Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

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.

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 .

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.