A Little Love Story

by Roland Merullo

  She nodded. A smile went wobbling across her mouth. She said, “Well, in some other life, then,” and drifted away.

  When she was gone I watched the TV screens for another little while, watched the crowd, sipped my Pepsi. It wasn’t the place for me. I walked out of the ballroom and back down the corridor. In the glassy, brassy lobby I went up to the reservation desk and paid for a room, then rode up in the elevator with a man, a woman, and three small children. One of the children leaned against my leg without looking because he thought I was his dad. His mother smiled down at him, and then at me.

  In the room, I dialed Janet’s cell and, when she answered, a huge loud cheer went up where she was. We had to wait for it to die down. “This is Doctor Entwhistle,” I said, when she could hear me. “I’m in Room 876.”

  And she said, “Good news from all directions. Ten minutes.”

  4

  AT FIRST, WAITING for her, I turned on the TV, which was hidden in a fairly well-built oak-veneer cabinet at the foot of the king-sized bed. But by then I had slipped all the way down my usual Election Day slope from sentimental to cynical, so after a few seconds I turned it off and closed the cabinet and lay flat on the bedspread, looking up. I had always loved the feel of a nice hotel room, the order and anonymity. Before my brother and sister and I grew too old for it, my parents had liked to take us to New York or Montreal for special weekends. Once, we’d spent two nights at the Gramercy Park Hotel, in two rooms. I remembered the big beds and musty curtains, the way the boards in the hallways squeaked as you went across the carpet, and I remembered my father pointing out a man in the breakfast room, and telling my brother and sister and me that this hotel was the man’s home. “Nothing to hammer or paint,” my father said. “No trash to take out. No meals to prepare.”

  In some odd way, Ellory and Lizzie and I had been marked by that moment. We’d become more up-to-date versions of that man in the breakfast room: solitary lives, not a lawn to mow among us. It was strange, my parents had been so perfectly professional and so politely suburban, and their offspring had gone methedrine-Reno and monk on them, gone carpenter-artist. Two of us more or less happy in our own oddball ways, and the third…I promised myself to call Lizzie, soon. She’d try to make me feel guilty, because that’s what she felt. She’d end up yelling at me when I refused to send money. She’d hang up in a righteous addict’s huff. I’d call her anyway. It was good to get yelled at every once in a while. It might keep me from turning out like some of the well-off young couples in my neighborhood-fretting over what flavor of fair-trade coffee to buy and cutting into line at the checkout when you looked the other way.

  “You want to have kids of your own,” I said aloud in that room. “That’s all. You want a love like that, close against your life. You want that to be your contribution.” And then there was the sound of knocking.

  I hadn’t seen Janet in nine days. She’d been flying all over the state with our glorious governor and his team on a last-hour vote-getting polka. I opened the door all expectation. She was dressed up for the big night in a dark purple spaghetti-strap dress and her hair was brushed and beautiful, but her cheeks were sunken and her eyes large and the muscles above her collarbones and around her shoulders looked like they’d shrunk by half. In nine days. She watched my eyes as if she knew what she looked like and was hoping something on my face would show her she was wrong, that the mirror lied and the scale lied and the breathing gauges lied. Pity made another run at me then, but I had already made up my mind about pity.

  “Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. “Doctor Entwhistle. Come in, you’re right on time.”

  After a small hesitation, she shook my hand and smiled. “Hello, Doctor. I have forty-five minutes, tops.”

  “Forty-five minutes will do. Come in, take off your dress and your shoes, please, and sit on the edge of the bed.”

  When she was undressed and sitting there, I checked the reflexes of her knees with an imaginary rubber hammer and said, “Excellent.” I examined her toes and fingers, running my own fingers along them and feeling the way they were rounded because the blood vessels there had been starved for oxygen for years and years and had grown thick with overwork. She was the perfect patient, and I was a considerate doctor, and, at first, it was just a cute little love game we were playing to keep the conversation away from other things. It was a minute or two before I realized what kind of trouble we were in. But I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I kept going. I wrapped my thumb and middle finger around her left bicep-thinner than my wrist-and pretended it was a blood pressure cuff. “One-forty over ninety-one. Are you agitated?”

  “I ran all the way up here,” she said. She coughed.

  I took her pulse-eighty-one-pretended to flash a light in her eyes, poke an otoscope in her ears, check her tonsils with an imaginary tongue depressor.

  At last she said, “I’m having sexual problems, Doctor. It’s embarrassing to talk about.”

  “Ah.”

  There was some kind of warning siren going off inside me. I ignored it. I asked her to stand up and remove her brassiere and I spent a long time examining her breasts and nipples, and then the scars on her belly. “Trouble digesting?”

  “Only when I eat.”

  “Ah.”

  I turned her around and tapped gently on the bones of her spine. I worked down from the back of her neck, feeling my way lightly along the rounded trail of bones between her shoulder blades, then along the lower curve. I folded down the elastic top of her underwear and pressed my thumbs in against the dimples there, expertly. An expert failure. Standing close behind her, I ran my palms down the outsides of her upper arms and she shivered. And then, because pity made another run at me, I wavered for two seconds, and then just plunged in. Pretending to hold a stethoscope to the back of her lungs and pretending to steady her with my left arm around the front of her chest, I said, “Have you ever had a bronchoscopy?”

  “A hundred and eleven times.”

  I could hear what I wanted to hear in her voice then, a will toward humor, toward grace, a courage so enormous it seemed to radiate around her like a second body. I felt small beside it. I said, “Deep breath for me now, Ms. Ross.”

  “Rossi.”

  She took a shallow breath, all wet trouble.

  “Again, please.” I was running my hand across her nipples.

  “Cough now, please,” I said, and she started coughing and could not stop. She coughed and coughed and sucked in air, her back muscles tight as iron. I panicked inside myself. I reached back on the bed and balled up my T-shirt and held it to her mouth and she spit into it. I felt a change in her then, an anger or a frustration or a bitterness rising. She wiped her mouth and threw the T-shirt hard at the TV cabinet and turned to me, but before she could say anything I was kissing her mouth, the kiss of kisses, and then turning her onto the bed on her back.

  And then I was trying, with everything inside me, with all my own pain and understanding of pain, with my own small supply of courage and strength, with everything the world of work and musing had taught me about being alive, I was trying to show Janet what I felt about her. I did not want to try to squeeze it into words because words cannot hold certain things, any more than a painting or a photograph can.

  Beneath me on the bed she was weaker than I remembered, her skin warmer, the arms around my back sharper-edged. I wanted to put my whole self inside her, muscles, bones, breath. I timed my breath to her breathing. I slid my right hand underneath her and lifted her off the sheets with me and I wanted to have pity on her and have no pity at all. I wanted her to feel like she was running but without having to run. I wanted her to escape the pain of breathing hard and be lifted out of her body and into a warm sea of pleasure. My face was pressed into her neck and she was humming a quiet song, coughing once, taking quick breaths and then making a string of sounds like the sound of someone working, pushing toward something, more and more urgently, and then all the urgency was gone and she was breakin
g open against me, a breaking apart, a death, two deaths, and for a little blessed while we weren’t two packages of bone and blood, but one package, every pain erased, every protection gone. I had never felt anything like that.

  5

  LATER, GOING DOWN to the ballroom in an empty elevator, Janet held my arm in a way that seemed to me a gesture of pure love. She had called the governor’s suite, and when she got off the phone she told me they could tell now-from returns in certain precincts in the western part of the state-that Valvoline was going to win by four percentage points or so. “He calls them ‘manure-rakers,’” she said. “It’s shorthand for rural people. ‘Spuds’ is shorthand for Irish, ‘Garlics’ for Italians. ‘Twiddles’ for gay people. As in: ‘Nettie, get me a meeting with some voices in the Twiddle vote, but make sure it’s not on TV.’”

  “We should be glad then, Nettie. The manure-rakers have come through for our guy.”

  “We should be glad,” she said, “because Nettie still has her health insurance.”

  But we weren’t glad then, in spite of the feeling we’d had on the big hotel bed upstairs. I remember the warmth of her arm against my body as we came out of the elevator, and I remember walking down the corridor and hearing a burst of wild happy yelling pour out of the open ballroom doors, and I remember feeling that we were being sucked away from the mysterious and the real, and back tight against something toxic, a Superfund site of the soul. It wasn’t only Valvoline. It was just all of us, shit-rakers, Twiddles, Spuds, stuck in our individual skin-packages, afraid of our dying and our demons, always clawing for more-a breath, a break, an orgasm, a corner office. Janet and I moved into the ballroom as if wading into a hot bubbling tidal pool.

  We sipped from plastic glasses of wine. Janet introduced me to people she knew, mostly State House types who had played some small role in the campaign. I watched the way her friends looked at her, and I could see, in their faces, beneath the happy gleam of victory, a species of fear, of love.

  At quarter past ten, when Valvoline came down for his speech, the room exploded with cheering and applause. He worked his way up onto the stage. Women were hugging him. Men were shaking his hand and looking into his eyes and clapping him on the back as he squeezed past them toward the podium. For a little while, Janet went up on stage with the crew, and when the governor was introduced I clapped right along with everyone else, and even flashed him the thumbs-up sign once, when I thought he looked my way.

  6

  JANET WAS TOO TIRED to drive herself home, and she needed her vest and inhaler, so after the party we left the hotel and I drove her to her apartment on Beacon Hill. She put her arms through the holes in the vest and pressed the Velcro straps together and did her half-hour of chest PT, spitting mucus into a little bowl, her body shaking and her mouth twisting down, as if she were a kid on a funhouse ride she was tired of. While she did that I wandered around the room. I’d been there a few times, but had never really looked at the pictures-Janet in a soccer uniform, her tough-looking dad in work overalls, her mother beside a small new car. She sucked on her inhaler, popped a pile of pills into her mouth, had a hit of oxygen, and we went to bed. In her small bed, with the lights out, she rolled over against me. Her breaths were short strips of wet cloth being torn out of her, one by one.

  “I’m taking a week off to see if I can get back some strength,” she said quietly near my ear.

  “Good.”

  “I’ve moved up three slots on the transplant list.”

  “Double good.”

  For a few minutes I listened to the traffic on Beacon Street and to the building’s old pipes knocking. I thought she had fallen asleep-she was tired enough, but the oxygen always kept her awake for a while. Her right foot twitched twice. She ran the sole of it over my calf. She swallowed.

  “You know I’ll never last long enough to get new lungs, right, Jake?”

  “No, I don’t know that.”

  “I’m about half a step away from going back into the hospital. The last lung function test was twenty-seven percent. I’ve been around enough CF people to know what twenty-seven percent means. I’ve seen enough of my friends die, and I remember what they looked and acted like a couple of months before they died. It doesn’t make it any easier for me if you pretend it isn’t there. I don’t want that from you.”

  “Alright.”

  “I’d like to make it to Christmas. I’d like to buy you a motorcycle and give it to you on Christmas Eve, and buy you a leather jacket to go with it, and make love to you with you wearing the leather jacket and nothing else.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t sound so excited.”

  I had two minutes then of not being able to get any words out. She was running the sole of her foot over my instep. During those two minutes my mind, my strange mind, was absolutely consumed with an image of her father, balanced on a staging 150 feet above the Mystic River, patching concrete and obsessing about his daughter. I had spent a little time with Giselle’s mother and dad after her service, and had some idea what the grief of a parent felt like. I thought about them, too. In the warm room-so warm we had only a sheet over us-I was buried under the idea of what it might feel like to know your child was going to die before you died, and how she was going to die, and having to watch that as it happened, to live those days and those hours and those minutes, one after another, year by year.

  “Earth to Jake,” Janet said tiredly. “Jake, come in. Over.”

  I tried to talk but it was like trying to pull myself out of myself.

  “Begin reentry.” She coughed and kept coughing and climbed tiredly out of bed and went into the bathroom for a while, then came back. “Coast straight down through the gloom cloud, it’s clear here on Beacon Hill.”

  “Coasting down,” I finally managed to say. I felt tiny beside her then. Tiny and not brave. There had been a time when I thought her father was a coward for doing what he’d probably done, but his picture was so close on the night table that I could have reached out and held it and I had nothing bad to think about him then. Nothing. Not one bad thought.

  “Mum Rossi wants you for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  I had my eyes closed. My arm was around her. I could feel her ribs.

  “RSVP ASAP.” She nudged me with her knee.

  I couldn’t say anything. I could not squeeze out one sound.

  “You can bring a date, if you want. A marathon runner. A triathlete. An oarswoman from your college days.”

  She pushed me, hard. I said, “I’d like to bring Helen.”

  “Who is Helen?”

  I coughed. I took two breaths. “Remember the blond in the painting I was working on the first night you slept over?”

  “Who is she?”

  “Helen.”

  “Right. Don’t be an ass. Who is she to you?”

  “My mother.”

  7

  A MELIA ROSSI, IT turned out, was one of those people who get their satisfaction in life from having guests in the house, cooking for them and watching them eat, making a fuss over them, making them happy. I remember reading that in some places, in ages past, opening your house to strangers had been considered an essential part of being human, an acknowledgment of some kind of invisible link. I like that kind of thing. I like warmth and uncalled-for kindness, the small unnoticed generosities that speckle the meanness of the world. Often, over the years, customers would make Gerard and me a bowl of hot soup at lunch, or bring out iced tea and cookies. Once, when Gerard was having a tough time just after his divorce and the woman whose garage we were rebuilding was a psychotherapist, she’d taken him into her office for a half-hour session, gratis. Those small gestures always lifted us out of the work routine and put a kind of polish on the day.

  Janet’s mother wanted me there for Thanksgiving, then she wanted me and my mother. Then me, my mother, and Gerard. Then me, my mother, Gerard, and Patricia and Alicia, his twins. I was afraid that, next time Janet talked to her mother, Gerard’s ex-wife,
Anastasia, would get an invite, too, and though Anastasia is a fine woman and a good mother and an excellent dinner companion, it probably would have meant trouble, having her and Gerard looking at each other over a turkey carcass. But Anastasia was visiting her dad in a nursing home in Carlsbad, California. So, on Thanksgiving Day we had a two-pickup caravan heading out to the blue-collar suburb where Amelia Rossi lived and where Janet had grown up: Mum and I in front; Gerard, Patricia and Alicia bringing up the rear.

  My mother was having a fairly lucid day. I’d told her we were going to my girlfriend’s mother’s house for Thanksgiving, and that seemed to make her happy. I’d been having a peculiar feeling all that morning, though, even before I’d driven to Apple Meadow to pick her up. Something was haunting me, some bad breeze from a forgotten dream, some premonition. I thought it might be because one of my favorite uncles had died on Thanksgiving Day, years before, so the holiday was always ringed in black for me.

  The sky was low and gray, the winds wirling, and the truck felt less than perfectly stable on the road. To make things stranger, on the way over the Mystic River Bridge, as I was thinking about Janet’s father again, my mother said, “We forgot to pick up Dad at work.”

  “Dad’s gone, Mum.”

  “Gone where?”

  “He died.”

  “Of what?”

  “Two strokes.”

  She fell silent for a while, as if the shock and sadness of this fact had knocked her back down into a world of feelings that wrapped themselves around her like wet sheets. She sat there, wrists crossed in her lap, bouncing on the truck’s old seat, making her way all wrapped up and with great concentration along one dim interior alleyway after the next. Her husband was dead. Why had that happened? What did it mean?