Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

“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.

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.