When You Went Away

by Michael Baron

  As though this music was some kind of psychic life-support system, Maureen seemed revived as long as I kept playing. She wasn’t gone; she was here next to me, and intertwined with me. I could follow her out of the living room and into the bedroom, the kitchen, a nearby shopping mall, or the streets of Rome. I could hear her voice, touch her fingers, feel her breath. I knew if I just kept at it, I could keep her here with me indefinitely.

  And I slowly came to understand that, just like a medical life-support system, it was all completely artificial. I could keep the pumps going, sing a few more songs to conjure up another receded memory, but eventually I would have to stop and when I did, Maureen would be gone again.

  I rested my hands on the keyboard and my head against the piano and the sadness enveloped me completely. I brought Maureen back tonight. By touching on memories I hadn’t recalled in years, she became very real. And that made losing her realer as well. This was worse than any sneak attack. I had consciously brought her to me and then saw her evaporate.

  A surprising thing happened then. With the tears rolling down my cheeks and my head still against the piano, I fell asleep. And when I awoke some time later, it was with very vivid memories of what had transpired, but with an utterly different feeling about them. I felt enhanced, maybe even bolstered. I knew I could give myself this present again whenever I really needed it. Just about everything I really cherished was in these songbooks and they were always waiting for me. Maybe the magic I generated by bringing Maureen back to me tonight wouldn’t always be as strong, maybe in fact it would get progressively weaker, but I knew for a fact that I could touch her in some way by doing this. That was more than I had before. More than I had in what seemed like a very long time.

  I got up from the piano and checked on Reese. He lay on his back and stirred when I entered the room, opening his eyes for a moment before rolling over and settling into sleep. I touched his head lightly and then went off to bed.

  I’d traveled a couple of dozen years and untold distances tonight. It was time to get some rest.

  FOURTEEN

  Like Fire Had Been to the Cave Men

  That Saturday we had our picnic with Ally. It rained the night before and even though the sun was shining brightly in the morning, I thought about calling it off. If the ground were wet, we would have a tough time finding a place for our blanket. Ultimately, Ally talked me into sticking with our plans and we met her at the park under a cloudless sky.

  “Did you have to tip the maitre d’ to get this spot?” I said to her. Though the park was crowded, she’d carved out a place for us under a tree and right near a stream.

  “I called a few people.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  She took Reese from my arms to allow me to put down his gear. I wasn’t sure what was going to entertain him today, so I brought an inordinate number of toys along with enough diapers and changes of clothes to allow us to stay here for the summer.

  This was the first time Ally and I were together out of the office since our “date,” and I was a little nervous about it. My invitation to her had been rather impulsive. She knew how I felt about taking our relationship any further and certainly this was something that friends did, but I wondered if she thought I had changed my mind. I still had no idea what my relationship with Ally was supposed to be. We were friends, ones who shared a passion for interesting food and an underachieving baseball team among other things. And she was my go-to person with stories about Reese, complaints about the office, or any little detail that caught my attention in some way.

  But while I had no intention of acting on it, it was absurd to think that my interest in her stopped there. Every morning, as I drove to the office, I looked forward to seeing her and I thought about what the first things might be that we would say. This clearly had little to do with our being buddies. This was more than a little unsettling to me, and while I found a way to manage it while we were at work, our having this picnic together roiled things up all over again. How could I possibly reconcile this with the way I felt sitting at the piano a few nights earlier?

  “Was I supposed to bring a tent?” Ally said, referring to the vast amount of luggage I had with me.

  “You can never be too prepared.”

  “I think there might be a point at which you can be.”

  “You haven’t seen Reese eat yet. I’ll bet you we go through every piece of clothing I have here.”

  “I think your daddy just insulted you,” she said, holding Reese’s face up to hers. He giggled and then tried to eat her nose. Ally laughed and then laid him softly onto the blanket. Reese immediately rolled over and propped himself up on his arms.

  “Are we eating or playing on the swings first?” she said.

  “I vote for eating. Reese got up at a quarter to six this morning, so breakfast was at 6:30. I haven’t had anything since.”

  “Good thing you’re hungry. I stopped at Mattarici’s and got all kinds of antipasto.”

  Ally insisted on bringing the food. She laid out a collection of plastic containers filled with smoked mozzarella stuffed with sun-dried tomatoes, marinated roasted peppers, sautéed broccoli rabe, grilled vegetables, and cannellini and tuna salad, along with a wedge of parmesan and a loaf of Tuscan bread. I of course had a variety of mashed things for Reese, though he gummed a piece of crust through most of the meal.

  The food and the increasing sunshine took the edge off for me. Ally was as relaxed and easy as she was during our numerous office conversations and we sat quietly, enjoying our meal and taking in the day. Reese seemed relaxed as well, satisfied to stay on the blanket, even though the wonders of grass, trees, and rippling water were only a few good rolls away.

  “Mattarici’s must be twenty-five minutes from your house,” I said as we finished off most of the food. “You didn’t need to go all the way there.”

  “Are you kidding? If I had gone to Subway, you never would have spoken to me again. It’s time for the swings now, isn’t it?”

  We cleaned up and brought Reese over to the playground. Ally pushed him on a baby swing for what must have been a half hour, his reactions ranging from delight to a trance-like fixation on some spot in the distance. At one point, I moved to pull him out and he protested loudly. I stepped back and let Ally continue pushing.

  Afterward, we got his stroller out of the car and went for a long walk, stopping for a few minutes to watch some Little Leaguers play a game and then allowing Reese to admire a squirrel for a while. On the way back to the blanket, he fell asleep with his head at a ridiculous angle, which had to be terribly uncomfortable. I never understood how kids were able to do that or how they weren’t rubbing their necks for hours afterward. I took him out of the stroller and laid him down.

  “How long will he sleep?” Ally said.

  “Anywhere between ten minutes and three hours.”

  “Good to see you can pin it down so precisely.”

  “We’ve learned to live with each other’s inconsistencies.” She looked over at him and touched him on the leg. “He’s really adorable, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “He smiles so easily. That says something.”

  “That he’s woefully naïve about the dangers that surround him?”

  She smirked. “I was thinking that it said that you’ve made him feel happy and secure.” She leaned back on the blanket and raised her face to the sun. “I like watching you dad.”

  “I don’t feel like I’ve done that much dading today. After all, you were the one playing with him on the swing and pushing his stroller.”

  “I’m an easy mark because this is a novelty. You probably could have gotten me to change his diaper too if you asked.”

  “We’d have to know each other a whole lot better before I subjected you to that. There’s something about him and sweet potatoes. Medical research could gain valuable information from one of those diapers.”

  She laughed and patted me on the hand. “Well I think yo
u dad very well.”

  “Thanks.”

  We sat together and watched others entertaining themselves in the park. Two kids who couldn’t have been more than five tried to play catch with a rubber ball, though neither seemed to have the requisite eye-hand coordination to do it well. A family barbecued sausages while eating huge slabs of watermelon. A mother and her children played tag. An older couple walked slowly arm in arm. A pair of teenagers necked on a bench.

  The sun asserted itself in the increasingly insistent way it did in June. I felt cocooned, happily insulated from anything other than the world inside our blanket. Reese’s nap was a brief one, probably not more than twenty minutes or so. When he awoke, he propped himself up on his hands and knees and grinned broadly at us. Ally was right. He did smile very easily. When he made eye contact with me, his entire body shook, landing him back on his stomach. But he got up immediately and then, completely unexpectedly, moved toward us.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize he was crawling,” Ally said.

  “He wasn’t,” I said, moving closer to Reese, leaving a shorter distance for him to traverse. “This is the first time.”

  Reese had been rocking on his hands and knees for more than a week now, but before this, he hadn’t been able to propel himself forward. He flopped on his face a moment later, but was up and moving again right after that. I had little doubt that he’d be circumnavigating the family room before the weekend was up.

  “This is very exciting,” Ally said, joining me on her hands and knees next to Reese.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I was at work the day Tanya crawled for the first time and I didn’t get to see her do it myself for nearly a week. This was much, much better.

  “I feel very privileged to be here for this,” Ally said. Eventually Reese crawled over to me and I pulled him into my arms. “Yeah, me too.”While I held him, Reese’s head swiveled to take in the world around him, as though he understood that it just got considerably smaller.

  • • •

  The crawling thing lent an air of celebration to the rest of the afternoon. It’s funny that we find something so inevitable so delightful. Of course, Reese would crawl some day. He’d even made it clear to me that the day was imminent. But still, when it happened, it was momentous. And the best thing about it was that he didn’t know it was inevitable. For Reese, crawling had to be a remarkable new discovery, like fire had been to the cave men or the double helix had been to Watson and Crick. I’m sure the possibilities this new skill afforded dazzled him, and my guess was that he went to bed dreaming of this new mode of transportation that night.

  Suffused with excitement over my son’s crossing this threshold, I did yet another impulsive thing, inviting Ally to come back to the house for dinner. The three of us were having such a good time together that it seemed pointless to end it in the late afternoon.

  I prepared the food while Reese and Ally played on the floor in the family room. Now that it was time to cook, I worried about what to make for her. I had stopped by the fish store on the way home and bought some scallops, but how to prepare them was still very much in question. I didn’t want to send the wrong message by making something too terribly formal, and I certainly didn’t want to push myself beyond the limits of my talents and fall flat on my face in front of her.

  Ultimately I decided we’d start with some orecchiette with artichoke hearts and that I would sear the scallops and serve them with a simple lime butter. There was some asparagus in the refrigerator and I roasted this and made some red rice with almonds to go on the side. I hoped that this evenly balanced my desire to make this dinner casual with my desire to show off a bit.

  “You see, this is total alchemy to me,” Ally said as we ate. “I kind of wish I watched you make this, but I got a little distracted.” She looked over at Reese, in his high chair painting with his barley cereal and bananas. “I know it happens all the time and I’ve read thousands of articles on the subject, but I just don’t see how a person takes these ingredients and makes something that tastes like this.”

  “There’s really very little mystery to it.”

  “Not to me there isn’t.”

  I was very glad that Ally appreciated the food. I knew I had done at least three things wrong with the food, but she either didn’t notice or was too polite to say and I was thankful regardless. I loved cooking for people and had made meals for hundreds of dinner parties over the years. But in doing so, a certain level of complacency had set in. It wasn’t that I didn’t care whether people liked what I prepared or not, but rather that I assumed I cooked with at least enough competency to avoid offending anyone. To some degree, that was enough for me. But I really wanted Ally to like this meal. I wanted her to notice how the lime enhanced the sweetness of the scallops, which caused me to use more zest than I should have. I made the asparagus too salty because I wanted her to see how the Arbequina olive oil played against the fleur de sel. And I shouldn’t have served rice as a side dish after making pasta as an appetizer. But this was a kind of rice I had just gotten online from a small grower and I wanted to impress her with my ability to seek out rare ingredients.

  Ally seemed nonplussed by Reese’s regular interruptions during our meal. We could barely exchange sentences between his dropping his spoon on the floor, making a variety of noises at the top of his lungs, and otherwise calling attention to himself. This had become part of the backdrop of mealtime at home for me, but tonight I was much more conscious of it; Ally and I usually talked together undisturbed. But she didn’t seem fazed by the patchwork way in which we communicated tonight. In fact, she seemed charmed by it.

  There was little question that she was taken with Reese. She fooled around with him throughout dinner and even when she was talking to me, she would grab his feet (which he thought was hilarious) or make funny faces at him. This was a bit of a trip to the candy store for her.

  But what was more interesting to me was that Reese seemed completely comfortable with her. He was in full-blown separation anxiety mode at this point in his life and he had no patience for anyone who wasn’t Lisa or me. Even Codie had a problem with him recently when I left the room. But I could have taken a trip to Aruba and Reese would have been fine with it as long as Ally was around. When she took him from my arms to let me unload my stuff at the park, he went to her without a complaint and they were inseparable after that.

  This pleased me. Until this moment, sitting at the dining room table with a son who smiled easily and could now get from here to there on his own and a woman who gave me lots of space while at the same time engaging me, I didn’t realize how much I missed feeling good. How much I needed more than a temporary reprieve from sorrow. This was a startling revelation.

  I was glad Reese liked having Ally around, because by this point I was hoping she’d come to visit often.

  • • •

  Ally was sitting on the couch in the living room reading a magazine when I returned from putting Reese to bed. She’d tucked her feet beneath her legs and she leaned against the armrest. This was the least animated I’d ever seen her, and if anything she was more beautiful in repose. I watched her for a moment until she felt my presence and looked up.

  “Is he down for the night?” she said.

  “You might as well be asking me the meaning of life. Reese’s sleep patterns are entirely unknowable.”

  She swung her legs around and I sat on the couch. “I had a great time today,” she said.

  “So did I.” I nodded toward the hallway. “Reese too. He told me he was going to ask you to go steady with him.”

  “Wow, I was hoping he’d feel that way. Do you think you could let him know that I like him too and if he asked me nicely, maybe . . . ?” She let her voice trail off in pitch-perfect middle school girl fashion.

  “You two are on your own now.Want some coffee or something?”

  “No, I’m fine. Dinner was great. I’d ask for the recipes, but then I’d feel obligated to try to cook them
and all those artichokes would have died in vain.”

  “Maybe we can cook something together sometime. It’ll take the mystery out of it for you.”

  She smiled. “I’d like that. Though I don’t mind the mystery.”

  I sat back on the couch and looked off into the medium distance, not really focusing on anything.

  “If I told you that I wanted us to be more than friends,” she said, “would that totally freak you out.” “It might.”

  “I think I still have to say it.”

  I turned to her. “I’m not at all sure that I can handle this.”

  Her eyes dropped and she nodded.

  “The thing is,” I said, “I really want to be able to.” She looked up at me and what I saw in her eyes was something I had no idea I wanted that badly until exactly that moment. It said that she understood, at least in some way, what this meant to me and that she cherished it. It said that she wasn’t playing with me and that this was a big deal for her as well. It said that I was safe with her. I’m not sure what she saw in my expression.

  She leaned forward to kiss me and as our lips touched, I not only responded, but savored the act, willing it to last as long as possible. I reached out and she poured herself into my arms. I was as hungry for the embrace as I had been for the kiss.We kissed this way for a long time and the longer it continued the more desperately I wanted it. I had no idea how much I was starving for this until it happened.

  After several minutes, Ally pulled back slightly and touched her hand lightly to my face, looking deeply into my eyes at the same time. It was a remarkably tender gesture and whatever level of restraint I maintained was gone.

  Ever so slowly, like people who believed they had limitless amounts of time, we made love. Each step progressed slowly from the previous one. Not because we were tentative or afraid – at this point, I set aside every thought other than those of Ally – but because we wanted to bask in that particular moment. I wanted to feel our bodies together at various phases of undress. I wanted to touch her over and over again and explore each stroke’s differences and similarities. It was only toward the end, when the energy built inexorably between us, that our movements intensified and crested. I had been numb for so long that this level of sensation was nearly overwhelming.