Where Love Goes (4 page)

They go up the stairs together. If something bad happened at school she tells Jenny, and Jenny licks her face. “They’re just dumb kids anyways,” she says. “Who needs some dumb Brownie troop?”

Her dad always leaves an after-school treat out for her, and one of their NFL collectibles glasses all set out for her milk. Before she could read he’d leave her a note all in pictures, but now he prints words for her and he doesn’t even have to make the letters very big anymore. Sometimes the note tells her to preheat the oven to 350 or put the laundry in the dryer. She knows how to do many things now. Why would he need a girlfriend when he has her?

Then she watches “Live and Let Live.” She wishes somebody would tell Pamela her husband is having an affair. That woman is such an idiot. She likes Andrea the best. Andrea would be a nice mom, she bets. She wonders if Andrea has any kids in real life. Of course, if she does, they are probably home alone right now eating a bowl of Cheerios just like her, watching their mom on TV. TV moms are the only kind that act so nice all the time.

After “Live and Let Live” comes “Wheel of Fortune.” Vanna White, that turns the wheel, is going to have a baby, but Ursula doesn’t think she will be a very great mom. Too skinny. She’s the kind that would buy skim milk and give her kids celery sticks for an after-school snack. Plus she’d always be worried about messing up her outfits.

So far on “Wheel of Fortune” Ursula has won fifteen trips for two to Disney World and one trip to Bermuda and a complete kitchen of General Electric appliances and a bedroom set from Broyhill and a ton of other stuff she doesn’t even remember. She wishes she could’ve won the first-class trip for two to the Super Bowl for her dad and her. He would have loved that. Some woman got it that didn’t even look like she knew who Troy Aikman was.

Her dad usually doesn’t get home till a little after “Wheel of Fortune” ends, but she still turns the TV off as soon as the show’s over. Any more television than that and her dad says she could turn into a potato. One time for a joke she left the TV on and set a big old sprouted potato right on the spot in their TV chair where she always sits for him to find when he got home from work. Then she hid behind the couch until he came home.

“Oh my God!” he said when he came in and found it there. “It’s finally happened. Just what I was afraid of. I can’t say I didn’t warn her.”

She was giggling so hard by this point she thought she might wet her pants.

“Little girl,” he said, “can you help me? I think my daughter has turned into a vegetable.”

“It’s me, Daddy,” she said. “I’m here.”

“I’m not your daddy,” he said. “I’m Ursula’s daddy. And now she’s lost to me. I guess from now on I’ll have to call her Spud.” He was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands and the potato in his lap, making crying noises.

“Daddy!” she yelled into his ear. “It’s okay! I’m Ursula!”

“Don’t tease me,” he said. “Can’t you see I’m a broken man? I’ve just lost the light of my life.”

“It’s okay,” she said, patting his shoulders. “I’m back. I never left.”

He looked up then. “You’re here?” he said. “Is it really you? No, I must be dreaming.”

“It’s me! It’s really me!” she cried. She jumped into his lap. He threw his arms around her.

“Whew!” he said. “Boy, was that a close one.”

“I would never leave you, Daddy,” she said. “You know that.”

“What would I do without you?” he told her.

Y
ears before Joan and Tim started living together back in graduate school she had gone through a severe case of endometriosis which was supposed to have left her sterile.

Tim was working on his dissertation at the time—a paper about the propagation of mushroom species. Joan was a performance artist, at work on a piece about the subjugation of women in Third World cultures. “Womb-an Weep” never had much of an effect on Tim, but the climactic scene—of an African tribal clitorectomy ritual—attracted the attention of an alternative theater in Knoxville, Tennessee. They invited her to come and do a residency there. Her bags were packed when she and Tim found out she was pregnant.

It was Tim who persuaded her to have the baby. Her gynecologist agreed it was amazing that she’d gotten pregnant at all, and said it was highly unlikely that she’d ever conceive again, especially after an abortion. So Tim made her the deal: If she’d have the baby, he’d take care of it. He’d come up with the money, too. All she had to do was carry it nine months. For some reason that still surprises him she agreed.

Ursula was breech. In the end they performed an emergency cesarean, with Joan heavily sedated. She hemorrhaged so badly she didn’t see Ursula for a whole day. Tim has always wondered if that was the beginning of Joan’s problems as a mother. She had insisted on giving the baby her own surname, but in every other way Ursula was Tim’s from the beginning.

Joan hated nursing, said it made her feel like a cow. Tim held Ursula against his bare chest while he bottle-fed her and carried her in a Snugli while he worked on his dissertation. When she cried at night, he was the one who got up.

It probably didn’t help Joan’s feeling about motherhood any that Ursula was, from the first, a dead ringer for her father. Where Joan was fine-boned and white-skinned, with black hair and a birdlike body, Ursula was large, pink, and solid, with big hands and thighs like a Sumo wrestler. When she was three and a half and a girl she admired in preschool started taking ballet classes, she said she wanted to take ballet, too.

“That’s ridiculous,” Joan had said. “She’ll just make a fool of herself if she puts on a leotard and tights.”

At the time, Joan was having an affair with a poet she’d met at a workshop that winter, but he was married and a lot older. She didn’t go to any great lengths to conceal what she was doing from Tim. He hoped it would blow over and they could work things out for Ursula’s sake, but after Frederick came Elliot, who asked her to come with him to New Zealand. Joan left when Ursula was four. Tim and Ursula have seen her twice since then. “My mommy doesn’t want me does she?” Ursula asks him.

Tim is never sure how to answer this question. Sometimes he thinks it’s better for her to get used to the idea and let go of false hope. Other times all he knows is that her sadness is unbearable to him and he has to protect her from the truth at all costs.

“Of course she does,” he tells her. “Mommy misses you so badly she can hardly stand it. She just can’t take care of you right now. But I can.”

“When I’m ten I’m going to go live with Mommy,” she tells him.

“If that’s what you want, then you will,” he said.

“If I could, I’d go live with Mommy now. You just don’t let me,” she told him. “You’re mean.”

“If you think so,” he says.

F
or the first year after Joan left it was all Tim could handle, just getting Ursula off to preschool in the mornings and getting out of work early enough to pick her up, maybe buy a few groceries, and get home in time to make the macaroni and cheese. After dinner they might do karate or cut out paper dolls before her bath. “I’m going to wrap myself up in paper, tie myself with string, stick some stamps on top of my head and mail myself to you,” they would sing while he scrubbed her. Running the washcloth over her tender pink skin—her tinkler, Ursula called it—Tim could hardly remember how long it had been since he’d touched the body of a woman. He felt like a eunuch.

Then one day when he was grading papers in his office at the college, this very beautiful graduate student had come in and shut the door behind her. Almost spilling out of her halter top, she had bent over his desk, with its framed Sears portrait of Ursula and the drawing she’d made him for Father’s Day. “Listen, Professor Shepherd,” she said. “I want to fuck you.” How could he say no?

Galen was twenty-four years old. She wasn’t anyone he’d bring home and introduce to Ursula, but after five years of politically correct and highly infrequent lovemaking with Joan, with her hard little breasts and the clenched, angry, joyless way she’d lie there, with her vibrator and her tube of K-Y jelly, and another year and a half of spending his evenings playing Candyland and reading
Angelina Ballerina
, Tim saw Galen as an angel of mercy.

She had large, wonderful breasts and a round, wide ass she liked to get down on her knees and show him. “I’m your puppy,” she would say, and then she’d nuzzle against his cock and lick him. She even wore a collar one time. Or she might come to his door dressed as a nurse, late into the night when he was grading papers. She had amazing things in her doctor bag: Chinese balls she rolled over his body, feathers, massage oil. She was playful and shameless, with her Girl Scout leader’s uniform and her press-on tattoos and her tasseled pasties and G-string. One night she filled her mouth with ice cubes, to chill her tongue she said, then spit them out and took in his cock. One night she brought real police-issue handcuffs and asked him to clamp her to his bed. Tim had to work hard that time to get Joan’s voice out of his head, lecturing about the subjugation of women. “It’s okay,” Galen whispered. “We’re just playing. Nobody’s getting hurt. I want it, remember?”

All that semester and part of the next they fucked like that, usually between one and four
A.M
. She only stayed overnight that one time, when Tim got his neighbor Paula to invite Ursula for a sleepover with her daughter, who didn’t really get along with Ursula very well. There was never any question of Tim and Galen spending family time with Ursula. He had no doubt she could think up great things to do in a bowling alley, but bumper bowl with a five-year-old was probably not one of them.

Tim never felt he was using Galen. There wasn’t any question of love between them. He knew she was getting as much pleasure out of him as he got out of her. But there came a point when keeping up with his disconnected life began to wear Tim down. Rising from his bed after nights of burn-it-up fucking with Galen after maybe two hours of sleep, he’d stand there at the stove cooking Ursula’s eggs with his cock sore and his butt aching, and instead of feeling replenished, he felt spent. When he was with his daughter, the nights didn’t seem real. When he was with Galen, it was as if Ursula didn’t exist. Licking a piece of jam off his hand as he was buttering her toast, he suddenly got a wave of Galen’s scent from his fingers and felt like a thief.

Ursula was usually a heavy sleeper, but there was this one night. Galen was tied, spread-eagled, against the washer/dryer in the laundry room, and he was fucking her from behind with the dryer set to tumble, hot, so it vibrated her breasts in a way she loved. “I promise I’ll do a better job on your shirts next time, Mr. Woody,” she was pleading. “I’ll never leave that ring around the collar again.” All of a sudden Ursula was standing there, holding her blanket, looking at them.

“I wanted juice,” she said, in that husky, nighttime voice of hers. “I kept calling. You didn’t hear me.”

Tim covered Galen with a couple of towels that were folded on top of the dryer and wrapped another one around his own waist. He was untying Galen’s wrists while he talked to Ursula.

“This is a friend of mine,” he told her. “We were doing laundry.”

Ursula drifted into the kitchen. In the glow of the refrigerator he reached for a Dallas Cowboys cup and poured her Hi-C. Neither one of them said anything more about Galen. When he tucked her back into bed, he said, “Sometimes kids see stuff that might seem scary. That just means things happen sometimes that you’re too young to understand.”

“I understand, Daddy,” she said. She patted his head. “It’s okay. You do a good job.”

Galen left quickly. Tim called her the next morning to say he couldn’t see her anymore. “I have to just be a dad right now,” he said.

“It’s been fun,” she said. She said she’d like it if they could still be friends though, which surprised him, considering that they’d hardly ever done anything besides screw.

It turned out that Galen loved nineteenth-century English novels, Jane Austen in particular, and that she had a fascination with moss, which was the subject of her master’s thesis. (She liked to fuck on it, that much he knew. But she also knew a good deal about moss propagation and little-known species, it turned out.) He ended up advising her on the thesis, and sometimes, late at night, she’d call him and tell him about how things were going with her current boyfriend. The guy liked to spank her with a leather strap, and she wasn’t always sure, this time, if he had a good attitude. She told him to stop one time and he just kept hitting her harder. Tim knew the strap she was talking about, of course. The thought of somebody doing that to Galen sickened him. He was ashamed that he’d ever spanked her himself.

The memory of their nights together is not much different than a movie he watched a long time ago. Since Galen he has lived like a monk. Or like Mr. Rogers, he used to tell her, although he knew, if he and Galen were still seeing each other, she would probably want to have him put on a cardigan sweater and let her suck his cock while he sang “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

B
lue Hills isn’t much of a town for nightlife, especially if you aren’t part of a married couple, because most people in this town are. Weekends when her children go with their father Claire rents movies from the thirties and forties—romantic comedies mostly—and watches them in bed with her long underwear on and a big bowl of popcorn. She puts on the country albums her kids hate—Patsy Cline, Vern Gosdin, Randy Travis, Patty Loveless, Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill. One time she played George Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today” twelve times in a row. There’s a love story for you: a song about a man whose heart stays true to the woman he adores, decades after she’s left him. The day he stops loving her is the day the undertaker hauls his body away.

Sometimes Claire barely hears another human voice from Friday evening until Sunday dinnertime, when she picks the children up. She may take a walk or go to the gym with her friend Nancy, who is also divorced, but without kids, and sometimes she’ll tackle a big job like putting up or taking down the storm windows or preparing her taxes. She may put in some time over at the children’s museum preparing grant proposals or sending out letters to potential donors. She is usually in bed by nine on weekends.