Where Love Goes (14 page)

“That’s not true,” he’s saying. “You know I do. I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’ll never let it happen again.”

Claire has her head in her hands by this point. Tim doesn’t seem to notice.

“No,” he says. “I will, really. I’m bringing you a treat when I come home. Maybe we’ll do something fun after school Monday, what do you think? Go out for a milkshake maybe, huh?”

Even with the receiver pressed against Tim’s ear, Claire can make out the sound of Ursula’s voice berating him.
“Never again,” he’s saying. “I swear.”

Claire doesn’t know what he says next. She has left the room.

W
hen it’s finally over and he hangs up the phone, he finds Claire in the kitchen washing dishes noisily.

“I can’t believe you,” she says. “One minute you’re a big, strong, sane grown-up man, and the next thing I know your eight-year-old child has brought you to your knees. How could you let that happen?”

“You don’t understand,” he tells her. “All these years I’ve been the only person she’s had. I never left her like this before. She didn’t know how to handle it.”

“That’s no excuse for letting her treat you like that,” Claire says. “Anyone would think she was the parent and you were the child. You’re supposed to be the one in charge, remember?”

“She’s just a kid, Claire,” he says. He reaches out to touch her neck, but there’s something almost guilty to his touch now.

“Exactly my point,” she says.

“She told me she didn’t think I loved her anymore. She said you were my favorite.”

“Oh, great,” says Claire. “So I’m in competition with an eight-year-old.”

“There’s no competition,” he tells her.

“You get to have a life,” she says, hearing Mickey’s voice.

“I know,” he says. “You’ve given it to me.”

B
ecause Sandy and Jeff kept Ursula overnight on Sunday and brought her to school straight from their apartment, Ursula doesn’t see her dad again until she gets off the bus Monday afternoon. He’s there waiting for her. This is the first unusual thing.

He has bought her a bag of Gummi worms. Another dead giveaway, in Ursula’s opinion. What kind of an idiot does he think she is, anyway?

He gets down on his knees to hug her. He used to pick her up and whirl her over his head, but he doesn’t do that anymore and Ursula knows why. She weighs seventy-nine pounds.

“I missed you so much,” he says.
Liar
.

“Let’s see your picture.”

“It sucks.”

“Hey, does not. This is a beauty, Urs. I love the way you made the clouds.”

“You smell funny,” she says.

“Here,” he says to her. “Let me carry your backpack. Tell me about your day.”

“So,” she says. “Did you kiss her?”

“Yes I did,” he tells her. “I care about Claire a lot. When people feel that way about each other, that’s what they sometimes do.”

“Like you used to kiss me?”

“I still kiss you,” he says. “But different. One kind of kisses are the kind a dad gives his little girl, and you will always be my little girl. The other kind are the kisses a man gives a woman, and that’s the kind of kisses I give Claire.”

Blahblahblahblah. She puts her hands over her ears, but she can still hear him. She starts singing the Barney theme song. This used to be their personal joke, hers and her dad’s. Because they both think Barney is such a jerk. Now he’s probably told her all about it of course. The woman he kissed
.

“Listen, Urs,” he says. “You’ll like her. If you give her a chance.” He has a begging sound to his voice. She feels bigger than him. At that moment she knows she could squish him if she wanted to. He’s the one who taught her, in karate, the most vulnerable part on a man. The balls.

“Do you like her as much as you used to like my mom?” she asks him.

“Yes,” he tells her. “Yes I do. And she likes me a whole lot too. And she’s very anxious to meet you. She asked me to give you this letter, in fact.”

He takes a piece of paper out of his pocket. She can see a cartoony type drawing on it of a woman and a couple of kids. The thought of her having kids hadn’t even occurred to Ursula until this moment. They will hate her. They’ll think she’s fat and they’ll be right.

“ ‘Dear Ursula,’ ” he starts to read.

“Shutupshutupshutupshutup!”
she yells, covering her ears again. She’s singing the Barney song again, very loud this time.

“Ursula,” he yells, grabbing her by the shoulders to keep her from spinning out into the road. “You’ve got to listen to me. I’m the parent here. I’m the one in charge.”

The woman must have told him to say that. Either that or he read it in some book about how to raise kids.

“You’ll like her, you’ll see,” he says. “Do you think I’d ever pick someone to be with that wasn’t nice to little girls?”

“I’ll hate her,” she says. “And she’ll hate me. And we’ll all be miserable. Just wait and see.”

C
laire has never had a lover like Tim, who wanted even more than she did. It almost scared her about him when she discovered it, but it also thrills her. For as long as she can remember, she hasn’t been able to get Mickey out of her bed. It’s been close to three years since she laid eyes on the man and still, somebody else would touch her in a place that reminded her of a moment he touched her there, and she would see his face over her, plain as a hologram. “Baby,” the lover would whisper as he collapsed onto the pillow beside her, and she turned her face and wept quietly. Her lover would think this was just the aftereffects of an orgasm, but it was always Mickey.

With Tim it’s different. His hunger for her is so vast, his energy so explosive, he seems to drown out the old waves of sadness that have become as much a part of having sex for her as kissing. Thinking about Mickey while Tim is making love to her would be like trying to keep some gentle Irish tune in your head at a Rolling Stones concert. She loves the wildness of him, and the bigness: It takes her breath away.

The other thing about Tim is the bigness of his love for her, which might alarm someone who hadn’t experienced big love herself. Last weekend, their second together, she woke up in the middle of the night and found him just lying there studying her the way she used to study Mickey as he slept. “I can’t believe I have you,” he said. “I don’t want to miss a moment of you.”

Just watching her undress—or watching her dress again, which is harder for him—Tim looked as if he might cry. “What’s the matter?” she asked him.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “I just love you so much.”

“Nobody will ever love you the way I did” Mickey had said to her
.

“You’re wrong,” she tells Mickey now, in her head, as Tim lowers himself over her, stroking her leg as if he’d never felt skin before
.

T
im doesn’t know what to do. He has to be with her. Once he’s known the feel of kissing her, of being inside her and having her legs wrapped around his back, he can’t bear to be away from her anymore. He has to be, of course. He has used up nearly all the money from his grant, and he’s only teaching one class this summer, which cuts his income down by two-thirds. If he can’t get his new grant proposal finished and approved, he’ll run out of money by the end of the summer. As it is, he’s had to take out a loan to send Ursula to day camp once school gets out. She doesn’t want to go, but he knows if she stays home he won’t get any work done. Tim’s having a hard enough time keeping his concentration.

He would want to spend every minute of his day with Claire if there weren’t kids involved. He would build a post and beam house for her, for the two of them, somewhere in the mountains, near the sound of running water. He would want to make them a home. Because he knows he would never get tired of looking at her. Or touching her. “
You are the only woman I have ever known who just flat-out deserves to be loved round the clock,” he says
. Just making his bed, all he can think of is this: her in it.

M
ickey was every inch the bachelor lover, a man with four kinds of jalapeño peppers in his refrigerator and not much else, and ticket stubs from six different jazz clubs in his pockets, a man whose address book is filled with almost nothing but women’s names, jazz clubs and take-out food places, a man with stereo speakers in every room of his house, including the shower.

It’s different with Tim. Tim seduces Claire with his tender domesticity. There’s something almost unbearably touching to her in the picture of him struggling with French braids and the microscopic hooks and eyes on a Barbie flight attendant’s uniform. He clips coupons and shops for tofu and makes his chicken stock from scratch. He watches Monday-night football and keeps a basketball in his car at all times, along with the needle to inflate it in case the air is getting low. He also wonders why his daughter’s T-shirts emerge from the dryer a dingy shade of gray.

“Call me a madman,” he writes to her, “but I’m simply the kind of guy who actually loves kids’ Christmas concerts and putting on storm windows. I enjoyed changing Ursula’s diapers—sick, huh? I want to go with you to get the car inspected. I want to grind the beans for your coffee and bring it to you in bed.” What he is, at his core, is a family man
.

A
n envelope arrives from him. By regular mail this time. Inside is a colored museum postcard of a Chagall painting called
L’Anniversaire
. It’s a painting of a man and a woman in a room. The woman is holding flowers. There’s a meal on the table, and a sort of flowered spread on the bed. The man is kissing the woman. As is so often the case in a Chagall, his feet are not touching the ground. He is flying, in fact. His head is bent as if he were a dolphin, so his lips can touch the woman’s. She is leaning forward to meet these lips of his, so her body is at an angle that no body could maintain in real life, no body could maintain without toppling over. Her skirt swirls around her dainty ankles. It is an image of love and ecstasy.

This is not a new postcard. Claire can see several places where tacks have been stuck around the edges, as well as a place on the back where a piece of tape used to be. There is also a note in the envelope.

“Years ago when I was in graduate school I bought a couple of shoe boxes of postcards for a few bucks,” he writes. “Joan used to cut them up and use them for collages at one point. But when I moved out of our bedroom, I took several of my favorites from her studio and put them above my computer. Of all of them, this one was my most favorite; No big mystery why: It depicts what I was missing in my life. Nothing for me captures better than this painting the spirit of what I hoped to know of love—the bed, the food, the flowers, the wholesome, uplifting feel of it all. All I ever wanted in life is in this picture. All I ever wanted I have found with you.”

T
im and Claire have arranged for Claire and Ursula to meet at the Two Brothers Diner on a Thursday afternoon when Pete’s playing baseball and Sally’s at ballet. Claire has seen pictures of Tim’s daughter but she wasn’t prepared for the sight of her. Ursula’s glasses are so thick they actually magnify her eyes, which are a pale, red-rimmed, watery gray. She is also bigger-boned than Claire imagined. Like her father, but it’s a less successful look on a little girl. There is nothing little about her as she sits hunched over the table, playing with sugar packets.

Ursula’s hair is a pale strawberry blond, and thin. Her skin is also very pale and pink, almost transparent. “No fun at the beach,” Mickey would say. Which also applies to Tim, of course, although, knowing how Claire loves the ocean, he has gone there with her, slathered himself with number 45 sunblock and kept his legs covered. Tim would go anywhere with Claire. He is crazy in love with her, and she can tell that Ursula knows this, too. Ursula seems to know everything.

“I’m fat,” Ursula says as Claire settles herself at their booth. “Is that all you’re eating?” she has asked, looking at Ursula’s bagel, which she has hardly touched. Claire reaches out her hand to shake Ursula’s, having decided on the drive over not to hug her right off.

“I’m Claire,” she says. She knows better than to tell Ursula, “I’ve heard so much about you.”

What she tells Ursula is, “I always wanted red hair.” That part is true. Just a different shade. She tells Ursula she loves her dress, which is the loose, Empire style parents buy when they’re worried about their daughter’s weight. There was a brief period shortly after her separation from Sam when Sally appeared to find her comfort in peanut butter sandwiches, and she put on weight for a while. But that was a long time ago. Sally is tall and slim now, and beautiful. After seeing a recent photograph of Sally, and knowing she had a brief chunky phase, Tim told Claire she made him feel hopeful for Ursula. Claire did not say—though it was what she was thinking at this point—that her own daughter was never like Ursula. Even when she had that belly on her, there was always a lightness to Sally.

Ursula, on the other hand, seems not simply heavy but heavy-hearted, too. Claire sees it in the way Ursula sits in her chair—slumped over and defeated-looking. It’s in those sad, watery eyes behind her unflattering glasses frames. It’s her fingernails, which are bitten below the quick, and the baby-talk voice she uses as she tells Claire, “I bet my dad likes you better than me.” The truth is, Claire has never seen a sadder-looking child.

She kisses Tim. Not their usual kiss—which would have been the long kind, mouths open, pressed up against each other hard. This one is a peck on the cheek, like something June Lockhart would deliver to her husband on “Lassie.”

“You’re so pretty,” Ursula tells her, still in that baby-talk voice. “I wish I was pretty.”

Claire knows she’s being baited and takes it. “Of course you’re pretty,” she says. “And pretty silly, too.” Claire has always believed in talking to children basically the same way you’d talk to anybody else. She says something about how women are never happy with the way they look. “Me, I’ve got straight hair and I always wanted it to be curly. And you probably want yours to be straight, right?”