Where Love Goes

by Joyce Maynard

  “No date,” Mickey tells her. “I rented a video.”

  “What’s the story?” she says. Mickey always goes out Friday nights. Saturdays, too. And often on weeknights besides.

  “I don’t know what’s happening, Slim,” he tells her. “The response letter I send when I answer the personals doesn’t seem to be reeling them in the way it used to. Last month I mailed out twenty-five and I only got four responses back. Not a live one in the bunch. You think I’m losing my touch?”

  “Maybe the word is out about you, Mickey,” Claire says. “ ‘Ethereal yet pithy’ and all that. ‘Plethora of freckles.’ That letter’s been in circulation an awfully long time. It might be time for a new approach.”

  She writes the new letter herself:

  Dear Friend,

  Your ad in the Phoenix has caught the eye of my friend Mickey. This letter comes to you by way of introduction from a highly discriminating woman of roughly your age and stage in life who answered an ad of his long ago and has loved him ever since.

  I’ll get to the part about how it is that I could hold Mickey in such high esteem as a former boyfriend, lover of women, and all-around wonderful man and still not be with him myself in a minute. (No, he did not suffer a horrible disfiguring accident, and no, I didn’t get sent to North Dakota in some top-secret government witness relocation program.)

  It doesn’t matter how many attractive eligible bachelors you have kept company with. You have never met a man like Mickey. This is a man who gives the kind of priority to love that most of the people who answer your ad have probably been giving to things like getting to be partner in their law firm or reaching the million-dollar sales mark.

  Mickey is a true lover of women, is all. And when the woman comes along who is a good candidate for being loved by him and knows how to love him back with equivalent imagination, passion, and single-mindedness, he will be a true and irresistible lover of her.

  Mickey’s a Southerner who developed early a passion for music and baseball. He’s also a devoted father to his son, Gabe, the product of a marriage that ended long ago.

  Mickey’s approach to child raising is a lot like his approach to romance: one-on-one. Observing Mickey and Gabe together is like watching a pair of bachelor roommates. They go listen to jazz, hang out at Fenway. For Christmas last year, Mickey spent the better part of a weekend making a tape in his recording studio using actual crowd noises, commercials, and hokey organ music and featuring the voice of a baseball announcer friend of his narrating a duel between Mickey (as aging relief pitcher for the Red Sox) and Gabe (as rookie phenom for the Texas Rangers). Needless to say, the duel ended with Gabe hitting the pennant-winning home run and the crowd going wild. I tell you this as evidence of the kind of painstaking care this man gives to those he loves. The list is short, for good reason. A man can’t give this kind of attention to more than a few people in his life. And there is basically one slot vacant in Mickey’s: for a rare and wonderful woman.

  Mickey has set things up for himself in a way that allows him to spend virtually all of his time doing what he likes and almost none of it doing what he doesn’t like. As a result, he is not one of your more conspicuously affluent types, but his quality of life exceeds that of any BMW-driving fast-track slave to the time clock I’ve encountered. Spending time with Mickey is—in addition to other things—wonderful fun.

  He will always notice what perfume you’re wearing, and if you have a birthmark between two of your fingers, he will find that out. He will open the car door for you. He will make you tapes of wonderful music you have never heard before, and he will listen to every story you tell him and want to see what you looked like when you were a little girl.

  When you walk down the street with him, he will occasionally point out the beautiful hair of one woman you pass and the elegant bearing of another, but what I always felt when he did this was that his level of connoisseurship and deep appreciation only made his love and unequivocal loyalty to me all the more precious.

  He would name the day John Lennon was shot as one of the saddest in his life, and the day Ella Fitzgerald dies will doubtless be another. He told me the night I met him that he never gives or receives presents—which first left me feeling a little regretful that there would be no bouquets and packages from Victoria’s Secret in my future with this man. But the fact is, his love is the gift. And true love in return is the only one he cares about.

  Without boring you (this letter is about your romantic quest, after all, not mine), I will explain briefly how it came to be that I am attempting to assist in the romantic search of a man I love so well myself, who I believe loved me in equally large measure.

  I had children (still do) and a life he felt would never allow the kind of intense, passionate intimacy he lives for. He said it was better for him to bid me good-bye than to stand around trying to fit in some watered-down version of his brand of loving in between the demands of my kids’ games and fixing dinner. And because I love him as I do (which is to say, with a selflessness I once thought could only exist between a parent and a child), if he could find a woman who had freedom and space enough to make loving and being loved by him the central focus of her life, it would make me happy.

  You shouldn’t contact Mickey if you don’t feel up for a major and possibly life-altering experience. Truthfully, I should add, it wouldn’t hurt if you are in possession of a good combination of the physical attributes that particularly appeal to this man. Although, being the lover of women he is, they run the gamut from very long legs to adorable petiteness, with a decided preference for dark hair, blue eyes, great skin, a good figure, a beautiful face.

  You shouldn’t respond if you want babies or have any yourself. You shouldn’t respond if you need to get taken to expensive restaurants, or any restaurants, in fact, where entrées go into the double-digit category. But if what truly matters most to you is finding a man of rare intelligence and humor with a large and loving heart, who would look UP take notice every time you walk in the room, and then think about you after you’ve left it, you will not find a better one. I wish you well.

  Claire shows Mickey’s letter of recommendation to Tim. He is very quiet as he studies it. Finally he looks up.

  “I never opened the car door for you,” he says. “I’m sorry. But I did know about the birthmark.”

  • • •

  She shows the letter to Nancy, who makes a snorting noise when she finishes.

  “I like men to give me presents,” she says. “I think they should. You’re the only person I know who could make a virtue out of a person being cheap. So long as that person’s Mickey.”

  “I was just trying to make a point,” Claire tells her.

  “Tight with money, tight with love, that’s what I always say,” says Nancy.

  “You don’t understand Mickey,” says Claire.

  “When are you ever going to get over this guy?” Nancy says, shaking her head.

  It’s such a nice evening Claire has decided to ride her bike over to Pete’s game down at Haskell Field. Tim said he and Ursula might meet her over there; these days Ursula likes to ride her two-wheeler everywhere, and now that it’s summer and the days are longer, she can ride after dinner, even. One of these days, Claire likes to think, they might all ride together the way some families do that she watches at the park, pedaling in a row like ducks. Father, mother, kids.

  Pedaling down Grove Street, she notices two figures up ahead on skateboards. Even before she recognizes them they catch her attention; there is so clearly an energy and excitement between them. They look so happy and playful—like children, but also like lovers. Only when she gets up closer—though not so close that they see her—does she realize the two figures are her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend, Travis. Sally wears her short shorts as usual, cut off half an inch below the start of her firm, tight buttocks. Travis wears those crazy fat pants of his that he had to go to five different stores to find. Size forty-six Wranglers from the Bi
g Men’s section, dragging so low only the toes of his AirWalks show. He ties them with a piece of rope, and still it’s a mystery what keeps them up over those nonexistent hips of his. He’s shirtless as usual, every rib showing on his smooth, flat, hairless chest, and a full inch of cotton boxer shorts revealed above the drooping waistband of his pants.

  Travis has given Sally his old skateboard, but she’s still just a beginner. She stands on the skateboard a little unsteadily. After a second she hops off and tumbles onto the grass along the edge of the sidewalk, laughing. Travis tumbles down beside her. He places a hand on her belly with a degree of assurance that startles Claire. He has touched her there before, a lot. He nuzzles his head against her neck and whispers something to her. She laughs again.

  Claire has gotten off her bike. She’s walking it up the hill, partly because the pedaling is hard at this point but also, she knows, because she can’t take her eyes off the two of them.

  Travis gets up. Sally is still sitting on the grass with her skateboard beside her, but he has set his almost delicately down on the tar. Now he places one foot on the board and kicks off with the other. He glides out into the road.

  Here is this boy who has practically been living at her house for half a year, whose lanky frame sprawled on her living-room floor Claire steps over nearly every day as he lies there on that nearly concave belly of his, watching skateboarding or snowboarding videos, depending on the season. She feeds him peanut butter cookies and he drinks their milk a quart at a time, straight from the jug, often with his Walkman playing and the faint sound of rap music leaking out the sides of his earphones under his goofy blond dreadlocks. Now and then, on the rare occasions when he isn’t over at their house, and he calls for Sally, and Claire answers, she may ask him, “How’s it going, Travis?” But mostly she knows him as a monosyllabic stranger who follows her daughter around like an Irish setter puppy.

  She’s accustomed to seeing him carrying his skateboard, of course. He’s never without it. Sometimes she will see him glide up to their door on it, hopping off at the precise spot where the sidewalk opens out onto their front walk, and parking it on the front porch.

  But until this moment, Claire has never really seen Travis ride. Now she watches nearly transfixed by the totally unexpected beauty of him.

  He must be as tall as Tim—well over six feet—but where Tim is built like a linebacker, Travis is a dancer, a stalk of bamboo. His face, which she always recognized as handsome—especially if he’d do something about his hair—has a look of total concentration as he zigzags wildly down the sidewalk, then fishtails back. Now he makes a circle directly in front of Sally, seeming to guide his board with nothing but the movement of those narrow hips of his.

  Now he’s jumping for her. His whole body rises in midair, and somehow he has taken the skateboard with him—his arms outstretched as if he were balancing on a tightrope, and a quarter-inch motion in the wrong direction would send him plummeting. Claire has always thought of Travis as skinny, but now she sees that his body is just perfectly lean. The muscles on his arms are those of a man, not a boy.

  He lands on a curb, but instead of toppling over, he jumps again. Now he’s twirling. Now he bends low, kicks off with one foot to build up more speed. He careens past Sally in a way that seems to be heading him directly into the path of an oncoming car. Claire is raising her hands to her face too terrified to scream, but just at the moment when it seems certain he’s about to end up underneath its tires, he cuts a sharp, impossible-seeming left and stops on a dime. Sally, who must have seen him do this before, only laughs.

  Still frozen on the sidewalk, her hands clutching the handlebars of her bike, Claire breathes for the first time in what seems like ages. They are so absorbed in each other, these two, they haven’t noticed her, and they won’t. She lifts herself back up on the seat and pedals off to her son’s game.

  I know what that was, she thinks to herself. That was a mating dance.

  It’s the bottom of the second inning when Claire arrives at Pete’s game. Tonight the Angels are playing the White Sox, the only team in the league that’s lost more games than they have. White Sox lead three to one.

  Other years, even back when his T-ball team lost every game but one, Pete was always the one calling out to his teammates from the field that they could come back and win the game. Last year, when his team, the Tigers, were behind, Pete would turn his baseball hat inside out and start the rally cap cheer. Other mothers would actually lean over to Claire on the bench and say to her, “That’s some boy you’ve got. He does more to encourage the team than the coach. You must be very proud of him.”

  Yes, she said. She is. The only person she’s ever seen to love baseball the way Pete did was Mickey. Whom Pete couldn’t stand—although they were a lot alike. Same tenacious aggressiveness up on the mound. Same dry wit in the dugout. These days, though, Pete sits slumped and silent on the bench, silent even when the rest of his team is cheering. He has been placed in right field most of the time and he’s low on the batting order. Often he sits out an inning or two. He has been striking out a lot.

  At the other end of the bench Claire spots Sam, lithe as a teenager in his ripped jeans and T-shirt, eyes fixed on his son as he comes up to bat. Claire and Sam sit as far apart as they can at games, unless one of them has some piece of information to convey to the other—a pickup time to check on, a piece of business to discuss about Sally’s car insurance of Pete’s summer camp. This evening, though, Claire has this crazy longing to set aside all the old battles for the duration of the game anyway and slide over onto the seat next to him. She wishes they could just talk about baseball. About their son, actually.

  She has already consulted Mickey about Pete’s baseball slump this season, as much as a person can by long distance. She has even attempted to describe to Mickey, over the phone, the way Pete has been swinging the bat lately, the way he seems to step away from the ball as it whizzes toward him, as if he was afraid of being hit. He was never afraid of the ball before.

  “Can’t Tim work with him?” Mickey asked her. But Pete dislikes Tim even more than he disliked Mickey.

  Now, as her son ambles up to the plate with that bored, impassive look on his face that breaks Claire’s heart, she shoots a look at his father on the chance that he might be looking her way, too. If he did she might actually say something to him about Pete for once, not money or scheduling.

  “Can you help him?” she would say. “He’s so unhappy.” Sam is a natural athlete, good at any sport he tries. No doubt he knows how Pete needs to adjust his swing.

  But Sam stares straight ahead grimly as Pete adjusts his cap.

  “Easy out,” someone calls from the White Sox bench. Claire wants to yell “Hush!”

  “Give us a single, Temple,” one of Pete’s teammates calls out to him in the voice they all seem to adopt during games, a full octave lower than their normal range. Like a twelve-year-old boy’s idea of how a man talks.

  “He throws junk, Temple,” someone else calls to Pete. “You can hit him.”

  It is a junk pitch, too, high over Pete’s head. Only he swings at it, more like someone swatting at a fly than somebody playing baseball. Strike one.

  “Choose your pitch, Pete,” his coach calls to him.

  The pitcher throws another ball. This time Pete’s not buying it. Claire says one of her baseball prayers. Three more. All she’s asking for tonight is a walk. A walk or a single.

  Next pitch is a strike. There’s a groan from the Angels bench. “Come on Temple. Not again.”

  From his end of the bench, Sam calls out, “Be a hitter, son.” After all these years of sitting on the bench at her son’s games—and Mickey’s and Sam’s before that—Claire has never really understood the language of cheering from the sidelines the way so many of the other parents do, even a lot of the mothers. She asked Mickey one time what he calls out to Gabe at his Little League games.

  “It depends on what he’s doing, Slim,” he told
her. But what he tells his son most often is, “See the ball.”

  Claire liked that. “See the ball, Pete,” she calls out to Pete now.

  He swings and misses. Strike three. Pete throws the batting helmet in the dirt and scuffs back to the bench. He has that tough look on his face that Claire knows means he needs all his concentration to keep from crying. Claire shoots a look in Sam’s direction again. What does he think? What should they do? For a second there it looks as though Sam wants to talk to her too.

  Just then Tim and Ursula arrive on their bikes. “Look, Daddy, there’s Pete,” Ursula calls out. She’s using her baby voice tonight. “Yea for Pete!” she yells. “Yea for Pete!”

  Tim scrambles up the steps of the bleachers to join Claire and kisses her cheek. Ursula snuggles up beside her. This evening she has evidently decided she likes Claire.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Tim says, a little breathless. “Ursula had a little trouble on the hill. How are we doing?”

  “We’re losing,” Claire tells him. “The coach put Pete in right field again, too.”

  “My daddy could punch him if you want,” Ursula says. “My daddy’s the strongest.”

  “Never mind, Ursula,” Claire tells her. “Some problems a person has to work out for themselves.”

  Ursula has made a deal with her dad. He let her quit day camp on condition that she will play quietly until three o’clock, when day camp would have let out, and not bother him. Last time she asked him what time it was he said ten-thirty. That means she’s only got four and a half hours more to wait. But pretty soon she can ask him for lunch anyway.

  She’s playing Barbies. The girls are going to a party today. Jessica is wearing the blue glitter evening gown. Samantha is wearing a pink mini dress and a fur stole Ursula has made out of a piece of cotton she got out of an aspirin bottle. Because she doesn’t have a party dress for Tracy, Ursula has draped a hankie around her waist with a purple hair ribbon to keep it in place.