A Little Love Story (22 page)

I looked at him when he said that, really looked at him. I had an urge to go over to one of the windows and open it and throw all the chairs out, including the one he was sitting in. “You’d be out of commission three days,” I said. “The lieutenant governor runs the state for longer than that when you’re on vacation. You’d be in the hospital two weeks, tops.”

“I understand that,” he said. “And under different circumstances…” He fluttered one hand at the windows. “Under different circumstances I’d oblige you.”

“It’s not me you’d be obliging. It’s her.”

He looked out the window for a little while. I thought we were finished, but then he swung his head around so that he was facing me dead-on and spoke in a quiet, violent voice, all the politician stripped away so that, even in his suit and behind the big table he was not the governor then: “You couldn’t begin to know what I felt for her. You couldn’t begin to guess what was between us. I was going to marry her,” he said, and it occurred to me then, in a hideous flash, that I was looking at myself in a terrible dream, talking to Brian, about Giselle. “I didn’t care what it cost me, with my children or with anyone else. You couldn’t begin to know what it was like to see her day after day after day and not touch her, not talk to her except about business, to feel her drifting away from me.”

By then the trembling I’d had in my legs earlier, talking to him on the cell phone, had started again, and moved into my arms and hands. It occurred to me that maybe Janet had a residue of love for the governor, some secret feeling she hadn’t wanted me to know about. In my mind I had been making him out to be pure ego. Naturally, it was my own ego, my own anger, my own jealousy, my own smallness, that had been doing that.

I said, “She asked me to ask you if you’d do it. She could barely speak. She said your name.”

He slammed one fist down on the wood. “I have a
state
to run!” he yelled.

I said, “Fine.”

His face was shaking. Jealousy funhouse mirrors.

I said, “I asked you to give me two minutes and that’s about two minutes. My name is John Entwhistle. In case you change your mind, I’m in the phone book in Boston. Or you could just be at the Mass General Hospital pulmonary lab at seven o’clock tomorrow morning. For testing, you know.”

I stood up. He was breathing hard. I thought, for one second, that if I made the wrong kind of move or said the wrong kind of thing, he was going to charge at me, and we were going to end up wrestling around on the floor again. I wanted him to do that. I waited two seconds, hoping, then I made a quick turn toward the door, so quick I accidentally bumped my thigh on the arm of the chair. And then I turned back to him and said, with almost no bitterness, “I’ll tell Janet you sent your best. I’ll tell her you said you’ll be praying for her.”

The governor did not stand up.

At the door I turned around again. “I was envisioning the headlines, though, you know?
GOVERNOR DONATES PART OF LUNG, SAVES STAFFER’S LIFE
. A person could go a long way on publicity like that.”

He looked as if he would spit. I closed the door quietly, smiled a trembling crazy smile at the secretary, and went down the blurred sets of stairs and out into the cold blackness. I walked and walked along Beacon Street. At some point I stopped on a corner, took Janet’s phone out of my pocket, and called my apartment like a robot—no messages—and then Gerard—no volunteers.

Eventually, I went back to the hospital. But I couldn’t bring myself to go up to Janet’s room, so I sat in the cafeteria sipping bad coffee and watching the nurses and doctors and orderlies on their breaks. I went and sat in the dimly lit chapel on the first floor, a perfectly nondenominational, quasi-religious place with pews and stained glass. I put my face in my hands. For a long time after Giselle died I had been angry at God, and at a lot of other things. And then one day it occurred to me that it was anger that had killed her and everyone else who’d died on that day, and I started trying to imagine my way backwards in time to where that anger had come from, a crazy-making, evil, righteous anger. And then I started to notice, firsthand, that anger was almost always righteous and crazy-making. All you had to do was turn on the radio talk shows and you could hear that plainly enough, hear the pot being stirred and heated. All you had to do was yell at somebody in traffic and you could see it in yourself. Anger began to seem wrong to me, almost always wrong, and I began to think it might be my problem, not God’s. So I talked to Ellory about it. Ellory said, “You always have a choice,” which made sense, and was helpful.

I tried not to be angry. I tried to pray.

Maker of cells, I said. That amount of suffering has to count for something. I’m not trying to tell you what to do or how things should be set up. I just believe that that amount of suffering has to count for something, I just believe that. It can’t be just random. If it’s just random, and people suffer like that, then count me out, I don’t want another second of this. I’m going to go and jump—

Someone in one of the other pews was weeping quietly. I stopped trying to pray and just sat there for a while, then I left the chapel and took the elevator upstairs, where the nurses all knew me, and knew what was happening to Janet. One nurse in particular—a very large, very dark-faced woman named Bethany—was such a kind, sweet soul, and cared for Janet so tenderly and patiently, that I had an urge to ask her, as I walked past, who she prayed to, how she put the words together.

I went into Janet’s room, all set to lie to her and tell her Valvoline was considering it—when I knew he wasn’t. But she was sleeping, her face turned sideways on the pillow, her mother asleep, too, in the chair beside the bed. Amelia woke up and lifted her tired eyes to me, all the hope in the world there.

“No news yet,” I said. “Gerard’s calling everyone we know.”

“My sister is, too.”

“We’ll find somebody, don’t worry.”

Doctor Ouajiballah came by on his last rounds and checked the digital readouts on the various machines near Janet’s bed. Pulse. Blood pressure. Oxygen level. Janet’s mother gazed at him as if he’d been holding out on us, and was now going to raise her daughter up with a sweep of his hand. But he had nothing to say to Janet’s mother.

I followed him out into the hall, and when he started to tell me what to expect in the way of testing the next day, I tried to listen carefully but couldn’t.

“There’s a problem,” I said, when he finished. “Right now we have only one donor.”

“What do you mean, sir?” Something like a smile wavered along his thin lips. He was looking for a punch line, and when none was forthcoming he said, “You told Doctor Vaskis you had two donors, sir.”

“I had to tell him that to get him to do it. I lied. We have one. We’re working on getting the second.”

I watched the kindness on his face just evaporate.

“You lied, sir?” he said.

I nodded.

“To Doctor Vaskis and to me.”

“Yes.”

“And you had me call the insurance bastards and tell them we had two donors to test, when we do not. The same bastards I will have to call again, on someone else’s behalf, in a week or a month or a year, and ask them to underwrite a quarter-million-dollar operation, or a lifetime of medication, based on my judgment and integrity.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You had me call the pulmonary testing lab and ask them to put you ahead of people who already had appointments?”

“Give me one day. We’ll find somebody, I’m sure we will. Just one day. I’m sorry.”

But I was only partly sorry, and he knew it. He spun around and went striding down the hall past the nurses’ station. I went back into the room.

Janet stirred often, and coughed, and moaned loudly from time to time. Every ten minutes I called my apartment for messages, but there was only something from a prospective customer who wanted us to bid on her apartment-house renovation, and from a painter we sometimes used, looking for indoor work, and something else from Jeremy at the gallery. It was not easy to be there with Amelia. Every time I hung up she was watching my face for the smallest twitch or sparkle of news. Every time I shook my head—nothing—it felt like I was sawing off one of her limbs. Worse, I could see that the thought of Janet dying had brought back the pain of the other big death in her past, and the same thing was happening to me. Giselle was haunting me then, not a lover but a sister, a cousin, a ghost.

Eventually, Amelia told me she had to eat something, she’d be gone twenty minutes, and would I be sure to have her paged if Janet woke up, or if something changed?

By that time I was so twisted up by the ghosts and the echoes and the pure misery of everything that I pulled my chair close to the bed and just lay my face down on the sheet over Janet’s thigh, not thinking anything or hoping for anything. When Amelia came back upstairs with her sandwich in a Styrofoam box, she found me that way, and came and put her hand on my back.

Janet’s aunt Lucy arrived after supper. I used that as an excuse to leave. I drove my truck around Boston for an hour, in the Friday night traffic, under a kind of evil spell. When I couldn’t do that anymore, I stopped at Adam’s Steak House, where Janet and I had gone a few times, and tried to eat my way into oblivion. A sixteen-ounce sirloin, two glasses of Cabernet, salad, potato, two pieces of pecan pie, coffee. I had done the same kind of thing the day after Giselle died, though I didn’t remember that until I was sitting there with an aching stomach.

My stomach still hurt by the time I got home. The phone was ringing when I came through the door, but when I picked up, there was only a dial tone. I called Gerard, thinking it might have been him, and for once he answered by saying, “Hello?”

“Anything?”

“Jake, I’m going up to complete strangers and asking them to volunteer for major surgery on the Monday before Christmas.”

“I forgot Christmas. What about friends?”

“Julie, Alex, Bob Twining—O-negative, a closet smoker, and a sympathetic-but-no, in that order.”

“Did you call Coach Florent? I should have called him.”

“Sympathetic, sort of, but no. And no, you shouldn’t have called him. How’s Janet?”

“Lousy. I told Ouajiballah we lied. He’s not happy.”

“We had no other option.”

“He doesn’t see it that way.”

“What about the gov?”

“He has a state to run.”

“A state to run? That’s what he said? A state to run?”

“Under other circumstances he’d oblige me.”

“What about Janet’s family?”

“They’re all too short, and the ones that aren’t too short have asthma. Her aunt is still trying, though. Neighbors, friends of neighbors, cousins of cousins.”

“Alright, I’ve got one fireman at the precinct here who was wavering a little. I’m going down to harass him. You have to get up early for the testing, yes?”

“Six.”

“Good. I’ll call you after midnight, then.”

I put the phone in its cradle, lay back in the bed, and fell almost immediately into a deep sleep, with one spark of vivid dream in it. In the dream I was in a jewelry shop where I had once bought sapphire earrings for Giselle for her birthday, only Carmine Asalapolous was behind the counter, lifting out one beautiful ring after the next, and setting them in a neat row on the glass countertop. “Wait three days and give her this one,” he said. I was struggling to tell him I couldn’t wait three days, trying to find the words, trying to get the urgency of things across to him, when the telephone woke me. I rolled over to the edge of the bed and grabbed it.

“This John Entwhistle?” the voice said.

I squeezed my eyes tight and shook my head hard. “Yes.”

“Governor Valvelsais. Listen, I’ve given it some thought and I’ve decided to give a lung to Janet.”

I held the phone against my face.

“Are you there?”

“Here.”

“Well, say something, then.”

I said, “A…a lobe…you only have to give one lobe. Your right lung has three lobes and your left—.”

“I’m stepping up,” he said.

I was squeezing the phone hard.

“Where do I report?” he said.

“Pulmonary testing. Mass General. Seven o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll be there at eight.”

“Good,” I said, awake by then, clearheaded as could be. “You’re…you’re a good man.”

“Coming from you that means so much,” he said.

“Right.”

“There’s a condition.”

He paused. A list of conditions ran through my head. He wanted Janet back. He wanted me to leave town.

He said, “When people ask, you say I volunteered without a moment’s hesitation.”

I could not speak.

“Clear?”

“Fine.”

“That’s the phrase: ‘without a moment’s hesitation.’”

“Got it,” I said.

“I want your word.”

“You have it.”

“Then I’m stepping forward for her. Tomorrow, eight a.m.”

“Mass General,” I said, but he had hung up.

I called and left a message for Doctor Ouajiballah, and at the nurses’ desk for Janet’s mother. I called Gerard. I lay back on the bed in the darkness and did not go to sleep.

9

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED
there at quarter past six the next morning, the beautiful beast of hope was prowling the hospital corridors. I could see it in Amelia’s sleepy face as we stood outside Janet’s room, and hear it in her voice. She said that Janet was out cold then, had been awake for two hours in the middle of the night, coughing up blood, that she’d told her then about the governor’s decision, and that Janet had smiled a smile to break your heart in five pieces.

“What a fine fine man he must be,” Amelia said.

At the nurses’ station, and at the reception desk of the pulmonary testing department, it was the same: the nurses, orderlies, and technicians knew Janet’s story, knew what she’d been through. Some of them had watched for years as the bacteria with the big names did their work on her. They knew exactly what was happening, and what would happen—they’d seen the same slow sinking with a hundred other CF patients, and thousands of people with cancer and MS and ALS and diabetes and diseases they had no name for. They were lined up like foot soldiers against those diseases. All their working lives went into that war, all their tiredness and tedium. They had the smartest generals in the world and the most sophisticated weaponry, and their weeks were filled with one lost battle after the next.

So when they understood that there was a chance to save someone they cared for, that was not a small thing to them. You could see it plainly on their faces: it was not a routine Saturday morning.

The governor and I spent all that day getting blood drawn, and more blood drawn, breathing hard into sterile tubes, peeing into sterile cups, answering questions, filling out forms. Sometimes we were in the same room; usually we weren’t. We did not exchange a word. Our eyes met once when he was on a machine, blowing every last molecule of air from his lungs. He looked away immediately and blew harder, as if it were a competition, and our pulmonary function numbers would be published on the front page of the
Herald
the next day.

Fine, I thought. Knock yourself out. Break every lung record known to man, as long as you don’t back away from this.

At the end of that day I went up and sat with Janet and her mother for a little while, and talked with her aunt in the hallway for a little while, and talked with Doctor Ouajiballah, who seemed to have forgiven me. Then I drove—tired by then—to the fancy mall in Chestnut Hill and found the jewelry store just before it closed, and bought a simple gold ring with little pairs of triangular notches at its edges from a salesman whose name was Dimitrios Cassas.

On Sunday, it was more of the same. Only, in the afternoon the fun was capped off with two hours in a room talking to a mustachioed psychiatrist, who worked, I guessed, not for the hospital but for the insurance company. “You are aware that you are putting your life at risk,” he said.

I said that I was.

“You understand that, even if the surgery goes perfectly, you’ll have a period of painful recovery.”

“Yes.”

“And you understand that, even if the recipient survives the surgery, she may live only a day or a month or a few months if her body should reject the new tissue.”

“I understand that very well.”

He went along like that for a while, giving me horror stories about transplant operations gone bad, infections, collapsed lungs, bleeding, suffocation, rejection. He showed me pictures of men and women with drainage tubes sticking out of their chests and frightened expressions on their faces, and when that was over, and I’d responded calmly and rationally to every question, he made good aggressive eye contact and he said, “Why are you doing this, Jake, really?”

And I could not help myself. I was tired from the testing, and worried because Janet had looked like a skin-draped skeleton in the bed that morning, and because more blood had come out of her overnight, and we hadn’t been able to talk at all the day before. I was pretty sure the governor wasn’t being grilled this way. He had, in fact, made the front page of the
Herald
that Sunday morning:
GOV GIVES TILL IT HURTS
superimposed over a full-page photo of his face. There was a glowing article inside, complete with a quote from John Entwhistle, who said the governor had agreed “without a moment’s hesitation.” And I didn’t care about that. I was a little bit nervous about the operation and the recovery, but not afraid. I didn’t care about the drainage tubes, or about not being able to run as hard as I liked to run, and I didn’t care about whether or not Doctor Ouajiballah liked me, or Amelia thought I was a decent boyfriend for her daughter. All of that had somehow boiled away. I was just tired then, and worried we were too late. The whole thing was taking on a cold realness that seemed to echo off every square inch of the plain walls and the chipped linoleum and the lab machines.

Against that realness, I heard the psychiatrist say, “Why are you doing this, Jake?”

And so I looked back at him very calmly, and I said, “Because I’m hoping to be president one day.” And he blinked and closed his notebook and went off to tell whoever he had to tell that we were a go for Monday morning.