Where Love Goes (8 page)

“I was worried about her mental state,” Sam said. “Knowing the history of psychological instability in her family. My own parents have a very happy marriage, with no history of substance abuse. That’s probably why I have an easier time peeping my emotions in check.”

Claire wanted to reach into her purse and take out the lucky baseball Mickey had sent to her for her day in court, that he used the day he pitched the one-hitter back in Birmingham. She wanted to hurl it at Sam, but of course that only would have proved him right. “Just don’t get hysterical on me,” her lawyer hissed at her. So she was stone.

In court Craig, the guardian ad litem, testified that he had some concern about Claire’s status as an Adult Child of an Alcoholic and her tendency to be overemotional. “Knowing Mrs. Temple’s family background, and her apparent history of occasional outbursts in front of the children, it would probably be a good idea for her to get some therapy,” he said. “But since at this point in time she doesn’t appear to present a threat to herself or the children, I’m recommending that the children continue to maintain primary residence with their mother, and that the court mandate liberal weekly visitation with their father.” The judge concurred.

C
laire and Sam have been apart now over five years, divorced for three. In the yoga class she signed up for in an effort to get Mickey out of her brain and find some respite from the bitterness of the custody battle, Claire met Nancy, who was still married at the time, but not for long. They took to going for walks in the early-morning hours before her kids got up. Because of the walking and the low-fat diet Nancy has put her on, Claire is very lean now, and Nancy has become Claire’s best friend in Blue Hills. They have taken country line dancing class together and gone camping on Lake Champlain while Claire’s kids were off with their father. One Christmas they bought themselves matching gold lamé dresses and performed a karaoke number together at the Ramada Inn that won first prize. Claire always laughs at Nancy’s dirty jokes as if she’s never heard them before. Nancy doesn’t mind it when Claire calls her up at night and she’s feeling lonely, no matter how late it is.

For months after Claire and Mickey parted, while she was fighting to hold on to custody of her children, just the sound of Mickey’s voice brought tears to her eyes, so she didn’t talk to him. Sometimes he would send her tapes—Timbuk 3, Miles Davis, Milton Nascimento, Peter Gabriel—in which every song, every wailing trumpet, every chanting Bulgarian seemed to be speaking directly to her. She knew he still loved her, same as she still loved him. There was simply nothing to be done about it.

After almost a year of taking out the thought of Mickey and turning it around in her brain almost hourly, the sensation of missing him was no longer so much a shooting pain as it was a dull, bearable ache. She hadn’t forgotten the look of his body, naked, or his particular, distinctive windup when he threw a curveball out on the pitcher’s mound for the Hornets. But now she could consider these things without an accompanying stab.

Claire had been dating a divorced lawyer in town for a few months at this point, and she was having occasional, companionable sex with him, without any illusions on anybody’s part concerning love. One day without any deliberation at all she picked up the phone and dialed Mickey’s number. When he answered, she said, “It’s Claire, Mickey. I just finished listening to the new Joni Mitchell album and I was wondering if you’d heard it yet.” Then she realized he was playing the same album, right then.

“Some good songs on this one, all right, Slim,” he said, as if it had been yesterday when they’d spoken last, instead of almost a year ago. “But Joni’s got to give up cigarettes. Her voice is shot.”

He was back in her life. But it was different this time.

Before long it got to be her habit to call him up every day. First thing she’d do as soon as the children went off to school was pour herself a cup of coffee and dial Mickey’s number. “You know what, Slim?” Mickey told her during one of their morning conversations over coffee, “I think this might just be the perfect relationship.”

Nancy, who has never met Mickey, considers it bizarre that in the two years they’ve been doing this, Claire and Mickey haven’t seen each other once. He sends her his baseball team portrait every year, though, along with an annual report on the state of his hairline. Now and then he sends a photo of Gabe, and one time she sent him a picture of Pete and Sally dressed as John Lennon and Paul McCartney for Halloween. When Claire won a big grant to mount a multicultural exhibit at the children’s museum and a professional photographer took a portrait of Claire for their new brochure, she sent Mickey the contact sheets. He wrote funny captions under every shot except for one he circled with a china marker.

“Get me a print of that and send it to me, huh, Slim?” he asked her.

Talking on the phone as they do now, they seldom refer to their old history together. They tell each other about blind dates they go on, music they’re listening to, lovers they have—Mickey’s many, Claire’s few. Mickey tells Claire his theories about what the Red Sox are doing wrong. Claire tells Mickey about the petty politics at the museum, her battles with the board and its director, Vivian, who wants her to put more emphasis on computers and video technology and makes barbed remarks about Claire’s failure to drum up more big corporate contributions. Though they seldom discussed their children when they were lovers, now, surprisingly enough, Mickey often tells Claire something Gabe’s been up to and asks about her kids. She tells him about little things Sam does like forgetting to bring Pete and Sally’s bikes back from his house or sending them home, Sunday nights, full of sugar and video games, with none of their homework done, or the time Claire came home to find Sam upstairs taking a shower.

“You need to tell that guy if he keeps leaning over the plate, he’s going to get hit with the pitch,” Mickey tells her. The next time Claire sees Sam—and he makes one of his little digs at her—that is precisely what she says. There is a trace of Mickey’s Alabama accent in her voice as well as his strength as she delivers the line. Sam looks at her strangely. But he backs off, too.

Often in her confrontations with Sam Claire will pretend that Mickey’s standing there in his Hornets uniform, telling her what to say. He may be talking baseball, or whispering in her ear in his scratchy-voiced Miles Davis imitation.
“Smooth and slow,” Miles will tell her. “You don’t have to blow hard. Just blow.”
Or he may just be Mickey, reminding her that she is good and strong, and not the dysfunctional hysteric her ex-husband likes to make her out to be.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” she tells him, “but it won’t be possible for you to take Pete out to the comic store again tonight after his game. Until he gets his act together about the chores I ask him to do, he’s got to get to bed by eight-thirty.”

Sam will shoot Claire an angry look then most likely, followed by a gesture to his son that says,
“Women
. What can you do?” But for once he doesn’t take it further.

“You have to draw a line in the dirt and tell him he can’t cross it,” Mickey says. “Your problem is you spent way too many years with that guy and those kids of yours drawing new lines every time they stepped over. And now you wonder why they don’t respect you.”

Mickey had told Claire when they were still together that nobody would ever love her the way he does. It’s not something they speak of anymore, but this knowledge allows her to hear about his other lovers with a feeling that approaches pleasure. She loves him so much she wants him to be happy and cared for, she explains to Nancy. He loves her so much he wants the same for her. The only lover who could ever threaten her would be one he didn’t tell her about. Same thing for her. She pays more for long distance every month than she pays for food.

“So tell me what she looks like,” Claire will say, having heard from Mickey that he’s taken some new girlfriend to a Texas Rangers game, and knowing that means it’s serious. Serious for him, anyway
.

And he will describe her extraordinary skin or the elegance of her calf muscle. She has no children, of course
.

“Have you told her about the vasectomy yet?” Claire will ask, once the relationship has progressed to a certain point. Knowing what it’s like to love him and lose him, she maintains a sisterly protectiveness for these women. But she also knows that Mickey doesn’t reveal to these women the most precious and irreplaceable parts of him, which makes it easier for them when they discover they aren’t going to get to keep him forever
.

“Has he met the children?” he’ll ask her on the infrequent occasions when the tables are turned, and she’s the one with a prospective partner. He can barely conceal his surprise if she says, with some defensiveness, “Yes, and he thinks they’re great.”

“We went to Martha’s Vineyard with them for the weekend,” she tells him. She no longer expects this sort of thing to get any kind of a rise out of him. The fact that a relationship allows for this kind of family-ish togetherness only confirms for them both that it must lack the passionate intensity of their love affair. They all do
.

On rare moments she gets a little shaky during these phone calls. “Come on now, Slim,” he’ll say. She imagines his hand stroking her neck. “Stop that now. We’ve been through this. You know the rules.”

And she’ll snap out of it.

S
ometimes Pete hears his mother crying on the phone. He will be lying in the dark, at an hour so late she supposes he’s asleep, and he will hear that record of organ-violin music she sometimes puts on that’s like what they’d play on a soap opera night after they found out someone had a brain tumor. The saddest piece of music in the world. Other than that, she mostly listens to country now. All these songs about relationships that didn’t work out.

“Sometimes I just don’t know how I’m going to keep taking care of everything,” she’s saying into the phone. “I feel so alone.”

Sometimes he hears her talking about her job, and what will happen to them if the board doesn’t renew her contract at the children’s museum. They didn’t reach their fund-raising goal this year and his mother has had to cut her own salary back by three thousand dollars. Sally needs car insurance once she gets her license this fall. His mom still owes her lawyer so much money he’s going to attach their property, whatever that means.

“All day long I’m taking care, taking care,” she sighs. “There’s never anybody taking care of me.”

She thinks Pete hasn’t noticed, but he has. He has seen her, mornings after a blizzard, out in the driveway shoveling out their car. He has watched her struggling to get their basketball hoop up. “Three-quarter-inch socket wrench!” she says. “Who would think you’d need four different-sized wrenches to put up one lousy hoop?” Finally she got it up, but it has never been quite right. It wobbles. Every time he plays basketball, it’s a reminder that other people have their dads to put up their basketball hoops. He has his mom.

She can’t get the lawn mower started. Nobody told her you had to mix in a special kind of oil with every two gallons of gasoline, and now the motor’s clogged. They have maggots breeding in their trash bin, and although it is his sister’s job to carry out the trash, Sally refuses to go anyplace near it. His mother tries pouring bleach in the bin, tries boiling water, but nothing kills them. Finally, with rubber gloves on, she scrapes them out and flushes them down the toilet. This is a day when the toilet flushes. Sometimes it doesn’t. Then his mother tries to work the plunger, but sometimes it’s no good.

In spring their basement floods, and his mom has to run out and rent a sump pump. Pete stands at the top of the steps watching her in hip boots sloshing around in the dark, cold water, with boxes of Christmas ornaments and old school projects floating around her like little rafts.

Moments like this Pete wishes he was a man. He would do something. He is ashamed and disgusted with himself to see his mom down in the basement like this, or up on the roof, or out in the freezing cold running jumper cables from her battery to their neighbor’s when their car won’t start. He hates it that she’s the one who has to bury their cat when he gets hit by a car, and catch the bat that gets into Sally’s room in the middle of a slumber party of screaming girls. In April, a few weeks before baseball sign-up, when she hears him talking about all the competition in senior league for pitching positions, she offers to catch for him. She means well, but there’s no way she could catch his pitches. Your dad does that, not your mom.

She tries hard. Every spring she buys tickets to Fenway Park just for the two of them. Sitting in the bleachers beside her, Pete looks around. Every other kid he sees has come with a dad. Either that or both parents.

She doesn’t understand the game. When one of the Red Sox hits a pop-up, she cheers, evidently thinking—because it goes so high—it must be a really great hit. She’s always surprised when the outfielder catches one of these type of hits, which he always does, of course. “Gee,” she says, “I thought that was a homer for sure, didn’t you? It looked like that one was headed straight over the green monster.”

A couple months back—Sally’s prom night—the two of them sat on the porch after she drove off with Travis, Claire sipping her coffee, Pete with a mug of hot chocolate. “I know I should be past all this,” his mom said, snuggling up to him on the porch swing, “but just once I’d like some handsome prince to come along and whisk me away to the ball. Pretty silly, huh?”

He can’t do anything about that. In fact, on the rare occasions when somebody has shown up to whisk his mother off (usually just to the movies, or some restaurant in town), the guy was nothing like a prince. Pete knows he is never very polite to these men. He knows his mother wishes he would be more pleasant. But they’re just such geeks. Why does she need to go out on dates, anyway?

But it’s no good when she stays home all the time either. She gets grouchy and mad. She’s always yelling at him to pick up his room and mop the kitchen floor, but really, he figures, she’s just sad about other stuff. Money for instance.