While I Was Gone by Sue Miller Page A

needed some time alone. A letter to my mother, trying to explain why I was doing what I knew she would think of as foolish and cruel thing. I hadn’t sent either of them my return address, and I’d asked them both not to try to find me.
    I didn’t want to think of myself either, of what I would do next, after this. Since it suddenly seemed there might be an after this.
    Instead I twied to keep busy. I haunted bookstores, sat in cafes, drinking coffee and smoking. As the weather got colder, I went often to the Gardner Museum—for the humidity, for the scent of jasmine in the courtyard.
    But of course, the truth was that I was depressed, and that waiting for me the moment I stilled was a sorrow that filled my time amply with its emptiness, that kept me very busy even as I lay open-eyed on my bed or sat at my desk staring out at the houses across the street. I tried my hardest never to still.
    ONE DAY I WOKE TOUCHED BY MORNING SUN AFTER SITTING
    up too late talking the night before and then reading in my room.
    My mouth tasted of every cigarette I’d smoked. I’d left my window open, and it had gotten chilly in the night. I lay now tented to my nose, glad for the damp heat of my own breath. Someone was whistling downstairs. Probably John, making his elaborate ritual breakfast before slowly reading the New York Times all the way through. I was wishing for flannel pajamas, for an electric blanket, for heavy woolen layers like the ones I’d slept under as a child. I was wishing I didn’t have to get out of bed to shut the window. I hugged my knees to my chest.
    The flesh of my legs felt smooth and cool.
    Finally I found the grit to do it. I threw back the covers, stepped to the window, and slammed it shut. I pulled on a T-shirt and headed down the hall to the bathroom. I pushed the door open into humid warmth. Eli turned to me slowly, drying himself. He was naked. His body was slender and pale, hairy only on his chest and below his knees, and then the dark pubic patch. His thighs were long, the muscle a beautiful shape, and his penis swung heavily as he turned in my direction. The wet coils of his hair just touched his shoulders. He seemed merely puzzled by my sudden appearance.
    “Oh! Sorry!” I cried. I pulled the door shut again and ran back through the chill to my bed. I slid once more down into the warm spot I’d left behind and closed my eyes. And saw his slow turn to me over and over, his hand ceremonially opening out the towel as though that were a form of greeting, the weighted dark of his penis moving over his white thighs.
    ANOTHER MORNING, LATE IN THE FALL, DUNCAN PISSED OFF.
    I had just come downstairs to have breakfast in a T-shirt and jeans, and bare feet in spite of the chill, and he announced this before he said hello. It was fucking ridiculous, he said.
    “What? What’s the problem?” I asked.
    He was bitterly pleased to explain. There were two dollars in the kitty with which to shop for his cooking day, and he had no money—“Zed,” he told me, drawing deeply on his cigarette-to kick in.
    Everyone in the house lived from week to week or month to month, and whatever the last few days of anyone’s cycle, that person was usually utterly threadbare. People borrowed from one another in a complex sociogram of debt, and the elaboration of the payback schemes was often strained. (“Look, just give me twenty of what you owe me and the other twenty to Sara, cause I borrowed from her last week.”
    “But Sara borrowed from me yesterday.”) Only I, with my steady influx of tips, always had some cash. Most of it in ones, to be sure, but cash. Daily. Duncan hadn’t yet realized this. The others had.
    Now I told him.
    “How much?” he asked.
    “Enough,” I said.
    “Unless you’re planning on champagne or caviar or something.”
    He shook his head.
    “Spaghetti and meatballs.” This was no surprise. He always made spaghetti and meatballs.
    “Salad. Sara Lee for dessert.”
    “Which Sara