A Little Love Story (12 page)

10

B
Y THE TIME
we got back to Boston it was eight-thirty at night. We stopped for takeout at Fez and set the warm paper bags between us in the cab of the truck on the way to my apartment. While I was getting out plates and glasses, Janet called the governor on his private line and I heard her leaving a message in a don’t-mess-with-me-you’re-lucky-to-have-me voice: “Charlie, Janet. I’m taking the holiday tomorrow. I’ll be in the office Tuesday morning as usual.”

We sat at the small kitchen table I had made from some tiger maple I’d found at a mill in western Massachusetts on my way home from visiting Ellory one time. Maple is a nice-looking wood anyway, but tiger maple has shimmering bands of light and dark running down the grain, so that even a board that’s been planed and sanded perfectly smooth seems to have ripples in its surface. In certain kinds of light, the ripples seem almost to be moving. During the first breakfast we ate together at that table—it was the morning after the third time she slept over—Janet noticed the wood and said how much she liked it. I’d been starting to feel something with her that I didn’t think I was going to be able to let myself feel again, and I was nervous, and in a little spasm of nervousness I started to tell her all about the different woods: how poplar had an olive-green or brownish tint to it and how well it held paint and how it was more stable than pine for interior trim; how southern yellow pine was as hard as some hardwoods, even though it wasn’t one, technically, and so it made good flooring if you didn’t mind the heavy, wavy grain; how the architect I liked to work with ordered screen doors from a tiny company in Maine that made them from South American cedar, which was not really cedar at all but a species of mahogany that was used on the decks of ships because it was resistant to insects and rot and didn’t swell or warp when it got wet. Interesting stuff. I went on and on and she watched and listened and started to smile and finally I stopped and smiled, too. It became a joke with us. We’d be at a bar downtown and she’d say, with a perfectly serious expression, “Jake, what kind of wood is this?”

“Siberian chestnut,” I’d say. “Very rare.” And I’d go off on some made-up spiel about how the chestnuts themselves were considered to have aphrodisiac qualities, or how the black Siberian squirrel gnawed the twigs to survive in bad winters. Some elaborate mishmash like that, just to hear her laugh.

She’d taken her pills and she’d done her chest PT with the vibrating vest, and while I was putting together the food, she sat running her hands over the tabletop. We’d bought lamb kebabs with hummus, pieces of warm pita bread that the people at Fez baked themselves, a spicy yogurt dip—and there were Fudgsicles in the freezer for dessert. I opened a bottle of white wine—Sardinian, the same Argiolas we’d had on our first date at Diem Bo. Janet was coughing more already. Just as I sat down she coughed and got up and went to the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush. When she came out she had one very small droplet of blood on her lower lip. I started to eat.

“So how did you ever end up working for this guy?” I asked her after a while.

She looked up, searching for jealousy in my face, but there was not much jealousy there anymore. No jealousy at all, really. Almost none.

She said, “I was having a conversation with some friends in my college dorm and I was saying how rotten the world was, how the politicians were corrupt, how the system was all twisted and skewed. One of my friends said, ‘Why don’t you do something about it, then, instead of just whining?’ So I decided to. I went to the Kennedy School and got my master’s and Charlie was running and he was promising to fund children’s programs and completely eliminate poverty in Massachusetts—not cut it down, completely eradicate it.”

“I remember.”

“Nobody says that. Most politicians don’t even mention the poor.”

“The poor don’t fund-raise,” I said.

“So I thought it would be perfect. I was still fairly healthy. I thought I’d do that for a while and then, if they came up with a cure, I’d try something radical like running for Congress. I was twenty-three, a bit on the naive side.”

“You’d make a good congresswoman.”

She waved a lamb kebab and coughed. A little flash of pain cut across her face.

“I mean it. You care about people. You’re tough, you’re smart.”

“One,” she said, “I’m not a millionaire. Two, I’d go crazy saying the same thing over and over and over again during a campaign. Three, Americans don’t vote for sick people. Four, I’m not that great a compromiser. Even if I got elected somehow, I’d just alienate everyone. I have crazy ideas. I think we should put a lot of money into desalination plants, for example, because the key commodity of the future will be water, not oil. I think each little town and neighborhood should have its own high school again and that the buildings themselves shouldn’t hold more than about twenty classrooms, and that the healthy kids should spend some time every week tutoring the special-needs kids, and that nursing homes should be built right there against the school in the same complex—they do that already in some places, but not with high schools, usually. I think everyone should do six months of volunteer work between high school and college—not just grunt work, painting bandstands and bleachers, but hospice work or environmental work or…” She coughed and coughed and made another trip to the bathroom. When she came back the drop of blood was gone and she went on talking as though she’d never left. “…or military service. Everyone. Every single kid, even the ones in wheelchairs. I think women should have six months’ paid vacation after they have a baby.”

“I’ll write you in,” I said. “You can run as the Idealist Party candidate.”

“It’s just smart,” she said. “It’s all just really practical.”

“Or you could run on the electrocute criminals, cut-art-in-the-schools, hate-your-gay-neighbor platform like the guy Valvoline’s running against.”

“Right.”

“Makes your boss look good.”

“He changed, Jake. Power changes people. The fear of losing power changes people most of all. His wife left him—because he’d changed so much—and then he panicked and changed some more. He’s not a bad man.”

“Just small,” I said, without thinking. But almost all the ugliness in me had been washed out during that day. It was as if I’d finally decided that I’d had enough jealousy for one lifetime. It must have showed in my voice because Janet was watching me, and after a few seconds she smiled her pretty smile, and it was like forgiveness.

A
FTER THE MEAL
I said I wanted to paint her and she said she didn’t mind, but that she was tired, and could probably only stay up another hour or so.

In the warm months Janet liked to sleep naked. But it was getting colder by then, and she had a pair of sea-green silk pajamas she kept at my apartment in a drawer with a change or two of clothes and some medicines. I turned on the air purifier I had bought after the second week we were together. She put the pajamas on and sat in a chair with her legs crossed at the knee and her arms crossed at the wrist, looking straight at me. I paint in oil on linen, as I said. Linen is expensive, but I like it because, even though most people say it doesn’t make any difference, I think it makes the edges of things not perfectly sharp and if you don’t lay the paint on too thick, it can give everything a smooth quality. I had a canvas already gessoed. In the center of it, I painted just the sea green with its light and shadows, and worked for some time getting the arms and legs right. Then I painted Janet’s face and hair, and then I used a #16 brush and almost a whole tube of Paynes gray to make a background. When I had it roughed in enough so that I thought I could finish it without her being there, I stopped and cleaned up and we went to bed.

I lay on my back in the bed and she lay half-leaning against me with her face on my shoulder and one arm across my chest. When she coughed she brought her right hand up to her mouth and trapped the cough between her palm and the skin of my bare shoulder. Between coughs I could hear her breath rattling around. We lay like that for a long time without saying anything.

“What is the waiting list looking like?” I asked her finally.

“I’m eighteenth. In Massachusetts they’ve been averaging about two a month.”

“So next summer.”

She coughed, then nodded her head against my shoulder, but I listened to her breathing and I knew she wouldn’t live until the next summer. I was sure she knew it, too.

She wrapped herself tight against me, one arm over my chest, right thigh on top of my thighs, face against my neck, and we fell asleep that way.

11

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Columbus Day, there were tremendous winds in Boston during the morning hours, winds like I had never seen except in the edge of Hurricane Belle. The tops of the trees whipped back and forth. Leaves and newspapers and people’s hats went skidding down the sidewalks like exuberant children. Janet and I slept late, then she sat for another little while and I worked some more on the painting. Afterwards, we took a trolley to the North End and had pasta and salad in a place with six tables, where, before you ordered, they brought you small bowls of olive oil and a basket of hard-crusted bread that was soft as cotton inside.

After the meal I said I wanted to walk to the Back Bay, my favorite part of Boston. In the 1800s it was just marshy tidal flats, but as the city grew, the area became more valuable and the marshes were filled in with thousands of tons of granite from quarries in Needham. Something about the flat straight avenues lined with four- and five-story brownstones, something about the particular mix of buildings on Boylston Street—clothing stores, churches, skyscrapers, little take-out Thai and Szechwan eateries—something about the beggars and businessmen, something about it just felt to me the way a city is supposed to feel—edgy, busy, a visual feast. The winds had mostly died down. Janet said she was feeling strong enough to walk, but by the time we’d gone as far as the Public Garden—maybe a mile and a half—she was having a hard time. When I glanced at her once I could see that the muscles of her forehead were pinched tight, as if she were working out some complicated math formula, when all she was trying to do was breathe.

I said how nice the gardens looked, with the trees so bright, and the more muted colors in the flower beds. I pretended I wanted to sit on one of the benches there and watch kids feed the ducks.

“I hate this,” she said when we sat down and she caught her breath. A hard little wind blew her hair up around her face. She was quiet for a minute, then, softly, almost as if she were talking to herself, “Being dead, I think I can deal with. Being alive and not able to do things, not be able to walk, for God’s sake…”

I put my hand on the top of her leg. In a minute she turned her face away, and started crying. I took my hand from her leg and put it around her shoulders, and pulled her against me.

“Some days I want to scream. I want to stand out in the middle of the street and look up at the sky and just scream and smash things. I want to ride a horse or jog on a beach or go bowling. Anything. I used to be so physical. I played field hockey at school. I loved to swim, to skate. Everything I tried, I loved—hiking, cross-country skiing.” She stopped. She swiped at her right eye with the bottom of her palm. She took a breath and blew it out. We stared at the Public Garden for a long while and then she said, “Alright. I’m finished with that.”

“All you do is complain.”

“Right,” she said. “I’m sorry. Do you want children, really?”

I heard the bending note again.

“Most of the time. You?”

“I’d have eight if I were strong enough. I’d fill a huge house with them. I have dreams about having children. Two or three times a week now I have a dream like that.”

“Are you sure you can’t?”

She turned her face away.

Not far in front of us, in the direction Janet had been looking when she asked the question about children, a little towheaded boy and a little towheaded girl were throwing something into the pond. Potato chips, it looked like, tossed up and wobbling in the breeze. The ducks weren’t interested in that particular brand of potato chips, and the girl was getting more and more upset about it and trying to stamp both her feet at once and yelling in a lispy, weepy, aggravated voice: “Duckies! Duck-IES!” The boy seemed to think the problem was that he wasn’t throwing the chips out far enough, so he’d rear back and fling them mightily and then stand with his fists at his sides as the ducks made their quick turns back toward the middle of the pond. There were adults, alone and in pairs, sitting nearby on the other benches, and on the grassy bank, but whoever the parents were, they were of the school of parenting that said, Let your kids play right on the edge of a dirty pond deep enough for them to drown in and let them get really frustrated there and don’t say anything to them or do anything about it.

After a few minutes an older woman walked over to them. She reminded me of my mother, the same erect posture and sure-ness about her. The boy and girl didn’t seem to know her, but the woman gave each of them a slice of white bread, and showed them how to tear up the bread into pieces. When the ducks saw this turn of events, they came gliding toward the towheaded twins, a white fleet of expectation, and the girl started jumping up and down again, her shoes lifting all of an inch into the air. Duckies! Duckies!

Janet and I were both watching. For some reason the little drama made me think of something I had seen in Mexico, years before. I had sold a painting—my first—and to celebrate, Giselle and I had flown to Puerto Vallarta on a whim. We didn’t even make hotel reservations, just took a taxi from the airport into town, asked around with our high-school Spanish, and found a very clean
casa de huespedes
with pastel-colored tile floors three blocks from the beach. We stayed ten days. In the mornings I would get up early and go for a run before the sun had come up over the mountains. Then I’d go back and shower and we’d walk to a breakfast place we liked, where there weren’t any other tourists. One morning we were sitting there with our
huevos rancheros
and
café con leche
and a small skinny boy walked in and began going from table to table with his hand out. The boy was six or seven. He had sores on his face and arms, and a threadbare T-shirt. We gave him what amounted to three dollars or so and he managed to get to one more table before the owner came and roughly ushered him out. At the next table, behind Giselle’s back and directly in my line of vision, sat a man in a fine gray silk suit and a white shirt open at the collar—I will always remember this man—and when the boy had been chased out unceremoniously into the happy seaside morning, this man started doing strange things with his food. He took one of the fresh breakfast rolls that eggs were served with in that place and he opened it down the middle with his thumbs. He picked up the juicy browned slice of ham with his fork and folded it into the roll, then he lay a piece of avocado in there, then some fried egg. I watched him over Giselle’s right shoulder. The owner watched him, too. The man worked with a surgeon’s grace, with careful movements, without dropping any food on the material of his expensive suit. When he was finished he wrapped the sandwich carefully in two napkins, stood up, and hurried out the door, and I watched him trotting down the sidewalk in the same direction the boy had gone. In a few minutes he came back and finished what was left of his breakfast.