In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

  I was grateful that the church filled up. And yes, I had to keep myself from ogling. Because there was Sandra Bullock herself—sunglasses, hat, and stylish black dress. Julia Roberts, too, looking kind of old, actually. And George Clooney—every bit as good looking in person as he is on screen I was a little annoyed to discover. No Jeff Bridges, unless I missed him. But mostly it was common folk, or as common as they get in these parts.

  The minister said a few words of scripture, but kept it to a minimum. Said a few cursory words about Emerson and losing one’s life so early, before leaving the podium where four people spoke. A Marc Somebody who had his own production company (according to the single-page program) talked about Emerson’s invaluable work in the film industry and made public not just his admiration for Em’s work but his regret that while “we” all knew his impact on film industry, few outside the industry recognized it. Happily, Marc Somebody said, Emerson was exactly the kind of person “not to give a shit.” This got an appreciative chuckle from the crowd, but not from the minister.

  The next man to take the podium said he was a fellow writer and I racked my brain for where I’d seen him before, thinking I’d met him, until it dawned on me that he’d been clutching an Oscar the one time I’d been sucked into watching the Academy Awards on TV a few years ago, though I didn’t recognize the name on the program. He talked about Emerson’s impact on television writing, noting that the shows he’d written for or produced had been seen by many tens of millions of people. He also noted how few people would attach Emerson’s face or name to a given show or movie and that, to his credit, in an industry and city of elbow-to-elbow egos, Em didn’t have one, at least not that you could know about. In a business where greed and backstabbing were simply part of life as usual, Emerson was the very soul of generosity and loyalty.

  To Collista in the front row, he said, “Em was the personification of loyalty and truth.” To Alex and Peter, beside Collista, this writer, who might have been Em’s twin brother, he said, “It will be many decades till you realize the depths of this, but you couldn’t have made up a better father”—the writer choked up here—“that even in a fatherhood cut way too short, you were beyond lucky. He lives on in you. He lives on in me and a thousand others and I will miss him every day I’m alive.”

  I’ve always been a sucker for grief; watching others grieve has always hit me hard. There are no words for it; grief requires years to convey. But that honest choking up I saw brought the real sadness bubbling up from the depths in me, and a tear did careen off the side of my nose.

  I felt enormously grateful that Em’s mother spoke next. I had never met her, and I don’t think Emerson and she were close, but who knows. He always kept his personal history in the deep background department. I don’t know why—I thought his rise from the lower middle classes with zero familial financial support had, well, he’d made it to a funeral like this, hadn’t he? Famous, smart people speaking of their indebtedness.

  Mrs. Randall, gripping Kleenex, spoke about his “indomitable spirit,” even as a youth, how bright he was. Not smart, she said, though he was that, we all knew. He was like an actual light. “In a house that saw more than its share of darkness, he was my beacon,” she said.

  A few more tears and I had to get out my own Kleenex and try and blow my nose as noiselessly as possible.

  And last, Collista spoke. She is a beauty, with abundant, shoulder-length hair, light brown, but with highlights that could very well be natural, given all the sunshine here. I could just make out the backs of the children’s heads from where I sat. The girl, Alex, blonde, and the boy, Peter, had Emerson’s strawberry blond exactly. I liked Collista on the spot. There was something, I don’t know, stately about her—in her heart she was older. Elegant on the inside as well as out. Something that would be confirmed when I shook her hand at the receiving line after the service. Something I hadn’t been planning on. Hell, I wasn’t planning anything at this point; what could I do other than take things moment by moment?

  Collista spoke about Emerson the family man, to complete the picture of work, friendship, and family; they truly were the triangle that described his life. I honestly didn’t know if there was a hypotenuse; I guessed it was family, the longest and most important side, but if all sides were equal, that makes for an unworkable structure in life juggling all three in equal measures; the golden ratio, as I see it, is what we should work toward. My life had been, until Emerson stepped in. Or rather till I threw myself under his self-powered steam engine. At any rate, they truly were the three pillars of his life, of most lives I guess, unless you’re the president of the United States or Elizabeth Taylor. Then I guess you’re not even human.

  “He worked so hard for us,” she said. One of the speakers had used the word loyalty, and I didn’t think twice about the veracity of it. But when Collista said, “And he was so true, to me and to us,” looking down at her kids, her mother-in-law, her own mother and father (I presumed), the other two older folks in the front right pew. “From the beginning,” she said, and looking up to the audience, “always true.” Did the baby kick me or did it just feel that way from guilt?

  I didn’t hear any more, my mind blanked, until the minister noted there would be a reception at the Randall house immediately following the service “for friends and family.” I tucked the program and my soggy Kleenex in my purse and waited in a slow-moving procession to depart the church. I was back-and-forthing on whether to attend the reception. I wanted to go, wanted desperately to see the life he’d decided to make here, the house he’d lived in. I felt it would help me with the loss and help me better know who my baby’s father had become. Or was I simply being a horrible voyeur and making an unthinkable trespass to get what I felt I needed? Also, I didn’t really want to have to confront Collista; that wasn’t desired or necessary, but could probably be avoided if the gathering were large. I was just starting to wonder why the line was moving so slowly, taking forever to get out of here, when I approached the front door. I was in a receiving line. I’d noticed many bolting for the side door; I’d been standing in line with those who were offering personal condolences here.

  If I bolted it would look weird. A hundred jumbled thoughts prevented my acting, and the line continued to move as I did nothing. Keep your composure, Grimsley! Take a breath.

  I had a few moments to consider, a few handshakes and hugs away, and I got okay about it, because I knew that Em had been true to her in his heart. But just how true? I could only guess it was far more true than she would ever be able to know without knowing the rest.

  Also I realized I’d be able to shake the hand of my son’s grandmother, first in the receiving line, to have at least touched her flesh. I would also get to see up close Em’s son and daughter—my son’s half brother and sister—next in line. I would do this, and not attend the reception, much as I wanted to see the kind of house and life he and Collista had created. Since I was doing this, taking more seemed wrong, almost selfish. The service itself showed me the life he’d made out here.

  His mother stood beneath the barrel-tiled gable of the exit, gray old-lady hair, plainly dressed and lightly scented with cheap perfume, and was so red-eyed and confused from grief I said only my name, then, “Emerson was a dear friend I knew at Duke. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you for being here, those were good years for him, some of the best. I’m glad you were a happy part.” She didn’t give any indication that she recognized my name, that Emerson had mentioned me—which is one good thing about uncommon names: people don’t forget them. But I did feel, or catch in the corner of my eye, Collista glance at me when I said Duke, just briefly. She snagged on that word, her glance at me definitive. Next in line was his seventeen-year-old son, Peter, who was shaking hands with his right and clutching a handkerchief in his left to dab his leaking eyes and nose. I said nothing, mouthed “I’m sorry,” and moved on to Alex, the daughter who was a beautiful young lady a little too stylishly dressed for this occasion. She
was dry-eyed and stone-faced. Could she have been—bored? That’s what her expression said. Presumably bulwark, keeping in the grief.

  I got a good look at her as I waited to shake Collista’s hand because a bony, weepy woman was sobbing on Collista’s shoulder and Collista was doing her best to console the underfed creature.

  And then, Jesus God, a new possibility hit me, and I got a major adrenaline rush and started breathing hard: what if he had told her? I knew he said he wasn’t going to tell her, but he also said he was going to try to repair their marriage. What if it had been part of their therapy, or if Emerson confessed out of guilt?

  Freed from the wet embrace, Collista turned to me. I paused, trying to contain my nerves, long enough to tell if I’d set off an interior bomb in The Wife. No. Not that she let on. I said only, “I was a close friend of Em’s when he was at Duke.”

  Collista, hair long and straight, falling naturally over the straps of her black dress, was completely composed, steely even. “Are you Grimsley?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She asked pointedly, “You don’t live here, do you?”

  “I live in Durham.”

  “You’ve come a long way.”

  “Twenty-five years ago, your husband meant a very great deal to me. I’ve followed his career, but from a distance. I’m very sad to be here, and sadder still for your loss but am glad I came. To share the grief with people who knew and loved him.”

  Her eyes were bright blue and she was beautiful, but up close the dryness of her skin, the crow’s eyes, the lines of life creased her face. She had been a genuine beauty once, clearly, but she was my age or a little older, and mortal like the rest of us. She looked me dead straight in the eye, no emotion, only seriousness, uncommonly composed given the situation. “Will you come to the reception, please?”

  “I’d be grateful to be there.”

  What else could I have said? What should I have said? “If you’re sure” or “If I’m welcome” or “I’ve come all this way, but really, I can’t”? Also, it seemed almost as if it hadn’t been a question but rather a command. She’d turned her attention to the couple beside me, waiting.

  Well, okay then, I’d been given my answer.

  *

  I plugged the Brentwood address into my GPS and drove until the mechanical voice said, “In five hundred yards arrive destination”: a lovely and large suburban house, lots of trees and shrubbery, a detached garage, connected to the house by a portico. I parked in the street. I took the fieldstone front walk, passed beneath a hedgerow archway, and followed a stream of strangers through the open front door into a spacious foyer.

  The house was lovely and well appointed. It might have been waspy given its classical Georgian design, but instead it felt rustic—hardwood floors, distressed rather than polished furniture, wrought-iron sconces and chandeliers. The kitchen was immediately to the left, a large spacious one with a breakfast area decked out with laptops and iPads. Here a small catering crew prepared food at a large central island, and at the far end Peter was surrounded by five friends, four guys and one girl, talking quietly. I didn’t and wouldn’t see Alex. A woman in a black vest stood behind a bar in the foyer, offering wine and beer, soft drinks and sparkling water, which I requested. The living room was elegant without being showy. A large modernist painting hung over the mantle—it looked like a Francis Bacon, whom I’d studied in art history at Duke—this would have been interesting, but the signature was an artist I’d never heard of.

  French doors along the back wall of the living room opened out onto a patio; to the right a swimming pool where those who’d arrived were already congregating, moths to flame, LA natives to blue pools of water; to the left was a wooden structure built around a large outdoor fireplace, crackling away, and beside it a wood-burning pizza oven, comfy-looking furniture for lounging, and a wet bar. All of it shaded by an enormous sycamore taller than the house. Not knowing anyone, I wandered more, through the dining room, a table laden with canapés. I circled back through the foyer, saw framed photos of formal occasions of the family—in front of a Christmas tree, gathered on a dune on a beach, the standard family images that don’t really tell you anything. A stairway leading up held lovely, artful, formal black-and-white photographs of the children at varying ages signed “CM” and dated—Collista’s work surely.

  I passed again through the living room, at the back of which was a closed door. I turned the handle slowly, not knowing if it was meant to be private, or who knows—maybe I’d find a couple copulating. One can hope for something startling behind a closed door in an unfamiliar house, no? That actually happened in an Anne Tyler novel I’d read and loved ages ago, an older couple have sex at someone’s funeral reception and are caught. So I paused to listen if I detected movement. When I didn’t, I peeked in, then entered what was clearly Em’s office.

  White woodworking, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a lot of books, but also shelves lined with half-inch-thick volumes, inexpensively bound and titles written by hand on the spines in thick black marker—scripts, I guessed, because there was The Blind Side among the two dozen or so lining a top shelf. Some more I recognized, most I didn’t.

  I could see all this from where I stood in front of a large wooden desk, which faced the door I’d come through. I walked around the desk to where Emerson would have sat, a leather desk chair, a large iMac, stacks of papers, legal pads and scripts, books, Post-It notes with to-do items—the desk of a man who was still alive, from the looks of it, the desk of a man who had finished a hectic day and had simply stood up when called for dinner, fully intending to return.

  “I haven’t been able to touch it except to read what he’d been working on.”

  The voice made me jump and take a breath, feeling immediately guilty for the intrusion. Collista stood in the doorway.

  “I’m sorry, the door was closed. I shouldn’t be in here.” I came out from behind the desk. The room, the wood paneling and dark carpet bright with sunlight now, two maroon club chairs on either side of a table stacked with books, more French doors that opened onto a side patio.

  “No, I’d closed the door because it’s a mess. I haven’t been able to move anything, I’m afraid.”

  “I understand.”

  “Grimsley, again, yes?”

  “Grimsley Feller, yes.”

  “He mentioned you.”

  And when she said this, I swear she gave my entire body a once over. I’d started to show, of course. And my figure was pronounced by overall weight gain encouraged by Maggie. Long a physical sloth most invigorated by a four-hour stretch of reading than of cycling or hiking, I was in better physical shape than I’d been since well, Emerson—but still I was eating all I could. So with my clothes off, my pregnancy was definitively evident, but I’d bought a dark loose-fitting dress for this day, so the particular curves weren’t distinct and, having scrutinized myself, and the way the smock hung, for an hour this morning in my room from every angle, knew that it was entirely possible to presume only that I was simply a bit of a porker. You had to see the newly deep arch of my back, not apparent from what I was wearing and her view, to recognize that it was a pregnancy and not just a bit of a potbelly.

  But look me over she did. Shamelessly, actually.

  “Said he saw an old girlfriend. Your name is memorable.”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  “He saw other friends when he was there. You’re the only one who came today that I’m aware of.”

  “I’d like to tell you why,” I said. This was a surprise! Just came out! Terrible nerves? Guilt? Would have slapped my own hand over my mouth as if to take it back, but Em’s son, Peter, looking like a fine young man in his dark suit and a tie of aqua and gold, hair slightly slicked, appeared behind her and said, “Mom? The Andersons are here and asking for you.”

  “I’ll be right there, Peter.”

  He departed and she returned her focus to me. She looked surprised, more open, less suspicious, as if I’d s
urprised her with good news. “Thank you. Thank you. And I’d like to hear why.” Her eyes steely blue, I noticed, cool as her voice, not accusatory, but sincere, rather, and so I relaxed. A little. I suppose.

  “And I also have a question,” she said. She looked down then up to my eyes. “But it requires a conversation that can’t happen now,” she said, and her demeanor changed, warmed further. “Not today, not with all these people. I’m exhausted already and will be spent by the end of the day. How long will you be in town?”

  “I leave tomorrow evening.”

  “Would you be able to return tomorrow, late morning?”

  “Of course.”

  “Eleven o’clock?”

  “Whatever time is convenient.”

  “Thank you. And I hope you’ll stay and have some food. I haven’t been able to eat in a week—somebody should. Also I hope you’ll introduce yourself to people who knew him here. I’m sure they’d like to hear what Emerson was like when he was a young man.”

  “Thank you. I’ll say good-bye to you now, then, in case I’m unable to find you later. This is a hard day. I am truly sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you.”

  I extended my hand and again, she took it but looked hard at my bulge.

  I honestly didn’t know what was going on in Collista’s mind. Had Emerson confessed the affair and she suspected and did the math? Why on Earth would she have any inkling I was pregnant with her husband’s child unless he had confessed the affair? So maybe he had. Or was I just being completely paranoid? I decided to believe the latter.

  Until I got in the car. Good Lord, she’d asked me to come back. Why? I mean, I was glad—I’d come to LA, I now knew, needing to know what happened during his last months and to glimpse the life he’d made. Now I needed to know why. But what did she need to ask me if it wasn’t about our liaison? Shit.