Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

I like October-early October, especially-in spite of the slow death of things. Janet, it turned out, was a big October fan. And it turned out that we matched up in other ways, too. Drives in the country, Middle Eastern food, art museums, music that ran the spectrum from Bach to Pearl Jam, weekend nights in bed, weekend mornings in bed, spontaneous bursts of harmless adventuring, long rides on Friday nights (it took a while for the replacement parts to come in, but I’d gotten the truck fixed up finally), people who were quirky and generous-we had an appreciation for a lot of the same types of things.

We did not talk about the governor, or Giselle. And we talked only in short, rare bursts about cystic fibrosis-those were the unspoken rules for us. She was getting sicker; it did not take a pulmonologist to see that. And, by the time we’d been going out for a few weeks, I had done so much reading on the disease that I knew where the getting sicker would take her, and along what routes, and about how fast.

I had learned that there are certain kinds of bacteria with pretty names like Burkholderia cepacia and Pseudomonas aeruginosa that thrive in the thick mucus in the lungs of cystic fibrosis people. These bacteria are everywhere-in the skin of onions, in the moist air of a shower stall, in Jacuzzis, in river water-but they move into and out of normal lungs without anyone ever noticing. If they visit the lungs of a person with CF, though, they stay there and form colonies, and the colonies throw up dense films that act as shields against the assault of antibiotics. The delicate tissue of the inside of the lung tries to protect itself against these colonies and becomes inflamed. Over time, the inflammation breaks the cells down so that the complicated system of blood and breath doesn’t work anymore the way it was designed to work. Over time, over almost thirty years in her case, enough lung tissue has starved and rotted so that you can’t walk up three flights of stairs to your boyfriend’s bedroom without sounding like you’ve just been on the treadmill for an hour at the gym.

Near the end of September, Janet’s pulmonologist, whose name was Eric Wilbraham, sent her into the hospital for five days of intravenous antibiotics to try to control the bacteria, and I went there every day after work to make her laugh. One night I caught Doctor Wilbraham in the hallway. I have the bad habit of forming solid impressions about people on first meeting, and I didn’t like him. But we had a pretty good conversation about spirometers, and pseudomonas, and cepacia, and chest physical therapy, and inhaled steroids and Pulmozyme, and things like that. My mother would have been proud. I had become semiknowledgeable on the subject, which was not necessarily a good thing because I could see, beyond the doctor’s pleasant and hopeful science-talk, the outlines of what was happening, and it was like a small, sharp-toothed animal in my gut, gnawing away. In the week before she went into the hospital, Janet had started to use oxygen at night sometimes. Usually she had to stop twice to rest on the way up to my apartment. She was twenty-seven.

After that hospital stay, though-a “tune-up” she called it-she had a good week. The movement into her blood of the most powerful antibiotics in the medical arsenal had beaten back the bacteria. She coughed less, she had more energy, a healthier color returned to her face. She was pretty and hopeful again, the way she had been when I’d first seen her.

By then, Gerard and I had the professor’s addition all closed in and we were nailing up the long, rust-colored rows of cedar clapboard, a job I loved. On the second Friday in October, the start of the holiday weekend, I finished work, went home and showered, and drove down to the State House to pick Janet up. On two other occasions I had been to her office, and had met a couple of her friends there, and I could tell she had been talking to them about me, and that they were examining me to see if I was worthy, which is what friends always do. That night I found a parking space two blocks from the side entrance and went in that entrance, through the security checkpoint and up two flights of stairs. The Massachusetts State House is really a spectacularly beautiful building-murals on the walls, mosaic tile floors, stained glass, carved wood. Someone named Bulfinch designed it, and he went all out to impress people with the authority and importance of government. But for some reason I had never felt comfortable there. Years before, I’d been inside the State House for an Arts Council ceremony. I had won a grant, and though I was glad and honored to have won the grant, the air in the building seemed to press on me from four sides with that history-all golden and flashy on the surface, all dirty and smoky underneath. It was a strange thing: I felt that if I stayed in there too long, I’d never be able to paint again.

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.