Where Love Goes (7 page)

Claire remembers a visit their family had taken to Disney World, back when she and Sam were still together. There was this couple at Epcot Center kissing under the fake Eiffel Tower—a kiss that lasted for the entire five minutes they were standing in line for whatever movie it was they were showing there. Watching them kissing like that, in a way she and Sam never did, Claire had felt her legs go weak
.

“Can you believe it? They’ve got their tongues in each other’s mouths,” Sally had said. Then she and Pete laughed. That night in their hotel room, alone with Sam after the children were asleep, Claire wept to him about that kiss. “We’re raising children who think expressions
of affection are comical,” she said. “You only kiss me when you want to have sex.”

“Give it a rest, Claire,” said Sam
.

With Mickey there was never a shortage of kissing. He touched her constantly.

“How’d you get this?” Mickey asked Claire one time, a few minutes after she arrived on Friday. There was a deep cut on her thumb. He noticed every little thing about her. Claire just shrugged. When her children were around, she didn’t pay attention to what happened to her.

With his son, Mickey played catch and attended jazz concerts Sunday afternoons. Gabe had long since learned to entertain himself at events like this. Pete and Sally would have been asking when they were leaving or requesting money for the arcade next door, not that she would have taken them to a jazz club in the first place. But Gabe, who was almost the same age as Pete, always sat there patiently looking through his baseball cards, and when Mickey would ask him a question like “Who wrote that song?” he could tell you it was Thelonius Monk. At bedtime, Mickey read him the box scores for the American League or a book on baseball tips for Little Leaguers, with chapters like “How to Bunt” and “Theories of Base Stealing.”

For Claire he would stop at three different stores until he found the kind of coffee beans she liked, which he’d grind fresh for every pot he made her. He’d warm her bathrobe in front of the fire when she was having a bath, and then he’d put the towel on her hair and dry it. Before it got to be time for her to leave, Sundays, he warmed up her car for her, checked her oil and her tires. He made her call him when she got in the door of her house after she got back home, so he knew she was okay. “No offense, Slim,” he said. “But you drive worse than you sing.”

Claire and Mickey used to talk about how they might work things out so they could live together. Secretly Claire believed that once he got to know Pete and Sally better, Mickey would realize what wonderful children they were and his view of blending families would change. Sometimes when they were making love she even allowed herself to imagine that they could have a baby. The one time she brought it up, he actually shivered. “Horrifying idea,” he said. Shortly afterward Mickey had his vasectomy.

As anxious and uncertain as it made Claire feel, knowing the intensity of Mickey’s resistance to spending time with her children, it was also part of what she loved about him. He loved her too much to share her. Nobody had ever loved her that much before, or stood up for her in the face of the constant demands of her children the way Mickey did.

He would say he wanted to take her to see the Red Sox play Oakland, and she’d say, “Can we get another ticket and take Pete?” Mickey would say no, I want it to be just you and me. Imagine Sam saying that.

Hearing that Mickey took his mom to a ball game without including him, Pete was not so much resentful as puzzled. He had never thought about his mom having a life apart from him, or desires beyond his and his sister’s happiness.

Observing the arrival one day of a Victoria’s Secret shipment Claire had ordered, Sally commented a little sharply, “How much does all this underwear cost, anyway?” Always before, if a mailorder shipment came, it would have been for Sally.

“You know how long it’s been since I bought anything for myself?” Claire told her. “You know how many years I’ve been wearing maternity underpants?”

On the phone with Mickey, she would say to Pete, “Don’t interrupt,” and keep talking. When she brought the children down to Mickey’s house with her, she and Mickey would leave them at the house Saturday night with a babysitter and go out to some club.

“I can’t believe it,” Sally would mutter. “You drag us all the way to Boston, where all this cool stuff’s going on, and then you leave us at some guy’s house we don’t even like while you’re off having a great time.” Worst of all were the occasions when Gabe would be there too, and Claire and Mickey would leave the three of them sitting glumly on the couch (not Gabe, of course; Gabe never complained), watching a video.

“I get to have a life,” she told them. Mickey had told her that, and she wanted to believe it.

E
ight or nine months into their relationship Claire had actually begun to consider whether it was possible that after the end of the school year her children might just move in with their father while she moved in with Mickey. That was how much she wanted to be with him.

“You leave your kids?” he said. “You could never do it. I’d never let you either.”

“Maybe I could,” she told him. “As long as they’re happy, I’m fine. They don’t have to be happy with me. Just happy.”

“But they wouldn’t be. And neither would you. You’re a
mom.”
It was almost an obscenity the way he said the word, but Claire knew he was right.

Mickey was getting worn down, she could see it. “I feel like I’m trying to live my whole life in two days a week,” he said.

“Even when you’re here, you’re not always here,” Mickey told her. He was right too. They’d be eating their dinner by the fire, listening to Chet Baker, Mickey rubbing her back. Suddenly he’d feel a tightness in her neck.

“What it is it, Slim?” he’d ask. “Oh, nothing,” she’d say. Then she’d start talking about this crazy grapefruit diet Sally’d been on, and her worry that her daughter might be borderline anorexic. Just when she’d let it go and he’d be kissing her again, he’d lose her again like a radio station whose signal is weak.

“Pete’s so hostile and disrespectful to me these days,” she’d say. “It’s as if Sam’s in our house in Pete’s body. I talk to him and he doesn’t even answer. I’ll hear him on the phone to his dad, whispering about me, and I know that instead of backing me up when I enforce some kind of boundaries, Sam just commiserates with him about how unreasonable I am.” And then she’d tell Mickey about how she’d confiscated Pete’s boom box last week when he had neglected his chores again. And Pete’s response: “You just want me to be perfect, like your stupid boyfriend’s kid.”

“Where have you gone, Claire?” Mickey whispered to her. “Come back to me.”

By July Claire couldn’t make love with him without crying. She could see their time together closing in as clearly as if they were staying in an apartment whose lease would soon be up. From the moment she arrived on Friday nights all she could think of was how much time was left before she’d have to go.

Remember this, she’d think as they would sit on his porch swing having a beer and listening to Ella, or on his couch some evening, listening to a particular recording of Bud Powell he loved, her head in his lap while he read the sports page. She knew now this was a country she was visiting and her visitor’s permit was about to expire.

She started asking him for the names of certain jazz albums he played a lot, asking him to tape them for her. She went out and bought a couple hundred dollars’ worth of perennials and planted them in Mickey’s garden. Sometimes she’d wake in the middle of the night and just lie there watching him sleep.

At the end of July Mickey saw his son off to camp in preparation for the month he and Claire were going to spend together. The day she was supposed to go to Mickey’s, with her bags packed in the backseat of her station wagon, she got a call from her lawyer telling her Sam had decided to file for custody of the children on the grounds that she was an emotionally unstable parent. Claire called Mickey and told him she couldn’t come and be with him in August. Or ever again.

“You do what you have to, Slim,” he told her. “I always knew this couldn’t last forever. I was just going to enjoy every second for as long as I could, and I did too. You ride the ride until it’s over. Then you get off. Simple as that.”

On the other end of the phone Claire was weeping too hard to speak.

“Hey, baby,” he said. “None of that. You know you’re my true love and you always will be. It’s just one of those things.”

After she put down the phone she walked over to the stove, where she had been making her leek and potato soup to bring to Mickey’s house. She picked up the pot, and threw it with all the strength she had against the black and white tiles of her kitchen floor. There are three chips still missing from the place it landed. She stood there for a long time after that, her whole body shaking, calling out his name.

Then she took out the mop and cleaned up the mess. Over the course of the next four weeks, while her kids were off with their father, Claire met with her lawyer and defrosted the freezer and canned thirty-two quarts of tomato sauce. She sewed a patchwork quilt for Pete’s bed, using fabric from all his outgrown flannel shirts, and stenciled a row of flamingos along the ceiling of Sally’s room. She organized their photograph albums and ordered enlargements of all her favorite pictures of her children, which she framed and hung in her bedroom. She cut off her braids—not in some desperate, middle-of-the-night rampage, but calmly, with nail scissors, at her bathroom sink. Later she went to a Newbury Street salon that charged her a hundred dollars to shape what was left of her hair into a chic, French-looking style that everyone says suits her well.

The day before her children were due to come back home from their father’s house, Claire spent an afternoon listening to every one of the tapes Mickey had made for her. She left till last the tape of herself and Mickey singing together, taped in Mickey’s studio. Then she put the tapes away.

When her marriage had ended, Claire experienced a heady, exhilarated feeling of release, as if a great weight had been lifted from her. But with Mickey gone she felt like a widow. Every time a Beatles song came on the radio, she imagined Mickey’s hand tapping out Ringo’s drumbeat on her thigh. A wave of feeling washed over her and made her knees buckle and her stomach turn over, sometimes took her breath away even. And it could hit her at any moment: from the news that a particular Red Sox pitcher had blown out his arm or a weather report mentioning storm warnings for the North Shore, from the taste of jalapeño in somebody’s guacamole, the sound of some kid practicing the trumpet, drifting out a window when she was out on her bike. There he was again. There he wasn’t, actually.

Once her kids came back from Sam’s house and school started, she was occupied, and that was good. She attended Pete’s soccer games and Sally’s dance recitals. The director of the children’s museum, whose brochures Claire had always designed for free, moved to New Mexico, and when her job was offered to Claire, she took it even though the salary was a little less than what she’d been earning at the ad agency. She had always dreamed of making a place like this—rooms full of treasures where children can touch anything they want, and instead of adapting to the rules of the adult world, it’s what they care about that matters.

The custody hearing in her divorce from Sam was scheduled to go to court right before Christmas that year. She sold the Thomas Hart Benton drawing her father had left her to pay the rest of her lawyer’s retainer. “You keep your nose clean and we’ll win this thing,” he told her, “but it’s going to cost you twenty, thirty thousand dollars.”

A guardian ad litem was appointed to evaluate Claire and Sam as parents and make a recommendation to the court concerning custody. The day before the guardian was scheduled to pay his home visit Claire spent the entire afternoon cleaning their house. An hour before he was due to arrive she put bread in the oven and set her baseball glove out on the counter. Past the point where pride remains a consideration, she put the Mother’s Day card Pete had made, “For the #1 Mom in the Universe,” up on the refrigerator. Maybe she should set out a pair of Sally’s jeans to mend?

How do you begin showing a total stranger, in a matter of an hour or two, what kind of a parent you are? What is there a person can say that gets the point across about how she loves her children? Where does she begin?

Craig, the man the court had appointed to evaluate Claire’s fitness as a mother and make a recommendation that would determine the next half dozen years of all their lives, turned out to be very young: twenty-eight, thirty tops, father of an infant daughter. “So,” he said, “what sort of father is Sam, in your opinion?”

“He loves the children, naturally,” Claire said. “He’s just never been all that involved in a lot of their lives. I don’t think he ever took one of the kids to a doctor’s appointment or stayed home when one of them was sick.” When she told him how Sam would speak of “babysitting” their children, on the occasions when he’d take them for a morning, Claire observed a flicker of discomfort on the guardian ad litem’s face and realized that this man probably used this same term concerning his own participation in child care, which was probably equally spotty. Her palms were sweating now.

“I don’t know how you gals do it,” he said. “Jobs, kids, aerobics classes, doctor’s appointments, the whole shooting match. Me, I’m still trying to figure out how to fasten the tabs on a Pamper.”

This guardian work was a sideline for Craig. He was actually a paralegal, but he’d taken many courses in child psychology. He was only a few credits away from getting his master’s, in fact. “You know, Claire,” he said earnestly as she told him about Pete’s migraine headaches, and how they often coincided with his return from his father’s house after the weekend, “there’s more to kids than meets the eye.”

In December she went to court, where Sam testified that Claire was prone to hysterical fits and uncontrolled rage, like her father. He told about the time she had thrown the dessert for their Christmas dinner down the garbage disposal, and how she threatened to jump out of the car that time, and dumped a bag of trash on the floor when all he’d said was that he hoped she’d get around to taking it to the dump soon.