Where Love Goes (5 page)

Tonight, though, Claire is going out on a blind date. She hasn’t done this in almost a year. It scares her to realize how excited she is at the prospect. And for so little reason.

A woman she knows from the gym set this up. The woman mentioned that she had a friend who had recently broken up with the woman he’d been seeing. Forty-three years old, two kids, working in something to do with real estate. Bob’s been divorced eight years, she told Claire. This is a good sign, Claire knows. The ones freshly out of the stable are still obsessed with their wives. “He’s got that cute, teddy bear look, sort of your basic Tony Danza type,” Pauline told her. Claire figured she was supposed to know who Tony Danza was, so she didn’t ask.

It’s not a lot to go on, but the simple fact of knowing that her doorbell will ring tonight, and there will be a man on the other side ready to take her somewhere, anywhere but her own kitchen, somebody to do the driving for once, is enough for Claire at the moment. When she gets home from the supermarket she will take a long bath and give herself a facial. She’ll put on her good underwear and shave her legs. She will pour herself a glass of wine and put on an album of Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto, timed so it will still be playing when he arrives.

Claire knows that the moment she’s enjoying now as she blow-dries her hair and pulls up her stockings may well be the most exciting point in the evening. Now, before she meets him, anything is possible. She can hold on to the hope that she is about to meet a man who will sweep her off her feet. She can still consider the possibility that this may be the very last blind date she will ever have to go on, and that tonight might in fact be the very last Friday night she carries out the trash for the early Saturday-morning pickup alone. She has entertained this possibility twenty times over the course of the last five years’ worth of blind dates: a dozen or so, in those first few wildly hopeful, energetic months after leaving her marriage, before she met Mickey. None at all for a solid year after Mickey left, followed by a second flurry, during a period in which she figured that since she’d never find anyone like Mickey again, there was no longer any need to seek out the love of her life. Forget about getting swept off your feet, she told herself. Go for the nice guy who’ll take out the trash.

C
laire opens the door to find that the man on the other side is a couple of inches shorter than she is. He also wears his hair long on one side and combed over the top of his head in a way that he must suppose will conceal a sizable bald spot.

“Let me guess,” he says. “Clara?” He makes the fingers of his right hand into the shape of a gun and points it at her. “You can call me Kreskin,” he tells her.

“Actually, my name is Claire,” she tells him.

“Right, right,” he says. “Bob Getchell.” He extends a hand as if he were launching into a sales pitch.

“Nice place,” he says. “You rent or own?”

“Own,” she tells him. “Me and the bank.”

He shakes his head. “Place like this has probably dropped ten, maybe twelve percent in value in the last two years alone,” he says. “People just don’t want the upkeep, you know. I only mention it on account of I’ve got a party I’m working with currently that’s in the market for a place like this.”

“I’m not selling,” she says. How has she got to such a ridiculous point so fast? she wonders.

“You got a couple of rug rats, I understand?” he says. Bob has picked up Pete’s signed Mo Vaughn baseball that he doesn’t like anybody to touch. “I got two of them myself.”

“I’ll just get my jacket and we can go,” says Claire. She feels a hundred years old suddenly. She thinks longingly of her bathtub and her solitary bed. The sooner they get going, the sooner she can be home.

He opens the car door for her—a small, unexpected courtesy. Settling into his own seat, he clicks a tape of Michael Bolton into the cassette player. “This guy sure can sing a song, huh?” he says.

“I guess so,” Claire says. “He’s never been a favorite of mine.”

“You’re kidding,” says Bob. “I thought all you girls creamed in your pants over him.”

Let me out here, she’s thinking. She could tell him she suddenly remembered she’d left the iron on, run into the house, lock the door and turn out the lights. After a while he’d give up and go away.

“I gotta tell you,” he says, “Pauline has hooked me up with some real bowwows. I was actually gonna blow this one off, figuring you’d be another one, only she said, ‘Trust me, Bob, I’ve seen her in the steam room.’ Boy, was she right this time.” He is looking straight at her breasts as he says this. Claire imagines herself staring back at his crotch in a similar fashion, but she’s afraid what she might see if she did.

“So how old are your children?” she asks.

“Girl thirteen, boy fifteen,” he says. “Seems like every time I turn around, their mother’s asking me for more cash. Know what I mean?”

“Kids that age need a lot of things that cost money,” Claire says. “I bought my son a pair of sixty-dollar cleats just last fall, and he already needs a new pair.” She talks to fill the air, and to keep him from saying something worse. Keep the conversation on shoes, she figures. And real-estate values.

“Oh, sure, you got your necessary expenses,” he says. “But some of these individuals out there just gouge you for all you’re worth. Take my wife. She says the boy needs therapy at eighty bucks a pop. Now our daughter’s supposed to see this dermatologist in Boston. Prescriptions alone run twenty, twenty-five bucks. You think the kid ever heard of Clearasil? That was good enough for us, huh?”

Claire says nothing. Michael Bolton is singing his rendition of “Since I Fell for You.” Bob has pulled into the parking lot of a not very good Italian restaurant. He reaches across Claire’s chest to undo her seat belt.

“I can handle it myself,” she says.

“Yeah, there’s some other things I’d like to see you handle,” he tells her.

“You know,” she says, “I think I have to go home now.”

“Listen,” he says. “It was just a joke. I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. I know you gals are a little sensitive these days.”

“Fine,” she says. “I’m just not feeling very well.”

“So let me give you a Tums,” he tells her. “I keep them handy all the time, on account of my ulcer. I was going to warn you, in fact. If you hear gurgling, not to worry, it’s only my gut kicking up.”

“I have to be honest with you, Bob,” she says. “This isn’t going to work. So I think the best thing would be for you to take me home. Save your money.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with women these days,” he says. “Nobody’s got a sense of humor anymore. One false move and a guy’s dead meat. Look at a person sideways and she’s slapping you with a sexual harassment suit or some shit.”

Claire is getting out of the car now. “Actually, I think I’ll call a friend to take me home,” she says.

“Fucking cunt,” he calls out after her. “I give you three years, four tops, before your estrogen supply gives out, and you can’t give a guy a hard-on to save your life.”

N
ancy isn’t home. She’s away at a yoga retreat, Claire remembers afterward. In the end, Claire walks home in the dark, tripping a couple of times. Her good shoes will be ruined. The first thing she does when she walks in the door is reach for the phone.

She calls Mickey. It’s the number she keeps on the emergency card in her wallet to call in case of an accident. Mickey’s is the number she would remember if she forgot every single other thing, even her name. When he picks up the phone and she hears that familiar voice, dear as her own children’s, she’s overtaken by tears.

He knows it’s her. “Baby,” he says. “Come on now, baby. Tell me what happened.”

For a few more moments all she can do is cry. But just hearing his voice murmuring to her from a hundred twenty miles away, that it’s all right, he’s here, she can feel her breathing become more regular until finally she’s able to speak.

“Oh, Mickey,” she says.

“Bad night, huh, Slim?” he answers. He knows her so well she doesn’t even really need to tell him the particulars. He can guess.

“I’m so tired, Mickey,” she tells him.

“I know, baby.”

“First it was Sam,” she begins. He knows what it’s like for her when Sam comes to take the children. Even though he has never met Sam, Mickey has heard enough stories about Sam’s Friday-night pickups to hate him.

“Then I had this date,” she says.

“Let me guess,” he says. “It wasn’t Sean Connery or Dwight Yoakam.”

She was going to tell him the whole story, but what’s the point? All she really wants to say—all she ever wants to say—is that the guy wasn’t Mickey. Once again.

“You know you’re my true love, don’t you, Slim?” he says. “You know I’ll love you forever. Nobody else will ever love you like I do.”

She’s crying again, but not the great gasping sobs anymore. “I miss you, Mickey,” she tells him.

“You don’t have to miss me,” he says. “I’m right here.”

“Weren’t you supposed to have a date yourself tonight?” she asks him. It has come back to her that when they last spoke, yesterday afternoon, he was planning to take somebody named Angela to a concert of Bulgarian women singers.

“She told me during intermission her favorite jazz musician was Kenny G,” he says. “I took her right home. We didn’t even stay for the second half.”

“Oh, Mickey,” she sighs. “What am I going to do?”

“Same thing you’ve been doing, Slim,” he tells her. “Raise those chilluns of yours. Keep baking the chocolate-chip cookies. When we’re eighty-five and the last one’s out of the house, maybe we’ll get together in Miami Beach and play shuffleboard.”

She’s heard this line before. She knows them all by heart, but there’s a comfort in hearing him tell her again.

“You all right now, Slim?” he asks her. He’s telling her, actually, that she is.

“I’m all right, Mickey,” she says. “I’m going to bed now.”

“Red Sox have a new relief pitcher that looks promising,” he says. “Throws sidearm.”

“Good night, Mickey,” she says.

“Night, Slim.”

Now she can sleep.

S
he met Mickey through an ad in the personals of a Boston newspaper she’d been reading one night almost a year after she left Sam. It was close to midnight—also a weekend when the kids were with their father—and she’d been listening to Lucinda Williams and finishing off a bottle of wine. So she called the 900 number and spent an hour just listening to people’s voices telling who they were, what they wanted in a relationship. Or what they said they wanted, anyway. Mickey’s was the twenty-third message she listened to. She liked his Southern accent. Most of all she liked his voice.

In the voice-mail message she left after listening to his recording, Claire didn’t mention her two children or the more than a hundred miles separating the town where she lived in Vermont from the one outside Boston he had chosen largely for its proximity to Fenway Park and lots of good jazz. The end of his own marriage had coincided—maybe not by chance—with the birth of his one and only child.

He had noted Claire’s area code when he called her back, naturally. He said he wasn’t into long-distance relationships.

“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’d rather drive two hours to have dinner with somebody who really interested me than walk down the block to have dinner with somebody I don’t care about.” She told him she’d drive in to the city to meet him. He said okay. She hadn’t even mentioned her own two children at this point.

She arranged for Pete and Sally to have sleepovers with friends that night. She bought a new dress, red, with a pleat up the back. Claire had gone out on plenty of blind dates by this time, but none whose prospect left her feeling so excited. All week long she’d thought about his voice on the other end of the phone.

He had chosen a little Brazilian restaurant in a part of town she’d never been. Always before this when Claire went into Boston it was to take her kids to the science museum or bring Sally to the ballet. The restaurants she knew were all the kind you’d bring children to. Here the menu was printed in Portuguese and there was percussion music playing and oilcloth on the tables and the smell of spices Claire had never cooked with. She had arrived early, regretting her choice of dress once she saw what the rest of the mostly foreign-looking clientele were wearing. She went to the ladies room and washed off her makeup, put her pearl earrings back in her purse, mussed up her hair.

When she came out again she saw him. She knew from his freckles he couldn’t be Brazilian even before she heard his soft Alabama accent asking the waitress if she had a quieter table. He wasn’t a handsome man exactly, by conventional standards, but she maintains that she fell in love with him the moment she saw him. Later he admitted to Claire that he felt that way himself. “It was so plain, you were so ready to be loved,” he said. “You looked like an orphan. I just wanted to put my arms around you and take you away.”

Not that he did. He was very formal with her that night. He got up from the table when she approached him. He shook her hand. Before they sat down she asked him whether he thought her car was all right parked where it was. Her station wagon looked as if it had pulled up at the end of a long and hair-raising car chase, with the front end up over the curb and the rear pointed out into traffic. She had been so distracted when she got to the restaurant she hadn’t even noticed.

“So,” he said with a regretful smile, looking out onto the street in the direction of her messy station wagon, with its I
soccer bumper sticker and the tumble of empty juice boxes and school papers in the back. “How old are your kids?”