A Little Love Story

by Roland Merullo

  “Mother of all colds,” I said, into her hot flesh. The skin between her breasts was saltier than it should have been, as if she had fallen into the ocean, not the river. As if she had not showered.

  “It’s not a cold,” she said.

  “Mother of all bronchitises.”

  “You can’t catch what I have.”

  “I’m not worried about catching it. I’m stronger than two oxes. I have the immune system of the gods.”

  “You have your pants still on is what you have.”

  “You’re naked enough for both of us.”

  “Take them… off.”

  Instead-I don’t know what was wrong with me-I picked her up the way firemen do, one forearm behind her legs, her midsection over my right shoulder, and carried her into the painting room. She was not heavy. There was an old backless couch against one wall, canvas green with beaten-up springs. She was laughing as I lay her down there.

  “The pants,” she said, but then she started coughing again so I put the air conditioner on low to get some of the paint smell out. I unfolded a clean drop cloth and put it over her chest and hips and legs. I climbed in with her as if we were under a sheet.

  She pulled my belt out of the loops and threw it on the floor, and then snapped open the button on my wet jeans, pulled the zipper down, and left her hands there. There was a shaft of filtered streetlight slanting in against the wall, and we were used to the dark by then, so I could make out the shape of her face, and see glints of light in her eyes. “Listen,” she said, her hands moving around inside my pants, her voice all naked earnestness. “I’m almost a hundred percent sure I can’t get pregnant, I mean it. And I can’t give you any kind of sickness, nothing. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you weren’t lying about the year?”

  “No.”

  “And it wasn’t because there’s something wrong with you?”

  “There’s plenty wrong with me, but no.”

  She kissed me longer than the other kisses, then coughed over my shoulder again, that wet swampy two-note cough that seemed to echo and rumble in a wet barrel the size of the whole room. I didn’t care about the cough. I ran my fingers along her spine and shoulder blades. She had fine soft skin. She pulled away. She tugged my pants down, then brought one leg up, put her toes over the top of them, and pushed down until they were off my ankles. “Your underwear is wet,” she said, but I was past talking. It had been 381 days since I had done this and my heart was like a big wet fist slamming against the inside of my ribs. Lines of electricity were skittering across my lips. I moved my right hand down across the side of her hip and down against the wet slick heat between her legs. I could hear her breath change. She rolled half onto her back, half against the wall, and moved her legs apart a little and made the humming noise in the back of her mouth but I could see that her eyes were open. For a few seconds it was awkward. She squirmed and pushed away from the wall to get her back flat on the couch, she kicked at the drop cloth, but she never took her eyes off me. I moved my hand up, fingertips wet. She was yanking down on the elastic of my underwear with one hand. The air conditioner hummed. In the kitchen the phone rang once, went quiet, and then rang again and kept ringing until the machine clicked on. I moved on top of her with my weight on my elbows and I could see her eyes gleaming, fires in the night. In a whisper I wouldn’t have heard if her mouth wasn’t so close, three little puffs of speech that slipped out of her between the humming moans, I thought she said, “Don’t hurt me.”

  And I thought, before I could no longer think, that there wasn’t a chance in a hundred million chances that I would.

  9

  IT HAS ALWAYS SEEMED to me that all the trouble between people, all the differences that cause trouble, go away with sleep. When you wake up there’s a little stretch of time, a few blurry seconds, when you’re separated by almost nothing. I fell asleep as soon as we’d finished making love. I woke up after a short while and Janet was on her back and I was on my side, half-leaning against her, and there was no trouble between us.

  “You awake, Joe Date?” she asked quietly.

  I said that I was. I said, “This is nice. But I have a perfectly good queen-sized bed in the other room and there’s not so much bad air from the paint and thinner.”

  She seemed to have stopped coughing. “I don’t want to go in and disturb your exes.”

  “No exes,” I said. “No ghosts in there.”

  In the small bedroom, under the covers in the dark she said, “I miss the drop cloth, kind of. Propositioned in midriver. Sex under a drop cloth. It’s been different.”

  She started coughing and it went on for more than a minute. I didn’t think she was going to stop. She got up and went into the bathroom. I heard her spit, and run the water, and spit again, and I could tell she was trying not to let me hear. When she was back under the sheet she lay quiet for a while. And then she said: “Attractive, isn’t it, the spitting girl.”

  “I don’t care. There’s a plastic bucket in the kitchen. I’ll bring it in here so you don’t have to keep getting up all night.”

  I brought the bucket in, with a dishtowel, and set it next to her side of the bed, wide awake now. She seemed wide awake, too. The clock beside her read 2:11.

  We were lying side by side on our backs, a siren wailing blocks away. I put my left hand on the top of her hip bone, trying to signal, not necessarily that I wanted to make love again, but that I wanted to stay down there where we had gone, in that lost nation beyond the reach of words.

  But then something came over me and I asked, “What’s making you cough like that?” because I believed, by then, that it wouldn’t spoil anything for me to ask it. Bad allergies, I thought. Or the tail end of pneumonia. Or some new flu from Thailand or Bali or central Australia.

  She waited so long before answering that I thought she’d fallen back to sleep. I would have been perfectly happy not to know. She’d already told me I couldn’t catch it, and I trusted her, and I believe people should have their private places if they want them. But at last she said. “You get the prize, then.”

  “Which?”

  “The record for going the longest without asking. Also the record for kissing without asking, and not seeming like you were afraid.”

  “My mother was a doctor. She dealt with sick people all day and caught a cold about once every twenty years and I’m the same way. Don’t answer about the cough if you don’t want to.”

  But after another short silence, she told me the name of the disease she had. The sound of the two words sent a little terrifying thrill down my neck and across the skin of my arms, and I felt two reflexes, almost at the same time. I felt myself recoil away from her, and heard some interior voice trying to convince me there hadn’t been anything special about the night, that I didn’t really know her, or want to know her. There was a part of me that wanted no more sadness for a while. I didn’t know much about the disease but I knew it wasn’t good, and I understood then that the coughing and the pills weren’t just part of some passing inconvenience. Something inside me pulled away from that. And then something else washed me back. As a boy I had run away from things, from fights, from sadness. When my dad told me my favorite grandfather had passed away unexpectedly, my response was to sprint out the front door of our house and all the way up the street, trying to get away from that truth. When I broke off with my college girlfriend I did it from California, by mail, and only went to see her later, face to face, because she made me. But all that running had left me ashamed of myself, so ashamed that, as an adult, I cultivated the opposite reflex. When Gerard lost his mind for a while in college, I went to the psych ward every other day to visit him. When my father died, I was holding his hand. I helped break up a bad fight in downtown Boston late one night. When things went sour and then tragic with Giselle, I tried, in the most secret part of me, not to run from it but to stand there and face it and deal with it. And so, in the bed with Janet, I could feel the
old urge to back away. And then something better, holding me.

  She said, “Do you know anything about it?”

  “Not much. I’ve heard the words. My mother would know, I’m sure. Tell me.”

  So she spent ten minutes telling me. Which is not that easy a thing to do, talk about your terminal disease with someone you barely know, in bed, on your first night together. When she was finishing up, she felt awkward, I could tell from her voice, a little bit worried again that I might hurt her somehow. She rolled over and kissed me, and said she was sorry for running on like that, she had to go to sleep, we could talk about it in the morning if I wanted.

  In a minute or two I felt her body relax. I lay awake with the side of my arm against her warm skin, trying to take in what she had told me, to make it more than just words, trying to stay there with the feelings in me. Not to pity, not to run, not to rescue just for the sake of convincing myself I was a good person. Not to lie to myself or to her in any way.

  There had been something wonderful and unusual about that night. I tried, for a while, to understand it. Janet didn’t have a lot of the ordinary defenses, I said that already. I don’t mean she was totally unprotected. No one that smart is totally unprotected after about age four. But, in spite of what she had whispered in my ear, I believed she wasn’t really worried about being hurt. I thought then that what I felt in her, what was different about her, was some kind of monumental courage, a courage I could feel as clearly as if another creature lay breathing there between us in the bed. I lay awake for a while, just admiring it. In the middle of the first part of the lovemaking, she had taken my fingers pretty forcefully and run them across the wide, slightly depressed scars on her upper belly. And so while she was sleeping, I put my hand there again, and traced the taut skin, and then I fell asleep, too.

  10

  IN THE MORNING I woke up with no one beside me. I listened for Janet in the bathroom or in the kitchen but after a few seconds I knew the apartment was empty. I do not particularly enjoy the smell of day-old river water on my skin, so I got up. The plastic bucket was not where I had set it, and the dishtowel lay neatly folded on the side table as if it had not been used.

  I do not like to stand in the shower a long time. I do not really like to shave, but I have been told I don’t look my best with a one- or two-day growth of beard. So I showered and shaved and put on a clean pair of jeans, a clean T-shirt from a road race in which I’d finished eighty-ninth that summer, and sneakers with no socks, and I went and stood in the sunlight in the painting room. The drop cloth had been neatly folded up, and the old green couch looked the way it always looked, as if nothing important had happened there. Light was pouring in through the tall windows, catching a glass jar of brushes just so. On the easel was a canvas I had been working, and though I don’t paint perfectly clear and representational paintings, it was easy enough to see that it was a portrait of a pretty blond woman, twenty-five or so, sitting at a table with a vase of lilies beside her left elbow, and a look of ease on her face, as if she had already accomplished the most important part of what she had been put on earth to accomplish, and was proud of that in a quiet way, and at peace with herself. As if she had learned not to run away from things. As if she believed those things held, within them, the answers to all the huge questions about how best to live out a human life. On that canvas I was trying to show that I loved this blond woman, and admired her, and I think I had accomplished that, or was beginning to accomplish it.

  What probably did not show was that the woman was my mother.

  I studied the canvas for some time, then went into the kitchen intending to clean up the spilled cereal. Janet had cleaned up the cereal and washed the bucket and leaned it in the sink to dry, and, behind the faucet, left a note in a precise printed hand.

  Dear Joe Date. I’m sleeping with the governor. Safest sex only. My insistence on that makes him angry. I’ll stop if you ask me out again. If not, then thanks for a kind of weird but nice night. Janet. P.S. The painting is nice. The woman is beautiful.

  11

  I DON’T HAVE ANY Greek blood that I know of, but I seem to have some mysterious connection to Greek Americans. I don’t know why this is. The ones I’m friendly with have a real appreciation for food and friendship and loyalty, which strikes me as a healthy set of appreciations. Gerard was Greek. And Carmine Asalapolous, my doughnut-making friend. And half a block from my apartment was a loud little breakfast place I liked, Flash-in-the-Pan, which was run by Maria and Aristotle Reginidis, who probably had a few drops of Greek blood in them somewhere.

  I went there that morning, with Janet’s note folded in my back pocket next to my still-damp wallet. For $3.99 you could get two sunny-side eggs with real home fries-the kind with a patchy soft frosting of paprika and oil and browned potato flesh-link sausages you could cut through with the edge of your fork, rye toast with butter, and with marmalade that came, not in plastic packets, but in a glass jar. Good coffee in heavy, thick-lipped cups. The silverware was also heavy, scarred with a million silvery scratches, and if you wanted, you could order a grilled bran muffin on the side, for your health… with a quarter-cup of whipped butter on top of it.

  I liked the cheap framed photos of Greek temples on the walls, and the clean bathroom with un-painted-over graffiti (“U.S. Out of North America Now!” was my all-time favorite) and the fact that Maria and Ari’s beautiful green-eyed nine-year-old girl, Giana, sat at the cash register on days when she didn’t have school, making change with a serious face, like an adult. I liked, too, that Maria and Ari weren’t afraid to have the occasional little marital spat there behind the counter, as if they didn’t need to prove to each other that they had a good thing going on between them. It was the kind of marriage, and the kind of child, I’d hoped to have someday, when I had been planning for a marriage and children.

  “The eggshill bucket is full! But why why why can’t you tik out the eggshill bucket when is full? Why?”

  “See this!” Maria would yell back, decaf pot in one hand, regular in the other. “This is why. What’s more important, eggshell bucket or they get their coffee hot when the cup is empty?”

  “My other wife could do both!”

  Ari had not had any other wife, except in his imagination. They’d shake their heads, mutter in some ancient Kalamata dialect, fuss and fume for a while. Sometimes, rather than sitting there in polite embarrassment, one of the regular customers at the counter would take sides and say something like, “My wife can do both, you know, Maria.”

  “Good,” Maria would say. “Send her in.”

  Half an hour later she’d squeeze past Aristotle at the grill and lay a hand on his aproned ass.

  It was not the kind of food, or the kind of show, you could get in the hotel restaurants, or the chains, where the first commandment was never to seem actually human. Thou shalt not offend the customer’s sensibilities under any circumstances. Thou shalt not laugh or shout.

  The country was going that way, it seemed to me. Political figures got hundred-dollar haircuts and e-mailed their spin doctors to find out how to say good morning to their children. Our governor, for example, was a clean-faced millionaire with a plastic smile who was trying, that month, to get back the authority to execute criminals because he wanted more than anything to be reelected, and his opponent talked tough on crime, so he had to appear tough on crime, too. He had done some good things, as Janet said, getting poor kids access to better health care, for example, and fixing up some schools. He knew he had the vote of the more compassionate types, and he was trying to steal a few percentage points from his opponent, who would have executed people without benefit of trial if he’d been allowed to. Four years earlier this same man, our governor, had been photographed-by a newspaper reporter-having a nasty argument over fried clams on Lynn Beach with a young woman not his wife, and had made up an absurd story, told a few plastic jokes, posed repeatedly with his two teenage daughters, given blood, gone to church with the cameras on him, and
been reelected two months before his wife filed for divorce. His picture was always in the newspaper and on the TV, his voice was everywhere. I had never liked the man.

  When I had eaten half my eggs and potatoes and finished my first cup of coffee, I took Janet’s note out of my pocket. I unfolded it, smoothed out the wrinkles, and set it on the counter-top beside my coffee cup, where I could study the handwriting and the words.

  12

  THAT AFTERNOON I put on a summer sport coat over my T-shirt and drove half an hour west to visit my mother. She was living then in one of the leafier suburbs, not far from where I had grown up, in a place called Apple Meadow. People cooked her meals and cleaned her room, and there was a garden with white metal chairs set around a fountain, and manicured lawns, and an activity room with a television and a card table. Doctors, nurses, physical therapists, cleaning women, receptionists-everyone I’d ever spoken with at Apple Meadow seemed competent and caring, and you couldn’t find a surface with dust on it if you were paid to, and there was really no other place my mother could have been as happy and safe, or treated as well. But every time I drove up to the guardhouse and gave my name I felt like some kind of traitor, a good enough son wearing a thin suit of selfishness.

  She was sitting in an armchair in the sunny visitors’ room, gold and diamond earrings my father had given her sparkling at the sides of her face, hands resting in her lap. She might have been waiting for me or she might not have been. At sixty-seven, she was the youngest person there. Probably the healthiest, too, except for the fact that her mind-which had been a wonderful mind-had started to travel down roads that were closed off to most other minds. She recognized me when I came through the door, though; her neatly trimmed eyebrows lifted a quarter of an inch and she flashed her small, pretty smile, one corner of one top front tooth chipped away from when she had tried to bite the flip top off a can of Pepsi. “Ellory!” she said, holding out her arms. “Doctor Entwhistle!”