Roland Merullo: A Little Love Story

That afternoon I hung two interior doors and put the lock-set assemblies in-I remember it very well. Hanging doors is not a simple job, the tolerances are small. My mind would stay on the work in my hands for a few seconds at a time, then swing away. I had to take one of the doors down and put it back up again four times before I got it right. Gerard did not make one joke.

When I came home at the end of the day, there was one message on the machine-Jeremy Steams, who owned the gallery where I showed my paintings. He did not know anything about Janet. He was calling to tell me that he was using one of my paintings in a half-page ad in Art in America , something he’d been promising he’d do for the past two and a half years. When I called him back, I tried to sound pleased.

I showered and changed and drove across town to the hospital. Janet lay on her side, raking in one shallow breath after another, occasionally lifting the oxygen mask to ask for water, for help turning onto her other side, or for her mother or me to hold the metal pan up to her mouth so she could spit. I wanted in a terrible way to tell her about our trip to Dover. Every now and then she would make eye contact with me or with her mother and it tore through me and I kept wrestling with myself about whether it was better or worse to give her hope. I pictured myself telling her, and then Vaskis saying no, and then having to tell her he had said no, or having to tell her he’d said yes but we couldn’t find a second donor.

On the way home, I thought I should have done it, though, at least should have let her know we were trying everything we could try, that there was still some last little glimmer.

At a specialty shop on Harvard Avenue, I bought a bottle of white Argiolas and some bread and cheese and two Granny Smith apples. I went home and made up a plate and poured a glass and sat in the kitchen, not eating and not drinking, looking at the telephone. Gerard had promised not to call. Janet’s mother wouldn’t call unless it was an emergency. I took a sip of wine, carried the glass with me into the painting room, and sat on the sofa there. I got back up and paced, drank a little bit, put the food away when it was clear I wasn’t going to be eating any of it. I looked out different windows, poured a little more wine. Hours passed this way. At quarter after midnight, because I knew I would not be able to sleep, and knew I couldn’t paint, and knew it was too late for any good news, I wrote Ellory another note telling him what was going on, and when that was done I called my sister. She answered on the third ring.

“Lizbeth, it’s Jake.”

“Jake who?” she said, in a voice just absolutely dripping.

“Your brother.”

“Mum alright?”

“She’s the same. She asks for you every time I see her.”

Lizbeth paused. I thought she might be turning down her TV or something, or talking to a client, and then she said, “Here comes the guilt trip, sailing across the sand-shit desert. Mum asking for me. You visiting, me not visiting. Same old sand-shit, snake-talk Jakie.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Some of us have the money to fly, you know, and some of us just don’t.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, really.”

“Right. My good-boy, snake-talk brother.”

“Look, if you want to come back to see her, I’ll send you a ticket.”

“Send me the money and let me buy my own ticket. I can get a deal here. I have friends who work in the airlines.”

“I’ll send a ticket tomorrow if you want. I’m not sending money.”

As soon as those last four words were out of my mouth, my sister started to yell, a quick crescendo about how nothing mattered to me but money, and how all I thought about was money, and how she was sick and tired of being the only daughter and being treated like a baby because of that, and how hard she worked, and how easy I’d always had it, and just on and on and on. The four words had been a mortar round, and the mortar round had blasted a hole in the wall of a dam, and now a whole lake of bitterness was pouring out.

“Lizbeth,” I said, three or four times, but the bitterness drowned me out. It was not exactly a new experience for me. My sister had been systematically destroying herself for a decade by then, and over the course of that decade I had sent money, and self-help books, and humorous cards, and I’d made well-meaning suggestions, and talked to friends of mine who were therapists, and passed on their advice, and stayed up half the night worrying about her, and fielded unpleasant phone calls from bail bondsmen, bikers, bookmakers, and casino security types. None of it had changed the trajectory of her fiery downward arc by so much as a fraction of a degree.

I knew, once she started using the word “coward,” that we were close to the end, so I did my best then to try to listen beyond the words and not have bad thoughts toward her. I tried to match the notes in her voice to the notes that had been there when she was a young girl, a happy soul, joy to be around. It didn’t work.

“You’re a coward and you’ve always been a coward and you call up like the coward you are and you should be ashamed of yourself for the way you treat me…”

And so on for another minute or two, top volume, before she slammed the telephone down in her sad little apartment in Reno, and the dial tone droned across the lower forty-eight.

I turned out the lights and lay in bed, looking at the shapes the shadows made against the wash of street light on the ceiling, listening to the muted sounds-car engines, horns, conga drums from downstairs. There was no real possibility of going to sleep, I knew that, but I held out some hope for twenty minutes or so, and then sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed, thinking I would go to Betty’s for a doughnut and some company, or go back to the hospital. The phone rang. I let it ring twice. Sometimes, if Lizbeth was high enough or angry enough, she would decide after stewing for a while that I had hung up on her and she’d call back with more shouting. At which point I usually pulled the phone cord out of the wall.

I answered on the third ring and heard an unfamiliar woman’s voice saying my name. The bedside clock read 12:56. I thought it was the hospital calling. I was already moving toward my shoes. But the woman said: “I’m Louise. Doctor Vaskis’s wife. Calling unconscionably late. He says he’ll do it Monday morning if you and your friend pass all the tests you have to pass. He said to tell you he’ll call the other doctor, what was his name-”

“Ouajiballah.”

“Yes. He’ll call him in the morning.”

“What’s today?” I said.

She laughed a carefree laugh. “As of about fifty minutes ago, Friday.”

“Tell him for me that…tell him I can’t find the words to thank him.”

“I softened him up,” she said. “So you can thank me, too. He didn’t really want to retire, you know. He’s been a little bit grumpy since he decided to. That was his whole life, saving people. It’s not something you just give up.”

“No…I imagine…Thank you. Thanks…I-”

“Plus, I think he thought your friend kind of threatened him.”

“My friend would never do that.”

“Well, there was something peculiar in the air. We both felt it. He’s not an ex-convict, is he?”

“Yes, he is, actually,” I said, “but he has a good heart.”

I turned the conversation away from Gerard’s warm heart and imaginary prison time, and rambled on, telling her to thank Doctor Vaskis again, that he was a genius, a good man, that I’d never forget him until the moment I died. When we said goodbye, I called the ex-convict and he answered the phone this way: “Your call is important to us. You’ll never know how important. All our customer service associates are temporarily busy at the moment right now servicing other customers, but your call is so important to us that-”