While I Was Gone by Sue Miller Page B

Lee?”
    “You can pick, since you’re putting up the dough.”
    “Cream cheese cake.”
    “I concur.”
    “Can I drink my coffee? Are you in a rush?”
    He made a magnanimous gesture, and I sat down. But morning chat seemed suddenly hard to make. Duncan was not the sort of person who felt compelled to fill a swelling silence. He was staring at a spot of sun on the linoleum floor now, smoke from his cigarette trailing slowly upward.
    Finally I made my offering.
    “How are classes?”
    He grimaced and swatted my words away with a light flip of his hand. I was reminded of how much I’d disliked him at first. I drank some more coffee.
    “Okay, your turn,” I said, after a minute or two.
    “My turn?”
    “Your turn to ask a question. Isn’t that the way human intercourse works?”
    “Don’t be cute,” he said.
    “Don’t be an asshole,” I answered. I had learned to say such things.
    After a moment, he said, “Well, now that we’ve got that out of the way.” And another ponderous silence fell.
    I broke it at last.
    “Ask me one question,” I said.
    “Just one, or I won’t give you any money.”
    He looked at me and then smiled. Then he laughed, a rarity for Duncan. It was seductive, I granted Dana that mentally.
    “Let’s see,” he said.
    “What would I most like to know about you, Licia Stead?” He examined me unblinkingly with his cold eyes, and felt sorry, suddenly, that I’d started this. He leaned forward and drew again on his cigarette. Abruptly he said, “Okay, who’s your other self?”
    I set my cup down. I could feel the thickness of the blood in my ears, my chest. I willed my face to be unrevealing.
    “Why, whatever do you mean?”
    “Your other self. You know. Everyone here has another, better self.
    Not just what you see, for Christ’s sake. Dana the world-renowned sculptress. And courtesan. Larry the… president of the brave new world, I suppose. I’m really a famous recording artist women can’t get enough of. Et cetera.” Pause.
    “Licia the waitress doesn’t cut it.
    So who are you, really?”
    “Ah, well,” I said.
    “Ab. As it happens, I am but a waitress, an umble waitress, sir.” I was flirting, I realized, flirting in the lightheartedness of my relief that this other self he wondered about was merely the self of ambition, not some secret past he’d guessed at.
    “And therefore”—I fluttered my eyelids—“probably the only honest person in this house.”
    “Honest, eh? So you say, so you say.”
    “You too? Everyone around here doubts my word.”
    He shrugged and looked away again, not interested suddenly.
    Turned off.
    I didn’t like it, I realized, this abrupt fading of his interest. This must be how he did it with women. On, then off—the charm of a cold person who warmed just for you, momentarily, and left you yearning for more.
    It only made me angry. I stood up.
    “Let’s go,” I said.
    “Let’s get the money.”
    He stabbed out his cigarette and followed me through the living room, up the stairs, across the wide upstairs hallway. The other doors stood this way and that, some open, some shut, Larry’s room tidily on display, Sara’s and John messy. Someone was in the shower—the one note tune of the pipes, the humid, soapy smell in the air.
    Duncan followed me to the doorway of my room, and I went to my desk and opened the drawer. I’d had a good weekend, and I hadn’t made a bank deposit for several days before that. There must have been around three hundred dollars in mostly single bills, here stacked, there just shoved in.
    “What do you need?” I said. My back was to him. He couldn’t see the drawer or its abundance.
    “I don’t know. Give me what you can.” He sounded so bored, so contemptuous of all this, that I was suddenly jumpy with irritation, with the impulse to jolt him, or to bend him. I reached into the drawer and scooped up handfuls of bills. Turning, I tossed them high in the air and then spun slowly around in the