Where Love Goes

by Joyce Maynard

  Even though Claire says now that she will marry him and that she wants to set a date even, Tim has never felt such anxiety about her as he does now. In the last couple of days he has seen something in her that never used to be there and it frightens him. There is this numb quality about her. “Sometimes when I talk to you or touch you,” he says to her, “I feel like I’m sending radio signals into space.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  Not that she’s physically withdrawn. In fact, Claire has never made love so ferociously before. Always before it has been Tim who was crawling all over her and couldn’t get enough. The day she came to him after he sent her his terrible angry fax, Claire was like a person who hasn’t been touched in a year, a person eating her last meal. She scratched his skin. She pounded his back. She kissed him so hard the next day his lips were swollen.

  It’s a thrilling thing to see her this way, but it also leaves Tim with a heavy sense of foreboding. There is a burn-it-up quality about her these days. Even about her failure to practice birth control, which she told him about afterward. This was what he wanted, of course. Only something feels wrong. “We might as well,” she said. “Sometimes there’s nothing to do when you’re standing on the edge of a cliff but to jump.”

  He can’t say when it happened, but Tim’s life has gotten out of his control. The Estuarine Research Institute sent him a letter last week telling him they can’t pay him the first installment for his mussel study until the first of the year, when new federal funds become available. He has managed to pay his phone bill by hocking his VCR and his camera, but he doesn’t know how he’ll manage to come up with next month’s rent in the next five days, and his landlord has already told him no more extensions. Tim has had to cancel the appointment he made with the therapist Claire was so eager for him to see with his daughter, even though he knows she needs to talk to someone badly. When Ursula heard he sold the VCR she threw one of her shoes at him and called him a fuckhead. He has to send her to her room so often now the plywood of her door has actually split in one place from Ursula’s kicking. “You hate me,” she screamed at him this morning. “You wish I wasn’t even born.”

  Tim dreams about a life without her. Lying in his bed waiting for one of Claire’s visits, he imagines what it would have been like for the two of them if they’d met ten years ago, or twenty, before either of them had incurred the scars of so many old injuries or acquired the baggage of ex-husbands, ex-wives, angry children, and the guilt that comes from trying to undo their pain.

  For just a moment Tim allows himself the fantasy that he is Travis and Claire is Sally. He is seventeen years old, riding up to her house on a skateboard, with no care greater than successfully executing a jump over the curb. She comes running out the door to meet him. “Let’s take off someplace,” she says to him, laughing. Who knows where they’re going or when they’ll be back? Maybe never.

  In his real life of course, the best Tim can do is steal little scraps of time with the woman he loves: a furtive kiss in the supermarket parking lot, a couple of hours’ desperate, clutching lovemaking sometime between midnight and dawn. A phone conversation interrupted by the call of his child. A fax she must rip off the machine quickly, before her children see.

  This weekend, though, Tim has arranged to go away with Claire for a night in the mountains. He can’t afford it, but he’ll take her out to dinner. They won’t talk about their children. It will be just the two of them.

  Claire’s pregnant. She doesn’t even need to take the test. Even though it’s been years, she remembers the feeling well. She knows enough about fetal development to understand that what is going on in her is not actually the movement of an organism that is, at this point, no bigger than a pen mark. Still, there’s this fluttering in her, like a very small trapped bird. Even when it makes her clutch her stomach and run for the toilet, she has always loved this feeling. A baby, she says. She’s had enough of words on fax paper and discussions with Nancy about self-actualization. Enough therapy sessions and calculations about how old everybody will be when. There’s no debating the existence of a real, flesh-and-blood baby.

  “I don’t see why we can’t just throw them all together and let an omelette of a family happen,” Tim said to her. “It won’t be the way you’d want it to happen or the way I would. It would settle somewhere, that’s all. And we’d deal with that.”

  Okay, she thinks. We’ll do it.

  Claire and Tim leave Ursula with Sandy and Jeff. Claire’s children are staying at their house with Nancy, who has agreed to sleep over for the night.

  They drive north to the White Mountains. They find a motel with individual cabins—fireplace, TV, kitchenette, $37.50 a night—on the banks of the Pemigewasset River. From the bed they can hear the water running over the rocks. Claire will tell him her news here. They’ll have thirty-six hours in which the only child mentioned will be theirs.

  He has brought massage oil and wine, which Claire won’t drink now, though she hasn’t told him why.

  “You know what I want to do?” she says. “Watch the World Series naked, eating lobster.” Tonight is the seventh game, Philadelphia versus Toronto at the Skydome. Mickey is in Toronto, in fact. Annalise managed to get tickets from her cousin, who works in the Blue Jays’ press office.

  “No wonder you’re in love,” Claire said when he told her.

  “There are other reasons,” he said.

  They hike on Mount Jefferson until early afternoon, when the rain begins, then go back to the room. “The strangest thing happened to me out there,” he tells her. He had wandered off for a moment to look at a rock formation. Rounding a bend in the trail to catch up with her again, he had spotted this woman. I never saw somebody so beautiful, he was thinking. How could he think such a thing, he asked himself, when he was in love with Claire? But there you have it. He did.

  “Only then I realized it was you,” he says. “I swear, there was this moment when I saw you with your hair drenched and your hands in your pockets, looking out across the ridge, and I didn’t think, There’s this woman I know so well and love so much. I just thought, There’s this stranger and she’s grabbed my heart. Day after day I keep falling in love with you all over again.”

  • • •

  Tim and Claire have found a restaurant in Lincoln that advertises one-pound lobster dinners for $9.95. They go in and explain to the hostess that they want a couple to go.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “We don’t do takeout. This is a sit-down restaurant.”

  “But couldn’t we just buy them and carry the food out?” he asks her. “We don’t need the butter and rolls. Just the lobsters would be fine.”

  She tells him no. “This isn’t that kind of place,” she says.

  Claire steps in now. “Well, suppose we had sat down to eat and we didn’t finish our meal,” she says. “You’d wrap the leftovers up and let us take them home, right?”

  “That would be different,” the hostess says;

  “Oh, come on,” Tim says again. He has a fire laid in the fireplace. The game starts in an hour.

  “Those are the rules,” she says.

  So they sit down and order. Tim has a beer while they’re waiting. Claire orders juice. At the table next to them is a woman Claire can tell is a single parent with her three young children. She has dressed up for this dinner and she is trying to have a real conversation with her kids—the oldest two, anyway. They’re playing with the sugar.

  “How do you think they did that special effect where the guy’s arm melted like that?” she says. None of the children responds.

  “I’ve seen that movie,” Claire could tell her. Also the movie that is this woman’s life. More Saturday nights than she can count she has found herself putting on a dress and spending more money than she had any business spending, just to go out into the world of grown-ups and have dinner at a place like this, even though it was with her children.

  “So what do you think,” says Tim, “are they going to nam
e Paul Molitor the Most Valuable Player?”

  This is just their game. She has already rated the entire Phillies roster according to which ones she would soonest have sex with. Mitch Williams being dead last.

  “I like Molitor well enough,” she says. “But I have to go with Cito Gaston. Or Jimmy Key.”

  “Interesting choice,” he says. “Especially since he was traded to the Yankees two years ago.”

  Their lobsters arrive. They crack the claws to make it easier later back at the Rocky Knoll Cabins. He takes a bite. She does the same. Then Claire grabs her stomach dramatically and doubles over. Tim calls the waitress.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he says in a hillbilly accent. “But as you can see, the little lady here is fixing to toss her cookies. It’s that durned morning sickness again. So if you wouldn’t mind just wrapping up our lobsters …”

  The waitress looks at Claire suspiciously.

  “Unless, of course, you’d rather have her stick around and throw up all over your restaurant,” he says, standing up dramatically and speaking loud enough that everyone in the place can hear him. “We’ve got a pregnant woman here, for God’s sake!”

  The waitress goes for the hostess. Claire picks up her coat and heads for the door. She is in the car waiting for him, laughing so hard she has tears in her eyes, when he comes out a minute later carrying their two foil-wrapped lobsters, along with corn and cole slaw, rolls, salad, and a little plastic container of drawn butter.

  “You were right, you know,” she tells him.

  “What are you talking about?” he says.

  “I am. Pregnant.”

  He actually kisses her feet.

  They watch the game on the floor in front of the fireplace wearing nothing but their plastic bibs. She loves the animal feeling of digging into the soft pink lobster meat with her fingers, the butter dripping over her skin. He licks it off. Every once in a while one of them will comment on a play. At one point Claire imagines she sees Mickey in the crowd as the camera pans the box seats, but it happens so quickly she can’t be certain. The woman next to him was very beautiful, that’s for sure. Which would fit.

  Sometime around the fourth inning they move onto the bed. “A baby” he says, stroking her belly, her breasts. “I cant believe we’re going to have a baby.”

  He feeds her Ben & Jerry’s chocolate ice cream, which is more like soup now. John Kruk doubles to right field and Claire climbs on top of Tim.

  She decides she hates the Phillies, who seem to spend all their time on the bench chewing tobacco and spitting. “Imagine kissing a man who chews tobacco,” she says.

  Sometime around the seventh inning she drifts off to sleep. This is the first symptom of pregnancy to hit her strongly. She is so tired all the time.

  His hands on her hair, just gently stroking her, wake Claire just in time to see Joe Carter round the bases on that last, glorious home run of his. Mickey will love this, she thinks. He is out there somewhere, explaining to Annalise what pitch Williams should have thrown that might have left Carter swatting air. “You never want to give a guy like Carter a high fastball at a moment like that in the game,” he will be saying. “Big mistake.”

  “I want to see you with your belly out to here,” Tim says.

  “Kind of a Mitch Williams look, huh?” she says. But he can’t joke anymore. There are tears in his eyes.

  “I want to rub your back. I want to rub your feet. I want to take care of you in a way you’ve never been taken care of before. I have so much love for you,” he says. “I don’t know where to put it all.”

  Driving home from the mountains, Tim keeps saying the same thing over and over: “We’re pregnant.”

  “Let’s get this straight,” Claire says. “I’m pregnant. You just helped get me this way, okay?” There’s a sharpness to her voice as she says this. She doesn’t say it, but Mickey used to make fun of men who talked about pregnancy as if it were a shared condition.

  “Next thing you know, they’ll say they’re breast-feeding. Then they’ll be going through the change of life,” he said. She wishes Mickey didn’t interrupt her life all the time this way with his observations but that’s what happens. “Go away, Mickey,” she wants to call out.

  “Do you think we can have a home birth?” Tim asks her. She knows he has always been sad that he never got to witness Ursula’s birth because of the emergency cesarean.

  “I don’t know, Tim,” she says, strangely embarrassed. “I’m pretty old for that kind of thing.”

  “I wouldn’t want to do anything that would endanger our baby,” he says. “I was just thinking how great it would be if we could have it right there on our bed.” Our bed.

  “And then Ursula could be right there, too, to bond,” he says. “And Sally and Pete, naturally.”

  Is it just the pregnancy, or why is Claire feeling queasy?

  “You know what I was thinking?” he said. “I know you’ll want to breast-feed, but it would be so great if we got a breast pump to pump your milk, so I could feed the baby right from the beginning.”

  Back when she was pregnant with Pete and Sally, Claire was always trying to interest Sam in feeling their kicks, but now when Tim puts his hand on her belly, she lifts it like a wet fish and sets it back in his own lap.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t touch me there at the moment,” she says. What a bitch. And the worst part is, he apologizes.

  Now he’s talking about demand feedings versus a schedule. What does she think about having the baby in the bed with them for the first six months or so? Just until she’s old enough to go in with Ursula?

  Or he. “Imagine,” he says. “It never even occurred to me we could have a son.”

  “I want to take him camping,” Tim says. “We’ll start out just sleeping in the yard under the stars. I’ll take him down to the pond and show him all the different kinds of peepers. We’ll collect frogs’ eggs and mushroom spores and animal scat.”

  “What would you think about the idea of disconnecting the television?” he asks her. “I hate what it’s doing to Ursula.” Now, there’s an idea that would do wonders for his relationship with Pete.

  He’s talking about Waldorf education and Suzuki violin. He doesn’t want to be one of those Little League fathers who are always screaming out instructions to their kids on the field. “Stop me if you ever hear me doing that, promise?” he says. “I want to build you the most beautiful rocking chair in the world. I want to knit you a shawl to cover yourself while you feed our child. You will be a madonna to me.”

  There’s a call on Claire’s answering machine from Sergeant Wallace of the Blue Hills Police. Jenny has been hit by a car. Because nobody was home when it happened, the Animal Protection Society has taken care of it. She was so badly injured the only humane thing to do was have her put to sleep.

  Tim will be picking up Ursula right about now at the neighbors’. Sally is out somewhere, with Travis no doubt. Mickey has also called to say could you believe Carter’s home run? What was Williams thinking of, giving him that pitch?

  She is just standing there taking this in when the phone rings again. Tim. “I just had to tell you again,” he says, “that was the best day of my life.”

  She gives him the news about Jenny.

  Ursula knows how it happened. Jenny missed them so badly—Ursula and her dad, her real family. She had gone looking for them. She was crossing Elm Street, one block down from their apartment, when the car hit her. She was on her way home. She probably had her tongue hanging out the way she does when she’s excited. Her ears were flopped back from running. I’m free at last, she was probably thinking. I finally got out of there.

  Pete was the worst, the way he kept playing that horrible loud music all the time. How was Jenny supposed to sleep? They never did tricks with her. They didn’t talk to her. One time when Ursula was over she had heard Sally say, “That dog is on my bed again. Will somebody please come take it away?”

  Now she shou
ld be happy. Jenny’s body was taken to the Animal Protection Society, where Ursula and her dad picked her up Sunday night after they got the news. If she and her dad had been just a few hours later, Jenny would already have been cremated. They got there just in time. But not really.

  Ursula didn’t go into the room with her dad, but she was waiting when he came out. He had Jenny in his arms, wrapped in her special blanket, which he and Ursula had brought. Her face was covered, but one of her paws was drooped down from underneath the blanket. Pete and Sally evidently never clipped her nails.

  Her eyes were closed, and it looked like there was actually a tear in the corner of one of them, although Ursula knew it was really just that goo she got sometimes. Somewhere inside there must be blood oozing out of her, but on the outside she looked fine. Ursula herself knows how that can be. To look at Ursula at that particular moment, for instance, you would never have guessed all the things that were oozing out inside her.

  They drive to a place her dad knew from his research work, way out in the woods. There’s moss in this place and ferns and a nice smell Jenny would like. If Jenny was here—not just this dog body, but the real Jenny—she would want to dig. Also chew sticks.

  They have brought her chew bone. Also her collar. Her dad has also brought a shovel. After he sets Jenny on the moss, still wrapped in her blanket, he begins to dig.

  There should be a song, Ursula thinks. She thinks about the songs they’ve been learning at school. “Buffalo Gals.” “Eating Goober Peas.” The theme song from “Gilligan’s Island” that Mrs. Kennedy taught them during recess one time when it was too rainy to go out. None of them is right.

  She sings that song “I Will Always Love You.” “If I should stay, I would only be in your way,” she sings. “But I will always love you.”