A Little Love Story

by Roland Merullo

  “It very well might.”

  “Fine,” Janet said, but I had the feeling she was saying it only because she was running out of strength, and didn’t want to argue with him that way, gasping for words while he watched.

  “Very good,” Doctor Wilbraham said, but he was offended. His eyes went ricocheting angrily around from the chart in his hands to Janet’s face, and after a few seconds of that he couldn’t seem to find a way to say good-bye, so he just gave a stiff nod and marched out.

  We watched him go.

  “Could you get us some coffee now, Ma?” Janet said.

  Her mother looked hard at her and started to say something, but Janet turned over her wrist, stretched out her fingers, and caught her mother’s hand. “Ma, please? I love you…please.”

  When her mother was gone, a nurse came in with a milkshake-sized can and poured it into a tall plastic glass. “Chocolate ice cream soda,” she chirped. “You know the drill, sweetheart.” She watched until Janet started to drink, touched her on top of the head, and left us.

  “I want two things,” Janet said to me when we were alone. She was tired and weak but all fire.

  “Ask.”

  She coughed and coughed and I held the crescent-shaped pan up to her mouth so she could spit. “When this IV is done tomorrow,” she said, as I was washing the pan out in her sink, “I want you to take me for a ride, as long a ride as I can manage. I don’t care if you have to lower me down out of the window and into the bed of the pickup, or wheel me out in a goddamned wheelchair.”

  “Not a problem,” I said. I went back to the bed and faced her.

  “That’s the easy thing.”

  “Alright.”

  “The hard thing is, I want you to take a sip of this.”

  “What is it?”

  “GoLYTELY. The name says it all. I have an intestinal blockage. Try it.”

  I took one sip-salty pineapple soup-and made a face that drew a laugh out of her.

  13

  OVER THE NEXT TWO DAYS, Janet and I had a couple of short stretches of being alone, and two phone conversations. I was not comfortable with the idea of her leaving the hospital, but that was not something I could say. I understood why she wanted to. I understood it a little better every time we talked, but I was nervous about it. We decided it would be simpler for her just to slip out of the building, rather than be officially discharged. That way she could walk back in and take up where she’d left off if she had to, and we both knew she would have to.

  Except for some psychiatric wards, it is not very hard to sneak out of a hospital. Janet had been in that particular hospital so many times that she knew the schedule of the doctors and nurses, when they made their rounds and when they took their breaks. And she’d been a patient on that floor so often that she knew which nurse would be least likely to pay attention to her when she walked down to the reading room at the end of the hall for a little exercise once the IV was done. The reading room is open to visitors. It’s a simple matter to have someone put a change of clothes in a tote bag and leave it just inside the leg of the sofa there. A simple matter to take the tote bag into the corridor bathroom, change, and then walk out and down the stairwell in street clothes. Sunday mornings are a little easier than other times to try this.

  The antibiotics had, as Doctor Wilbraham promised, made Janet feel stronger, and she left a note for her favorite nurse so there would be no panic when they discovered she had gone. At nine-fifteen on Sunday morning she walked out of the building on her own, dressed in jeans, a wool sweater, and cowboy boots.

  I was waiting in my truck by the main entrance. I had her winter coat and hat and gloves in the cab, and three portable oxygen tanks wrapped in their narrow blue backpacks with gold trim. When she was on the seat and warmly dressed and we were driving away from the building, she clipped the oxygen on under her nostrils, but left it there for only a few breaths.

  “Where to?” I asked her.

  “Manhattan. I want one night in a nice hotel. And don’t expect any gymnastic lovemaking.”

  “The rings,” I said. “The parallel bars.”

  She reached over and put a hand on top of my leg.

  “Your mum’s going to be upset.”

  “She’s at Mass. I called and left a message on her machine.”

  “Doctor Wilbraham isn’t going to like it.”

  Janet didn’t answer.

  At that hour on a Sunday there was almost no traffic. After I asked her if she was hungry and she said no, I found the expressway on-ramp and we headed south. We drove for a long while without saying anything. The landscape there is mostly flat, and bleak at that time of year: patches of maples and oaks with a few brown leaves clinging to the branches, clusters of strip malls, and then frozen fields with the occasional sagging white Colonial presiding, the farmland waiting to be bulldozed and built on. And then, sometimes, like a surprise, an old New England town with slate-roofed houses, a mill, and church spires. I looked over at Janet occasionally as we went along. She seemed to be studying everything, drinking it, searching the American landscape for some hidden meaning that she’d missed in the last twenty-seven years. Somewhere near the Rhode Island line I asked her where she was on the transplant list.

  And she said, “Stop it, Jake.” Not in any kind of an angry way, but in a plain, even tone, the way someone who knew you well might ask you to turn off a radio. So I didn’t try to start any conversation after that, figuring she ought to have everything the way she wanted it for those twenty-four hours: the place she wanted, and the food, silence if she wanted silence. I decided that if I was worth anything as a person, I ought to be able to let her be with what it was she had to be with then: not urge her to fight it if she was tired of fighting, not ply her with hope, not make her think about who might be upset or worried, not ask anything of her, nothing, just be alive with her while she was alive.

  Somewhere in the southwestern part of Connecticut, just before we passed into New York State, after she’d been sucking on the oxygen for a while and quiet for a long time, she started to talk, without looking at me. “It’s so odd,” she said, and if, when we’d first met, her voice had been coming up through a wet barrel, then on that ride it was coming up through an echoing, rain-filled quarry. “It’s so odd. I think about my father all the time now. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about him. He wasn’t an educated man, but he could imagine his way into the future in more detail than most people. He saw this, what I’m like now, he saw it twenty years ago. That’s all. When I was a girl everyone else said I looked fine, I was going to be fine, they were going to find a cure, and if I’d been born fifteen years later that would have been true probably, but…year by year he saw that that was just a hopeful lie and it slowly made him crazy. He was shaky to begin with, my mother says-his father went out on the streets a few years after he was married. ‘There’s a gene for quitting in them,’ my mother said once or twice, in her worst moments. From the day I was diagnosed-I was six weeks old-he started calling up doctors and asking them what would happen to me, and when. He never stopped pestering them. He was a big, strong, simple man, a union mason who specialized in heights, working high up. You would have loved him. If the doctors were evasive with him, he’d start to yell. He used to tell my mother about it while she was cooking dinner. I’d be in the living room watching cartoons or something and he’d be pacing back and forth in that tiny kitchen, all upset. ‘They think I don’t understand, Amelia!’ he’d yell. ‘But I understand better than they do! I understand fine! Perfect! Better than they do!’ Now my mother says the same thing.”

  She stopped and put the oxygen up to her nose, and I held the pickup in the middle lane of the highway, flying past the little harbor at Westport, where most of the sailboats were wrapped up and drydocked for winter.

  “Once, when I was eleven, he went to the office of the CEO of a huge drug company. He took a day off from work and dressed up in one of the two suits he owned-one for cold-weat
her funerals and one for warm-weather funerals, he used to say-and he drove his six-year-old Chevy down to some corporate headquarters somewhere in New Jersey, uninvited, without an appointment, and he sat in the waiting room of the president or the CEO. All day. Of course, the man wouldn’t see him. He waited and waited there in his suit as if he was going to sell them something. Finally, at five o’clock he just lost it and he went right in past the secretary and burst into the guy’s office and pounded both his huge fists on the desk and demanded to know how the guy could live with the fact that kids were dying of this disease and his company was spending exactly zero dollars on research for drugs to cure it.”

  All of this didn’t come out at once. She’d speak in long, monotone, wet-quarry bursts, then take another few minutes of oxygen, then say another few sentences. I drove and listened.

  “Know what the CEO said to him?”

  “What?”

  “My mother told me all this after he died. He said, ‘I’m sorry about your daughter, Mr. Rossi, but it’s pure mathematics.’”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning thirty thousand people have the disease in America, and you don’t make enough profit selling thirty thousand of anything to justify spending millions of research dollars. My father couldn’t wrap his mind around thinking like that. He accidentally woke me up when he came home that night, he was yelling so loud. ‘Pure mathematics!’ he was shouting in the kitchen. ‘That bastard! That son of a bitch!’”

  She had started breathing more heavily, so she stopped talking for a while. We hurtled along 1-95, past the knot of glass-walled buildings that is downtown Stamford, all the confidence and optimism there, all the shine. I tried to remember if I had ever heard my father shout, in the house or anywhere besides at a Red Sox game. He arranged deals for businesses and managed money for people in an office in a thirty-four-story building downtown. He advised clients on the best kind of investments to choose so they would be as comfortable as possible when they grew old.

  “They sent me to a camp for CF children when I was fourteen, because they thought it would be nice for me to be around other kids with the same sickness. But it turned out that we all ended up giving our germs to each other. They don’t do CF camps anymore because of that. The camp was where I got the cepacia, and when my father found out about it, and heard what it was, and what usually happens to people who get it…that’s when he jumped. My mother says he gave up, that he just couldn’t take it finally, that he quit. She had to go to work selling shoes at Jordan’s when he died. She’s bitter, she has a right to be-she had to sell our car and never even had another one until I bought her one, four years ago. And probably he did give up. He had problems. I remember some days he wouldn’t go to work and would just lie in his room pretending to sleep…But the thing I remember most about him is…I can almost reach inside myself and put my hand on that feeling, even now…he loved me more than anything, Jake…he…I don’t think everybody has that kind of warmth in their lives.”

  “Not many people have it,” I said.

  “I never told anybody this, not even my mother, but he appeared to me the day after he died. I had a vision of him. There were a lot of people in the house and I went outside alone for some reason, into the back yard, and he was there. He didn’t say anything to me, but he was there and looking at me, and I could feel that love. Really…You think I’m crazy, Jake?”

  “No.”

  “Or that I was temporarily crazy, or not breathing right or something?”

  I shook my head. “How old were you again?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “It’s a lousy age to lose a parent.”

  “But the reason…the thing I want to say is…” She stopped and rested. We crossed into New York State. “After I saw him there, I was never afraid of dying. I’ve seen four friends die of CF, three in the hospital and one at home. Three of them died pretty calmly, but I was holding my friend Celia’s hand when she died. I was seventeen. It was horrible. She was making horrible noises, like a dog that had been hit by a car, huge, drawn-out moans that started in her throat and rattled her whole head. Her hair was on the pillow-I remember this-and it was shaking there as if a wind were blowing through it. Her mother was hysterical, slapping Celia’s feet and legs so hard to try to keep her alive that the nurses had to restrain her. It was horrible. I worry about the pain of dying like that and I get panicky when I’m out of breath, but I never worry about being dead. Whatever else happens, it will mean I’ll just be free of this body. I won’t have to work to breathe.”

  She stopped and rested again. She coughed, looked away from me. “Until I met you, I never even cared about living very much. I’d had so much time to get ready for the idea of being dead, you know. And being stuck in this body was not exactly a picnic.”

  I started to say something, but she waved at me not to.

  “When you jumped in the river that time after I fell in, and you came up sputtering and slicked your hair back and it was all standing straight up, at that minute I started to care. I wanted to have some fun with you. I wanted to see if…I’ve never had that much real luck with men. I mean, I had boyfriends I liked, I had enough sex. But I always felt there had to be some deeper level of intimacy that I could get to, some truer connection I could feel…So now I know I was right about that, and I know what it feels like, and I want a few more years of it. That’s what makes it shitty.” She flung one hand, palm-inward, toward the window. “But I can deal with everything else, the fear and the mess and all the ugliness and everything. I just wanted to tell you that. I just want you to be able to deal with it, too.”

  14

  WE MADE IT TO New York City by 2:00 p.m. and checked into the Waldorf-Astoria, two toothbrushes and the portable oxygen machines for luggage. I had been there once before, with my parents, when we’d gone down to New York for my sister’s sixteenth birthday, and I’d been there once with Giselle. I love the lobby of that hotel, with its tile floor mosaics, and the stupendous bouquet of flowers in a vase there on a mahogany table. I feel religious in old hotels, an urge to believe, to worship. I don’t know why. I mentioned that to Ellory once, and, without even having to think about it, he said that the whole purpose of prayer and fasting and meditation and the monk’s life was to make you stop taking everything for granted, make you actually see a table or a tree or a person, instead of worrying about survival and pleasure all the time. If you can just do that, he said, then you’re all set, as far as God goes.

  So I guess I was all set then, in the Waldorf-Astoria, because when I walked into the lobby from the street, holding Janet’s hand, I was seeing everything clear-eyed.

  When we got up to the room, Janet wrapped herself in the thin chenille spread and fell asleep with her clothes on. I stood at the window and looked down on Fiftieth Street and everything was a little bit shocking to me in a way that I’d almost forgotten things could be-the tar rooftops and rust-stained water towers, the windows across the way with their pigeons sitting on stone sills; down below, Christmas lights, and yellow cabs angling across traffic lanes; crowds of people on the sidewalk, so many histories there, so many different worries and loves and connections. I watched the light and color seep out of the day. I put one fingertip to the cool glass. I felt like I was linked to Janet and had been linked to her for centuries, and that we were both linked to every person in that city, and at the same time I felt a kind of warm solitariness. For a little while, everything was exactly in its place, all of it made of the thinnest porcelain. In the next breath it could all shatter and remake itself in a different form and nothing would be lost.

  I ordered a twenty-dollar glass of brandy from room service, gave the young man who brought it a ten-dollar tip, and sat there sipping as the room went dark. I imagined that Janet and I had children, a boy and a girl, adopted from Vietnam for some reason. They were three or four years old, precious creatures. We were on vacation in New York with them, showing them the holiday decorations, taking
them into toy stores, zipping their jackets, holding them when they threw tantrums or when they were cold. I was connected to them in the same way I was connected to everyone else, only more deeply, more warmly.

  Janet said “Beethoven” in her sleep. She was a gray shape on the bed. I breathed in and let my breath slowly out, and soon I was just my ordinary self again, sitting in a hotel room with a glass in one hand, two brownish drops in the bottom of the glass, a dark night and street noise and a good soul on the bed there, near me, leaking away.

  When Janet woke up I suggested a room-service dinner, but she said she was feeling strong, she wanted to go out. She was using the oxygen on and off. We called down and asked the concierge to recommend someplace exotic and not too dressy and we ended up taking a cab to a Ukrainian restaurant on Thirty-fourth Street. There we had bowls of bloodred borscht with dollops of sour cream floating in them, and then small dumplings in a thin sweet sauce. Janet ate almost none of her soup, and only two dumplings. She sipped from a cup of tea, took some hits of oxygen. I ate everything in front of me and then everything that was left over in front of her. I drank a glass of straight vodka and then two more.

  “Are you getting drunk, Jake? I don’t mind if you do. Are you a mean drunk?”

  “Goofy.”

  “When’s the last time you were drunk?”

  I thought, immediately, of lying to her, then caught myself and said, “September 11, 2001, beginning at about four o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “When you knew Giselle was dead?”

  I nodded.

  “And then you gave up sex for a year?”

  I nodded again. The couple at the next table looked over at me.