While I Was Gone (15 page)

C HAPTE R

THAT’s WHAT I WAS DOING, THEN, TRAVELING BACIC TO my old life to see if I could pick up the pieces—to see if there were any pieces left to pick up—when I met Daniel.

We were in Logan Airport in Boston. Our flight had been delayed for several hours because of the gathering storm. I had drifted around, drinking acidic coffee in the restaurant, reading the GSobe quite thoroughly—there was no mention of Dana that day. Now the flight had been called, but it was over booked A small crowd was milling around the gate, and when the attendant got on the speaker system to ask if anyone would be willing to give up his seat and fly out the next day in exchange for a future free ticket, Daniel and I both stepped forward, along with two other men—one a student type with an enormous backpack towering ominously over his head, the other middleaged, clearly a businessman.

I suppose I could have gone back to Lyman Street for the night, but the idea never occurred to me. Or perhaps it occurred and was nearly simultaneously dismissed. I know I felt I’d said my last goodbye, I’d closed the door on that part of my life, on those people, on “Licia Stead.” In any case, I rode with the others on the shuttle bus to our free night at the airport Ramada Inn, still thinking of, still humming, “The Farmer in the Dell.”

As we were checking in, the businessman—Dave, sporting the long sideburns that respectable people were just beginning to wear-proposed that we all have a drink to celebrate our decision and our future free travel. The point of this was to have a drink with me, the nubile blonde, I could tell that. But I didn’t want to be alone in the hotel any more than he did, so after I’d taken my bag to my room, went back downstairs to the bar to meet them all.

Of course it was Daniel I ended up talking to. The student fled fairly quickly, and then it was just a matter of waiting Dave out, which took a while. But finally Daniel and I were alone together at the over varnished dark table, and we stayed there as the room emptied around us, as the bartender gave last call and started to clean up. As he finally flipped the other chairs up and rested them, legs in the air, on the other tables.

What I knew about Daniel by the time we were walking slowly through the deserted lobby to the elevator was how unnervingly beautiful I found him—pale and fine-boned, with a physical reserve, a kind of tautness, that compels me still. And that he was kind. He’d been especially kind to me, but he had also been kind to the student, and even kind to Dave. I knew that he’d been in the Peace Corps in Africa, that he’d grown up on a farm, that he was in divinity school in Boston, a worried believer who thought he could help people, could make a difference in the way they felt about their lives. What I felt I understood about him, what seemed to glow in his intelligent face, was that he was good, with a goodness I believed in absolutely, even then.

You couldn’t not.

And what did he know of mea Well, first the basic facts.

That I’d grown up in Maine, gone to the University of Maine, and taught high school for a short time before I became a waitress. After that much information, Dave left, and things got more personal and tawdry.

Daniel learned that I was married, that my life was a mess, that I’d been willing to get off the plane because I wasn’t in a hurry to go home to my husband, which was where I had to go. That someone I loved had just died. That the world seemed a place without meaning or heart to me. I’d wept briefly, sitting at the gleaming table with him, and he’d leaned forward to shield me from the eyes of the bartender and the only other people left in the room, a couple getting noisily drunk at the bar. For a few seconds he placed his hand tenderly on the side of my face, and I had the sense that if I could only stay here with him, everything would be all right.

The elevator doors had just closed us in, he was just saying, “You know, I wish we could… ,” when the universe seemed to lurch and the doors slid open again. I saw that we were on the fourth floor.

Mine.

“God, that was a fast ride,” I said.

He reached over to hold the doors open for me.

“It was.

Much too fast.”

I backed awkwardly out of the elevator, and we said good night over its threshold. As the doors shut on Daniel, his mouth was opening to speak. I stood for a moment, wondering what he might have wanted to say, and then I turned and walked slowly down the dim, carpeted corridor to my room.

We saw each other in the morning, of course, jockeying in line for the plane, but it seemed easier not to talk then beyond a nod of grave recognition.

It was more than three years before we met again, in New York this time. I was the one who called him, tracking him down through his divinity school. I had thought of him often in those years. Thought of his face mostly, the incandescent skin wired with some kind of internal light, and of his cool hand, touching my face. I was working for Dr.

Moran in that interval, and then in veterinary school. My life was solitary for the most part—animals and colleagues excepted—and full of hard work I’d already come to love. Occasionally, though, that pattern would shift, and I would become, for a time, wildly, angrily promiscuous. I’d use six or seven people in rapid succession. And then I’d be done and retreat again to isolation and work.

I didn’t stop to ask myself why, what it was I thought I was doing, but I came later to feel it had to do with a sense that perhaps once again I was settling too soon, rushing into something I thought would solve all my problems—work this time, instead of marriage. And running from something, too, some deep fear that connected to Dana and her violent death. But I didn’t examine this. What I felt then, all I felt, was rapacious, ridden by a scouring sexual appetite.

And when those waves of impersonal appetite seemed completely over, it was Daniel I was thinking of. Daniel, with whom I had spent one evening.

He was surprised, and then delighted, to hear from me. We had three or four conversations by telephone, each of which lasted several hours. I remember it, stretched out on the bed, talking in my tiny apartment. The maple branches brushed against my window with a gentle scraping sound—I watched the pale undersides of the leaves lift and lower—and we talked. We compared job markets, veterinary medicine versus the church. We talked about how we saw our careers playing out. We discussed families, children, the power of mothers in our lives. I told him about my painful, unresolved feelings about my father, dead at sixty-four, about my parents, how they’d met when my mother came straight from secretarial school to work for him. We talked about animals, how we knew them, how we felt about them. I told him about Dr. Moran and his wonderful hands, about a snake I’d actually become fond of. Daniel had been in charge of the family chickens on the farm and had hardly a good word to say about birds.

We agreed on dogs and cats. We titillated each other with references to other relationships, hints of our sexual histories. My ear would hurt when I hung up.

Finally we arranged to see each other, to come to New York. We met at an expensive restaurant he’d chosen for us, though we barely bothered to finish the meal we ordered. Thickheaded and nearly speechless with desire, we took a cab back to my faded hotel near the 22nd Street Y and joined what seemed like an army of German tourists in the tiny and ancient elevator. It groaned, it rumbled.

It stopped on every floor. People got off, got on. The languages changed. Years passed. I heard French, and then what I took to be Portuguese. We’d been in front, by the elevator doors, at the start of the trip, but by the time it was nearly over we’d shifted around so many times to accommodate others that we were now wedged together at the back, our bodies pressed to each other along one side. I was trembling, I couldn’t bear to look at him.

“Now, this, on the other hand,” Daniel said in a conversational tone, “this is a very slow elevator.”

We were married six weeks later, and I would say we have lived happily, if not ever after, at least enough of the time since.

There are always compromises, of course, but they are at the heart of what it means to be married. They are, occasionally, everything.

BUT OF ALL THE COMPROMISES MARRIAGE REQUIRES—AND IN

particular, marriage to a minister—perhaps the most difficult for me has been putting my life and my concerns aside when someone else’s life and concerns are occupying Daniel’s mind. It isn’t just that he’s busy when this happens, as an architect might be, or a lawyer or a stockbroker or a professor, it’s that he’s taken up emotionally too.

In those days after I’d seen Jean Bennett and Arthur and heard Eli’s name again, Daniel tried to sympathize with me. At dinner on Tuesday night I talked about it all, as I hadn’t in years. I called up the old names from my life in the Cambridge house, and he wondered with me about the others—I’d kept up with none of them. How funny it was, he agreed with me, that it should be Eli, the one I knew least-the one all of us knew least—who had reappeared in my life.

How strange it all was.

“Do you remember my premonition?” I asked him, resting my elbows on the table.

“What premonition?”

“You know—I told you—that sense I had yesterday of dislocation.”

“Oh, the admonition.” He smiled.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Now we know it was a premonition.”

“Do you think so?” he said.

“Well, I’m just sorry you have to feel any of it again.”

We sat in silence for a moment, and then he asked, “If it was a premonition, what was it a premonition of, exactly?”

I realized I had no idea, and laughed.

“Well, maybe it was an admonition.”

Meanwhile, of course, Daniel had active grief, recent death-Amy’s—to contend with. As well as a service and a burial to arrange, and all the logistical problems around that. We’d have several of Amy’s relatives from out of town at our house Thursday night, so even I would be part of it at that point, though I had this aspect of my involvement in Daniel’s life down to a science, the girls’ beds and the guest room off the kitchen were always made up fresh. I had casseroles frozen. I’d buy a baked ham. On Wednesday afternoon I’d hit the gourmet shop for take-out food and rolls, for scones and breads for breakfast. I’d set up the ten-cup percolator, rarely used, and buy half and-half and whole milk, extra orange juice, fruits and jams, butter and margarine. My job was to recede and leave food and comfort behind, and I’d learned how to do that without much cost to myself.

From time to time over these few days, Daniel gave me his distracted attention, “How are you holding up?”

“When this is all over, we’ll sit down and really talk.”

“This must be terribly hard for you.”

Was it? Was it hard?

I suppose, in some ways.

Most of all, though, it preoccupied me. I saw Jean once more, on Wednesday evening, when she came to pick up Arthur after his round of steroid injections. There was no real change in spite of three doses, but I gave her the pills and some Valium I’d started him on because he seemed anxious. She told me I’d hear from Eli over the weekend. I was anticipating that, then, thinking of how it would feel to speak to him, to see him again, as well as thinking often about Dana. Not just Dana as she’d been in life, which came back to me primarily in ways I’d revisited over and over through the years, certain familiar scenes, but Dana as she’d looked when I discovered her—something I’d successfully not thought of for a long time. Though even here I’d reviewed my own terror so often at the start that it, too, seemed oddly distant now.

Newly preoccupying, though, in a repetitive, pressured way-like the oddly riveting details and images from a dull movie you thought you’d forget instantly—were certain ancillary scenes. I hadn’t recalled the cleanup, for instance, that came raw and, yes, hard when it returned. Or our bitterness and shame over being exposed in the papers, over having exposed Dana. I recoiled inwardly in a new way from these memories. I was puzzled briefly by their fresh power.

Until I realized that they came because of Eli, because it was he who had reentered my life and not one of the others. Because it was he who had been unable to touch Dana’s blood, who had watched me weeping on my knees in the pinkish mix of soap and Clorox and blood and gone upstairs to throw up, over and over. And it was he who had seemed most shocked and upset at the useless and irrelevant exploitation of what had been made to seem sordid in all our lives.

It was Eli’s perspective that made it hard, when it was hard.

I found myself thinking, too, of my life, of what I’d made of it since then. In the first years after Dana’s death, I would call up her face when I felt lost or uninspired or hopeless. I’d remind myself of how young she’d been when everything was taken from her. I’d use her loss as my scourge, a prod to rise above my own misery. How lucky I was, after all, just to have gone on. To be living, to have my work, my husband. Even to be feeling despair was, I’d remind myself, pure good luck. Grace, as Daniel would call it.

At some point, though, I’d stopped. I’d stopped feeling that intimate connection to her death. My life changed and I changed.

Time folded over those events and that story. Other deaths, other griefs, replaced my grief for Dana and reshaped my thinking about how life got lived, how death got faced. How we accounted for our time on earth.

Now it had come back to me, but with some of that sense of remove I felt looking at the group photo of us on the porch steps, seeing myself there in my long hippie hair and my bell-bottom jeans.

Remove, and a kind of shame for having forgotten so much I’d sworn always to remember. It seemed to me then that if there was an admonition, it was simply this, we have no right to let go of so much that shaped us, we shouldn’t be allowed to forget.

WHEN I GOT HOME THURSDAY EVENING, THERE WERE THREE

cars besides Daniel’s pulled into the yard around the kitchen. I parked in front of the house, so everyone could get out easily, and made two trips in with the extra groceries. Before I’d left home in the morning I’d set out fruit and cookies, sherry and wine with a corkscrew and glasses, coffee cups, and the percolator, ready to be plugged in.