Where Love Goes (44 page)

Once Claire would have told you it could never happen that when she’d attend her son’s baseball game on a Saturday and run into their former babysitter Melanie, she’d actually wave to the young woman from across the field. Melanie is her children’s stepmother now, nine months pregnant with Sam’s child.

“You might want to get new bumpers for that old crib in the attic if that’s the one you’re going to be using,” Claire tells her. “The bars aren’t spaced as close together as they should be.” She has even given Sam and Melanie the box of the kids’ old baby clothes she had been holding on to all these years thinking she might need them herself. She won’t.

She hands Melanie Pete’s overnight bag. He’s going to his father’s house for the weekend. “He’s going to try to convince you he doesn’t have any homework,” she tells Melanie. “But he’d better get started on his Famous American report or he’ll be in trouble later.”

“I’m psyched to give him a hand,” Melanie says pleasantly, looking over the mimeographed sheet sticking out of his bag. “Buckminster Fuller was so cool.”

“If I don’t see you before you go into labor, good luck,” Claire says. “They tell you the pain is terrible and maybe it is, but you know something? Once it’s over you won’t even remember.”

I
t still astonishes Claire sometimes that a woman who loves the touch of a man as much as she does should find herself sleeping alone every night. As the years have passed in which her life has continued in this unattached way, it’s the sleeping together part more than the sex she misses most. Sex she can find. Passion even. It’s not an impossible task finding an agreeable man to kiss her wildly in the middle of the night. The rarest thing would be waking up with a man beside her in bed and having coffee together in her ratty bathrobe with her glasses on instead of contact lenses and no makeup. The rarest thing would be a night in which she slept in the arms of a man. Just slept with him.

When her children were small and she was still living with her husband and sleeping with him in their chilly bed, she used to get up in the middle of the night sometimes and wander through their house. Often she would go into her children’s rooms and lie down beside them, curl herself around their hot little bodies as they slept, just listening to their breath. Her children have always been sound sleepers; they never woke when she did this, although they might shift in their sleep, adjusting themselves to her presence in the bed. If she wrapped her arms around Pete he might let out a small sigh. One time after a particularly terrible fight with Sam, when she climbed in with her daughter, Sally had spoken in her sleep. “The dolphins are coming,” she said.

These days Claire stays in her own bed, with its canopy of printed scarves from Florida and California and Niagara Falls draped overhead and her piles of feather pillows and the garden of upside-down dried roses shooting out from the ceiling like a storm of arrows. She still keeps a CD player beside the bed and listens to music as she drifts into sleep: Joni Mitchell’s
Blue
, Steve Earle singing “My Old Friend the Blues,” Mark Knopfler’s movie soundtracks, with that heartbreaking guitar of his, the melancholy trumpet and vocals of the beautiful and doomed Chet Baker. “There’s someone I’m longing to see,” he sings. “I hope that she turns out to be someone to watch over me.”

Claire takes various men to bed with her, but only in her mind. Lying there with no light but the faint glow of her Nautilus shell and the music playing faintly, she runs through her list and chooses one. Sometimes it’s a lover she has known. More often it’s not. She may choose her son’s basketball coach one night and the man behind the fish counter at the supermarket some other time. If she’s seen one of their movies recently she may choose Tommy Lee Jones or Sean Connery. She went to bed with Dwight Yoakam once. Another time it was Andre Dawson, her favorite player on the Red Sox, before he got traded to the Marlins.

One man she never takes out and makes love with this way is Tim. Another one is Mickey. Another is Sam.

She is not crazy. She’s just getting by, is all, and this is one of the ways she has learned to do it. Now his hand is running through my hair, she thinks, and then she follows his touch as his fingers make their way down her neck and spine. Making love this way, with an invisible lover, it takes a lot of concentration not to lose your place. It’s like a game she sometimes plays with Pete when a song they both know very well comes on the radio and she turns off the volume for thirty seconds or so, but she and Pete keep singing. The idea is to discover, when you turn the volume up again, that you’re at just the right point in the song still. They are so good at this with certain songs (R.E.M., for instance, singing “Everybody Hurts”), Claire has joked to Pete that they might as well sell his boom box and all his CDs. “We can just imagine the whole album now,” she says. “Kind of a virtual-reality thing.”

In the virtual reality of her solitary lovemaking, Claire’s lover holds her very tightly, one step away from hurting her. She wraps her legs around his neck, digs her heels into his back, holds his face between her hands, breathes the air directly from his mouth. She presses her palms
against his chest. She moves her pelvis as if she were dancing. She may also run her hands along her own belly and over her breasts, imagining that the fingers she feels are someone else’s. “I want to fill you up,” he says to her. “I want to drink you.”

Alone in her bed, she may even whisper the things she would say to him. Or maybe it’s not words at all she utters but animal sounds, a bird’s song. She runs her fingers up and down the shaft of his cock. Sometimes he enters her from above, sometimes she’s on top, impaled on him. Or he may be pressing against her back, with his arms wrapped around the front of her, cupping her breasts. She hugs her pillow as he thrusts into her, until the moment when she imagines his body reaching that impossible tension followed by explosive release
.

The bed will be damp now. She’s drenched in sweat. The only measure she has of time is that Chet Baker is singing a different ballad now: “It’s Always You” or maybe “Let’s Get Lost.” “Isn’t it Romantic?”

It’s not, of course. She’s just acting out a little play, the same way Sally used to—and then Ursula—with Barbie and Ken. Different scenes but the same idea. You imagine a world and you make yourself a character inside it, and who’s to say it’s any less real than all the little plays everybody’s actually performing around you? Who’s to say a real flesh-and-blood man between her sheets would be any more present for her in the end than the ones summoned from her imagination?

One good thing about these men Claire conjures up: They never break your heart. And you never break theirs either.

L
abor Day. Sally’s off visiting colleges, but Claire has driven to the old house to pick up Pete from his weekend with his father. She opens up the back of her station wagon to make room for his bags. Six and a half years her son has been going back and forth between his parents’ houses and he still transports his stuff in brown paper bags.

Claire’s in the process of attaching the rack for their bikes when Melanie comes out. “He’s almost set,” she says. “But you’ve got to come inside and see this.”

Claire walks into her old kitchen. “This way,” says Melanie, and she leads Claire into the downstairs bedroom. Pete is sitting in a rocking chair that Claire once used to nurse her children. Melanie and Sam’s baby, Seth, lies against Pete’s stomach, drinking from a bottle. Claire studies the tiny clenched fists, the folded-over ears, the round, smooth head so new you can still see a pulse, barely below the surface of the skin at the soft spot. “He’s almost finished,” Pete whispers. “You wouldn’t believe how this little guy chows down.”

The bottle is empty. Seth begins to fuss, arching his back and sputtering. Claire is surprised to see that instead of handing the baby over to Melanie as she would have supposed her son might do at a moment like this, he just lifts Seth onto his shoulder and rubs his back gently. He’s singing a song she recognizes from the most recent Green Day CD.

“Pete’s great with Seth,” Melanie says. “He’s really going to miss his big brother.”

Shortly after Claire had moved out of this house she went back one time when the children were at school to pick up the last of her things. Sam must have come home early from work that day. He was still wearing his painter’s pants and the T-shirt they bought years before on a family trip to Luray Caverns with a picture of a rock formation on the front that looked like a fried egg. Sam and Claire were still trying to be friends at this point, so he was helping her carry boxes out
.

When the last of the boxes had been packed in her car, they walked back into the house. She needed a glass of water
.

He ran the water to make it cold. They had an artesian well. Claire has never tasted water so good
.

“Thanks,” she said, setting her glass down. They just stood there for a moment. And then he put his arms around her more tenderly than she could remember. She put her arms around him then too and for a long time they simply held each other
.

He kissed her. There was no playfulness and you couldn’t call it passionate either, although there was a hunger to the kiss that Claire has seldom experienced—even with Mickey, even with Tim. Not a hunger borne of any hopefulness; they had no future together and they knew it. Just a bone-crushing sadness. A grief and regret so enormous you couldn’t see it in a person without wanting to comfort him. Even if, as was the case, there resided in you at that moment a grief and regret equally crushing. A sorrow beyond words
.

Then without speaking they walked into their old bedroom
.

They were the only two people in the world that day who could understand all the thousands of things that contributed to the dizzying sadness of this moment. They had stopped at a VFW hall on their first date and danced the polka and an old man named Heinz had bought Sam a shot of whiskey and told him, “There’s nothing better in life, son, than the love of a good woman.” He raised his glass with the prayer that they’d be dancing the polka on their fiftieth anniversary. Downed his drink in a single gulp.

As she walked home through the streets of Ann Arbor with Sam that night, something possessed Claire to say to him, “Show me a trick.” Why she asked him that she still doesn’t know. It’s not a question she asked any other man, before or since.

“All right,” he said. There in the middle of the street he stood on his right leg and held the other, bent in front him, with his right hand. Then he jumped, lifting his right leg off the ground and through the hoop his other leg and arm had formed, and he landed solidly on the other side. Sometimes Claire actually thinks that was the moment she decided to marry him.

The first time she cooked him dinner she made potato chips from scratch. Twelve of them. He painted their names on the mailbox at the end of their road: Mr. and Mrs. Sam Temple. For their first anniversary he gave her a card with a rose on the front and the words “To My Treasured Wife.”

He was the only other person who had been there that night they lay in each other’s arms and he whispered, “I want to have a baby with you,” and she whispered back, “Me too.” She can still see him walking through the rooms of their old house in the middle of the night while Sally screamed inconsolably, singing her “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille.”

She remembered the day they were so broke they couldn’t buy diapers, and she was crying, and he had taken out his paintbrush and made a stack of thousand-dollar bills that he showered over her head like confetti. He knew, if he remembered, what her body looked like before babies. She had seen him catch a fly ball in deep center field, in midair, to make the third out of his softball league’s championship game.

And though they had also witnessed each other’s worst moments—more of those, no doubt—this much was true: They had been young together, and they were the containers of each other’s youth. They were as ridiculous a pair of life partners as Sonny and Cher, standing at their twin microphones in their striped bell-bottoms and love beads, singing “I Got You Babe.” They had made each other promises before either one of them had a clue as to how impossible it would be to keep them. They were poorly suited for each other. They were foolish and unwise and naive and selfish and blind—two people whose single greatest common bond was the sense of loss and old hurt each of them carried into their marriage like a dowry. Still, they had spent their biggest hopes on each other, and they would never be so extravagant again.

And they were also the parents of each other’s children. Claire has only to look into the face of her son and see his father. Sam must do the same with their daughter. How can you look at your child without finding in him some piece of his other parent? How can you not love that piece?

He led her over to their bed that day. The mattress had been stripped. Maybe it was about their marriage being over. Maybe Sam was just preparing to wash the sheets. They removed their clothes wordlessly and without touching—each of them attending to their own buttons and zippers, untying their shoes, peeling off their socks, laying them down on either side of the bed like the elements of a religious ritual from a church neither one of them ever attended. He got in on his side. She got in on hers
.

There on the very mattress where their babies were born—the stains of her blood still visible—they made love for the last time. It didn’t last particularly long. It wasn’t particularly great, although she knows she wept and she thinks he may have too
.

Afterward they both dressed without saying anything. She had another glass of water. Then she drove away
.

A
fter all these years, all those hours on the telephone, and all that missing him, Claire sees Mickey again. Not really Mickey, actually. She sees Mickey’s son, Gabe, who has evidently come to the Boston Science Museum, as Pete has today, on a school field trip. Claire is a chaperone.