A Little Love Story (5 page)

6

T
HERE 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 I was showing the officer my somewhat out-of-date, damp, Boston University Alumnus ID and explaining about my key, my very good friend Coach Florent, and our arrangement.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?”

“What’s that?” the trooper demanded, though even with the gentle knock and squeak of the dock hinges and even with the cars humming past on Memorial Drive, there wasn’t a chance in a thousand he hadn’t heard me.

“There are towels inside. Why don’t you get her one instead of making remarks like that?”

It was a very hard look he fixed on me then. I looked back at him. The boathouse lights made a small fuzz at the edges of his shoulders. “Pass that over,” he said to the BU cop, and he took my ID and marched up through the bays. We could hear his boots on the steps, then the heavy wooden front door slamming closed.

Janet was shaking slightly, dripping wet, still holding on to my arm. Given what our outing on the river had turned into, that gesture seemed like an act of generosity on her part. “If you go up to the landing and turn right, there’s the women’s showers,” I said to her. “There should be towels in there. No one will mind.”

When I was alone with the officer, a motorboat with a bow light went slowly past and I walked back down to where the double scull was floating and held it out at arm’s length so the wake wouldn’t knock it against the edge of the dock. There was water in the bottom of the boat, three or four inches from when the gunwale had dipped under Janet’s weight. When the wake died down I took the oars out and set them aside on the dock and tilted the shell toward me. I splashed out some of the water, but it was still too heavy to lift alone. The college cop came over and squatted down near me. He smelled like cigarettes.

“How’d you feel about helping me get this out of the water?” I said.

“Bad back.”

“Alright. Maybe the trooper will help.”

“He going to find anything there when he puts your name in the computer?”

“No.”

“Kind of a dumb remark, wasn’t it?”

“His or mine?”

“Yours.”

“Sure. I do that.”

“Kind of a dumb stunt, too.” He gestured toward the boat.

“You ever been out on the river at night?”

He shook his head. I thought of telling him about when I was a junior and a senior and we had gone out on the Charles in eights in the dark. The captain those years was pre-med, and so was I. We had an organic chemistry lab that went until four o’clock twice a week, so afterwards we’d hurry over to the boat-house and change and go out at four-thirty and by five-thirty it would be black dark. Coach Florent had a spotlight on his launch. He’d ride along next to us and shine the spotlight on you to see how your technique was, to see if you were coasting at all in the middle of the tough pieces. He had a bullhorn. “Entwhistle!” he’d yell in his high squeaky voice. “Down and away with the hands! Come on, John! Down and away. Then stand on the catch! STAND ON IT, GODDAMN IT!”

Sometimes the air temperature would be twenty degrees. A coat of ice would form on the shafts of the oars. But after you’d been rowing hard for a while, everything except the skin of your face would be warm, and sometimes we’d go down into the basin and do thousand-meter pieces there, invisible in the black, cold night. You’d feel like you had skidded off the edge of the predictable world and were just out there where no one and nothing could see you.

But I decided it wasn’t a story the officer would appreciate. I splashed some more water out of the boat with one hand and waited.

Soon we could hear the trooper’s boots on the stairs, and then on the dock. We stood up. The trooper handed my ID to the BU cop and said, “Do what you want.”

“Look,” I said, as he was turning away. “She’s sick. She was shivering. I wasn’t trying to be a wise-ass, you just—”

“She’s the governor’s slut,” he said at me, in a voice that was hard as a punch. “Everybody who’s been anywhere near him knows that. Used goods.”

He turned and marched toward the light. We heard him trotting up the stairs, and then we heard the door again, and then the sound of the cruiser engine as he accelerated.

7

J
ANET AND
I
MANAGED
to tip and splash almost all the water out of the boat. Once it was up on our shoulders, the officer gave her a hand with some of the weight, and then helped us set it on the rack. He stood by without saying anything as I locked the bay doors, and then he followed us upstairs and I reset the alarm and turned out the lights. Janet had taken a hot shower but had to put the wet black dress back on, and then her dry sweater over it. She was coughing every fifteen seconds or so, and I worried that the dip in the Charles had taken her bad cold and turned it into pneumonia. Folded up in one hand she was holding her wet black panties and bra, and the officer could not keep his eyes from going there. He asked if we needed a ride. When we said we didn’t, he told us to stay out of trouble, and wished us a good night, and, after one last look at Janet and what she was carrying, got into his white and blue college police car and drove back over the bridge.

We walked across the four lanes of Memorial Drive and climbed into the truck. I kept a long-sleeved jersey there for days when Gerard and I got rained on, and for times, after work, when I didn’t want to walk into a sandwich shop or a bar all sweat and sawdust. I stepped out of the truck again and changed my shirt, but I didn’t put my good sport coat back on. We closed the windows and turned up the heat. It was hard to shake the chill.

“Everything go alright with the state police?” Janet asked, when we were driving over the bridge.

“Fine,” I said. “No problem.”

“He was on the State House detail a few times.”

I was trying hard but I could not think of a good next thing to say. We stopped in a short line of red taillights near the end of the bridge, and it seemed to me that I could feel the roadway trembling. We could have looped around to the left there, back toward Diem Bo, where I supposed Janet had parked, or we could have turned right, toward my apartment. When the light changed I went straight.

“Amazing,” I said finally, “how one jerkoff can sour a mood.”

Janet watched me across the seat. “And we were having such a nice time,” she said. “Swimming and everything.”

I laughed. I was just driving aimlessly and she knew it. We were trying to get back to the place we had been in Diem Bo but I wasn’t sure anymore how we had gotten there, and my being not sure made her not sure, I could feel that. All the nice liquid easiness that had been swirling between us had somehow hardened up and cracked.

For a few minutes we drove around on the back roads of Brookline in an awkward silence and then I turned, for no particular reason, onto Beacon Street and headed toward Coolidge Corner. She broke the silence: “Did you mean what you said at the restaurant? About being afraid of women’s bodies?”

“Terrified.”

“Is that something I could help you with?”

Joe Date would have made a cool remark then. “Absolutely,” he would have said. Or: “I was hoping you’d offer.” Or: “I’m willing to give it another try. It’s important not to let your fears rule you.” But in order to make remarks like that when you want to make them, your mind has to be focused right on the there and then, and mine wasn’t. We were not far from the building—a three-story, redbrick townhouse—where I’d first made love with Giselle, and I was upset at myself for taking that route on that night, for being the kind of person who let the past haunt him, distant and recent, who let the remarks of jerkoffs cut and stick like bits of grit in raw flesh. For an hour there in Diem Bo and afterwards I had slipped free of all that.

We were driving past 1178 Beacon Street and I was smelling the lemon laundry soap on the sheets and Giselle was standing by the half-open Venetian blinds with no clothes on. I had made love with a short list of other women by that point—in college and afterwards—but I had not ever felt anything like what I’d felt with her on that night. I’m not talking just about the physical feelings. I think what happens when you make love is that you communicate with the other person through a thousand secret channels. Every place your skin touches her skin is another little conversation. You can’t control those things the way you try to control a regular conversation; you can’t decide what to say and what to keep from saying. It’s as if the hair on your arms and the skin of your shoulders and the bones of your legs all carry different bits of your whole history there inside the cells. Everything that has happened to you, every thought and feeling and hope and sorrow, it’s all stored there. When you put your body against someone else’s body the cells can’t help but talk to each other, see where they match up and don’t, make billions of calculations as to where your histories and dreams speak a common language, what might be the chances of a happy life for the two of you and your as yet unborn child. It’s biological, I think, and more than biological, part of the whole mysterious package that makes a pregnancy, or a friendship. That night, with Giselle, all the conversations were carried on without translation—at least it felt that way. In fact, later that same night I dreamt she
had
gotten pregnant, in spite of everything we were doing to prevent it. In time there would be other kinds of lovemaking. Our dreams and visions would veer off into sulky solitudes, but on that night I’d felt, for a while, that we weren’t completely separate souls, and that is not a feeling you forget.

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.”

8

T
HERE 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.

“The pants,” she said, but then she started coughing again so I put the air conditioner on low to get some of the paint smell out. I unfolded a clean drop cloth and put it over her chest and hips and legs. I climbed in with her as if we were under a sheet.

She pulled my belt out of the loops and threw it on the floor, and then snapped open the button on my wet jeans, pulled the zipper down, and left her hands there. There was a shaft of filtered streetlight slanting in against the wall, and we were used to the dark by then, so I could make out the shape of her face, and see glints of light in her eyes. “Listen,” she said, her hands moving around inside my pants, her voice all naked earnestness. “I’m almost a hundred percent sure I can’t get pregnant, I mean it. And I can’t give you any kind of sickness, nothing. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“And you weren’t lying about the year?”

“No.”

“And it wasn’t because there’s something wrong with you?”

“There’s plenty wrong with me, but no.”

She kissed me longer than the other kisses, then coughed over my shoulder again, that wet swampy two-note cough that seemed to echo and rumble in a wet barrel the size of the whole room. I didn’t care about the cough. I ran my fingers along her spine and shoulder blades. She had fine soft skin. She pulled away. She tugged my pants down, then brought one leg up, put her toes over the top of them, and pushed down until they were off my ankles. “Your underwear is wet,” she said, but I was past talking. It had been 381 days since I had done this and my heart was like a big wet fist slamming against the inside of my ribs. Lines of electricity were skittering across my lips. I moved my right hand down across the side of her hip and down against the wet slick heat between her legs. I could hear her breath change. She rolled half onto her back, half against the wall, and moved her legs apart a little and made the humming noise in the back of her mouth but I could see that her eyes were open. For a few seconds it was awkward. She squirmed and pushed away from the wall to get her back flat on the couch, she kicked at the drop cloth, but she never took her eyes off me. I moved my hand up, fingertips wet. She was yanking down on the elastic of my underwear with one hand. The air conditioner hummed. In the kitchen the phone rang once, went quiet, and then rang again and kept ringing until the machine clicked on. I moved on top of her with my weight on my elbows and I could see her eyes gleaming, fires in the night. In a whisper I wouldn’t have heard if her mouth wasn’t so close, three little puffs of speech that slipped out of her between the humming moans, I thought she said, “Don’t hurt me.”

And I thought, before I could no longer think, that there wasn’t a chance in a hundred million chances that I would.