In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

  Why did parting with what one cherishes most seem so inevitable, so unstoppable? Nothing changes, not in ancient myth, not in the story of our days. Only the backdrop changes, only the clothes and the scenery change.

  He would forever pull onto I-85, June 28, 1991, open a Diet Coke, light a cigarette, and head west into the future he chose—the end.

  Four

  That’s all he wrote. Like I said, Em was the one for remembering things. Yes, it all came back vividly with the reading. It was exactly as he wrote it.

  When Em had left for good, I fell into a depression so deep it took Mom and Sterly a month to drag me up out of the grave and into the light, and then another six months of steady work and life to admit to myself that my one love did not love me, that he was gone and would not return. And now that he was truly gone, returned to me for one night and now gone from this world forever, I had to truly and finally give him up to that great beyond.

  I’d returned from Los Angeles on a Monday, having read the innocuous-seeming concluding sentence, assured myself he hadn’t written of our recent affair, showered, and gone to work. And I worked the rest of that week before I had the weekend to read. And during one clear-headed empty Saturday morning, I read the entirety of what he’d written before he died.

  I think he knew he couldn’t send it to me. And not because long ago I’d told him not to write about me or us. I think that when he’d finished, had gotten it out of his system and onto the page, there wasn’t anything more to say; he tried to return to the life he’d created and the shame of it, the reason for the tears at Duke’s Chapel, the inexorable decay inside—or life with me gone absolutely?—became too great to live with.

  I wasn’t angry that he’d written about me, of course. But this may well have been because the point was moot. The first time he’d tried to put our story on paper, I’d been livid with anger without knowing why. We never talked about it and I was not reflective at the time. But now that I look back on that morning, I think something registered deep in my heart, a certainty that if he were to write about me or us, it would be the end of us, or the end of me, rather. I believed that he could literally write me out of his life. And that once he did, I would cease to be. It turned out to be the other way around. Why?

  I now couldn’t help thinking, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, if I were, in fact, responsible, as Collista had implied, that I’d caused his death. Did he wish that that day back in May had never happened? Would he still be here today?

  I, unlike Em, do believe in “God,” capital G, and have since age seven, shortly before Daddy moved us to Durham. The quotation marks are important because it’s not a Biblical, mean-old-man God, not a Christian or Muslim God I believe in. And it’s not a Buddhist thing—don’t get me started on them with all their endless talk of suffering. I personally believe that we need to take all the happiness we can get, since life is so hard, and that we really should take each day as it comes, leave tomorrow for tomorrow, as Christ said (a great teacher, who surely had a main line of communication with that G word). I don’t believe we’re born sinners needing saving, and we certainly shouldn’t be our own personal guilt factories, which so many people seem to be. Whether or not there’s a heaven, or if our souls are immortal, it’s no concern of mine presently. I’ll find out when the time comes.

  It was late summer 1974, when I got what I’ve come to believe was a gift, something I’ve been searching for ever since and have been unable to receive. I was seven and alone. My brother and sister were younger by two and four years and I spent most of my days in solitude, long hours by myself, always happily, and I think the solitude was a critical feature of the gift. It didn’t happen by chancing on a hidden forest glade, or at the edge the Grand Canyon or anything. It was just our normal backyard, out by the garage, a summer weeknight, same smells of summer and garages in the warm South Carolina dusk. A moon had risen and I looked at it and looked at it, and it was so clear and beautiful, I soon found myself laughing. I looked all around me at the silhouettes of the leaves, the shape of the back of my house, the attic gable, the trees and blue air and the warm black-topped drive against my bare feet, and I laughed. Because I suddenly understood that everything was connected, everything, all of nature, the driveway at my feet, the worms in the dirt, and the moon and my parents and the bats that had come out—it was all somehow simply a manifestation of one great thing, a spinning inevitable harmony, and I was filled with a kind of joy I’d never felt before and never would again. It was simply so uncontainable I couldn’t stop laughing. It was like an interior aurora borealis, waves of light, joy, washing over my entire being.

  I’ve thought about this a lot because, well, that too is simply one of those moments you never forget, like the moment I first saw Em, when you’re given a gift so big it changes your life. (I see Em now as a gift, not the dagger he so often felt to me when I was a young woman; indeed, I, the unlikely cause, or at least a part of, of his early departure kind of makes me the dagger in the end—who’d have thought, twenty-five years back on that bench in Duke’s main quad?) Whatever it was, the source of this joy, the harmony of all things, was inside me, and I was an inevitable part of it, but I also recognized that it came from outside me. I know this now because I simply didn’t have the intellect or the spirit to generate it myself, make it up, that is—it was just so huge, so endlessly vast my brain couldn’t have fabricated it. I know it came from outside also because it went away, forever. I never wanted it to end, but I could feel it subsiding, and I tried to maintain it, tried to keep laughing, but it fell slowly away, and I could no more stop its leaving than I could stop day turning into night; it receded, gradually but inevitably, as the aurora borealis leaves the sky. As of course it had to. No one could live full-time with that kind of joy—the body couldn’t sustain it, you’d never get anything done (kind of like being in the first throes of love). So, when I’d laughed and smiled until I couldn’t anymore and the gift was played out, all gone, I walked up our back deck and into the dining room. Mom was finishing up the dishes at the kitchen sink, Daddy was in his study where he always was, my brother and sister were lying in front of the TV in the den. I went to my room and sat on the edge of my bed, just sat there, feeling so peaceful and good and lucky and happy, so so happy.

  I never could have put it into these words at the time, and I was too young to realize what it was, but I was old enough to know how unusual it was. I tried to put myself in situations where it might visit me again, but it never did. And only years later did I understand it to be the biggest gift anyone could get. To be granted an understanding that we were and are everything, even the horrors of the world, dictators and war and viruses—it’s all a good and great harmony issuing from a single source.

  This conviction lives at the back of my mind always, there but out of daily sight. A single source—it’s the most anyone can know, and I suppose that if you’ve never experienced it, you’ll be skeptical of what I’m saying, as you should be, unless you’ve spoken to anyone halfway intelligent who has experienced something similar. But those people who have, they usually keep quiet about it, as I always have. Because it’s impossible to put into words completely. I’ve never tried before till now. And now I do so with hopes of answering the question, what had I done to my old love? And what did it mean that he’d done himself in? Because he surely had.

  The daisies were proof of that.

  February 14, six weeks ago. I was breast-feeding when the doorbell rang. I put my newborn son in the crib and left him there, wailing and red in the face. I opened the door and there stood a man in a clean jacket with a logo I didn’t read holding a big bouquet of daisies.

  The sight of them was so shocking I didn’t do anything, just stared at the guy with my mouth open. He was trying to give them to me. Again—it felt like an actual blow to the head. I knew immediately who they were from, and for long moments I thought that it meant Em was alive, literally alive, had faked his own death to return t
o me.

  “I can set ’em down here, if you want,” the man said. “But I do have to get moving. Busy day, you know?”

  I took them from him and thanked him and closed the door.

  There was no note. So just to be sure, I called the florist to ask who sent them. The owner, a woman, told me it was anonymous. I pressed, and she said she honestly didn’t know. She explained that this was common on Valentine’s Day, a lot of requests for anonymous deliveries.

  “Mistresses,” she said. “Secret loves. Every year, and thank goodness for it!” The woman cackled hoarsely, coughed, then said, “I can honestly say I don’t know the name of the person who ordered these—cash, by mail, says here.”

  “Says where?”

  “In our register, our book where we keep a record of orders.”

  “Can you tell me when the order was placed?”

  “Let’s see,” she said. I waited. She said, “Hm.” I heard pages shuffling. “Oh, right.”

  “Oh right, what?”

  “I do remember this now. Anonymous requests are common. But what is uncommon, especially where men are concerned, is thinking ahead. I took this order myself, October 20. Four whole months ago.”

  I thanked her. I clipped the stems and put the daisies in a vase with water and brought them to the bedroom where my baby, who had been born two weeks earlier, remained wailing. I fixed his greedy mouth to my breast and lay back on pillows against the headboard, staring at the flowers and trying to figure it out, tears quietly rolling off my cheeks and onto my chest and my nursing boy, the only christening he’d get, tears of love and sorrow.

  *

  I still haven’t figured it out, even after all these pages—what they truly meant. In college, he’d given me daisies each of the four years he was there, and he remembered to send them to me during his year in New York, the sweetheart, the last I’d gotten till now. I’d always received them in the spirit with which I thought they were given. I presumed they were meant to say, “You’re important to me.” Even after the Gatsby revelation. I wasn’t Daisy and he didn’t love me, for if he had, wouldn’t he have stayed?

  And I had to accept these as the same. He had to assume I’d never read the pages he’d been working on before he died. And I think the October order wasn’t just because he was thinking about me a lot, but rather because he knew then he was a goner. He knew whatever was inside him was unsustainable once he’d left me in his mind for good. I was his muse, I knew, had always known, and liked being just that. That’s what I’m guessing.

  I wonder if I could have changed that. By letting him know that his final gift to me was a new life. But if I’d changed it, it wouldn’t have been his final gift, would it? Would he have come back, stayed in our life somehow? I know now, too late, what those daisies said—that he did love me and had never stopped. But you can’t change another person’s destiny, and I will not blame myself.

  I honestly don’t know what to make of it all, but I did lean back on that old memory of what happened to me out by the garage, that big message I got about the connectedness of all things. If there’s proof that it’s the truth, it’s simply that life begets life. Nor is it neutral, either, this force: life wants more of itself. For the good. And that’s what this baby is, proof of it, these long years later, maybe willed on that day when I first saw my only love.

  For Randall M. Feller, On or After Your Eighteenth Birthday

  You were born as predicted on February 1, 2011, after a labor that felt like it was going to kill me until they used a knife to get you out. And there you were, healthy. Seven pounds, six ounces, twenty digits, a strong spine, and a beating heart, all four chambers intact. I named you then, on sight, with just a middle initial, only that. I don’t know what name you’ll make for yourself or what I’ll call you. I mainly call you Little Man now, what you are.

  Spring has come early and so I can sit outside by my pond while you feed. I can set you on a blanket in the grass in the soft April sun when you’ve gorged yourself to sleep and I can think and write.

  I originally began these pages I’m giving you here to try to understand two big unknowns. First, what your father’s visit and my getting pregnant with you meant, and what I should do. I picked up these pages again, shortly after a trip to Los Angeles to attend your father’s memorial, to say goodbye to him and get a glimpse of where he’d chosen to make his adult life and who he’d done it with and who else he made (good people, I have every reason to believe; go search for your half-siblings if you wish, but, as bears repeating, do no harm). I finished the last of the pages about a month after your birth and it occurred to me, staring at the empty vase where I’d kept the daisies long after they’d died and had started to stink—forcing me to throw them out and accept that they were to be my last—that, unlike flowers and people, words and stories are things that don’t die, and that these pages might be of use to you when you’re an adult. All fatherless boys want to know their father’s story, and this was the part of it I knew and could give to you.

  And I’ve very much worked to make it a story—restoring our proper names. It’s still the best way to get at the difficult whys of life—sorry. Also, it was the only way that I’ve been able to marry your father, however sadly, to intertwine our stories as we had so often intertwined our bodies.

  If I haven’t made it to age sixty-five to give this to you in person, there are a couple of things you should know. The original pages your father wrote, along with a lot of other stuff, is archived at Duke’s library and they’re not open to the public until you say so, if you wish, because I don’t know if he would have wanted them available in their unfinished state. But I’ve made them open to you if you want to read them.

  Also, by the time you’re nineteen or so, the twenty-year moratorium Professor Blackmore put on his papers will be up and they’ll be open to the public. You’ll find letters from your father there in Blackmore’s general correspondence, and I suspect it will be the best way to get to know who your father was beyond this record I’m leaving you. We wrote actual letters back then, printed on paper, folded and slipped into a stamped envelope, delivered by human hand. I’m sure you’ll hear your father’s voice in those letters, get a good sense of the man he was, or young man (I haven’t had the heart or stomach to read them); he really was a fine writer, your father, and I loved him with my entire being.

  And if you turn out to be a writer, which I hope you don’t, for the record, but if you do, make copies of your good email, and print out the good ones you receive and file them, will you? This is Mom the archivist talking. We’ve lost who knows how much useful information about our lives thanks to electronic communication, half our stories now gone, deleted with the invention of each new device that makes sending them easier than before. How are we going to know who we are if we don’t remember who we were, if we don’t remember our own stories?

  When I say I hope you don’t become a writer like your father, I should add this: do be an author of something. Not a book or a script, necessarily, but a company, a building, a school, an organization that does good work, an invention of any kind. Make something of your own. You may end up being a part of something bigger for your work, like I am, working for this university. But at some point, make something out of yourself. I made you! I hope to be worthy of you as long as you need me, and I hope you are worthy of me when you no longer do need me. (The Fellers as a clan haven’t had a great record of longevity, but who can say now that we’ve learned to cut back on the smoking and butter-soaked grits?) Neither of your grandfathers made it to seventy, so take care of yourself.

  If I don’t make it to sixty-five, you won’t even be out of college. But I’ll have plenty of time to tell you in person about what it’s like to lose your mother. That’s a whole other story I’m intimate with, when I sense you’re ready.

  That’s all, Little Man. But please know this: Your father wanted to be extraordinary, and he was in many, many ways. But those ways did not make hi
m happy (except when he was with me—smiley face icon, can’t bring myself to type it, but I do say this with humor). Life is not always easy, so it’s important to enjoy as much as you can, as often as you can. Above all, try not to hurt anyone—everyone struggles. Please take my words to heart, especially when times are tough. Especially when you’ve hurt someone without meaning to.

  Strive to be extraordinary if you wish, but don’t expect happiness in return. I’d rather you just have a good time. Find work you care about and be the best at it you can be. Cherish the friends you make along the way. It is the ordinary lives that are the best, and love is the most valuable essence in this world, love in all its forms—my love for Em, my love for you, the love your father gave to me, the love that created you. Embrace it all.

  Strong Conspirators

  One

  Karen Markstrom floated in and out of fevered consciousness though her eyes remained open and fixed on her husband, who stared out the bedroom window at the spot where the accident had happened.

  In the dim blue light, streetlights reflecting off the pristine snow, Frank appeared to be his former self, the boy she’d met, twenty-one years old, all radiance and promise. The light cast his angular chin and sharp nose in dramatic relief against the dark master bathroom and hid what few wrinkles had worked their way into his forty-five-year-old complexion. He’d kept his athletic physique. His blue eyes nearly glowed in this light.

  Those blue eyes, so vivid even in her mind, now, twenty-four years later. “Who … are you?” he had said, without the least self-consciousness. All she’d done was to enter the kitchen late in the evening as the party waned, and he had zeroed his gaze on her like sun through a magnifying glass. He had walked to her, leaving whomever he’d been talking to, and said, “I’m Frank.” She had been struck dumb by his looks and confidence, and when she failed to respond, he grinned wide and easily, took her arm, and led her outside to the pool.