A Little Love Story by Roland Merullo Page A

When Gerard lost his mind for a while in college, I went to the psych ward every other day to visit him. When my father died, I was holding his hand. I helped break up a bad fight in downtown Boston late one night. When things went sour and then tragic with Giselle, I tried, in the most secret part of me, not to run from it but to stand there and face it and deal with it. And so, in the bed with Janet, I could feel the old urge to back away. And then something better, holding me.
    She said, “Do you know anything about it?”
    “Not much. I’ve heard the words. My mother would know, I’m sure. Tell me.”
    So she spent ten minutes telling me. Which is not that easy a thing to do, talk about your terminal disease with someone you barely know, in bed, on your first night together. When she was finishing up, she felt awkward, I could tell from her voice, a little bit worried again that I might hurt her somehow. She rolled over and kissed me, and said she was sorry for running on like that, she had to go to sleep, we could talk about it in the morning if I wanted.
    In a minute or two I felt her body relax. I lay awake with the side of my arm against her warm skin, trying to take in what she had told me, to make it more than just words, trying to stay there with the feelings in me. Not to pity, not to run, not to rescue just for the sake of convincing myself I was a good person. Not to lie to myself or to her in any way.
    There had been something wonderful and unusual about that night. I tried, for a while, to understand it. Janet didn’t have a lot of the ordinary defenses, I said that already. I don’t mean she was totally unprotected. No one that smart is totally unprotected after about age four. But, in spite of what she had whispered in my ear, I believed she wasn’t really worried about being hurt. I thought then that what I felt in her, what was different about her, was some kind of monumental courage, a courage I could feel as clearly as if another creature lay breathing there between us in the bed. I lay awake for a while, just admiring it. In the middle of the first part of the lovemaking, she had taken my fingers pretty forcefully and run them across the wide, slightly depressed scars on her upper belly. And so while she was sleeping, I put my hand there again, and traced the taut skin, and then I fell asleep, too.

10
    I N THE MORNING I woke up with no one beside me. I listened for Janet in the bathroom or in the kitchen but after a few seconds I knew the apartment was empty. I do not particularly enjoy the smell of day-old river water on my skin, so I got up. The plastic bucket was not where I had set it, and the dishtowel lay neatly folded on the side table as if it had not been used.
    I do not like to stand in the shower a long time. I do not really like to shave, but I have been told I don’t look my best with a one- or two-day growth of beard. So I showered and shaved and put on a clean pair of jeans, a clean T-shirt from a road race in which I’d finished eighty-ninth that summer, and sneakers with no socks, and I went and stood in the sunlight in the painting room. The drop cloth had been neatly folded up, and the old green couch looked the way it always looked, as if nothing important had happened there. Light was pouring in through the tall windows, catching a glass jar of brushes just so. On the easel was a canvas I had been working, and though I don’t paint perfectly clear and representational paintings, it was easy enough to see that it was a portrait of a pretty blond woman, twenty-five or so, sitting at a table with a vase of lilies beside her left elbow, and a look of ease on her face, as if she had already accomplished the most important part of what she had been put on earth to accomplish, and was proud of that in a quiet way, and at peace with herself. As if she had learned not to run away from things. As if she believed those things held, within them, the answers to all the huge questions