Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

I should have forgotten it, though, at least right then, because I almost waited too long before I turned and looked at Janet. I was shaking a little but I didn’t think she could see that. On her lap she held the damp pile of cotton.

“I live here near here,” I said. Just that clumsy.

And she nodded and watched me, black hair, black eyes, one freckle, very calm. She coughed, barely parting her lips and not bothering to cover her mouth.

“My two ex-wives and my aunt live with me, though, I should warn you. She’s a Tibetan Buddhist priest. We’ll have to be quiet so we don’t scandalize them.”

She kept looking at me. I studied the road, glanced over once.

“You’re nervous, right?”

“Little bit,” I said. “I haven’t had sex in over a year.”

“You’re joking.”

I shook my head. “That’s not something I would joke about.”

THERE WAS AN EMPTY parking space in front of my building, a phenomenon roughly as common as a full solar eclipse. On the stoop, hair in dreadlocks, one of the other tenants’ boyfriends sat quietly tapping a conga drum between his knees with just his fingertips. He looked up as we approached and said, “Two beautiful raats from de rivah.”

“You have no idea,” I told him, and then, “Let it go full blast, Eamon. No one in this neighborhood goes to bed before midnight on Friday.” So he smacked the drumskin hard for a dozen notes and Janet and I went through the heavy pine-and-glass door and up the stairs to that beat. Three nights, and she was breathing as if she’d run all the way from the boathouse. My hands weren’t exactly working perfectly, and my heart was banging around, and I scratched the keys on the face of the lock and dead-bolt some before I was able to push them in and open the door.

“Don’t turn on the lights,” she said, when I started to.

I closed the door and nipped the deadbolt, out of habit. “I’m all river water. I was going to jump in the shower.”

“Don’t.”

She dropped her sweater and wet underwear right there in the uncarpeted hallway. She tugged the jersey out of my pants, and I pulled it up and over my head and dropped it on top of her clothes. She put her hands on my belt buckle, then stopped, then unbuckled it, and stopped again. Faint light from the street pushed past the window shades in the bedroom and lit the open doorway there. The hallway was dark and so quiet I could hear our breathing.

“It wasn’t true,” she said, fixing her eyes on my eyes, “about the long series of first dates. He was a first date, a year ago. I wouldn’t go to bed with him, and he was like a ninth-grader about it.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You know what I want,” she said.

“What?”

“Brutal honesty. Can we do that?”

“Sure.” I pushed the straps of her dress off her shoulders, but she held the material there, coughing, staring at me through the semidarkness. “Alright,” I said. “It mattered a little.”

“It was a lie.”

“Good. Can we keep all jerkoffs out of the conversation now?”

She nodded but held the dress against her body. I ran my fingertips down lightly and just brushed the tops of her breasts through the damp material.

“I have no diseases you can catch,” she said.

“Excellent.”

“I won’t get pregnant.”

“Alright. Information registered. I don’t want to talk.”

“I want to talk the whole time,” she said. “Every second. Keep the kisses short so I can talk in between, when I’m not coughing.”

I had not forgotten how to kiss. I leaned toward her and caught her open mouth with my mouth, and my whole body started in on a fast, small shaking. A few seconds of that sweetness, that thrill, that tremble, and she pulled away and coughed over my shoulder.

“That was nice,” she said.

“Shh! My aunt. My two exes.”

“Okay, sorry,” she whispered in my ear. And then, still whispering: “I want to come in the room where you paint.”

“I come in there all the time,” I whispered back. “It’s no big deal.”

She laughed, quietly, as if there were, in fact, relatives and ex-relatives lurking in the dim hallway, all the ghosts from our separate pasts hovering against the high factory ceiling, getting to know each other. We had our chests pressed together, but the damp dress was still glued to her.

“Time to take that off. You’re getting me all wet.”

“I’m getting you all wet?” She moved herself a few inches away from me so I could peel the material down off her chest and hips and thighs. I picked up my dry jersey and ran it gently over the skin where her dress had been, over two scars on her belly, shining in the half-light, over the bones at the front of her hips and down the front insides of her thighs. She had a beautiful body and was standing in the almost-darkness with her hands clasped on top of her head, making a soft vibrating noise in the back of her throat. I kept brushing her skin lightly with the balled-up jersey, keeping the buttons and the collar away so that only the softest cloth touched her. She was completely at ease like that, with her clothes off, and it seemed to me that no woman had ever been so naked with me, that it was impossible, almost inhuman, to be as naked as that. I don’t know why I felt this with her, it was just the person she was-I’d noticed it in the restaurant, and at the boat-house. The usual defenses weren’t there. You felt as though you could reach right inside her chest and explore her whole inner life and she wouldn’t fight about it, wouldn’t mind, wouldn’t worry. She asked me-just above a whisper-if I was afraid, and I told her I had never been so afraid.

“Turn around,” I said. “It’s an equal-opportunity shirt.”

The being afraid part was true. Other than that, I had no idea what I was saying. I had never run my shirt over a woman’s legs or the bones of her back in that way, not on my best night. When she coughed I could feel her back muscles clench, as if her whole body were being bent and bent.

“You are the nicest kind of weird,” she murmured.

I tossed the shirt backwards over my shoulder but by that time we had somehow moved a little ways down the hall so that the trajectory of the shirt took it right through the kitchen door. It landed on the table and knocked over a cereal box there. You could hear the box fall sideways with a bump and then the cereal spilling out onto the floor, one quick rush at first and then a slow dribble.

The noise made Janet spin around.

“It was just my shirt hitting the cereal,” I said. “Quaker Oats Granola. My aunt eats it before she goes to bed.”

With both hands she took hold of my head and pulled my face down against her chest. I planted circles of small kisses there, orbiting her nipples. When she began to cough, I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her against me as if I could infect her with my congenital good health.

“Mother of all colds,” I said, into her hot flesh. The skin between her breasts was saltier than it should have been, as if she had fallen into the ocean, not the river. As if she had not showered.

“It’s not a cold,” she said.

“Mother of all bronchitises.”

“You can’t catch what I have.”

“I’m not worried about catching it. I’m stronger than two oxes. I have the immune system of the gods.”

“You have your pants still on is what you have.”

“You’re naked enough for both of us.”

“Take them… off.”

Instead-I don’t know what was wrong with me-I picked her up the way firemen do, one forearm behind her legs, her midsection over my right shoulder, and carried her into the painting room. She was not heavy. There was an old backless couch against one wall, canvas green with beaten-up springs. She was laughing as I lay her down there.