Where Love Goes

by Joyce Maynard

  He is still driving, keeping his eyes on the road. They pass an old Subaru wagon pulled over under a clump of pine trees, the silhouette of two people necking in the front seat. “Way to go, buddy,” Travis mutters. “Those people have the right idea,” he says to Sally.

  She ejects Nine Inch Nails and puts in Tori Amos—a cassette Travis calls her Sensitive Female Music.

  “You know how I feel about you Sally,” he says. He slides a single finger under the elastic of her panties. She doesn’t stop him, though he can feel her drawing in her breath.

  “It’s a big deal to me, Trav,” she tells him. “I’m not sure I’m ready.”

  “It’s a big deal to me, too,” he says. “I think about it all the time. Every single minute.”

  “I don’t like to feel pressured,” she tells him.

  “I don’t want to pressure you, either,” he says. Two fingers. One stroking her soft blond hair. One inside her.

  “I love you,” he says. “I love you so much. To me you’re the most beautiful girl in the world.”

  She is no longer saying anything, but she doesn’t stop him, either. If you asked her right now whether she felt good or not, she couldn’t tell you.

  Claire sits in a late-model Subaru station wagon with a My Little Pony hanging from the rearview mirror and a bunch of old Happy Meal boxes on the floor. Also a placemat from Friendly’s that someone—Tim’s daughter, Ursula, no doubt—has colored in, careful to stay in the lines. But Ursula isn’t here; she’s at her T-ball practice. The two of them are driving nowhere in particular, but in the general direction of a pond he sometimes takes his students to do fieldwork, where he knows of a wonderful bed of moss.

  He has put a Van Morrison cassette that Claire also owns in the machine. In a moment, she knows, they will get to the part where Van starts moaning as if he were making love.

  “I can’t believe I feel so nervous and shy,” he says. “At my age. I feel like a kid.”

  She doesn’t laugh. “It never gets easy,” she says. “I know that.”

  “Sometimes it’s easier than this,” he says. “It’s easier when you care less. But with you, I just want to do everything right.”

  “Don’t worry so much,” she says. “We could be friends, okay?”

  “I would like that,” he says. “But I have to be honest. I would also like more than that. I couldn’t stop thinking about you last night.”

  “You probably just had some questions about pioneers, right?” she says.

  “Making my daughter’s lunch today, I couldn’t even focus on what she was saying,” he tells her. “I was reading her Beezus and Ramona last night and I couldn’t even follow the story. Which wasn’t that complicated, believe me.”

  “I know,” she says. “I practically have that one memorized.”

  “I’m not usually like this,” he tells her. “I actually made a decision after the last relationship I was in that I was just going to focus on my daughter until it felt like she didn’t need me so much.”

  “I’ve had the same general idea,” Claire says. “It doesn’t always work so well, does it?”

  “I thought I was doing all right,” he says. “I wasn’t even thinking about finding a woman. I just saw you and it was like somebody shot a thousand volts of current through me.”

  “I don’t know if I have anything to offer you, Tim,” she says. “It feels like every ounce of me is spoken for. With my job and my kids and everything. Even though mine are older than yours, it’s still just about all I can manage sometimes, giving them what they need.”

  He pulls the car over and turns it off. He takes her hand. “Maybe if you didn’t have to do it all by yourself it would be easier,” he says. “Did that ever occur to you?”

  “Sure,” she says. “In my fantasies. It’s just the logistics that are hard to figure.”

  “Could be you figure too hard,” he says. “You might just have to let go and let your life happen.” He bends over her and kisses her very hard on the lips.

  She kisses him back. She also puts her arms around him tightly and presses her chest against his. Her body is shaking.

  “I can’t,” she tells him. “I have to be a mother.”

  “Of course you do,” he says. “What else should you be?” It is at just this point, as he is pressing his tongue into her mouth, that a car goes by she thinks she recognizes. A fragment of very loud music drifts in the window like the smell from a neighbor’s barbecue caught on the wind. Then it fades away and they’re alone again on the dirt road, so still and quiet this could be the day after a nuclear holocaust, and they could be the last two inhabitants on the planet.

  Tonight Tim has cooked eggplant parmigiana for himself and his daughter, with Caesar salad, garlic bread, and asparagus tips in lemon butter. For dessert he’s baked double fudge brownies, which they will have with whipped cream and chocolate sauce while he and Ursula watch “Rescue 911.” He can’t make a meal like this every night, but he tries to as often as he can. If he could just make enough good food, maybe his daughter might be satisfied and content in ways he knows she is not. He understands it doesn’t really work that way, but he puts so much love into his cooking, he has to believe some of it makes its way to her.

  In the next room he can hear Ursula watching “The Price Is Right.” “Take the dining-room set, you dummies!” she is calling out to the television screen. Jenny, their dog, barks.

  “Too bad, folks,” Bob Barker is saying. “Looks like you went over on this one. Tell us what we have for the Fergusons to take home with them, Johnny.”

  “I told you so,” Ursula is saying. “I knew you were going too high.”

  “I knew they should’ve stuck with the dining-room set, Dad,” she is calling out to him. “Now alls they got is a dumb exercise bike.”

  Tim is thinking about kissing Claire. He imagines how it would be if she was here right now, tossing the salad next to him maybe, while he lifts the asparagus from the steamer. He thinks about setting another place at their little card table. He imagines her next to him on one side, and his daughter on the other. Claire would slip her foot out of its shoe under the table and lay it in his lap as they ate. He would place his hand there and rub her toes, one at a time. Ursula would be telling them something about a show she’d watched that day or something her teacher said, but instead of the old lonely weariness, he would have Claire’s foot to hold as he sat there listening. The two of them would exchange glances over the funny things his daughter says.

  Later, clearing away the dishes while Ursula splashes in the tub, he would bend over her and kiss the back of her neck. She would be covering the eggplant parmigiana with aluminum foil while he sponged off the counter, and he would whisper in her ear, “Ten minutes till her bedtime.”

  He reads his daughter a bedtime story—a chapter of Greek mythology, tonight. He turns on her Raffi tape and switches on her nightlight.

  “Don’t forget to kiss Phillip too,” she murmurs. He kisses her doll—an anatomically correct boy baby her mother sent her last Christmas. He sings Ursula her special song: “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.”

  “I love you, Daddy,” she says, half asleep already as he tiptoes out of the room. Upstairs, he knows, Claire is already waiting for him, propped on pillows, reading a magazine with her glasses on. She’s wearing a pair of his pajamas. She smells of bath oil and baby powder. The dishwasher hums, at the end of its cycle. His dog snores. He turns out the last of the downstairs lights. Claire has set down her magazine now, hearing his foot on the step.

  He mounts the stairs with the anticipation of a weary traveler at the end of a long day’s journey, pulling up to the watering hole at last—a Muslim arriving at long last at Mecca, a pioneer catching his first glimpse of the turquoise Pacific, Admiral Byrd planting his stake at the North Pole. He is exhausted, but still he burns for her. This is the way a person is supposed to end his day.

  Claire is lying in bed when the fax line rings—five A.M.
five-thirty maybe. She leaps out of bed and runs upstairs to her office. She would like to read his fax right away, but she doesn’t. She rips it off the machine and stuffs it in her bathrobe pocket instead. Then she goes downstairs and makes her coffee. Only when all the water has dripped through does she let herself pour her mug and settle in to read what he has written. Nobody else is up at her house.

  She reads his letter slowly to savor it. She pretends she is having her coffee with him, the way she has been having her coffee with Mickey these last three years. Only with Mickey there was no hopefulness and prospect; with Mickey, she could only look backward, never forward.

  It’s different with Tim: Tim is like an unopened present.

  She supposes her children must have noticed that something’s up. Sally has asked her why it is the fax line keeps ringing at such odd hours now. “Can’t you tell them to send their grant information at a more reasonable time?” she tells her mother. “I’m trying to sleep.” Upstairs in her office, Claire rips his letter off her machine. Three pages—the longest yet. She sighs as she settles into her chair to read it.

  “I want to give you all sorts of good things” he writes. “The first ladyslipper of spring. The arrowhead I found when I was eleven. I wish I could write you poems and paint you pictures. I wish I could stitch you a velvet cape. I want to grow you grapes and feed them to you. I am drunk with love of you.”

  Ursula and her dad are snuggled up on her bed reading after her bath when he tells her about the woman. He has put mini marshmallows in their hot chocolate.

  “So, I have some news,” he says.

  Her mother is coming from New Zealand—not to visit this time. To stay. She has dumped Elliot after he shaved off his beard and she discovered he didn’t have any chin underneath. Her parents have realized they’re still in love. They’re going to move to Orlando, Florida, and get a kitten. She’s going to have a baby sister.

  “I’ve met somebody,” he says. “A woman.”

  “So?” she says. She has to be careful here. She can tell.

  “Her name is Claire,” he says. “She’s really nice. I think you’ll like her.”

  Ursula feels like she’s just got sucked inside their TV set. She’s Crystal on “Live and Let Live” and he’s Tucker, who has fallen in love with Natalie, the cocaine dealer. After they get married, and Natalie becomes Crystal’s stepmother, the police arrest her, but her dad takes the rap for her and goes to prison. Then Natalie sends Crystal/Ursula to boarding school and gives all her toys to her own kid, Brittany, who takes horseback-riding lessons.

  “What’s this got to do with me?” She says. She is looking at a mini marshmallow melting in her mug.

  “We’ve been getting to know each other,” he says. “We haven’t spent a lot of time together yet because she’s got kids too, and we’re both so busy, but I think we’re going to be seeing more of each other. I like her a whole lot.”

  “So now you want to ditch me?” says Ursula.

  “You nut,” he says. “You know I’d never leave you. I’m just going away for the weekend.”

  “What are you talking about?” she says. The room has begun to spin and she has this sick taste in her mouth like when you start to throw up but it doesn’t come out all the way. Her father has gone out on a couple of dates before this, but that was just for a few hours. She was usually still awake when he got home. Her babysitter doesn’t know how to sing their special song. Nobody else does.

  “Claire invited me to come for a sleepover at her house,” he says. “Sandy and Jeff said they’ll take care of you.” His downstairs neighbors. He has given them a big box of Ursula’s old toys and clothes for their baby, Keith, and her car seat in return.

  “You already had this all figured out!” she yells. “You didn’t even ask me.”

  “I’m asking you now,” he says. “I’m asking you how you feel about it.”

  “Bad,” she says.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “I thought you might want me to be happy.”

  “Why can’t you be happy with me?” she says. “I thought we were going to work on my bike riding this weekend. I thought we were going to rent House of Blood”

  “You can do that with Sandy and Jeff,” he says. “You can do it with me, next weekend.”

  “Sure,” she says. “Next weekend you’ll probably go off and marry her.”

  Tim arrives at Claire’s house at eight o’clock on a Friday night with his old high-school gym bag in his hands, along with a bouquet of supermarket daffodils. He knows her children have gone to their father’s for the weekend.

  The fact that Claire evidently keeps her Christmas lights up year round—and lit—seems appropriate.

  “I haven’t been able to think about anything else but you all day,” he tells her. “When Ursula woke up she said she felt hot. I felt like a jerk, but all I could think of was, what if she came down with something, and I couldn’t be with you tonight?”

  “She’s all right?” Claire asks. She is wearing a long lacy dress with some kind of leotard underneath and an apron one of her children must have made for her, with a crayon picture of a woman and a couple of kids on the front and the words “World’s Greatest Mom” in rainbow letters.

  “She’s fine,” he tells her. “I’m the one that’s burning up.”

  She brings him into her kitchen, where she has a soup on the stove, and salad and French bread. She sets the daffodils in a vase. Sting is singing “Fields of Gold.” She pours him a beer and sets their soup on the table. They sit and look at the food. Neither one of them makes a move to eat.

  “It looks great,” he says, still not touching a thing.

  “Vichyssoise,” she says. Also motionless.

  “So what’s been happening at the museum?” he asks her.

  “We just got a bequest of this old Lionel train setup,” she says. “Buildings, tunnels, bridges, a whole little world in miniature. Now if I can just raise the money to build the addition we need to house it.”

  “I always loved trains,” he says. Silence again.

  He has got up from his seat and come over behind her. He kneels beside her chair and puts his arms around her, burying his face in her lap. “I never wanted anybody the way I want you now,” he says.

  “Well, then,” she says. She takes his hand and leads him up the stairs to her bedroom. He is dimly aware that she is lighting candles, and that the room smells of something wonderful, jasmine maybe, but he can’t take his eyes off Claire.

  She sits on the edge of her bed. He undresses her very slowly. She can hear him draw in his breath as her blouse falls away. He touches one finger to the hollow at the base of her neck and traces it down the space between her breasts to her belly. She tightens her muscles slightly; even lean as she is now, she feels self-conscious about her stretch marks.

  He shakes his head. “I love everything about you,” he says. After that there are no words anymore, just his big arms, his broad back, his chest pressing against her, his cock, his tongue. His hands are trembling. His mouth is everywhere. He’s like a child seeing snow for the first time, like an old prospector reaching into some stream for the ten millionth time to find a nugget the size of his fist. He’s like a drowning man who has caught hold of a life rope at the last possible second. He will never have enough of her.

  Tim and Claire don’t get out of bed until Saturday afternoon, except to eat a couple of times and go to the bathroom. When the phone rings Claire lets the machine pick it up.

  “I should call Ursula,” he says. Then they start kissing again and he lets it go.

  “I should call Ursula,” he says a few hours later.

  “Right,” she tells him. Every part of her is sore.

  “But I don’t want to. I don’t want to think about her now. Just you.” Then they start in again, and the next time he thinks about his daughter it’s ten o’clock. Way past her bedtime.

  Sunday morning Claire finally plays her messages back. The f
irst one is from Nancy. Something about a yoga class. Then a child’s voice—deeper and more insistent than Claire had imagined, but of course she knows right away who it must be.

  “Where are you?” the voice says. No hello. “Why haven’t you called me?”

  The next message is from Pete at his dad’s, reminding her to feed his iguana. Then Ursula again.

  “You poop face. You dope. Call me now.”

  Tim is standing next to her as she plays these back. “God,” he says. “I’ve been terrible. I’ve got to call her right away.”

  “I hate you,” the next message begins. “Don’t bother calling. I never want to talk to you anymore anyways. You’re the worst daddy in the world.”

  There are more, but he isn’t waiting to listen to them. He’s dialing.

  Claire stands there a few inches away from him. Before this he had been kissing the back of her neck. Now he has stepped away like a dog who’s been discovered peeing on the rug.

  “Ursula?” he’s saying. “It’s Daddy, honey. I’m so sorry I didn’t call you back sooner. I was out.”

  Claire shakes her head. She knows she should leave the room, but she’s frozen to the spot. She has to hear this.

  “That’s not true,” he’s saying. “You know I do. I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’ll never let it happen again.”

  Claire has her head in her hands by this point. Tim doesn’t seem to notice.

  “No,” he says. “I will, really. I’m bringing you a treat when I come home. Maybe we’ll do something fun after school Monday, what do you think? Go out for a milkshake maybe, huh?”

  Even with the receiver pressed against Tim’s ear, Claire can make out the sound of Ursula’s voice berating him. “Never again,” he’s saying. “I swear.”

  Claire doesn’t know what he says next. She has left the room.

  When it’s finally over and he hangs up the phone, he finds Claire in the kitchen washing dishes noisily.