While I Was Gone (25 page)

“They were probably grateful to get the gig. Providence must be the big time for them, wouldn’t you think?” I’d been feeling irritated with Daniel for the last few days, ever since our dinner at Eli and Jean’s. The evening there had been uncomfortable, so much so that Daniel had announced afterward that if I wanted to see Eli Mayhew again, I should do it on my own. I blamed Daniel for the way it had gone, I was annoyed at him.

There was a raw rain falling outside—there had been for the whole drive east. Now that our wipers were off, it blurred our view of the street.

“Here we go,” I said. A group of people was approaching, you could hear their voices drawing nearer under the rain’s thrumming on the car. A girl shrieked with laughter. There were six or seven of them. A few had umbrellas, but most were in parkas with the hoods pulled forward, hiding their faces.

“Come on,” I crooned to them all.

“Come to Cassie.”

They did. They stopped at the bar, and when they opened the door, there was a confusion of music and voices that floated out to us.

“Gee, it’s alive in there anyway,” Daniel said.

“Let’s go. At least now we know we won’t be the first.”

I had started to move away from the car when Daniel called over to me, “Lock it.”

He was right, of course, it was a rough neighborhood, but somehow I felt annoyed with him for thinking of it and for his peremptory tone—one in a series of what I knew very well were petty grievances I could have been said to be collecting against him over the last few days, He stood up one evening in the middle of something I was saying to him and began to pick up the bits of wet leaf one of the dogs had tracked into the living room. I overheard him on the phone passing judgment on a movie we’d seen in exactly my words, without crediting me. Even the blood-specked tissue stuck on a shaving cut one morning got on the list, and the familiar, theatrical groan as he rose from a living room chair. I knew these were absurdly small-minded, I knew they weren’t, in some sense, real. I knew anyone could have made a similar list about anyone else. About me, for instance. I knew, but somehow once I started, I couldn’t stop myself.

The club was warm and cheerfully noisy as we entered, the sound like a thick substance you moved through—a combination of canned music and shouted conversation. The room was long and narrow.

There was a bar running along one side, up to where, on a lighted, raised platform, the mikes and stools and drums were set up. A solitary fat bass rested against the wall. The place was two-thirds full, mostly with young people sitting jammed in at the little round wooden tables.

A few people were at the bar. Singletons, I remembered from my waitress days.

The jukebox was playing a loud song, hard and driving and anti melodic a male voice shouting the Lyrics, in accusation after accusation. A lone young woman was moving dreamily on what must have been the dance floor, a small open area in front of the bandstand, looking seraphic, so at peace, she seemed to be dancing to a tune other than the one playing.

Daniel and I went to the front of the room, searching for a table from which we might be able to see the bandstand easily, but they were all full up there. We decided, leaning toward each other and shouting, to sit at the near end of the bar. Better than a table anyway, we concluded, if people were going to be dancing right in front of the musicians.

“What, beer?” Daniel yelled at me when the bartender came over and pushed napkins at us. He, anyway, seemed not to care that we were the oldest people in the room—a big-jawed man who hung his face out at us and nodded once when Daniel gave him the order. The young people around us deliberately hadn’t registered us, as though we were profoundly handicapped, somehow difficult or embarrassing to look at.

The beer tasted wonderful, sharp and deeply bitter. I was ravenous, suddenly. I asked Daniel to order nuts or chips or something.

“Which?” he yelled.

“Anything!” I shouted back.

I’d BEEN NERVOUS ABOUT THE EVENING AT ELI S, BUT IT HAD started well enough, Jean had cut her hair, and this gave us all something immediate to talk about. She looked elegant, and I said so.

It was as though she were wearing a trim, wavy cap on her head.

“I hate it,” Eli said. He was helping me off with my coat in the entry hall. The floor was slate, I noted, as water from our boots pooled on it.

“Why do they do it?” he’d asked Daniel, who looked up from heeling his boots off, blank and polite.

“Women,” Eli explained, gesturing at Jean and me.

“Why do they take what’s so lovely and—chop!—get rid of it?”

I had thought of Dana then, looking at herself in the mirror over the fireplace.

“Why did I do it?” she asks me.

“We do it because it’s easier,” Jean had said.

“Same reason men have short hair.” Looking at her as she spoke, I realized she was as transformed as Dana had been, everything about her could be understood differently. She suddenly had a flapper’s careless glamour.

“The hell with ease,” he said.

“Tell you what. Grow it back and I’ll brush it for you, or shampoo it, or whatever it is that makes it harder.”

“Oh, Eli, as if you were ever even here.”

He laughed.

“I’ve been on the road all fall, lecturing and conferencing,” he said to Daniel as we moved into the living room. I trailed Jean with the wine we’d brought.

Daniel was asking Eli about his travels as we settled ourselves.

There was a fire going in the large stone fireplace. I looked around.

The room was huge, wainscoted to eye level with some reddish wood. Cherry, most likely. I sat on a black leather couch, Daniel in a deep plush chair. Jean had taken the wine from me, with thanks, and was pouring for us now from a bottle already open on the coffee table. Two huge abstract paintings, full of bold bands of color, stood propped against the wall. They weren’t going to fit above the wainscoting.

“I was supposed to be gathering my strength with the sabbatical,” Eli was saying.

“Getting ready to launch myself anew. Instead I’ve completely dissipated it. I’ve shot my wad. But it’s been fun.” He laughed.

“Hard on Jean though.” He’d sat down in a chair next to the fireplace.

“Made her so mad she cut her damned hair off.”

“God, the egocentwism of the guy! Here you go,” she said, handing me my glass, Daniel his.

“Sometimes,” she said to Eli, lifting her own glass in his direction, “a haircut is just a haircut.”

Daniel laughed, his face moved into a rictus of false pleasure. He was being too polite. I sensed right away that there was something in Eli’s manner—in Eli—he didn’t like, maybe that mocking, ironic tone, maybe his ease around Jean and me, a kind of possession he seemed to take of us, of the situation. The alpha male. In any case, Daniel was being over careful, solicitous. Now he was asking what Eli was doing on the road, what he’d been lecturing on—and so I, too, found out that he was working with something called nerve growth factor.

Something that could regenerate damaged nerves in the brain. That the focus of his work might eventually be Alzheimer’s disease, or spinal injuries.

“Transport’s our area.”

“Transport?” Daniel asked.

“Getting the stuff where it needs to go. Right now you have to apply it directly, because the brain has such an efficient defense mechanism against toxins—and in this case, useful drugs. And that means surgery. Brain surgery.” He shook his head.

“Which is hardly practical for a disease population of any size. So we’re looking for alternate ways.” He smiled at Daniel.

“Alternate routes. I’m the transportation planner for the brain.” He leaned forward and stirred the fire with the poker.

“If I ever get to work again.”

Jean began to speak. She had questions about the town, she said.

A list, actually. Would we mind? No, fire away, I said. And she did.

Where did we shop for groceries? What were the best dry cleaners?

Were there good local restaurants? She’d noticed we had a piano-did we know a tuner? A dentist?

We gave her information, told tales on our neighbors.

The dentist who’d survived a mid life crisis by training as a lay therapist, who stuffed your mouth with cotton and then earnestly asked you how you felt about your sexuality, about your parents. The eccentric chef at the tiny French restaurant, who could be heard weeping in the kitchen if things were not achieving the requisite level of perfection.

We moved around seemingly with ease from topic to topic through the evening—the party at our house, who the various guests were.

My work, Arthur. Dogs in general. Dogs versus cats. Adams Mills, Jean’s and Sadie’s school. Throughout it all, Daniel maintained his civility, the reserve I’d noted earlier.

“Do tell,” he said once, and I raised my eyebrows and made a face at him. If I could make him laugh at himself, maybe he’d notice how ridiculous he was being, maybe he’d relax.

“Do tell?” I wanted to say. But I didn’t dare.

Halfway through dinner, Eli turned to him.

“Jo tells me you’re a preacher.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s an interesting line of work.” I watched Daniel’s thin smile.

“I’m wondering how you got into it.”

“Oh, I suppose in many ways it was similar to how you got into your line of work.” I tensed.

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, middleaged 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.