When You Went Away

by Michael Baron

  We decided not to announce our relationship at work, though it wasn’t a state secret. Ben knew what was going on, as did Ally’s assistant. I was also relatively certain that some of the people on the team knew we were together and maybe Ally’s boss, though no one actually said anything to me. I wondered what my colleagues thought about this. Were they happy for me that someone as great as Ally had come into my life, or were they furrowing their brows? I set these questions aside, along with the numerous others that mounted in that place in my mind that I fenced off. I needed to take Tate’s advice and let this play out. And I had to be less concerned about what everyone – including me – thought.

  Our physical relationship was electrifying. Our lovemaking was an utterly holistic experience; I could feel it on any number of levels at once. I wanted to touch Ally constantly. I took inordinate pleasure in twining her fingers with mine or wrapping our legs around each other’s while we lounged on the couch. I had convinced myself that my lustful urges mellowed over the years, replaced by what I considered the deeper satisfactions of comfort and affection. But Ally aroused me in an almost unearthly fashion. This wasn’t just pure sexual desire. It was more like meta-intimacy.

  And it was most surely intimate. While it would have been foolish – absurdly foolish, as it turned out – to say that I knew everything about Ally in our first month together, we were hungry to experience as much of each other as we possibly could.We always talked in bed after making love, sometimes for hours. About inconsequential things, about topical things, about things that happened during the day to one of us, to someone else we knew, or even to the Yankees. I loved these conversations, even the most trivial of them. Ally’s voice sounded different to me late at night, almost incantatory.

  We talked more about Maureen as we spent more time together. Ironically, I was a little self-conscious about doing this at first. Since it wasn’t acceptable to me to understate how much I loved my wife, I tended to give the briefest possible truthful answers when Ally asked about her. Finally, she confronted me about it.

  “Do you not want me to do that?” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Ask you about Maureen.”

  I held her closer to me, though doing so meant that we could no longer see each other’s eyes. “No, of course you can ask me about her.”

  “As long as you can respond in sentences of no more than four words.”

  “Do I do that?”

  “Every single time.”

  I kissed the top of her head. “I’m afraid if I start that I’m not going to be able to stop.”

  “Why do you need to stop?”

  “Because it’s hard for me to imagine, after making love, that you want me to tell you how completely devoted I was to another woman.”

  Ally propped herself up on one arm. “But I do want to hear it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s you. Because she kinda fills this house and I want to have a better sense of her. Because she’s Reese’s mother. And because I actually want to know what it’s like to be that much in love.”

  “You’ve never been that much in love?”

  “We’re not talking about me now. And besides, even when you aren’t saying more than four words about her I can tell that most people have never been that much in love.”

  I held her a little tighter. “She was everything.”

  “Do you think you could be a little more specific?” “I don’t think so. I mean for nineteen years, it wasn’t just that my world revolved around her but that my world became my world with her. You know, I really only started living when we started dating. So we did just about every significant thing together.”

  She reached for my hand and squeezed it. “That must be incredible to have with a person.”

  “It was. Incredible.”

  She tilted her head up to mine and kissed me. “Never feel like you can’t talk about her. I want to get to know her more. Maybe the two of us can become friends in some kind of spiritual sense.”

  I laughed. “That’s just what I need, the two of you getting together at some cosmic coffee shop and snickering over my shortcomings.”

  “I won’t snicker. Chortle every now and then, maybe, but never snicker.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  She hugged me. “I mean it. I want Maureen to be an open topic between us. I know you think about her. There’d be something seriously wrong with you if you didn’t. So let me think about her as well.”

  “As long as it doesn’t freak you out.”

  “Everything about us freaks me out.”

  I sat up a little when she said that. “It does?”

  She pulled me toward her. “I don’t consider that to be a bad thing.”

  • • •

  The next day, the check for Maureen’s life insurance policy arrived. It took an inordinate amount of time because the company kept asking for more information and each time they did, I put off providing it. At one point, they even sent me a notice saying they were “closing the case” (which I don’t think they could actually do, legally) because I was being unresponsive. When we took out the policies, I never bothered to think about the details involved in cashing one in. I never for a second thought I needed to think about this.

  But now, more than six months after I found her lying dead in our bed, I stared at a check for a considerable amount of money. I refused to see this sum as the equivalent of the value of Maureen’s life because there weren’t enough digits in the world to represent that figure. What this number did mean, though, was that Reese (and Tanya if she returned) would have plenty of money for college and we could weather my unemployment if Eleanor Miller suddenly decided they no longer needed me.

  I decided to spend one very tiny bit of this money on a present from Maureen to Reese. For days, I thought about what Maureen would choose if she’d had the opportunity. It had to be something he could enjoy as a child but hold dear to him later. I ultimately decided on a spectacular cherry rocking horse handmade by an artisan in Rhode Island because it reminded me of the painting that Maureen bought for Reese just weeks before she died. I imagined this horse becoming a family heirloom – one of the antiques she loved so much – passed down from generation to generation in the memory of Maureen Rubato who would have galloped off into the sunset with her son if fate had been kinder.

  While we were in the craft store, I spotted a gorgeous handmade autoharp. I strummed a few chords and the sweetness of the sound sent me back to days in Washington Square Park, sitting against a tree with Maureen in my arms, listening to someone playing a Joni Mitchell song. It was April and warm enough to make us want to be outside, but cool enough to need the warmth of each other’s bodies. Maureen said that I was at my softest while we held each other like this. And she told me now that she wanted me to have this autoharp – and to play something from Ladies of the Canyon in memory of her.

  So I bought it too. Maybe I could learn to play some of my old songs on it. Songs sounded different when played on a new instrument and they would certainly sound different coming out of this beautiful piece of artistry. Maybe I’d even write some new ones. That was a fitting thing to do with this gift from my wife.

  • • •

  I’m sure your mother told you how we met at NYU, though I doubt her memory of our early days matches mine exactly. She was on the entertainment committee and I was just back from the club tour I did with the band. She wanted to hear us play and I told her about a gig we had coming up at a club in the city. She tried to clarify herself and I finally realized that she wanted us to audition for her. I snickered and told her the names of some of the clubs we‘d just played. I then told her that I wouldn’t audition for my own school. She wasn’t pleased with this response and I assumed I would never see her again. I shrugged it off with the attitude I was full of at the time, but this really felt unfortunate because I wanted to play on campus and your mother was always really great looking.

  You
can imagine my surprise when she showed up at the club a few nights later. She came to me after the show and told me she thought we were “pretty good.” Then she laughed. Much later, I found out that the laugh meant that she actually thought we were very good.

  We had a drink at the bar and then ultimately pancakes at a seedy diner at 3:00 a.m. By my second cup of coffee, I was certain that I was in love. It wasn’t just that your mother was gorgeous and that she became more gorgeous when she talked about things that mattered to her. It was that I was thrilled to be in her presence. It’s impossible to describe this unless you’ve been through it yourself, but I knew that what was going on here wasn’t just physical. There was something elevated about the whole experience, like I was visiting with royalty or had been granted an audience with John Lennon.

  I swear I became nicer from that moment on. My friends probably thought that it was your mother “straightening me out.” But the real reason was that I understood that by being a jerk with her the first time we met, I ran the very real risk of alienating her completely. Can you imagine what I would have lost?

  I wanted to be with her every second after that. I swear I thought about marrying her when I walked her back to her dorm that early first morning. This was a huge shock to me, as finding a permanent relationship was somewhere around 87th on my to-do list. But while I might have been guilty of arrogance at this point in my life,

  I definitely wasn’t stupid. I went out with enough women to know that your mother was like absolutely none of them and that I could consider it a decent life if I dedicated mine to keeping her happy.

  One of the Big Lies about relationships is that they require a lot of work to keep them alive. I don’t think anything ever came more easily to me than loving your mother. Of course, we had rough patches. Of course, there were times when we didn’t see eye to eye. Of course, there were days when she pissed me off pretty badly (and I’m sure many more when I pissed her off worse). But loving her and wrapping my world around her was always a breeze.

  I guess I can officially say now that our love lasted forever. How’s that for a horribly bittersweet notion?

  SEVENTEEN

  Capers

  On a Saturday in mid-July, Ally and I took Reese to his first game at Yankee Stadium. Like so many other things I did with him at this point – talking to him about my day, describing various items around the house, explaining why I couldn’t allow him to do certain things – it was more to get us accustomed to the behavior than because I thought he derived anything from it. I wanted him to feel natural and comfortable amongst the large crowds that gathered at Yankee Stadium and I wanted live baseball to be a meaningful part of his childhood. He still seemed surprisingly attentive when I had the television tuned to a game. And the plush ball I got him for Opening Day was still one of his favorite toys, both to throw and to teethe on.

  The drive to the stadium was a hassle, as always. Construction slowed us on the L.I.E. and more construction did the same on the Cross Bronx. This meant that by the time we got to the Deegan, there were huge lines to get into the parking lots. As painful as this experience was, I knew it would be worse going home. For this reason alone, I didn’t go to nearly as many Yankee games as I wanted to over the years.

  “Does Reese get his first taste of a hot dog today?” Ally said as we took our seats in the loge along the first-base line.

  “He just might. Of course, what he would love is the Cracker Jacks, but they’re a major choking hazard.”

  Reese seemed fascinated with his surroundings. This was by far the largest crowd he’d ever been in and certainly the noisiest (and this was before the game). I got a little nervous on the drive because our crawling along made him impatient and he fussed for most of the last forty-five minutes. But now that we were here, his eyes were huge, and he seemed just stunned by the immensity of it, standing on my legs, looking out toward Monument Park and working his mouth into an O. Then just as suddenly, he flopped down onto my lap and began gnawing on my index finger.

  The first baseball game my father and uncle took me to was a Mets game, since we were Long Islanders and the rest of my family were Mets fans. The Mets beat the Chicago Cubs 4-0. The details of the game I know only from the scorecard I kept in my room until I moved out of my parents’ house and still have in a box somewhere in the basement. But my sense memories are very strong: the smell of the grass and french fries, the blustery voices of fans unaccustomed to winning, the vibration of the stands when the Mets scored a run or staved off a rally.

  I also remember the way my father and uncle talked to one another during the game, seemingly arguing while actually sharing the same point of view. This is a form of communication particular to sports, maybe even particular to New York sports. Even if you rooted for the same team, you showed your true dedication and knowledge by saying everything combatively. It took me a little while to understand that my father and uncle weren’t actually angry with each another, and then the rhythms of this peculiar method of discussion appealed to me.My father and I took it to an entirely new level later when I became a Yankee fan, and then we actually did argue, though we managed to constrain our most vocal differences to the playing field.

  If Reese became a Mets fan when he grew up, would I take it personally? Rooting for the Yankees was an essential part of my makeup, like loving the Beatles or Gorgonzola cheese. Tanya’s ambivalence about baseball (or Maureen’s for that matter) didn’t bother me because they were choosing no team, not another team. But if Reese became a Mets fan, especially after I shared my passion for the Yankees, would I see it as a betrayal? If he became a Red Sox fan, I could only interpret this as an outright act of rebellion, but there wasn’t anything this clear about the Mets.

  It wasn’t worth worrying about. This was a special day at the stadium: “The Kid” was coming to the Bronx. Last night, they called Bobby “Kid” Kitterer up from the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees to make his first start in right field. He’d compiled monster statistics in half a year at AAA – a .340 batting average, 23 home runs and 57 RBI’s – and Yankee management decided it was foolish to give him any more “grooming” time. And the team unquestionably needed a boost. They were only two games over .500 and six games behind the surprising Toronto Blue Jays in the American League East.

  “I can’t believe we lucked into seeing ‘The Kid’s’ first major league game,” Ally said.

  “I know. I’ve been following him since he had that big year with Staten Island. I just knew he was going to do something.”

  “Let’s hope he’s for real.”

  “He’s for real. He has all the tools: the swing, the arm, the legs. The only thing that might mess him up is if New York scares the hell out of him.”

  Ally and I didn’t argue/talk when we spoke about baseball, but it was still nice to have someone with whom to share this. Earlier in our friendship, it tickled me to have a “buddy” with this common interest. But now it was more than that, something we built evenings around and called each other about during the day.

  The Yankees took the field and the crowd cheered wildly.

  “This would certainly scare the hell out me,” Ally said.

  Reese bit my shoulder. His teeth had been slow to emerge, but I felt the first little bud this morning and at this point he chewed on everything in the vicinity.

  As the first Kansas City Royals player stepped into the batter’s box, the Bleacher Bums in right field began their “roll call.” Starting with the left fielder, they called the name of every Yankee in the game except the pitcher and catcher (who had other things going on at that moment) and continued to do so until that player turned in acknowledgment. It was a long-standing tradition, one of the many that elevated the Yankees’ relationship with their fans. They saved Bobby Kitterer for last and when he turned and waved, the crowd in the bleachers roared. Even this crowd, who had seen so many special players and witnessed so many dramatic sports moments, felt that this was a signal event. It probably would
n’t have seemed this way if the Yankees had a ten-game lead, but regardless of the reason, it made “The Kid’s” (and of course, Reese’s) first game a festive one.

  The Yanks gave up three runs in the first. The same problem that plagued them all season. No one understood why, but their starting pitchers consistently began poorly before straightening out. As a result, the team regularly played from behind and all too often never caught up.

  Kitterer’s first three at-bats were unremarkable. He popped up to third on the very first pitch he saw, grounded to second his next time up, and struck out on three pitches his third.He saw five pitches total in his first three times at the plate and looked jumpy. He did, however, make a gorgeous running catch with two runners on to end the fifth, bringing the crowd to its feet.

  In the bottom of the seventh, the Yanks were down 4-3. Reese decided that hot dogs weren’t to his liking and that bouncing up and down on my legs was much more entertaining than anything happening on the field. He was so well behaved and I only needed to get up to walk with him a couple of times, but it was obvious there were many things he would prefer over sitting in a box seat for three hours. I tried to keep him occupied while watching the game at the same time.

  A strikeout and a very close play at first left the Yankees with two outs and no one on when Kitterer came up again.He watched a ball in the dirt and then another up and in. The Royals pitcher then made a significant mistake, leaving a ball out over the plate. The Kid pounced on it, sending it six rows deep over the right field fence. The entire crowd jumped up when he hit the ball, and after it sailed out of the park, Ally kissed me hard before turning back to the field to scream her approval. Even Reese looked out and smiled as Kitterer rounded the bases, though it was probably because he just caught the glint off a mustard package.