder. In the soul?” Eli’s voice gave this italics. He did not, you could tell, believe in the soul.

  “Among other things. The soul. Yes,” Daniel said. Looking back, I would remember his face then, its clarity, its wholeness.

  “Aha,” Eli said. He seemed, really, delighted. This new, middle-aged Eli loved to talk too. “But what if I told you that thought, feeling, personality—even faith—are a matter of neurons, neurons firing in specific learned pathways in the brain. That’s what the soul is. That’s all. You can extinguish any of it with a single knife cut or a blow to the head.”

  “I’d say that had nothing to do with what I was talking about.”

  “But look, what I’m saying is that God is an idea. A human idea. He resides in the particular arrangement of the matter in your brain. Change the matter and presto. God is gone.”

  Daniel cleared his throat. He said, “And what I’m saying is that I agree you might be able to eliminate my belief by altering my brain, but that doesn’t mean God is gone.”

  “But where else does he live but in your brain? Your brain and other brains that have been deliberately structured the same way. You’re a smart man, you see that. He’s an idea, like the idea of life after death.” His hand circled. He smiled. “Or the virgin birth.” His smile widened.

  “Eli . . . ,” Jean began.

  “No, he doesn’t mind explaining this.” Eli turned to Daniel. “Do you?”

  “There’s nothing to explain,” Daniel said. “I’m not explaining.”

  “Ahh! I’ve offended you. I didn’t mean to. Look, why not see me as a candidate for conversion.” His hand rose and rested on his own chest. “I mean, here I am, a lost soul, a nonbeliever. Why not try to convince me, persuade me. Why not save me? That’s what your faith is about, isn’t it? Harvesting souls?” He was completely genial in this, but there was the quality of assumption that we could all treat this as he did, lightheartedly. A kind of intellectual joke.

  I looked over at Daniel. His face was tight. “If that were what my faith was about, what I’d say to you is that you’re not ripe.” Eli missed the metaphor. He looked puzzled. Daniel went on. “There has to be some need, some desire, even, for God. Maybe just some sense of something missing in your life. And I don’t think you feel that.” Daniel sat back in his chair. “I’m sure, actually, that you don’t.”

  At last Eli heard it, the dismissal in Daniel’s tone. His face shifted. He, too, sat back. “No,” he said. “No, you’re right. I don’t.”

  “Eli,” Jean said brightly, “lives in his own universe. Some men are like that. And here’s the evidence. We married four years ago, and Eli was then fifty-two and had never been married. Never even lived with anyone. Except Arthur, of course. It’s a wonder he ever did marry. He would like me to consider it a miracle.” She laughed brightly and turned to me, clearly inviting me to join her, to help her shift the course of events. She asked me now about the Holts, the former owners of the estate. We talked about their grand house, divided into expensive condos. We talked about condos versus houses, about the problems of new construction versus old construction. She was good at this, good at talking, at acting. It must be part of what Sadie admired about her as a teacher.

  I followed her lead. There were stories about our house to offer. The annual spring flood in the earthen basement, the beautiful old bottles and jars of aged, mysterious fruits and vegetables in the root cellar, left at some time in the distant past. Eli, and then finally Daniel, joined us, and we all moved away from danger, back to what didn’t matter so much. We made our way carefully through the evening until Daniel and I could decently excuse ourselves and leave.

  The stage went black now, though in the dim lights from the bar and the glowing jukebox we could easily see the band members coming out onto it. They picked up their instruments. The room quieted slightly. Cass moved to the front of the stage and stood with her guitar slung low, at hip level. Her hair had grown a little; it was the length of what we’d called a pixie cut when I was young. She wore a short-sleeved shirt, tiny and pale, with a row of glittering buttons down the front. Her long arms looked fleshless, skeletal—made me aware, suddenly, that wrists were knobs. Her hipbones jutted above her jeans in the bare space between them and the too-short shirt. Her navel was exposed.

  She stamped her foot twice, the lights went up, and abruptly a wall of undifferentiated noise assailed us. A group of four or five girls immediately rushed forward and started dancing, and it was through their motions, their nervous, bouncy boxing, that I heard the beat at last and then oriented myself in the din so that I could separate out and get them all: bass, guitar, drums. A guy with a sax blatted, too, in quick, short phrases that tried to pull the beat a different way. Cassie’s guitar threaded through the more dominant rhythm, offering—if you listened carefully—a kind of melody. And then she stepped forward and nearly rested her mouth on the mike. She began to sing. Her voice was a growl, a howl. Rich, though, rounded and complex. She sang a song she’d sung for us at home, sweetly, huskily. Here it was bluesy, primal.

  If you didn’t wanna stay with me

  You coulda said so

  You coulda said so

  If you thought you had to wander free

  You coulda said so

  You coulda said so . . .

  The room shouted along with her. I watched her mouth shaping the words to several more verses—the exposed teeth, the tongue, the curled inside of her lips. Her head was tilted, her eyes were closed in agony. Her fingers moved over the guitar at her crotch as though she were playing with herself, which was probably the point.

  If you thought love was no good for you

  You coulda said so

  You coulda said so

  If you didn’t want to work to be true

  You coulda said so

  You coulda said so . . .

  By now the dance floor was jammed, an undulating mass with the odd arm flung suddenly up, the heads bobbing this way and that. Cass stamped one foot, one leg, in a regular rhythm. When she rested, when the band took over, she closed her eyes and an ecstatic smile lighted her face. Or she turned and beamed on whoever was soloing a smile of such beatific affection that I was jealous of each recipient.

  Now she stepped forward again. She was wailing.

  Instead you raaan,

  she sang,

  sometime between dark and dawn.

  Instead I woke up, baby, and you were gone.

  Now a soft growl:

  I reached for you, baby, but you were gone.

  You coulda said so.

  You coulda said so.

  The band stopped then, and she sang alone, musically, in her regretful, rich contralto: “Yooouuuu could have: said! so!” A slow broken chord on the guitar, and the lights went off.

  The whistles and screams washed over them in the dark, and when the lights went up again, I saw that the flesh of her neck was silvered wit
h sweat already, her shirt dampened under the arms. She was laughing and loving the waves of appreciation. She danced lightly under them a moment, bent her head and lifted it several times, now this way, now that. Then she turned her back to us, I heard her thumping out a beat: “two . . . three . . . four!” and she spun around as the noise began again. The dance-floor people were moving nearly against Daniel and me. I turned back to him and yelled, “She looks so happy!”

  “What?” His hand cupped his ear.

  We leaned together, and I shrieked, “She’s happy!”

  He pulled back, nodding. He agreed.

  We sat through the whole first set. Cass sang the lead in most of the songs. There was one instrumental, and on two of the other songs the men sang. (Was that dark one Raimondo? I wondered, or was Raimondo just a white boy with a dark name?) When it was Cassie’s turn, she howled and wailed and shrieked and grunted, but it was strong and powerful music if you gave yourself over to it, and her voice was the center of all of it, lifting from a growl to a clear, pure singing, and then back again effortlessly. When you watched her, it seemed it must be agony—the body hunkered to keep her mouth to the mike, her face contorted, the bobbing, skipping dance she did when she moved with the beat. But if you closed your eyes and just listened, you could hear that she was utterly in control. Her wild response to the applause after every number was a kind of agreement with it: I was great, wasn’t I?

  She came to sit with us during the break, a towel around her neck. The crowd parted to let her pass and followed her with eager, friendly eyes. We ordered her a beer. She let me kiss her. Her shirt was soaked, her hair wetted into little points around her face.

  “You were wonderful, Cass,” I told her. “I’m so proud.”

  Daniel said something to her on her other side, and she turned to him. He moved over and made room for her to sit between us. But this meant, in the din, that she had to talk to one of us at a time in order to be heard and to hear. Basically, she chose Daniel, and I thought of what Sadie had said to me the night of the party—that the twins found Daniel easier. In the noisy bar, an image from another life occurred to me: Daniel standing behind the glass storm door of our first apartment, holding both little girls as I went down the walk to work in my scrubs and sneakers. They were wailing, crying, and I could hear his murmuring voice under that, trying to make them call goodbye, trying to reassure them. I’d turned and made an amused grimace, which he mirrored—I could see his pale face through the glass, the squirming, miserable twins in his arms. And then I turned away. While they called to me and cried, I walked away. I went to work, and as soon as the routine of my long, hard day began, I forgot them. I forgot them. My choice, surely.

  Now Cass turned back to me. “Thanks for coming, Mom.”

  We’d told her ahead of time we could stay only for one set; it would take us several hours to get home. Besides, she was leaving right after the show. She was driving to Concord, New Hampshire, tonight. They had a bed there, a gig the next night.

  “I loved it, dear,” I said. “I was so impressed.”

  “I think I’ll be home for a few days at Christmas,” she said. “If that’s okay.”

  “More than okay.”

  “What?”

  “More than okay,” I yelled. “Great.”

  “Oh, good.” She slid off her stool. “Well,” she said. And she kissed Daniel quickly, and me, and then was gone.

  The thick, snowy rain was welcome after the smokiness of the bar. The silence of the street too. I heard our smallest noises magnified. Wetted footfall, the car door opening and then slamming, the metallic clicking of our seat belts. The rustling of our clothes. The slow tick of the battery clock on the dashboard before Daniel started the engine.

  “She was really good, wasn’t she?” Daniel said. We were on the highway now.

  “She was. I loved watching her.”

  “I’m exhausted by it, though,” he said. I looked over. Why did he have to say that? It made me suddenly tired, too, and before, I had felt only exhilarated.

  We drove on, not talking. I nearly dozed once or twice, turned away from Daniel, looking out the dotted windows at the whir of black trees against the bruised gray sky. I had the sensation you have as a child, that I was the one holding still while they were rushing by me, going somewhere.

  And then I realized with a shock that snapped me wide awake that what I was feeling was a bitter sorrow with my life, a sharp envy for Cass. That I wanted to have what she was having—to have had, anyway, what she was having. That I wanted to be standing at the center of my life in hot lights, moving in ecstasy to music that crashed around me, that came from me, that linked me to others. That I wanted to be turning and dancing and laughing under the caressing waves of applause. That I wanted to be driving with the band through the rain down some nameless country road to a place where I’d never been before. That I wanted to be making love slowly and elaborately in the parked van in a dark city alley, listening to the hitched breathing of the others while they sat back and watched.

  CHAPTER

  10

  I had lists for the holidays, and every day I tried to check off two or three items. Get pecans for baking. Order a goose for Christmas Day. Find warm slippers for Sadie. Another day, another list: for Cass, buy the secondhand jeans jacket I’d seen at the church resale shop, with a sinuous red dragon embroidered on its back. Pick up the personal stationery I’d ordered for Daniel, and get cards while there at the shop. Drop in at Layton’s for the trailing, romantic shawl in the window—far too expensive, no doubt, but then it was Christmas, and Nora had expensive taste.

  Beattie and I and sometimes Mary Ellen sat together at lunch behind the counter these wintry days, with the sign in the window turned to say CLOSED. The boarding dogs sat rigid at our feet in case a crumb should fall their way, but the effect was of great attentiveness to our conversations. Occasionally when I looked at them, seemingly so riveted to our easy banalities, I had to laugh.

  Mostly these days we talked about how much we had to do. Beattie was making a doll’s wardrobe for a favorite great-niece, and she described this to me one day in elaborate detail—the playsuit with matching bloomers, the party dress, the wool coat and beret, the sundress. “Two tiny pockets in the skirt,” she said, “and I made the most cunning little hankie that tucks into one, just the points showing, like that.” She made a minuscule church steeple with the tips of her fingers.

  “You are a good person, Beattie,” I said. “It’s store-bought for me all the way.”

  “Well, you’re very busy,” she said. She burped daintily, her hand over her mouth. She’d been eating carrot sticks, slowly, in a rabbity, swivel-jawed way. After a moment, she said, “Still, I think there’s nothing like something you make yourself.” Never one to avoid the backhanded insult.

  “Mmm,” I agreed.

  “Edith, now. She’s sending people that TV-shopping junk she ordered for herself. I shouldn’t criticize, I’m glad to get rid of anything I can, but doesn’t that seem kinda mean to you? Of course, it’s all still in the boxes and the tissue and whatnot, so they’ll never know, but it’s not the same.”

  No, I said. It certainly wasn’t.

  I moved efficiently through my days. Daniel was especially busy now, as he always was in the church’s Advent season. There were extra choir performances. There were almost nightly prayer meetings, as well as several community events to prepare for and stage, including a huge party where gifts were given out to the needy and elderly. There was a children’s pageant, calling for many rehearsals. The girls had always loved this. First when they could be in it, as a shepherd or a wise man or an angel or, best yet, the Virgin Mary. Later because the pageant used a live sheep and donkey and there was the excitement of waiting for the inevitable and deeply hysterical accident. Daniel loved everything in this happy season, and he was cheerful through the long days in his slightly distracted way.

  And I was grateful. Because for all the busyness,
all the extra cooking, all the ticking off of chores to be done, what I was thinking of was Eli Mayhew, of his quick call to me the day after we saw Cass, and of next Sunday, when I would meet him for coffee. There had been some urgency in his voice, I thought, and this excited me. I wondered what it suggested, what it might lead to.

  Sometimes what I imagined was simply more of what we’d glancingly already had—talk. But sometimes I let myself think that the talk would become more private over time, even intimate. He would become a dear friend, a confidant. And our spouses? Oh, they would know about and respect our intimacy, maybe even be mildly amused by its intensity, its power—Daniel’s ill will was somehow easily vanquished in this fantasy. Or never considered.

  Occasionally, though, my imagination offered up the more predictable outcome: an affair. I would remember touching Eli at the clinic and again at my party—the density of his body, its heavy heat, so different from Daniel. I would see again the slow turn of his beautiful young body toward me in the steamy bathroom long ago. Like a greeting.

  And then I would dismiss it. Coffee. Coffee and talk on a winter Sunday morning while Daniel was at church. That was all.

  I had suggested the Pennock Inn, two towns over. What I had said to Eli on the phone was that it was prettier, nicer than the town inn, but as soon as I hung up I had to acknowledge that I’d chosen it mostly so we wouldn’t run into people who knew us. Who knew me, in particular, since Eli knew hardly anyone yet.

  When I arrived, there were only two other tables occupied in the dining room. I actually looked, I checked to see that neither held someone I knew. Eli was sitting by himself, next to the window overlooking the falls. He’d been watching for me: he waved as soon as the hostess pointed him out, as soon as my eyes fell on him.

  I was late. Sadie had called just as I was leaving the house. As I sat, I was apologizing, breathlessly. I explained further as I removed my coat, as he signaled the waitress, as I ordered my first cup of coffee and he his second. I was, in fact, babbling, talking about Sadie, her adoration of Jean, her need to be in touch often this first year of college. Behind him, through the crazed, bubbled panes of old glass, I could see the gun-colored waterfall rushing down between ice-covered rocks.