Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

“I want one thing from you,” I said, when no one could hear. “I want the home address of the surgeon.”

“His name is Leicus Vaskis. His address, home address, is in Dover, Massachusetts, I believe. I could perhaps find it for you, though it would be highly irregular for me to give that information out.”

“This seems like a good time for highly irregular, don’t you think?”

He looked at me. He raised and lowered his eyebrows.

“I want your word that if he agrees to do it, you’ll recommend that the insurance company pay for it.”

He raised his eyebrows a second time. It was some kind of island code for yes. He said, “If all other factors are in order, I would surely consider doing that.”

“Why didn’t you consider doing it before?”

“Because the chances of success at this point are exceedingly slim, sir. Because I wasn’t her doctor. Because it should rightly have been tried two weeks ago if we were going to try it.”

“How much time do we have before…before it would be too late to try?”

“At the minimum, two days. At the maximum, I would guess, ten days.”

I asked il dottore another handful of questions, yanking the information out of him, short melodies of polite and beautifully cadenced speech, and then I thanked him three times and nearly crushed his hand in mine, and, instead of waiting for the elevator, I ran down the four flights of stairs.

From a pay phone in the lobby I called Gerard’s cell. I knew he would be at the job site, and I guessed he’d be putting hardware on the louvered bifold doors in the professor’s new bedroom. Every couple of weeks he changed the way he answered his phone: sometimes it would be a quote from Anna Akhmatova, or a scrap of T. S. Eliot; because he had a fondness for Chinese women, he’d ask a waiter at a Chinese restaurant how to say, “I know you love me,” in Mandarin, and then practice it until he believed he’d gotten it right. Anything but a simple “hello.” It was funny sometimes; other times it made you crazy.

“Nixon residence. Gerard the plumber,” he said when he picked up.

“Gerard.”

“Speaking.”

“I talked to Ouajiballah, and it’s a possibility.”

“That’s what we like to hear!” he said. “What’s Janet’s blood type?”

“O-positive, like me.”

“I can’t doan, then. I’m AB-negative. I stayed up until three last night doing research.”

“Alright.” I kicked the base of the telephone, hard. “Alright, we’ll find somebody. Do you know how to get to Dover?”

“Of course. I go there regularly. My bookie lives there.”

“Forget the closet hardware for now. And forget the damn jokes, will you please? Meet me at my place at nine-fifteen.”

“Yes, Mister Liddy,” he said, and hung up.

I swung by Doctor Ouajiballah’s office, which was in a building next to the hospital. When I told his secretary my name, she handed me a manila envelope, which I opened in the hallway. Inside was a piece of paper with the logo of a pharmaceuticals company on it and beneath the logo: “1339 Madison Road.”

AT THAT POINT in my painting career, I’d had three solo shows, all at the same small gallery between Newbury and Boylston Streets. In order to get my paintings there-physically move them there, I mean-I’d built a wooden box that just fit between the wheel bays in the bed of the pickup, and a balsa-wood rack (the same light, strong wood that racing shells used to be made from) that could be slid neatly into the box. I’d wrap the canvases loosely in plastic and bubble wrap and slide them into the rack so they were standing up on one edge. A piece of quarter-inch-thick red rubber glued to the top of the box kept the rain and snow out.

I screeched up in front of the apartment and double-parked there, flashers on. Gerard was waiting. He and I cleaned some wood scraps and a sawhorse out of the bed and threw them on the frozen mini-lawn. We carried the rubber-topped box down from my apartment and bolted it in place with freezing fingertips. I ran back up, checked the portrait of Janet to make sure the new paint had dried, then wrapped it as if I were taking it to the gallery to be shown. I carried the painting, Gerard carried the rack. We slid everything into place in the box in the truck bed, closed and bolted the box, slammed the tailgate, and headed off.

“Sorry about the blood type,” Gerard said, when we were on our way.

“We’ll find somebody.”

“What about your brother?”

“My brother smokes.”

“We’ll broadcast an appeal. I dated a woman at WCVB, she’ll-”

“The hospital won’t allow any publicity.”

“Screw the hospital. What can they do?”

“They’ll refuse to do the operation. Ouajiballah told me. They don’t want some shithead coming in and saying he’ll be more than happy to give a lobe of his lung…for fifty thousand bucks or something.”

“Or her firstborn.”

“Right. Nice.”

“Sorry.”

“The first step is getting this guy to agree to do it. Ouajiballah says he’s an odd duck. He’d never even ever speak a single word to the person he put the lungs into, never even see them when they were conscious. He refused to talk to the press. He’d just come into the hospital in a kind of zone, go into the operating room, stand there for six hours, do something that about ten other people on earth can do, and go home.”

“A psycho.”

“Right. Psycho-genius.”

“I can relate. Why the painting?”

“He retired three weeks ago. The painting is the best bribe I could think of on short notice.”

“Ah,” Gerard said. “Something for the man who has everything.”

I AM A VERY CALM PERSON. I inherited that from both sides of the family. It wasn’t unusual for my mother or father to receive an urgent phone call at home, a nurse saying a patient had taken a sudden turn for the worse, or a client panicking about oil futures. Under my parents I’d served a kind of apprenticeship of calm.

But as we drove out of Boston into the picket-fence suburbs, I could feel a sort of salty panic rising like a tide in the cab of the truck. The sky was a woolly gray and the air outside cold and hard as metal. I had a feeling that Janet was going to die on that day. I had given Amelia the number of Gerard’s cell phone, and I kept expecting it to ring, and to have Gerard hand it to me across the seat, and to hear Amelia’s voice on the line, shaking with terror.

But the phone didn’t ring. The premonition about Janet built up in me. The nice houses we drove past turned into nicer houses, until, by the time we crossed the Dover line, “house” wasn’t even the right word anymore.

We could not find a single restaurant or public building in Dover. Finally we saw a library, and stopped there to ask how to get to Madison Road. Even after we found Madison Road, we had to drive the entire length of it-about two miles-three times before we could be sure which long, unmarked driveway corresponded to the address Ouajiballah had given me.

“And I thought you grew up in a fancy neighborhood,” Gerard said.

We turned in between two shoulder-high fieldstone pillars with stone lions sitting regally on top. The driveway was hard-packed gray gravel, and at first, to either side, we saw only hardwood trees with red brambles on the lower tier, the bare cold branches and trunks running the whole spectrum of grays and blacks and browns. A quarter-mile in, the terrain to the left of us opened into pastureland with white rail fencing enclosing it, and what might have been mistaken for a hotel-gray-shingled, many-windowed, three-floored-in the distance. A Thoroughbred horse cantered riderless toward the house, as if hurrying to announce our arrival.