Roland Merullo: A Little Love Story

“The tastes and qualities of the woman involved. What she reads, for instance. How many languages she speaks.”

“What’s German food?” I asked him, because he had gotten married at a young age to a German woman named Anastasia and had his two beautiful girls-five-year-old twins-by her, and the breakup of that union had been so spectacularly awful for him and for Anastasia and for the twins that it hung around his neck like a great weight of guilt and hurt and he still talked about it too much.

“Heavy,” he said, without missing a beat. “Sticks to you.”

“Good. I’ll remember. Seeing the twins this weekend?”

“You should see your face when you ask about them, Colonel.” He looked up at the television screen, but he was not really paying attention to it. “You would be the father of fathers, you know that, don’t you?”

“You’re kicking my bruise.”

“Sometimes a bruise needs a good kick,” he said. “I’ll call you tonight, either just before midnight or just after.”

“Don’t.”

“I will, though. I know myself.”

AT FIVE MINUTES to seven I gave a dollar to the valet attendant at Diem Bo and straightened the lapels of my sport jacket. It was a beautiful September night, clear and warm, with enough summer still in it to make you believe the world was a good and happy place, and the couples you saw strolling on New-bury Street were destined for long peaceful lives together.

As I was walking up Diem Bo’s brick front steps, I was greeted by an imaginary messenger from the world of ugly thoughts. A troll, a goblin, an ugly little creature from the kingdom of fear. His message went something along the lines of: Why this again? But I knew why. For the previous twelve months I had been skating over the surface of things, and I worried that, if I kept at it too long, I’d end up like some of the guys I knew in the trades, plumbers and painters and masons-decent enough thirtyish and fortyish men who could not really carry on a conversation with a woman, and who skipped along from Monday Night Football to darts at the local pub to long days with the mortar and cinder blocks, or hammer and two-by-eights, and who were afraid to ever talk about anything more interesting than what had gone on last Thursday night in the pocket-billiards league, or the latest Red Sox game, or the last time they’d had a blow job.

I wasn’t like that. Gerard wasn’t like that. But Gerard, at least, had his children to keep him honest. I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day that what you’d told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You’d had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in a tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half what it could be.

I looked up from that pleasant thought, inside the door of Diem Bo now, and saw Janet Rossi at a window table halfway back in the room. There was a tall glass of iced coffee in front of her. I spend a lot of time looking at faces, and her face was not beautiful in the way models’ and actresses’ faces are supposed to be, but pretty in a way all her own: shining black hair, black eyes, a slightly bent nose, and a wide mouth. There was something-a kind of tough smartness maybe-shining quietly out from her. Instead of walking down the long narrow room, I waited for the hostess to come over and escort me, and I watched in the meantime. Janet put a handkerchief to her mouth and coughed. It was a lousy time of year for a cold.

She was wearing a black dress cut low enough to show the bones on the front of her chest. She smiled when I sat down, a large, even smile that lit up her eyes, one slightly crooked tooth upper left, one freckle beside her nose. I have funny hair, “awkward hair” my girlfriend Giselle used to call it, the kind that stands up too straight, so that if you cut it short like I do, it can look ragged and boyish. I thought Janet might be smiling at my hair but was too polite to say anything.

As I sat down I accidentally knocked a fork off the table. “So, how was your day, honey?” I said, after the noise of the clattering fork had died down in my mind. “Kids okay? Sitter come on time?”

She just looked at me and pushed the long black hair off her right cheekbone. She touched her thumb and middle finger to the iced-coffee glass. “You’re a little weird, aren’t you,” she said, in a tone that had a couple of spoonfuls of regret in it.

I shook my head. “A little nervous, that’s all. I’m not exactly Joe Date.”

“Joe Date?”

I felt like I had fallen on my knees in a puddle of mud, and now, to make up for it, I was falling on my chest, with a white shirt on. “How are you?” I asked.

“Fine. Are you insinuating you don’t go on many dates? Married or something?”

“Never married.”

She took a sip of her coffee. “Why? You’re what, about twenty-eight? Nice-looking.”

“Thirty,” I said. I had a glass of water up to my face for protection. I saw Jason or Dominick or Adam-who-will-be-your-serverperson, off at another table, and with all my heart I was willing him to come over and let-me-tell-you-about-tonight’s-specials. Janet had me pinned down with the black eyes. She coughed and tried to hold it in. She wanted an answer.

I moved my left foot and felt the fork down there. “I have seven kids out of wedlock,” I said. “That’s why. I’m up to my forehead in credit-card debt. I’m hyperactive. Women’s bodies make me uncomfortable. You’re nice-looking and not married either, right? It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bad person.”

She almost seemed to be smiling. She hadn’t gotten up and walked out, at least, leaving me to pay for her Vietnamese coffee.

“No.”

“Hi. I’m Brian and I’ll be your server tonight.”

“And just in time,” I said.

Brian was tall and wide-shouldered, handsome as a shirt model. He blinked twice and started to try to get us to buy drinks before we ate. I could see in his face and hear in his voice that he was the type of person who was nervous around people and pretended not to be. He’d built an elaborate personality over his nervousness. He’d developed an armor, an act, a defensive outgoingness. It was the kind of thing that made me dislike someone right away. And the name was no good, besides. One of God’s little jokes.

I said, “We’ll both have the special.”

“There are two specials tonight.”

“We’ll have one each.” I turned back to Janet. “Would you pick the appetizers and dessert?”

Jason went into one of the speeches he had memorized: “The appetizer special tonight is braised scallops in a lemon butter saffron sauce with shallots and thinly sliced Shiitake mushrooms, finished with a kumquat glaze.”

“We’ll try one,” Janet told him. “Two forks, please.”

I could tell by the way she said “forks” that she was a real Bostonian.

“I’ll have what she’s drinking,” I said.

Adam wrote this down and then began to tell us what the two dinner specials were. I put my hand on his arm. “We’ll have them,” I said. “One each. We’ve been married eight years, this is our anniversary, we’re trying to introduce some unpredictability into the relationship, so we don’t really want to know what we’re having, if that’s okay with you.”

Dominick looked at me earnestly. The menus were huge and he was awkward collecting them. “Anything to drink?” he asked.

“What she’s having.”