A Little Love Story (4 page)

“People don’t want to hear about life and death,” she said.

“Of course not. Why would they?”

“They want to be entertained.”

“Which is where your boss comes in. The Wilbur Mills of Lynn Beach, caught with an escort service babe. Eating fried clams, if I remember correctly.”

The squirrel ran across her face again. “He’d been in a terrible marriage for years.”

“Even so. As a citizen of Massachusetts I felt personally embarrassed. I mean, the guy has to pay for a woman to eat clams with him? What kind of governor is that? Taxpayer money, besides.”

“He’s done some good things.”

“I know it. I just—”

Adam was advancing on our table. With both hands I waved him away. He smiled at me. He winked. Janet and I stopped talking about the governor and shared the food—I wasn’t afraid; I never got sick, almost never—and worked our way through the meal and the talk kind of easily. She had somehow taken my natural urge to be too polite—devastating on a first date—and shoved it over the side of the table. She went stretches of several minutes without coughing at all, then started in again. It didn’t seem too bad really, just the tail end of a nasty cold.

Instead of asking the usual questions about brothers and sisters and parents, she said, “Everyone has a mess in their family. What’s your mess?”

“I’m pretty sure my sister works as a kind of call girl in Reno. She says she does therapeutic massage, but I’m pretty sure she’s talking about a certain kind of therapeutic.”

“Really? Does she like it?”

“I never asked. She has some methedrine problems and that’s made her a little hard to talk to. Unless you talk very fast. My brother is a Trappist monk in northwestern Connecticut. To balance things out.”

“Nobody ever married.”

“Not yet. What’s your mess?”

“My father was working on the Mystic River Bridge and either fell off a staging or jumped. We were never sure. Thirteen years ago today, actually.”

“Sorry.”

She waved her fork. “He was a good man. I just try to remember the good things.”

On that hopeful note, Abraham returned and we ordered dessert from him the same way we had ordered the main courses. Janet said, “Fruit for me, if you have it. Sweet and no chocolate for the gentleman.”

With dessert we each had another Vietnamese coffee and the last of the wine and we scooted and slipped through the usual conversational alleys and came out okay. Even though she wanted to split it, I paid the check and put in a forty-dollar tip. I’m old-fashioned there: if you do the inviting, you do the paying. And I was in a mood to spend money outrageously. That happens to me sometimes. Walking away from an ATM machine once in Harvard Square I gave a hundred dollars to a street musician. Five new twenties in his hat. I’d had what people call a comfortable childhood, in what they call the middle class, and I’d built up a thriving little two-man carpentry business, and sold some paintings besides, and I had more money than I knew what to do with and it meant almost exactly nothing to me. During the meal, all the normal insecurities and self-consciousness of a first date had somehow been knocked away and, though I didn’t know why that was, I liked it and it made me reckless, nutty. Plus, it wasn’t Jeffrey’s fault that he was Brian.

When we walked out of Diem Bo I wasn’t nervous. It had rained most of that week but the night was unusually warm for September—hot, really—and I felt completely at ease in it, and with Janet, standing on the sidewalk watching women walking dogs, and couples holding hands, and men in suits on cell phones, and taxis and traffic lights, and a moon almost full, and the healthy brick facades of the townhouses there. Gerard and I had gutted a whole floor of one of those townhouses once, tearing out the old and putting in the new, and it had made us feel heroic, in spite of the parking problems.

I believe Janet felt at ease, too. She was standing close to me, and had draped a pretty striped sweater over her bare shoulders. We were looking away from each other, watching the parade of another city night.

Completely without having planned to do it, I said, “Would you want to go out on the river?”

She turned her face toward me and her eyes were slightly wide and it was easy to see that she’d had a little tickle of understanding what I’d meant, or had made a good guess, and the idea was exciting to her.

“I have a key to the BU boathouse. Have you ever been out in a racing shell? Would you want to?”

“Wouldn’t we need another seven or eight people to fill it up?”

“They have some that are made for two.”

“Are you going to drown me?”

“Not unless one of us makes a huge mistake.”

She moved her eyes in small jumps across my face, and I wondered if I’d pushed the elastic edges of our nice easiness too far too fast and it was going to break open and all the good air between and around us was going to rush off up Newbury Street. I stood still and let myself be looked at. In a situation like that, it is the next thing to impossible for a man to imagine the kind of fear a woman is capable of feeling. I knew that, at least. I knew there was no reason for her to be afraid in that way, and knew I couldn’t say so.

“How weird are you?” she asked. “Really.”

“Weird within normal boundaries.”

She looked at me for another five or six seconds.

“The water will be flat on a night like this. The moon’s almost full. I rowed four years in college, I even have a Head of the Charles medal, and I can give you a written guarantee you won’t fall in.”

“Is it hard exercise?”

“Not tonight.”

More of the dark eyes on me. I liked it. I was innocent, I was good. I had, for some reason, not even been having indecent thoughts. I wasn’t trying to charm her or seduce her or Joe Date her; I was just feeling something different, some freedom I didn’t usually feel on first dates, didn’t usually feel at all. Had never really felt, in fact.

She said, “Okay then.”

We rode in my dented old truck up Commonwealth Avenue, across the Boston University Bridge, and parked in a dirt lot on the other side of Memorial Drive. At the boathouse I used my key in the lock and then turned off the alarm inside and led her down a set of stairs into the concrete-floored, high-ceilinged bays where the long white shells lay on their racks and you could smell sweat and damp concrete and the river. “They used to be made of wood,” I said. “They were beautiful.”

But even made of carbon fiber, they were creatures to look at: sixty feet long, twenty inches wide, a foot deep, with quarter-inch-thick hulls and V-shaped aluminum riggers, and inside, intricately curved ribs and sleek seats on tracks and pairs of sneakers bolted in.

Janet ran her hands over the bow of a boat named
Leila Sophia
. She flipped the gate of one of the riggers gently back and forth so that it made a
click-clack
sound that echoed in the bays.

“They can go as fast as twelve miles an hour,” I told her, “which seems faster on water, much faster, and with eight oarsmen and a coxswain it can be seventeen or eighteen hundred pounds going across the water at that speed, no motor.”

We walked around to the other bay where the smaller boats were kept, singles and doubles and fours. She ran her hands over those, too, played with the oarlocks, peered up underneath them to get a sense of the way the ribs and seats were fashioned.

I hadn’t yet opened the big red garage door that led out onto the dock. Friend or no, keys or no, alarm code or no, I wasn’t supposed to be there at that hour. The head coach then, whose name was Jacques Florent, had been my coach ten years before, and sometimes I came in and helped him organize the two-thousand-meter races on Saturday mornings in May, or did a repair for free on the dock or on one of the weight benches. In exchange for that, he gave me a key and let me take a single out on Sunday afternoons in the warm months. Or let me come in and use the ergometers in the winter when the team wasn’t using them and when the streets were too icy for my regular morning run. But the shells were expensive, fragile as the skeleton of a sparrow, and taking them out on the river at night had never been mentioned as part of the deal. Not alone, not with a date you hardly knew. When you rowed in those boats you moved backwards across the surface of the water, so if something was coming downstream in the dark—a tree limb, an old tire—you wouldn’t know about it until it crashed through the ten-thousand-dollar bow and the river came pouring in.

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.”