In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

  She engaged his computer, clicked the mail icon, clicked NEW. She wasn’t even seated, just resting her left arm on the chair back—this would be quick.

  When an empty new email popped up, she said, “Could you spell it please?”

  I did and when I got to the M, my full email appeared, grimsley.feller@duke.edu.

  Her eyes darted to mine. “Looks like there was some contact.”

  My heart raced, thinking back, but I couldn’t remember anything. “There wasn’t.”

  “There must have been.”

  “You can check,” I said.

  She did. Which was pretty cold-blooded, now that I think about it. Or perhaps she was just responding to everything now like a tortured animal.

  She typed my name into the search field. Two emails appeared, the one he’d written on the day of his return, and my response. When she’d finished reading both, she simply said, “I’m sorry.” Then she clicked the REPLY button, attached a document called “Untitled.” She typed the first letters of her name in the cc field—“So you can reach me if you have a reason to”—and hit SEND.

  “A little forewarning,” Collista said, “You’re going to get a little shock when you see his name in your inbox. At least I did when I sent something to myself from this computer. Like he was alive and sending me something.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “Thanks for coming here. It couldn’t have been pleasant.”

  “I came only to grieve and to know what happened to my friend. If I’d had something to hide, I wouldn’t have come. I hope you believe that.” Lie upon lie. (Why did I offer?)

  She looked me over as she had yesterday, looked at my dress but really wasn’t looking at my dress.

  “One last question,” she said. “I can’t get it out of my head. Are you pregnant?”

  Straight at me like a fist. It required a street-fight-fast aggressive response, which came to me as though I did improv professionally: “I hope you’re embarrassed when I tell you no.”

  Her eyes rose to meet mine. “Well, when you read what’s in your mail, you won’t wonder why I asked you here.”

  *

  I’d never seen Venice Beach; it wasn’t far and my flight wasn’t till late. I figured a beach would be a good place to sit and think. That was wrong. As I drove down and down, the sun went away. The closer I got to the beach, the cloudier it got until the sky was a flat mat of depressing gray. The air was damp and cool. From hot and sunny to cold and damp. And that was just the air, that didn’t include the freak show that ran the entire length of the sandy, asphalt path—freaks and homeless, skateboarders, a three-legged dog, shop after shop of chintz and shitty carnival food.

  I removed my shoes and walked to the water’s edge. I was mainly alone there. There wasn’t much surf, and it just kept getting colder the closer I got to the water.

  I sat to think. I checked my email—yep, there it was. Collista had been right about the shock, just for a moment, his name in big bold black letters. I didn’t open it. Instead, her parting words when she showed me to the door sounded off in my head:

  “You have my email if you need to reach me, if you have any information to convey. If all that you’ve said is true, I don’t hold you responsible. I want you to know that. But nor is this an invitation to be friends. Our connection ends here unless you have something you think can help me. I’m doing this for me, not you.”

  I didn’t even say good-bye because there didn’t seem to be anything good happening just then other than my getting the hell away from her anger and sadness so that I could think.

  Hold me responsible? My stomach turned, and by the time I was buckled into my car, I thought I was going to be sick. I took a slug of bottled water, warm by now, started the car, and pulled quickly away. When I was out of sight, I pulled over and rested my head on the steering wheel. What was I going to do for ten hours before my flight? I plugged Venice Beach into the GPS.

  The gloomy beach and this particular swath of misfit humanity weren’t doing anything but enhancing my disorientation. I walked north till beach access ended, then just walked along the decrepit streets, passing funky little houses set in crumbling concrete. Eventually I turned left, hoping that farther from the beach was better than closer, which was sort of true. I came upon a semi-decent street with boutiquey shops and restaurants. I walked into a darkish bar called Hal’s. I wasn’t hungry but knew I should eat. I would have rather had a drink and a cigarette, but I had another burger instead. I’d had three meals in LA, each one a burger. I forced it down with multiple glasses of sparkling water.

  It took me about an hour to find my car, but I finally did, and the airport was minutes away. Soon I found myself in an ordinary airport concourse, teaming with America. It wasn’t Venice Beach, but everyone looked fat and ugly to me. I bought a biography of John Cheever, whom I hadn’t read in ages, and about whom I knew little, available as a thick paperback—that would easily last me. And I was in the mood for a real story, not make-believe, something true and grounding. A book. Something solid.

  Three

  My connecting flight from Charlotte to the Raleigh-Durham International Airport was on time and I was back at home by 8:30 on Monday morning. I started coffee, then stood for a long time beneath the hot water of the shower—just stood and let it soothe me. I rubbed my growing belly, which was smooth and tight. This too was comforting, moving my palm in a circle over my little Buddha. I tried to think about what I’d have to do at work, what chores needed to be done, what I’d need to buy at the grocery store today. Did my sister need me for something? I couldn’t remember. What day was it? Monday. No, surely I’d planned to keep the day empty because I knew I’d be tired and a little disoriented. I hadn’t planned on how much. Surely it was partly how the daylight in California had altered my body and mind, no matter how brief it had been, and no matter how I’d tried to keep on North Carolina time. You just can’t trick your body that way. Also, I hadn’t slept well on the plane.

  That and what I read before I landed at the Raleigh-Durham airport.

  It was only after the plane was definitively in the air above California that I had determined to read the document. But stupid me forgot to download the document so that it was actually in my device. I hadn’t realized that I’d needed an Internet connection to actually download the document contained in the email. So I tried not to think what might be in it. I presumed it was about me and Emerson, but I didn’t know what, or how much. Had he written an account of our affair, and was that why it was “secret”? I dreaded seeing that—God I hoped it wasn’t that—and feared that Collista had to read an account of that night and realized from my presence that it hadn’t been fiction. But there was nothing I could do but read my new book and try to sleep. I half-slept, as best I could in the uncomfortable seat, the twenty-something seated in the center seat beside me hogging the armrest with her blubbery arm and listening to music loud enough for me to hear, but not really hear what it was, so that it only sounded like mosquitos perpetually threatening. And she didn’t turn off the TV monitor in front of her, so its flickering images of old sitcoms and Entertainment Tonight kept vying for my attention. So I was groggy on arrival in Charlotte. I hurried to the gate for my flight to Durham, which was already boarding, but I had enough time to click on the email, then tap the untitled document and see it engage.

  The first line was “Heather.”

  But with the second line—“Slowly the girl, a junior in college, surfaced to consciousness from the hum of a stick being dragged against her window screen”—I knew I’d been right. I had to stick my phone in my pocket to board, to find an overhead bin for my bag, to take my seat. I reopened it and skimmed. He’d called himself Scott, and me Heather, but that was all that he’d changed. The flight attendant announced that the doors were shut and was scolded into turning off my “device.”

  The Charlotte to Raleigh flight is so short they don’t even bother with a beverage service. So a
s soon as I was allowed, I turned my phone back on and skimmed as best as possible on the little screen of my iPhone.

  They were vignettes mainly. I’d catch on details I remembered. He certainly remembered. How did he know that I was so upset when he broke up with me that I retched in the sink? I must have told him. Did I remember it, did I even do it? It sounds right, it reads true. I hadn’t thought about it much, what I did, actually; I recalled only the sharpness and immediacy of the pain, and I felt utterly bereft. He was the one, when he visited last May, who remembered that I’d taken him to that bench where he broke up with me, not I. He always said, memory’s a funny thing. There were events he wrote about that I remembered and some I did not—he was allowing some fictional license, I could see. But not with one, a big one I’d buried deep—the last time we’d seen each other, 1991, a year after he’d graduated. How could I have pushed that time down into the bottom of my memory? I put a rock on the earth to keep it from coming back up in my thoughts, watching him smile sweetly at me, wave and start that U-Haul down Onslow Street for the last time, bound for Los Angeles.

  But the plane began its descent and I scrolled fast to the last paragraph. It ended there, more or less, with that last visit in 1991. I couldn’t know if it worked as a sustained story, I hadn’t read it for that. And I couldn’t know how he would have ended it had he lived or what he would have done with it.

  I couldn’t know if there’d be a next chapter or part that began, “In May, 2010, Scott Stevenson, having returned to his alma mater to say farewell to his mentor, appeared at Heather’s back door, and she led him in.”

  I stepped out of the shower, chafed my hair as dry as I could get it with a towel, brushed it out. I regarded my naked torso, swept my palm top to bottom straight over my belly. No denying it here in the mirror, even though my ass has gotten a little fat, boobs too, hanging a little heavy. My legs were solid, and my arms were sexy (I thought). I wonder if Collista knew. She couldn’t have known for certain since I flat out denied it. Em obviously hadn’t confessed the affair, nor had he written about it, so I knew, logically, that I didn’t need to concern myself with whether she knew or even suspected that I carried her husband’s child.

  So I guess it makes that last line of hers especially chilling. Responsible for what?

  I broiled some cheddar cheese on bread while I drank coffee. I was dead tired, but the kind of tired that’s so deep you know you can’t sleep. So I was glad for work. I ate the toasted cheese as I drove so I wouldn’t be too late. The day was dry, overcast, unseasonably warm, could have been fifty degrees, and the campus was throbbing with students heading into their last weeks of classes before the winter break.

  Don was manning the desk when I arrived.

  There are a couple of worktables and computers in the front of this room, 103 Perkins. It’s a long, narrow space with offices to the left and archival stacks through the door to the right. The room was cut in half by a glass divider where the actual research area was located. Don and I took turns at the desk when assistant curators weren’t on it, signing people in and checking people out. No food or drink, no bags of any kind are allowed. We give people a lock and a locker for their belongings. We have to pass all material through a glass window once they’re inside, and when they leave we’re required to check all their materials to ensure no one’s absconding with anything we’ve given them.

  When we’re at the desk, we’re the gatekeepers.

  I caricatured hurrying because I wanted him to know I knew I’d made him late for his meeting with Trish; he was already gathering up his stuff before I reached the desk.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I told her I’d be late when I got your text, thanks.” He took hold of my left hand and asked, “You all right?”

  Don was the single person who knew the specifics of my errand.

  “Yes, I’m glad I went.”

  “We’ll talk later then. You must be exhausted.”

  “I’ll make it.” I took a seat at the desk. “Anything unforeseen on the agenda today?”

  “Not really. That woman at the end”—he pointed to a woman with red hair at the farthest table, a folder open and a large narrow box filled with more before her—“is doing some work on Styron and was looking for her own correspondence with him from 1967 up through 1979.” He lifted his eyebrows, quizzically.

  Tired as I was, I was still on my game: “Years between Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice.”

  “Well done.”

  “Anyone I should know?”

  “No, academic only, I think. I’ve been through all but the last year of his general correspondence, looking for her letterhead, if you could handle that for her when she asks. Also a guy from New York will be here later to work with the Rulah: Jungle Goddess comics series.”

  “They’ve been ordered?”

  “In the back waiting.”

  Most of our archives are held in a warehouse off campus and have to be ordered. Our library has one of the biggest comic book collections in the country, if you happen to be into that kind of thing.

  *

  Of course, one of the emotions jostling against my insides was the hurt for Em, and then for Collista, to realize that during those final months with his family, renewing his vows with Collista, having loving sex, feeling young again—he was spending a powerful part of his day with me.

  Is that what Collista meant when she said the word responsible? That he was having an affair in his head? Or that what I suggested he do was unsustainable? That the thought of me alone could not sustain him. Nor could story. I’ll give her that much—she said what she did because she wanted me to feel that I’d somehow been complicit.

  And now how could I not consider this? What if he had not come to Duke that day? Good God, had I caused his death?

  No. He knew where I was. He could have come back to me anytime for whatever life I gave him. Or maybe not, maybe he could do neither—“like a man to double business bound” in the play he once so despised, he could only stand in pause, considering both, paralyzed. Perhaps this was untenable.

  Untitled

  She leapt into his arms—that’s what he remembers, looking back. How could he have left that leaping body so thoughtlessly? He’d parked the U-Haul in front of her house. Stepped out of it, stretched his arms and back, having driven eight hours from Manhattan. He heard the screen door smack shut, and by the time he was on the sidewalk, she had lofted herself at him like some kind of flying squirrel and had wrapped her legs around his waist and arms around his neck, 120 pounds of girl wrapped around 180 pounds of guy.

  He laughed, always music to her ears, from the very beginning. He turned 360 degrees, hugging back, before setting her down. He held her shoulders and looked at her.

  “Oh, man, you’re a welcome sight.”

  She grinned, taking him in with her eyes.

  She sighed a long, relieving exhalation, shook her head, and held out her arms. “Welcome back, stranger!”

  They hugged again and he smelled her hair, and she knew from the hug how glad he was to be here.

  “God, I love the sound of your voice.”

  “And I love that you’re finally here, safe.”

  They released each other.

  She said, “But you smell of cigarettes and car B.O. First thing you’re getting close to is a bar of Lifebuoy in my shower. You have clean clothes?”

  He chuckled at her, said he did, and retrieved a duffel from the passenger seat. An empty can of Diet Coke clattered onto the street and he tossed it back in. He hoisted the duffel over his shoulder. She took his left hand in her right and led him up the walk. “I mean, no offense or anything. You know I love your smell when you’re gamey from living, but right now you’re just plain smelly.”

  He laughed again, so happy to be where he was, feeling so right.

  “Grims, a good hot shower and change of clothes are exactly what I need.”

  “You hungry? What can I make you to eat? I have
some fried chicken I can reheat.”

  “Anything with substance. Eight hours of Marlboro Lights, Diet Cokes, and I-95 has left me pretty empty.”

  “Since when did you start smoking?

  “New York. Does things to you.”

  He stopped on the porch. He stared at the swing. He remembered it so well, that one afternoon more than a year ago reading Gatsby, a college senior about to graduate, one of their last days and nights before he packed his bags and headed where aspiring writers felt all but required to go. He then turned to look at the street, to look at the house, taking it all in.

  “Grimsley,” he said. “Thank you. I feel so lucky to be here. I feel like I got out of Hell Town in the nick of time. I was all but killing myself.”

  “And I feel lucky to have you here.”

  “Are you sure it’s okay, a month? My new lease doesn’t start till July first.”

  “Of course. You can stay forever if you want!”

  She said it lightly, but he knew she meant it, and he tried not to think about that. He said, “You’re a lifesaver.”

  “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

  *

  While he showered, she put fried chicken in the toaster oven and leftover mashed potatoes in a covered bowl to microwave.

  Sterly was still at work, and Grimsley had moved into Amanda’s room upstairs after Amanda got a job offer in Charlotte. She and Sterly had both gotten raises and could afford the rent, though Sterly spent most of her time with her fiancé. Grimsley waited on her bed as long as she could after the water stopped. When he was taking too damn long, she slipped into the steamy, shampoo-scented air. His hair was slicked back, and he was just finishing shaving. She saw that he hadn’t changed—narrow waist, swimmer’s shoulders, a body she just couldn’t keep her hands off of.

  She wrapped her arms around his chest, pressed her cheek to his warm smooth back, smelled his skin.

  “Yep,” she said. “Still the same old sexpot!”

  He chuckled, got the last spots on his chin and neck. He hit the drain knob to let the water out. Holding her gaze in the mirror, he said, “You were only a sexpot with me.”