A Little Love Story (19 page)

4

A
T THAT POINT
in my painting career, I’d had three solo shows, all at the same small gallery between Newbury and Boylston Streets. In order to get my paintings there—physically move them there, I mean—I’d built a wooden box that just fit between the wheel bays in the bed of the pickup, and a balsa-wood rack (the same light, strong wood that racing shells used to be made from) that could be slid neatly into the box. I’d wrap the canvases loosely in plastic and bubble wrap and slide them into the rack so they were standing up on one edge. A piece of quarter-inch-thick red rubber glued to the top of the box kept the rain and snow out.

I screeched up in front of the apartment and double-parked there, flashers on. Gerard was waiting. He and I cleaned some wood scraps and a sawhorse out of the bed and threw them on the frozen mini-lawn. We carried the rubber-topped box down from my apartment and bolted it in place with freezing fingertips. I ran back up, checked the portrait of Janet to make sure the new paint had dried, then wrapped it as if I were taking it to the gallery to be shown. I carried the painting, Gerard carried the rack. We slid everything into place in the box in the truck bed, closed and bolted the box, slammed the tailgate, and headed off.

“Sorry about the blood type,” Gerard said, when we were on our way.

“We’ll find somebody.”

“What about your brother?”

“My brother smokes.”

“We’ll broadcast an appeal. I dated a woman at WCVB, she’ll—”

“The hospital won’t allow any publicity.”

“Screw the hospital. What can they do?”

“They’ll refuse to do the operation. Ouajiballah told me. They don’t want some shithead coming in and saying he’ll be more than happy to give a lobe of his lung…for fifty thousand bucks or something.”

“Or her firstborn.”

“Right. Nice.”

“Sorry.”

“The first step is getting this guy to agree to do it. Ouajiballah says he’s an odd duck. He’d never even ever speak a single word to the person he put the lungs into, never even see them when they were conscious. He refused to talk to the press. He’d just come into the hospital in a kind of zone, go into the operating room, stand there for six hours, do something that about ten other people on earth can do, and go home.”

“A psycho.”

“Right. Psycho-genius.”

“I can relate. Why the painting?”

“He retired three weeks ago. The painting is the best bribe I could think of on short notice.”

“Ah,” Gerard said. “Something for the man who has everything.”

5

I
AM A VERY CALM PERSON
. I inherited that from both sides of the family. It wasn’t unusual for my mother or father to receive an urgent phone call at home, a nurse saying a patient had taken a sudden turn for the worse, or a client panicking about oil futures. Under my parents I’d served a kind of apprenticeship of calm.

But as we drove out of Boston into the picket-fence suburbs, I could feel a sort of salty panic rising like a tide in the cab of the truck. The sky was a woolly gray and the air outside cold and hard as metal. I had a feeling that Janet was going to die on that day. I had given Amelia the number of Gerard’s cell phone, and I kept expecting it to ring, and to have Gerard hand it to me across the seat, and to hear Amelia’s voice on the line, shaking with terror.

But the phone didn’t ring. The premonition about Janet built up in me. The nice houses we drove past turned into nicer houses, until, by the time we crossed the Dover line, “house” wasn’t even the right word anymore.

We could not find a single restaurant or public building in Dover. Finally we saw a library, and stopped there to ask how to get to Madison Road. Even after we found Madison Road, we had to drive the entire length of it—about two miles—three times before we could be sure which long, unmarked driveway corresponded to the address Ouajiballah had given me.

“And I thought
you
grew up in a fancy neighborhood,” Gerard said.

We turned in between two shoulder-high fieldstone pillars with stone lions sitting regally on top. The driveway was hard-packed gray gravel, and at first, to either side, we saw only hardwood trees with red brambles on the lower tier, the bare cold branches and trunks running the whole spectrum of grays and blacks and browns. A quarter-mile in, the terrain to the left of us opened into pastureland with white rail fencing enclosing it, and what might have been mistaken for a hotel—gray-shingled, many-windowed, three-floored—in the distance. A Thoroughbred horse cantered riderless toward the house, as if hurrying to announce our arrival.

“Wise of you to drop out of med school,” Gerard said.

But I had grown up around doctors. Doctors didn’t live like this.

Gravel crackled under the truck tires. When we reached a high spot in the driveway, about halfway between the street and the house, I could see two people jogging in front of us, climbing a long, gentle slope that crested just ahead of them and then flattened as it approached the front door. A few more seconds and I could tell that the runners were a man and a woman. They were dressed in blue sweat suits, the woman’s long straight black hair floating up and then bouncing down against her back, the man wearing a dark wool winter cap.

They were running fairly hard. They must have heard the truck wheels on the gravel because they moved to their left when we approached. As we passed I gave them as much room as I could, and slowed down and lifted my left forearm in a casual greeting, without looking at them. The way any deliveryman would.

We pulled up just beyond the path to the front steps, and got out. The man and the woman were probably seventy-five feet behind us, sprinting now, we could hear their running shoes scuffing and slapping the dirt, and then the sound of labored breathing.

I lowered the tailgate. Gerard and I started to loosen the wing nuts at the four corners of the box, but it was slow going in the cold, and by the time we had the wooden cover off and had set it in the pickup bed, the runners had reached their finish line—which seemed to be about even with the back end of the truck—and were trotting in loose circles and breathing hard, then walking with hands on hips. Ducking beneath the ladder rack, we tugged the bubble-wrapped painting out of its box, and balanced it on the tailgate. Gerard hopped down, then held it steady while I hopped down. When we started to loosen the outer covering of bubble wrap, I could not keep myself from glancing at the man and the woman again. The doctor was lanky and wide-shouldered, sharp-featured, sixtyish, breath spewing out of him in big clouds. I had told myself that I’d be able to guess our odds as soon as I had a good look at his face, but I’d been wrong about that. My hands were working the masking tape, and I didn’t want eye contact yet, and just as I started to glance away the woman turned toward me, breathing hard, and I saw in that second that she was young and healthy-looking and very beautiful. A little squirt of bitterness went through my mind—irrational, idiotic. I looked away.

We let the bubble wrap and the plastic sheeting fall to the ground and rested the bottom edge of the frame on it, facing us. It wasn’t exactly the way real delivery people would have done it. By that point the man and the woman were moving toward us, not breathing as hard as they had been. I realized I had not shaved that morning. Try as he did, Gerard could never completely erase a certain tough-guy pentimento from his face—the heavy eyebrows, the rough mouth and chin—and it occurred to me that it would not take any great leap of imagination for the doctor and his girlfriend to see us as thieves. Or worse.

The doctor was two inches taller than me, his eyes steady, an unnaturally pale blue, not particularly friendly.

I made my face pleasant and unthreatening. “Doctor Vaskis?”

He nodded curtly. He was not happy to see us. The gorgeous woman—thirty years his junior—had come up close to him and now pulled a foot up behind her, stretching her quadriceps and holding his elbow with her other hand for balance.

“We have a gift delivery for you,” I said, and though, by then, my voice was starting to wobble like the voice of an unpracticed liar, the word “gift” caught them. Everyone likes to be given a gift. The woman tilted her head slightly, as if she might change her angle of vision and see through the back of the canvas, and, in spite of himself it seemed, Doctor Vaskis let his features soften in expectation, too, the way you do on the morning of your birthday when someone is about to give you something and you want to assure them you like it. I had more or less prepared things to that point, and then decided I would just ad-lib. But no ad-lib was coming to me. The Thoroughbred had trotted up to the end of the pasture nearest us, and was snorting and fuffing his lips over the top rail, and when he was finished, a bad, cold silence started to creep up around us.

“We’re the delivery guys from Entwhistle Fine Arts,” Gerard ad-libbed.

The doctor and the woman looked at each other, and then at me. I took a breath, as if I had something else to say, but I didn’t, and the doctor seemed to sense then that things were not what they seemed. His face turned hard in the way of people with money or power when they are afraid. Another second and he would have thrown us off the property, or taken out his cell phone and called the Dover police, who would not have been kind to us. I saw it. Gerard saw it, too, and turned the painting around to face them. The woman studied the canvas, then bent her lips in between her teeth. She looked up at me, and then at the doctor.

“Who is it?”

“Janet Rossi,” I said. “She has cystic fibrosis and maybe a week to live.”

The woman moved her eyes back to the canvas. The doctor’s hard gaze flicked across it for a second, and then came to rest on me. I knew I could have been wrong, but it seemed to me then that, if you could judge by the good doctor’s expression at that moment, he was not a warm man. An exquisite mechanic, brave maybe; maybe as disciplined as the gods. Surely he had done more good for the world than a million people like me, but it was as if, in order to do what he did, he’d had to guard himself against the softening effects of sorrow and failure, against his own humanity, his own death. There’s a certain price you pay for that, and I thought I could read that price in the hard line of his lips.

“How did you get this address?”

“I hired a private detective,” I ad-libbed. “The hospital wouldn’t give it out. All the hospital would say is that there is one chance for her—a living lobar transplant—and there is one surgeon in New England who can do the operation.”

“She has
cepacia?
”

“Yes.” I watched him. “As of yesterday afternoon she’s tenth on the list for a cadaveric, she won’t come close to living long enough to get one.”

“I’m retired,” he said. “Sorry.”

“The only other surgeon who could do it is in New York. Janet won’t survive a trip to New York.” I looked at the woman, but if there was any well of sympathy in her, she wasn’t letting me near the pump. She avoided my eyes, studied the painting for another little while, and then she said, “I’m going in to shower, Leski. It’s nice, though, isn’t it?” He nodded. She did not look at us, and walked up the path and up the stairs and through the front door.

“I know you’re retired. And I know there’ll always be one more and one more you could do, but this woman has been fighting her whole life. From about the age of six weeks she’s been through things that most people—”

“I know the disease, thank you.”

“I know you know it, but—”

“You two are the potential donors, I suppose.”

Gerard said, “Yes.”

“Blood relatives?”

“Friends. A fiancé and a friend.”

“You’re the fiancé?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s my painting. I paint. I’m a painter. We want to have children. Adopt. Look, I’m sorry we came to your house. We’re not criminals and we’re not crazy, and you can keep the painting either way, yes or no, because of what you’ve done for other…you know…I swear to God you’ll never see either of us again.”

He just watched me from beneath the dark wool hat, blue eyes close-set beside a sharp nose. He said, “The procedure ties up three operating rooms, three teams of surgeons at two different hospitals. It puts at risk the lives of two healthy individuals. It costs between a quarter of a million and a million dollars, not counting the follow-up care. She’ll have to take antirejection drugs for the rest of her life and the potential side effects from those drugs are manifold—renal failure, tremors, bruising, digestive troubles, weight gain, bone loss, diabetes, risk of opportunistic infection.”

“I know all that,” I said.

“And I suppose you also know the survival rate for
cepacia
patients?”

“Forty percent are alive after two years,” Gerard said. “But the data sample is small.”

“And do you know how fondly the insurance companies look upon those kind of numbers?”

“Your survival rates are better,” Gerard said.

“How do you know?”

“I did some research.”

I looked at Gerard then. Every drop of his usual abrasive and needy goofiness had disappeared. He was like a fact, standing there, a challenge incarnate. He wasn’t blinking.

“Doctor Ouajiballah said he’d go to bat with the insurance company if you’re the surgeon,” I put in.

“Ouajiballah said that?”

“Gave me his word.”

“Gave you this address, too, if I’m not mistaken?”

“Yes.”

He smirked. His horse nickered. “No private detective, then?”

“No.”

“Any other falsehoods involved here?”

“None. Except I’m Entwhistle Fine Arts.”

He looked out past the horse to the expanse of frozen pasture. He should have been chilled by then, standing there in the cold air after a hard run, but there was an odd stillness about him. You couldn’t imagine him being chilled, or afraid, or making a mistake, or admitting to having made a mistake. Exactly the kind of guy you wanted if you or someone you loved were about to be cut open. For probably a full thirty seconds he didn’t speak to us or move, and then, without looking at us, he said, “I’ll take the painting—my wife liked it—and I’ll call you within twenty-four hours with an answer.”

“Fine,” I said, and he cut me off when I started to thank him.

“I will tell you I’m leaning toward no.”

“Why?” Gerard said.

The doctor turned his head and sent Gerard a look that was lined with ugliness, and I could see the pride in his pale eyes as clearly as if it had slithered up his spine and out through the front of his pupils.

“Oops, sorry,” Gerard said, not very sincerely. I saw something in my friend then, some old bad energy from the streets where he had been brought up. I did not know if the doctor could see it. “We’re sure you have your reasons. Look, let me carry this into the house for you while Jake closes up the box and cleans up this mess. And then you’ll never see either of us again unless you decide to cut us open.”

“I wouldn’t cut you open,” the doctor said. “Someone else does that. I cut
her
open.”

That’s comforting
, I almost said. In fact, I came within an absolute whisker of saying it, because I had just given away a painting that meant everything to me, and was going to get nothing in return, and because, by then, I felt I was in the presence of a thin slice of something almost hideous between two pieces of remarkable talent. Gerard felt it, too, I knew that. We had our own proud serpents pressing out through our eyeballs. I thought of Janet pursing her lips. I said, “Again, our apologies. I know we’ve intruded and I appreciate it that you’re even willing to think it over. My mother was a doctor—Judith Entwhistle—and I know she would have been pissed as hell if the friends of a patient ever came driving up to her house asking for special care.”

“I appreciate it, too,” Gerard said, but there was a note of disgust in his voice. He was hoisting the painting over his head, just pressing in against the outside edges with the palms of his hands, not a fingerprint anywhere, showing off his upper-body strength. He walked up the path that way, two steps ahead of the good doctor.

I picked up the bubble wrap and plastic sheeting and jammed it into my homemade crate. Threw in two of the wing nuts and bolts and twisted the other two in place. I sat in the truck with the heater on and looked at the horse in the pasture—creature of incredible grace. I had a few sketches of her at home, photographs. I could try to make another painting, though there is a difference, painting someone who is right there in front of you, alive.

Gerard stayed inside the mansion for eight or ten minutes—giving detailed hanging instructions, I guessed. At last, I heard his boots on the gravel, then the passenger door closing. I put the truck in gear and we rattled down the long driveway, onto Madison Road, back in the direction we had come, past the library, past mansion row, and then down into the upper class.