While I Was Gone (33 page)

This shattered my understanding of the un erse the feeling I’d had—I think every child has it until some point in life—that my life was somehow sacred and foreordained, the one absolutely necessary life I had to live.

Apparently not. Apparently I might never have been. Or I might have been other than what I was.

And, it occurred to me then, mightn’t I yet be? It seemed suddenly that what had been the cornerstone of my existence was shifting sand. That what had been a given was merely a whim. It seemed possible that there was another life waiting somewhere out there for me.

This was not exactly how I thought it out, of course. Mostly I felt it, a yearning, suddenly justified, for something other for myself.

Better.

More real somehow. More like the lives I read about in my books.

Later the boots turned up missing, causing my mother to ponder retroactively the mystery of blistered heels on a barefoot girl. A new interpretation was arrived at, and I was walked down the road, made to find the boots—rain-soaked and stiffened, curled, ruined.l—and punished.

I don’t mean to trivialize my feelings on coming home to Daniel by comparing them to that other homecoming. On the contrary. For that early shame felt deep and permanent, a stain I would wear forever, an agony I was condemned to wake to over and over, a final isolation I’d brought on myself by turning in the wrong direction, heading the wrong way, when I was confused and wounded.

Each day now, too, I woke and felt something very like that agonized wrench of childhood. Sometimes Daniel was not in bed with me.

He’d gotten up, sleepless, and gone to one of the girls’ rooms. Or out to his study. Then the disorientation, the pain, lay in his absence, in my aloneness in the bed. Sometimes I was the one who’d moved in the night. I’d wake with the light falling from the wrong direction, the bed turned, dizzyingly, the wrong way, and in the seconds it took to orient myself physically, I would be returning, too, with a sinking weight in what felt like my heart, to what I’d done. To all it seemed I’d destroyed. It was like waking over and over to an illness, a long fever I could not recover from.

My brother had said to me then, “I’ll never speak to you again.” Of course, I believed him, and what’s more, I believed I deserved it.

Daniel might as well have said it, though we spoke daily, we exchanged information about where we were going, about what time we’d be back. And occasionally more. Tonelessly he’d sometimes tell me he’d run into someone I knew, or report on something he’d seen, something that had happened to him—the kind of thing that would once have been the beginning of a long, meandering conversation. But these were offered so listlessly now that I understood them to be mere formalities. Just as Daniel would not stop saying good morning to me, or how was your day.2—just as he would make himself be civil to me in those ways—so he would politely, dutifully offer me nuggets that neither of us had the energy to turn into conversation.

Though at odd moments, the silence between us would be broken by the quickest, the most radical of exchanges about what was truly important to us. One of us would blurt out just a sentence or two, as though we couldn’t bear to keep at it any longer than that, as though one idea at a time was all either of us could express or take in.

These were sometimes preceded, these cries from the heart, by an oddly formal introduction, “Allow me, Daniel, just to say I never meant for it to go as far as it did.” And the quick answer, “I’m sure that’s true.”

. “I

would ask that you never see him again.”, “Of course not.” Once, in bed, long after I would have assumed he’d fallen asleep—just before he got up and went to sleep elsewhere—he suddenly said in a rough, low pitched voice, “I don’t know how to stop thinking about it.”

For once, my work was no consolation, the world did not fall away when I moved among the animals. As I touched them, as I manipulated them, as I treated them and thought about them, I was still too much myself, too much the Jo who’d wrecked everything. I didn’t know anymore what it felt like to take satisfaction in anything. I couldn’t remember when I had liked myself or anything about my life.

My very voice made me sick, its dryness, the way it cracked on certain words. I hated my need to smile at clients. I hated the sight of my ugly shoes emerging from underneath my scrub pants, the way my hands looked arranging things on my uble, the way my body felt as I moved around the clinic in it. Though when Mary Ellen spoke to me quickly, privately in the hall one day, offering to pick up the slack for a week or two if I wanted some time off, I understood by the panicked rapidity of my refusal how much worse things would be if I couldn’t come in every day.

A week passed since I had met Eli. Then ten days. The world froze and we froze in it. The bird feeder hung empty. We opened the door and let the dogs run at night instead of walking them. Neither of us had the energy to make our bed, or any of the beds we variously slept in. Or to pick up, to build a fire, to throw away rotting fruit or dried out flowers or the old take-out containers that accumulated in the refrigerator. I felt I was living on pure will. Every act was a deliberate one, costly and difficult. I’ve said that once I felt held in my life. Now I was holding on to what was left of it for dear life. Dear life.

While below our tepid, empty exchanges, the deep moat of silence widened between us.

OF COURSE, WE HAD TALKED THE NIGHT I CAME BACK. BUT

even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded as the night

| progressed. I suppose in some way I knew how it would be even as I was blurting out my confession, but I couldn’t have—I think I couldn’t 5, have—stopped myself anyhow.

Why? Why couldn’t I have kept quiet? I asked myself that often in the days that followed. Why hadn’t I spared him my painful, ugly little secret and kept things the same between us?

I suppose the answer in part is that the weight of what I’d learned and the power of the emotional state I was in were so heavy and deep, I it felt they had become me. I felt I had no choice. I didn’t, in fact, think about an alternative. I suppose it was in part because I needed so much, right then, that my need made me stupid. I suppose I was so EN caught up with what Eli had said and the way it altered my own history -that I wasn’t thinking about how my confession would alter ours.

But even as I spoke, had to speak, I was thinking, This, this is what you’ve done.

“Oh, God, Daniel,” I’d said when I saw his face change, saw it go white.

“Let’s sit down, let’s get a drink or something, and then I’ll tell you the whole story.” I think at first I felt that if he heard all of it, if I explained it in exactly the right way, he would see how it had been, how I had been in it. He would be, as he always was, so with me that he could feel it as I had felt it, he could help me now with my terror, my horror. And I think I hoped, too, that there would be a way made available for my words not to mean what they had seemed to mean.

He was still concerned, if not quite loving, when we sat down together in the living room, when I tried to start and burst into tears again. When I began my tale with Eli and Dana and their long-ago love affair.

But after I’d finished that part of it and his face had sagged in sympathy and horror, after he’d agreed with me that, yes, this was a murder, no matter how it was explained, no matter what Eli had made of himself later—after all that agreeing and sympathizing were over, he’d stood and put another log on the fire, and from that distance he turned and asked me, “So what does all this have to do with your going to Boston secretly to meet him?” And I understood that where the story for me was somehow all of a piece, for him it was two quite separate narratives, with two separate meanings.

Now I fumbled again to tell it, trying in a different way to call up the magic of my own past as my seducer, to explain the pastness in my attwaction. To explain Eli as my betrayer, and-to connect all of this to my horror at how it had turned out. I knew that this version wasn’t strictly true. Part of me knew it wasn’t true. But I was also desperate to have Daniel’s sympathy, desperate for him not to feel what he was bound to feel. Desperate to imagine I still had the power to make While I spoke, he had come to sit at the other end of the couch. I watched his profile looking at the fire, watched it as his face pinched shut, his lips tightened in an embittered line. It seemed minutes after I’d shut up at last when he said, “You will forgive me”—those were his words, You will forgive me—“if I can’t really focus on Eli and Dana. I know that’s part of your shock and pain, but…” He shook his head, and his nostrils flared slightly.

“Fuck it. That’s how I feel. Fuck that.

We sat in silence for a long time then. I couldn’t answer him. I sat thick headed staring into the fire. Daniel never used language like that with me, to me, and I felt the words like blows.

Finally he said, without looking at me, “Be honest, Jo.

Do me that courtesy. Be honest about why you went to meet him.

It was as though I were in a nightmare, a nightmare in which the frightening thing was that I had no words. I opened my mouth and no words would come out. At the same time, I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t going to be some way for me to make him understand me.

At last I started stupidly to go over it once again. I may even have been using the same phrases, since my brain would not work to find new ones. I know I started to weep again, too, but that felt suddenly like self-pity, and I tried to stop.

Daniel was looking at me as though he didn’t know me. He stood up and crossed the room. He lifted the screen and set it in front of the fire, and then, with his back to me, he said, “You met him to screw him. You met him to fuck him. You met him to lie down with him and wreck our marriage.”

When I didn’t answer, he left the room. I heard him in our bedroom, moving around, and then he crossed the living room, holding some clothing and his glasses. WIthout saying another word to me, he went up the narrow stairs to the second floor.

AS WE PASSED THROUGH THE LONG DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I

sometimes envied Daniel what I thought of as the simplicity of his pain, his sorrow. He had been as good as betrayed. I had been ready to sleep with someone else, it was the most astonishing accident that hadn’t. Though occasionally it seemed to me as I rewrote things mentally that of course I wouldn’t actually have gone through with it, of course I would have stopped.

For me, the sorrow was laced with guilt. I was the betrayer, after all, and it was with a pained and startled self-recognition that I felt this as something familiar about myself. I had thought of it as new, as new really. Something startling, something fresh I was learning about myself. It had even titillated me, I could be, I might be, a person who could betray someone.

Now it came muddled with Dana’s death, with that time in my life when I’d betrayed everything, my husband, my mother, my past.

When I’d betrayed even Dana—I felt that way, I remembered that feeling—by living, when she died.

It wasn’t news, then. Or it was old news.

Stale, sad news.

And of course, pressing in on me every day along with this sense of l [ all I had ever done, now and earlier in my life, to hurt people who had 1 ] only loved me, there was also the knowledge that I needed to decide what, if anything, I was going to do about Eli, about what he’d told me. About Dana’s death.

They pushed together, they merged in my mind, they became confused equivalents, Eli’s killing Dana and my casual, sleazy destruction of all I would have called fine in my life. In this mood, it took a conscious effort for me to convince myself that what I had done was different in any degree from what Eli had done. The idea that had any morally higher ground, that I should be Eli’s accuser, seemed ludicrous.

At other times I actually thought that if I went to the police and accused Eli, there would be relief in it for both of us. It would be like accusing myself too. I imagined that to pUt myself through such a thing—a confession, a full confession of how I had come to have this information, even as I was also making public the information, his confession to me—would be a necessary punishment for what I had done. What was it he had said? That we were all tainted. Yes, my heart said. Yes, I am.

And then I would swing into the mood opposite this. I would recollect my rage at Eli that evening, I would call up the image he had given me of his hitting at Dana over and over, the blood leaping to every wound. I would accuse him mentally of manipulating me, trying to trick me. There was no equivalence between us! Our betwayals, our sins, our tainted ness were of an entirely different order, could not begin to be compared. Once, in this mood, I hit the examining table in my office so hard that Beattie came rushing down the hall, thinking I d fallen or dropped something.

When I was feeling that way, what I thought was that I should report him so that he—he, the murderer—could be punished. But then I’d think about everything else he said. I’d wonder if it had been I true, his sense that he’d lived his life redeeming himself by his work.

And if it was true, was that enough? And was I in charge of seeing that he was punished, thereby ending the work, the good part of his life.

Sometimes it would seem to me that what I needed to do was simply to forgive Eli, in order to be forgiven myself. But, I’d tell myself, I didn’t have that power, that right, to forgive, or to be forgiven.

It was, after all, Daniel whose forgiveness I needed. And Eli needed, not mine, but Dana’s. Or her family’s. Or society’s. And I could speak for none of them.

The days dragged by. I would wake at night and move around the cold house trying to imagine a solution, and I could not, because everything was so knitted together in my mind. There seemed nothing I could do, no action I could take, no remedy, that didn’t smack of self-interest or self-justification. And then even this fastidiousness, this self-examination, would disgust me. It seemed like a further egocentrism, an intolerable dwelling-with-myself. Myself, whom I felt sometimes I could not bear.