Where Love Goes

by Joyce Maynard

  It’s not a lot to go on, but the simple fact of knowing that her doorbell will ring tonight, and there will be a man on the other side ready to take her somewhere, anywhere but her own kitchen, somebody to do the driving for once, is enough for Claire at the moment. When she gets home from the supermarket she will take a long bath and give herself a facial. She’ll put on her good underwear and shave her legs. She will pour herself a glass of wine and put on an album of Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto, timed so it will still be playing when he arrives.

  Claire knows that the moment she’s enjoying now as she blow-dries her hair and pulls up her stockings may well be the most exciting point in the evening. Now, before she meets him, anything is possible. She can hold on to the hope that she is about to meet a man who will sweep her off her feet. She can still consider the possibility that this may be the very last blind date she will ever have to go on, and that tonight might in fact be the very last Friday night she carries out the trash for the early Saturday-morning pickup alone. She has entertained this possibility twenty times over the course of the last five years’ worth of blind dates: a dozen or so, in those first few wildly hopeful, energetic months after leaving her marriage, before she met Mickey. None at all for a solid year after Mickey left, followed by a second flurry, during a period in which she figured that since she’d never find anyone like Mickey again, there was no longer any need to seek out the love of her life. Forget about getting swept off your feet, she told herself. Go for the nice guy who’ll take out the trash.

  Claire opens the door to find that the man on the other side is a couple of inches shorter than she is. He also wears his hair long on one side and combed over the top of his head in a way that he must suppose will conceal a sizable bald spot.

  “Let me guess,” he says. “Clara?” He makes the fingers of his right hand into the shape of a gun and points it at her. “You can call me Kreskin,” he tells her.

  “Actually, my name is Claire,” she tells him.

  “Right, right,” he says. “Bob Getchell.” He extends a hand as if he were launching into a sales pitch.

  “Nice place,” he says. “You rent or own?”

  “Own,” she tells him. “Me and the bank.”

  He shakes his head. “Place like this has probably dropped ten, maybe twelve percent in value in the last two years alone,” he says. “People just don’t want the upkeep, you know. I only mention it on account of I’ve got a party I’m working with currently that’s in the market for a place like this.”

  “I’m not selling,” she says. How has she got to such a ridiculous point so fast? she wonders.

  “You got a couple of rug rats, I understand?” he says. Bob has picked up Pete’s signed Mo Vaughn baseball that he doesn’t like anybody to touch. “I got two of them myself.”

  “I’ll just get my jacket and we can go,” says Claire. She feels a hundred years old suddenly. She thinks longingly of her bathtub and her solitary bed. The sooner they get going, the sooner she can be home.

  He opens the car door for her—a small, unexpected courtesy. Settling into his own seat, he clicks a tape of Michael Bolton into the cassette player. “This guy sure can sing a song, huh?” he says.

  “I guess so,” Claire says. “He’s never been a favorite of mine.”

  “You’re kidding,” says Bob. “I thought all you girls creamed in your pants over him.”

  Let me out here, she’s thinking. She could tell him she suddenly remembered she’d left the iron on, run into the house, lock the door and turn out the lights. After a while he’d give up and go away.

  “I gotta tell you,” he says, “Pauline has hooked me up with some real bowwows. I was actually gonna blow this one off, figuring you’d be another one, only she said, ‘Trust me, Bob, I’ve seen her in the steam room.’ Boy, was she right this time.” He is looking straight at her breasts as he says this. Claire imagines herself staring back at his crotch in a similar fashion, but she’s afraid what she might see if she did.

  “So how old are your children?” she asks.

  “Girl thirteen, boy fifteen,” he says. “Seems like every time I turn around, their mother’s asking me for more cash. Know what I mean?”

  “Kids that age need a lot of things that cost money,” Claire says. “I bought my son a pair of sixty-dollar cleats just last fall, and he already needs a new pair.” She talks to fill the air, and to keep him from saying something worse. Keep the conversation on shoes, she figures. And real-estate values.

  “Oh, sure, you got your necessary expenses,” he says. “But some of these individuals out there just gouge you for all you’re worth. Take my wife. She says the boy needs therapy at eighty bucks a pop. Now our daughter’s supposed to see this dermatologist in Boston. Prescriptions alone run twenty, twenty-five bucks. You think the kid ever heard of Clearasil? That was good enough for us, huh?”

  Claire says nothing. Michael Bolton is singing his rendition of “Since I Fell for You.” Bob has pulled into the parking lot of a not very good Italian restaurant. He reaches across Claire’s chest to undo her seat belt.

  “I can handle it myself,” she says.

  “Yeah, there’s some other things I’d like to see you handle,” he tells her.

  “You know,” she says, “I think I have to go home now.”

  “Listen,” he says. “It was just a joke. I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. I know you gals are a little sensitive these days.”

  “Fine,” she says. “I’m just not feeling very well.”

  “So let me give you a Tums,” he tells her. “I keep them handy all the time, on account of my ulcer. I was going to warn you, in fact. If you hear gurgling, not to worry, it’s only my gut kicking up.”

  “I have to be honest with you, Bob,” she says. “This isn’t going to work. So I think the best thing would be for you to take me home. Save your money.”

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with women these days,” he says. “Nobody’s got a sense of humor anymore. One false move and a guy’s dead meat. Look at a person sideways and she’s slapping you with a sexual harassment suit or some shit.”

  Claire is getting out of the car now. “Actually, I think I’ll call a friend to take me home,” she says.

  “Fucking cunt,” he calls out after her. “I give you three years, four tops, before your estrogen supply gives out, and you can’t give a guy a hard-on to save your life.”

  Nancy isn’t home. She’s away at a yoga retreat, Claire remembers afterward. In the end, Claire walks home in the dark, tripping a couple of times. Her good shoes will be ruined. The first thing she does when she walks in the door is reach for the phone.

  She calls Mickey. It’s the number she keeps on the emergency card in her wallet to call in case of an accident. Mickey’s is the number she would remember if she forgot every single other thing, even her name. When he picks up the phone and she hears that familiar voice, dear as her own children’s, she’s overtaken by tears.

  He knows it’s her. “Baby,” he says. “Come on now, baby. Tell me what happened.”

  For a few more moments all she can do is cry. But just hearing his voice murmuring to her from a hundred twenty miles away, that it’s all right, he’s here, she can feel her breathing become more regular until finally she’s able to speak.

  “Oh, Mickey,” she says.

  “Bad night, huh, Slim?” he answers. He knows her so well she doesn’t even really need to tell him the particulars. He can guess.

  “I’m so tired, Mickey,” she tells him.

  “I know, baby.”

  “First it was Sam,” she begins. He knows what it’s like for her when Sam comes to take the children. Even though he has never met Sam, Mickey has heard enough stories about Sam’s Friday-night pickups to hate him.

  “Then I had this date,” she says.

  “Let me guess,” he says. “It wasn’t Sean Connery or Dwight Yoakam.”

  She was going to tell him the whole story, but
what’s the point? All she really wants to say—all she ever wants to say—is that the guy wasn’t Mickey. Once again.

  “You know you’re my true love, don’t you, Slim?” he says. “You know I’ll love you forever. Nobody else will ever love you like I do.”

  She’s crying again, but not the great gasping sobs anymore. “I miss you, Mickey,” she tells him.

  “You don’t have to miss me,” he says. “I’m right here.”

  “Weren’t you supposed to have a date yourself tonight?” she asks him. It has come back to her that when they last spoke, yesterday afternoon, he was planning to take somebody named Angela to a concert of Bulgarian women singers.

  “She told me during intermission her favorite jazz musician was Kenny G,” he says. “I took her right home. We didn’t even stay for the second half.”

  “Oh, Mickey,” she sighs. “What am I going to do?”

  “Same thing you’ve been doing, Slim,” he tells her. “Raise those chilluns of yours. Keep baking the chocolate-chip cookies. When we’re eighty-five and the last one’s out of the house, maybe we’ll get together in Miami Beach and play shuffleboard.”

  She’s heard this line before. She knows them all by heart, but there’s a comfort in hearing him tell her again.

  “You all right now, Slim?” he asks her. He’s telling her, actually, that she is.

  “I’m all right, Mickey,” she says. “I’m going to bed now.”

  “Red Sox have a new relief pitcher that looks promising,” he says. “Throws sidearm.”

  “Good night, Mickey,” she says.

  “Night, Slim.”

  Now she can sleep.

  She met Mickey through an ad in the personals of a Boston newspaper she’d been reading one night almost a year after she left Sam. It was close to midnight—also a weekend when the kids were with their father—and she’d been listening to Lucinda Williams and finishing off a bottle of wine. So she called the 900 number and spent an hour just listening to people’s voices telling who they were, what they wanted in a relationship. Or what they said they wanted, anyway. Mickey’s was the twenty-third message she listened to. She liked his Southern accent. Most of all she liked his voice.

  In the voice-mail message she left after listening to his recording, Claire didn’t mention her two children or the more than a hundred miles separating the town where she lived in Vermont from the one outside Boston he had chosen largely for its proximity to Fenway Park and lots of good jazz. The end of his own marriage had coincided—maybe not by chance—with the birth of his one and only child.

  He had noted Claire’s area code when he called her back, naturally. He said he wasn’t into long-distance relationships.

  “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’d rather drive two hours to have dinner with somebody who really interested me than walk down the block to have dinner with somebody I don’t care about.” She told him she’d drive in to the city to meet him. He said okay. She hadn’t even mentioned her own two children at this point.

  She arranged for Pete and Sally to have sleepovers with friends that night. She bought a new dress, red, with a pleat up the back. Claire had gone out on plenty of blind dates by this time, but none whose prospect left her feeling so excited. All week long she’d thought about his voice on the other end of the phone.

  He had chosen a little Brazilian restaurant in a part of town she’d never been. Always before this when Claire went into Boston it was to take her kids to the science museum or bring Sally to the ballet. The restaurants she knew were all the kind you’d bring children to. Here the menu was printed in Portuguese and there was percussion music playing and oilcloth on the tables and the smell of spices Claire had never cooked with. She had arrived early, regretting her choice of dress once she saw what the rest of the mostly foreign-looking clientele were wearing. She went to the ladies room and washed off her makeup, put her pearl earrings back in her purse, mussed up her hair.

  When she came out again she saw him. She knew from his freckles he couldn’t be Brazilian even before she heard his soft Alabama accent asking the waitress if she had a quieter table. He wasn’t a handsome man exactly, by conventional standards, but she maintains that she fell in love with him the moment she saw him. Later he admitted to Claire that he felt that way himself. “It was so plain, you were so ready to be loved,” he said. “You looked like an orphan. I just wanted to put my arms around you and take you away.”

  Not that he did. He was very formal with her that night. He got up from the table when she approached him. He shook her hand. Before they sat down she asked him whether he thought her car was all right parked where it was. Her station wagon looked as if it had pulled up at the end of a long and hair-raising car chase, with the front end up over the curb and the rear pointed out into traffic. She had been so distracted when she got to the restaurant she hadn’t even noticed.

  “So,” he said with a regretful smile, looking out onto the street in the direction of her messy station wagon, with its I soccer bumper sticker and the tumble of empty juice boxes and school papers in the back. “How old are your kids?”

  For twelve years Claire’s children had been the central focus of her life. She could talk for twenty minutes about the pros and cons of circumcision or the desirable number of years between children before it would suddenly occur to her—hearing the sound of her own voice—that the woman she used to be before children had virtually disappeared. To Mickey she was that woman again. Or a new one she barely recognized.

  Mickey told her that first night that he didn’t get involved with women who had children; it violated his sense of romance. “The worst thing that could happen would be for you and me to fall in love,” he said. “Because we couldn’t be together”—not together the way Mickey liked anyway—“and it would break both our hearts.” By the time he said this it was also plain that there was some powerful pull between the two of them. When they danced she didn’t have to keep her eyes open or think about how to move. She didn’t even notice when the music stopped.

  “Now that’s one heck of an interesting place for a person to have a birthmark,” he said. He had noticed a tiny mole between the third and fourth fingers of her left hand. No doubt he had also noticed that her eyes were moist.

  “Back then you were like someone dying of thirst after days of traveling across a desert in a hundred-and-ten-degree heat, and I was just the first person who offered you a cup of cool water, that’s all,” he told her later. “It was like your skin had been turned inside out. You were so ready to be touched.”

  They stayed at the restaurant four hours. He took her back to his house, he said, just because he could tell looking at her that she would fall asleep on the road if she tried to make the long drive home so late at night.

  He led her to the room his son slept in, weekends he was there, with its baseball-print sheets and framed photograph of Nolan Ryan. He gave her towels and a toothbrush even. He keeps a supply on hand. He was going to simply tuck her in with a kiss on her cheek, fix her coffee in the morning, and send her on her way, he told her later. He was planning on never seeing her again.

  She was the one who reached up and took his face in both her hands as he leaned over the bed, kissed him on the lips and wouldn’t let go. She was the one who said, “Don’t you believe in stealing bases ever?” And when he said no, actually—not if the odds were heavily against him; he knows his limitations—and he pushed her away, she was the one who wouldn’t leave it there. She got up out of his son’s bed and walked down the hallway to his bedroom, where the light was still on and a record was playing that she still can’t bear to listen to—Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane.

  This time when she kissed him he didn’t push her away. He just sighed more deeply than she has ever heard anybody sigh, before or since. “You win,” he said. But really, it was always Mickey who won. On the baseball diamond or off it.

  Mickey operates a recording studio where he composes music and
records the mostly unexceptional work of would-be musicians in need of demo recordings. He pitches on a fairly competitive weekend baseball team, and during baseball season he attends Red Sox games when the team’s in town. He is also a devoted father to his son, Gabe, though he’s a very different kind of parent from the kind Claire is. “It’s crazy what happens to people when they have kids, and they give up everything else they ever cared about,” says Mickey. Mickey would never have bought a Raffi album for Gabe. Gabe has been raised since infancy on the Beatles and jazz. For Christmas Mickey hangs lights on his cactus plant and sticks baseball cards in a stocking, period. For Gabe’s birthday Mickey gave him a saxophone.

  Mickey loves his baseball and his music and his boy. He’s also practically made a career of loving women. Not necessarily sticking it out over the long haul. But adoring them, anyway, and lavishing on them a certain kind of undistracted fascination and attention to the most minute of details. He keeps the photographs of women he’s loved hanging on the walls all over his house, the same way his son has mounted the cards of all his favorite ballplayers on the walls of his room. Explaining Mickey to Nancy, Claire told her about the time, fairly early in her relationship with him, when he had been describing to her his first serious love, the girl to whom he’d lost his virginity at sixteen. “She had,” he said, his eyes practically misting over at the memory, “the most beautiful nookie.…”

  “Imagine,” Claire told Nancy, “a man who not only remembers that information from a distance of twenty-five years. But imagine a sixteen-year-old boy who would have paid attention to that kind of thing in the first place.”

  Mickey is still friendly toward his former wife, Betsy, Gabe’s mother. Her picture hangs on a particularly prominent spot on the wall in his recording studio and he will still reminisce fondly about a trip they took one time to New Orleans, or her exquisitely shaped fingernails, the shape of her rear end. They parted amicably shortly after Gabe’s birth, and since then Mickey has held to his view that parenthood spells the death of romantic and passionate feeling between men and women. He wants no more of it. No more children of his own. None of anybody else’s children either.