A Little Love Story (3 page)

5

A
T FIVE MINUTES
to seven I gave a dollar to the valet attendant at Diem Bo and straightened the lapels of my sport jacket. It was a beautiful September night, clear and warm, with enough summer still in it to make you believe the world was a good and happy place, and the couples you saw strolling on New-bury Street were destined for long peaceful lives together.

As I was walking up Diem Bo’s brick front steps, I was greeted by an imaginary messenger from the world of ugly thoughts. A troll, a goblin, an ugly little creature from the kingdom of fear. His message went something along the lines of: Why this again? But I knew why. For the previous twelve months I had been skating over the surface of things, and I worried that, if I kept at it too long, I’d end up like some of the guys I knew in the trades, plumbers and painters and masons—decent enough thirtyish and fortyish men who could not really carry on a conversation with a woman, and who skipped along from
Monday Night Football
to darts at the local pub to long days with the mortar and cinder blocks, or hammer and two-by-eights, and who were afraid to ever talk about anything more interesting than what had gone on last Thursday night in the pocket-billiards league, or the latest Red Sox game, or the last time they’d had a blow job.

I wasn’t like that. Gerard wasn’t like that. But Gerard, at least, had his children to keep him honest. I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day that what you’d told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You’d had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in a tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half what it could be.

I looked up from that pleasant thought, inside the door of Diem Bo now, and saw Janet Rossi at a window table halfway back in the room. There was a tall glass of iced coffee in front of her. I spend a lot of time looking at faces, and her face was not beautiful in the way models’ and actresses’ faces are supposed to be, but pretty in a way all her own: shining black hair, black eyes, a slightly bent nose, and a wide mouth. There was something—a kind of tough smartness maybe—shining quietly out from her. Instead of walking down the long narrow room, I waited for the hostess to come over and escort me, and I watched in the meantime. Janet put a handkerchief to her mouth and coughed. It was a lousy time of year for a cold.

She was wearing a black dress cut low enough to show the bones on the front of her chest. She smiled when I sat down, a large, even smile that lit up her eyes, one slightly crooked tooth upper left, one freckle beside her nose. I have funny hair, “awkward hair” my girlfriend Giselle used to call it, the kind that stands up too straight, so that if you cut it short like I do, it can look ragged and boyish. I thought Janet might be smiling at my hair but was too polite to say anything.

As I sat down I accidentally knocked a fork off the table. “So, how was your day, honey?” I said, after the noise of the clattering fork had died down in my mind. “Kids okay? Sitter come on time?”

She just looked at me and pushed the long black hair off her right cheekbone. She touched her thumb and middle finger to the iced-coffee glass. “You’re a little weird, aren’t you,” she said, in a tone that had a couple of spoonfuls of regret in it.

I shook my head. “A little nervous, that’s all. I’m not exactly Joe Date.”

“Joe Date?”

I felt like I had fallen on my knees in a puddle of mud, and now, to make up for it, I was falling on my chest, with a white shirt on. “How are you?” I asked.

“Fine. Are you insinuating you don’t go on many dates? Married or something?”

“Never married.”

She took a sip of her coffee. “Why? You’re what, about twenty-eight? Nice-looking.”

“Thirty,” I said. I had a glass of water up to my face for protection. I saw Jason or Dominick or Adam-who-will-be-your-serverperson, off at another table, and with all my heart I was willing him to come over and let-me-tell-you-about-tonight’s-specials. Janet had me pinned down with the black eyes. She coughed and tried to hold it in. She wanted an answer.

I moved my left foot and felt the fork down there. “I have seven kids out of wedlock,” I said. “That’s why. I’m up to my forehead in credit-card debt. I’m hyperactive. Women’s bodies make me uncomfortable. You’re nice-looking and not married either, right? It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bad person.”

She almost seemed to be smiling. She hadn’t gotten up and walked out, at least, leaving me to pay for her Vietnamese coffee.

“No.”

“Hi. I’m Brian and I’ll be your server tonight.”

“And just in time,” I said.

Brian was tall and wide-shouldered, handsome as a shirt model. He blinked twice and started to try to get us to buy drinks before we ate. I could see in his face and hear in his voice that he was the type of person who was nervous around people and pretended not to be. He’d built an elaborate personality over his nervousness. He’d developed an armor, an act, a defensive outgoingness. It was the kind of thing that made me dislike someone right away. And the name was no good, besides. One of God’s little jokes.

I said, “We’ll both have the special.”

“There are two specials tonight.”

“We’ll have one each.” I turned back to Janet. “Would you pick the appetizers and dessert?”

Jason went into one of the speeches he had memorized: “The appetizer special tonight is braised scallops in a lemon butter saffron sauce with shallots and thinly sliced Shiitake mushrooms, finished with a kumquat glaze.”

“We’ll try one,” Janet told him. “Two forks, please.”

I could tell by the way she said “forks” that she was a real Bostonian.

“I’ll have what she’s drinking,” I said.

Adam wrote this down and then began to tell us what the two dinner specials were. I put my hand on his arm. “We’ll have them,” I said. “One each. We’ve been married eight years, this is our anniversary, we’re trying to introduce some unpredictability into the relationship, so we don’t really want to know what we’re having, if that’s okay with you.”

Dominick looked at me earnestly. The menus were huge and he was awkward collecting them. “Anything to drink?” he asked.

“What she’s having.”

“Very good. I’ll be right back with the scallops. They’re excellent.”

“Sorry for giving you a hard time,” I said.

When he went away, Janet started to say something, but it turned into a deep, watery cough that sounded like it was shaking her body from bone marrow to skin. She excused herself and walked off to the bathroom carrying her purse. I watched her go.

I put my right hand in the pocket of my sport jacket. They were playing Beethoven quietly from small ceiling speakers, and I heard it as if from a childhood dream: my mother and father home from work and enjoying a drink, asparagus steaming, Beethoven on the tape player. I tried to calm down. I looked around at the other men at other tables. They seemed well groomed, with normal hair and good, white-collar careers, and a regular dating record, or a wife, or a steady girlfriend, or kids. No one else in Diem Bo was nervous. I tried doing a breathing exercise Gerard used before his bicycle races, but it made me dizzy so I stopped and stared out at Newbury Street over the top of my arm. When Janet had been gone twelve or fourteen minutes, Joshua brought the scallops. “And a Vietnamese iced coffee,” I said, pointing across the table at the tall glass.

“Very good,” he said.

Five or six minutes later he brought it. “How are the scallops?”

“I haven’t tried them yet.”

“Excellent.”

Two more minutes and I understood that Janet Rossi was not coming back. The part of me that had been against going out on a date again had been the correct part, and the little troll reappeared and started in on a not very nice line of I-told-you-so. In compensation, then, I developed a plan: I would eat all the food we had ordered, buy a thirty-dollar bottle of wine on the way home, and then put John Hiatt on my music machine pretty loud and drink and paint until I knew I could fall asleep. Sitting there, formulating that plan, I felt an old sourness rising. I began to feel sorry for myself in the most childish and brutal way, and though I knew from other times that it would pass, that it was only a little half-dry bloodstain on the shirtsleeve of my mind, I wet it and rubbed it and indulged it for a few more minutes until I saw Janet come out of the bathroom. At which point I started spooning scallops onto her dish like Joe Date.

She gave me a wary look, as if I was going to ask her about the coughing. But I had decided not to. Son of a doctor who had made sure my brother and sister and I weren’t squeamish about the body and its troubles, I wasn’t one of those people who are afraid of catching a cold. Though I’d noticed that several such people were sitting near us.

Before Janet started to eat, she took out a plastic container with several compartments in it, placed six different pills on the tablecloth, and swallowed them with water. It was easy to see that she was waiting for me to ask about them but I didn’t ask because I wanted everything to be alright then. I wanted to be with a woman and have no trouble between us, no jealousy, or anything like that, no sickness. Even just for one night I wanted that. She opened her purse again and snapped it closed, and when I didn’t mention the pills, she started to eat.

I said, “When I get nervous or when something really upsets me, I make goofy jokes. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. I would like to officially start over.”

She nodded and looked up.

“What kind of a day did you have, really?”

She swallowed. “Awful.”

“Why?”

“I’d rather not say. It has to do with the person I work for.”

“Which is who?”

“Which is the governor. It was on my card.”

“Of Massachusetts?”

Another nod.

“The famous Charlie Valvoline?”

Nod number three, and some little squirrel of bad feeling skittering across her cheekbones. “He hates that nickname. Could we talk about something else?”

“Sure. You start.”

The scallops were excellent, and there was something intimate about sharing them that way, and about not knowing what kind of main course Richard was going to bring us. Janet asked what I did for work, but I wasn’t really paying attention to the question because by then I was already beginning to get the sense that there was something vast and wrong in her life, some shadow so enormous that it covered her and me and half the tables in Diem Bo. It was in the movement of her eyes and hands, and in her voice—which was on the husky, throaty side, and resonated behind the bones of the middle of her face. The advantage to meeting and dating when you’re fifteen or seventeen or twenty is that, except in a few awful cases, there has not yet been too much trouble in your romantic life, or in your date’s. You might go through some kind of trouble like that later, together, but at least you start out more or less unscarred. But on dates as a something-less-than-young man, with a something-less-than-young woman, you could start out with someone who had already been through such horror and misery in other relationships that the hope and eagerness in her had been kicked to death before you even had your first kiss.

You could see it in some women’s eyes, in their posture. You could hear it in the way they talked: their pain quota had been filled, for life; there was only so far out into that naked middle ground they were ever going to let themselves go again, and who could blame them?

I wondered sometimes if women saw that in me.

But this was different. This trouble was immediate and oversized. It crept around in Janet’s voice, in the choreography of her hands—which were long-fingered, strong-looking, beautiful hands. I had just a flicker of a thought then that I should get away from that trouble, protect myself, make things easy. But it was attractive, too, in a strange way. My own troubles stirred and blinked in a bad sleep. They sensed a friend in the room.

“So what kind of work do you do?”

“I make things,” I said. “I make houses during the week. At night and on weekends, I make paintings.”

Eric was standing by the table. “If I remember this right,” he said, “the gentleman had the whole sea bass and the lady had the Duckling Saigon.”

“You nailed it,” I told him. “We’ll have a bottle of wine. The lady will tell you which one.”

Jared was happy we were having wine, and Janet ordered a bottle of Sardinian white with what sounded to me like perfect pronunciation and then, when he was gone and we were eating, she said she would give anything to be a person who made things. “I deal in fluff,” she said. “Image. Spin.” She coughed the wet, two-note cough. “Horseshit.”

“I’m totally fulfilled,” I said. “My life is superb. Which is why, the first time you saw me, I was out at midnight ordering two doughnuts by myself.”

Oscar brought the wine and presented it with a flourish. Janet looked at the label and said it was fine. “Can’t smell anything,” she said, and he said, “Very good,” and opened it like an Olympic champion.

“What hurts in your life?” she asked when we were alone again. I just looked at her. I just wanted Brian to stay away. I wanted the tables at Diem Bo to come with a sign like the ones hotel rooms come with and you can hang on the doorknob. Don’t Make Up The Bed.

“You want a joke?” I said. “Or do you want to go there that quick?”

“Alright. I can go there, but let’s finish the specials and then go there.”

“And in the meantime, what about those Red Sox, huh?”

“No.”

“Alright, how about this? In the meantime, what’s the shadow over you? What’s that pain?”

“A bad day at work.” She coughed and massaged the skin over her breastbone with three fingers, and I could tell she wanted off the subject. “What kind of paintings?” she said. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“Paintings where I’m trying to say something about life and death, and then at the last minute I chicken out.”