In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

  “With worry you wouldn’t see me again, or worry for me?” He’d jumped on this without even a pause for consideration, he was wound so tight with self-consciousness. Not self-absorbed, fragile, self-hate, just clear self-consciousness about all, except for the sadness I could see. That’s what I saw in his face, in the speed of his response.

  “Worry for you.” He didn’t avert his eyes, so I kept on. “I don’t expect to see you again. But it doesn’t mean I can’t know you. I want you to be in touch when you’re back. Call the library and ask for me. Search my name on the site—it includes my email. Will you do that?”

  “Well, sure.” Now he looked at the pines that lined the eighteenth hole. “Of course.”

  “I hope I’m wrong. But I see what I see. And I just want you to know that if the sadness I think I’m seeing rises up on you as a real threat, if you need to talk, or whatever, I just want you to know I want to help.”

  He gripped my shoulders and said, “I’ll be okay, Grims. And I’ll thank you forever for what you’ve just said. You are a good, good friend.” He gave my shoulders a parting squeeze. No embrace.

  “Will you write to me?”

  He paused but said, “You bet.”

  I smiled. “All right then.”

  I turned and walked to my car.

  “Hey, Grims.”

  I turned full around and stood, just ten yards away. He smiled that too-familiar smile, his old smile, that youthful, seductive, evil-beatific smile, like he knew something you didn’t want him to know, and he shook his head. “You still teach the torches.”

  A knot in my throat yanked taut at the particular Shakespeare reference, but I managed to swallow and fake a grand smile. “You’re a doll,” I said and turned for my car.

  I was at a full-on weep by the time I turned onto Cornwallis Road—tears so plentiful I almost missed the driveway I’d been turning in to for some twenty-two years now.

  Why? I wish I could say it was for him.

  Eight

  I certainly didn’t know my own mind or soul by the time I stepped through my front door. I’d sat in my gravel drive in the dark car till the tears wore me out and I figured it was safe to go inside. It wasn’t. And not because there was an intruder or a snake (I’d actually had a troublesome house snake a few years back, a big black razorback). My house proved unsafe precisely because it was empty. I’d never felt so alone or so foolish, so utterly wasteful, as I did when I saw the old jug by the fireplace.

  I’d gotten it on a trip through that area of North Carolina famed for its jugs—actually referred to as Jugtown—and the quality of the clay in that land that makes them so fine; it was once a thriving industry, but is now more or less a little pocket of hippie artisans practicing this once-lively craft. Moonshining also used to be a way of life down here. Now that craft is kept alive, just barely, by tourists. I’d bought the jug as a souvenir, an old-fashioned moonshine jug with a ring holder at its narrow opening that would have had a cork in it were it to be of use. But it wasn’t destined to remain a souvenir of the place I loved so. It was just an empty vessel, of no use beyond sentiment, remembrance of things fucking past, and the sentimentality of the object itself suddenly revolted me. This empty, useless vessel.

  I smashed it on the brick hearth. Then, when silence flooded in again, and nothing, absolutely nothing had changed, I collapsed in a heap as if all the bones in my body simply vanished, cutting my arm on a shard of Jugtown kiln-fired clay, and I kept sobbing till there were no more tears, till I was just wept dry.

  Eventually, I suppose I pushed my body up, forced it up, in my recollection of it—this was just three months ago—like a prisoner of war who’s been beaten simply because he annoyed the prison camp’s general, who as far as I was concerned that night was God himself, to be thrust back into my self-built cell.

  I found a broom in, yes, the broom closet—even that I hated, I hated that I had a broom closet where I kept a broom. I remember distinctly hating myself for it. I swept up the shards of my broken jug but left them in a pile in front of the fireplace. I didn’t want to cut my feet, but I was too despondent to actually care to pick it up, rid the nice little symbol I’d made for myself on my own damn floor. One sweep of the broom spread blood across the floorboards at the hearth’s edge, which was when I noticed I was cut. Not badly. I put the broom back and dabbed the cut on my triceps with a paper towel.

  I walked up the five steps to the third level of my little house in the woods. It’s nestled into a beech forest, this house, and my back patio looks out onto a pond where all kinds of winged creatures come to play. The middle level has a small kitchen and dining/living room with the comfiest reading chair on Earth. And there’s a lower-level, rec-roomish space that leads to the garage. In this room, I keep my desk and watch occasional TV on an old leather couch big enough for the occasional guy; we can watch a movie and do whatever else feels right or needed. It’s also where I found that snake, so I tend to make noise when I head down there.

  Tonight I hated my funky little house for the boring little nothing that it was (I, of course, being the boring little nothing, not my house and home of two decades). I took a shower, hot as I could stand it, wanting it to scald me. I combed my hair and let it leave a soothing water mark on the back of my night gown. Wondering how on Earth I would sleep, I pulled a bottle of bourbon from the cupboard, poured three fingers into a juice glass, and drank it down. I leaned heavily on the counter.

  When I turned, I saw Emerson through the glass door leading from the patio back into the living room. Though I was so shaken I wasn’t sure. It was dark outside and lights were on inside. I walked closer, not believing my eyes. I approached the door, unthinking. I saw my reflection superimposed over his image, just enough light to illuminate him, but barely, enough to doubt what I saw.

  *

  It was him, not my imagination or a play of the light. But he didn’t move when I unlocked the door and pulled it toward me. He stood, arms at his sides, without expression. Too terrified, I judged from his stone-cold stare. I’m not sure how long we stood there. Long enough for my heart to rev up to full throttle, like the first time we’d exchanged words in the Duke gardens. He just stared at me, my old friend, once twenty-one, now past forty. But even with two decades of husk enclosing his true self, I still saw the boy he’d been that first moment on the main quad. He surely saw the same in me because he was, well, here. But he was so clearly wrecked, inside, that I knew it was up to me to act. Thinking only of him, of easing him through why he was here, I first reached out and touched his hand, just a stroke to make sure we both knew we were actually here together in the flesh and not dreaming. I needed that at least.

  “Em, you’re here. I know why and you shouldn’t try to deny it, so let’s get it over with and figure out the consequences when we can think straight. It’s already been done. You’re here, for a reason, it’s done in your head. What we’re about to do is just signing the papers. You can’t not do it. It’s over.” When he didn’t move or speak, I said, “I want this, too. It will all work out.”

  When he stepped through the doorway, I realized how clearly upset he was. He continued to stall, so I took the back of his neck and pulled is face down to mine and that cavern of want I’d felt in the chapel all but moaned open for him. We kissed hard and long with the old familiarity, as if nothing, but nothing, had changed in all these years. That kiss was like opening a long-lost book of poems to your favorite one and finding your old self responding emotionally to the words exactly as you had in your passionate, poetry-loving youth, but with a freshness and perspective you’d then lacked.

  I broke from the kiss, took off his tie, and said, “Take your shoes off.”

  Those were the last words spoken before we crossed over. I led him the five steps up to my bedroom. I was just in a nightgown, easily dispatched. He got out of most of his clothes, all but his shirt, still on but unbuttoned as he lay on the comforter, chest heaving, the deed done and the bed
still as neatly made as it had been this morning.

  It’s important for you to know this because it’s how it sometimes happens. The sex was about as fast and pleasant as a punch in the nose. He was only half there and came upon entry. It scarcely qualified as sex at all. I maybe would have laughed if it hadn’t been Em, and therefore troubling, not to mention a pretty serious situation generally, what we’d just done. This certainly was no longer the boy I knew.

  After I’d given him a few minutes to calm down, I said, “I hope this was just nerves and fright and not something seriously wrong with you.”

  “Me, too,” he said.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “Water. I’d really like some water.”

  I put on a robe, descended to the kitchen, and filled two glasses with ice and water. I gave him enough time to put his clothes back on if that’s what he wanted or needed. But I did truly hope to find him still in my bed, ever my favorite place for him to be this many years later, I realize now, the one man I’d ever, and still, loved. He was in bed, hadn’t wanted to bolt; his shirt was on the floor with the rest and he was under the covers, staring at the ceiling.

  “Okay then,” I said, “have a good long drink. Then we talk.”

  He sat up to drink.

  “You didn’t get drunk after I left, did you?” I asked.

  “Thought about it. It was literally drink you out of my mind or come here. Tell me I didn’t do the wrong thing.”

  “I think you did what you had to do.”

  I snuggled into him, put my head on his chest, and again the familiarity both startled and comforted me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For the performance? Don’t be. You just did something deeply against your nature. You’ve been unfaithful to the person I’m guessing is your best friend. I’m the one who’s sorry.”

  “Are you?”

  I thought I was until I answered. “No. I think you had to do this. I’ve never met your wife. I guess I’ll be worried and sorry if I’ve been part of some damage that turns out to be permanent, which maybe I have been. I guess my question to you is, do you wish you’d never seen me today?”

  “Yes, I truly do wish I’d never seen you.”

  We were quiet for a while. I shouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know the truth.

  “Should I be sorry?” I asked.

  “No. This was my doing, my responsibility.”

  More silence. “When was the last time you had sex?” I asked.

  “More than a month ago, and it wasn’t pleasant. We’ve been fighting a lot. The intimacy is hard. And my equipment hasn’t been operating the way it used to. I’m getting old.”

  “They have little blue pills for that now, have you heard?”

  “Yeah, well, if there were some kind of actual desire I felt coming from Collista, I kept hoping I wouldn’t need it. Maybe you’re right, it’s been going on for a while.”

  “Either of you taking anything for depression? That can take down the libido from three hundred yards.”

  “I didn’t know I was depressed till you told me tonight, remember?”

  I paused. “Has my body changed?”

  “Your body, what little of it I caught sight of just now, remains one of the most perfect I’ve ever beheld.”

  “It isn’t anymore.”

  “Like you said earlier, we don’t change fundamentally. Yours is not only a beautiful body, it’s the most generous I’ve ever known.”

  We were quiet then. I snuggled into him after that sweet thought (he may have dozed for a little) and let what happened cool off. But then my flesh got hungry again, my hands, my breasts, my legs, my belly—it all just wanted to merge with him. And before long, his body answered back. And he was right; he didn’t need those pills at all.

  He was so surprised he threw off the covers and stared at his own engorged cock, a lovely pink flag pole, throbbing. “My God, I haven’t felt that in years.”

  I took hold of it, smiled and said, “Me neither.”

  He sigh-moaned from the pleasure I’d begun giving and, well, I will only reveal that during the next ninety minutes I was returned more completely to the young woman I once was than I ever had been and surely ever would be.

  *

  Emerson said a sweet but definitive good-bye the following morning. I called work and told them I wouldn’t be in till noon. Trish didn’t ask why, likely too surprised since I’d never missed a day in twenty years, except for once when my sister went into labor at a very inconvenient 4 a.m. with my youngest nephew. My love—for I knew he was that and had always been and would be forever—departed for a 10 a.m. flight, after a final and customary and lovely early morning pleasure for him. He showered and dressed. I delayed work because I wanted to enjoy this uncommon spring morning, with hot coffee and birdsong. As I sat on my back patio staring out at my pond, the heron arrived, which I took to be a good omen, a blessing somehow.

  After the second sex … remember how I said a woman can be mad from 360 degrees? Well, the best of us can fuck that way, too, and I took Em through most of them. After the second sex, the really good, protracted, amazing sex that night—we both liked it athletic—we were too keyed up to sleep. I poured us both a bourbon. He asked if I had a cigarette, and I did, in the freezer, for just such occasions; this is Durham, after all, tobacco central. We sat out on my back patio in the cool, still air. It was then he told me more about what I’d already sensed.

  After Duke, when we let our connection go, he was productive, he said, but terribly alcoholic. Not sick alcoholic, but he hated being poor in the city, and said he was pretty much either drunk or getting over a hangover from the day he got there till the day he got a sweet assignment for Vanity Fair, then recently resuscitated, profiling a young new actress named Julia Roberts. He said he was surprised I hadn’t remembered this because we’d talked about it when he’d left New York and stayed with me before heading to Los Angeles. I told him that was more than twenty years ago, and my mind wasn’t what it used to be. But anyway, this led to more stories, more connections, a healthier life in Los Angeles, meeting and marrying Collista, kids, and eventually big money writing movie scripts and the television shows he now said he had little respect for.

  After a second drink, I thought his infidelity began to weigh on his mind when he grew quiet, but he said, “Grimsley, I don’t feel bad about what happened, and I don’t want you to. I’d have guessed I’d feel terrible, but I honestly don’t. What we just did was so good and so right, how could I? But I’m not going to tell Collista. In fact, it’s somehow made me want to commit more to her, to repair what damage I’ve done to her and to us, and I hope she’ll want to do the same. Does that make any sense? I’m thanking you for that, and for this, what’s happened, and I hope you understand.”

  He looked down, took a deep breath. “I hope you don’t think I’m an asshole who used you.”

  I laughed.

  “Thank you for laughing,” he said, still looking down.

  “I know what I’m doing,” I said, “who I am, and who you are. We’re still the same people, and we still have the same relationship we always did. Great sex and no strings, and I’m good with it if you are. I’m true to my word, old friend. I’m here if you need me, but you have your life and I have mine, and I truly am happy. Never more so thanks to what just happened, I know. You probably just saved me, coming here. I’m exactly where I want to be. I will be sad when you go, but no worries about my showing up on your doorstep with a surprise.” (Not true, as it would turn out, but it wouldn’t matter by then, not the way I’d have thought, had I known then what I know now, anyway.) “I loved what we shared years ago, and I loved our renewed glimpse of what we had just now. And God knows my body’s still hungry for you as it ever was. Don’t think you’re being selfish. I am so happy and satisfied by what just happened in there. For me, it’s truly a ‘more that I give, more that I have’ situation. Our bodies are just good together.
I don’t know what it means. But that sex just now was deeply good for me and I hope somehow good for you, or at least I hope it causes no harm.”

  “Grimsley, I’ve had a number of lovers, good and bad, for love and for need, but I can honestly say, I have never had better sex than I have always had with you.”

  “Same here.”

  “For some twenty years, I’ve thought about the sex we used to have, like the sex we just had—and I swear, I didn’t think I was actually capable of it anymore, or feeling it like that—I’ve thought about our long-ago sex so, so many times, maybe in my mind I’ve never left you, that part of you.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I’m going to be sad about it, since I now know I’m still in love with you and it’s not likely we’re going to see each other again.”

  He didn’t respond to that one. Our cigarettes were long gone and we’d drunk even the melted ice so our glasses were dry. “Time for sleep? What time’s your flight?”

  “Grimsley, I think I can say this now and truly mean it. I do love you, and did. I love you, my old, old friend.”

  “I love you, too. I always have. But it’s a different love, and we’d never work that way, so I’m going to try to understand that and try not to be sad.” I stood. I didn’t need any more talk or love. I pulled him up by his hand and held it as we went to my bedroom and slept a good and easy sleep.

  So. Wordless sex at dawn like old times, a shower for him while I made coffee, and a good kiss good-bye. He did want to make it clear that this would be the last time we’d see each other. He hoped I was okay with it. I told him yes, that I was rooted here and happy and truly grateful to be returned, briefly, to the girl I was by his still-magnificent body and gorgeous face and the smell of his skin. To know that we don’t really fundamentally change.

  I reiterated my request that he remain in touch by email or letter or phone.

  I know he arrived safely in Los Angeles, because he emailed when he got there:

  Dear Grims,

  Can’t thank you enough for helping me see clearly again. But especially for you. I finally see you for what you were years ago and are still, an actual angel.