Where Love Goes (25 page)

On the screen, Wolfenstein is slashing his sword. He has chopped off two warriors’ heads now, and he is moving on a third. There is blood dripping on the bricks. A bat circles over his head. Crunch.
Got him
.

“She says, ‘I love your big cock,’ ” says Ursula, her voice deep and low. She is practically whispering this in his ear. “She says, ‘Nobody ever fucked me like that.’ She has a purple bra that she left at our house one time. My dad keeps it under his pillow.”

“Get out! Just get out!”
he screams
.

“I have to go now, girl,” she tells Jenny, in the baby voice again. “Bye-bye, baby girl.” A minute later he can see her riding down the street on that pink bike of hers. The last thing he sees is the top of her helmet disappearing behind a row of shrubs.

T
he horrible truth is, Ursula was only partly going over to their house to give Jenny a run. She was actually thinking she was going to make friends with Pete when she went over there. Her dad said maybe he’d play soccer with her if she went over there. The horrible truth is, Ursula actually admires Pete. She has watched him on the playground at school, where he is a Classroom Buddy. He is one of the most popular boys. When she told Marcy, this really popular girl that helps her reading group, that she knew Pete, Marcy said everybody in sixth grade wanted to go out with him. “Don’t tell Pete,” Marcy said, “but Sarah McAdam thinks he’s cute and so do I.” Ursula had been planning to tell Pete that. The other stuff just came out by mistake.

This happens a lot to Ursula. She makes this plan to do all these nice things, like Pollyanna. She thinks up how she’s going to give Ashley a Tootsie Pop and ask if she wants to come over to her house. Sometimes she even practices these conversations at home with her dad or Jenny, back when Jenny still lived with them, and when she does it with her dad it always works out right, but when she does it at school, it’s like there’s this little worm that starts squiggling around in her brain. And before you know it what happens is she’s telling Ashley that Derek said she had cooties and Ashley is saying, “Yeah, well, you should hear what Derek says about you,” and Ursula is saying, “Well, Derek is a big pecker head,” and Ashley is saying, “Now I know why nobody likes you,” and Ursula is saying, “I’ll tell the teacher,” and she does, and then those kids get in trouble and hate her more than ever.

A
fter the kid tells him that about his mother and Tim, Pete decides he’ll find out for himself. His mother’s bed is always rumpled up in the morning, but that doesn’t mean anything. She could just be doing that so they’d think she’d been there. The only way to know for sure is to watch.

Ten o’clock, he calls out good night to her. She comes in his room, bends over him, kisses his cheek.

“I love you, son,” she says. She’s wearing perfume. Did she used to do that on school nights?

“You going to bed, too?” he asks her.

“Soon,” she says. “You have a soccer game tomorrow?”

He says he does. Also he’s been wanting to ask her something. “Could he please not come to my game this time?” he says. He’s talking about Tim, who came to the last game and cheered louder than his own dad, who was also there, when Pete made that goal in the second half.

“Tim loves watching you play,” says his mom. Why does she have to make him feel guilty all the time, like it’s his job to make Tim happy?

“And Ursula admires you so much,” she says. “I don’t know if you realize that, but she thinks you’re wonderful. She told Tim if she ever had a brother she’d want it to be somebody just like you.”

She’s a desperate woman. Under her perfume, he can smell it.

“I’d just rather they didn’t hang around all the time, okay?” he says.

For a while there he’s almost decided the kid must have been making the whole thing up. He can hear his mother downstairs, playing the record of one of those wailing country singers she loves. He hears the faucet running. He hears the dishwasher start up. The porch light clicks off. His sister is off the phone now. He can hear the Tori Amos album she always puts on to help her get to sleep. No car ignition. He looks out the window just to check,and sure enough, there’s the Toyota sitting in their driveway in the same place it’s been all night.

But then he catches sight of her. Not in the car, but partway down the block, under the glow of a street lamp: his mother walking in the direction of Tim’s apartment.

M
ickey has fallen in love. Not with one of his smooth-bellied twenty-six-year-olds this time, though. The woman is thirty-eight and divorced. She lives in Rhode Island. She has two children, one of whom is younger than Pete. Her name is Annalise.

“So what does she look like?” Claire asks him. She is trying hard to remember how the routine goes even as the room begins to spin.

“Small tits,” he says. “Long legs. Incredible neck. Fixes the best margaritas I ever tasted. And can you believe it, she actually owns a Milton Nascimento CD?”

“Ethereal yet pithy,” Claire says. “What about her kids? How are you going to work that part out?”

“You got me, Slim,” he says. “Send them to military school, I guess. I must be losing my mind.”

He volunteers nothing about the sex and Claire doesn’t ask. “How’s Carrottop doing?” he asks her.

“I wish Tim would take her to a therapist,” she says. “Actually, I think it might be a good idea if all of us went into family therapy together.”

He sighs heavily. “You aren’t pregnant, are you?” he asks her.

She shivers. “No.”

“So,” he says, “you hear the new Crowded House album?”

E
arly on in their time together—when she was fresh out of her marriage, and they were still in the phase she things of now as Mickey nursing her back to health—he asked her why she didn’t wear perfume
.

“I just never did,” she told him. “I never had any, I guess” Sam had bought her a bottle of Chanel Number 5 for Mother’s Day one year, in the aftermath of the birthday when she’d burst into tears after opening his gift of a pressure cooker. As with the black garter belt he got her that other time, Sam’s attempts at romantic gifts never rang true to Claire. It was as if some guy at one of his building jobs had handed him an instruction manual that said, “Garter belt, black. Perfume: Chanel Number 5.”

“Well, you should,” Mickey told her. Wear perfume, he meant. “It’s one of life’s great pleasures.”

He took her to Colonial Drug in Harvard Square. “Wait till you see this place,” he said as he led her in. It was the old-fashioned kind of drugstore, with Kent brushes and tortoiseshell combs and boxes of chocolates and dark wood moldings around the glass cases. One whole wall of the store was nothing but perfume testers. Next to every one was a hand-typed card describing the fragrance
.

Mickey studied these cards as closely as he would if he were reading box scores. When he had half a dozen fragrances picked out, he unbuttoned the cuffs of her blouse and rolled them up enough to expose her wrists and part of each forearm. He reached for one of the little strips of paper they kept in a jar on the counter and dabbed it very lightly on her right wrist. He dipped another strip of paper into a different tester and rubbed that on her other wrist. “Oh,” she said. “This one is wonderful, too.”

Then the back of each hand. Then each of her forearms. He had taken out a three-by-five card, on which he wrote the name of each of the perfumes
.

“I think I like this one the best,” she said, pointing to number three. Ma Griffe
.

“Did you think we were going to buy one just like that?” he asked her. “That’s not how you do it.”

They walked around Harvard Square for a couple of hours. They had a margarita at a Mexican place and shopped for used CDs at a couple of little record stores. Every ten minutes or so he’d reach for one of her arms and sniff one of their test patches. “It’s not just the way the perfume smells when you first put it on,” he told her. “It’s what happens when you live with it. Every woman’s skin is different.”

•   •   •

They made three separate trips to Colonial Drug before they found her perfume, a scent called II Bacio. Now, Claire sprays herself with perfume even when she knows she will be totally alone for the pure pleasure of smelling herself. Since buying that first bottle she has picked out half a dozen other scents. Il Bacio is still her favorite, but she hardly ever wears it anymore. She has learned that there is nothing—not a photograph, not a piece of music even—that summons a memory more sharply than a scent. There are times when something as simple as a blend of coffee brewing or the smell of baseball glove leather can do it to her, or a soap she realizes he used, or a certain kind of greasy sandwich that they sell outside Fenway Park.

Hearing the news about Mickey and Annalise, Claire no longer needs to throw a pot of soup. She doesn’t crawl into bed. She has no braids left to cut off. If she were a drinker, this is where she would pour herself a double scotch. As it is, she climbs the stairs to her room, puts on a Lucinda Williams CD, takes out her perfume bottle, and bathes herself in Il Bacio.

W
hen do we get to come over to your house again?” Ursula asks Claire when she stops by their apartment with a jar of the leek soup she’s made and a pan of cornbread. This is the same question Ursula asks Claire every time she sees her and it always has the same effect. Claire can almost feel a hand constricting around her heart, a tightening in her throat. Ursula’s question makes it seem to Claire as if Ursula and Tim have no life besides the one she provides them, which is a suffocating notion. And where in the normal course of things she would have pictured Ursula coming over all the time, the child’s perpetual asking has the effect on Claire of wanting to withhold what she knows Ursula wants so badly. Claire despises herself for this. She feels ungenerous and inhospitable. A stern, reproachful, lecturing tone whose sound she hates comes into her voice.

“You know, Ursula,” she says. “Last time you came over, all you did was ask your dad when he was going to take you home again.” This is true: The only time Ursula lets up on asking to come over and play is when she gets to come over, at which point she never plays. She leans against her father, wherever he may be, and whispers to him things Claire is just as glad she doesn’t hear, as well as a number she does hear. Ursula complains that Claire’s kids are being mean to her. She’s bored. She can never speak directly to Sally or Pete, only to her father, directing him to tell them things. He tries to get her to talk for herself, having been instructed in this by Claire, but in the end he usually gives up.

“Ursula wonders if you know that Jenny doesn’t like it when pieces of dog chow get in her water bowl,” Tim tells Pete, as gently as he can.

“Yeah,” says Pete. “We heard already.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Pete,” Tim will say, instantly apologetic, putting a hand on his shoulder (a terrible mistake). “I think you’re doing a great job taking care of Jenny. We’re both incredibly grateful to you.”

“Sure,” Pete says, beating a hasty retreat.

“When are we going to get to come over to your house?” Ursula asks Claire again. The first time she asked, Claire was telling Tim about a meeting she’d had with a woman who wanted to give her collection of antique teddy bears to the museum. And since one of the many things she has expressed to Tim concerning his relationship with Ursula has to do with his willingness to let her interrupt him, she kept talking as if she hadn’t heard. The interrupting issue was one of Mickey’s big things with Claire. “
You let your children walk all over your life” he used to tell her
.

“You let your child walk all over your life,” she tells Tim. “Which means she’s walking all over mine, too.”

“When do we get—” Ursula begins for the third time.

“Listen, Ursula,” says Claire with a sharpness that startles her own self. “You need to know you aren’t the only person in the world.”

A
s if she didn’t
. What Ursula knows, in fact, is that she is only just barely in the world at all. One more step and she could just fall right off the edge.

Used to be her dad would set a pitcher of apple juice next to her bed every night with a Boston Patriots cup next to it in case she got thirsty in the night. She does get thirsty, too, and though the pitcher would always be there, what she liked was for him to come and pour the juice for her, and he would, too.

“Daddy,” she would call. And just like that there he’d be. Pouring.

Then Claire told her dad kids shouldn’t have fruit juice in the night. The sugar sits on their teeth all night, she told him, and they get cavities. Plus apple juice has calories. Why not water?

So then he would get up and pour her the water. And then Claire said, “She’s in third grade. Don’t you think she can pour her own glass of water? And you shouldn’t be naked like that when you come in to her, either.” So now he wears a bathrobe.

“Daddy,” she would call. “I need to go potty.”

“When my children were her age they went by themselves in the night. If they needed to go at all, which was rare—and would be for yours too if you didn’t leave that stupid pitcher next to her bed.”

Like a dog he obeys. She has him by the balls. Her dad taught Ursula that expression. Now he’s the one it’s happened to.

So Ursula gets up by herself at night now. Here in their cold, miserable little apartment that smells of the downstairs tenants’ cigarette smoke and a hundred ancient meals of fish sticks, Ursula makes her way alone down the dark hallway, past the door he now keeps not only shut but locked, to their horrible stinky bathroom that now has things like Tampax in it and a tube of something she once thought was toothpaste, only it tasted terrible, so she knows it wasn’t. Now Ursula has to pull up her Garfield nightie herself as she sits her too-big butt on the chilly toilet seat, with nobody there to hand her the toilet paper, folded like a flower the way he used to.