Where Love Goes (45 page)
It has been five years now since she saw Gabe—he was not yet nine then; he’s got to be fourteen now, and he must have grown six inches—but she recognizes him instantly. Because it’s Mickey’s face he has. Shyer, rounder, same freckles, more hair, a butt that shows the promise that he may become a pitcher after all. He’s horsing around in front of that slice of a giant redwood that’s displayed in the museum lobby, with little red light bulbs placed at various concentric rings within the wood indicating the age and growth of this particular tree. The year Christopher Columbus landed. The year of the Black Plague. The year Christ was born.
Gabe doesn’t see Claire and wouldn’t recognize her if he did, she knows. Many women have come and gone in his father’s life since Claire left it. “You keep getting girlfriends with
C
names,” Gabe told Mickey once, a year or so after she’d left, referring to the arrival on the scene of a woman named Cynthia, close on the heels of a Carolyn. That was, she guesses, Gabe’s last acknowledgment of her place in his life or his father’s.
So Claire just stands there for a while watching this boy who is, within a couple of months, the age of her own son, although he is fairer-skinned, more knowledgeable about jazz certainly, and less well acquainted with the inside of a principal’s office and a police station.
I read him the chapter about forcing bases, she thinks. We made Christmas cookies one time
.
“You don’t have to do that stuff around here,” Mickey had said to her almost sharply when he came home from his game and found the two of them in his kitchen, taking the last of the cookies out of the oven and cleaning up the sprinkles. “That’s not who you are to me.”
“But maybe it’s who I am to him,” she said
.
In fact, Claire always had a particular tenderness for Gabe. Maybe it was even love. Claire believes there was also a time when Gabe had a feeling that was something like love for her. Not the love a son has for his mother. Unlike Ursula—that other child who, if their paths cross five years from now, will not recognize her—Gabe has always had a very present mother on the scene. Whatever that woman’s story is, Claire will never know it now.
But there was this wonderful aspect to the time Claire spent with Gabe that came specifically from the fact that she was not his mother. She didn’t have to provide birthday parties and rides to after-school activities, didn’t have to pick up after his friends, didn’t have to make every sorrow in his life go away, wasn’t solely or even majorly responsible for the quality of his days. She didn’t suffer when he stepped up to the plate and struck out. She could just lie there on Gabe’s bedroom floor with him, quizzing him on baseball statistics. Or lie there on Mickey’s couch doing absolutely nothing at all with him but being there. There has never been another child in her life about whom she felt that way.
Somewhere inside Gabe’s gangly body, Claire suspects, there may be a dim memory of her. She supposes if she went up to him now and introduced herself—“I’m your father’s old friend Claire”—a flicker of recognition might cross his face. He would know, at least, that what he used to feel about her, when he felt something, was good.
Good but gone
.
Her own son approaches her now—a heartbreakingly handsome young man who will soon be taller than Claire. “Can I have some money for the gift shop, Mom?” he asks her. “They’ve got these neat hologram postcards. I wanted to send one to Dad.”
She hands him a five-dollar bill. “I swear,” she says, “sometimes I get the feeling I’m hemorrhaging money.” But she’s smiling when she says it this time, and he is, too, when he answers her.
“Right, Mom,” he says. “We’ve heard. And I’m going to empty the dishwasher every morning for the next twenty jillion years, remember? And take care of you in your old age.” One of the many things she loves about her son is the way, even now, he’s not ashamed to kiss her when his friends are around. Then he disappears again, naturally. He has asked Sally McAdam if she wants to sit with him at the planetarium show. She does.
“Where does the love go?” she wants to call out, right there in the middle of the Boston Science Museum
. There is a question for some expert. Only which floor would she go to find her answer? Physics? Biology? Electricity? Or maybe the planetarium?
She knows there is a thing that happens in your body when you love somebody and you see them. Or you stop seeing them. Or you want to see them but you can’t. Or you see them again after a long time of not seeing them, and realize that it was there all the time, like a dormant virus, just waiting to take hold of you again. Your eyes may fill with tears. You shiver. Your stomach may turn over. You have a hard time catching your breath, and when you are again able to make a sound, the sound that comes out of you is different.
Claire also knows that sooner or later that will change. It may take a long time, and like the scar under her chin or her stretch marks, it may not disappear completely, but it fades, and when it does, that feeling—or maybe it’s the absence of feeling, like the eventual absence of pain following the amputation of a limb, like the space in your closet you get because the person who always used to mess it up has moved out, that is saddest of all.
“I will love you forever,” the man says to the woman. “No matter what happens, no matter where our lives may lead, this will never change. This is real as rock. I will never stop loving you. Nobody will ever love you again the way I love you now. I will never love anybody again the way I love you now.”
Only he will, of course. He will not love her forever—not the way he does when he speaks these words, anyway. They are real when he says them, but they disappear, like the bones of a hummingbird in a cigar box. Like a fern that turns into petrified rock. Like an extinct species of bird. Like Nolan Ryan’s fastball. Like the last note played on a single guitar string at the most wonderful concert you ever attended, and the last flickering flame from the lighter of the last cheering fan in the dark stadium afterward. Like a continent that drifts out to sea, creating a whole new geography, a whole new globe. Like a star that exploded, leaving only an aurora borealis.
And what do you do then, after the love is gone? When you go to a ball game and run into a person you used to love so much the thought of passing a single day without hearing the sound of that soft Alabama voice of his was unimaginable? What do you do when a big red-haired man passes you on the street, with his red-haired daughter, and you know for a few months there you thought you were going to live with this man for the rest of your life, for a few weeks his sperm and your egg were actually lodged in your uterus on the way to becoming a person who would probably have had red hair? What do you do when you find yourself sitting on the bench at a soccer game beside a man who once held his hand against the small of your back as the two of you skated on black ice under a full moon over Lake Michigan, once showered you with hand-painted thousand-dollar bills, once held his cupped hands between your legs, waiting as you screamed to catch the baby whose head was even then ripping your skin apart as she burst out into the world? What do you say to this man you once married, and once divorced, who has also ripped you deeper, harder, and drawn more blood than childbirth ever did?
You say, “How’ve you been? Nice day for a game, huh?” You say, “What do you think, will those Red Sox ever get an outfield?” You may kiss the red-haired man on his cheek perhaps, and ask the red-haired daughter what grade she’s in now. You may duck into a café and have a cup of coffee together. You say to the man on the soccer bench, “He looks like you when he runs.” Then you get back into your car and head out onto the road again.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Given the choice, I would have been a musician, not a writer. But I play music when I write, and the choices I make about the music I listen to as I write have a lot to do with the work I go on to produce. I create a soundtrack for myself when I’m sitting at my keyboard, and the story comes out of that soundtrack. In the case of this novel, the soundtrack consisted of a lot of my favorite songs about love. They’re pop songs, jazz, folk, Celtic—with a heavy emphasis on country, not because my novel was set in the South, but because the themes of my story are the stuff of country songs. I wanted a reader to feel, after reading this, a little like how I feel, after listening to Loretta Lynn or Patty Loveless or Patsy Cline or George Jones or Vern Gosdin. The best way I knew to get in the mood was to play their music as I wrote.
I put a lot of music into my fiction, because my characters also listen to a lot of music. The lyrics of the songs they play serve as a way of expressing—first to themselves, then to the people they’re with—what they long for and what breaks their hearts. I know it’s true for me, and I think it’s true for a lot of other people, that many of my ideas about love were formed as a result of listening to a range of songs, from Cole Porter to Lucinda Williams to Paul Simon. Partly as a homage to the artists who wrote and performed these songs, but also out of a belief that introducing readers to the music I love will enhance the experience of reading my work, I wanted to make that soundtrack I created for myself available to the readers of my work—although, of course, each of us also needs to create our own soundtrack, at times, featuring the songs that reverberate for us in particular.
But on the chance that you might want to know what’s featured on my playlist, I’ve put together a list of the songs I was listening to when I was writing
Where Love Goes
. In no particular order, here they are:
Patsy Cline—“I Fall to Pieces”
Joao Gilberto/Stan Getz—“Para Machucar Meu Coracao” (the whole album, actually)
The Waterboys—“How Long Will I Love You?”
Traveling Wilburys—“End of the Line”
Suzy Bogguss and Chet Atkins—“I Still Miss Someone”
Loudon Wainwright—“So Many Songs”
Peter Gabriel—“Mercy Street” (and every other song on
So
)
Townes Van Zandt—“If I Needed You”
Ella Fitzgerald/Louis Armstrong—“They Can’t Take That Away from Me” (and a heap of other Ella Fitzgerald recordings)
Jennifer Warnes/Leonard Cohen—“Joan of Arc”
Van Morrison—“I’m Carrying a Torch for You” (and a few dozen other Van Morrison songs)
George Jones—“He Stopped Loving Her Today” (and just about anything else George Jones ever sang)
Marc Cohn—“True Companion”
Timbuk 3—“Wheel of Fortune”
Zachary Richard—“Big River”
Bobbie Cryner—“Too Many Tears Too Late”
Lyle Lovett—“If I Were the Man You Wanted”
Randy Newman—“Falling in Love”
Roberta Flack—“First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”
Dougie McLean—“Ae Fond Kiss”
Dolly Parton—“I Will Always Love You” (and a lot of the old Dolly and Porter Wagoner duets)
Maura O’Connell—“Blue Train”
Dwight Yoakam—“Ain’t that Lonely Yet”
Paul Simon—“Hearts and Bones”
Nancy Griffith and Arlo Guthrie—“Tecumseh Valley”
Crowded House—“Fall at Your Feet”
Mary Chapin Carpenter—“Something of a Dreamer”
Otis Redding—“I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”
Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane—“My One and Only Love”
Alison Krauss—“I’ve Got that Old Feeling”
John Gorka—“Bigtime Lonesome”
Greg Brown—“Spring Wind”
Dave Mallett—“Red, Red Rose”
Mary Black—“Past the Point of Rescue”
Steve Earle—“Goodbye”
Tom Waits—“Whistle Down the Wind”
Kieran Kane—“I Keep Coming to You”
The Mavericks—“Neon Moon”
Joni Mitchell—“Amelia” (also the entire
Blue
album)
Silly Sisters—“Somewhere Along the Way”
Patty Loveless—“Here I Am”
Vern Gosdin—“Time Stood Still”
Chet Baker—“Someone to Watch Over Me”
Cheryl Wheeler—“Almost”
Nina Simone—“I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl”
Steeleye Span—“Dawn of the Day”
Vince Gill—“We Won’t Dance”
The Roches—“Expecting Your Love”
Travis Tritt—“Foolish Pride”
Kate and Anna McGarrigle—“Heartbeats Accelerating”
Bruce Cockburn—“Someone I Used to Love”
Lucinda Williams—“Passionate Kisses”