While I Was Gone by Sue Miller

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.