Where Love Goes

by Joyce Maynard

  For years since his divorce Mickey has filled his dance card, as he likes to put it, with women he meets through the personals, the same way he met Claire. Eventually he mailed Claire a copy of the letter he typically sent out to the women whose ads he answered, which he kept on his computer. By the time Claire read Mickey’s personals response letter, she was already in love with him, but if she hadn’t been, she figured the letter would have done it.

  Dear Stranger,

  I liked your ad—ethereal yet pithy. Joni Mitchell crossed with Tina Turner maybe? I dunno. Whatever it was I read between the lines you wrote, it got to me.

  As for whether the feeling might be mutual, I’ll give you the basic data. I’m poking forty with a short stick, brown hair, brown eyes, no broken bones, don’t smoke or dope, six feet tall on a good day, with one hundred seventy-six pounds of ballast and a boyish plethora of freckles. My friends tell me I’m reasonably attractive, but then who’s going to tell you to your face that you’re reasonably ugly?

  I grew up in Alabama, the only state in the union where you can be your own uncle. My sport is baseball, and I guess I’d better tell you right off that I’ll be unavailable during World Series week. I spent my formative years pitching dirt balls against a barn door pretending to be Don Drysdale, but I didn’t fool anybody.

  My life’s other consuming passion is music. I appreciate everything from Laurie Anderson to Frank Zappa, but what I love best is jazz: Miles, Monk, Mulligan, and Ella Fitzgerald, my favorite woman of all time.

  Given a choice, I would’ve been a pitcher, but the fact is I was a high-school band nerd. Round about age fifteen I started playing in rock ’n’ roll bands—strictly opening act material, mind you, but it kept five guys in motel rooms and pot for a lot of years and more miles.

  Round about the time I hit thirty it came to me that I’d rather never see forty at all than find myself, at forty, still playing “Proud Mary” to a roomful of drunks half my age. So I went home to Birmingham, got married, and had a kid. The marriage proved to be a mistake early on but it did produce the one pure joy of my existence, my eight-year-old son, Gabe. Trumpet player, get it? I would’ve named him Louis, but he was a little too pale for that.

  Back when my marriage was in its last throes, the little woman and I left Alabama for Massachusetts and I found this great old cape on the North Shore that we could almost afford, with a barn out back that I’ve turned into a sixteen-track recording studio. You wonder how it is an Alabama boy like me would move fifteen hundred miles to a place he didn’t know a soul, I’ll tell you. I love Fenway Park, and I refuse to watch another game of baseball played on AstroTurf. Turns out around these parts there’s enough would-be musicians—and believe me, I use the term loosely—that I can make something that resembles a living recording their demos. Not a single John Lennon in the bunch.

  I get Gabe every other weekend, during which time I attempt to educate the boy in the finer things of life, meaning jazz and baseball I bring him to a lot of Red Sox games on the theory that now is as good a time as any for a kid to learn about disappointment. We buy a ridiculous number of baseball cards.

  Weekends I pitch for the Salem Hornets. The Sox haven’t drafted me yet, but we are the number-three team in the North Shore league. As far as music goes, my band these days comes to me by way of a synthesizer. Let me tell you, I get a lot less grief out of my Kurtzweil than I used to from my old drummer. I think maybe I’ve finally found the perfect musical relationship. Give me my mixing board and my baseball glove, my boy and a good margarita now and then, and I’m a happy man.

  Or would be, if it wasn’t for this damned need I feel for my one true love. I admit it. I’m a hopeless romantic, a guy that still believes every lyric Cole Porter ever wrote. What I’m trying to say is, I want to feel my pulse racing. I want to feel that old Van Gogh kind of love that makes a guy want to cut off his ear and gift wrap it. Come to think of it, I’m not growing enough hair anymore to cut off my ear for you, so maybe you’d settle for a dozen roses. Come to think of it, a dozen roses might be a little much for my budget. Maybe you’d settle for a card.

  So here I am sitting on my back porch with an ice pack on my rotator cuff (I pitched last night), sipping a beer and listening to Ella. Now I’m going to toss this message in a bottle out to sea. Who knows? Maybe it’ll wash up on your shore.

  The year she spent with Mickey, this is how Claire lived her life:

  Back home in Blue Hills during the week, she tried guiltily to be a perfect mother. That was her way of earning the right to be with Mickey. Even more diligently than before, she made sure she was home every night to read to Pete and Sally and tuck them into bed, sometimes getting back to work on ad layouts or account proposals once they were asleep. She hardly ever lost her temper with her children anymore, she was so happy and well cared for. She joined the playground committee at Pete’s school and volunteered to be a chaperone on Sally’s class trip to Washington, D.C. She typed her kids’ book reports without giving them her usual lecture about how she wasn’t anybody’s secretary. She got up before her children every morning to pack their lunches and get breakfast on the table and she made sure they had a good meal every night at six, even if it was just spaghetti. Before they ate she always made her children hold hands and sing grace. They say this is the dorkiest thing they’ve ever heard of, but she also suspects that if she ever stopped insisting that they do it, they’d feel vaguely disappointed.

  Late at night she’d call Mickey, or he’d call her just to say good night, except for Wednesdays, when he played basketball. She counted the days until the weekend, when she’d see him again.

  Claire went to divorce mediation with Sam that year, and to therapy with Pete and Sally. Eventually, when the therapist himself said he thought they’d done as much work as they could, for now, she let it go. “Your children still have some unresolved anger to work out,”, said Dan, the therapist, “but evidently they’re not ready to deal with it yet, and we have to respect that.”

  Weekends Claire had her other life. As soon as Pete and Sally left for their father’s house Friday afternoons, Claire threw her own overnight bag in the back of her station wagon and drove to Mickey’s. She wore her new silk underwear and played the jazz tapes Mickey had made for her, timed to last exactly as long as the drive took her: two hours and fifteen minutes. Mickey would have dinner waiting, and he’d make her eat, even if she wanted to make love first. “Somebody’s got to look after you for a change, Slim,” he’d tell Claire.

  From Friday night to Sunday afternoon, when she’d make the drive north again, she was nothing but his lover. She didn’t talk about the children with Mickey—not hers, and seldom his. He didn’t want her to do his laundry. If they went grocery shopping, they never needed a cart, just one of those plastic baskets you take if you’re going through the express line, because all you have is wine and jalapeños and fresh mussels and coriander.

  Sometimes Mickey’s son, Gabe, would be with them for a night or two, but having Gabe around was nothing like having her children around. “You don’t even talk in the same voice when your kids are in a one-mile radius,” he’d say to her. “We can be having a conversation, then Pete asks you to make him a sandwich and you stop everything and do it.”

  Mickey’s voice seemed to call to her through the brambles of her life, “Come out, come out. This way.” She wanted to disentangle herself; she just didn’t know if she could.

  As much as Mickey disliked the person Claire became around her children, Claire’s children disliked even more who she became around Mickey. “My mom gets this weird, whispery way of talking when she’s around him,” Sally said once during therapy. “The two of them are always touching each other and whispering stuff. Sometimes they even sing these old Beatles songs together in the car. It’s really dumb.”

  They were accustomed to Sam’s way of treating Claire. To them, Mickey’s brand of tenderness and concern was evidence of what Pete called his wimpishness. �
��He’s always doing stuff like putting pillows under her feet and giving her neck massages,” he told the therapist. My dad would never do something like that, is what he was probably thinking, Claire knew.

  Claire remembers a visit their family had taken to Disney World, back when she and Sam were still together. There was this couple at Epcot Center kissing under the fake Eiffel Tower—a kiss that lasted for the entire five minutes they were standing in line for whatever movie it was they were showing there. Watching them kissing like that, in a way she and Sam never did, Claire had felt her legs go weak.

  “Can you believe it? They’ve got their tongues in each other’s mouths,” Sally had said. Then she and Pete laughed. That night in their hotel room, alone with Sam after the children were asleep, Claire wept to him about that kiss. “We’re raising children who think expressions of affection are comical,” she said. “You only kiss me when you want to have sex.”

  “Give it a rest, Claire,” said Sam.

  With Mickey there was never a shortage of kissing. He touched her constantly.

  “How’d you get this?” Mickey asked Claire one time, a few minutes after she arrived on Friday. There was a deep cut on her thumb. He noticed every little thing about her. Claire just shrugged. When her children were around, she didn’t pay attention to what happened to her.

  With his son, Mickey played catch and attended jazz concerts Sunday afternoons. Gabe had long since learned to entertain himself at events like this. Pete and Sally would have been asking when they were leaving or requesting money for the arcade next door, not that she would have taken them to a jazz club in the first place. But Gabe, who was almost the same age as Pete, always sat there patiently looking through his baseball cards, and when Mickey would ask him a question like “Who wrote that song?” he could tell you it was Thelonius Monk. At bedtime, Mickey read him the box scores for the American League or a book on baseball tips for Little Leaguers, with chapters like “How to Bunt” and “Theories of Base Stealing.”

  For Claire he would stop at three different stores until he found the kind of coffee beans she liked, which he’d grind fresh for every pot he made her. He’d warm her bathrobe in front of the fire when she was having a bath, and then he’d put the towel on her hair and dry it. Before it got to be time for her to leave, Sundays, he warmed up her car for her, checked her oil and her tires. He made her call him when she got in the door of her house after she got back home, so he knew she was okay. “No offense, Slim,” he said. “But you drive worse than you sing.”

  Claire and Mickey used to talk about how they might work things out so they could live together. Secretly Claire believed that once he got to know Pete and Sally better, Mickey would realize what wonderful children they were and his view of blending families would change. Sometimes when they were making love she even allowed herself to imagine that they could have a baby. The one time she brought it up, he actually shivered. “Horrifying idea,” he said. Shortly afterward Mickey had his vasectomy.

  As anxious and uncertain as it made Claire feel, knowing the intensity of Mickey’s resistance to spending time with her children, it was also part of what she loved about him. He loved her too much to share her. Nobody had ever loved her that much before, or stood up for her in the face of the constant demands of her children the way Mickey did.

  He would say he wanted to take her to see the Red Sox play Oakland, and she’d say, “Can we get another ticket and take Pete?” Mickey would say no, I want it to be just you and me. Imagine Sam saying that.

  Hearing that Mickey took his mom to a ball game without including him, Pete was not so much resentful as puzzled. He had never thought about his mom having a life apart from him, or desires beyond his and his sister’s happiness.

  Observing the arrival one day of a Victoria’s Secret shipment Claire had ordered, Sally commented a little sharply, “How much does all this underwear cost, anyway?” Always before, if a mailorder shipment came, it would have been for Sally.

  “You know how long it’s been since I bought anything for myself?” Claire told her. “You know how many years I’ve been wearing maternity underpants?”

  On the phone with Mickey, she would say to Pete, “Don’t interrupt,” and keep talking. When she brought the children down to Mickey’s house with her, she and Mickey would leave them at the house Saturday night with a babysitter and go out to some club.

  “I can’t believe it,” Sally would mutter. “You drag us all the way to Boston, where all this cool stuff’s going on, and then you leave us at some guy’s house we don’t even like while you’re off having a great time.” Worst of all were the occasions when Gabe would be there too, and Claire and Mickey would leave the three of them sitting glumly on the couch (not Gabe, of course; Gabe never complained), watching a video.

  “I get to have a life,” she told them. Mickey had told her that, and she wanted to believe it.

  Eight or nine months into their relationship Claire had actually begun to consider whether it was possible that after the end of the school year her children might just move in with their father while she moved in with Mickey. That was how much she wanted to be with him.

  “You leave your kids?” he said. “You could never do it. I’d never let you either.”

  “Maybe I could,” she told him. “As long as they’re happy, I’m fine. They don’t have to be happy with me. Just happy.”

  “But they wouldn’t be. And neither would you. You’re a mom.” It was almost an obscenity the way he said the word, but Claire knew he was right.

  Mickey was getting worn down, she could see it. “I feel like I’m trying to live my whole life in two days a week,” he said.

  “Even when you’re here, you’re not always here,” Mickey told her. He was right too. They’d be eating their dinner by the fire, listening to Chet Baker, Mickey rubbing her back. Suddenly he’d feel a tightness in her neck.

  “What it is it, Slim?” he’d ask. “Oh, nothing,” she’d say. Then she’d start talking about this crazy grapefruit diet Sally’d been on, and her worry that her daughter might be borderline anorexic. Just when she’d let it go and he’d be kissing her again, he’d lose her again like a radio station whose signal is weak.

  “Pete’s so hostile and disrespectful to me these days,” she’d say. “It’s as if Sam’s in our house in Pete’s body. I talk to him and he doesn’t even answer. I’ll hear him on the phone to his dad, whispering about me, and I know that instead of backing me up when I enforce some kind of boundaries, Sam just commiserates with him about how unreasonable I am.” And then she’d tell Mickey about how she’d confiscated Pete’s boom box last week when he had neglected his chores again. And Pete’s response: “You just want me to be perfect, like your stupid boyfriend’s kid.”

  “Where have you gone, Claire?” Mickey whispered to her. “Come back to me.”

  By July Claire couldn’t make love with him without crying. She could see their time together closing in as clearly as if they were staying in an apartment whose lease would soon be up. From the moment she arrived on Friday nights all she could think of was how much time was left before she’d have to go.

  Remember this, she’d think as they would sit on his porch swing having a beer and listening to Ella, or on his couch some evening, listening to a particular recording of Bud Powell he loved, her head in his lap while he read the sports page. She knew now this was a country she was visiting and her visitor’s permit was about to expire.

  She started asking him for the names of certain jazz albums he played a lot, asking him to tape them for her. She went out and bought a couple hundred dollars’ worth of perennials and planted them in Mickey’s garden. Sometimes she’d wake in the middle of the night and just lie there watching him sleep.

  At the end of July Mickey saw his son off to camp in preparation for the month he and Claire were going to spend together. The day she was supposed to go to Mickey’s, with her bags packed in the backseat of her station wagon, she got
a call from her lawyer telling her Sam had decided to file for custody of the children on the grounds that she was an emotionally unstable parent. Claire called Mickey and told him she couldn’t come and be with him in August. Or ever again.

  “You do what you have to, Slim,” he told her. “I always knew this couldn’t last forever. I was just going to enjoy every second for as long as I could, and I did too. You ride the ride until it’s over. Then you get off. Simple as that.”

  On the other end of the phone Claire was weeping too hard to speak.

  “Hey, baby,” he said. “None of that. You know you’re my true love and you always will be. It’s just one of those things.”

  After she put down the phone she walked over to the stove, where she had been making her leek and potato soup to bring to Mickey’s house. She picked up the pot, and threw it with all the strength she had against the black and white tiles of her kitchen floor. There are three chips still missing from the place it landed. She stood there for a long time after that, her whole body shaking, calling out his name.

  Then she took out the mop and cleaned up the mess. Over the course of the next four weeks, while her kids were off with their father, Claire met with her lawyer and defrosted the freezer and canned thirty-two quarts of tomato sauce. She sewed a patchwork quilt for Pete’s bed, using fabric from all his outgrown flannel shirts, and stenciled a row of flamingos along the ceiling of Sally’s room. She organized their photograph albums and ordered enlargements of all her favorite pictures of her children, which she framed and hung in her bedroom. She cut off her braids—not in some desperate, middle-of-the-night rampage, but calmly, with nail scissors, at her bathroom sink. Later she went to a Newbury Street salon that charged her a hundred dollars to shape what was left of her hair into a chic, French-looking style that everyone says suits her well.