A Little Love Story (2 page)

2

S
HE 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

O
VER 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.

I finished—or reached a stopping point—at eleven-thirty, cleaned up, and was in bed by midnight, when the phone rang.

I thought it was Gerard. In those days he often called me late at night to see how things had gone in the nonworking part of my day and to ask what supplies we might need from the lumberyard to start work the next morning. Another person would have waited until the next morning to talk about how things had gone, and asked about supplies in the afternoon when we were finished for the day. But Gerard could not be held to the standards of another person. He brought Virginia Woolf to work for lunch-hour reading. He liked to recite Latin poetry, by heart, sometimes shouting
Lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
out over the streets of Cambridge, Allston, or Beacon Hill from a three-story staging. He was addicted to doing research on his computer, and he’d talk for hours about supernovas and scuba equipment, the political situation in Kazakhstan, Tour de France champions, diseases of the beech tree, NASCAR standings. His interests were encyclopedic, his memory photographic, his sense of loyalty and need for affection without bounds. As a boy, his family life had been less than perfectly nurturing. As a young man, he’d dropped out of college—where we’d been friends—and then spent time in a hospital for bipolar problems. I had let him live at my place for a while between college and marriage. And later, I’d hired him to work with me, building additions, fire escapes, three-car garages, tearing out whole sections of houses that had gone rotten or been eaten away, and replacing them with plumb walls and level floors and neat interior woodwork. During the previous year—the Evil Year, I called it—he had paid me back with interest for whatever favors I’d done. So we had complex worlds swirling around in the alleys and avenues of our friendship—gratitude, shame, grief, old childhood wounds, new arguments, a speckled canvas of deep affection that we never talked about.

But it wasn’t Gerard’s voice in any case. The person on the line had the mother of all colds.

“It’s Janet,” she said. “Rossi.” She turned her mouth away from the phone to cough. “I’m sorry if I was rude today. It’s hard for me to talk at work.”

“You weren’t too rude.”

“I hope this isn’t too late to call. You were up this late at the doughnut shop, so I guessed you were a night person.”

“A night person and a day person,” I said. She coughed again and I was going to make a little remark about it, but my sense of humor can get strange sometimes when I’m nervous—I’ve been told that more than once—so I held back. “Where do you work?” I asked her. What I kept myself from saying was, “In which mine?”

“The governor’s office.”

“I saw him on the TV at O’Casey’s last week.”

“He’s running again, so things are a little hectic.”

He should run
, I almost said, because I had some kind of instinctive, bone-and-blood dislike for the man, even though he’d been a decent governor up to that point.
He should start running at the door of the State House and not stop until he gets to Ixtapa
, I had an urge to say. But I was holding on to my comic side with both arms by then.

She said, “I called to see if the dinner invitation is still good.”

“Let me check the calendar.” I picked up my August
National Geographic
and made the pages flap. “I have a Friday in 2006,” I said. “November.”

“You’re paying me back.”

“Or this coming Friday night. Nothing between, I’m sorry to say … except this Saturday night. Also good.”

There was a long pause then. It wasn’t health-related.

“I can be a little goofy this late,” I said.

“Are you on something?”

“Paint fumes.”

“Oh.”

“That was a joke. There’s a new Vietnamese restaurant on Newbury Street. Diem Bo. It’s a great place if you like that food. Noodles and so on. Shrimp. That coffee they make with all the milk and sugar in it.”

“I love Vietnamese coffee.”

“Good. Seven o’clock okay?”

“Perfect.”

“Friday’s better, it’s sooner than Saturday. Friday okay? Meet you at Diem Bo?”

“Fine.”

“Good. It made me happy that you called.”

“I’ll see you Friday.”

We hung up and I lay awake for a long time, thinking I shouldn’t have said it made me happy that she’d called, then thinking it was alright. Thinking I wasn’t really ready to go on a date just yet, and then thinking I might be.

4

O
N
F
RIDAY AFTERNOONS
Gerard and I quit for the day at four o’clock and went to O’Casey’s for a drink. In addition to his other passions and talents, Gerard was a world-class bicyclist, and very careful about what he put into his body, so he usually had tomato juice with a twist of lime. I like beer but beer does not like me, so I usually had a glass of Merlot. Bub, the bartender, made no secret of the fact that he thought our choice of beverages unmanly. He called us “Red One” and “Red Two,” though Gerard is dark-haired, going bald, and my hair is the color of old hay.

“Good that you’re dating again,” Gerard said, when I told him about my plans for that evening. “I’ve been worried about your mental health … which is a subject I know something about.”

“Everything is a subject you know something about.”

I asked Bub for some Beer Nuts to go with the Merlot. He smirked.

“And Vietnamese is the right choice,” Gerard went on. “It’s sex food.”

“How do you figure?”

“Just is.”

“What’s love food?”

“Greek, naturally.”

I nodded. Gerard’s last name was Telesrokis. “What’s marriage food?”

“French. Or a steak house.”

“What’s Thai food, then?”

“Sex food, too. Kinky, though.”

“Chinese.”

“Chinese is old-fashioned courtship. Szechwan especially.”

“Alright.”

“Vietnamese is an excellent first date. In time, if things go well, you can progress to Greek or Thai, depending.”

“On?”

“The tastes and qualities of the woman involved. What she reads, for instance. How many languages she speaks.”

“What’s German food?” I asked him, because he had gotten married at a young age to a German woman named Anastasia and had his two beautiful girls—five-year-old twins—by her, and the breakup of that union had been so spectacularly awful for him and for Anastasia and for the twins that it hung around his neck like a great weight of guilt and hurt and he still talked about it too much.

“Heavy,” he said, without missing a beat. “Sticks to you.”

“Good. I’ll remember. Seeing the twins this weekend?”

“You should see your face when you ask about them, Colonel.” He looked up at the television screen, but he was not really paying attention to it. “You would be the father of fathers, you know that, don’t you?”

“You’re kicking my bruise.”

“Sometimes a bruise needs a good kick,” he said. “I’ll call you tonight, either just before midnight or just after.”

“Don’t.”

“I will, though. I know myself.”