Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

“Siberian chestnut,” I’d say. “Very rare.” And I’d go off on some made-up spiel about how the chestnuts themselves were considered to have aphrodisiac qualities, or how the black Siberian squirrel gnawed the twigs to survive in bad winters. Some elaborate mishmash like that, just to hear her laugh.

She’d taken her pills and she’d done her chest PT with the vibrating vest, and while I was putting together the food, she sat running her hands over the tabletop. We’d bought lamb kebabs with hummus, pieces of warm pita bread that the people at Fez baked themselves, a spicy yogurt dip-and there were Fudgsicles in the freezer for dessert. I opened a bottle of white wine-Sardinian, the same Argiolas we’d had on our first date at Diem Bo. Janet was coughing more already. Just as I sat down she coughed and got up and went to the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush. When she came out she had one very small droplet of blood on her lower lip. I started to eat.

“So how did you ever end up working for this guy?” I asked her after a while.

She looked up, searching for jealousy in my face, but there was not much jealousy there anymore. No jealousy at all, really. Almost none.

She said, “I was having a conversation with some friends in my college dorm and I was saying how rotten the world was, how the politicians were corrupt, how the system was all twisted and skewed. One of my friends said, ‘Why don’t you do something about it, then, instead of just whining?’ So I decided to. I went to the Kennedy School and got my master’s and Charlie was running and he was promising to fund children’s programs and completely eliminate poverty in Massachusetts-not cut it down, completely eradicate it.”

“I remember.”

“Nobody says that. Most politicians don’t even mention the poor.”

“The poor don’t fund-raise,” I said.

“So I thought it would be perfect. I was still fairly healthy. I thought I’d do that for a while and then, if they came up with a cure, I’d try something radical like running for Congress. I was twenty-three, a bit on the naive side.”

“You’d make a good congresswoman.”

She waved a lamb kebab and coughed. A little flash of pain cut across her face.

“I mean it. You care about people. You’re tough, you’re smart.”

“One,” she said, “I’m not a millionaire. Two, I’d go crazy saying the same thing over and over and over again during a campaign. Three, Americans don’t vote for sick people. Four, I’m not that great a compromiser. Even if I got elected somehow, I’d just alienate everyone. I have crazy ideas. I think we should put a lot of money into desalination plants, for example, because the key commodity of the future will be water, not oil. I think each little town and neighborhood should have its own high school again and that the buildings themselves shouldn’t hold more than about twenty classrooms, and that the healthy kids should spend some time every week tutoring the special-needs kids, and that nursing homes should be built right there against the school in the same complex-they do that already in some places, but not with high schools, usually. I think everyone should do six months of volunteer work between high school and college-not just grunt work, painting bandstands and bleachers, but hospice work or environmental work or…” She coughed and coughed and made another trip to the bathroom. When she came back the drop of blood was gone and she went on talking as though she’d never left. “…or military service. Everyone. Every single kid, even the ones in wheelchairs. I think women should have six months’ paid vacation after they have a baby.”

“I’ll write you in,” I said. “You can run as the Idealist Party candidate.”

“It’s just smart,” she said. “It’s all just really practical.”

“Or you could run on the electrocute criminals, cut-art-in-the-schools, hate-your-gay-neighbor platform like the guy Valvoline’s running against.”

“Right.”

“Makes your boss look good.”

“He changed, Jake. Power changes people. The fear of losing power changes people most of all. His wife left him-because he’d changed so much-and then he panicked and changed some more. He’s not a bad man.”

“Just small,” I said, without thinking. But almost all the ugliness in me had been washed out during that day. It was as if I’d finally decided that I’d had enough jealousy for one lifetime. It must have showed in my voice because Janet was watching me, and after a few seconds she smiled her pretty smile, and it was like forgiveness.

AFTER THE MEAL I said I wanted to paint her and she said she didn’t mind, but that she was tired, and could probably only stay up another hour or so.

In the warm months Janet liked to sleep naked. But it was getting colder by then, and she had a pair of sea-green silk pajamas she kept at my apartment in a drawer with a change or two of clothes and some medicines. I turned on the air purifier I had bought after the second week we were together. She put the pajamas on and sat in a chair with her legs crossed at the knee and her arms crossed at the wrist, looking straight at me. I paint in oil on linen, as I said. Linen is expensive, but I like it because, even though most people say it doesn’t make any difference, I think it makes the edges of things not perfectly sharp and if you don’t lay the paint on too thick, it can give everything a smooth quality. I had a canvas already gessoed. In the center of it, I painted just the sea green with its light and shadows, and worked for some time getting the arms and legs right. Then I painted Janet’s face and hair, and then I used a #16 brush and almost a whole tube of Paynes gray to make a background. When I had it roughed in enough so that I thought I could finish it without her being there, I stopped and cleaned up and we went to bed.

I lay on my back in the bed and she lay half-leaning against me with her face on my shoulder and one arm across my chest. When she coughed she brought her right hand up to her mouth and trapped the cough between her palm and the skin of my bare shoulder. Between coughs I could hear her breath rattling around. We lay like that for a long time without saying anything.

“What is the waiting list looking like?” I asked her finally.

“I’m eighteenth. In Massachusetts they’ve been averaging about two a month.”

“So next summer.”

She coughed, then nodded her head against my shoulder, but I listened to her breathing and I knew she wouldn’t live until the next summer. I was sure she knew it, too.

She wrapped herself tight against me, one arm over my chest, right thigh on top of my thighs, face against my neck, and we fell asleep that way.

THE NEXT DAY, Columbus Day, there were tremendous winds in Boston during the morning hours, winds like I had never seen except in the edge of Hurricane Belle. The tops of the trees whipped back and forth. Leaves and newspapers and people’s hats went skidding down the sidewalks like exuberant children. Janet and I slept late, then she sat for another little while and I worked some more on the painting. Afterwards, we took a trolley to the North End and had pasta and salad in a place with six tables, where, before you ordered, they brought you small bowls of olive oil and a basket of hard-crusted bread that was soft as cotton inside.

After the meal I said I wanted to walk to the Back Bay, my favorite part of Boston. In the 1800s it was just marshy tidal flats, but as the city grew, the area became more valuable and the marshes were filled in with thousands of tons of granite from quarries in Needham. Something about the flat straight avenues lined with four- and five-story brownstones, something about the particular mix of buildings on Boylston Street-clothing stores, churches, skyscrapers, little take-out Thai and Szechwan eateries-something about the beggars and businessmen, something about it just felt to me the way a city is supposed to feel-edgy, busy, a visual feast. The winds had mostly died down. Janet said she was feeling strong enough to walk, but by the time we’d gone as far as the Public Garden-maybe a mile and a half-she was having a hard time. When I glanced at her once I could see that the muscles of her forehead were pinched tight, as if she were working out some complicated math formula, when all she was trying to do was breathe.