Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

“Not many people have it,” I said.

“I never told anybody this, not even my mother, but he appeared to me the day after he died. I had a vision of him. There were a lot of people in the house and I went outside alone for some reason, into the back yard, and he was there. He didn’t say anything to me, but he was there and looking at me, and I could feel that love. Really…You think I’m crazy, Jake?”

“No.”

“Or that I was temporarily crazy, or not breathing right or something?”

I shook my head. “How old were you again?”

“Fourteen.”

“It’s a lousy age to lose a parent.”

“But the reason…the thing I want to say is…” She stopped and rested. We crossed into New York State. “After I saw him there, I was never afraid of dying. I’ve seen four friends die of CF, three in the hospital and one at home. Three of them died pretty calmly, but I was holding my friend Celia’s hand when she died. I was seventeen. It was horrible. She was making horrible noises, like a dog that had been hit by a car, huge, drawn-out moans that started in her throat and rattled her whole head. Her hair was on the pillow-I remember this-and it was shaking there as if a wind were blowing through it. Her mother was hysterical, slapping Celia’s feet and legs so hard to try to keep her alive that the nurses had to restrain her. It was horrible. I worry about the pain of dying like that and I get panicky when I’m out of breath, but I never worry about being dead. Whatever else happens, it will mean I’ll just be free of this body. I won’t have to work to breathe.”

She stopped and rested again. She coughed, looked away from me. “Until I met you, I never even cared about living very much. I’d had so much time to get ready for the idea of being dead, you know. And being stuck in this body was not exactly a picnic.”

I started to say something, but she waved at me not to.

“When you jumped in the river that time after I fell in, and you came up sputtering and slicked your hair back and it was all standing straight up, at that minute I started to care. I wanted to have some fun with you. I wanted to see if…I’ve never had that much real luck with men. I mean, I had boyfriends I liked, I had enough sex. But I always felt there had to be some deeper level of intimacy that I could get to, some truer connection I could feel…So now I know I was right about that, and I know what it feels like, and I want a few more years of it. That’s what makes it shitty.” She flung one hand, palm-inward, toward the window. “But I can deal with everything else, the fear and the mess and all the ugliness and everything. I just wanted to tell you that. I just want you to be able to deal with it, too.”

WE MADE IT TO New York City by 2:00 p.m. and checked into the Waldorf-Astoria, two toothbrushes and the portable oxygen machines for luggage. I had been there once before, with my parents, when we’d gone down to New York for my sister’s sixteenth birthday, and I’d been there once with Giselle. I love the lobby of that hotel, with its tile floor mosaics, and the stupendous bouquet of flowers in a vase there on a mahogany table. I feel religious in old hotels, an urge to believe, to worship. I don’t know why. I mentioned that to Ellory once, and, without even having to think about it, he said that the whole purpose of prayer and fasting and meditation and the monk’s life was to make you stop taking everything for granted, make you actually see a table or a tree or a person, instead of worrying about survival and pleasure all the time. If you can just do that, he said, then you’re all set, as far as God goes.

So I guess I was all set then, in the Waldorf-Astoria, because when I walked into the lobby from the street, holding Janet’s hand, I was seeing everything clear-eyed.

When we got up to the room, Janet wrapped herself in the thin chenille spread and fell asleep with her clothes on. I stood at the window and looked down on Fiftieth Street and everything was a little bit shocking to me in a way that I’d almost forgotten things could be-the tar rooftops and rust-stained water towers, the windows across the way with their pigeons sitting on stone sills; down below, Christmas lights, and yellow cabs angling across traffic lanes; crowds of people on the sidewalk, so many histories there, so many different worries and loves and connections. I watched the light and color seep out of the day. I put one fingertip to the cool glass. I felt like I was linked to Janet and had been linked to her for centuries, and that we were both linked to every person in that city, and at the same time I felt a kind of warm solitariness. For a little while, everything was exactly in its place, all of it made of the thinnest porcelain. In the next breath it could all shatter and remake itself in a different form and nothing would be lost.

I ordered a twenty-dollar glass of brandy from room service, gave the young man who brought it a ten-dollar tip, and sat there sipping as the room went dark. I imagined that Janet and I had children, a boy and a girl, adopted from Vietnam for some reason. They were three or four years old, precious creatures. We were on vacation in New York with them, showing them the holiday decorations, taking them into toy stores, zipping their jackets, holding them when they threw tantrums or when they were cold. I was connected to them in the same way I was connected to everyone else, only more deeply, more warmly.

Janet said “Beethoven” in her sleep. She was a gray shape on the bed. I breathed in and let my breath slowly out, and soon I was just my ordinary self again, sitting in a hotel room with a glass in one hand, two brownish drops in the bottom of the glass, a dark night and street noise and a good soul on the bed there, near me, leaking away.

When Janet woke up I suggested a room-service dinner, but she said she was feeling strong, she wanted to go out. She was using the oxygen on and off. We called down and asked the concierge to recommend someplace exotic and not too dressy and we ended up taking a cab to a Ukrainian restaurant on Thirty-fourth Street. There we had bowls of bloodred borscht with dollops of sour cream floating in them, and then small dumplings in a thin sweet sauce. Janet ate almost none of her soup, and only two dumplings. She sipped from a cup of tea, took some hits of oxygen. I ate everything in front of me and then everything that was left over in front of her. I drank a glass of straight vodka and then two more.

“Are you getting drunk, Jake? I don’t mind if you do. Are you a mean drunk?”

“Goofy.”

“When’s the last time you were drunk?”

I thought, immediately, of lying to her, then caught myself and said, “September 11, 2001, beginning at about four o’clock in the afternoon.”

“When you knew Giselle was dead?”

I nodded.

“And then you gave up sex for a year?”

I nodded again. The couple at the next table looked over at me.

“And she wasn’t the love of your life? Brutal honesty.”

“No, she was not. Do you want me to say who the love of my life is?”

She smiled in a way I hadn’t seen her smile in two weeks, and shook her head.

I ordered one more vodka with dessert. My head had begun to shift and shimmer-it wasn’t a bad feeling. But beyond that I felt as though something, some immensely heavy grief, was being laid across my face and ears, fine thin layers of dense wet black cloth, one upon another. The waitresses wore paisley kerchiefs around their hair and short skirts, and ours came with the last vodka and the teapot on a tray beside one thin slice of fourteen-dollar white chocolate pie with a boysenberry sauce.

“Ukraine is famous for fourteen-dollar white chocolate pie slices in boysenberry sauce, you know,” I said.