While I Was Gone (6 page)

The attraction was that none of the rules from my world applied.

W’lth everything I saw, everything I did, I felt that doors were opening. My life had been so orderly, such a careful, responsible progression, one polite step leading logically to the next. In this crummy, second-rate world, I had a sense of liberation, of possibility, and I embraced even its most tawdry aspects. I once complained to the genial, barrel-bodied bartender, Eddie, about the language a few of my customers were using in addressing me. He was silent a minute, pouring my shots, filling my chaser glasses with ice in a fixed and elegant rhythm. When he handed me back my check, he met my eyes and said, “Grow up, sweetheart.” I was shocked for only a few seconds, and then I laughed—Of course! I thought—and he grinned back at me.

There was a fight at the bar one night just as we were closing. I’d never witnessed a fight among adult men before. I was handing over the last of my checks at the cash register when it started. From time to time as the evening had worn on I’d noticed the raised voices among the men sitting to my left. Now there was a kind of explosion over there, and someone slammed into my back. Eddie dropped his shaker and was on top of the bar within a second, pulling at a huge man who was bent over the harmless old regular we called the Judge. It was he who had fallen against me, and he was lying on the floor now, under the big guy—you could hear the dull wet whumps as he hit the Judge’s head over and over.

Almost as soon as it had begun, it was finished. The men were in motion everywhere, violently pulling the big man away and out of the bar, bending his arms behind him with unnecessary force. Eddie was helping the Judge up, then getting him ice as he sat bleeding on a barstool in cheerful drunken amazement. Already everyone was laughing, talking excitedly. It was becoming a story.

I stood there dumbfounded for a minute, and then I felt I had to sit down immediately. When I looked at myself in the mirror in the ladies’ room, I saw that I was covered with dark, spreading freckles. It took me a moment to recognize them as blood, the Judge’s blood, sprayed all over me when he got hit.

I was perversely excited. I decided to wear it home. I wanted to scare my husband, to make him see something—I couldn’t have said what—about the world I was moving in now. I wanted a witness. I hoped a policeman would notice me and stop me.

But it was dead in the city. At a red light, a car pulled up beside mine. A couple. She looked over. She turned to him. He bent forward and looked over too. Then the light changed and they took off, speeding to cut in front of me on the narrow street.

Ted was asleep when I got home. We had pink bathroom fixtures in that apartment, and I remember watching the blood purl an odd rusty color in the water against the pink basin as I washed it off.

IT WAS THERE, AT THE ACE OF SPADES, THAT I GOT THE IDEA

to leave. Step three. I was substituting on a Wednesday for another waitress, Judy. Anita, the head waitress had called me that afternoon and asked me to cover as a favor. She’d pitched her voice dramatically low on the phone, “If anyone asks, you don’t know anything about why Judy not there.”

I was about to point out to her that as a matter of fact I didn’t know anytinng about why Judy wouldn’t be there, but I checked myself, as often did with my coworkers, afraid I might sound snotty or smart-ass.

Afraid I might sound like myself.

The night was easy and slow. So slow that the band barely bothered to perform, instead sitting around in the bar, “drinking their paycheck,” as Eddie said. At ten-thirty or so, Tony Zadra—Tony Z, we called him—arrived. He was one of the owners and also Judy’s lover.

He saw me and came right over.

“Where’s Judy?” he asked.

I was standing at the bar, filling chaser glasses.

Ginger. Soda with a twist.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t know,” he said.

“Right,” I said. I looked at him. He was a small man with a thick neck and a big pompadour. He needed to be smiling to be attractive in any way, and he wasn’t smiling.

“She call you,” he asked. I noticed a little dab of shaving foam on the curve of his ear.

“No.” I gestured toward the back of the bar.

“Anita asked me to fill in for her.”

He turned and went toward the kitchen, where Anita was taking a cigarette break.

They were in there awhile. I had to cover a couple of Anita’s tables for a round or two, and I was relieved enough when she emerged to be incurious for the moment.

But then Tony Z came up to me again. I was resting by the waitress station. My tables were happy.

“So I suppose you didn’t talk to Judy.”

“No,” I said.

“You don’t have any idea where she is.”

“I told you. No.”

“What bullshit,” he said. He pointed his finger at me. I saw the cords stiffen in his neck.

“What complete bullshit that is, Jo.”

She’d run away, of course. She’d vanished. And now, now that she was gone, we began to get the explanations. Every day, there was new gossip. Tony Z was so jealous that she couldn’t even go shopping with a friend. He’d monitored her phone calls. He’d had her followed.

He’d sometimes parked all night outside her house, when she looked out she could see his cigarette glowing in the car. He’d hit her a few times.

And now she was gone. She’d escaped.

This was like sirens singing me away. It was, suddenly, all I could think of. The job at the Ace of Spades had been a foot out the door of my ordinary life, but I saw now what it could lead to. All of me out the door.

I wanted to go as much as I’d ever wanted anything.

Suddenly I saw the paltriness, the temporizing quality, of everything I’d done so far.

At night I’d lie awake next to my innocent, dreaming husband and imagine it, where I’d vanish to, the note I’d leave behind.

You might have thought I’d worry about him, about causing him pain or at least embarrassment. I simply didn’t. I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy. That makes you unkind. When I described myself as I was at that time to Daniel, I often said to him, “You wouldn’t have liked me then.”

He’d shake his head.

“Not possible.”

“I wouldn’t have liked you I said once, just to startle him, to show him how mean I might have been.

It worked. His face shifted, a hurt he was trying not to show. And then he said, “Well, that’s different, isn’t it?”

I think, too, that by then, by the time I was getting ready to leave, I understood how shallow, how inconsequential, Ted’s and my attachment to each other was. We had married through innocent stupidity through a pure lack of imagination. We had gone to college together and had furtive sex for a year. He was accepted to medical school.

We wanted to go on having sex, we wanted to live together, but in the world we’d grown up in, you couldn’t do that without love, without marriage. So, trapped already by our desires, we made it happen—we fell willfully in love, we got married.

It seems to me that Ted was probably not unhappy. He had his work, which he liked, and which kept him too busy to think about the shape of his life, his destiny—as I did, constantly. And my strange job gave his life a certain kinkiness that the other medical students couldn’t claim. They came home to wives who were teachers. Or social workers, or nurses, or graduate students. Or to their dorm rooms—a bed, a desk. They came home to dinner, to studying deep into the evening, the night. Ted might have felt he was unusual, having a wife with such an intriguingly unwholesome job. I think I imagined my disappearing as something he might even, in some sense, be grateful for.

Another story he could tell to make himself interesting.

I left on a Monday. I’d called Anita a day or two before and told her that my mother was ill, that I had to go to Maine and didn’t know when I’d be back. I told Ted I was going to Washington for a few days to see a friend from college who’d ended up there. I got on a bus for Boston with a one-way ticket. I was familiar with the city from college visits, but I wasn’t aware of knowing anyone who actually lived there.

I thought I could find my way around easily and also be completely anonymous.

I didn’t see my husband again for seven months.

I arrived with one bag on a rainy evening in May. Within three days, I was sitting in a bright, sparsely furnished living room in Cambridge, being interviewed by four people as a potential roommate for a group house. One of them was Dana, whom I came to love. One was Duncan, another was Larry. And one of them, a tall, slightly slouched man in his mid-twenties, with worried brown eyes and curling dark hair that came down just over the rim of his collar—I remembered him clearly now—was Eli Mayhew.

THE FIRST LIE I TOLD WAS MY NAME. FELICIA, I SAID.

And then, because this was, I suddenly realized, a seriously ridiculous name, I also said, “As in happy to be here,” and dipped my head slightly.

“But my friends call me Licia. Or Lish.”

don’t know where any of this came from. I certainly hadn’t planned it.

It just seemed suddenly the wisest course, to be someone else.

After that, the other lies seemed easy. Seemed to be not so much lies as the story of Licia Stead. And some of it was true. I had just gotten a job at Red Brown’s Blues, a bar in Inman Square. I was living temporarily at the YWCA. And if I wasn’t from Montpelier, if I hadn’t gone to school at the University of Vermont, well, Licia Stead might have.

I’d found the house advertised on the bulletin board at a dusty bicycle repair shop I’d gone into, searching for cheap transportation.

It was next to ads for used furniture, typists, and three or four other housing options. I tore off one of the little fringed tags with a phone number and made my appointment, along with several other appointments, from a pay phone at the Y. The room I was sitting in for my interview was large and squarish-the linng room. It was a sunny day, light was pouring in at the two tall windows that ran from ceiling to floor on the wall that faced the street, and lying brightly across the bare floor, which was stained dark toward the corners of the room and worn to a scratchy grayish white in the traffic patterns. There was a large mantelpiece, whose fireplace, if there had ever been one, was plastered over. There were two sagging couches covered with Indian-print spreads, facing each other over wooden box that seemed to serve as a kind of combined coffee table and footrest. My interviewers were sitting on these couches—had the air, actually, of having been swallowed by them. For this reason I had perched myself on one of the two metal folding chairs set up next to them, facing the mantel. As I talked, I felt awkwardly and intensely visible, and very tall.

The girl asked most of the questions. Dana. At first glance I’d been startled by her—she could have been my’t win. Like me, she was big boned with straight blond hair worn long, below her shoulders, the way everyone wore it then. The way I was wearing mine. It’s true she was more solid than I was, more bosomy. Still, I thought, there was even a facial resemblance, the long oval, the just-slightly-too-big nose, the dark brows. But Dana had freckles, which I didn’t. And she frowned earnestly in concentration when she spoke—or smiled, or grimaced, whereas my face, I knew, was more masked, more careful.

Did I smoke? Oh. How much? (The house allowed smoking, I had checked, because I did smoke then, sporadically.) What would my hours at work be? While I was talking, she smiled steadily at me, an extraordinary, warm, encouraging smile. And then she’d fire away again. Did I like to cook? Did I like movies? What movies?

Every now and then after one of these questions, one or the other of the men in the room would groan audibly, or say, “Jesus, Dana.”

Once, one of them—Duncan—said in a singsong voice, “What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite food?”

Dana gave him the finger, then turned to me.

“I know they’re dumb questions, but we just need to hear you talk. Maybe you have questions for us?”

I had been to two other houses before this. The gravity of my interviews in them had intimidated me. Now I realized that I just hadn’t liked the people I met.

I liked this. I liked the ease these people had with each other.

In particular I liked Dana, her generosity, the warm attentiveness that I felt like a bright light falling on me. What I wanted to ask-all I wanted to ask, really—was, “Will you take me?” I didn’t think I could ask that. Instead I framed a few questions, as famous, nearly, as hers.

Rules?

There weren’t many. No smoking in the bedrooms, for fear of fire.

Everyone cooked a group meal once a week. You had to sign up for any given dinner two days before so the chef would know how much to prepare. You couldn’t have someone sleep over more than once a week or you had to pay extra rent. No sleeping with other house members, unless you were officially living together. There was much throat-clearing among the men over this, and Dana blushed richly under the freckles.

What would my room be like?

Dana would show me.

It was a neat room, lots of light, Dana said, leading me up the stairs.

A conversation had started among the men as soon as we left the living room, and I could hear a muffled laugh below us now. Dana was saying she wished my room had been available when she moved in, but now she was all set up in her space and didn’t want to switch.

The stairs opened onto a large central hallway. I quickly took in three or four rooms opening off it. We turned left and then left again along a narrow walkway between the stair rail and a wall, toward a door at the front of the house.

“It’s kind of down here by itself,” Dana said, turning back to me, smiling again.

The room was small, but it had windows on two sides. One looked out over the driveway, the other across the street to the similarly exhausted-looking houses there. It had three pieces of furniture-a bed, a bureau, and a nicked desk. One of the drooping parchment colored window shades was torn. Both had faint white lines in them, lines that leaked tiny stars of light here and there.