Where Love Goes (11 page)

A couple months back, he says, Joan called Ursula at seven o’clock on a Sunday night—the first time they’d heard from her in half a year. Since then, Ursula won’t go anyplace on a Sunday night, even though that’s when they show free movies at the library. She and Tim used to go every week and walk over to Friendly’s for ice creams afterward.

“Now they could be giving away Barbies down at Wal-Mart and it wouldn’t matter, if it was a Sunday night,” he tells Claire. “Ursula would have to stay in that chair of hers next to the phone. ‘I think this is the night, for sure, Dad,’ she says. ‘Any minute now she’s going to call.’ Only she doesn’t. Usually I just let Ursula stay there in the chair until she falls asleep. Then I carry her up to bed and she doesn’t talk about Joan again until the next Sunday.”

L
ong after Claire and Tim have finished their omelettes they’re still sitting in the restaurant. She’s surprised to hear herself telling him about that last terrible winter of her marriage, when she seemed to have lost the ability to sleep. She might lie down for a couple of hours in the bed she shared with Sam, listening to him snoring at the far end, and sometimes she’d cry in this soundless way she had. Sometimes he’d wake up complaining that her crying was making the mattress shake. “Take the boohooing someplace else would you babe?” he’d tell her. “If I don’t get some sleep, I’ll be no good on the job tomorrow.”

So she’d get up. She might do a load of laundry or bake bread. She alphabetized the spices and polished the silverware. Sometimes she’d creep into her children’s rooms and sit there on the floor sorting Legos into bins according to colors or lining up Pete’s Matchbox cars on the shelf.

Three o’clock, maybe four, she’d feel bone-weary, but she knew if she went back to bed with Sam, it would start all over again: She’d reach for him. He’d push her away. She’d cry. The bed would shake. He’d tell her to take it someplace else. So this time she’d go lie down in one of her children’s narrow single beds, under Pete’s He-Man quilt or Sally’s with the ballerinas. Then finally she could sleep.

Years later, when Sam decided to fight for custody, this was one of the things he told in court as evidence that she’s an unfit mother. “I never had any evidence that she, you know, touched them inappropriately,” he told the Marital Master. “But you have to wonder. The state she was in, there was no telling.”

There on the stand, in the same blue blazer he wore on their wedding day, Sam recounted the story of the time she had stood in the bathroom holding a pair of scissors to one of her braids. “What can I say?” he told the judge, shaking his head regretfully. “She was hysterical.”

“And what did she do then, Sam?” his lawyer had asked him. A woman
.

“She said she was going to cut off her hair if I didn’t talk to her,” he answered. “It was very frightening to the children, but I tried to put their minds at ease. I told them, ‘Mommy was just having one of those days.’ ”

“I have primary custody of the children now,” Claire tells Tim. She also explains that she has never got over the feeling that was left with her from the experience of going to court, that she is always being watched and judged as a mother. She can’t ever afford to let her guard down. She has to be perfect or it could all happen again.

Claire doesn’t weep, telling Tim about her marriage and divorce, but Tim’s eyes become moist as he listens. Though she knows there are people—Sam for instance—who would look with disdain at a grown man sitting across from her in the diner brushing the tears from his eyes with his napkin, for Claire there’s something wonderfully comforting and tender about him.

“He’s very big,” she will tell Mickey tomorrow when she calls him. “He looks like he just came in off the football field.” But there is also something almost feminine about him. Once she had supposed there was safety in attaching herself to a strong, tough-seeming man. Now she knows there’s more safety in softness
.

•   •   •

“Partly I hate your husband for doing these things,” Tim says. “But I also feel sorry for him, that he has to live the rest of his life knowing he’s lost you.”

“If he had ever treasured me that way he wouldn’t have lost me in the first place,” she tells him. “That was the point.”

“How could he let you go?” Tim says. “If it was me that had had you and lost you, I don’t think I’d ever get over it.”

U
p Until this moment Tim hasn’t touched her. Mostly because if he started he could never stop. He hasn’t taken his eyes off her though. He has missed nothing. Not the way she runs her hand over her eyebrows sometimes as if she were smoothing a sheet, or the way she runs her fingers down her neck as she talks about this man, Mickey, she tells him about—as if she’s feeling his touch at that moment in just that spot. He loves her Hopalong Cassidy watch and the surprising heartiness of her laughter. He notices a small scar under her chin and knows he will ask her about it later. He sees that she has a few gray hairs, and when she looks up to see the Special Coffee of the Day he can tell from the very slight narrowing of her eyes that she must be nearsighted. Some dentists would probably tell her to fix that gap between her front teeth, but he would like to put his tongue there. There, and on her neck, and in her ear, and all over her.

Partly he knows it’s the way she looks that has such an effect on him, but it’s something else, too. Although she has told him she’ll be forty on her next birthday, there is this startlingly playful, girlish quality about her. But there is this other thing about Claire: It’s so clear to Tim what a good mother she is, and he loves that. Same thing Mickey hated about her.

She’s stroking the handle on her mug and looking into the bottom of it as if there were tea leaves with a message there. “I can’t believe we’ve been here three and a half hours,” she says. “My children will think I’ve been murdered and thrown in the basement of some madman. Either that or they will have rented a video.”

Mine will be in bed, he knows. It’s been over a year since he’s hired a sitter for his daughter, and until now the thought of her hasn’t crossed his mind all evening. Ursula. For a moment there it was as if he’d forgotten her name.

He reaches his hand across the table and touches her palm. Just that.

“I could look at you for a long time,” he says.

O
n the steps to the museum where he drops her off, because this is where her car is parked, he tells Claire he wants her to write a letter. It turns out they both have fax machines. Claire’s is in the little attic office she’s set up at home for her fund-raising work and grant proposals.

“Sometimes it’s easier for me to say what I’m really thinking on paper,” he says. “Talk is cheap.”

To Claire—who has been spending at least an hour a day on the telephone with a man she’s still in love with, who lives a hundred and twenty miles away, that she hasn’t seen in over three years—this is not necessarily so. Although it occurs to her that in all the years she has been talking with Mickey, missing Mickey, aching over losing Mickey, the only piece of mail she’s ever gotten from him was the form letter he keeps on his computer to send to the women who answer his ad in the personals.

So the idea of a man who lives only a few blocks from her but wishes to have a correspondence with her has a nice old-fashioned feeling to it. She gives him her fax number. For a second there, she’s sure he’s going to kiss her, but he just takes her hand and holds it for a moment. Then he leaves.

W
here were you?” her son asks her when she comes in, a little after ten. Pete’s sitting at the computer playing Flight Simulator with Jared, who is evidently sleeping over. They’re piloting an F-15 over Paris. The Eiffel Tower whizzes below in a blur.

“I had dinner with a friend,” she tells him.

“Nancy called,” he says. “Also, Dad wants to know if he can take us out Thursday night instead of Wednesday.”

“Fine,” she says. She’s thinking about that moment in the restaurant as she was telling Tim something Sam had said to her once, when it looked as if Tim had tears in his eyes.

“Of course I’m not ‘in love’ with you,” Sam told her one time. “Being in love is for teenagers and country music. We’re married, for Christ’s sake. We have kids.”

Claire is thinking about those big hands of Tim’s, and what they would feel like in her hair. She has never made love with such a big man. She wonders if he would crush her, knock the wind out of her, rip her skin.

“The garage door opener’s jammed again,” Pete’s telling her. “I had to bring my bike in the back door. Plus there’s something funny with the toilet. It keeps making this gurgling noise.”

He has a little girl. A motherless child. And who is Claire if not a mother? She is other things besides that, too, she knows now—better than she used to. But there is also this place in her that will always want to bend over other women’s carriages and pick their babies up, take other women’s troubled sons on her lap and help them churn butter. She thinks about the story Tim told her tonight, of how Ursula sits by the phone Sunday nights, and of the question Tim says she keeps asking him: What did I do bad to make my mother stop loving me?

Claire hasn’t laid eyes on this child, and already she wants to wrap her arms around her. Her and her father, both.

E
arly the next morning Tim faxes Claire a poem about estuaries. Estuaries and her neck. “I didn’t want to say good-bye to you last night,” he writes. “After you left I just sat there in the parking lot of the children’s museum, thanking God that I met you.”

Imagine Mickey saying something like that, Mickey thanking God. Mickey, who won’t even let Gabe sign up for Cub Scouts because of that line in the pledge about doing your duty to God and your country. Mickey, whose religion is Miles Davis and the American League. Usually when she compares some man she’s met with Mickey, the new man looks like a pale, flat stranger. This time, imagining the two of them side by side, Claire actually smiles.

She faxes Tim a drawing of herself fixing pancakes for Pete and Jared, who have taken off on their bikes now, happy that the snow has finally melted enough that they can get out exploring again. Sally won’t be up for hours.
“Thank God I’ve still got one child who leads a wholesome, active life,” Claire writes. “All my daughter does these days is sleep, watch snowboarding videos with her boyfriend, and ask me t0 take her for driving practice.”

“I cant imagine what it must be like to see your daughter driving a car,” he writes back. “Mine’s just learning to ride a bike.”
At the bottom of the page he has made a drawing of a man standing next to a bicycle. There is a little girl wearing a helmet on the bicycle, and a balloon coming out of her mouth with the words “There’s nothing to riding a two-wheeler, Dad.” The man is doubled over as he holds the bicycle, pushing her along. Buckets of sweat pour off him.

“After I take Ursula out on her bike this afternoon, I’m dropping her off at T-ball practice,” he writes. “So how about coffee?”

Claire could just pick up the phone to answer him, but she doesn’t. She faxes back a picture of herself—same bathrobe—tossing the pancakes into the air as she answers, “
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

T
im stands over his machine watching as her fax scrolls out. His daughter is calling to him for another bowl of cereal but he doesn’t go right away as he usually would. He can’t leave his desk until he’s seen her fax.

There’s nothing glamorous about the cartoony way Claire has drawn herself in this picture. She’s wearing a ratty-looking bathrobe and her breasts seem to droop exaggeratedly underneath it. Tim remembers these breasts well from yesterday and they looked beautiful to him.

In the picture Claire’s short mop of hair is sticking up in tufts around her small thin face. There are bags under her eyes and though when he saw her he guesses she must have been wearing contact lenses, in her drawing she’s wearing glasses. In one hand she holds a spatula and in the other a bowl of pancake batter. All around her are broken egg shells, sticks of butter, maple syrup tipped over sideways and dripping on the floor. Even the flowers in the vase she has drawn, sitting on the counter, are drooping. Her kitchen is a mess.

But she’s wearing earrings. She has also given herself a heart-shaped locket in this cartoon. Her eyes, in the picture, are looking skyward, as if she’s just caught sight of a bird out the window.

He thinks about all the song lyrics he’s ever heard and how inadequate they are. He sits at his computer wishing he could play it for her like the most beautiful guitar she’s ever heard.
Mark Knopfler. Ray Phiri. Gerry Scott-Moore. Chet Atkins. Django Reinhardt
.

In the same way that he would love to touch her all over, he would love to pour all sorts of words over her. He would like to tell her that he wants to touch her like the map of a place he’s never been. He wants to say that from the moment he laid eyes on her, he knew as he has never known about any other woman that he would never run out of things he wanted to tell her or questions he wanted to ask. That he suspects the day isn’t long enough to finish loving her. He would like to tell her that he knows, looking at her thirty-nine-year-old face and her thirty-nine-year-old body, that he would still love her seventy-five-year-old face and whatever body it is that will come with it—and given the chance, and God help him, the strength, he would still want to be making love to her then too, the way he does right now.

In the next room, Ursula is calling to him, more insistently this time.
“Daddy,”
she says. “I told you,
cereal.”

“Coming, Urs,” he says, but he doesn’t move.

What is there to say to her that’s substantial enough for how he feels without scaring her away?

“I have no destination in my mind but loving you.”

“I want to be the end of your search.”

“Let me be the next exit you’ve been looking for, the crack in old plaster that comes from nowhere and goes all the way across the room,
the sound the constellations make wheeling across the sky unseen in the middle of the day, a phone call you’ve been waiting for, a song you like and haven’t heard in a while, coming on the radio. Let me love you like the weight of a lawn upon the ground beneath it, the movement of water down a slick rock in some quiet place you’ve always wanted to be.”