Roland Merullo: A Little Love Story

“Wise of you to drop out of med school,” Gerard said.

But I had grown up around doctors. Doctors didn’t live like this.

Gravel crackled under the truck tires. When we reached a high spot in the driveway, about halfway between the street and the house, I could see two people jogging in front of us, climbing a long, gentle slope that crested just ahead of them and then flattened as it approached the front door. A few more seconds and I could tell that the runners were a man and a woman. They were dressed in blue sweat suits, the woman’s long straight black hair floating up and then bouncing down against her back, the man wearing a dark wool winter cap.

They were running fairly hard. They must have heard the truck wheels on the gravel because they moved to their left when we approached. As we passed I gave them as much room as I could, and slowed down and lifted my left forearm in a casual greeting, without looking at them. The way any deliveryman would.

We pulled up just beyond the path to the front steps, and got out. The man and the woman were probably seventy-five feet behind us, sprinting now, we could hear their running shoes scuffing and slapping the dirt, and then the sound of labored breathing.

I lowered the tailgate. Gerard and I started to loosen the wing nuts at the four corners of the box, but it was slow going in the cold, and by the time we had the wooden cover off and had set it in the pickup bed, the runners had reached their finish line-which seemed to be about even with the back end of the truck-and were trotting in loose circles and breathing hard, then walking with hands on hips. Ducking beneath the ladder rack, we tugged the bubble-wrapped painting out of its box, and balanced it on the tailgate. Gerard hopped down, then held it steady while I hopped down. When we started to loosen the outer covering of bubble wrap, I could not keep myself from glancing at the man and the woman again. The doctor was lanky and wide-shouldered, sharp-featured, sixtyish, breath spewing out of him in big clouds. I had told myself that I’d be able to guess our odds as soon as I had a good look at his face, but I’d been wrong about that. My hands were working the masking tape, and I didn’t want eye contact yet, and just as I started to glance away the woman turned toward me, breathing hard, and I saw in that second that she was young and healthy-looking and very beautiful. A little squirt of bitterness went through my mind-irrational, idiotic. I looked away.

We let the bubble wrap and the plastic sheeting fall to the ground and rested the bottom edge of the frame on it, facing us. It wasn’t exactly the way real delivery people would have done it. By that point the man and the woman were moving toward us, not breathing as hard as they had been. I realized I had not shaved that morning. Try as he did, Gerard could never completely erase a certain tough-guy pentimento from his face-the heavy eyebrows, the rough mouth and chin-and it occurred to me that it would not take any great leap of imagination for the doctor and his girlfriend to see us as thieves. Or worse.

The doctor was two inches taller than me, his eyes steady, an unnaturally pale blue, not particularly friendly.

I made my face pleasant and unthreatening. “Doctor Vaskis?”

He nodded curtly. He was not happy to see us. The gorgeous woman-thirty years his junior-had come up close to him and now pulled a foot up behind her, stretching her quadriceps and holding his elbow with her other hand for balance.

“We have a gift delivery for you,” I said, and though, by then, my voice was starting to wobble like the voice of an unpracticed liar, the word “gift” caught them. Everyone likes to be given a gift. The woman tilted her head slightly, as if she might change her angle of vision and see through the back of the canvas, and, in spite of himself it seemed, Doctor Vaskis let his features soften in expectation, too, the way you do on the morning of your birthday when someone is about to give you something and you want to assure them you like it. I had more or less prepared things to that point, and then decided I would just ad-lib. But no ad-lib was coming to me. The Thoroughbred had trotted up to the end of the pasture nearest us, and was snorting and fuffing his lips over the top rail, and when he was finished, a bad, cold silence started to creep up around us.

“We’re the delivery guys from Entwhistle Fine Arts,” Gerard ad-libbed.

The doctor and the woman looked at each other, and then at me. I took a breath, as if I had something else to say, but I didn’t, and the doctor seemed to sense then that things were not what they seemed. His face turned hard in the way of people with money or power when they are afraid. Another second and he would have thrown us off the property, or taken out his cell phone and called the Dover police, who would not have been kind to us. I saw it. Gerard saw it, too, and turned the painting around to face them. The woman studied the canvas, then bent her lips in between her teeth. She looked up at me, and then at the doctor.

“Who is it?”

“Janet Rossi,” I said. “She has cystic fibrosis and maybe a week to live.”

The woman moved her eyes back to the canvas. The doctor’s hard gaze flicked across it for a second, and then came to rest on me. I knew I could have been wrong, but it seemed to me then that, if you could judge by the good doctor’s expression at that moment, he was not a warm man. An exquisite mechanic, brave maybe; maybe as disciplined as the gods. Surely he had done more good for the world than a million people like me, but it was as if, in order to do what he did, he’d had to guard himself against the softening effects of sorrow and failure, against his own humanity, his own death. There’s a certain price you pay for that, and I thought I could read that price in the hard line of his lips.

“How did you get this address?”

“I hired a private detective,” I ad-libbed. “The hospital wouldn’t give it out. All the hospital would say is that there is one chance for her-a living lobar transplant-and there is one surgeon in New England who can do the operation.”

“She has cepacia? ”

“Yes.” I watched him. “As of yesterday afternoon she’s tenth on the list for a cadaveric, she won’t come close to living long enough to get one.”

“I’m retired,” he said. “Sorry.”

“The only other surgeon who could do it is in New York. Janet won’t survive a trip to New York.” I looked at the woman, but if there was any well of sympathy in her, she wasn’t letting me near the pump. She avoided my eyes, studied the painting for another little while, and then she said, “I’m going in to shower, Leski. It’s nice, though, isn’t it?” He nodded. She did not look at us, and walked up the path and up the stairs and through the front door.

“I know you’re retired. And I know there’ll always be one more and one more you could do, but this woman has been fighting her whole life. From about the age of six weeks she’s been through things that most people-”

“I know the disease, thank you.”

“I know you know it, but-”

“You two are the potential donors, I suppose.”

Gerard said, “Yes.”

“Blood relatives?”

“Friends. A fiancé and a friend.”

“You’re the fiancé?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s my painting. I paint. I’m a painter. We want to have children. Adopt. Look, I’m sorry we came to your house. We’re not criminals and we’re not crazy, and you can keep the painting either way, yes or no, because of what you’ve done for other…you know…I swear to God you’ll never see either of us again.”

He just watched me from beneath the dark wool hat, blue eyes close-set beside a sharp nose. He said, “The procedure ties up three operating rooms, three teams of surgeons at two different hospitals. It puts at risk the lives of two healthy individuals. It costs between a quarter of a million and a million dollars, not counting the follow-up care. She’ll have to take antirejection drugs for the rest of her life and the potential side effects from those drugs are manifold-renal failure, tremors, bruising, digestive troubles, weight gain, bone loss, diabetes, risk of opportunistic infection.”