Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

JANET AND I didn’t say a word as we made our way across the field and onto the logging road. We didn’t say anything walking back along the two-lane highway toward where the truck was parked, either. No cars passed, and the moon had swung behind the trees, but there were small breaths of cool October wind against the skin of our faces, and the woods were black and trembling on both sides of us, and we walked through a feeling you can’t find in the city. The whole human drama seemed like just a crazy sideshow, a circus ring of glitter and anger set against some enormous dark background, little wisps of hope here and there.

When we were sitting in the truck with the heater on, I said to her, “New York or by bus?” because I couldn’t yet bring myself to tell her where I was actually planning to go.

And she said, “A decent motel. New York tomorrow, okay?”

There was something strained and unfigurable in her voice. I thought maybe she was in a hurry then, or tired out, that she wanted to get to a motel room with enough time and energy to make love. But when we found a place, and checked in, and had gone into the room and closed the door without turning on the lights-which had become a little ritual for us-she said, “I want to do something different tonight, will you, Jake?”

I said that I would be happy to, depending on what kind of different she had in mind, but probably I’d be happy to.

“I want us to take off all our clothes and sleep next to each other and not make love.”

“Not make love, or not make love and not indulge in any variations on the same theme?”

“Nothing. I just want to talk a little, and then sleep. We’ll make love when we get to New York.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve never done that before.”

“I have,” I said. “I did it lots of times when I was fifteen and sixteen, except the girl wasn’t completely naked and neither was I and it didn’t go on all night.”

“And you remember it fondly,” she said.

“Vividly.”

“It’s one night, Jake. I’d like to try it.”

We tried it. We took off every particle of clothing and climbed into the motel bed where so many other souls had made love and had sex and been angry and hopeful and afraid and alone. We just lay there in the darkness holding hands. It wasn’t too bad until she hooked her left ankle over my right ankle, and I could feel her thigh against my thigh, and the heat of her all down the length of my leg.

“Is this supposed to be in sympathy with Ellory or something?”

“He’s a kind man. I liked him. I liked what he said about pleasure and dying.”

“Are you paying me back for being a gorilla with the governor?”

She pushed me with her elbow, not too gently. “It’s not a punishment, it’s an experiment. It’s just something I want to do. I want to feel what there is between us if we don’t have sex.”

“You can feel what there is between us. Let me turn on my side.”

Another strong elbow. “Stop,” she said. “I mean it. If you can’t handle it I’ll just crawl into the other bed. It’s one night.”

“Alright.”

“I have something important to tell you.”

“Alright,” I said, but in the course of three seconds the air in the room had changed. I breathed in and out. I said, “Is this because of what happened in your office?”

“It has nothing to do with that, and it has nothing to do with meeting your brother. I had already made up my mind before those things.”

“You’re going to become a nun,” I said, because I was nervous then. Memento mori . I was worrying about what Ellory might have said to her when I went outside. I was thinking there are all kinds of deaths and you’d have to be half-machine in order not to remember that.

“Jake. Stop.”

“I’m stopped. I’m ready,” I said, but naturally I wasn’t. All my beautiful thoughts about being in the moment and not being afraid just lifted up and flew out through the cheap drapes and I was left lying there in the body of my actual self.

“I’m going to put my name on the list for a double lung transplant,” Janet said, up into the darkness of the room. “I thought, before, that I’d never want to do that, but now I’m going to.”

WHEN SHE WAS ASLEEP I tried to time her breaths against my own. Three to one-quick short inhales and slower exhales, as if her body didn’t quite have the strength to push all the old air out. I wondered how she could even sleep, breathing that way, and why it didn’t exhaust her by about eleven o’clock in the morning.

I heard trucks going by on the highway next to the motel, and I thought constantly about what she had said. From the hours I’d spent in front of Gerard’s computer I knew what it meant to sign up for a double lung transplant: it was the last miracle a CF person reached for before giving up. Even if she made it to the top of the list of people waiting for new lungs, and even if the operation worked, she’d be condemning herself to a life of even more medication and even more side effects. Tremors, bone loss, sleep problems, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, muscle cramps, increased susceptibility to diabetes and to opportunistic infection. She’d still have cystic fibrosis, but for a year or five years or eighteen years, she’d breathe, and for a while at least the breaths would come easy.

I took her left hand and lay it palm-down on top of my thigh, and put my own hand over it. I tried to calm myself by breathing with her, concentrating hard on that awkward rhythm and the feeling of her hand and nothing else.

But it is hard to keep the mind still like that. I went from the rhythm of our breathing to thinking about what Ellory had said about his wild years. From there I tried to imagine, for the ten thousandth time, what Giselle must have gone through in the hour before she died, and then what dying really was.

Air stopped going into and out of a pair of lungs, that was all. Your heart stopped squeezing and relaxing. Millions of cells stopped doing the kinds of things they had been doing for ten or twenty-seven or ninety years. Clear enough. But if you tried to ask what happened to the part of the person you couldn’t see or measure, the part you envied or argued with or loved, then you sounded like a ninth-grader on marijuana.

It seemed to me, lying there with Janet, skin against skin, that Ellory had come to understand something I didn’t understand-not about death or God as much as about minute-to-minute living. In the sterile room, with the whine of tires and truck engines beyond the windows, I felt that some absolutely essential fact was right there for me to take hold of, right there. I went to sleep reaching for it.

AT BREAKFAST THE next morning I told Janet I had changed my mind about where we were going. “I’ll take you to New York next time it’s my turn to pick,” I said, and she nodded and said that was fine. But there was a strain in my voice, a weight, a bad nervousness. And I knew her well enough by then to see in her eyes that she wanted to talk about it.

When we were in the truck again, I asked if she could deal with four more hours of riding.

“I love riding,” she said. “It’s moving without having to get out of breath.”

“We’re going to Pennsylvania.”

“Fine, Jake. Just go,” she said, but there was something unspoken between us, wisps of warm smoky fear in the air of the cab.

She sat with her bare feet up on the dashboard, one arm dangling out the window, the wind blowing strands of hair around her face. To make it so we didn’t have to talk, I put good music on the CD-John Hiatt, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Springsteen, Chopin, Saw Doctors, Dave Matthews, a little-known Cajun outfit called Doctor Romo.