Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

I hadn’t seen Janet in nine days. She’d been flying all over the state with our glorious governor and his team on a last-hour vote-getting polka. I opened the door all expectation. She was dressed up for the big night in a dark purple spaghetti-strap dress and her hair was brushed and beautiful, but her cheeks were sunken and her eyes large and the muscles above her collarbones and around her shoulders looked like they’d shrunk by half. In nine days. She watched my eyes as if she knew what she looked like and was hoping something on my face would show her she was wrong, that the mirror lied and the scale lied and the breathing gauges lied. Pity made another run at me then, but I had already made up my mind about pity.

“Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. “Doctor Entwhistle. Come in, you’re right on time.”

After a small hesitation, she shook my hand and smiled. “Hello, Doctor. I have forty-five minutes, tops.”

“Forty-five minutes will do. Come in, take off your dress and your shoes, please, and sit on the edge of the bed.”

When she was undressed and sitting there, I checked the reflexes of her knees with an imaginary rubber hammer and said, “Excellent.” I examined her toes and fingers, running my own fingers along them and feeling the way they were rounded because the blood vessels there had been starved for oxygen for years and years and had grown thick with overwork. She was the perfect patient, and I was a considerate doctor, and, at first, it was just a cute little love game we were playing to keep the conversation away from other things. It was a minute or two before I realized what kind of trouble we were in. But I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I kept going. I wrapped my thumb and middle finger around her left bicep-thinner than my wrist-and pretended it was a blood pressure cuff. “One-forty over ninety-one. Are you agitated?”

“I ran all the way up here,” she said. She coughed.

I took her pulse-eighty-one-pretended to flash a light in her eyes, poke an otoscope in her ears, check her tonsils with an imaginary tongue depressor.

At last she said, “I’m having sexual problems, Doctor. It’s embarrassing to talk about.”

“Ah.”

There was some kind of warning siren going off inside me. I ignored it. I asked her to stand up and remove her brassiere and I spent a long time examining her breasts and nipples, and then the scars on her belly. “Trouble digesting?”

“Only when I eat.”

“Ah.”

I turned her around and tapped gently on the bones of her spine. I worked down from the back of her neck, feeling my way lightly along the rounded trail of bones between her shoulder blades, then along the lower curve. I folded down the elastic top of her underwear and pressed my thumbs in against the dimples there, expertly. An expert failure. Standing close behind her, I ran my palms down the outsides of her upper arms and she shivered. And then, because pity made another run at me, I wavered for two seconds, and then just plunged in. Pretending to hold a stethoscope to the back of her lungs and pretending to steady her with my left arm around the front of her chest, I said, “Have you ever had a bronchoscopy?”

“A hundred and eleven times.”

I could hear what I wanted to hear in her voice then, a will toward humor, toward grace, a courage so enormous it seemed to radiate around her like a second body. I felt small beside it. I said, “Deep breath for me now, Ms. Ross.”

“Rossi.”

She took a shallow breath, all wet trouble.

“Again, please.” I was running my hand across her nipples.

“Cough now, please,” I said, and she started coughing and could not stop. She coughed and coughed and sucked in air, her back muscles tight as iron. I panicked inside myself. I reached back on the bed and balled up my T-shirt and held it to her mouth and she spit into it. I felt a change in her then, an anger or a frustration or a bitterness rising. She wiped her mouth and threw the T-shirt hard at the TV cabinet and turned to me, but before she could say anything I was kissing her mouth, the kiss of kisses, and then turning her onto the bed on her back.

And then I was trying, with everything inside me, with all my own pain and understanding of pain, with my own small supply of courage and strength, with everything the world of work and musing had taught me about being alive, I was trying to show Janet what I felt about her. I did not want to try to squeeze it into words because words cannot hold certain things, any more than a painting or a photograph can.

Beneath me on the bed she was weaker than I remembered, her skin warmer, the arms around my back sharper-edged. I wanted to put my whole self inside her, muscles, bones, breath. I timed my breath to her breathing. I slid my right hand underneath her and lifted her off the sheets with me and I wanted to have pity on her and have no pity at all. I wanted her to feel like she was running but without having to run. I wanted her to escape the pain of breathing hard and be lifted out of her body and into a warm sea of pleasure. My face was pressed into her neck and she was humming a quiet song, coughing once, taking quick breaths and then making a string of sounds like the sound of someone working, pushing toward something, more and more urgently, and then all the urgency was gone and she was breaking open against me, a breaking apart, a death, two deaths, and for a little blessed while we weren’t two packages of bone and blood, but one package, every pain erased, every protection gone. I had never felt anything like that.

LATER, GOING DOWN to the ballroom in an empty elevator, Janet held my arm in a way that seemed to me a gesture of pure love. She had called the governor’s suite, and when she got off the phone she told me they could tell now-from returns in certain precincts in the western part of the state-that Valvoline was going to win by four percentage points or so. “He calls them ‘manure-rakers,’” she said. “It’s shorthand for rural people. ‘Spuds’ is shorthand for Irish, ‘Garlics’ for Italians. ‘Twiddles’ for gay people. As in: ‘Nettie, get me a meeting with some voices in the Twiddle vote, but make sure it’s not on TV.’”

“We should be glad then, Nettie. The manure-rakers have come through for our guy.”

“We should be glad,” she said, “because Nettie still has her health insurance.”

But we weren’t glad then, in spite of the feeling we’d had on the big hotel bed upstairs. I remember the warmth of her arm against my body as we came out of the elevator, and I remember walking down the corridor and hearing a burst of wild happy yelling pour out of the open ballroom doors, and I remember feeling that we were being sucked away from the mysterious and the real, and back tight against something toxic, a Superfund site of the soul. It wasn’t only Valvoline. It was just all of us, shit-rakers, Twiddles, Spuds, stuck in our individual skin-packages, afraid of our dying and our demons, always clawing for more-a breath, a break, an orgasm, a corner office. Janet and I moved into the ballroom as if wading into a hot bubbling tidal pool.

We sipped from plastic glasses of wine. Janet introduced me to people she knew, mostly State House types who had played some small role in the campaign. I watched the way her friends looked at her, and I could see, in their faces, beneath the happy gleam of victory, a species of fear, of love.

At quarter past ten, when Valvoline came down for his speech, the room exploded with cheering and applause. He worked his way up onto the stage. Women were hugging him. Men were shaking his hand and looking into his eyes and clapping him on the back as he squeezed past them toward the podium. For a little while, Janet went up on stage with the crew, and when the governor was introduced I clapped right along with everyone else, and even flashed him the thumbs-up sign once, when I thought he looked my way.