Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

I sat beside the river for an hour, until my body started to shake from the cold, and then I walked back to my truck and drove to the State House with the heat on high. I couldn’t get warm. I parked in Janet’s spot. I went in past the first security check, and climbed the three flights of stairs to the governor’s suite of offices, where there was a state policeman I’d never had any trouble with.

When I was past him, too, and had entered the high-ceilinged suite of rooms that surround the governor’s office, the secretary saw me. She reached for the telephone. I put my hands up in a gesture of peace. I said, “Janet has a few days to live. She wants me to say one thing to the governor. I already called him, he already knows.” She took her hand off the phone and glared at me. While she was glaring, the door behind her opened and the president of the senate stepped out of the corner office and walked by me, winking as if he’d just done me a favor. Then the man himself appeared.

“I’m not afraid of you,” was the first thing out of his mouth.

“Good,” I said.

“Janet’s dying,” the secretary told him, and he looked away from her and away from me and stared, tight-lipped, through one of the tall windows that faced out over Boston Common. I could have been wrong, but it seemed to me then that there was the smallest glint of satisfaction in his eyes, as if Janet’s troubles were a kind of punishment that had come from not loving him, or not sleeping with him again. At that moment I hated him, there is no other word. He had done some good things from that office, but it seemed to me then that in order to run for an office like that, you had to have an ego, or a need, the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float. It had to be festooned with all sorts of fine ideas about public service, with good deeds, pretty phrases, clean suits. But it had to be there; it had to be the motor and the wheels. It had to want authority and praise, that great sweet surge that comes from knowing a million people had pulled the lever beside your name. I don’t know what creates an appetite like that in a person, but I saw it in him then, through the filter of my hatred, and I realized I was counting on it being there, under the neat hairdo and the clean cheeks and the excellent posture.

I tried to imagine I was speaking directly to that need and not to him. “Two minutes and you’ll never see me again,” I said.

The secretary was looking up at him like a puppy. For her benefit, perhaps, he struck the posture of an unafraid man, a big man. But what was hard for him was that, inside, he was tiny-not in the good way we’d felt after rowing hard, but in a frightened way, a sad, self-pitying, little-boy way-and he knew I knew it. He motioned me into the office with a sideways swing of his head.

Near his small desk was an oval conference table. He took his place at the head of it. There was a kind of steady pulse of power in the high-ceilinged room, with the portraits on the walls, the limp flags held up by spear-topped poles, the small couch and table with the pictures of his girls. I sat down across from him. He swiveled back and forth once and then looked at me over the tips of his fingers.

“Janet has three or four days to live,” I said. “At the outside.”

“I’m extremely pained to hear that. We sent cards, all of us. We call every day. We’d visit if we were allowed.”

“She appreciates it. Her mother said to thank you. But she’s tenth on the transplant list. She won’t live to be ninth.”

He kept his fingertips together, tapped them once. “If you’ve come here to ask me to put her at the top of the list, that’s something I simply cannot do.”

“I’m not asking that. The one thing that could save her life is something called a living lobar transplant. She needs two people to give up one lobe of a lung each. The donors have to be taller than five foot ten, nonsmokers, in good shape. We have one so far-”

“You?”

“Yes. We have probably the best transplant surgeon in the country set to operate on her first thing Monday morning. Leicus Vaskis. The insurance is all approved.”

“I know Vaskis,” the governor said. He blinked twice. He lowered his forearms so that his hands hung down over the ends of the chair. He said, “And?”

“And Janet asked me to ask you to be the other donor.”

He closed his eyes and let out a quiet, one-note laugh.

“No donor has ever died in surgery. You’ll lose some of your lung capacity, but won’t really notice it very much in the course of any ordinary day. You’ll-”

“I have a state to run,” he said.

I looked at him when he said that, really looked at him. I had an urge to go over to one of the windows and open it and throw all the chairs out, including the one he was sitting in. “You’d be out of commission three days,” I said. “The lieutenant governor runs the state for longer than that when you’re on vacation. You’d be in the hospital two weeks, tops.”

“I understand that,” he said. “And under different circumstances…” He fluttered one hand at the windows. “Under different circumstances I’d oblige you.”

“It’s not me you’d be obliging. It’s her.”

He looked out the window for a little while. I thought we were finished, but then he swung his head around so that he was facing me dead-on and spoke in a quiet, violent voice, all the politician stripped away so that, even in his suit and behind the big table he was not the governor then: “You couldn’t begin to know what I felt for her. You couldn’t begin to guess what was between us. I was going to marry her,” he said, and it occurred to me then, in a hideous flash, that I was looking at myself in a terrible dream, talking to Brian, about Giselle. “I didn’t care what it cost me, with my children or with anyone else. You couldn’t begin to know what it was like to see her day after day after day and not touch her, not talk to her except about business, to feel her drifting away from me.”

By then the trembling I’d had in my legs earlier, talking to him on the cell phone, had started again, and moved into my arms and hands. It occurred to me that maybe Janet had a residue of love for the governor, some secret feeling she hadn’t wanted me to know about. In my mind I had been making him out to be pure ego. Naturally, it was my own ego, my own anger, my own jealousy, my own smallness, that had been doing that.

I said, “She asked me to ask you if you’d do it. She could barely speak. She said your name.”

He slammed one fist down on the wood. “I have a state to run!” he yelled.

I said, “Fine.”

His face was shaking. Jealousy funhouse mirrors.

I said, “I asked you to give me two minutes and that’s about two minutes. My name is John Entwhistle. In case you change your mind, I’m in the phone book in Boston. Or you could just be at the Mass General Hospital pulmonary lab at seven o’clock tomorrow morning. For testing, you know.”

I stood up. He was breathing hard. I thought, for one second, that if I made the wrong kind of move or said the wrong kind of thing, he was going to charge at me, and we were going to end up wrestling around on the floor again. I wanted him to do that. I waited two seconds, hoping, then I made a quick turn toward the door, so quick I accidentally bumped my thigh on the arm of the chair. And then I turned back to him and said, with almost no bitterness, “I’ll tell Janet you sent your best. I’ll tell her you said you’ll be praying for her.”

The governor did not stand up.

At the door I turned around again. “I was envisioning the headlines, though, you know? GOVERNOR DONATES PART OF LUNG, SAVES STAFFER’S LIFE. A person could go a long way on publicity like that.”