While I Was Gone (27 page)

I laughed.

“Well, we’re not out of the woods yet.”

The waitress brought my coffee and refilled Eli’s cup. We waited.

When she’d left, he said, “I regret it.” He shook his head.

“No kids.”

“Do you? Well, you married so late.”

“I did. It was hard, surprisingly hard”—he smiled mockingly—“to find an absolutely perfect person.”

“I congratulate you.” I raised my cup.

“She is perfection, I know this from Sadie. And it’s plain, of course, as the nose on my face.” I sipped the coffee. It was not quite warm enough.

“Well, as it happens, she is perfect for me.”

“Which means?”

He looked up in surprise. He saw it was a serious question, and his mobile face screwed up in thought.

“Well, I guess that Jean and I have a certain… distance from each other. That sounds cold, and I don’t mean it to. But each of us has his life, a very separate life.

We’re used to being solitary, we each lived alone for so long. We leave each other room. A lot of room. It is distance.” He lifted his hands. He was wearing an expensive-looking, loosely woven tweed jacket.

“Maybe that’s privilege of the childless marriage.”

“It might be.” I tilted my cup slightly back and forth in its saucer and watched the surface of brown liquid shift.

“Somehow, over the years, Daniel and I have become—I don’t know—sort of mired in each other. I can not notice him too easily. It’s as though we’re two halves of something.” I looked up at him.

“You know what I liked? I liked the way Jean stood off from you a little the other night, made fun of you in a way, and spoke of you… theatrically, I guess. Certainly distantly.

So she could make us all more comfortable when you and Daniel were headed for that little…”

“Explosion?”

“Oh, Daniel never explodes. Contretemps. Let us say contretemps.”

“Well, if we must.”

I laughed, too loudly. It sounded harsh and artificial in the nearly empty room, and the three women at the table closest to us looked over and then leaned in to speak to each other.

I shifted in my chair.

“Anyhow,” I said, “I admired the way she pulled that off. Daniel would never put up with my speaking of him so distantly in his presence.”

“What would he do?”

“Oh, step forward. Speak for himself. Correct me. I don’t know.” I felt suddenly uncomfortable.

“I’m not criticizing him. Just trying to say how things are different in our marriage.” I shrugged. We both looked away, at the falling foamy water. Distantly through the window you could hear its steady thunder.

When Eli spoke again, his voice was lowered.

“You must be wondering why I called you.”

I looked over at him. His eyes were on me, those eyes that used to watch and watch. They seemed smaller now, less needful, more amused. It made him look less soulful than he had looked in the past, but sexier.

“Well, yes, a bit,” I said.

He leaned forward.

“But seeing me, meeting me again, must have done the same thing for you that it did for me.”

I blushed. I could feel the heat in my face, a sudden parch in my eyes.

“Maybe so,” I said. Perhaps he had been imagining, too, the various ways our relationship might play out.

But then he smiled and said, “It brought back that whole time, which I’d felt I left pretty much behind.”

After a beat, I said, “And that’s what you wanted to do?

To leave it behind?”

“God, yes!” He laughed with his mouth closed, a funny snorting sound.

“Didn’t you?”

Well, of course I had. I had rushed from it into all that I had now.

And then only slowly begun to yearn back. I shrugged.

“I loved it.

In a way. I mean, I know it ended so badly for all of us. But I felt so free. So carefree. Relatively speaking. I suppose mostly what I’m saying is that I felt young. Young and passionate and a little reckless.”

“See, I hated all that.” His face, registering feeling so transparently, shifted, grimaced, as though he’d tasted something sour.

“Feeling so at the mercy of all that.”

“Did you? Were you? At its mercy? I never thought of you that way.” I had thought of him as exactly the opposite. Careful.

Steady.

Gray. An image of his face across the dining room table occurred to me, watching us with his steady, calm eyes. Watching.

“Very much. Very much. And I wanted… everything.” He laughed.

“To be loved, but to be alone. Because I was only truly comfortable by myself. To be great in science, but not to be, God forbid, a scientist. I think I mentioned that before, how agonized I was—torn, really—about all that. I mean, I loved science, but I could tell it cut me off from the world I wanted to be in. From all of you, certainly.”

He looked out the window.

“My problem was I could understand that,

, I

too, or at least understand where it came from, that sense of science as betrayer. I mean, with Dow Chemical and napalm and the sense of imminent nuclear disaster—everything that was in the air generally.”

He smiled grimly at me now and made a fist in the air.

“But it also pisses me off now just to think about it—the stupid, anti scientific romanticism of that era.” He frowned for a moment.

“I think that might be part of why I react so badly now to people like your husband, like Daniel. Smart people who won’t accept the implications of science into their thinking.”

I started to say something, to defend Daniel, but he opened his hand to StOp me.

“Look, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to get into that again.

It was bad enough to have antagonized him when he was a guest in my home. All I mean to say is that I was unhappy then, when we lived together. I felt… tormented a good deal of the time.”

After a moment, I said, “I’m so sorry to hear that.” I sipped at my coffee.

“I thought of you as happy. Content anyway. I would have said that then, I think. Content.”

“Content!? With what?”

“Well, you had your work. Of all the members of the house, I would have said you were surest about that, most committed to it.

And you liked the house, I thought.” I set my cup down.

“And we all liked you well enough.”

“Stop right there. Well enough. That’s it, I’m afraid. Who in their right mind wants to be liked well enough?”

I laughed, embarrassed.

“Point taken.” We sat in silence a moment.

Someone had turned some Muzak on low, and I was aware of it suddenly, a sprightly, violin-ridden version of “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

Eli said, “Do you remember this, coming out of the living room one night and finding me in the hall?”

I blushed, because I was suddenly conflating this with the day I walked in on him in the bathroom. But I said, “Yes. I almost ran you down.”

“See, the thing was, I was afraid to come in.” He shook his head.

His voice was pitying, tender, as though he could see himself there, as though that person were his child.

“Afraid?”

“Yes.”

“But afraid of… ?” It seemed impossible to reconcile this large, gruff, nearly ebullient man with a younger Eli so frightened he couldn’t enter a room of friends.

He shrugged.

“How I’d fit in. Or wouldn’t. You were all so… well, carefree, as you say. Laughing, giggling.”

I snorted.

“Stoned out of our minds, probably.”

“No, here’s what it was.” He raised his finger.

“I

thought I would ruin it. I was afraid of having to feel the change when everyone got stiff, got polite. Having to feel my effect.” He grinned.

“What we in science would have called the Eli effect.” And then he stopped smiling, he looked down.

“What I thought was that Dana would be solicitous and sweet, and everyone else would be polite, and someone would make room for me on the couch, and then, because I was there-because of the Eli effect—the fun would dry up for a bit, palpably. And then, as you slowly forgot about me, start again.”

“You make us all sound quite horrid. All except Dana.”

He smiled quickly.

“Who could be horrid too. When she wasn’t being very, very good. But that’s not what I mean. And you weren’t.

was talking about how I felt, about myself. About how paralyzed I was then. Terrified, really, of any move I might make.”

He was looking at me but not seeing me. I wanted him to see me. I said, “But we all were, in some way. Don’t you think?” I lifted my hands.

“I was. I was married, and so I couldn’t really go forward with my life as a single person, which I was pretending to be. And I didn’t want to be married, I knew that. But I couldn’t imagine divorce—the failure of that, the ending of that life. I was raised to keep at it, whatever it was. To work harder if it wasn’t going well.” I smiled.

“Doggedness. Doggedness is what I was raised for.”

He asked me then, and I told him, about where I’d come from, about my mother, my family. About the life I might have led if I hadn’t run away from it. About Ted waiting for me the whole time he knew me, and how that felt. He was curious, probing. We ordered more coffee.

He talked, too, about his family, from a wealthy suburb north of Chicago, about being raised to believe he could do anything, have anything he wanted. He spoke of what he’d done since Lyman Street—the post doc at Berkeley, the research fellowship at Stanford, the slow turn from chemistry to the chemistry of biology, the primacy of work in his life.

“For a long time,” he said, “it was all I thought about. All I’d let myself think about.” He spoke of the effect of this on his relationships along the way, how they were always truncated or distorted in some sense. He mentioned a British scientist he saw every few years at conferences. A woman he went out with once a month or so for three or four years, until she finally announced that it-“whatever it was,” he said, grinning—was over. He had relaxed as we were speaking. He was slouching forward over the table now.

“Much, much water under the dam. Or is it over the dam?”

I said.

“I can never recall.”

“Whatever. You seem happy now. Are you?” His hand, resting on the side of his face, pushed into the flesh by his eyes, by his cheekbone.

I nodded.

“Lots more than then.”

“When you were what? A seething cauldron of angst?” He underlined the words with his tone.

“Well, when I was a seething cauldron of something causing angst in everyone else, anyhow. My poor ex-husband. He wasn’t a bad guy, either.”

“Are you in touch with him?”

“No. I heard he’d remarried, but that was years and years ago.” In fact, he’d remarried twice, I knew from people who’d known us both in college. He was a dermatologist very successful, and lived in a gated community outside Albuquerque. He had children by his third wife, children young enough to be his grandchildren.

“So you don’t know if he’s forgiven you.”

“That doesn’t even matter. The issue for me was forgiving myself.

And not so much because of him. In a way, forgiving myself for being alive. For being so, I guess, thoughtlessly alive. Dana made me feel that.

Dana’s death.”

He nodded.

“Me too,” he said. He looked out the window, over the falling water. His mouth opened, as if to speak, but then he looked at me and stopped. After a moment, he said, “And you did.”

“What?”

“Forgive yourself.”

“Yes. With work, mostly. It was basically my salvation.

Dogs and cats, horses and cows. The odd elephant.”

“Elephant!”

I smiled.

“I had a zoo internship for a couple of months in vet school. Great, great fun. And a feather in my cap. Of course, it was all useless knowledge in the end. How to use a sixty-cc syringe.” I made | its enormous shape with my hands.

“A twelve-gauge needle.” I laughed.

“I don’t see anything bigger than a big dog now. But it was fun. And it made me feel I’d earned my way back to a normal life.”

“Yes, that’s what one does, isn’t it? After hurting other people.”

“It sounds as though you held yourself so far away from other people that you couldn’t hurt them.”

He laughed sharply, and then his face fell into bitter lines.

“That was certainly the point,” he said.

“The point of what?”

“Of the shape of my life.” He raised his hand abruptly for the waitress, and I looked at my watch.

“Lord!” I said. Daniel would be getting home in about half an hour. I stood up.

“I’ve got to run. I had no idea how late it was.”

Eli got up, too, pulling out his wallet. He’d walk out with me, he said. He left a tip on the table, and we crossed the empty room.

the other parties had left.

While we stood at the hostess stand in the entry hall, waiting for our bill, he suddenly turned to me and said, “Look, do you mind talking about this? About the past? What was, what might have been, etcetera, etcetera.” His hand made a circle I was getting used to as a gesture of his.

“How one forgives oneself for being who one was.”

“No. Not at all. It’s kind of special, actually, to have someone to do it with. Someone who was there.”

The waitress appeared, and Eli paid her. We went outside, into the cold morning. The earlier snows had melted, and the air felt dry.

You could see the distant bluish line of the mountains. Our footsteps were loud in the Sunday stillness.

I said, “I think in a way I’ve been wanting to talk about the past with someone. Maybe you get to a certain age and you want to…

don’t know. Revisit the important times in your life.”

“I wouldn’t have said so.” We’d stopped now, by my car, and I turned and looked at him.

“But seeing you, Jo, and now talking to you…” He shrugged.

“That might be true for me too.” He touched my sleeve.

“I’d like to see you. To talk again.”

“So would I,” I said. I’d turned away, a little embarrassed.

“What? ” He leaned more toward me, and I was so unnerved, I took a step backward.

“I’d like that,” I said.

“Good. Sometime when we’re not so rushed, maybe.”