While I Was Gone (11 page)

“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 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.

“Ab. 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 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 again 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 Mlvaldi, and the volume was radically reduced.

When I came down, Dana looked over at me in the mirror above the fireplace. She was standing alone in the room now—the others had disappeared. Her hair had been cut off to a length of about two or three inches all around her head. Freed from its own weight, it rose in thick waves around her face, waves that still showed the sharp line of the scissors’ path. She turned around. She looked stricken, like a child who has barbered herself and is waiting for her mother’s response.

I crossed the room, lifted my hands to her hair, and touched the ends. Then I ruffled it up, fluffed it this way and that. It was a terrible, cruel haircut, but Dana herself didn’t look bad.

“You need to let me fix the ends,” I said.

“What do you think?” she asked. She turned to herself in the mirror.

“Why did I do it?” she whispered.

And I realized, looking at our reflections together, that though no one could miss how badly chopped at the hair was, the cut itself increased Dana’s beauty. Next to her, I—who’d resembled her so closely—looked conventional, merely girlish in my long straight hair.

Dana’s bones seemed to have sprung free from some pull, their Slavic force announced itself.

“It’s going to be fine,” I told her. Her eyes were wide in fear.

“It’s going to be better than fine,” I said.

“Wait up for me. I know.

Wash it and wait up for me. I’ll even it out.”

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

“Dana, did you hear me? You’re going to look great.”

“Am I?” she said. And then she turned suddenly.

“Oh, look!” she cried.

“Here it is, all my hair!” She’d gathered it and piled it on the wooden box between the couches.

“Maybe I should try to glue it back on! Maybe I can weave a toupee!” She laughed fiercely. Then she looked at me.

“No, seriously,” she said.

“Would you like a lock of it?”

Before I thought, I answered, “God, what for? No!”

And then I saw she’d meant it, though she looked more puzzled than hurt by my answer.

“Oh!” she said.

“Well, I just thought maybe.”

SARA AND I WERE GOING TO BE THE ONLY TWO THERE FOR

Christmas dinner. Dana was in Chicopee, John in Chicago with his parents. (Within a week or so of his return he would move out, though Sara knew nothing of this yet. I had guessed at the possibility, since I was the witness to the furtive comings and goings of the new woman by day.) Duncan had flown to the West Coast on a red-eye special to spend the holidays with his girlfriend, Larry had gone to Iarlborough Street with all the enthusiasm of someone about to have a lethal injection, and Eli was working but planned to join us later for dessert.

Sara and I each had only the day itself off, but in addition, neither of us had anyplace to go. Sara was estranged from her parents, wealthy San Franciscans, and Licia Stead’s parents were, of course, dead.

We had planned the meal carefully, our way of staying cheerful about all this. Roast chicken, mashed potatoes, peas—frozen, of course—and, at Sara’s insistence, creamed onions.

“You cannot have Christmas dinner without creamed onions.” We had stayed up late the night before, baking and decorating cookies for dessert. We’d decorated the living room, too, with paper chains we’d made and strung around the walls.

We’d wanted a tree but were appalled to discover how expensive one would be.

From time to time through the day’s preparations, I’d been overwhelmed by an unaccountable homesickness, and after we’d put the bird in to roast, I went to the upstairs hall and called my mother.

It was about noon. Her dinner, if she was having one, wouldn’t start for several hours. After five or six rings, she answered, sounding far away and therefore old and weak.

“Mother?” I said.

“It’sJo.”

“Josie!” Her voice rang out with a pure surprise, even joy, that unexpectedly made my throat cotton, made me sorry I hadn’t written her a second time and reassured her that I was all right.

When she spoke again, she’d composed hers el Her voice was dry.

“Well, I suppose I should say Merry Christmas.”

” “Well, that’s why I called, Mother. To say Merry Christmas to you.” I had composed myself too.

“And I wondered how you are.

What are you doing? For Christmas?” I asked, as though this were the kind of question that existed between us.

“Oh, Jo.” She didn’t want to make small ulk with me and this made her sound irritated.

“Well, your brother’s here,” she finally said, grudgingly.

“Nice,” I said.

“And the kids?”

“Yes. Of course, Jo.”

“Nice. Sounds like fun.”

She didn’t answer.

“Tell me how you are, Mom.”

“I don’t want to, Josie. I’m too mad at you, if you want to know the truth.”

“Well, that tells me something about how you are.” The wires between us fogged and ticked.

Finally she said, “When are you going home? What you’re doing isn’t right.”

“But I need to do it anyway.”

She made a snorting sound.

“There’s needing things and there’s wanting things, and you’re mixing up the two.”

I didn’t answer for a moment. Then I said, “I called to wish you Merry Christmas, Mom.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear your voice. I’m glad to know you’re alive.

But I tell you what, Jo—I don’t want you to call me again until you’re back at home, where you belong. That’s just the way I feel.”

“Over and out,” I said. I was angry, too, now.

“Goodbye, then, Josie.”

“Bye, Mom.”

I sat in the upstairs hall for some minutes. Sara was singing carols in the kitchen. I’d noted a tendency with her to drift toward the ones in a minor key—“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”—or to the later, sadder, and more obscure verses of familiar ones, “Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dyyyyyying, / Sealed in a stone-cold tomb.”

What was I smelling? Sage, rosemary for remembrance, the nostalgic herbs of family meals, of feasts of celebration with others.

I felt a wave of the purest self-pity. Tears rose in my throat. And then I made myself think it, I had chosen this, I had wanted it. It was I who was hurting others in my life, not the other way around.

“I, I, I, I,

I, I, I,” I

whispered savagely. Downstairs, I heard Sara say, “Whoops!” and then, almost simultaneously, a loud, wet-sounding crash.

We finished eating about three-thirty, finished cleaning up sometime after four. We played a game of Scrabble and were almost done when Eli got home. He helped us set the table again, for dessert.

While we were still sitting there with cookies and coffee, Larry arrived, loud and cheerful and smelling of “postprandial cigars,” as he called them. He was carrying a liquor carton, in which he had wine and ice cream and most of a pumpkin pie. The wine was real, in bottles, not jugs. We searched everywhere, but there was no corkscrew.

Larry remembered, he had a Swiss army knife in his room, with, he thought, a tiny corkscrew on one end. He ran up and got it, and indeed, it did have a tiny, inadequate-looking curlicue you could unfold from its red body.