“Once.”
“I’ve always believed it was because my being sick turned him off so much.”
“The woman I was with that night wasn’t sick,” I said.
“Was it Giselle?”
It was the first time either of us had spoken that name. I shook my head.
We rode on. After a few minutes I asked Janet why she had told me the Venezuela story just then, and she said she didn’t know.
“Was he the great love of your life?”
“No, you are,” she said, just straight and plain and serious like that, without any drama. And then, “Was Giselle the love of your life?”
I shook my head without looking at her, and then looked. She was almost smiling and seemed very calm. I drove along. We were past the little knot of Hartford by then. “We met in a bar on Boylston Street,” I said. “Three and a half years ago. We had a good time at first. I had my first show, sold a couple of paintings. We went to Mexico. We went up to Quebec City a couple of times. Everything was nice. We fought a lot-stupid little fights-but everything was going along pretty well. She was selling mobile phones and she was good at it, and then she got promoted to regional sales manager and, I don’t know, things started to go sour. She wanted to start having children and I was fine with that idea. But she had a whole plan-three children, a certain kind of house in the suburbs-and I kept saying I’d grown up in a family with three children in a nice house in the suburbs, and there was nothing wrong with it, I just didn’t really want to do it all over again exactly that way. She was pushing me to go back to med school. I kept saying I didn’t want to go back to med school, I wanted to paint. It got to be a regular thing for us-”
“I didn’t know you went to medical school.”
“I quit after the first year. I… we’d go along fine for a few days or a week, sometimes two weeks, then we’d get into the med school discussion, the suburbs discussion.”
“Ellory said you were planning to get married.”
I looked over at her. In that quick glance across the shadowy cab I couldn’t read her face, but there had been a kind of sad, bending note in her voice when she said “married.” It surprised me.
“I thought he might have said something.”
“I asked about the picture on his bookshelf. He said she’d died, he didn’t say how, but he told me you’d been engaged.”
“No,” I said. “We’d talked about it, but no.”
“No ring?”
When she said “ring,” I heard the bending note a second time.
“No.”
“I interrupted you. I’m jealous, I’m sorry. Keep going now, and then after this we never have to talk about it again, alright?”
“Alright. Giselle had grown up poor-her parents were from Brazil, actually. After she met me, she started to make a lot of money and then she started to worry that if she stopped to have kids she’d be poor again. But she didn’t want to leave the kids and fly all over the place every few weeks. It was a big confusion for her. I have plenty of money, you know. I make a good amount from carpentry. I sell a few paintings every year, the apartment is paid for and worth a lot. She knew all that. But… I don’t know… everything got tense. She started to travel more. She started to talk about this guy she worked with. They traveled to sales conferences once or twice together. I met him once. I knew there was nothing going on. But then some more time went by and I wasn’t sure there was nothing going on. I asked her. She got upset. Nothing was going on, nothing. Then the next day she told me they’d gone out for a drink at the last conference and they’d kissed afterwards and made out a little, but she hadn’t gone to bed with him. So I didn’t like that, naturally…She said it was wrong, she was sorry, she would never do anything like that again. From there, somehow, we got into another three-kids-in-the-suburbs fight. A few days went by. We made up. It was rocky for a month or so-this was the summer before this one, a year ago, a little more than a year…She had a meeting in New York and then a conference in San Francisco, and, I don’t know, we were talking on the phone when she was in New York and I had a bad moment-I thought I was done being angry and jealous but I wasn’t-and I asked her if this guy-Brian, his name was-if he was going on the trip with her the next day and she said he wasn’t, and we left it there…And then, afterwards, you know, after the day and the funeral services and everything, I went about three months without checking and then I had another bad moment and I looked up the list of the people who’d been on the plane and Brian’s name was there.”
“She could have just wanted you not to be jealous and that’s why she didn’t tell you.”
“I know that.”
“But you still didn’t go out with anyone else for a year?”
I nodded. I promised myself not to say anything else about it, and then I immediately said, “I did that for myself, for my own guilt. I wasn’t in good shape. Gerard used to take me places like I was a little kid-to his daughters’ dance recitals, to museums, to scuba classes. I was a little zombie-ish for a while. There was so much talk about it, naturally, in the papers every day, on TV every night. People who had lost husbands and wives and children. I stopped reading the papers, stopped watching TV. I banged nails and painted and got through the winter, and in the spring I started driving into the country alone on weekends and sleeping out in the woods in a sleeping bag, or going for long hikes, or going to see Ellory. It was rough for a while and then not so rough, and then I was starting to feel semi-alright again. I remember calling you that first afternoon, from work. Just sort of peeking my nose back into the dating world.”
“And I responded so nicely,” Janet said.
“I was almost better by then. I knew when I put the phone down, after you said no, that I was most of the way better.”
10
BY THE TIME we got back to Boston it was eight-thirty at night. We stopped for takeout at Fez and set the warm paper bags between us in the cab of the truck on the way to my apartment. While I was getting out plates and glasses, Janet called the governor on his private line and I heard her leaving a message in a don’t-mess-with-me-you’re-lucky-to-have-me voice: “Charlie, Janet. I’m taking the holiday tomorrow. I’ll be in the office Tuesday morning as usual.”
We sat at the small kitchen table I had made from some tiger maple I’d found at a mill in western Massachusetts on my way home from visiting Ellory one time. Maple is a nice-looking wood anyway, but tiger maple has shimmering bands of light and dark running down the grain, so that even a board that’s been planed and sanded perfectly smooth seems to have ripples in its surface. In certain kinds of light, the ripples seem almost to be moving. During the first breakfast we ate together at that table-it was the morning after the third time she slept over-Janet noticed the wood and said how much she liked it. I’d been starting to feel something with her that I didn’t think I was going to be able to let myself feel again, and I was nervous, and in a little spasm of nervousness I started to tell her all about the different woods: how poplar had an olive-green or brownish tint to it and how well it held paint and how it was more stable than pine for interior trim; how southern yellow pine was as hard as some hardwoods, even though it wasn’t one, technically, and so it made good flooring if you didn’t mind the heavy, wavy grain; how the architect I liked to work with ordered screen doors from a tiny company in Maine that made them from South American cedar, which was not really cedar at all but a species of mahogany that was used on the decks of ships because it was resistant to insects and rot and didn’t swell or warp when it got wet. Interesting stuff. I went on and on and she watched and listened and started to smile and finally I stopped and smiled, too. It became a joke with us. We’d be at a bar downtown and she’d say, with a perfectly serious expression, “Jake, what kind of wood is this?”
“Siberian chestnut,” I’d say. “Very rare.” And I’d go off on some made-up spiel about how the chestnuts themselves were considered to have aphrodisiac qualities, or how the black Siberian squir
rel gnawed the twigs to survive in bad winters. Some elaborate mishmash like that, just to hear her laugh.
She’d taken her pills and she’d done her chest PT with the vibrating vest, and while I was putting together the food, she sat running her hands over the tabletop. We’d bought lamb kebabs with hummus, pieces of warm pita bread that the people at Fez baked themselves, a spicy yogurt dip-and there were Fudgsicles in the freezer for dessert. I opened a bottle of white wine-Sardinian, the same Argiolas we’d had on our first date at Diem Bo. Janet was coughing more already. Just as I sat down she coughed and got up and went to the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush. When she came out she had one very small droplet of blood on her lower lip. I started to eat.
“So how did you ever end up working for this guy?” I asked her after a while.
She looked up, searching for jealousy in my face, but there was not much jealousy there anymore. No jealousy at all, really. Almost none.
She said, “I was having a conversation with some friends in my college dorm and I was saying how rotten the world was, how the politicians were corrupt, how the system was all twisted and skewed. One of my friends said, ‘Why don’t you do something about it, then, instead of just whining?’ So I decided to. I went to the Kennedy School and got my master’s and Charlie was running and he was promising to fund children’s programs and completely eliminate poverty in Massachusetts-not cut it down, completely eradicate it.”
“I remember.”
“Nobody says that. Most politicians don’t even mention the poor.”
“The poor don’t fund-raise,” I said.
“So I thought it would be perfect. I was still fairly healthy. I thought I’d do that for a while and then, if they came up with a cure, I’d try something radical like running for Congress. I was twenty-three, a bit on the naive side.”
“You’d make a good congresswoman.”
She waved a lamb kebab and coughed. A little flash of pain cut across her face.
“I mean it. You care about people. You’re tough, you’re smart.”
“One,” she said, “I’m not a millionaire. Two, I’d go crazy saying the same thing over and over and over again during a campaign. Three, Americans don’t vote for sick people. Four, I’m not that great a compromiser. Even if I got elected somehow, I’d just alienate everyone. I have crazy ideas. I think we should put a lot of money into desalination plants, for example, because the key commodity of the future will be water, not oil. I think each little town and neighborhood should have its own high school again and that the buildings themselves shouldn’t hold more than about twenty classrooms, and that the healthy kids should spend some time every week tutoring the special-needs kids, and that nursing homes should be built right there against the school in the same complex-they do that already in some places, but not with high schools, usually. I think everyone should do six months of volunteer work between high school and college-not just grunt work, painting bandstands and bleachers, but hospice work or environmental work or…” She coughed and coughed and made another trip to the bathroom. When she came back the drop of blood was gone and she went on talking as though she’d never left. “…or military service. Everyone. Every single kid, even the ones in wheelchairs. I think women should have six months’ paid vacation after they have a baby.”
“I’ll write you in,” I said. “You can run as the Idealist Party candidate.”
“It’s just smart,” she said. “It’s all just really practical.”
“Or you could run on the electrocute criminals, cut-art-in-the-schools, hate-your-gay-neighbor platform like the guy Valvoline’s running against.”
“Right.”
“Makes your boss look good.”
“He changed, Jake. Power changes people. The fear of losing power changes people most of all. His wife left him-because he’d changed so much-and then he panicked and changed some more. He’s not a bad man.”
“Just small,” I said, without thinking. But almost all the ugliness in me had been washed out during that day. It was as if I’d finally decided that I’d had enough jealousy for one lifetime. It must have showed in my voice because Janet was watching me, and after a few seconds she smiled her pretty smile, and it was like forgiveness.
AFTER THE MEAL I said I wanted to paint her and she said she didn’t mind, but that she was tired, and could probably only stay up another hour or so.
In the warm months Janet liked to sleep naked. But it was getting colder by then, and she had a pair of sea-green silk pajamas she kept at my apartment in a drawer with a change or two of clothes and some medicines. I turned on the air purifier I had bought after the second week we were together. She put the pajamas on and sat in a chair with her legs crossed at the knee and her arms crossed at the wrist, looking straight at me. I paint in oil on linen, as I said. Linen is expensive, but I like it because, even though most people say it doesn’t make any difference, I think it makes the edges of things not perfectly sharp and if you don’t lay the paint on too thick, it can give everything a smooth quality. I had a canvas already gessoed. In the center of it, I painted just the sea green with its light and shadows, and worked for some time getting the arms and legs right. Then I painted Janet’s face and hair, and then I used a #16 brush and almost a whole tube of Paynes gray to make a background. When I had it roughed in enough so that I thought I could finish it without her being there, I stopped and cleaned up and we went to bed.
I lay on my back in the bed and she lay half-leaning against me with her face on my shoulder and one arm across my chest. When she coughed she brought her right hand up to her mouth and trapped the cough between her palm and the skin of my bare shoulder. Between coughs I could hear her breath rattling around. We lay like that for a long time without saying anything.
“What is the waiting list looking like?” I asked her finally.
“I’m eighteenth. In Massachusetts they’ve been averaging about two a month.”
“So next summer.”
She coughed, then nodded her head against my shoulder, but I listened to her breathing and I knew she wouldn’t live until the next summer. I was sure she knew it, too.
She wrapped herself tight against me, one arm over my chest, right thigh on top of my thighs, face against my neck, and we fell asleep that way.
11
THE NEXT DAY, Columbus Day, there were tremendous winds in Boston during the morning hours, winds like I had never seen except in the edge of Hurricane Belle. The tops of the trees whipped back and forth. Leaves and newspapers and people’s hats went skidding down the sidewalks like exuberant children. Janet and I slept late, then she sat for another little while and I worked some more on the painting. Afterwards, we took a trolley to the North End and had pasta and salad in a place with six tables, where, before you ordered, they brought you small bowls of olive oil and a basket of hard-crusted bread that was soft as cotton inside.
After the meal I said I wanted to walk to the Back Bay, my favorite part of Boston. In the 1800s it was just marshy tidal flats, but as the city grew, the area became more valuable and the marshes were filled in with thousands of tons of granite from quarries in Needham. Something about the flat straight avenues lined with four- and five-story brownstones, something about the particular mix of buildings on Boylston Street-clothing stores, churches, skyscrapers, little take-out Thai and Szechwan eateries-something about the beggars and businessmen, something about it just felt to me the way a city is supposed to feel-edgy, busy, a visual feast. The winds had mostly died down. Janet said she was feeling strong enough to walk, but by the time we’d gone as far as the Public Garden-maybe a mile and a half-she was having a hard time. When I glanced at her once I could see that the muscles of her forehead were pinched tight, as if she were working out some complicated math formula, when all she was trying to do was breathe.
I said how nice the gardens looked, with the trees so bright, and the more muted colors in the flower beds. I pretended I wanted to sit on one of the benches
there and watch kids feed the ducks.
“I hate this,” she said when we sat down and she caught her breath. A hard little wind blew her hair up around her face. She was quiet for a minute, then, softly, almost as if she were talking to herself, “Being dead, I think I can deal with. Being alive and not able to do things, not be able to walk, for God’s sake…”
I put my hand on the top of her leg. In a minute she turned her face away, and started crying. I took my hand from her leg and put it around her shoulders, and pulled her against me.
“Some days I want to scream. I want to stand out in the middle of the street and look up at the sky and just scream and smash things. I want to ride a horse or jog on a beach or go bowling. Anything. I used to be so physical. I played field hockey at school. I loved to swim, to skate. Everything I tried, I loved-hiking, cross-country skiing.” She stopped. She swiped at her right eye with the bottom of her palm. She took a breath and blew it out. We stared at the Public Garden for a long while and then she said, “Alright. I’m finished with that.”
“All you do is complain.”
“Right,” she said. “I’m sorry. Do you want children, really?”
I heard the bending note again.
“Most of the time. You?”
“I’d have eight if I were strong enough. I’d fill a huge house with them. I have dreams about having children. Two or three times a week now I have a dream like that.”
A Little Love Story Page 11