Where Love Goes by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page A

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