A Little Love Story

by Roland Merullo

  “Are you sure you can’t?”

  She turned her face away.

  Not far in front of us, in the direction Janet had been looking when she asked the question about children, a little towheaded boy and a little towheaded girl were throwing something into the pond. Potato chips, it looked like, tossed up and wobbling in the breeze. The ducks weren’t interested in that particular brand of potato chips, and the girl was getting more and more upset about it and trying to stamp both her feet at once and yelling in a lispy, weepy, aggravated voice: “Duckies! Duck-IES!” The boy seemed to think the problem was that he wasn’t throwing the chips out far enough, so he’d rear back and fling them mightily and then stand with his fists at his sides as the ducks made their quick turns back toward the middle of the pond. There were adults, alone and in pairs, sitting nearby on the other benches, and on the grassy bank, but whoever the parents were, they were of the school of parenting that said, Let your kids play right on the edge of a dirty pond deep enough for them to drown in and let them get really frustrated there and don’t say anything to them or do anything about it.

  After a few minutes an older woman walked over to them. She reminded me of my mother, the same erect posture and sure-ness about her. The boy and girl didn’t seem to know her, but the woman gave each of them a slice of white bread, and showed them how to tear up the bread into pieces. When the ducks saw this turn of events, they came gliding toward the towheaded twins, a white fleet of expectation, and the girl started jumping up and down again, her shoes lifting all of an inch into the air. Duckies! Duckies!

  Janet and I were both watching. For some reason the little drama made me think of something I had seen in Mexico, years before. I had sold a painting-my first-and to celebrate, Giselle and I had flown to Puerto Vallarta on a whim. We didn’t even make hotel reservations, just took a taxi from the airport into town, asked around with our high-school Spanish, and found a very clean casa de huespedes with pastel-colored tile floors three blocks from the beach. We stayed ten days. In the mornings I would get up early and go for a run before the sun had come up over the mountains. Then I’d go back and shower and we’d walk to a breakfast place we liked, where there weren’t any other tourists. One morning we were sitting there with our huevos rancheros and café con leche and a small skinny boy walked in and began going from table to table with his hand out. The boy was six or seven. He had sores on his face and arms, and a threadbare T-shirt. We gave him what amounted to three dollars or so and he managed to get to one more table before the owner came and roughly ushered him out. At the next table, behind Giselle’s back and directly in my line of vision, sat a man in a fine gray silk suit and a white shirt open at the collar-I will always remember this man-and when the boy had been chased out unceremoniously into the happy seaside morning, this man started doing strange things with his food. He took one of the fresh breakfast rolls that eggs were served with in that place and he opened it down the middle with his thumbs. He picked up the juicy browned slice of ham with his fork and folded it into the roll, then he lay a piece of avocado in there, then some fried egg. I watched him over Giselle’s right shoulder. The owner watched him, too. The man worked with a surgeon’s grace, with careful movements, without dropping any food on the material of his expensive suit. When he was finished he wrapped the sandwich carefully in two napkins, stood up, and hurried out the door, and I watched him trotting down the sidewalk in the same direction the boy had gone. In a few minutes he came back and finished what was left of his breakfast.

  Book Three

  N o v e m b e r

  1

  BY EARLY NOVEMBER in Boston the trees have lost most of their leaves. On wet days the branches and trunks are black and slick-looking. In the afternoons a damp hard wind blows off the harbor, and then darkness swells up out of the tar streets, and the traffic lights shine like jewels. It is not winter but no longer truly fall, and the tourists are gone, and the city is stripped down to a tight rhythm of moneymaking: the mouths of subways suck in clots of workers and breathe them out again across town; the streets are full of taxis and delivery trucks and touched with a kind of coldness and sadness I have always secretly liked.

  I like it right through Thanksgiving, and the first snow, and Christmas, and then, near the middle of January, I begin to hate it. The days will never be warm again, I’ll never wear a T-shirt and running shorts again, or see women walking down Massachusetts Avenue with their legs bare and happiness on their faces. There is ice on the river, or the water is purple and raw. Why would anyone want to live here?

  But November is fine. Smart carpenters have gotten their outside work finished by then-Gerard and I learned that the hard way one year-so, by Election Day, we had Jacqueline’s addition closed in and clapboarded.

  Once we had the outside work done, we cut open the tight pink rolls of fiberglass insulation and stapled them into the stud bays, a miserable job that makes your wrists and neck itch for hours afterwards. On top of the insulation we stapled sheets of clear plastic, to keep the water vapor that’s inside the house from penetrating the walls and making the insulation damp and ineffective. And when that was done we began to put up the wall-board-Sheetrock, it’s usually called.

  Hanging “rock” is not a particularly enjoyable job. The board itself is made of pressed gypsum, heavy and awkward, and the cuts and joints have to be done just right. Most carpenters used screws and drills by then, but I have a crazy need to do some things the out-of-date way, so Gerard and I used hammer and nail. The trick to nailing up Sheetrock is to press the board tight against the studs with one hand and hit each nail hard enough so that you make a “dimple,” but not so hard that you cut through the gray paper that holds the pressed gypsum in place. Later, you fill the dimple with joint compound and sand it smooth, and if you do it right, when the wall is painted, the nail and the dimple don’t show. The best old carpenters have a feel for it, and, high or low, swing so that the business end of the hammer strikes the wallboard flat-on.

  Gerard was a past master at dimpling. That Election Day morning-it was sunny and nice, low fifties-I heard him in what would be Jacqueline’s guest bedroom giving her a lecture on Sheetrock. “The Greeks discovered gypsum, you know,” he said. “Gypsos, they called it. In America, factories started mass-producing this stuff right around World War Two, which put a lot of plasterers out of business. My dad was a plasterer. He went to school at night to become an environmental engineer, but then he became a barber. He was one of the first unisex barbers in Greater Boston. He actually invented the disposable razor for women, but had the patent stolen from him by a big corporation I won’t name.”

  “Really?” Jacqueline said. She was too savvy to be buying much of it, but she liked him anyway, liked us both. From what she’d told us, there weren’t that many laughs to be had in the hallways of the Harvard Physics Department. Sometimes when Gerard would be thirty feet up on a ladder reciting Ovid, or we would be bored with nailing subfloor and were going back and forth with lines from movies (“Chollie! Chollie! They took my thumb, Chollie!”), I’d look over my shoulder and catch her watching us, and she’d smile and turn away.

  My friend Gerard could be a goofy soul. But he was a good carpenter, one of the truly superb dimplers of all time, a natural teacher, too. I listened to him trying to persuade Jacqueline to take his hammer in her hand.

  “I’ll ruin something,” I heard her say.

  “What could you possibly ruin? Here, try it where the baseboard will go. That way if you make a little mistake you’ll never see it. Go ahead. Dimple away.”

  At lunch, after Jacqueline had gone off to work and Gerard had calmed down a bit, I asked him if he was going to vote for Governor Valvoline, who had been good enough to keep Janet on the payroll after her boyfriend went gorilla, and decent enough to cease and desist from saying he loved her at close range. In the weeks leading up to the election she had been working twelve-hour days.

  “Not,” Gerard said, “in two million y
ears.”

  “Who then? Captain Privatize?”

  “Privatize your aunt,” he said.

  “Who then?”

  “Nader. I want to send a message to the big multilingual corporations.”

  “Nader’s not on the ballot.”

  “Sure he is. You hit the button for Buchanan, Patrick J., and it counts for Nader. Everybody knows that.”

  “Buchanan’s not on the ballot either,” I said. “It’s Valvoline, Captain Privatize, or the Libertarians.”

  “The Librarians, then. I’m bookish on libraries.”

  “Be serious a minute,” I said.

  “Alright. Valvoline is the boss of the love of your life, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “But there’s just something about him we don’t like, am I right?”

  “Right.”

  “We don’t know exactly what it is, but he’s, you know, kind of a mook. And we don’t vote for mooks even if good people work for them. Alright, Captain Privatize is as rich as an Arabian prince and wants to bust unions and strap the bad guys down and jolt them. The Librarians want the government to leave everyone alone, rely on people’s natural good-heartedness, and hope everything works out. Where does that leave us?”

  “Up the well-known creek.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But not voting is un-American.”

  “Precisely,” he said. “Which is why yours truly is going hanging chad.”

  “It’s a kind of dimple.”

  “Dimple gone wrong.”

  I took a sip of root beer and watched an ambulance go past, lights blinking, siren off.

  Gerard said, “I’m glad we had this talk,” and stood up to go back to work.

  2

  I WAITED IN LINE at the polling place in my work clothes-boots, jeans, and an old Boston University Varsity Rowing sweatshirt with gypsum dust on it.

  I get sentimental when I go to vote. My precinct includes a neighborhood that’s mixed in every direction: white lesbians in business suits, Honduran maids just finished with a day’s work at the hotel, Russian Jews who remember Stalin’s voice on the radio, black ironworkers with their AB hardhats in one hand, Waspy white guys with gypsum dust in their hair. Looking at an improbable mixture like that when I’m in line to do my democratic duty, I think: There’s no country on earth anywhere near this good. And then, later, that it is a great country, and we have welcomed people from everywhere on earth, but that we somehow never really live up to our own grand rhetoric; that if we were half what we claimed to be, we’d long ago have cured every illness on the planet, and wouldn’t have hungry kids in Kansas or the Bronx, and a million or two million people in prison. And so on. I think about the whole mad, spiritless rush we call the working week. I sink and sink.

  In the end, that day, after wandering the moral maze for five or six minutes in the little booth, and feeling the usual election-day depression creeping up my leg, I cast my vote for the Idealist Party candidate, a write-in ballot: Rossi, Janet, S. And then I went home to get ready for the victory bash.

  3

  THE ELECTION-NIGHT party for Charles S. Valvelsais, a.k.a Charlie Valvoline, was held at the third most expensive hotel in Boston, a twenty-two-story palace with a lobby so heavy on mirrors, brass, and oriental carpet that you felt as though you were in an Ashkabad hookah joint where the lights had accidentally been turned on. Janet had been asked to help make some of the arrangements-a kind of demotion for her, Valvoline’s idea of payback-and as I walked down the carpeted corridor toward the noise of the ballroom, I couldn’t keep a bad thought from attaching itself to me. It was a thought I’d had before, and it went something along these lines: Janet had compromised herself and I had not.

  Hoping to change the world, she’d aligned herself with a man who was mixed-up inside, decayed, corrupt, false, whereas I hadn’t aligned myself with anyone and had stayed pure. I knew this kind of thinking was distilled bullshit, 180 proof, and I knew it came from the bad soil of a feeling that I hadn’t done as much with my life as I could have-I’d been given a good brain, a good education, a healthy body, and hadn’t helped anyone who really needed help, hadn’t given much back to the world besides a few dozen well-built additions scattered around Greater Boston, two small houses, eight garages, a hundred little repair jobs. I’d started medical school with the intention of doing what my mother had done-spending a life making sick people feel better-and then I’d somehow gotten tired of cramming scientific facts into my brain. I’d made an invisible turn, inward, thinking I’d be better off healing myself first, before I went after anyone else. Some days that seemed like a good decision, important, humble, mature; other days it seemed like escape. I had a room full of paintings, a short string of failed romances, no wife, no prospects for children. And in a certain kind of light, all that could take on the mean glint of failure, and that failure could make me start to tear down people who had done something more valuable. In that light, even Chuck Valvoline had led a more useful life, and I wondered if Janet ever compared us that way, if she had bad little thoughts about me that stuck to her, if those were the kinds of thoughts that ate away at the tissue of love, year by year, until you went looking for a replacement.

  But once I turned into the noisy ballroom-a happy, comical scene-it wasn’t too hard to shake those thoughts. The interior world, the world of art and musing, the world of working with your hands-those places had their value. And I was more or less satisfied with the man I had become, stupidities and all. On that night, I was almost at peace.

  The huge room was filled with men and women who believed that Valvoline was as good as we could do just then, a well-meaning guy in a tough profession. His supporters stood around in funny hats and shirts with his name written on them. They glanced up expectantly at the TV screen above the stage. They sipped drinks and laughed and leaned placards in the corners. They hugged and shook hands and their voices bounced in a crazy speckled roar against the walls. Valvelsais. Valvelsais. Vahlv-sai, Vahlv-sai. The name flashed everywhere you looked, but the man himself was sweating it out in a suite somewhere above us, surrounded by his closest aides, TV on, phones in constant use, paper plates with pizza slices and Styrofoam coffee cups strewn across every horizontal surface.

  Janet was up there, and all of a sudden I wondered if I should just go to O’Casey’s, watch the returns on TV, and call her the next day. I hadn’t seen her in a while, though, and I missed her. And she’d told me there was a chance she could slip away from Command Central sometime after 8:00 p.m. when the polls closed and the first numbers were announced and there was nothing left for her to do. We’d had a two-minute phone conversation at noontime, and she’d told me the exit polls were saying what all the other polls had said: too close to call. There had been a happy spark in her voice, the thrill of battle maybe, or the end of a long stretch of work. Or even just the anticipation of seeing me.

  I helped myself to a plastic cup of Pepsi and a celery stick, and I stood in front of one of the large screens and watched Johanna Imbesalacqua, my favorite news anchor (because I liked her name and because she had announced the events of September 11 with tears streaming down her face), filling airtime until the first results could be posted.

  A pleasantly plump, partly drunk woman came over and stood beside me. She had a drink in one hand, and beautiful brown hair with reddish highlights in it, and little silver crucifix-earrings. After a minute she asked how I thought it would go, and I tried to sound worried and said it was too close to call.

  “You really think so?”

  “What I really think is he’s going to win in a landslide.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Look who he’s up against.”

  “Isn’t it odd?” she said. “How could anyone vote for that man?”

  She moved half a step closer. Her eyes wavered when she spoke and I guessed she had been drinking since the first bottles were set out. “I mean, what are his qualifications?”

&n
bsp; “He has money. He talks tough.”

  “I think he has a lot of unresolved anger,” she said.

  We looked up at the screen. Johanna’s face had been replaced by an advertisement that showed a blond model driving an SUV through deep mud.

  “What’s the message there?” the woman asked.

  “Any stupid thing a man can do, a woman can do just as well,” I said, and she laughed with her head thrown back.

  “What do you do for work?”

  “I’m a carpenter.”

  It was loud there in the ballroom, and I have the typical Boston accent, and she didn’t, and she misheard. “Boston’s finest,” she said. “Are you undercover tonight?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “My ex was a fireman,” she said. “One election night we had sex while we were watching the returns. It was Reagan and Mondale. Every time another state was announced for Reagan, I made him just stop and be absolutely still. I wouldn’t let him move until I said so.”

  “Republicanus interruptus,” I said, and she threw back her head again, gleam of gold in her mouth.

  “He was hot and bothered that night, I’ll tell you.”

  “No wonder.”

  There was a little pause in the conversation, another flashy commercial-one of the fast-food chains pretending its hamburgers were fat and juicy-then the woman tapped me on the arm and said, “You wouldn’t want to get a room upstairs and celebrate in private, would you?”

  I looked at her. She seemed lively and happy. Under the happiness I thought I could see old hurts running, old disappointments, things she had hoped life would give her, and was still hoping life would give her. I thought of those hopes as little toys with batteries, only the batteries had almost all run down. This kind of thing-a proposition from a nice-looking woman after a few minutes’ conversation-had happened to me only once before. It was New Year’s Eve at a ski resort, and I’d been so surprised I hadn’t handled it the way I should have. This time I put my hand on her upper arm and squeezed gently and said, “My fiancée’s meeting me here in a little while. Otherwise I’d be at the desk with my credit card in two seconds.”