Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

“Once.”

“I’ve always believed it was because my being sick turned him off so much.”

“The woman I was with that night wasn’t sick,” I said.

“Was it Giselle?”

It was the first time either of us had spoken that name. I shook my head.

We rode on. After a few minutes I asked Janet why she had told me the Venezuela story just then, and she said she didn’t know.

“Was he the great love of your life?”

“No, you are,” she said, just straight and plain and serious like that, without any drama. And then, “Was Giselle the love of your life?”

I shook my head without looking at her, and then looked. She was almost smiling and seemed very calm. I drove along. We were past the little knot of Hartford by then. “We met in a bar on Boylston Street,” I said. “Three and a half years ago. We had a good time at first. I had my first show, sold a couple of paintings. We went to Mexico. We went up to Quebec City a couple of times. Everything was nice. We fought a lot-stupid little fights-but everything was going along pretty well. She was selling mobile phones and she was good at it, and then she got promoted to regional sales manager and, I don’t know, things started to go sour. She wanted to start having children and I was fine with that idea. But she had a whole plan-three children, a certain kind of house in the suburbs-and I kept saying I’d grown up in a family with three children in a nice house in the suburbs, and there was nothing wrong with it, I just didn’t really want to do it all over again exactly that way. She was pushing me to go back to med school. I kept saying I didn’t want to go back to med school, I wanted to paint. It got to be a regular thing for us-”

“I didn’t know you went to medical school.”

“I quit after the first year. I… we’d go along fine for a few days or a week, sometimes two weeks, then we’d get into the med school discussion, the suburbs discussion.”

“Ellory said you were planning to get married.”

I looked over at her. In that quick glance across the shadowy cab I couldn’t read her face, but there had been a kind of sad, bending note in her voice when she said “married.” It surprised me.

“I thought he might have said something.”

“I asked about the picture on his bookshelf. He said she’d died, he didn’t say how, but he told me you’d been engaged.”

“No,” I said. “We’d talked about it, but no.”

“No ring?”

When she said “ring,” I heard the bending note a second time.

“No.”

“I interrupted you. I’m jealous, I’m sorry. Keep going now, and then after this we never have to talk about it again, alright?”

“Alright. Giselle had grown up poor-her parents were from Brazil, actually. After she met me, she started to make a lot of money and then she started to worry that if she stopped to have kids she’d be poor again. But she didn’t want to leave the kids and fly all over the place every few weeks. It was a big confusion for her. I have plenty of money, you know. I make a good amount from carpentry. I sell a few paintings every year, the apartment is paid for and worth a lot. She knew all that. But… I don’t know… everything got tense. She started to travel more. She started to talk about this guy she worked with. They traveled to sales conferences once or twice together. I met him once. I knew there was nothing going on. But then some more time went by and I wasn’t sure there was nothing going on. I asked her. She got upset. Nothing was going on, nothing. Then the next day she told me they’d gone out for a drink at the last conference and they’d kissed afterwards and made out a little, but she hadn’t gone to bed with him. So I didn’t like that, naturally…She said it was wrong, she was sorry, she would never do anything like that again. From there, somehow, we got into another three-kids-in-the-suburbs fight. A few days went by. We made up. It was rocky for a month or so-this was the summer before this one, a year ago, a little more than a year…She had a meeting in New York and then a conference in San Francisco, and, I don’t know, we were talking on the phone when she was in New York and I had a bad moment-I thought I was done being angry and jealous but I wasn’t-and I asked her if this guy-Brian, his name was-if he was going on the trip with her the next day and she said he wasn’t, and we left it there…And then, afterwards, you know, after the day and the funeral services and everything, I went about three months without checking and then I had another bad moment and I looked up the list of the people who’d been on the plane and Brian’s name was there.”

“She could have just wanted you not to be jealous and that’s why she didn’t tell you.”

“I know that.”

“But you still didn’t go out with anyone else for a year?”

I nodded. I promised myself not to say anything else about it, and then I immediately said, “I did that for myself, for my own guilt. I wasn’t in good shape. Gerard used to take me places like I was a little kid-to his daughters’ dance recitals, to museums, to scuba classes. I was a little zombie-ish for a while. There was so much talk about it, naturally, in the papers every day, on TV every night. People who had lost husbands and wives and children. I stopped reading the papers, stopped watching TV. I banged nails and painted and got through the winter, and in the spring I started driving into the country alone on weekends and sleeping out in the woods in a sleeping bag, or going for long hikes, or going to see Ellory. It was rough for a while and then not so rough, and then I was starting to feel semi-alright again. I remember calling you that first afternoon, from work. Just sort of peeking my nose back into the dating world.”

“And I responded so nicely,” Janet said.

“I was almost better by then. I knew when I put the phone down, after you said no, that I was most of the way better.”

BY THE TIME we got back to Boston it was eight-thirty at night. We stopped for takeout at Fez and set the warm paper bags between us in the cab of the truck on the way to my apartment. While I was getting out plates and glasses, Janet called the governor on his private line and I heard her leaving a message in a don’t-mess-with-me-you’re-lucky-to-have-me voice: “Charlie, Janet. I’m taking the holiday tomorrow. I’ll be in the office Tuesday morning as usual.”

We sat at the small kitchen table I had made from some tiger maple I’d found at a mill in western Massachusetts on my way home from visiting Ellory one time. Maple is a nice-looking wood anyway, but tiger maple has shimmering bands of light and dark running down the grain, so that even a board that’s been planed and sanded perfectly smooth seems to have ripples in its surface. In certain kinds of light, the ripples seem almost to be moving. During the first breakfast we ate together at that table-it was the morning after the third time she slept over-Janet noticed the wood and said how much she liked it. I’d been starting to feel something with her that I didn’t think I was going to be able to let myself feel again, and I was nervous, and in a little spasm of nervousness I started to tell her all about the different woods: how poplar had an olive-green or brownish tint to it and how well it held paint and how it was more stable than pine for interior trim; how southern yellow pine was as hard as some hardwoods, even though it wasn’t one, technically, and so it made good flooring if you didn’t mind the heavy, wavy grain; how the architect I liked to work with ordered screen doors from a tiny company in Maine that made them from South American cedar, which was not really cedar at all but a species of mahogany that was used on the decks of ships because it was resistant to insects and rot and didn’t swell or warp when it got wet. Interesting stuff. I went on and on and she watched and listened and started to smile and finally I stopped and smiled, too. It became a joke with us. We’d be at a bar downtown and she’d say, with a perfectly serious expression, “Jake, what kind of wood is this?”