A Little Love Story

by Roland Merullo

  And that was before Governor Valvelsais had taken office, and before Janet and I never talked about him.

  We could have set a time and I could have met her outside. It would have been easier not to have to look for a parking space on Beacon Hill. But Janet said she couldn’t always be sure she’d be able to leave right at seven o’clock or whatever time we set, and she didn’t want to keep me waiting outside like that. And I had the feeling she liked to be seen walking down the corridors with her arm hooked through someone’s arm, liked the security guards and senators’ aides and the people she worked with to know she had a semblance of a social life, an actual boyfriend, a date. One of the bad parts of her disease, along with the physical suffering, was the way the persistent coughing and sickliness made people want to push you away. Once, after three glasses of wine, Janet spewed out a whole list of things people had said to her as a girl-in movie theaters, in classrooms, at parties. “Go home if you’re sick.” “Stay away from me with that cough.” “Doesn’t your mother feed you?” “You’ve had that cold for, what, about a year now?” And so on.

  Complete strangers and acquaintances alike would say such things, even though they were infinitely more dangerous to her than she was to them. She told me it made her want to just hang around other people with CF, but this was the twist of the knife: she wasn’t allowed to hang around other people with CF. She couldn’t be in a closed car with another person with CF, couldn’t come within three arms’ lengths for fear that one of them would give the other some lethal new germ they hadn’t yet been introduced to. She’d found out about that the hard way, she said, but wouldn’t elaborate.

  I walked down a long hallway, past a dozen closed doors, and then toward the front center of the building, where the governor and his closest aides have their offices. A state trooper stood guard at the entrance to the executive suite. Janet had given him my name, and while he looked over my ID, I studied the portraits on the walls, all the recent governors, captured in oil, larger than life. As election day approached, more people stayed late in the offices there-strategizing, maybe, or proving to the taxpayers that, under the current administration, they were getting their dollar’s worth. Still, the doors were thick old doors, and it was usually quiet in the suite at that hour, so I was surprised, as the trooper handed back my license, to hear voices. Two people arguing, it sounded like. Syllables muffled. The trooper didn’t seem to notice.

  As I walked on, making a right turn past the governor’s door, then a left, I was even more surprised to realize that the voices were coming from Janet’s office. And then that one of the voices was hers. I was about to turn around and make another lap of the corridor when the other person roared out: “I don’t give half a shit about him, alright?” It sounded like our governor, not on his best behavior. I hesitated for one breath. And then, because there was a note of what might be called distress in Janet’s muffled answer, I took hold of the doorknob, turned it, and pushed.

  The scene inside was not a highly original one. The office was small. Janet’s desk faced the doorway, an old green-upholstered armchair in front of it. Behind the desk, with one large window as background, was the chair she sat at when she worked, and she was standing to the side of that chair, holding the top front of her dress together with one hand. Her hair hung messily over one side of her face and it was easy enough to see, in her eyes and the muscles around her mouth, that she was angry and upset. There was a wash of fear there, too. Before that moment, I had never seen fear on Janet’s face. I’d seen her cough until she almost lost consciousness, and I’d heard her talk about having her stomach cut open when she was twelve years old, and how she had become infected and sparked a fever of a hundred and five and almost died. But I had never heard the bruise of real fear in those stories, or seen it where I saw it now.

  On the opposite side of her chair was the splendid governor of Massachusetts, the Honorable Charles S. Valvelsais, who had been elected in part by promising to make sure the legislature funded preschool and after-school programs for children from poor families-a promise he’d made good on. He was wearing a white shirt and a loosened tie. He also looked upset. There was a multitude of reasons why he could have been upset, but in the second or two seconds before I did what I did, it seemed to me that there weren’t many reasons why Janet would be standing the way she was standing with a button ripped off her dress and that look in her eyes. Governors sometimes yell at the people who work for them. Fair enough. But most governors don’t yell at the people who work for them and tear buttons off those people’s dresses. I was bothered to begin with, being in that building. And I had been a jealous person in a past incarnation, I admit that, and probably hadn’t yet completely reformed.

  And so I sort of made a run at all that, without stopping to consider. A straight sprint. Except that the green-upholstered armchair and the heavy oak desk were in the way. So I ran over them, one step up on the chair, one step across the desk, and I leaped over Janet’s computer and onto Governor Valvoline. In mid-leap I remembered that he’d been some kind of judo champion in college. But college was a long time ago for the governor. And probably, whatever the other demands of the political life might have been, he hadn’t spent the past nine years carrying two-by-tens across job sites or walking half-inch sheets of wallboard up two flights of stairs.

  We crashed to the floor, two nuts, arms and legs entangled, papers and statues of the Commonwealth and small electrical appliances banging down around us. Someone screamed, Janet probably. The governor was grunting, “I’ll fix… I’ll fix you,” in his most governoresque voice. He tried some kind of judo move on me, taking hold of my arm and using it as a lever to flip me out of the way, but we were on the floor, and the move only partly worked, and then it was all confusion and he was scraping at my face with his fingernails and we were wrestling and grunting and one of my hands flew free and so I punched him at close range, just a little awkward jab, and his nose started to bleed. One of Janet’s cowboy-booted ankles came between us where we struggled on the carpet. She was yelling at us and making small kicks with her foot. We scuttled away from each other and stood up.

  I was breathing hard and feeling like a boy. Between breaths I could sense a putrid disgust seeping up from the floor and all around me. The governor was leaning over from the waist, trying to catch the blood in his cupped right hand so it didn’t fall onto his shirt. A very small white-haired woman came through the door with a security guard-not the trooper-right behind her. I had never had much to do with security guards before meeting Janet. He had a gun out and was pointing it, sensibly enough, at me.

  The governor pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and put it up to his face. Through the material he said, in a weird voice, a public phony voice, “No, no. Get him out. I fell. I tripped and fell. It’s not broken.” He actually tried to laugh then. The sound came out from under the handkerchief like the chuffing of some animal trying to force its way up through the skin of a human being. “Out,” he commanded. “Everybody but Janet out.”

  “Not a chance,” she said, in a shaking voice. She had been standing between us while we calmed down, but had now moved to the other side of her chair. The state trooper appeared at the door. The security guard put his gun back where it belonged, and when he did that I felt as though everything behind my navel-the mucus and blood and half-digested food-settled a few inches lower in a heavy soup. “Out!” the governor said loudly. “I just tripped and fell, that’s all. Everybody out.”

  We made a not very graceful exit, me with my clothes all rumpled, and Janet breathing hard and having some trouble getting her sweater off the back of her chair, and Charlie Valvoline putting on a stern, manly face for whoever the older woman was-his secretary, I suppose-and the trooper asking the governor if he was sure he was all right, and the security guard eyeing me all the way out the door, as if, after all those years of just sitting around reading golf magazines, he had wanted more than anything to have been allowed to pull t
he trigger.

  Janet and I walked out of the executive suite and down the long corridor, not touching and not talking. I had been an idiot, I understood that in the most visceral way. A dirty wave was washing over me, a bad mix of feelings from my worst days with Giselle. I shook my head, hard.

  We walked down the steps. Before turning with me toward my truck, Janet seemed to waver a moment. We went the two blocks in silence and I realized I had parked near the little Catholic church where Ellory had liked to go after his conversion. I unlocked the passenger door for Janet and she climbed in. When we were pulling out of the parking space she started to cry. I wanted to touch her or find something to say, but wrestling with governors-with anyone, in fact-was not exactly a specialty of mine, and having a gun pointed at me was also not a specialty of mine, and I was not exactly in a state of mind where I could comfort someone else. My ribs and hands were sore, my left cheek was scratched, my left shoulder hurt where Valvoline had done the judo move, and my mind was replaying the scene again and again. So I just pulled out into the smoky madness of Friday-night traffic and listened to Janet cry.

  Before the bad scene in the State House, I’d had an idea where we might go that night-we took turns deciding, surprising each other, seeing who could be more inventive. She loved New York City, and that’s where I had been planning to take her. In the fog of bad feelings I thought it would be best to basically stick to the plan, and just take things a minute at a time.

  It was stop-and-go all the way down Beacon Street to Clarendon, and then not much better once we reached the entrance to the Mass Turnpike and headed west.

  My body stopped shaking. Janet didn’t cry for very long. She coughed, looked out the side window for a while, and then said, “I hate things like that. I hate that you did that.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Here we are with brutal honesty.”

  She kept looking out the window. We were stopped in holiday traffic in a long line of cars and trucks near the first tollbooth, still in Boston. Close enough to turn back.

  “He was talking to me. I was trying to get something for him out of my files and I turned around and he was pressing his face close to me, telling me he loved me. I pulled away. I told him he didn’t love me and I didn’t love him, that I was going out with someone now. He reached out for me, not to hurt me but kind of to get me to listen, and he accidentally caught the top of my dress and I pulled away. He started to yell… And then you came through the door like a wild gorilla. I don’t like that kind of thing at all.”

  “I came through the door ordinary. Then I went to wild gorilla.”

  She didn’t smile.

  “He deserved it,” I said. “I’m only seventy-five percent sorry.”

  “I’m not asking you to be sorry. I’m the one who’s sorry… that I ever let him touch me. You can’t imagine the depth and range of my sorrow right now.”

  “Why did you?”

  She shrugged.

  “Why did you let him touch you?” I said again, but I was just talking, filling up air. I was feeling less sorry by the second. By the time Janet spoke again I was down to thirty-five percent.

  “Sometimes you just want a little pleasure, that’s all. Some connection with somebody. Some, I don’t know-”

  “A doughnut.”

  “What?”

  “A doughnut, you want a doughnut. You want your share of sweetness to make up for all the shit you have to go through. You deserve the two doughnuts, or the kiss, or the cocaine, or the new car, or the new earrings, or the new fishing rod.”

  “What in the name of God are you talking about, Jake? What fishing rod? I don’t-”

  “Now you’re going to lose your job,” I said, to reel myself in.

  She laughed then, a small laugh with a hem of bitterness along its edges. “Not before the election anyway. You heard him. ‘I fell! It’s nothing! Everyone out!’ When he goes to buy underwear he worries which brand will get him more votes. He’s the epitome of the political animal.”

  “Why’d you sleep with him, then?”

  It had slipped out, and I couldn’t pretend to myself anymore that I was just filling air. Janet looked at me, then looked forward again. An oily silence floated between us in the cab of the truck. Until that minute I’d done an excellent job of not being jealous. From the time I’d read the note she left on my sink, jealousy had been whispering in my ear night and day. I’d see the governor on TV and I’d look at his hands and wonder where and how those hands had touched her. I’d look at his mouth. I’d hear a radio talk show host-this was rare-say he was handsome, or dignified, or that his plan to execute criminals meant he was the first governor we’d had in years with any cojones; I’d wonder if she’d ever touched his cojones; I’d notice that Boston magazine had named him one of the city’s top ten eligible bachelors. I’d see news clips of the governor with his daughters, or on his morning run, or lining up to donate blood for the hundred and twenty-seventh time with a big sappy smile on his face. And so on. It’s one thing for your lover to have had lovers before-who doesn’t have to deal with that, high-school sophomores? It’s something else to have that other person’s face and voice and picture and name ricocheting around every bar you step into, every newsstand you walk past, every radio station you listen to on your way to work. Jealousy fun house mirrors.

  Still, in the months before I met Janet, I’d had a lot of practice turning my mind away from certain types of thoughts, and, in the time I’d known her, whenever jealousy made one of its runs, I’d just stepped aside and let it crash past. Who knows why my little sidestep move wasn’t working that night? Because I’d actually wrestled around on the floor with the governor, maybe? Because he was still reaching into a part of my life with his pathetic I-love-yous long after he should have bowed gracefully out? Because the part of my life with Janet in it was becoming more important to me every day? Who knows?

  The traffic softened up slightly. We headed west at a slow pace.

  After a while Janet said, “I don’t ask you things like that.”

  “I know it.”

  “I don’t ask you who you’ve been with or anything about Giselle, or why you didn’t date for a year after you broke up with her, or even if you’re sleeping with someone else now.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Good. I’m not either.”

  A mile or so of edgy silence, not so bad now. This was the weird complicated tango of modern relationshipping. This was as ancient as dust and sweat.

  She said, “I was lonely. I got just very lonely. Of the four other men I work with, one is gay, two are married, and the other one has egg on his face when he comes to work.”

  “Literal egg?”

  She didn’t laugh. “I’m not exactly… I don’t exactly have attractive guys lined up at my door, no offense.”

  “You’re beautiful, you’re smart, you’re sexy. What are you talking about?”

  I could feel her looking at me across the cab of the truck, but I was afraid to look back.

  She said, “Come on, Jake. I cough. I spit. I ply myself with pills before every meal when I’m out on dates in restaurants. I’m a fun time, but not exactly what you’d call a good long-term investment.”

  “Not if I can help it,” I said, without thinking.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I’m going to keep you alive.”

  “By the force of your heroic masculine will?”

  “Don’t insult the force of my heroic masculine will,” I said. “I have a perfectly solidly average-sized heroic masculine will, maybe slightly larger.”

  She didn’t laugh then, either, but I glanced across the seat and caught something in her eyes, one flash of good light. We drove along. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Sanctum sanctorum,” I said. It was Gerard’s term for a woman’s body. It had just slipped out-like everything else I had been saying on that blessed night.

 
“You are an odd soul, Joe Date.”

  “To New York or by bus,” I said. One of my mother’s jokes.

  “You are essentially odd. If you ran for office, you’d never make it past the primary.”

  “Thank you. I consider that a high compliment. But could we keep all references to running for office out of the conversation? All jerkoffs?”

  “Okay.”

  “I have the blood of jerkoffs on my hands.”

  “You’re going goofy on me,” she said.

  “I’m on a crime spree. I’ve assaulted an elected public official and now I’m going to trespass on monastery grounds.”

  “He won’t press charges,” Janet said. “What monastery?”

  “We’re going to see my brother. The monk. Then we’re going to New York or by bus.”

  2

  MY BROTHER ELLORY is eight years and two months older than I am. After a brilliant teenage career of rebelling against what he called “our upper-middle-class subterranean upbringing”-including one glorious night in which he drove my father’s new Mercedes convertible off the road, between two pine trees and down the third fairway at the Wannakin River Golf Club-he decided to really hit my parents where they lived, and he’d converted to Catholicism. In the beginning, this conversion had everything to do with a college girlfriend named Renée St. Cyr (who believed that premarital intercourse was approved of by the Good Lord, in her particular case, as long as the other intercoursee was also Catholic), but soon it took on a life of its own.