Where Love Goes (6 page)

For twelve years Claire’s children had been the central focus of her life. She could talk for twenty minutes about the pros and cons of circumcision or the desirable number of years between children before it would suddenly occur to her—hearing the sound of her own voice—that the woman she used to be before children had virtually disappeared. To Mickey she was that woman again. Or a new one she barely recognized.

Mickey told her that first night that he didn’t get involved with women who had children; it violated his sense of romance. “The worst thing that could happen would be for you and me to fall in love,” he said. “Because we couldn’t be together”—not together the way Mickey liked anyway—“and it would break both our hearts.” By the time he said this it was also plain that there was some powerful pull between the two of them. When they danced she didn’t have to keep her eyes open or think about how to move. She didn’t even notice when the music stopped.

“Now that’s one heck of an interesting place for a person to have a birthmark,” he said. He had noticed a tiny mole between the third and fourth fingers of her left hand. No doubt he had also noticed that her eyes were moist.

“Back then you were like someone dying of thirst after days of traveling across a desert in a hundred-and-ten-degree heat, and I was just the first person who offered you a cup of cool water, that’s all,” he told her later. “It was like your skin had been turned inside out. You were so ready to be touched.”

They stayed at the restaurant four hours. He took her back to his house, he said, just because he could tell looking at her that she would fall asleep on the road if she tried to make the long drive home so late at night.

He led her to the room his son slept in, weekends he was there, with its baseball-print sheets and framed photograph of Nolan Ryan. He gave her towels and a toothbrush even. He keeps a supply on hand. He was going to simply tuck her in with a kiss on her cheek, fix her coffee in the morning, and send her on her way, he told her later. He was planning on never seeing her again.

She was the one who reached up and took his face in both her hands as he leaned over the bed, kissed him on the lips and wouldn’t let go. She was the one who said, “Don’t you believe in stealing bases ever?” And when he said no, actually—not if the odds were heavily against him; he knows his limitations—and he pushed her away, she was the one who wouldn’t leave it there. She got up out of his son’s bed and walked down the hallway to his bedroom, where the light was still on and a record was playing that she still can’t bear to listen to—Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane.

This time when she kissed him he didn’t push her away. He just sighed more deeply than she has ever heard anybody sigh, before or since. “You win,” he said. But really, it was always Mickey who won. On the baseball diamond or off it.

M
ickey operates a recording studio where he composes music and records the mostly unexceptional work of would-be musicians in need of demo recordings. He pitches on a fairly competitive weekend baseball team, and during baseball season he attends Red Sox games when the team’s in town. He is also a devoted father to his son, Gabe, though he’s a very different kind of parent from the kind Claire is. “It’s crazy what happens to people when they have kids, and they give up everything else they ever cared about,” says Mickey. Mickey would never have bought a Raffi album for Gabe. Gabe has been raised since infancy on the Beatles and jazz. For Christmas Mickey hangs lights on his cactus plant and sticks baseball cards in a stocking, period. For Gabe’s birthday Mickey gave him a saxophone.

Mickey loves his baseball and his music and his boy. He’s also practically made a career of loving women. Not necessarily sticking it out over the long haul. But adoring them, anyway, and lavishing on them a certain kind of undistracted fascination and attention to the most minute of details. He keeps the photographs of women he’s loved hanging on the walls all over his house, the same way his son has mounted the cards of all his favorite ballplayers on the walls of his room. Explaining Mickey to Nancy, Claire told her about the time, fairly early in her relationship with him, when he had been describing to her his first serious love, the girl to whom he’d lost his virginity at sixteen. “She had,” he said, his eyes practically misting over at the memory, “the most beautiful nookie.…”

“Imagine,” Claire told Nancy, “a man who not only remembers that information from a distance of twenty-five years. But imagine a sixteen-year-old boy who would have paid attention to that kind of thing in the first place.”

Mickey is still friendly toward his former wife, Betsy, Gabe’s mother. Her picture hangs on a particularly prominent spot on the wall in his recording studio and he will still reminisce fondly about a trip they took one time to New Orleans, or her exquisitely shaped fingernails, the shape of her rear end. They parted amicably shortly after Gabe’s birth, and since then Mickey has held to his view that parenthood spells the death of romantic and passionate feeling between men and women. He wants no more of it. No more children of his own. None of anybody else’s children either.

For years since his divorce Mickey has filled his dance card, as he likes to put it, with women he meets through the personals, the same way he met Claire. Eventually he mailed Claire a copy of the letter he typically sent out to the women whose ads he answered, which he kept on his computer. By the time Claire read Mickey’s personals response letter, she was already in love with him, but if she hadn’t been, she figured the letter would have done it.

Dear Stranger
,

I liked your ad—ethereal yet pithy. Joni Mitchell crossed with Tina Turner maybe? I dunno. Whatever it was I read between the lines you wrote, it got to me
.

As for whether the feeling might be mutual, I’ll give you the basic data. I’m poking forty with a short stick, brown hair, brown eyes, no broken bones, don’t smoke or dope, six feet tall on a good day, with one hundred seventy-six pounds of ballast
and a boyish plethora of freckles. My friends tell me I’m reasonably attractive, but then who’s going to tell you to your face that you’re reasonably ugly?

I grew up in Alabama, the only state in the union where you can be your own uncle. My sport is baseball, and I guess I’d better tell you right off that I’ll be unavailable during World Series week. I spent my formative years pitching dirt balls against a barn door pretending to be Don Drysdale, but I didn’t fool anybody
.

My life’s other consuming passion is music. I appreciate everything from Laurie Anderson to Frank Zappa, but what I love best is jazz: Miles, Monk, Mulligan, and Ella Fitzgerald, my favorite woman of all time
.

Given a choice, I would’ve been a pitcher, but the fact is I was a high-school band nerd. Round about age fifteen I started playing in rock ’n’ roll bands—strictly opening act material, mind you, but it kept five guys in motel rooms and pot for a lot of years and more miles
.

Round about the time I hit thirty it came to me that I’d rather never see forty at all than find myself, at forty, still playing “Proud Mary” to a roomful of drunks half my age. So I went home to Birmingham, got married, and had a kid. The marriage proved to be a mistake early on but it did produce the one pure joy of my existence, my eight-year-old son, Gabe. Trumpet player, get it? I would’ve named him Louis, but he was a little too pale for that
.

Back when my marriage was in its last throes, the little woman and I left Alabama for Massachusetts and I found this great old cape on the North Shore that we could almost afford, with a barn out back that I’ve turned into a sixteen-track recording studio. You wonder how it is an Alabama boy like me would move fifteen hundred miles to a place he didn’t know a soul, I’ll tell you. I love Fenway Park, and I refuse to watch another game of baseball played on AstroTurf. Turns out around these parts there’s enough would-be musicians—and believe me, I use the term loosely—that I can make something that resembles a living recording their demos. Not a single John Lennon in the bunch
.

I get Gabe every other weekend, during which time I attempt to educate the boy in the finer things of life, meaning jazz and baseball I bring him to a lot of Red Sox games on the theory that now is as good a time as any for a kid to learn about disappointment. We buy a ridiculous number of baseball cards
.

Weekends I pitch for the Salem Hornets. The Sox haven’t drafted me yet, but we are the number-three team in the North Shore league. As far as music goes, my band these days comes to me by way of a synthesizer. Let me tell you, I get a lot less grief out of my Kurtzweil than I used to from my old drummer. I think maybe I’ve finally found the perfect musical relationship. Give me my mixing board and my baseball glove, my boy and a good margarita now and then, and I’m a happy man
.

Or would be, if it wasn’t for this damned need I feel for my one true love. I admit it. I’m a hopeless romantic, a guy that still believes every lyric Cole Porter ever wrote. What I’m trying to say is, I want to feel my pulse racing. I want to feel that old Van Gogh kind of love that makes a guy want to cut off his ear and gift wrap it. Come to think of it, I’m not growing enough hair anymore to cut off my ear for you, so maybe you’d settle for a dozen roses. Come to think of it, a dozen roses might be a little much for my budget. Maybe you’d settle for a card
.

So here I am sitting on my back porch with an ice pack on my rotator cuff (I pitched last night), sipping a beer and listening to Ella. Now I’m going to toss this message in a bottle out to sea. Who knows? Maybe it’ll wash up on your shore
.

T
he year she spent with Mickey, this is how Claire lived her life:

Back home in Blue Hills during the week, she tried guiltily to be a perfect mother. That was her way of earning the right to be with Mickey. Even more diligently than before, she made sure she was home every night to read to Pete and Sally and tuck them into bed, sometimes getting back to work on ad layouts or account proposals once they were asleep. She hardly ever lost her temper with her children anymore, she was so happy and well cared for. She joined the playground committee at Pete’s school and volunteered to be a chaperone on Sally’s class trip to Washington, D.C. She typed her kids’ book reports without giving them her usual lecture about how she wasn’t anybody’s secretary. She got up before her children every morning to pack their lunches and get breakfast on the table and she made sure they had a good meal every night at six, even if it was just spaghetti. Before they ate she always made her children hold hands and sing grace. They say this is the dorkiest thing they’ve ever heard of, but she also suspects that if she ever stopped insisting that they do it, they’d feel vaguely disappointed.

Late at night she’d call Mickey, or he’d call her just to say good night, except for Wednesdays, when he played basketball. She counted the days until the weekend, when she’d see him again.

Claire went to divorce mediation with Sam that year, and to therapy with Pete and Sally. Eventually, when the therapist himself said he thought they’d done as much work as they could, for now, she let it go. “Your children still have some unresolved anger to work out,”, said Dan, the therapist, “but evidently they’re not ready to deal with it yet, and we have to respect that.”

Weekends Claire had her other life. As soon as Pete and Sally left for their father’s house Friday afternoons, Claire threw her own overnight bag in the back of her station wagon and drove to Mickey’s. She wore her new silk underwear and played the jazz tapes Mickey had made for her, timed to last exactly as long as the drive took her: two hours and fifteen minutes. Mickey would have dinner waiting, and he’d make her eat, even if she wanted to make love first. “Somebody’s got to look after you for a change, Slim,” he’d tell Claire.

From Friday night to Sunday afternoon, when she’d make the drive north again, she was nothing but his lover. She didn’t talk about the children with Mickey—not hers, and seldom his. He didn’t want her to do his laundry. If they went grocery shopping, they never needed a cart, just one of those plastic baskets you take if you’re going through the express line, because all you have is wine and jalapeños and fresh mussels and coriander.

Sometimes Mickey’s son, Gabe, would be with them for a night or two, but having Gabe around was nothing like having her children around. “You don’t even talk in the same voice when your kids are in a one-mile radius,” he’d say to her. “We can be having a conversation, then Pete asks you to make him a sandwich and you stop everything and do it.”

Mickey’s voice seemed to call to her through the brambles of her life, “
Come out, come out. This way
.” She wanted to disentangle herself; she just didn’t know if she could.

As much as Mickey disliked the person Claire became around her children, Claire’s children disliked even more who she became around Mickey. “My mom gets this weird, whispery way of talking when she’s around him,” Sally said once during therapy. “The two of them are always touching each other and whispering stuff. Sometimes they even sing these old Beatles songs together in the car. It’s really dumb.”

They were accustomed to Sam’s way of treating Claire. To them, Mickey’s brand of tenderness and concern was evidence of what Pete called his wimpishness. “He’s always doing stuff like putting pillows under her feet and giving her neck massages,” he told the therapist. My dad would never do something like that, is what he was probably thinking, Claire knew.