A Little Love Story (8 page)

We walked down the steps. Before turning with me toward my truck, Janet seemed to waver a moment. We went the two blocks in silence and I realized I had parked near the little Catholic church where Ellory had liked to go after his conversion. I unlocked the passenger door for Janet and she climbed in. When we were pulling out of the parking space she started to cry. I wanted to touch her or find something to say, but wrestling with governors—with anyone, in fact—was not exactly a specialty of mine, and having a gun pointed at me was also not a specialty of mine, and I was not exactly in a state of mind where I could comfort someone else. My ribs and hands were sore, my left cheek was scratched, my left shoulder hurt where Valvoline had done the judo move, and my mind was replaying the scene again and again. So I just pulled out into the smoky madness of Friday-night traffic and listened to Janet cry.

Before the bad scene in the State House, I’d had an idea where we might go that night—we took turns deciding, surprising each other, seeing who could be more inventive. She loved New York City, and that’s where I had been planning to take her. In the fog of bad feelings I thought it would be best to basically stick to the plan, and just take things a minute at a time.

It was stop-and-go all the way down Beacon Street to Clarendon, and then not much better once we reached the entrance to the Mass Turnpike and headed west.

My body stopped shaking. Janet didn’t cry for very long. She coughed, looked out the side window for a while, and then said, “I hate things like that. I hate that you did that.”

“What did he do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Here we are with brutal honesty.”

She kept looking out the window. We were stopped in holiday traffic in a long line of cars and trucks near the first tollbooth, still in Boston. Close enough to turn back.

“He was talking to me. I was trying to get something for him out of my files and I turned around and he was pressing his face close to me, telling me he loved me. I pulled away. I told him he didn’t love me and I didn’t love him, that I was going out with someone now. He reached out for me, not to hurt me but kind of to get me to listen, and he accidentally caught the top of my dress and I pulled away. He started to yell … And then you came through the door like a wild gorilla. I don’t like that kind of thing
at all
.”

“I came through the door ordinary. Then I went to wild gorilla.”

She didn’t smile.

“He deserved it,” I said. “I’m only seventy-five percent sorry.”

“I’m not asking you to be sorry.
I’m
the one who’s sorry … that I ever let him touch me. You can’t imagine the depth and range of my sorrow right now.”

“Why did you?”

She shrugged.

“Why did you let him touch you?” I said again, but I was just talking, filling up air. I was feeling less sorry by the second. By the time Janet spoke again I was down to thirty-five percent.

“Sometimes you just want a little pleasure, that’s all. Some connection with somebody. Some, I don’t know—”

“A doughnut.”

“What?”

“A doughnut, you want a doughnut. You want your share of sweetness to make up for all the shit you have to go through. You deserve the two doughnuts, or the kiss, or the cocaine, or the new car, or the new earrings, or the new fishing rod.”

“What in the name of God are you talking about, Jake? What fishing rod? I don’t—”

“Now you’re going to lose your job,” I said, to reel myself in.

She laughed then, a small laugh with a hem of bitterness along its edges. “Not before the election anyway. You heard him. ‘I fell! It’s nothing! Everyone out!’ When he goes to buy underwear he worries which brand will get him more votes. He’s the epitome of the political animal.”

“Why’d you sleep with him, then?”

It had slipped out, and I couldn’t pretend to myself anymore that I was just filling air. Janet looked at me, then looked forward again. An oily silence floated between us in the cab of the truck. Until that minute I’d done an excellent job of not being jealous. From the time I’d read the note she left on my sink, jealousy had been whispering in my ear night and day. I’d see the governor on TV and I’d look at his hands and wonder where and how those hands had touched her. I’d look at his mouth. I’d hear a radio talk show host—this was rare—say he was handsome, or dignified, or that his plan to execute criminals meant he was the first governor we’d had in years with any
cojones;
I’d wonder if she’d ever touched his
cojones;
I’d notice that
Boston
magazine had named him one of the city’s top ten eligible bachelors. I’d see news clips of the governor with his daughters, or on his morning run, or lining up to donate blood for the hundred and twenty-seventh time with a big sappy smile on his face. And so on. It’s one thing for your lover to have had lovers before—who doesn’t have to deal with that, high-school sophomores? It’s something else to have that other person’s face and voice and picture and name ricocheting around every bar you step into, every newsstand you walk past, every radio station you listen to on your way to work. Jealousy fun house mirrors.

Still, in the months before I met Janet, I’d had a lot of practice turning my mind away from certain types of thoughts, and, in the time I’d known her, whenever jealousy made one of its runs, I’d just stepped aside and let it crash past. Who knows why my little sidestep move wasn’t working that night? Because I’d actually wrestled around on the floor with the governor, maybe? Because he was still reaching into a part of my life with his pathetic I-love-yous long after he should have bowed gracefully out? Because the part of my life with Janet in it was becoming more important to me every day? Who knows?

The traffic softened up slightly. We headed west at a slow pace.

After a while Janet said, “I don’t ask you things like that.”

“I know it.”

“I don’t ask you who you’ve been with or anything about Giselle, or why you didn’t date for a year after you broke up with her, or even if you’re sleeping with someone else now.”

“I’m not.”

“Good. I’m not either.”

A mile or so of edgy silence, not so bad now. This was the weird complicated tango of modern relationshipping. This was as ancient as dust and sweat.

She said, “I was lonely. I got just very lonely. Of the four other men I work with, one is gay, two are married, and the other one has egg on his face when he comes to work.”

“Literal egg?”

She didn’t laugh. “I’m not exactly … I don’t exactly have attractive guys lined up at my door, no offense.”

“You’re beautiful, you’re smart, you’re sexy. What are you talking about?”

I could feel her looking at me across the cab of the truck, but I was afraid to look back.

She said, “Come on, Jake. I cough. I spit. I ply myself with pills before every meal when I’m out on dates in restaurants. I’m a fun time, but not exactly what you’d call a good long-term investment.”

“Not if I can help it,” I said, without thinking.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I’m going to keep you alive.”

“By the force of your heroic masculine will?”

“Don’t insult the force of my heroic masculine will,” I said. “I have a perfectly solidly average-sized heroic masculine will, maybe slightly larger.”

She didn’t laugh then, either, but I glanced across the seat and caught something in her eyes, one flash of good light. We drove along. “Where are you taking me?”

“Sanctum sanctorum,” I said. It was Gerard’s term for a woman’s body. It had just slipped out—like everything else I had been saying on that blessed night.

“You are an odd soul, Joe Date.”

“To New York or by bus,” I said. One of my mother’s jokes.

“You are essentially odd. If you ran for office, you’d never make it past the primary.”

“Thank you. I consider that a high compliment. But could we keep all references to running for office out of the conversation? All jerkoffs?”

“Okay.”

“I have the blood of jerkoffs on my hands.”

“You’re going goofy on me,” she said.

“I’m on a crime spree. I’ve assaulted an elected public official and now I’m going to trespass on monastery grounds.”

“He won’t press charges,” Janet said. “What monastery?”

“We’re going to see my brother. The monk. Then we’re going to New York or by bus.”

2

M
Y BROTHER
E
LLORY
is eight years and two months older than I am. After a brilliant teenage career of rebelling against what he called “our upper-middle-class subterranean upbringing”—including one glorious night in which he drove my father’s new Mercedes convertible off the road, between two pine trees and down the third fairway at the Wannakin River Golf Club—he decided to really hit my parents where they lived, and he’d converted to Catholicism. In the beginning, this conversion had everything to do with a college girlfriend named Renée St. Cyr (who believed that premarital intercourse was approved of by the Good Lord, in her particular case, as long as the other intercoursee was also Catholic), but soon it took on a life of its own.

My brother started to attend mass at the radical church near the State House that let homeless people sleep between its pews. He started to talk about “the Lord” all the time. He stopped driving cars onto golf courses. A year into this our father died, and my brother felt so guilty that he decided to leave his old life behind entirely and become a monk. After a decade or more of monkhood, he’d persuaded the abbot to let him live as a hermit in a one-room cottage on the monastery grounds (he told me there was some precedent for this in Church history), and he spent his days there praying and chopping wood, growing vegetables to give away to the local food pantry, and, three or four times a week, walking up to the main monastery buildings to teach and counsel novices. After the initial shock, my mother was not really unhappy about all this. If nothing else, it meant that Ellory would never again get his name in the paper under
POLICE BLOTTER
, and embarrass her at the hospital. It didn’t matter very much to me one way or the other, except that I saw him less. He was still my brother. He still smoked, still gave the abbot some trouble the way he’d given his parents trouble, and his teachers, his scoutmaster, his golf coach, and so on.

In the first blush of monastic infatuation, Ellory had been in the habit of sending me letters that always ended with a kind of eager encouragement. “The Lord’s gifts come in strange wrapping,” he’d write. Or “Pain is a blessing.” Or “Pray every second.” Things like that. It got so bad that, whenever Gerard or I banged a finger with the hammer, or dropped a crowbar on a toe, or tripped over a sole plate and went crashing into a wall, the other person would immediately say, “Pain is a blessing.”

But Ellory and I had always been close, in spite of the age difference, and his godly enthusiasms didn’t really put much distance between us. It seemed to me that he was at least as happy and well balanced as most of the non-monks I knew. On the four days a year when he was allowed visitors, I took my mother down there—it was less than three hours from Boston—and we had a meal with him and some of the other monks, his friends. Since a piece of her mind had been carted away, my mother had come up with the idea that my brother’s name was my name—John—and that he was, for some reason, an airline pilot, always in uniform, living in a mansion with all his pilot friends.

With time, Ellory had evolved an individualistic interpretation of the monastery rules. He was still celibate, as far as I could tell, though he told me he missed the company of women more than anything else. He observed a strict fasting regimen during Lent, and said formal prayers either six or ten times a day, I could never remember. But every few months I went down and visited him, in an unofficial way, sneaking through the woods to his hermitage, and he always broke the rules a little bit then. He always wanted me to smuggle onto the monastery grounds exactly one pack of Marlboro cigarettes. If it wasn’t Lent, I might bring him a bottle of red wine and some Jarlsberg cheese and good bread. Or a few cigars. Or some copies of
Sports Illustrated
(not the swimsuit issue). Once, on his thirty-third birthday, we arranged to meet at the side of the nearest road and I brought a change of clothes and spirited him off to a golf course for nine holes.

He was a good, devoted monk, and a good man. These were things he did, little things, ten times in a year maybe, to maintain some sort of interior balance. Even the pope, he pointed out to me, had sneaked away from Vatican City to go skiing once or twice when he was younger. “God doesn’t want machines, Jake,” he liked to say, after he’d been there awhile and had stopped ending his letters with “All the good Lord asks of us is that we think of Him.”

I said I didn’t know what God wanted anymore.

And he said, not in a preachy way, “You know right from wrong, Jake. God is just the part of you that knows right from wrong.”

“Sure,” I said. “Stalin had that part, too. Hitler. Mussolini. Idi Amin. They were all sure they knew right from wrong. So were nineteen assholes with box cutters.”

But by the time I took Janet there, Ellory and I had stopped having conversations like that. We just did what we did. He was a monk, I was a painter. I banged nails, I punched governors. His part of my father’s inheritance had gone to the monastery. My part had gone to buy the apartment I lived in. My sister’s part had gone into pharmaceuticals and roulette. We knew what was right and wrong and we wanted to serve our own little selfish demons, and balancing those things was called life.

I didn’t usually sneak up to the hermitage at night, though, unannounced. And I had never taken a girlfriend there.

For dinner, Janet and I stopped at a sub shop in Sturbridge—still a bit of bad air between us—and I had the pierced, beringed, and bespectacled young man make an Italian with everything on it, to go, for Ellory, and then bought the cigarettes at a convenience store in the same little strip mall, where another pierced and tattooed young fellow asked me to show my ID.