A Little Love Story (9 page)

3

O
N A QUIET
, two-lane highway not far from the monastery there was an unmarked dirt parking area large enough for two cars, nothing but woods all around. Hunters used it in fall and spring. Teenagers probably used it as a lovers’ lane. I had used it a dozen times to make my clandestine visits to my brother. I pulled the truck off the road there and killed the lights. Janet and I locked the doors and walked up the highway to the spot where I had met Ellory on the day we’d gone golfing. From there we stepped off onto an old logging road that had almost been reclaimed by the forest, an old wound, mostly healed. I kept a cigar-sized flashlight in the glove compartment, and had remembered to bring it, so we had a little light to work by, and a three-quarters moon, and, for Janet, even in sneakers and a partly buttonless dress, the going wasn’t too bad.

She’d been out of the hospital only a week and wasn’t coughing very much at all, but even so her lungs were functioning at only about thirty-five percent of capacity, so I went along at a slow pace. The visit was foolish in several ways, but I had mentioned Janet to Ellory in a letter, and he’d written back saying I should bring her to the next family day, which was scheduled for the start of January. But I knew that when Janet’s lung capacity dropped into the mid-twenties, which it would the next time she caught a cold, it would not be very easy to take her walking in the woods, or on a ride to the monastery, or much of anywhere else.

It was about half a mile on the trail. We stopped twice to rest. Janet did not like me to see how out of breath she was, so when we stopped she stayed a couple of steps away from me and turned her back. I pretended I’d found some interesting mushroom or something to study in the beam of my little flashlight. From things that had happened in my own life during the previous year, I knew about pity and what it ruined. My promise to myself, from the night I’d first typed the words “cystic fibrosis” into Gerard’s computer, had been that, no matter what else I did, I was going to steer my feelings for her a hundred and fifty miles wide of pity.

So I waited for her to say she couldn’t do something—couldn’t make love, couldn’t come into my studio because of the fumes, couldn’t walk a flat half-mile in the woods—but she never said that. I sometimes thought of her toughness as an iron bar running up her spine. Other times I thought of it as a fire in her chest. Once in a while, on my three-times-a-week morning runs, I’d find a long steep hill and sprint up it as hard as I could, just to feel the pain of wanting breath, and to realize she felt some version of that pain for most of her waking hours.

Soon enough the woods ended and there were open, almost-flat hayfields coated in silvery light, and an old rail fence with signs every thirty feet:
MONASTIC ENCLOSURE, PLEASE KEEP OUT
.

We ducked under the top rail. Crossing the hayfield, I took her hand. By then we had left the State House behind, it seemed to me, though my face hurt where the governor had scratched it, and my ribs and shoulder where he had practiced his judo on me. Janet’s hand felt hot against my palm and I had an urge to stop and lay her down in the sweet grass and make peace that way. I put the flashlight in my front pocket, then took it out and put it in my back pocket. We crossed a low rise and could see Ellory’s cabin ahead another eighty yards. The only window was an ocher rectangle, but as we got closer the light went out.

“He’s just going to bed,” I told Janet quietly. “It’s good, he’ll be done with his prayers, he’ll be hungry.”

We walked up to the cabin and I tapped on the door three times, two quick, soft knocks then a pause, then one sharp knock. In a minute the light came back on. Another minute and Ellory opened the door, any ordinary, nice-looking thirty-eight-year-old in a bathrobe, little spark of devil in the eyes.

“Hi,” I said. “Sorry to bother you, but have you noticed lately how much trouble there is in the world? Have you ever wondered why?”

4

E
LLORY TOOK A STEP
out of his hermitage and squeezed me so hard I thought the rib the governor had bruised was going to snap. Before I could breathe well enough again to introduce Janet, he said, “Either you’ve brought a beautiful woman with you or Brother Theodorus is playing dress-up again.”

“I’m Janet Rossi,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Sorry. I’m not allowed to shake hands with women.” Ellory stepped farther out from the hermitage and embraced her, too, though not as hard. “Come in, before the night watchman sees us and they turn me back into a Protestant.”

The hut was sixteen feet by sixteen feet with one chair, one table, one bed, one lamp, one three-shelf bookcase on the wall, a woodstove, a small sink with a hot plate to one side of it, a half-sized refrigerator, and a door that led to a closet with a flush toilet and a shower stall. I took the flashlight out of my pocket and Janet and I sat on the plain gray blanket on the bed. Ellory pulled his chair over. On his feet he was wearing a pair of no-heel leather slippers, color of a peanut shell, that my mother had given him when she was still, as we liked to say, “sharp.” They were in tatters, the tops and soles barely holding together, a toe showing through. Everything else in the room was perfectly neat—no cobwebs, no clutter, no excess—as if the monks had convinced my brother that the condition of his living space had some influence on the condition of his soul.

“Would you guys like me to call out for a pizza?” my brother offered. He paused one beat for effect, then went to the door, opened it, and, in a not very loud voice, sang out, “Pizza! Pizza!” He came back in and sat down, smiling like a kid in a swimming pool.

I could tell he was nervous.

Janet was watching him. “You have your brother’s sense of humor,” she said after a few seconds.

“It’s our dad’s, actually. He was an investment banker and then a financial counselor—did Jake tell you? White shirt and tie all week. Big serious meetings at which big serious men talked about large sums of money.”

“Big serious money,” I said.

“And at night, or on the weekends, or when we went someplace on vacation, he could be as foolish as a four-year-old.” He turned to me. His eyes were steady and clear. He was happy we’d come. “Remember Bastille Day?”

“We were on vacation in Paris,” I said to Janet, “and we were all sitting at a sidewalk table getting ready to have dinner.”

“Rue Mouffetard,” Ellory said. “No cars, you know. Little shops. Cobblestones.”

“And some guy with an accordion started playing lively French tunes. So my father grabbed my mother by the arm and pulled her out into the street and started dancing with her there, spinning her around, bending her backwards like Fred with Ginger.

“Which would have been fine, except he couldn’t dance to save his soul. He improvised. Mum improvised with him. It went on and on. The food was served, Mum came back to the table eventually, but Dad just kept going, solo. We started to eat and he just kept dancing, twirling around, flailing his arms up in the air. It really wasn’t that unusual a sight for us, him making a spectacle of himself. The people at the other tables loved it, though.”

“Mum loved it, too,” I said.

“Of course she did. She dealt with sick and dying kids all day, he was her relaxation … How is she anyway?”

“Okay. The same. Last time you saw her she was asking for me.”

Ellory almost smiled. “She’s not in any pain,” he said, and I could see the suit of guilt on him, too.

“She mixes us up,” I explained to Janet.

“You told me.”

We didn’t talk for a moment. Janet fussed with the top of her dress and pushed herself back on the bed so she was against the wall. She let her eyes wander over the sparse furnishings. Those sparse furnishings, I noticed for the first time, included a framed picture of a young woman, which sat on the top of Ellory’s bookcase, above a row of lentil soup cans and next to framed pictures of my sister, me, and our parents. I looked at it once, and then just focused on a corner of the room where my brother had set up a little shrine—crucifix, votive candle, a vase with a few stalks of some kind of wild berry in it.

I knew Janet well enough by then to see that she was at ease with Ellory and in his little house, the way she had been at ease in my apartment almost from the first minute. Families are like countries. They have their own language and jokes and secrets and assumptions about the right and wrong ways of doing things, and some of that always shows in the children, the way something of Germany or Australia always shows in a German or an Australian, no matter where they go. Outsiders like it or they don’t, they feel at home there or they don’t. It’s like the taste of cilantro. Giselle had never liked cilantro.

I had been thinking about the photograph and holding the bag with the sub sandwich and cigarettes in it. I was somehow not paying attention. After she’d finished looking at the pictures and the soup cans and reading the titles on the spines of Ellory’s books, Janet touched my arm and pointed to the oil stain on my pants. I handed the bag to my brother and told him what it was. He insisted we share the sandwich with him. We said no. He insisted again and we said no again, we’d just eaten, we were fine. And then he said okay but he would save half of it for the next day’s lunch. And then he ate the first half of the sub from a plate on his lap, with his bathrobe on and his hairy shins showing, in about three seconds. My eyes wandered up to the bookcase again, and I could not keep myself from thinking about something he had told me: that the monks in his order weren’t supposed to talk and so they learned sign language and there was a certain sign they used for greeting each other and it meant
memento mori
, remember death. When he’d first told that to me and for years afterwards I thought it was one of the worst things I’d heard about the monastery, right there in line with
Pain is a blessing
. “Remember life,” I thought they should be saying to each other. “Remember fun.”

But I’d gotten older and certain things had happened to me and to people close to me, and the monks’ little hand signal had started to make more sense. All of Ellory had started to make more sense.

I took the pack of cigarettes out of my shirt pocket and handed it over. He placed it on his desk, just so.

Janet pulled the top of her dress together again and asked him what it was like, living alone all the time.

In his early monastic days, Ellory would have said, “I’m not alone, I have the Lord’s presence,” or some special thing like that. But he’d grown up, finally, after thirteen years of no sex and no carousing and no sleeping later than four a.m. He looked up at her and said, “Oh, shit. You’ve been here all this time and I haven’t asked about you at all.”

“My life is an open book,” she said.

He smiled. He was still holding the dripping oily sandwich in both hands an inch above his plate. “Mine, too, but… What kind of work do you do?”

“I work for the governor of Massachusetts.”

“Doing what?”

“Reading and interpreting polls, deflecting and entertaining lobbyists, working on his travel itinerary in campaign years, advising on speeches, being a liaison with the press. Getting him reelected. My title is Special Assistant for Public Relations.”

“He must be a good man, then, if you work for him.”

“He’s a jerkoff,” I said. My hand was hurting more now; there was about two percent of being sorry left in me.

Janet had a particular way of pursing her lips when she was bothered by something I did or said. It made small ridges of skin at the outside edges of her mouth, and made the freckle almost disappear. When she pursed her lips like that in my direction, I knew everything was more or less alright between us. Ellory looked from me to her and she said, “No, he’s … flawed. I thought he might be someone special when I first went to work for him. He’s charismatic, in a politician’s way. He seems to care about children, really, and he’s good with his own daughters. When I first saw him—I went to work for him during his first campaign when I was right out of grad school—I thought he might turn into a great governor someday. I thought he might even run for president—he still wants to. But I’ve been there almost four years now and he’s squeezed three-quarters of the idealism out of me.” She coughed her deep wet cough and I watched my brother watching her. “I wanted to do something good for the world. Now I want to keep my health insurance and have someplace to go on rainy weekday mornings in February.”

“I was more idealistic at first, too,” Ellory said when she was finished. “The routine here breaks it out of you. That’s good, I think, or natural. Every life does that. Marriage does it, work does it. The trick is to somehow keep the gates open in the fences at the edge of your mind and not get hard and bitter. You don’t strike me as hard and bitter. Jake doesn’t strike me that way either, in spite of everything that’s happened to him.”

Janet looked at me when Ellory said that. It was as if I’d just taken off a pair of dark glasses and she was seeing my eyes for the first time. She looked back at Ellory, who was taking the opportunity to gulp down the second half of his sandwich, and whose eyes slipped once to the cigarettes on the desk.

“Don’t you miss sex?” she asked abruptly. “Don’t you miss being close to someone that way?”

“Sure.” Ellory got up to put his dish in the sink, and toss the waxed paper in the wastebasket. He washed the oil from his fingers, dried his hands, and looked at the cigarettes again, then came back and sat in his chair. “When I first started living here I used to masturbate every Monday night, right on schedule, once a week. It was something to look forward to.”

It did not sound like he was talking about sex. All the dirtiness and sweet spark had been taken out of it.

“I miss women,” he went on. “I miss that kind of intimacy. But I think whatever people do, they do in search of pleasure. Or trying to get rid of pain or fear, which is the same thing, basically. Everything, everything is really about that. Everything is about bringing your mind to a place where it’s at peace. There are just different routes. Some of them seem to lead there, and lead there for a while, and then don’t. Some things work for one person and don’t work at all for another person. Our sister takes a lot of drugs. Jake told you that, I’m sure. She just wants to put her mind in a pleasurable place or she just wants to get rid of the pain that’s there. It’s not a sin. It’s not something God despises her for. It doesn’t work, that’s all. And it just leads to her doing things, to herself and other people, that drive her farther away from the peace she’s looking for. That’s hell.”

Janet was staring at him. I was looking at the bookcase on the wall, measuring everything Ellory said against the photograph there.

“Bro,” I said, when he stopped for a breath.

“What?”

“You’re, you know, preaching a little.”

Janet said, “No he isn’t, Jake.” Then, to Ellory, “And this works for you, living like this?”

“It’s a good setup for someone like me, it wasn’t always.”

“Jake said you were wild.”

“I was afraid of dying, that’s all.”

“And now you’re not.”

“I might be, when the time comes. I imagine I will be, but maybe less than I would have been if I hadn’t come here. I’m curious about it some days.”

“Me, too,” Janet said.

I got up off the bed a little too suddenly, stepped out through the front door, and closed it most of the way. I went just far enough to be out of the window light, partway around the corner of Ellory’s little house. I looked across the dark fields. By then the moon was well up in the sky and the night was clear and we were far out in the countryside so that, even with the moon, there were about three times as many stars as I was used to seeing. You could feel the first bite of winter in the air. And in the darkness the monastery grounds and the dark shapes of buildings on a little rise half a mile away seemed to be giving off the scent of desolation.

My hand and my rib and one side of my face throbbed every time a pulse of blood went through them. I knew we weren’t going to New York then. I suspected I had never really been planning to take Janet to New York on that trip. Something moved up through me when I admitted that to myself, a twist of old anguish twirling up the bones of my back. Riding along with the anguish, or right behind the anguish, came a beautiful sense of relief, something like what I had felt at Diem Bo on our first date. It was a kind of fearlessness, I understood that then, a way of just standing in the moment of time I was standing in and knowing I could probably survive whatever was going to follow that moment. I understood, too, that, in their own ways, Janet and Ellory had both learned to do that, live in the present like that, gobbling up their fears.

After a time I went back into the cabin and they were looking at me. “Thought I’d pee outside,” I told them, and when Janet pursed her lips again, I said, “The neighborhood has gotten lousy here, I thought I heard somebody stealing the golf clubs out of my truck.” And when she kept her eyes on me and that expression on her mouth, I said, “I just needed a few seconds. All is well.”

But she kept looking.

We stayed another ten minutes. We talked about plans to bring my mother there for the January visiting day, and about the season the Red Sox were having, and a little bit about Janet’s mother, a devout Catholic herself. Over the course of the time we’d been dating, Janet had told me how her mother had taken care of her as a girl and as a young woman, doing her chest PT every night, taking her to doctors, sleeping on a cot beside her hospital bed, cooking special meals. A little overprotective at times, Janet said, but kind and tough and fond of men who worked with their hands. Janet kept saying how much I’d like her and how much she’d like me. I’d seen pictures of the woman. But, though she lived only ten minutes from Boston, I noticed that Janet made no move to actually introduce us.

My brother gets up at 4:15 every morning to pray, and Janet and I were supposedly on our way to New York City, so we said our good-byes, exchanging embraces like explorers getting ready to set off across different oceans. Janet and I stepped out into the night. When we were a few dozen steps from the cabin, I looked back and saw that the light was still on, the door still open, Ellory standing there in his bathrobe, watching us. Just before we crossed the rise, I looked back again and saw that the door was closed and the light still showing in the window and I knew he was praying for us then, asking whatever saints and spirits might be out there to watch over us, help us not to turn bitter and hard, not to be afraid.