Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

The scene inside was not a highly original one. The office was small. Janet’s desk faced the doorway, an old green-upholstered armchair in front of it. Behind the desk, with one large window as background, was the chair she sat at when she worked, and she was standing to the side of that chair, holding the top front of her dress together with one hand. Her hair hung messily over one side of her face and it was easy enough to see, in her eyes and the muscles around her mouth, that she was angry and upset. There was a wash of fear there, too. Before that moment, I had never seen fear on Janet’s face. I’d seen her cough until she almost lost consciousness, and I’d heard her talk about having her stomach cut open when she was twelve years old, and how she had become infected and sparked a fever of a hundred and five and almost died. But I had never heard the bruise of real fear in those stories, or seen it where I saw it now.

On the opposite side of her chair was the splendid governor of Massachusetts, the Honorable Charles S. Valvelsais, who had been elected in part by promising to make sure the legislature funded preschool and after-school programs for children from poor families-a promise he’d made good on. He was wearing a white shirt and a loosened tie. He also looked upset. There was a multitude of reasons why he could have been upset, but in the second or two seconds before I did what I did, it seemed to me that there weren’t many reasons why Janet would be standing the way she was standing with a button ripped off her dress and that look in her eyes. Governors sometimes yell at the people who work for them. Fair enough. But most governors don’t yell at the people who work for them and tear buttons off those people’s dresses. I was bothered to begin with, being in that building. And I had been a jealous person in a past incarnation, I admit that, and probably hadn’t yet completely reformed.

And so I sort of made a run at all that, without stopping to consider. A straight sprint. Except that the green-upholstered armchair and the heavy oak desk were in the way. So I ran over them, one step up on the chair, one step across the desk, and I leaped over Janet’s computer and onto Governor Valvoline. In mid-leap I remembered that he’d been some kind of judo champion in college. But college was a long time ago for the governor. And probably, whatever the other demands of the political life might have been, he hadn’t spent the past nine years carrying two-by-tens across job sites or walking half-inch sheets of wallboard up two flights of stairs.

We crashed to the floor, two nuts, arms and legs entangled, papers and statues of the Commonwealth and small electrical appliances banging down around us. Someone screamed, Janet probably. The governor was grunting, “I’ll fix… I’ll fix you,” in his most governoresque voice. He tried some kind of judo move on me, taking hold of my arm and using it as a lever to flip me out of the way, but we were on the floor, and the move only partly worked, and then it was all confusion and he was scraping at my face with his fingernails and we were wrestling and grunting and one of my hands flew free and so I punched him at close range, just a little awkward jab, and his nose started to bleed. One of Janet’s cowboy-booted ankles came between us where we struggled on the carpet. She was yelling at us and making small kicks with her foot. We scuttled away from each other and stood up.

I was breathing hard and feeling like a boy. Between breaths I could sense a putrid disgust seeping up from the floor and all around me. The governor was leaning over from the waist, trying to catch the blood in his cupped right hand so it didn’t fall onto his shirt. A very small white-haired woman came through the door with a security guard-not the trooper-right behind her. I had never had much to do with security guards before meeting Janet. He had a gun out and was pointing it, sensibly enough, at me.

The governor pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and put it up to his face. Through the material he said, in a weird voice, a public phony voice, “No, no. Get him out. I fell. I tripped and fell. It’s not broken.” He actually tried to laugh then. The sound came out from under the handkerchief like the chuffing of some animal trying to force its way up through the skin of a human being. “Out,” he commanded. “Everybody but Janet out.”

“Not a chance,” she said, in a shaking voice. She had been standing between us while we calmed down, but had now moved to the other side of her chair. The state trooper appeared at the door. The security guard put his gun back where it belonged, and when he did that I felt as though everything behind my navel-the mucus and blood and half-digested food-settled a few inches lower in a heavy soup. “Out!” the governor said loudly. “I just tripped and fell, that’s all. Everybody out.”

We made a not very graceful exit, me with my clothes all rumpled, and Janet breathing hard and having some trouble getting her sweater off the back of her chair, and Charlie Valvoline putting on a stern, manly face for whoever the older woman was-his secretary, I suppose-and the trooper asking the governor if he was sure he was all right, and the security guard eyeing me all the way out the door, as if, after all those years of just sitting around reading golf magazines, he had wanted more than anything to have been allowed to pull the trigger.

Janet and I walked out of the executive suite and down the long corridor, not touching and not talking. I had been an idiot, I understood that in the most visceral way. A dirty wave was washing over me, a bad mix of feelings from my worst days with Giselle. I shook my head, hard.

We walked down the steps. Before turning with me toward my truck, Janet seemed to waver a moment. We went the two blocks in silence and I realized I had parked near the little Catholic church where Ellory had liked to go after his conversion. I unlocked the passenger door for Janet and she climbed in. When we were pulling out of the parking space she started to cry. I wanted to touch her or find something to say, but wrestling with governors-with anyone, in fact-was not exactly a specialty of mine, and having a gun pointed at me was also not a specialty of mine, and I was not exactly in a state of mind where I could comfort someone else. My ribs and hands were sore, my left cheek was scratched, my left shoulder hurt where Valvoline had done the judo move, and my mind was replaying the scene again and again. So I just pulled out into the smoky madness of Friday-night traffic and listened to Janet cry.

Before the bad scene in the State House, I’d had an idea where we might go that night-we took turns deciding, surprising each other, seeing who could be more inventive. She loved New York City, and that’s where I had been planning to take her. In the fog of bad feelings I thought it would be best to basically stick to the plan, and just take things a minute at a time.

It was stop-and-go all the way down Beacon Street to Clarendon, and then not much better once we reached the entrance to the Mass Turnpike and headed west.

My body stopped shaking. Janet didn’t cry for very long. She coughed, looked out the side window for a while, and then said, “I hate things like that. I hate that you did that.”

“What did he do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Here we are with brutal honesty.”

She kept looking out the window. We were stopped in holiday traffic in a long line of cars and trucks near the first tollbooth, still in Boston. Close enough to turn back.

“He was talking to me. I was trying to get something for him out of my files and I turned around and he was pressing his face close to me, telling me he loved me. I pulled away. I told him he didn’t love me and I didn’t love him, that I was going out with someone now. He reached out for me, not to hurt me but kind of to get me to listen, and he accidentally caught the top of my dress and I pulled away. He started to yell… And then you came through the door like a wild gorilla. I don’t like that kind of thing at all .”