A Little Love Story Read Online Free PDF

boundaries.”
    She looked at me for another five or six seconds.
    “The water will be flat on a night like this. The moon’s almost full. I rowed four years in college, I even have a Head of the Charles medal, and I can give you a written guarantee you won’t fall in.”
    “Is it hard exercise?”
    “Not tonight.”
    More of the dark eyes on me. I liked it. I was innocent, I was good. I had, for some reason, not even been having indecent thoughts. I wasn’t trying to charm her or seduce her or Joe Date her; I was just feeling something different, some freedom I didn’t usually feel on first dates, didn’t usually feel at all. Had never really felt, in fact.
    She said, “Okay then.”
    We rode in my dented old truck up Commonwealth Avenue, across the Boston University Bridge, and parked in a dirt lot on the other side of Memorial Drive. At the boathouse I used my key in the lock and then turned off the alarm inside and led her down a set of stairs into the concrete-floored, high-ceilinged bays where the long white shells lay on their racks and you could smell sweat and damp concrete and the river. “They used to be made of wood,” I said. “They were beautiful.”
    But even made of carbon fiber, they were creatures to look at: sixty feet long, twenty inches wide, a foot deep, with quarter-inch-thick hulls and V-shaped aluminum riggers, and inside, intricately curved ribs and sleek seats on tracks and pairs of sneakers bolted in.
    Janet ran her hands over the bow of a boat named Leila Sophia . She flipped the gate of one of the riggers gently back and forth so that it made a click-clack sound that echoed in the bays.
    “They can go as fast as twelve miles an hour,” I told her, “which seems faster on water, much faster, and with eight oarsmen and a coxswain it can be seventeen or eighteen hundred pounds going across the water at that speed, no motor.”
    We walked around to the other bay where the smaller boats were kept, singles and doubles and fours. She ran her hands over those, too, played with the oarlocks, peered up underneath them to get a sense of the way the ribs and seats were fashioned.
    I hadn’t yet opened the big red garage door that led out onto the dock. Friend or no, keys or no, alarm code or no, I wasn’t supposed to be there at that hour. The head coach then, whose name was Jacques Florent, had been my coach ten years before, and sometimes I came in and helped him organize the two-thousand-meter races on Saturday mornings in May, or did a repair for free on the dock or on one of the weight benches. In exchange for that, he gave me a key and let me take a single out on Sunday afternoons in the warm months. Or let me come in and use the ergometers in the winter when the team wasn’t using them and when the streets were too icy for my regular morning run. But the shells were expensive, fragile as the skeleton of a sparrow, and taking them out on the river at night had never been mentioned as part of the deal. Not alone, not with a date you hardly knew. When you rowed in those boats you moved backwards across the surface of the water, so if something was coming downstream in the dark—a tree limb, an old tire—you wouldn’t know about it until it crashed through the ten-thousand-dollar bow and the river came pouring in.
    But I watched Janet running the palms of her hands across the sleek bottom of a boat, and I watched her fingers—a mechanic’s fingers, a pianist’s—opening and snapping closed the delicate oarlock, and I decided it would be a foolish thing to back away from the river now. It called to me, same as always, the wet slide of time. I could smell it in the air that seeped under the big red door. I took off my sport jacket and laid it over one of the shells. She put her sweater over my jacket. When I unhitched the clasp and swung the door open—first one side and then the other—the moldy, silky air washed against my face. “Too bad you can’t smell the river,” I