Free While I Was Gone by Sue Miller Page A

you’re nothing short of amazing,” Dana pronounced.
    Her hands lifted in one of her extravagant gestures, and she offered, “Amazing, perspicacious, intuitive—” Orange, “John interrupted.
    “You were the color guy?” Duncan pointed his cigarette at John
    “I’ll never tell.”
    “There was no color guy. Eli called himself gray, someone called Larry a commie, and someone else thinks Licia is sad.”
    “That’s your theory. Only the Eli part is established as fact.”
    “Who said sery?” Larry asked.
    “Who’s hot for Licia?”
    “Licia is sexy,” Duncan said.
    “I said it.”
    I was astonished. So far as I knew, Duncan had never even noticed I was female. He wasn’t looking at me now, either, yet he appeared to be completely unembarrassed to confess this.
    “Who said opaque?” Larry asked again.
    There was a beat of silence, just too long.
    “I did,” Dana said.
    “But you’re best friends with Licia,” Sara protested.
    “Still, she is opaque. To me anyway. Licia has secrets.”
    Dana smiled a bright smile at me, a smile that seemed suddenly false, too toothy.
    “See, that’s what makes her sexy,” Duncan said.
    “A little discretion goes a long, long way.” Dana looked at him sharply, visibly hurt.
    “What did you say, Licia? About yourself?”
    “Reserved. n “Same as opaque,” Sara said.
    “Nothing like,” Larry said.
    “I would still like to know this color asshole,” Duncan said.
    “Speaking of hostility.”
    Later Dana came to my room and apologized for calling me opaque.
    I told her not to be crazy, that I wasn’t the one who found it offensive.
    “I do, though,” she said.
    “I don’t want you to think I’m pushing you, or bugging you, or anything.”
    I looked over at her, my beautiful friend, and my heart felt thickened abruptly with love. How could she imagine there was something she could give me that I wouldn’t want, something she could ask of me that I wouldn’t try to give?
    I HAD BEEN IN THE HOUSE FOR OVER A MONTH AT THIS
    point, and I felt transformed and opened out—so altered it seemed nearly chemical to me, as though I were the one taking drugs. It was so much what I had wanted that I was sometimes frightened by it. By how fast it was happening. By how happy I could sometimes feel. By how radically different I seemed to myself from the good girl who’d moved so dutifully through high school and college and marriage.
    Whose friendships and deepest loves had all been, it seemed to me now, bland matters of convenience—someone who lived three doors down, someone in my sorority, someone I was sleeping with.
    Now when I turned the corner onto Lyman Street after work and saw our lights glowing in the darkness from the first-floor windows of the house, I sometimes broke into a run, I was so eager just to be there.
    I loved the fact that there was always someone awake, even at one or one-thirty. At that hour, intimacies sprang up easily. With Larry, for instance, one night over coffee in the kitchen. He was reading late and pleased to be interrupted, by what he called “a long, blond column of concentrated nicotine.” We sat for several hours under the intermittent flicker and buzz of the bare fluorescent ring on the ceiling, and he told me his story, all about his patrician, cultured background.
    His parents, he said, were at the opera, the ballet, the symphony, several nights a week, “while understanding dogshit about any of it.” He would inherit a town house on Marlborough Street eventually, and he’d made it his personal goal to look as though he didn’t belong there.
    “I
    want to be the kind of person that people are always coming up to and saying, May I help you?” when what they really mean is, What the hell are you doing here, lowlife scum?”
    ” Duncan often arrived home close to the time I did, but because I found him so difficult, Dana began to wait up for me, or to stop in at Red Brown’s and walk home with me. So there were often