While I Was Gone (30 page)

“I had a weird dream.”

MIs ions of sugar plums.”

“No.” I smiled.

“No.” And then I thought better of telling him.

“Actually, I can hardly remember it.”

But I did. It was a dream that was familiar to me, though it took various forms. Usually I was still married to my first husband, or Daniel in some way us Ted. This time it had been in a strange, messy house, unrecognizable, and Ted/ Daniel kept starting to make love to me, sliding his hand deep into my pants, touching me. I’d woken in the night feeling aroused, bigamous.

“I like it when I can’t quite remember dreams,” Daniel said.

“When I feel my brain has its own private life that I don’t necessarily have access to.”

“But if you worked at it, you could reach them. Freud says so.”

“Does he?” Daniel said.

“Well, the hell with Freud, I say. I say let the secret life be the secret life.”

I laughed and raised my coffee cup.

“Hear, hear.”

He reached over to pat my leg.

“There, there,” he said.

Then we both got up, he to shave, I to finish the stuffing and to prepare our big family breakfast. As I sailed the folded white cloth into the air and it bellied out over the table, it caught the first sure shafts of sunlight falling into the room and sank dazzlingly down, like the descent of a blessing, I thought, and I willed myself to record it, to remember.

EARLY THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER WE’d UNWRAPPED THE PRESents and put the dinner in the oven to cook, Daniel took me ice skating We hadn’t gone in several years, but they’d just flooded the town green and the ice was new and smooth.

I was not a good skater. Daniel was, and he glided around and around the edge of the ice, a slim, boyish figure at this distance, bent low, stwoking steadily, easily crossing one foot over the other as he swept round the curves. I pushed my slow way up and back, stopping every few trips to rest my sagging ankles and tensed legs by sitting on the wooden bench at the edge of the ice. From here I could see the front of the Congregational church, and behind it, modestly peeping around its corner, our house, in its regularity like a picture of old New England. Smoke puffed from the chimney, we’d left the sleepy, sated girls still in their bathrobes by the fire.

At last Daniel skated up to me, with a flourish of sprayed ice.

“Shall we?” he said, and opened his arms to receive me. I slid forward, and he took my hand in one of his and put his arm around my waist. We pushed off, and after a few faltering steps, I got his rhythm. I began to lean with him, now this way, now that. Daniel powered us, his legs pumping hard, his arm around me transferring his strength to me, giving my strokes length and reach. We rode across the smooth, gleaming ice under the bare maple branches, up toward the church with its long pointing steeple, back toward the houses facing it, their doors hung with festive wreaths, Christmas lights twinkling in a few windows. The wind we generated stung my nose and cheeks, but I was exhilarated. Up and back we went, leaning steeply into the curve at each end.

I felt young and strong, I felt I could have gone on like this forever, with just the sound of the rushing air and the skate blades slicing the ice, so that when Daniel let go of my hand and dropped back away from me to skate off again, I wasn’t ready for my own sudden heaviness, the stump like thickness of my limbs. I stopped dead in the middle of the gunmetal pond. Daniel danced by me, running, leaping, now that he was free of my dragging weight. He was showing off, spinning as he passed, landing on one skate, bending balletically.

I felt lumpen, old, and stiff. I turned around and around in the center of the pond, watching him circle me, full of a childish rage at him but also wanting to call him back, to stop him. To ask, somehow, for his help.

C HAPTE R

CAN YOU HAVE A DRINK? ELI ASKED. ARE YOU DRIVING

back this afternoon?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. What I’d told Daniel was that I was meeting Lauren Howe, a friend from Maine, and might spend the night if it got too late.

“I may stay over. In any case, yes. A drink.”

He raised his hand, a peremptory gesture, I saw.

Authoritative. A gesture that assumed. It excited me, this small thing, the way in adolescence seeing a boy’s big hands on the steering wheel of a car had excited me. Something about their power, their control over my situation, over my life. Something foolish, even willfully foolish.

The waiter came and took our order.

We were sitting by the tinted window in the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Boston. On the crowded sidewalk outside the plate glass, pedestrians hurried past, huddled against the cold. The Public Garden loomed dark and mysteriously beautiful across the street. There had been skaters on the frozen duck pond when I got out of the car, and tinny waltz music floating thinly in the darkening air.

“I’m glad you called,” he said.

“I am too.” Though I had felt almost frightened by the sight of him in the doorway, his face questioning the waiter and then opening in what seemed like pleasure as he saw me across the dimly lighted room.

“I’d been meaning to for a while,” I said, “but life’s been chaotic. As I predicted.”

“A nice chaos, though, as I imagine it.”

“It was. It was fun. But it was a relief when everyone left.” Sadie had gone back to school just three days earlier, after a long holiday break.

“I’m sure.”

The drinks came and we wordlessly raised our glasses to each other. In the corner, the group of men in dark suits suddenly laughed, loudly. My bourbon tasted smoky and thick.

Eli had begun to talk, speaking of the pleasure of being in the lab again—he’d come from there to meet me—of getting things set up.

He said he had stayed late in town twice the week before, he talked about the seductive quality of the solitude, about how he’d always loved the lab at night. He shook his head.

“Finally there’s nothing like work, is there?” he said.

I was thinking of him as a young man. The worker bee, we’d nicknamed him. I smiled.

“I can’t imagine a life without it,” I said.

“Retirement. Doesn’t that seem improbable?”

He agreed.

“Impossible, in fact,” he said. He spoke of a restless irritability that had overtaken him at some point late in the fall, like something physical, “like a nervous disorder. In spite of the fact that I was doing a kind of work, dashing around lecturing and attending conferences. It’s not the same, though.”

I sympathized. I talked about the way I felt walking into the clinic.

About the sense I sometimes had of being lifted out of ordinary life, of leaving it behind.

“Of course, it’S different in my work,” I said.

“There is no solitude. I mean, I have the animals, with their own personalities and lives. Their own life stories, really.”

He smiled.

“I suppose,” he said.

“Sure. Arthur had one, after all. For me, though…” He paused, looked out the window a moment.

“For me, work has been my life story, I think.” He was speaking more slowly than usual and without that lightness in tone which normally undercut the possibility of seriousness in whatever he was saying.

“Or perhaps a kind of substitute for a life story. I think of myself as a scientist first, before I’m a man, really. That’s why I think .

Well, when I spoke to you about Jean about our separateness, that’s why that’s so important to me. Because it frees me for what’s most central.” He looked sharply at me.

“I’ve tried to make my life count, and I think I have. I think, honestly, that the world is a better place because of the work I’ve done. And that’s everything to me.”

I smiled. Why? Because this was grandiose, but also, I think, highminded. I wasn’t used to such shameless highmindedness.

avoided it, I suppose because highmindedness combined with piety is such a deadly combination.

He saw the smile.

“You think I’m being immodest,” he accused.

“I’m not, I assure you. Crossing this blood-brain barrier is pivotal, absolutely pivotal, to curing all kinds of diseases.” He lifted his hands and began to count them off, finger by finger.

“Cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, even spinal cord injuries. All of them will have treatments eventually—soon. Some do already. But no way of getting them across the natural blockade in the brain.” And he began carefully to explain to me the applications of his work, its importance in various of these treatments. It made me think of the night when he’d explained his research to me on Lyman Street and of my sense then of seeing a different Eli. The Eli he’d become, I thought, watching him now.

The Eli he’d grown into.

He was talking about the impenetrability of the capillaries in the brain, their lack of porousness, what he called the “tight junctions” between cells. He talked about some other approaches for getting drugs across, temporarily shrinking the cells lining the capillaries so the drugs could, for a short period of time, pass through. Or surgically implanting them.

“But the most efficient way, the way that will help the maximum number of people—and will have application with the maximum number of drugs—is what we’re trying to do with nerve growth factor. Essentially it’s like smuggling it across,” he said.

“You get a molecule that’s allowed to cross, one with its own transport system, and you ask it to be your mule.” He grinned.

“To carry along the molecule you want to get in there.”

It seemed of great importance to him that I understand all this, and so I took care to be sure I did. The exchange was, for me, exciting, in part intellectually, but in part also because I sensed he might be wooing me with this. At one point he actually took his pen out and drew on a napkin the way the transport proteins ferried substances across from the bloodstream to the brain cells waiting outside the capillaries.

The black ink trembled and blotted on the soft paper.

I was aware of the beginning of a kind of physical restlessness in myself, an eagerness that was not yet fully sexual but could be, I could tell. I was titillated by Eli’s seriousness, by his clarity about his work, by the work itself, truly. What else? By his reference again to the separateness in his marriage. Even by the way he spoke my name as he explained things.

So it seemed somehow an interruption in everything when he suddenly sat back, looking intently at me, and said, “Do you mind if we talk about Dana?”

But then I realized that of course this was part of our intimacy too.

Of course we would. When I first thought about seeing him again-when Jean brought Arthur to me—that was exactly what I’d assumed we’d speak of sooner or later, Dana, the past, who we were then.

“No,” I said.

“No, I’d like that.” This will slow us down, I thought.

Yes, let’s slow down. Nothing has to happen. Nothing.

“It’s wonderful to think of having someone to talk about her with, actually. After all this time.”

He looked out the window for a long moment. And then at me, with an expression on his face I couldn’t read. He said, “Did you know she and I had been lovers?”

“Yes. Dana told me that.”

“Did she?” He seemed, momentarily, surprised.

“Well, she told everyone everything, didn’t she?” He shook his head, fondly.

“She was the second woman I’d slept with, in my meager sexual life of the time.

I was terribly in love with her.”

“that I didn’t know.”

“No one did. Including Dana, strangely enough.”

“So you just—what? Sat on it? Kept it secret?”

“No. No, I tried to tell her. I did tell her. That’s the ‘strangely enough’ part. Because in some sense she didn’t hear me. She wouldn’t hear me. She… Well, she was a very powerful person in some ways, you know. What she wanted was for us to be friends. Just plain old friends. That’s how she thought of us. So”—he made a face—“that’s what we were.” His hands were cradling the squat glass his drink had come in, sliding it a few inches back and forth across the tabletop.

“It was she who brought me into the house, did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“Yes.” He nodded.

“And at first, foolishly, I thought it was another kind of invitation.” He smiled, his self-mocking smile.

“This was after you were lovers, or before?” I was confused.

“When, exactly, were you lovers?”

He laughed, and I could feel my face lift in response.

“Yes,” he said.

“Let me tell you my story. I guess I do have a story, after all. A complicated story, in fact.”

He sipped from his drink and set it back down. He’d met her, he told me, at the Peabody Museum. He felt so socially awkward at that stage of his life that he ate there regularly in order to avoid having to eat with or talk to anyone from his lab or his department. Dana was there one day, moving behind the glass cases, a beautiful tall woman with thick blond hair reaching halfway down her back. She was alone, sketching the animals, their strange skeletal structures.

“The slotzD loris,” he said, with a peculiar emphasis.

“The honey possum.”

I smiled again, I’m not sure why.

She saw him watching her. She waved to him, he imitated her gesture, a slow curling in of separated fingers. A day or two later she was there again, and she came up to him this time and they talked.

“She talked,” he said.

“I was overwhelmed.” She said if he came often for lunch she’d see him again, that that’s when she usually came in too.

And so she did. Once, twice. And by the next week, she’d invited him back to the house with her and they’d made love in her room.

He paused, watching his hands move the glass again.

“I

don’t know that she was much interested in her own pleasure. My later experience tells me she might not have been.” He looked up at me.

“But she loved giving pleasure, in ways that were to me, then… astounding.”

He grinned.

“And even now, thinking back, certainly most accomplished.

But she zvanted, I think, to be amazing. I don’t know. She wanted to do everything, every time. To use up all of herself, all of you. To a person like me…” He lifted his hands.