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  A Little Love Story

  Roland Merullo

  In A Little Love Story, Roland Merullo – winner of the Massachusetts Book Award and the Maria Thomas Fiction Award – has created a sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious tale of attraction and loyalty, jealousy and grief. It is a classic love story – with some modern twists.

  Janet Rossi is very smart and unusually attractive, an aide to the governor of Massachusetts, but she suffers from an illness that makes her, as she puts it, 'not exactly a good long-term investment.' Jake Entwhistle is a few years older, a carpenter and portrait painter, smart and good-looking too, but with a shadow over his romantic history. After meeting by accident – literally – when Janet backs into Jake's antique truck, they begin a love affair marked by courage, humor, a deep and erotic intimacy… and modern complications.

  Working with the basic architecture of the love story genre, Merullo – a former carpenter known for his novels about family life – breaks new ground with a fresh look at modern romance, taking liberties with the classic design, adding original lines of friendship, spirituality, and laughter, and, of course, probing the mystery of love.

  Roland Merullo

  A Little Love Story

  © 2004

  for

  Steven Merullo

  Kenneth Merullo

  Peter Grudin

  Dean Crawford

  and

  in memory of

  Gerard X. Sikorski

  Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

  – AMELIA EARHART PUTNA

  A portion of the author’s earnings from this book will be donated to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

  Acknowledgments

  M Y FORMER MENTOR, Michael Miller, once told me that no one writes a book alone, and in my case at least, that has always been true. I’d like to mention here some people whose names do not appear on the cover but who made contributions, small and large, to this novel.

  First thanks, as always, to Amanda for her good faith, spirit of adventure, and steady love.

  My gratitude also to: Alexandra and Juliana for the gift of their presence; everyone at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, especially Dr. Preston Campbell III and Allison Tobin; Dr. Mark Pian, Dr. Geoffrey Kurland, Dr. James Yankaskas, Dr. Ronald Kahn, and Dr. Marlyn Woo, all of whom generously offered their time and expertise and helped me get the medical details right (any errors here are my own and not theirs); Dr. Janice Abbott, Ph.D., for help with the psychosocial aspects of cystic fibrosis; Dr. Robert Gerstle, Dr. Francis Duda, Dr. Anabel Quizon, and everyone at the Springfield, Massachusetts, CF center for their excellent care; Joe Merullo for his optimism and encouragement, and for suggesting I write a love story; Eileen Keaffer and Senator Stanley Rosenberg for their assistance with the physical details of the Massachusetts State House; my friend, the fine painter John Recco, and Sara Brigham for information about painting techniques and equipment; Maria Recco for help with Greek culture; Avery Rome for two wonderful assignments; Matthew Joyce and his family, David Manglos, and Fred Phillips for their courage and time-while this is not their story, they were surely an inspiration for it; a thoughtful and helpful group of readers: Amanda Merullo, Craig Nova, Peter Grudin, Dean Crawford, Barbara Cheney, Lisa Ahlstrom, Sydne Didier, Katherine Weinstein, Melissa Preston, and the person who taught me to read and to love books, Eileen Merullo; Cynthia Cannell for placing this novel and for years of support; my editor and friend Shaye Areheart; Jenny Frost, Cindy Berman, Julie Will, Darlene Faster, Tara Gilbride, Debbie Natoli, Kira Stevens, Tina DeGraff, and everyone at Shaye Areheart Books for their tireless efforts; Jeff Foltz, Patrolman Rick Camillo of the Boston University Police, and Coach David Sanderson of the Boston University varsity men’s crew for refreshing my memory about the school and the sport; Darra Goldstein for menu advice; Edward Steriti for the way he lives; and Officer Wise of the Dover, Massachusetts, Police Department.

  Last, I would like to express my gratitude to and admiration for all the CF patients, doctors, nurses, and family members I have spoken with or interviewed over the past four years. May every blessing come to you.

  F IVE MILES BELOW I dreamt the blue Pacific, scalloped with whitecaps and looking like it had been frozen in time. In my lap the sleeping black-haired bundle of life stirred and sighed and curled closer against my shirt. I cupped one hand gently against the back of his small head. When he was quiet I turned to the window again and saw four atolls gliding under us, an impossible cluster, four specks of cream-edged green on the immense watery background. I wondered about painting them.

  Strange how the demons do their work. With that fragile life sleeping against me, and two more dark-haired creatures close beside, and riding a run of good luck like I’d never known, my mind traveled along the ridges of its flying-fear, bumped and tilted, flipped upside down, and crashed into Brian. It occurred to me for the first time that he might have done some great heroic thing in the last minutes of his life, to make up for the not-so-great things he’d done before that. Alright, a voice in me said, let it go now. Let it be true. Let it go.

  The atolls coasted along in their dreamy, improbable stillness. Beside me I thought I heard a cough. I turned-too quickly-and her dark eyes held an expression that no one could paint. Don’t worry, they said. Just an ordinary breath, a good ordinary puff of life, part mine and part yours and part someone else’s. Be happy while we can.

  Book One

  S e p t e m b e r

  1

  MY YEAR OF MOURNING was over, and I decided to mark the anniversary by treating myself to a doughnut.

  By my own choice, I had not had sex with anyone during those twelve months. I’m not sure why I did that. Maybe it was out of respect for the woman I had lost, though she wouldn’t have wanted anything like that from me. My older brother is a monk, so maybe I was trying to prove I could keep up with him in the abstinence department. Or maybe I was just afraid I would meet someone I liked and sleep with her, then start to think about her all the time, then start to want to have children with her, and then she would be torn away from me and spirited off to some better world-if there is a better world-and that is not the kind of thing you want to go through twice in one year.

  So on that wet September night my year of abstinence was finished, and I went out looking for a doughnut as a sort of offbeat celebration. That’s all, really. A doughnut says: Listen, for your eighty-five cents I’m going to give you a quick burst of feel-good. No soul connection. No quiet walks. No long foreplay sessions in a warm one-bedroom. No extinction of aloneness. No jealousy. No fights. No troubles. No risk.

  On that night, the risk I thought I was willing to take extended only as far as chocolate-glazed. Steaming cup of decaf next to it, little bit of cream, the shabby comfort of my favorite doughnut shop. It seemed a small enough thing to ask, after the year I’d seen.

  The steady rain that had been falling during the afternoon and early part of the night had quieted to a light drizzle. The streets were black and wet, streaked with color from storefront neon and traffic lights. I worked my old pickup out of its parking space-foolish move, giving up a parking space in that neighborhood at that late hour-and drove to Betty’s.

  There is no Betty. Once there might have been, but at that point Betty’s was owned by Carmine Asalapolous, a rough-edged, middle-aged man who had told me once that he wished he’d done something heroic in his life so he’d have a piece of high ground to fall back on when the devils of self-doubt were after him. Carmine, I said, just being a decent person, good father, excellent doughnut-maker-that’s enough heroism for one life
. But he shook his big head sadly and said no, it wasn’t, not for him.

  Carmine went to a two-hour Orthodox service on Sunday mornings. During the week he liked to make off-color jokes with his regular customers. He had some kind of mindless prejudice against college professors, a scar between his eyebrows that looked like a percent sign, and two young daughters whom he adored and whose pictures and drawings were taped up on every vertical surface in Betty’s. He took his work seriously. If you got him going on the subject of doughnut-making, he’d tell you the chain doughnut shops used only the cheapest flour, which is why you left those places with a pasty aftertaste on your tongue.

  I parked in front. The roof of Betty’s was dripping and one cold droplet caught me on the left ear as I walked in. I remember that odd detail. In line at the counter I held a little debate with myself-how wild a night should it be?-then asked for two chocolate-glazed instead of one, a medium instead of a small decaf. Carmine was counting money in the floury kitchen. I could see him there through a sort of glassless window. He looked up at me from his stack of bills, pointed with his chin at the waitress’s back, and made a John Belushi face, pushing his lips to the side and lifting one eyebrow, the expression of a man who had not a millionth of a chance of ever touching the waitress in a way she liked, and knew it.

  I carried my paper cup of coffee and paper plate with two doughnuts on it to a stool at a counter that looked out on Betty’s wet parking lot. In a minute a trim, balding man sat beside me, with a black coffee and the Sports section of the New York Times. “Nice truck,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I saw you get out of it,” he said.

  I could not think of any response to this.

  He kept trying. He said: “You don’t see many of them still around. Fifty-one Dodge?”

  “Forty-nine.”

  “Gorgeous,” he said. “Like you.”

  I looked away. I was waiting for my coffee to cool, and was not really in the mood to talk, and though I understand sexual loneliness as well as the next person, there was not much I could do about this man’s loneliness. Just at that exact moment-it was after midnight-a woman walked out of Betty’s carrying a small bag and got into her car and she must have had a slippery shoe or been distracted by something because she put her new Honda in reverse and drove it across about fifteen open feet of parking lot and straight into the back of my truck.

  “Whoa!” the man beside me yelled.

  I took a good hot sip of coffee. I watched the woman get out, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand and looking as if she wished she had never been born. And then, very calmly, I went outside to talk to her.

  2

  SHE WAS A NICE-LOOKING woman. Not very tall, thin, with large breasts under a gray cashmere sweater and wide hips and what looked like genuine cowboy boots on, and jeans. She wasn’t really dressed to be out in the rain, and she was coughing. I had my coffee cup in one hand and my first instinct was to offer her some because she looked so miserable there, in pain, upset at her bad luck, and sick besides.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Jake. That’s my truck you just mashed.”

  She coughed and coughed and said how sorry she was.

  I said it wasn’t the end of the world-a phrase I had been using with myself all year. She got out her registration and insurance papers and gave me her business card, and since I don’t have a business card, I wrote my name and number on the back of another one of hers and that was the end of it. Carmine had come out and was wielding an old golf club in case there was any trouble, which, of course, there wasn’t. Just before the woman ducked into her Honda, she swung her long black hair away from her face and looked at me. Thank you for not making a big deal about it, the look said. But Carmine interpreted it differently.

  “You have the phone of this girl?” he asked, when she had driven away.

  I said that I did. We were standing there side by side in the drizzle.

  “Wait three days for the cold she has to go away, then call.”

  I finished my coffee right there in the rain, and Carmine took the cup, and I went home and more or less straight to bed.

  3

  OVER THE NEXT FEW days it wasn’t easy to keep from thinking about the young woman in the cowboy boots because I used my truck for work and I liked to look at it from time to time to cheer myself up. It was an official antique, forest green, with a bright chrome grille and a handmade maple rack over the bed for lumber and ladders. Every time I looked at the truck from a certain angle I could see the broken taillights and dented fender and I wondered how hard it would be to get replacement parts and I thought about the black-haired woman coughing in the rain.

  I didn’t mention her to anyone, not even to Gerard, who works with me and is closer to me than my own brother and sister. I waited three days-for her cold to go away and so as not to seem overly anxious-then dialed the number on her card.

  “Hi,” I said. It was my lunch hour, I was calling on Gerard’s cell phone, because I didn’t own a cell phone anymore. I didn’t own a TV, either, or a microwave, or a single pneumatic nailing gun, even though I could have afforded those things. I was sitting on a set of exterior steps we’d built as part of a new addition to a professor’s house in Cambridge, tuna sandwich on my lap. “I’m Jake Entwhistle,” I said into the phone. “You mashed up my truck the other night in front of Betty’s.”

  For a few seconds there was no reply. It sounded to me as though she was still coughing, but trying to stifle it. I pictured her turning her face away from the phone.

  “The doughnut shop,” I suggested, when she didn’t speak.

  “My insurance company should have sent you the papers by now.”

  “I’m not calling about that. I’m calling to ask you out.”

  “I’m at work,” she said.

  This didn’t seem like a promising answer, but I kept trying: “A restaurant dinner, on me. Maybe a walk around the block afterwards if it’s a nice night and we get along.”

  “Thank you, but I can’t,” she said. “And I’m very busy right now.”

  “Alright.”

  “You should get the insurance forms within a day.”

  “Alright,” I said. “I’m not worried. It’s an old truck.”

  “Good. Good-bye. Thank you anyway.”

  “’Bye,” I said. I set Gerard’s phone down on the new stair tread, finished my sandwich, folded the wax paper up into a perfect square, and put it in my back pocket. I looked out at the neighborhood of neat, wood-frame houses with swing sets in their backyards. Eventually I stood up.

  Instead of eating, Gerard was using the lunch hour to take a nap on the plywood subfloor of what would someday be the professor’s new bedroom. For a while I walked around, checking things that didn’t need to be checked, and at twelve-forty-five I went up and woke him. When he opened his eyes and saw me he said, “One more minute, Colonel, I was having the dream of dreams.”

  Everything was the something of something with my friend. The dream of dreams, the woman of women, the divorce of divorces. He had a rough, honest-looking face, a difficult past, and the two sweetest young daughters in the world. In another minute he stood up, ate a pear, and we spent the afternoon cutting two-by-six studs for the walls of the upstairs rooms and nailing them in place.

  “Let’s spruce things up, Colonel,” Gerard suggested at one point, because the two-by-sixes had been sawn from spruce trees.

  “The professor would like that,” I said.

  “The professor was in my dream. She was asking me to… well, I can’t say what she was asking me without the risk of offending community standards of decency.”

  “We’re in a school zone, besides,” I said.

  “The professor had given me a physics problem, I can say that much.”

  “She’s a good professor. We like her particularly much.”

  “Physics, biology, chemistry. All the sciences were involved. Latin, Spanish.”

  “Italian?”


  “Tongue of tongues.”

  We went on for a while with this kind of nonsense, driving sixteenpenny nails one after the next through the sole plate and into the ends of the spruce two-by-sixes. When the walls were framed, and the light had softened to an early evening light, we packed our tools away in a safe place upstairs, stood around for a while looking at the work, asked each other what kind of plans we had for that night, shook hands, as we always did, and went home.

  At home, I showered, made myself a supper of black beans, brown rice, red wine, and a Fudgsicle, and went into my studio to paint.

  “Studio” is probably too fancy a word. I had a three-room, 1,300-square-foot apartment in an old factory building where people had at one time made shoes. There was a small kitchen, a bedroom almost completely filled by the bed and bureau, a bathroom with old-fashioned, six-sided white tiles on the floor, and a very large awkward room with four tall, thirty-two-paned factory windows-my studio. I had two easels set up there, racks for old paintings, and shelves with tubes of paint, cans of gesso, pencils and charcoal and pastel chalks, sketches, brushes, drop cloths to protect a floor that had been gouged and grooved by vibrating shoe machines a hundred years before, then more or less refinished.

  In those days I was painting with oil on linen, and I liked to size the linen canvas myself with rabbit-skin glue, and then make a mix of titanium white gesso and a marble-dust filler and apply it in even strokes, all in one direction for the first layer, and then in the cross direction for the second. I liked to make the canvas frames by hand, cutting four pieces of poplar with my miter saw and joining them with mortise and tenon and pin. I painted fairly realistic portraits, of women mostly, but also of children and men. The people were sometimes purely imagined and sometimes based on actual people who had made some mark on my life, and often I stayed up very late working on them. Every eighteen months or so I had a gallery show and sold a few canvases for roughly what I would make in two weeks of carpentry.