While I Was Gone (29 page)

My heart ached for her, suddenly.

The concert closed with several carols, and Mother and I stood next to each other, sharing a hymnal. Her voice was thin and parched but completely on key, and at one point she ventured into a few notes of harmony against me, and we met each other’s eyes and smiled.

The museum was busy, though not frantic, as it sometimes was when we came, late enough in the day so the school groups had left, we speculated. We went straight to the gift shop, and Mother started making her careful choices, a bag of cat’s-eye marbles, a boomerang, a kit for building a dinosaur’s skeleton. There was a painful kind of parsimony to all this, and I found it difficult to watch. I moved away from her. I spent some time looking at the literature they had on animal life.

I was standing in the doorway, watching her pay—cash, she didn’t believe in credit cards—when I heard the announcement for a movie on African lions, a subject I was not without interest in, having helped to raise a litter of them once when I was working at the zoo. It would give Mother a chance to rest, I thought, for she had seemed tired on the longish walk in from the parking area.

“That would be very interesting,” she said, and so I took her packages from her, and we bought our tickets and proceeded through the museum behind the crowd of people also headed to the movie.

The theater was huge, an Omnimax, I saw. The pale-beige ceiling rounded vastly over the chairs like a tepid sky. I explained to Mother the way it worked, as we sat down, as we tilted back.

“Why, it’s just like going to the dentist,” she said, and we both laughed. It felt strangely intimate to be stretched out next to her.

The film started above us, around us. A man’s voice, deep and self important narrated. He sounded remarkably like the civic voice that had accompanied educational films of my school days. The photography was wonderful to watch, the animals with their gravity, their powerful tawny slowness and then murderous speed.

The narrative offended me, though. It was utterly spurious and imposed, involving, as it did, the repeated stumblings into danger and then rescues of the photographic crew as they tried to get in close for better shots. The deep voice vibrated, trying to pump up the excitement, as though watching the animals themselves couldn’t possibly be enough.

At some point I turned my head to see how all of this was affecting Mother. She lay perfectly still, her skirt carefully draped over her knees. Her old-lady shoes touched each other at the toes. She’d pulled her hands up and folded them together on her bosom, in modesty, perhaps, at lying down in public. Her mouth was slack, her eyes had swung up to look at something at the top of the ceiling, and I could see just the glimmer of white under the iris. I realized suddenly that this was the way she would look, dead. My pulse throbbed heavily, and I felt a moment of purest terror, of unreadiness. No, I thought.

Notyet.

I leaned over her, horrified.

She felt me looking, her eyes swung to me and saw the terrible thing in my face.

“What?” she cried out, struggling up, as frightened by me as I’d been by her.

“What?”

THE HECTIC DAYS PASSED. SADIE CAME HOME FROM SCHOOL,

slept late, often wanted the car in the afternoon. I took to driving home at lunch. She would drive me back to work and pick me up at the end of the day. I foisted errands off on her or we did them together late in the afternoon. We had family meals again, we had loud music in the living room at night. The house would suddenly be full of her friends, and I caught up with them, who was dropping out, who was transferring, who was in love. Daniel played carols at the piano, and we all sang along.

My chores increased, I was never alone. My life seemed to claim me utterly, in a way I would have said I was hoping for. But throughout all this, I couldn’t stop thinking about Eli. I thought of the way he had bent down to touch his cheek to mine in the parking lot at the Pennock Inn, the heat he radiated physically. I thought of the way his features had thickened and even coarsened some as he’d aged, making him seem a man of appetites. Energetic.

What Daniel had called my arush had changed, or I felt it differently. It was no longer my past, my own youth, that attracted me to I t l l Eli. It was the thought of Eli himself, the heavy, buoyant middleaged man. Still, I tried to think of this as lightly as I’d thought of that earlier attraction. As a kind of joke, really, one I might share with as I had the other one. But of course I didn’t. I kept it private.

A joke I shared with only me, then. Deliberately, playfully, I fed my fantasies about Eli. I allowed them to become sexual, I gave them specific flesh.

I imagined us in sundering, tearing passion in hotel rooms in Boston, in nondescript motels or inns in towns twenty or fifty miles away, laboring together, slick with sweat, sore, spent.

I’d look up from addressing cards or wrapping presents or doing dishes and see Sadie slouched in a chair, her eyes unfocused, a Walkman buzzing into her ears, or Daniel reading the paper or a book, and be embarrassed at the Technicolor detail of my sexual thoughts. Be surprised they couldn’t feel my heated distraction.

It was all right to imagine this, I said to myself, my own reassuring Ann Landers. As long as I understood it wasn’t going to happen.

It isn’t going to happen, I’d tell myself.

And then I’d imagine another scene, another inventive coupling, another spent falling away from each other in another bed.

I went further. I’d imagine Jean’s death, my divorcing Daniel. Or Daniel’s death, Eli’s divorcing Jean Only stories, I said to myself. Just that. Or they could both die. Painlessly, of course. A period of mourning, Eli and I turning more and more to each other.

It was all adolescent. I recognized this and even felt some contempt for myself on account of it. It reminded me of the period in my life when I was eight or nine and most in love with my father. During that time, I repeatedly imagined my mother’s dying in a variety of ways and my stepping into her role, caring for my father, becoming his sine qua non, his necessary. And now I told myself that this, all this daze of imaginary flesh I lived in, was as little connected to what was going to happen, to what I truly wanted, as that had been.

But what I was wondering was what I truly wanted. And what if Eli wanted an affair, what if he pressed for that? Would I resist?

I had certainly had temptations in the past—a number of mild pleasurable flirtations, and twice moments when I felt I was actively, and even perhaps reluctantly, choosing not to succumb to something that both compelled and frightened me. Once, only a few years earlier, at a conference of small-clinic vets in Hawaii, I’d been drawn to a vet from Seattle named Davis Holliston, a rumpled, cheerful, profane man, kind and sexy, a master teller of jokes. He had only to start, “A duck walks into a bar,” and I would be convulsed. Night after night we sat up late, drinking and talking and laughing with others. And then, finally, it was just us, and I had to decide.

And once, much earlier, we’d hired a man older than our usual high-school student—a man in his twenties—as an assistant in the clinic. I was in my mid-thirties, just starting the practice then, swamped with work and small children and the demands of the house, which we’d recently moved into, each room of which was a project waiting to be undertaken, decaying, water-stained wallpaper, linoleum flooring, obsolete, exposed pipes running from floor to ceiling.

To be reminded—as I was one night when we stayed on together and he hesitantly, then authoritatively, then wildly, kissed me—that I was sexual, that I was still young, that I was attractive, even in my scrubs, my grubby sneakers, this was a revelation, an awakening, a thrill.

temptation.

I resisted it. I broke away. I wept. I clung to him. I wept some more.

I went home and confessed my feelings to Daniel. For days we made time for each other, we talked passionately about our life together and what we needed to do to make it more intense, more loving again.

I had to fire Eric. He said he understood. We stood glumly opposite each other in one of the exam rooms, the moat of the gleaming stainless-steel table separating us, and talked about it, about my life, my responsibilities, about Daniel. About Eric’s life, about what he would do next.

I told Beattie I’d had to fire Eric because he’d been repeatedly late for the morning opening.

“Is that so?” she said at the time. And then, some days later, “You did the right thing, letting Eric go.”

“Thanks,” I said, not looking at her.

“Yes, he was too forward for my taste.” I could feel her eyes sharp upon me, hoping for a confidence, a confession—some dirt. But I kept my own counsel. Mine and Eric’s and Daniel’s.

This was it. My history. I assumed Daniel’s was something like it, though he hadn’t ever spoken to me of his attraction to anyone. But perhaps he’d had to say to someone what I said to Davis in Hawaii as he leaned in the doorway to my hotel room, that I’d always assumed about myself that I’d be faithful in marriage.

“Ah!” he’d said then, sounding approving and deflated at once.

I had assumed that. I assumed it still. But it seemed to me now that there might be circumstances so compelling, so out of the ordinary run of the possible, that the old rules, the old feelings, would no longer apply.

The truth was I didn’t know what I would do if I had the choice, and that, too, made me feel distant from Daniel, from my daughter, from what was normally a joyous period of preparation.

CASS AND NORA ARRIVED ON CHRISTMAS EVE, FROM OPPOSITE

directions and in time for all of us to go to the ten o’clock service together. Daniel was already at church, so we piled into my car.

Nora and Cass were being civil to each other, having a gingerly discussion in the back seat about a band Nora had heard recently in New York, the Little Piggies.

The night was wonderfully clear, and when we got out of the car at church, Sadie and I leaned back dizzily in the frigid air and tried to identify the few constellations we knew in the glowing sky. Cass and Nora danced around us, calling out invented names to hurry us along.

“Why, it’s the Little Piggies themselves!”

“Look! Look! The Jolly Green Giant!”

“And there’s Pater Familias!”

“Check it out! The Lederhosen! Over here!”

“The Alma Mater!”

“Come on, you guys! Let’s go!”

Inside, the church smelled of wool, of candles, of the pine boughs that decorated the altar, and of something vaguely like cinnamon.

the service was short, just scriptures and carols and a quick homily from Daniel. The children’s choir did a descant in their piercing clear voices on the last hymn, and it brought unexpected tears to my eyes.

At home we had hot cider with rum and opened one stocking gift each, the beginning of our prolonged ritual. There were lumpy purple mittens for Sadie from Beattie (“She made them herself,” I said). A new fishing lure for Daniel, bath oil for me, a tiny moonstone earring—or nose ring, or eyebrow ring—for Cass. A pair of tortoiseshell combs for Nora’s heavy hair, from Sadie.

Daniel was especially energetic and happy. He kept putting extra logs on the fire, stirring it. He sang to himself as he got us all more cider and cookies. It was the end of a long, demanding season for him, and he had three days with not a lot to do before the Sunday service. I went to bed early, but he said he wanted to sit up awhile with the girls.

As I passed through the hall on my way back from the bathroom, I could hear them in the living room, a burst of laughter and then Nora’s voice, “If you strained for a compliment—and I had to, believe me—you might have called it cinema verite. But it was really just plain home movies.”

“Dozvn-home movies, it sounds like,” Daniel said, and then I heard his loose, light laugh and I shut the door.

When I woke in the morning and turned to his side of the bed, the bedclothes lay rumpled and empty. Daniel was gone, the house was silent around me. I had an odd moment of fear, and then I realized he’d gotten up early and gone to church alone. He often did this on Christmas Day, beginning it in solitary prayer before he came home to our loud and secular festivities. I imagined him there now, sitting with his eyes intently closed in a pew in the chilly nave, the gentle morning light falling on his solitary figure, on the white-painted pews, the gray floors. How sad it was, really, I thought, lying there, that not one of us shared his belief, that he was so alone in this central aspect of his life. Did we even have beliefs? I wondered. I believed in animals, I supposed—their purity, their goodness. Cass believed in music, in cigarettes and coffee and wine and men. Nora believed in getting up early and starting each day carefully dressed, carefully made up.

And Sadie? Maybe Sadie still believed in us.

By the time I heard Daniel’s car crunching over the frozen snow in the yard, I was up and dressed, I’d fed the dogs and let them out, I’d made coffee and started the stuffing for the goose. Daniel burst in at the door, and I heard him stomping, sniffling, hanging up his coat and shedding his boots in the back hall. When he came into the steamy kitchen, his cheeks were flushed, his hair was raked up oddly from his hat, he looked like a badly cared for child. His face lifted when he spotted me. He cried out, “Merry Christmas, my darling, my dearest, my sweet,” and crossed to embrace me. His face was cold, bristly.

His nose was wet.

“Oh, Daniel,” I said. I kissed him lightly.

“Why pull away? Why, when I adore you so?”

“Do you?” I asked, embarrassed. I reached out and flattened his hair.

“An alternative, just a suggestion,” he said. He raised his finger, as though about to conduct an orchestra. ” And I adore you, my dearest husband.”

“Well, of course, I do,” I said.

“Come and sit, and I’ll pour you some coffee.”

We sat down opposite each other at the table. Sunlight had just begun to flicker through the kitchen windows, shifting with the motion of the pine trees behind the house as it edged above them.

“Oh!” I remembered, setting my cup down.