Roland Merullo: A Little Love Story

But I watched Janet running the palms of her hands across the sleek bottom of a boat, and I watched her fingers-a mechanic’s fingers, a pianist’s-opening and snapping closed the delicate oarlock, and I decided it would be a foolish thing to back away from the river now. It called to me, same as always, the wet slide of time. I could smell it in the air that seeped under the big red door. I took off my sport jacket and laid it over one of the shells. She put her sweater over my jacket. When I unhitched the clasp and swung the door open-first one side and then the other-the moldy, silky air washed against my face. “Too bad you can’t smell the river,” I said.

“What does it smell like?”

“Old.”

I slid the scull most of the way out of its rack, told her to go to the other side and rest it on her shoulder. We walked it out and slowly down the dock to the edge of the water. On the dock it felt almost like a summer night. She was thin, as I have mentioned, but strong enough to push the weight of the boat up off her shoulder and straight over her head. She grabbed for a rib inside when I told her to, looked back at me to see if she was doing it right. Beneath the straps of her dark dress I could see the muscles of her shoulders flexing.

“Now roll it over and down against your hip, and hold it… You’ve done this before, haven’t you.”

“Never.”

“Well, you’re a natural then.”

She coughed. “I played a lot of sports as a girl.”

“Just sort of half lean over and half squat down and reach it out so the bottom doesn’t bump the edge of the dock.”

The hull just patted the flat water. “Perfect.”

She held the boat close while I fetched the four carbon fiber oars-works of art in red and white-and then laid their necks in the oarlocks and pushed two oars out over the starboard gunwale. A jet flew over us then, headed out from Logan in the darkness. I showed her how to step in, but something wrong happened. I had been almost completely paying attention, but one small part of me had been distracted by the jet or lost in a little dream. We were upstream, Janet and I, just floating, with the blades of the oars lying flat on the smooth water, somewhere up past the bridge. It was dark there along the bank, the black water glided past. On the opposite shore, cars went up and down Storrow Drive in the streetlights. The city hummed. But we were outside it, close to the breath of the world. We didn’t talk. In my little dream I heard the jet. And then I must not have been holding the gunwale firmly enough, or must have forgotten how unstable a scull seems the first time you set your standing weight in one. Or she must have leaned over too far. The boat wobbled, not that much really. But she panicked and tried to catch herself too quickly and the far gunwale slipped out of my fingers and she went over, knocking her shins on the hard edge of the boat, and making a big, loud, awful splash.

I waited about two heartbeats and then dove right across the boat and into the Charles after her, socks on, pants on, dress shirt on, the water dark and raw against my face and shoulders and chest, and then black and silky and unexpectedly warm from the week of rain.

I surfaced to the sound of Janet cursing. She seemed to be able to swim, at least. She wasn’t panicking, but her breaths were short little rips of air. The waves we had made were rolling out into the middle of the river, and the streetlights from Memorial Drive wavered on the broken surface. She was breathing hard and then not so hard and in between breaths she was cursing like a plumber. In a minute we were treading water close to each other. Everything below the top two feet was cold.

I said, “The good news is our shoes are on the dock, nice and dry. The bad news is my wallet’s in my back pocket.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” she said. And then: “You promised I wasn’t going to get wet.”

“I’ve stepped into boats thousands of times without that happening.”

“You wobbled it.”

“I had a tiny lapse. You overreacted.”

She coughed and spat, swam out away from me a few yards, and then rolled neatly onto her back. I rolled onto my back and floated, too, because it was turning out that I hadn’t really been ready to go on a date again after all, and had ruined it, and now there was nothing to do but ride it out and go home, and wait another month or two months or twelve months and try again. I could feel the dark current tugging us slowly downstream, but I let it take me, and I tried not to worry, and it seemed to me then, in spite of everything and everything, that I was rubbing the front of my body against some kind of holy moonlit wonder. I had been dragging myself through the days attached to a burlap sack full of bad history, of mourning, and somewhere in Diem Bo I had cut it loose. It was trying to reattach itself to me at that moment, but I wouldn’t let it. I was going to have one night of not feeling bad, no matter what happened with this girl.

I went back to treading water, my body turned away from the boathouse. Janet stopped floating, and treaded water, too. Her hair was slicked down on both sides of her face.

I edged over a bit closer: “I have towels at my place. I’ll make tea. You can take a hot shower.”

She coughed and coughed and said, “You didn’t do that on purpose, did you?”

“Absolutely and completely not.”

“Alright. I’m done being angry.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m sorry. Let me make it up to you with the hot shower and the tea.”

“Well, I’ve never been propositioned before in the middle of a river. It’s very romantic.”

Blue lights blinked behind us, scampering across the water. Before I could turn around she said, “The good news is the boat hasn’t floated away. The bad news is there are two policemen on the dock shining flashlights.”

THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO but swim back to the dock, climb out, and stand dripping and shivering on the boards.

“Nice night for a dip,” one of the officers said sarcastically. He was a BU policeman, portly and jowly, with big fleshy hands, one of which was wrapped around a three-foot-long flashlight. He was looking at Janet’s chest. Behind him, also looking at Janet, was a state trooper in his gray Stetson. When she’d been out of the water a minute or so, Janet had a terrible coughing fit, by far the worst of the night. She walked off to the side of the dock and spit loudly there, which only made me feel worse than I already felt. I was showing the officer my somewhat out-of-date, damp, Boston University Alumnus ID and explaining about my key, my very good friend Coach Florent, and our arrangement. But it is not easy to appear respectable when your clothes are dripping. And, to complicate matters, the officer was acting tough and all-business in front of the state trooper-making his mouth stern, glaring at me from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows, and so on.

When Janet came back she put her arm inside my arm and said, in the direction of the trooper, “Allen?”

“It’s the governor’s girl,” he answered, not very nicely. “What’s this, a stunt to get votes?”

“No, a first date.”

“Another in an endless series,” the trooper said.

I looked at him then. The BU cop looked over his shoulder at him, and Janet was looking at him, and for a little empty stretch of seconds no one said anything. There had been a splash of meanness in his voice, and so much naked hurt that I wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed for him or angry. Backlit by the boat-house lights he was still mostly standing in the shadows, his face and the whole front of him in the river darkness, big shoulders, big arms, a big neck, a posture of pure aggression.

I don’t like aggressive people. And when I’m even a little upset, I tend to say things without thinking about them first. So I said, “Why don’t you do something useful and get her a towel instead of making remarks?”