In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

  Em had told me after the fact that he didn’t want it, that he had applied only at Blackmore’s insistence, and at the time he did anything that Blackmore insisted upon. I believed him. Em wasn’t the sour-grapes sort, and I don’t think he wanted more study, only the attention and the honor of it. By his senior year, he was fairly wild and needed to get out of school, clearly ready to burst into his own in the adult world of Manhattan.

  What had Emerson done upon leaving Duke? He’d spent one bad year working in Manhattan, that I knew, but after, I’m not altogether sure. Bits and pieces of hearsay were mainly what I got at reunions and in my work for the university. I kept my ear to the ground from here, via the alumni department. I knew that Em struggled in New York, as one was supposed to do, but when Blackmore’s agent was unable to place Em’s novel, Em segued seamlessly into journalism and used his charisma and charm to smooth-talk his way into numerous celebrity lairs for Vanity Fair profiles, making contacts he would parlay into even greater success in the entertainment industry. And it was in this respect that I’d last read about him—must have been seven years ago—in Entertainment Weekly. I wouldn’t be caught purchasing this magazine, but I do confess to paging through it given the opportunity. If I’m going to actually wait for a dentist to drill my teeth, I’ll indulge in some mental sugar while I do.

  Em had been nominated for a TV award for his work on some new crime drama, can’t remember the name (my tastes run more toward the English drawing room—filmed versions of Jane Austen novels, Upstairs, Downstairs). I remember being genuinely glad for him. He was photographed with his wife, Collista Meriwether, a Los Angeles fine art photographer from a moneyed family. (I Googled her that day, the left side of my mouth drool-slicked and sagging from the Novocain.) He looked in the photo very much as he had today, and his wife looked like your average Los Angeles socialite—blond, ravishingly good looking, and slim from who knows how many egg-white omelets.

  I never learned if he actually won the Emmy.

  This was not the last time he’d entered my mind—rather the most recent knowledge I’d had of him. A few weeks before today’s memorial, I’d read some letters he’d written (not to me), but I’d glanced at them only briefly, read one completely, and felt little—mild curiosity if anything, some regret, perhaps, for him. I didn’t linger on the letters. The truth of the matter is that for four years while Em was a student here, he occupied me continuously, but time mercifully let me forget him, and neither those few traces in the arc of his life I’ve noted, nor the more personal letters I’d found, unearthed the old feelings. And yet his physical presence on this day, the particular mix of carbon atoms and water and DNA that composed his singular body, seemed literally to transform me as he walked past me, engaging that long-unused gear that had twenty-five years earlier altered my course.

  *

  The memorial ended with words read by the man himself. He had a rich baritone, and was famed for his readings around here, but the words had in fact been recorded at my mother’s funeral service, five years earlier. Blackmore had spoken and concluded with a reading from one of his own favorite poems by Ben Jonson. It was touching then because it showed me how close my mother and he had been.

  It is not growing like a tree

  In bulk, doth make men better be,

  Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,

  To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:

  A lily of a day

  Is fairer far in May,

  Although it fall and die that night;

  It was the plant and flower of light.

  In small proportions we just beauties see;

  And in short measures life may perfect be.

  Blackmore had enunciated the word “small,” drew it out smoothly, deeply, for special attention. I remembered it from five years ago because it was so touching, but now it was simply sad, the smallness of us all, ultimately—our mortality, Daddy many years ago, my mom dead of lung cancer, Blackmore of … I was going to say simple old age, but let’s just call it what it is: The Inevitable. And soon, me. Life’s single certainty. It’s the happiest story there is, it’s said: “The grandfather dies, the father dies, the son dies.” But still.

  Organ music filled Duke Chapel after the poem to bring the memorial to an end, and my eyes were dry. I’d known Professor Blackmore ever since we moved here. My father was his exact contemporary; the young author, though, was a star on the campus by the time we arrived. Blackmore had arrived at Duke fairly needy from his home state of Virginia, the site of so many of his novels and stories. But he and I weren’t close. He was a prolific philanderer in his early days, occasionally with students, or so I heard; he always treated me like Daddy’s little girl, kind but aloof. I never took a class from him—too intimidating for me at the time. He reserved most of his heart and mind for his writing students, those who shared his love of the great Western texts.

  Not grieving, only thoughtful and sad, I was clear-headed enough to consider my options as the crowd filed out. Near the door, I could bolt for the library, where I had actual work to do for this occasion (a collection of Blackmore’s work and honors—first editions, medals, letters—had been organized by me and my colleague, Don Glassman, in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, in the small room off the entrance of Perkins Library, the Mary Duke Biddle Rare Book Room). Or I could wait for Em to exit, catch him then.

  Which brought up another fraught decision. Call out to him? Place myself where he’d see me and pray he recognized me? The latter terrified me, of course. For if he failed to recognize me, then I’d clearly have meant even less to him than I’d thought, and I couldn’t bear this devastation. And if this were so, I don’t believe I could forgive him, or forgive my pathetic self. Truly, he was so important to me those years ago that were he to fail to know my face, my eyes, then I’d deluded myself. I don’t care how many layers of time we’d built up between the selves we were then and are now.

  I could already feel my blood getting hot just thinking, and so, blinded by rising anger, I never saw him coming. He appeared before me out of the crowd like a shark rising to the surface, every bit as surprising, beautiful, and dangerous. To me at least. And I’m sure I took a breath but I don’t recall because I was paralyzed, struck so dumb for so many long, blank moments that he was the one who had to speak.

  “Grimsley,” he said. And then he said, “It’s me. Em.” I still said nothing, only stared into those intensely familiar gold-speckled eyes. “Emerson.”

  And then we embraced and I swear to God a physical hunger for him opened up inside me wide as a cavern, that gear I mentioned turned—and a hundred others with it. I felt I still knew every muscle and curve of his body as my arms wrapped around his back, face pressed into a white shirt that smelled of fresh starch. He actually had to pull me by my rib cage off him, gently but insistently.

  But it was clearly not to be rid of me, for he held on to my ribs, and beheld me, his eyes brightening, a smile alighting. But only momentarily, for the brightness dimmed and the smile melted away. His jaw trembled, his eyes filled. He said, “Please excuse me.” And like that he was gone, dove straight into the departing crowd and was quickly out of sight.

  And so was I. After five stunned, frozen-like-a-statue, what-just-happened seconds, I departed the chapel, pausing at the steps as the crowd parted around me. His slender but strong fingers still seemingly impressed on my ribs, I took a good, long breath. I smoothed my navy dress. I tightened my ponytail as tightly as I could, pushed my glasses high on the bridge of my nose, and headed down the steps and over to the adjacent library.

  It would be a day like any other.

  I and my days are as constant as the sun. I rise, I arc through my work, see a friend, call my sister, cook for myself or myself and a friend, and read till I dip below the horizon. Sometimes I’m hazy; sometimes I feel radiant. I arc low in winter and high in summer but every day I am there, like the day before. And this day would be no different. I determin
ed it would be …

  Except for the not-routine exhibit and reception people were now streaming toward—one I’d helped to build—consisting of a small narrative in letters, manuscripts, books, photo albums, and videos of the novelist and poet we’d just said goodbye to.

  The mentor of my ex-lover.

  Instead of checking in on the Rare Books room (where we’d moved couches and tables around to set up the exhibit) to make sure all was well as I normally would have, I entered the first doors to the library beneath the tower and took the marble steps to my office on the second floor. I sat at my desk. I straightened papers so that all edges were aligned in the three to-do piles I’d created before leaving for the ceremony (not knowing that I’d feel like a different person on returning now). I had no pressing matters since the exhibit was done, a full month’s work excavating the history of a protean man of letters who lived to age eighty-seven—two hundred boxes of archives.

  It was then that I’d sought out a cache of Emerson’s letters in Blackmore’s files. My colleague and friend, Don, was the main curator of this particular collection, but I’d been the one to sift through Blackmore’s correspondence from the last two decades of his life. True to his egotistical nature, perhaps planning his legacy since his solitary childhood, he’d saved copies of his own letters, at least those he thought might be of use to his archivists. That sounds mean, so let me just say that I’m truly glad he did, if only for the first letter he saved from 1992, which begins thus:

  Durham, 10 Jan 92

  Dear Em,

  Your long good letter came yesterday; tomorrow noon, my classes begin so herewith a not-too-long-considered answer.

  I was not a fan of Blackmore’s work—I’d read three novels (of the forty or so novels, essays, memoirs, and volumes of poetry he’d published during his career)—but his letter touched me to the point that I hunted down a folder on which Don, in his elegant script, had penciled the words “CORRESPONDENCE, EMERSON RANDALL, 1990–2009.” The folder, in the “CORRESPONDENCE TO” box, contained forty or so letters and notes, and a few postcards from Europe from Em to Professor Blackmore. The first of the letters were from New York—the college graduate giddy from the excitement of the big city—then a few from Los Angeles—a torrid romance with the woman who would be his wife (I skimmed)—but the one I was looking for was dated January 5, 1992. I needed to know what had elicited such words to a young writer, my long-ago friend, from the old master. There is a moratorium of twenty years on all but a selection of Blackmore’s papers according to his will and estate, but I have access to them all.

  Emerson addressed his mentor as Professor Blackmore, as he would deferentially throughout their correspondence. After a deceptively light, but relatively hopeful description of being newly wed and the absurd nature of traffic in Los Angeles, he gets to the point that required Blackmore’s immediate response:

  I have just discarded 102 pages of what was to be my second attempt at a novel and now that the despair has subsided, I feel strong enough to ask for your counsel. How on earth to proceed? Since age eleven I’ve written stories, have always known that I intended to earn my living as writer, as a novelist I had always presumed, because, well, that’s what any serious writer has done for the past few centuries.

  We all know it’s hard and wanting is not enough, as countless have tried and failed before me. In class, you lined the path with signs reading “Stay Out,” “Beware of Dog,” “No Trespassing” for anyone poking through the underbrush toward serious fiction. In your essay “To a Young Writer,” you begin succinctly: “If you can stop, you probably should.”

  Well, I can.

  For all these years I have felt compelled by the pressure of my life to write stories and I’ve come to what I fear is an either/or moment. Continue my attempts at fiction or follow the lure of the entertainment industry that has tugged at me since my arrival here two years ago.

  I know that I must write. The compulsion I mentioned above is very much physical as well as intellectual. Given this fact, I’m asking you for your hard advice. You always told our class, “If you really want to know what I think, ask, but don’t ask unless you really want to know.” I didn’t then because I thought I knew, or was arrogant enough to think it shouldn’t and didn’t matter what you thought, but now I’m asking. You actively helped me a few years ago by making the introduction to Lee, as wonderful an agent as any young writer could hope for. You encouraged me after reading the first thirty pages of the story I’ve recently discarded. Now, knowing what you do of me and my work, I’m asking for your frank assessment. Financially, we’re fine, but I don’t know how long I can comfortably lean on Collista, much as she supports my aims. Her family is very generous but the well is far from bottomless; we live just within our means as it is, and if we have children, as we both hope, I will need gainful employ. But mostly, I do not want to be that poor soul who lies to himself. I fear terribly that script- and screenwriting, where there are actual money-making opportunities for me, will burn too much of the muscle required for writing the fiction I aspire to. That is, I don’t know that I can do both.

  If you want to say to this twenty-four-year-old writer, “If you can stop, you probably should,” then I will. But if you think that I have words in me that may be of use to another living soul, that, given my innate compulsion to tell stories, that it is a matter of time and work, of running in place a while longer, then I’ll take that course.

  Please know I feel terrible putting this on you, but I need guidance as I never have before. If you don’t feel comfortable responding, I will not ask again, and will remain forever grateful for all that you’ve given me—truly, only my own father has given me more or shown me such uncommon generosity, asking nothing in return. For everything, thank you.

  Ever yours,

  Emerson

  So you can see why I felt a little regret for Em, knowing of course that he never did publish a novel, though I couldn’t know if he’d written a second. He may well have, given Blackmore’s response, a response that warmed me and gave me a sense of why my mother and Emerson felt such affection for and devotion to a man I perceived only as famous and cold.

  “I understand your frustrations, right down in my marrow,” Blackmore wrote back. “When I left Duke at age 22 and headed to cold dark Oxford, I worked in resounding silence for three long years.” The letter is five typed pages, worthy of publication, and I’ll leave the letter-to-a-young-writer-ly stuff contained therein for the bound volume twenty years hence should our culture want it (I hope it does) and get right to the conclusion that so moved me—his answer to the young writer in question.

  However fortunate you’ve been till now, you’ve almost surely had your big primal encounters. Whether they’re yet available for exhumation and working, neither of us can know till you’ve dug deeper and longer.

  One word of caution. I urged you to stay in Durham, or return to your home, if you intended to write. New York, long mythologized as the place to go if you would be a writer, is in fact the worst place for a young writer, as you found, filled as it is with so many wonderful and terrible distractions. You chose a place where you can work, but remember that no writer of serious fiction flourished in Hollywood. From Fitzgerald and Faulkner to someone like Charles Jackson—that you don’t know the name is its own instruction—to Richard Yates, their time where you now make your life was time wasted, did actual damage to their bodies and minds, the instruments of their art.

  But I can see you’ve built the hardest muscles a young writer must have for the work: the management of your time, the discipline to sit down and write, daily, and then to find some non-poisonous way to spend the remaining hours of your day. I’m referring, of course, to alcohol and other substances that so many American writers fall prey to. If you don’t believe me, check the liquor bill of any full-time successful writer of your Anglo ilk. From the sound of it, though, and as your marriage suggests, you’ve avoided this trap as well.

 
Therefore, I can tell you that it is, now, a matter of time, work, love, the dingy but ultimately sterling heroism of daily constancy in an effort to watch the world, see it (the rarest of skills), then comprehend some useable pattern and record it memorably for others. The rest of life needs much the same devotion; writing’s no biologic sport, no terribly special skill.

  So on, hard as it is, and blessings on it. And thanks for the gratitude you gravely and credibly proffer. What you, in particular you, are doing now is something I’m proud of, deeply respectful of, on a daily basis. So the welcome words are received most gladly, my friend—in this New Year and for many more, I beg. Love to Collista,

  and your worthy self

  from

  Daniel

  I smiled at the professor’s lovely words—the last three lines of the otherwise typed letter written in perfect fountain-pen cursive—and was warmed also to see confirmed Blackmore’s gratitude for Emerson’s deep devotion to him, which I well remember. But this Blackmore letter wouldn’t be pertinent to the exhibit we were creating, so I had returned it to the box and continued my sifting. Emerson’s words had kindled no feeling for my long-ago love, no visceral stirrings. Cold words on old paper. Not a hint of what his physical being could do—which was to boil my blood.

  *

  After straightening the papers at my desk, I aligned three very sharp pencils beside the papers. I looked for comfort to the photos standing on the right quadrant of my desk, photos of my younger brother and sister and their families, so solid and contented. My dad and mom. And at the far right, the biggest of the frames, Mom alone and at her best, with her big brunette feminist hair; she was teaching women’s studies at the time of the photograph. She left Duke after Dad died in 1996 to become executive director of the AIDS Task Force here because she wanted—I know it sounds cheesy, but here it is—to give back to the community. She told me she’d spent enough time shut up in books and teaching mainly privileged kids she no longer knew what, or what for. This was when AIDS was still a killer disease, a death sentence, and not the horrible chronic illness that it has become, and which she dealt with, primarily in the poor African American communities of the Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill triangle. It was exhausting on body and soul, but I know she was prouder of that unseen work than anything she’d ever done.