Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

To someone used to the Rhode Islands and New Hampshires of this world, Pennsylvania seems like an enormous state, the Montana of the east. I remember Gerard saying, after his cross-country bike trip the summer of his divorce, that Wyoming and Idaho were nothing compared to Pennsylvania, where, instead of one long climb and one long descent, you had an endless series of exertions and exhilarations, pain and freedom, pain and freedom, sweat and pain and then wind in your face and pure effortless speed.

From time to time I would feel Janet looking at me in a way she had not looked at me before our monastery visit. But we said almost nothing and did not touch. We drove and drove.

The place where we finally stopped was a humble little city in the middle of the Alleghenies. A few months earlier, nine miners had been trapped in a coal shaft there for three days before being pulled out. They had gone through something unforgettable, horrible. And the people who rescued them had been smart and brave, and all kinds of other people had given food and help. But something about it sickened me: the news anchors with their manufactured earnestness, the way the reporters seemed almost to enjoy it, locals enjoying the attention, too; the way, after a certain critical point, you could smell the book deals and movie deals, as if all of it had been nothing more than food for a ravenous entertainment machine. Not long after the miners’ ordeal, I gave my television set away to one of the local homeless shelters. I did not know how you were supposed to tell about that kind of terror, that kind of worry that someone you loved might slowly suffocate underground while you wanted to help them and couldn’t. But I knew a sour note when I heard it, and the TV, it seemed to me, had been full of sour notes all that year.

The pickings were a bit slim thereabouts, but I found the nicest hotel I could. We walked the streets for a while to work off the dullness of the drive, then ate at a steak house, went back to the room, and left the lights out.

“Are we there yet?” Janet asked. We were on the fourth floor and she was standing at a half-open window looking down at the lazy traffic.

“Almost.”

The day had been warm for October-low seventies-and at lunch she’d changed into the other dress she’d brought, a summery dress with small yellow flowers everywhere on a sky-blue background. I stood behind her, unzipping it. When I had unzipped it as far as her hips, I tugged it down off her shoulders, and when she took her arms away from the windowsill, the dress fell around her feet. Carefully, as if we had all of time in front of us, I picked up the dress and lay it on one of the beds. I put my hands on her bare shoulders and we stood that way, front to back, looking out. “The kids are asleep,” I said. “I checked.”

“You’re nervous again. I could feel it at dinner.”

“Calm is my middle name.”

“You’re going goofy.”

“Highway hypnosis,” I said. “Hydroplaning. Driver’s side air bags. My other truck is a Cadillac.”

“Jake.”

“What.”

“Take off the rest of my clothes.”

I did that. Still, she did not turn around. Our breathing was more similar now.

“Is there something here you want me to see?”

“Tomorrow there is.”

“Alright. Are your clothes off?”

“No.”

“Is my body exciting to you? I’m not fishing for… my hips seem wide to me, my feet seem large. I don’t think that would be exciting. This body doesn’t work right in so many ways I just want it to be right in one way.”

Instead of answering I lifted up her hair and kissed the back of her neck. Which was saltier than any normal back of the neck should have been. Which was the whole problem. I kissed the back of her neck and then I kissed the back of where her lungs were, and then kissed down bit by bit to her heels. She turned around and I kissed slowly back up, not touching the usual sex places but spending time on the bones at the top of her hips, the insides of her elbows, her collarbone, her throat. She stood still and didn’t touch me, but the tightness came out of her muscles almost as it had when she’d fallen asleep against me the night before.

“Cells singing,” she said, at one point.

I kissed her mouth, and because she could go a fairly long time that week without coughing, it was a long kiss, something new for us.

For some reason then, I bent down and licked the surgery scars on her belly, which she’d thought were so ugly that she’d stopped ever wearing a two-piece bathing suit, thirteen years old. I kissed the soft fleshiness of her breasts as if I could heal what lay beneath them, as if the pure force of my wanting pleasure for her could pass through skin and flesh and blood and cauterize the colonies of bacteria. Cells singing. In fact, the bad bacteria communicated with each other-researchers had just discovered that-and different ones had different assignments, like bees in a hive, like terrorists on an airliner. The tiny tubes through which her life ran were being choked off in minuscule increments every day, every instant. I kissed and licked her and I believed I could feel all that going on inside her and I wanted to burn down into her with what was in the middle of me, with the good in me, the good-wanting. I did not want any more death and suffering now, in my little world, not for years and years. Sometimes I could feel the force of that not-wanting as it scraped up against something larger. My own power, my own small will, against the huge merciless spinning-out of time. I had made a year of trying to yield to that something larger, and be understanding, mellow, resilient. But I wasn’t in a mood to do that anymore.

The song of Janet’s cells lifted up through her throat and murmured in the back of her mouth, echoing there, as her voice always did, soft flute notes tapping against the sides of a wet barrel. As I kissed her I unbuckled my pants. I pulled the zipper down and let them drop and stepped out of them and she pulled my underwear down, letting her soft hair brush the insides of my legs. I started to move her toward the bed but she brought her face up so that I was looking into her black eyes and she said, “I want it to be not just sex.”

“You’re talking to the right man.”

She turned around and put her hands on the windowsill and I stood very close behind her, with the shadows of the room on us, and the tinny bell of an elevator beyond the door, and then two or three people walking along the corridor, laughing loudly. I had my fingers on the tops of her hip bones and I could feel my pulse in every square centimeter of skin, but I knew exactly what she meant. I wanted a connectedness that was not just about lust, not just about orgasms. I wanted to pull it back from the world of gossipy magazines and television, the seen world, the talked-about and written-about world, the world of pretending life went on forever. Janet wanted that, too, I was sure of it. We were both all full of want on that night.

THE NEXT MORNING we slept in later than usual, and made love again when we woke up. Something had changed in the lovemaking, I don’t know how to say it. It was not driven by anything. There was nothing watching us. We could not have talked during it, or about it.

The diner where we had our late breakfast was busy with lunch customers, so instead of sitting in a booth we sat on stools at the counter. We didn’t talk about our feelings for each other, but those feelings had changed, had moved from blossom to fruit. In some strange way, going to visit my brother had been a kind of public statement for us-though a hermit’s house might seem like an odd place for public statements. I wasn’t a sacrilegious person. Ellory knew I wouldn’t take just any date onto the monastery grounds. And, once we’d been there, Janet understood that, too.