Where Love Goes

by Joyce Maynard

  In the virtual reality of her solitary lovemaking, Claire’s lover holds her very tightly, one step away from hurting her. She wraps her legs around his neck, digs her heels into his back, holds his face between her hands, breathes the air directly from his mouth. She presses her palms against his chest. She moves her pelvis as if she were dancing. She may also run her hands along her own belly and over her breasts, imagining that the fingers she feels are someone else’s. “I want to fill you up,” he says to her. “I want to drink you.”

  Alone in her bed, she may even whisper the things she would say to him. Or maybe it’s not words at all she utters but animal sounds, a bird’s song. She runs her fingers up and down the shaft of his cock. Sometimes he enters her from above, sometimes she’s on top, impaled on him. Or he may be pressing against her back, with his arms wrapped around the front of her, cupping her breasts. She hugs her pillow as he thrusts into her, until the moment when she imagines his body reaching that impossible tension followed by explosive release.

  The bed will be damp now. She’s drenched in sweat. The only measure she has of time is that Chet Baker is singing a different ballad now: “It’s Always You” or maybe “Let’s Get Lost.” “Isn’t it Romantic?”

  It’s not, of course. She’s just acting out a little play, the same way Sally used to—and then Ursula—with Barbie and Ken. Different scenes but the same idea. You imagine a world and you make yourself a character inside it, and who’s to say it’s any less real than all the little plays everybody’s actually performing around you? Who’s to say a real flesh-and-blood man between her sheets would be any more present for her in the end than the ones summoned from her imagination?

  One good thing about these men Claire conjures up: They never break your heart. And you never break theirs either.

  FALL

  Labor Day. Sally’s off visiting colleges, but Claire has driven to the old house to pick up Pete from his weekend with his father. She opens up the back of her station wagon to make room for his bags. Six and a half years her son has been going back and forth between his parents’ houses and he still transports his stuff in brown paper bags.

  Claire’s in the process of attaching the rack for their bikes when Melanie comes out. “He’s almost set,” she says. “But you’ve got to come inside and see this.”

  Claire walks into her old kitchen. “This way,” says Melanie, and she leads Claire into the downstairs bedroom. Pete is sitting in a rocking chair that Claire once used to nurse her children. Melanie and Sam’s baby, Seth, lies against Pete’s stomach, drinking from a bottle. Claire studies the tiny clenched fists, the folded-over ears, the round, smooth head so new you can still see a pulse, barely below the surface of the skin at the soft spot. “He’s almost finished,” Pete whispers. “You wouldn’t believe how this little guy chows down.”

  The bottle is empty. Seth begins to fuss, arching his back and sputtering. Claire is surprised to see that instead of handing the baby over to Melanie as she would have supposed her son might do at a moment like this, he just lifts Seth onto his shoulder and rubs his back gently. He’s singing a song she recognizes from the most recent Green Day CD.

  “Pete’s great with Seth,” Melanie says. “He’s really going to miss his big brother.”

  Shortly after Claire had moved out of this house she went back one time when the children were at school to pick up the last of her things. Sam must have come home early from work that day. He was still wearing his painter’s pants and the T-shirt they bought years before on a family trip to Luray Caverns with a picture of a rock formation on the front that looked like a fried egg. Sam and Claire were still trying to be friends at this point, so he was helping her carry boxes out.

  When the last of the boxes had been packed in her car, they walked back into the house. She needed a glass of water.

  He ran the water to make it cold. They had an artesian well. Claire has never tasted water so good.

  “Thanks,” she said, setting her glass down. They just stood there for a moment. And then he put his arms around her more tenderly than she could remember. She put her arms around him then too and for a long time they simply held each other.

  He kissed her. There was no playfulness and you couldn’t call it passionate either, although there was a hunger to the kiss that Claire has seldom experienced—even with Mickey, even with Tim. Not a hunger borne of any hopefulness; they had no future together and they knew it. Just a bone-crushing sadness. A grief and regret so enormous you couldn’t see it in a person without wanting to comfort him. Even if, as was the case, there resided in you at that moment a grief and regret equally crushing. A sorrow beyond words.

  Then without speaking they walked into their old bedroom.

  They were the only two people in the world that day who could understand all the thousands of things that contributed to the dizzying sadness of this moment. They had stopped at a VFW hall on their first date and danced the polka and an old man named Heinz had bought Sam a shot of whiskey and told him, “There’s nothing better in life, son, than the love of a good woman.” He raised his glass with the prayer that they’d be dancing the polka on their fiftieth anniversary. Downed his drink in a single gulp.

  As she walked home through the streets of Ann Arbor with Sam that night, something possessed Claire to say to him, “Show me a trick.” Why she asked him that she still doesn’t know. It’s not a question she asked any other man, before or since.

  “All right,” he said. There in the middle of the street he stood on his right leg and held the other, bent in front him, with his right hand. Then he jumped, lifting his right leg off the ground and through the hoop his other leg and arm had formed, and he landed solidly on the other side. Sometimes Claire actually thinks that was the moment she decided to marry him.

  The first time she cooked him dinner she made potato chips from scratch. Twelve of them. He painted their names on the mailbox at the end of their road: Mr. and Mrs. Sam Temple. For their first anniversary he gave her a card with a rose on the front and the words “To My Treasured Wife.”

  He was the only other person who had been there that night they lay in each other’s arms and he whispered, “I want to have a baby with you,” and she whispered back, “Me too.” She can still see him walking through the rooms of their old house in the middle of the night while Sally screamed inconsolably, singing her “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille.”

  She remembered the day they were so broke they couldn’t buy diapers, and she was crying, and he had taken out his paintbrush and made a stack of thousand-dollar bills that he showered over her head like confetti. He knew, if he remembered, what her body looked like before babies. She had seen him catch a fly ball in deep center field, in midair, to make the third out of his softball league’s championship game.

  And though they had also witnessed each other’s worst moments—more of those, no doubt—this much was true: They had been young together, and they were the containers of each other’s youth. They were as ridiculous a pair of life partners as Sonny and Cher, standing at their twin microphones in their striped bell-bottoms and love beads, singing “I Got You Babe.” They had made each other promises before either one of them had a clue as to how impossible it would be to keep them. They were poorly suited for each other. They were foolish and unwise and naive and selfish and blind—two people whose single greatest common bond was the sense of loss and old hurt each of them carried into their marriage like a dowry. Still, they had spent their biggest hopes on each other, and they would never be so extravagant again.

  And they were also the parents of each other’s children. Claire has only to look into the face of her son and see his father. Sam must do the same with their daughter. How can you look at your child without finding in him some piece of his other parent? How can you not love that piece?

  He led her over to their bed that day. The mattress had been stripped. Maybe it was about their marriage being over. Maybe Sam was just preparing t
o wash the sheets. They removed their clothes wordlessly and without touching—each of them attending to their own buttons and zippers, untying their shoes, peeling off their socks, laying them down on either side of the bed like the elements of a religious ritual from a church neither one of them ever attended. He got in on his side. She got in on hers.

  There on the very mattress where their babies were born—the stains of her blood still visible—they made love for the last time. It didn’t last particularly long. It wasn’t particularly great, although she knows she wept and she thinks he may have too.

  Afterward they both dressed without saying anything. She had another glass of water. Then she drove away.

  After all these years, all those hours on the telephone, and all that missing him, Claire sees Mickey again. Not really Mickey, actually. She sees Mickey’s son, Gabe, who has evidently come to the Boston Science Museum, as Pete has today, on a school field trip. Claire is a chaperone.

  It has been five years now since she saw Gabe—he was not yet nine then; he’s got to be fourteen now, and he must have grown six inches—but she recognizes him instantly. Because it’s Mickey’s face he has. Shyer, rounder, same freckles, more hair, a butt that shows the promise that he may become a pitcher after all. He’s horsing around in front of that slice of a giant redwood that’s displayed in the museum lobby, with little red light bulbs placed at various concentric rings within the wood indicating the age and growth of this particular tree. The year Christopher Columbus landed. The year of the Black Plague. The year Christ was born.

  Gabe doesn’t see Claire and wouldn’t recognize her if he did, she knows. Many women have come and gone in his father’s life since Claire left it. “You keep getting girlfriends with C names,” Gabe told Mickey once, a year or so after she’d left, referring to the arrival on the scene of a woman named Cynthia, close on the heels of a Carolyn. That was, she guesses, Gabe’s last acknowledgment of her place in his life or his father’s.

  So Claire just stands there for a while watching this boy who is, within a couple of months, the age of her own son, although he is fairer-skinned, more knowledgeable about jazz certainly, and less well acquainted with the inside of a principal’s office and a police station.

  I read him the chapter about forcing bases, she thinks. We made Christmas cookies one time.

  “You don’t have to do that stuff around here,” Mickey had said to her almost sharply when he came home from his game and found the two of them in his kitchen, taking the last of the cookies out of the oven and cleaning up the sprinkles. “That’s not who you are to me.”

  “But maybe it’s who I am to him,” she said.

  In fact, Claire always had a particular tenderness for Gabe. Maybe it was even love. Claire believes there was also a time when Gabe had a feeling that was something like love for her. Not the love a son has for his mother. Unlike Ursula—that other child who, if their paths cross five years from now, will not recognize her—Gabe has always had a very present mother on the scene. Whatever that woman’s story is, Claire will never know it now.

  But there was this wonderful aspect to the time Claire spent with Gabe that came specifically from the fact that she was not his mother. She didn’t have to provide birthday parties and rides to after-school activities, didn’t have to pick up after his friends, didn’t have to make every sorrow in his life go away, wasn’t solely or even majorly responsible for the quality of his days. She didn’t suffer when he stepped up to the plate and struck out. She could just lie there on Gabe’s bedroom floor with him, quizzing him on baseball statistics. Or lie there on Mickey’s couch doing absolutely nothing at all with him but being there. There has never been another child in her life about whom she felt that way.

  Somewhere inside Gabe’s gangly body, Claire suspects, there may be a dim memory of her. She supposes if she went up to him now and introduced herself—“I’m your father’s old friend Claire”—a flicker of recognition might cross his face. He would know, at least, that what he used to feel about her, when he felt something, was good. Good but gone.

  Her own son approaches her now—a heartbreakingly handsome young man who will soon be taller than Claire. “Can I have some money for the gift shop, Mom?” he asks her. “They’ve got these neat hologram postcards. I wanted to send one to Dad.”

  She hands him a five-dollar bill. “I swear,” she says, “sometimes I get the feeling I’m hemorrhaging money.” But she’s smiling when she says it this time, and he is, too, when he answers her.

  “Right, Mom,” he says. “We’ve heard. And I’m going to empty the dishwasher every morning for the next twenty jillion years, remember? And take care of you in your old age.” One of the many things she loves about her son is the way, even now, he’s not ashamed to kiss her when his friends are around. Then he disappears again, naturally. He has asked Sally McAdam if she wants to sit with him at the planetarium show. She does.

  “Where does the love go?” she wants to call out, right there in the middle of the Boston Science Museum. There is a question for some expert. Only which floor would she go to find her answer? Physics? Biology? Electricity? Or maybe the planetarium?

  She knows there is a thing that happens in your body when you love somebody and you see them. Or you stop seeing them. Or you want to see them but you can’t. Or you see them again after a long time of not seeing them, and realize that it was there all the time, like a dormant virus, just waiting to take hold of you again. Your eyes may fill with tears. You shiver. Your stomach may turn over. You have a hard time catching your breath, and when you are again able to make a sound, the sound that comes out of you is different.

  Claire also knows that sooner or later that will change. It may take a long time, and like the scar under her chin or her stretch marks, it may not disappear completely, but it fades, and when it does, that feeling—or maybe it’s the absence of feeling, like the eventual absence of pain following the amputation of a limb, like the space in your closet you get because the person who always used to mess it up has moved out, that is saddest of all.

  “I will love you forever,” the man says to the woman. “No matter what happens, no matter where our lives may lead, this will never change. This is real as rock. I will never stop loving you. Nobody will ever love you again the way I love you now. I will never love anybody again the way I love you now.”

  Only he will, of course. He will not love her forever—not the way he does when he speaks these words, anyway. They are real when he says them, but they disappear, like the bones of a hummingbird in a cigar box. Like a fern that turns into petrified rock. Like an extinct species of bird. Like Nolan Ryan’s fastball. Like the last note played on a single guitar string at the most wonderful concert you ever attended, and the last flickering flame from the lighter of the last cheering fan in the dark stadium afterward. Like a continent that drifts out to sea, creating a whole new geography, a whole new globe. Like a star that exploded, leaving only an aurora borealis.

  And what do you do then, after the love is gone? When you go to a ball game and run into a person you used to love so much the thought of passing a single day without hearing the sound of that soft Alabama voice of his was unimaginable? What do you do when a big red-haired man passes you on the street, with his red-haired daughter, and you know for a few months there you thought you were going to live with this man for the rest of your life, for a few weeks his sperm and your egg were actually lodged in your uterus on the way to becoming a person who would probably have had red hair? What do you do when you find yourself sitting on the bench at a soccer game beside a man who once held his hand against the small of your back as the two of you skated on black ice under a full moon over Lake Michigan, once showered you with hand-painted thousand-dollar bills, once held his cupped hands between your legs, waiting as you screamed to catch the baby whose head was even then ripping your skin apart as she burst out into the world? What do you say to this man you once married, and once divorced, who has also rip
ped you deeper, harder, and drawn more blood than childbirth ever did?

  You say, “How’ve you been? Nice day for a game, huh?” You say, “What do you think, will those Red Sox ever get an outfield?” You may kiss the red-haired man on his cheek perhaps, and ask the red-haired daughter what grade she’s in now. You may duck into a café and have a cup of coffee together. You say to the man on the soccer bench, “He looks like you when he runs.” Then you get back into your car and head out onto the road again.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Given the choice, I would have been a musician, not a writer. But I play music when I write, and the choices I make about the music I listen to as I write have a lot to do with the work I go on to produce. I create a soundtrack for myself when I’m sitting at my keyboard, and the story comes out of that soundtrack. In the case of this novel, the soundtrack consisted of a lot of my favorite songs about love. They’re pop songs, jazz, folk, Celtic—with a heavy emphasis on country, not because my novel was set in the South, but because the themes of my story are the stuff of country songs. I wanted a reader to feel, after reading this, a little like how I feel, after listening to Loretta Lynn or Patty Loveless or Patsy Cline or George Jones or Vern Gosdin. The best way I knew to get in the mood was to play their music as I wrote.