Free A Little Love Story by Roland Merullo

against the material. No, leave me to my imaginings. Please.”
    I left him to his imaginings.
    We had finished framing the professor’s addition and were involved in the monotonous nailing of half-inch plywood onto the second-floor walls. The professor’s name was Jacqueline Levarkian and she taught theoretical physics at Harvard. She was an attractive and obviously brilliant single woman, and from the day we’d started working there, in midsummer, Gerard had been trying various stunts to get her to pay attention to him. Once, when he knew she was home, he pretended to slip off the staging and dangled there, holding on with one hand and screaming out over the sedate Cambridge neighborhood for me to rescue him, pedaling his legs and gesticulating wildly with his free hand, three feet above the ground, like a circus clown. Two or three times during the workday he’d flip his thirty-two-ounce hammer into the air, end-over-end, three full revolutions, catch it expertly by its blue handle, and pretend to be making up physics formulas to describe the hammer’s movement (“You take the cosign of s , where s represents the centrifugal force of the atomic weight of steel…”). He’d sing snatches from operas he liked. He’d bring books of poetry—Latin, Russian, Italian, Greek—to the work site to impress her. Once, when Jacqueline had an afternoon off, she brought us out homemade oatmeal cookies and iced tea and Gerard engaged her in a complicated discussion of something called string theory, then kissed her hand afterwards.
    I knew this about my friend: early in his life he had not been given some quality of motherly or fatherly attention that says: I see you. You are fine as you are, flaws and all. You are accepted, you are beloved. And ever since then he had tried to fill up that empty place by getting attention, especially from women. Which had not made marriage an easy thing for him. Or for his former wife. With me, he talked too much and joked too much and laughed too loudly and called at all hours. But he could work like a pair of oxes, and I had never seen him be mean, and when Giselle died, he made sure I never sank below a certain level of rock-bottom misery and I did not expect I would ever forget that.
    I picked up a sheet of plywood, leaned it sideways against my hip and shoulder and the side of my head, and then passed it up to him on the staging.
    “Huddy! Queek!” he screamed as I was climbing the ladder. “Eeet eez sleeping from my grahsp!”
    When we had worked it into place and were driving the galvanized eightpenny nails at six-inch intervals, I asked him if he knew anything about cystic fibrosis.
    “Jerry’s kids,” he said, going into a terrible imitation of Jerry Lewis’s honking, bighearted goofiness.
    “That’s muscular dystrophy. I’m asking about cystic fibrosis. CF.”
    “All the alphabet diseases are awful, Colonel, I know that much. AIDS, ALS, MS, Ph.D.”
    “Is this something we want to be joking about?”
    “If it is what I think it is, then one of the only things we can do is joke about it, Colonel. You should understand that.”
    “Right. The woman I went out with on Friday night has CF.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Don’t worry about it. You need a governor on your mouth, though, sometimes.”
    Governor on your mouth. Amazing how things like that just slip out. Gerard, naturally, would not let it go.
    “Actually, if I had incarnated into a woman’s body, I wouldn’t mind the governor on my mouth. Our governor is one cute governor compared to, say, the governor of New Mexico …” and so on until I finally told him to stop, twice, and he did.
    When we finished the nailing and were putting our tools away, I asked him if I could come over and do a little research on his computer, and I did that, then went home and painted for a while on a fresh canvas. But the work was timid work, uninspired, unsurprising, no good. As if they were marching on a parade ground behind my eyes, I