In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

  The smell of the boatyard, the sawdust and old oily machinery—she hadn’t known why she’d responded as she did, why the nausea. She had worked so fiercely to bury—even deny—the event, as though she could treat it as she’d treated the accident. But now that she knew it, recognized that it meant he was still inside her, she could no longer deny it. That smell would always bring it sickeningly to the surface. Indeed, she would never forget the feeling, inside, of being fucked by a reprehensible man who was not her husband. She wished to forget it. But she couldn’t. The sex, his unstoppable urgency, had been thrilling in addition to being necessary—the sex itself, the strangeness of it, the danger, his animal force, her power over it and the pleasure of that power, and the guilt at the pleasure, entwined with the sex itself.

  She’d risen the next morning early, knowing she needed to leave, had to clear her head and take care of her body. She booked a flight to Boston to visit her dad, who still lived in the house she grew up in, arriving by nightfall. No questions asked by her father, and Frank didn’t question it. He understood her needing to get away and to be with a father she adored. She’d solidify the story of the accident with him. She felt a longing for her mom, dead twelve years from breast cancer, with an intensity unequalled since the day of the funeral. On Tuesday she saw an ob-gyn whom her father knew (he didn’t ask any questions, given her state) to see if a morning after pill would work and to get checked out generally by a doctor she’d never see again. Who knew if Dan had passed something on to her, that she could pass on to Frank, who must never know about this. Never.

  She began to feel at ease in the home she’d grown up in, her dad’s familiar cooking, the smells of her childhood, healing as if from an actual rape, though she didn’t consider it that—the opposite, if anything—and from the legal nightmare she couldn’t know when or if she’d ever wake from. She spoke with Frank daily. And on Friday, Frank told her the news: their civil attorney, Buck Heard, had called to say that, amazingly, the Klums were accepting a six-figure offer from the insurance company to forgo a trial. Frank said that Heard chuckled at how easily they were getting off. He said that initially the Klums’ attorney had alerted him that they did intend to litigate and would be asking for more money, more money by far, well beyond what their insurance covered. “Millions, with an s,” Heard told Frank. Heard had been unnerved by the phone call, since he knew that the Markstroms had no umbrella policy.

  Karen didn’t respond.

  Frank continued. “The way Heard described it, it was clear that this was not simply a play for substantial walking-away money.”

  “Walking-away money?” she asked.

  “The insurance company pays the family in order for everyone to avoid an uncertain trial. But he said their attorney was an asshole—Buck’s exact words were ‘unscrupulous but effective and not to be fucked with any more than you’d poke a copperhead with a stick.’”

  But, instead, the Klums had departed Cleveland for good, declining, as they’d originally promised, to sue Karen.

  “Did you ask who was representing the Klums? Was it Dan’s firm?”

  “No, I don’t care and don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter. It’s all going away.”

  “All going away,” she repeated.

  “You don’t sound relieved,” Frank said.

  “Believe me, I’m relieved.”

  “Buck was clearly calling with not just good news, but surprisingly good news. The walking-away money is a pittance compared to what they could have gotten. For whatever reason, the Klums’ attorney called and said that they didn’t have a case and that the family had decided not to litigate. End of conversation. Heard said this was nothing short of bizarre, but he wasn’t going to ask why, look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “How’s Nick?” she asked.

  “Nick’s fine. How are you?”

  “Flying back tomorrow. Can’t wait to be home.”

  “My love,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m not okay.”

  “But this is good news.”

  “I know it is, Frank.”

  Karen woke up in her own bed on Sunday, and life resumed on Monday—Nick back to school, Frank back to his work, she to hers in the depths of winter, but the days were already waxing toward inevitable spring. Their new, old life.

  Now, smoking her first cigarette in years, she remembered how powerful this poison was, how heady and lovely and releasing. Who cares, she thought? She deserved this, as did Frank. Here in the balmy August air of Martha’s Vineyard, listening to the hiss of midnight wind through grass, the smell of sand and ocean, she felt free for the first time since the night of the accident. Free, in that it would not kill her with its weight. But only because she accepted that the smell of sawdust and oil would always nauseate her, she would always know that unfamiliar presence inside her, just as Sarah Childress would always be dead, and Frank would always carry the guilt of having been the instrument of her death. It’s what they now lived with. This was life happening to them, and their pushing back against life, and life pushing back harder, and on. They were, in spite of everything, happy. Weren’t they? She and her love, the boy she’d fallen for one random summer night by a pool, a quarter century ago, the father of her child, the man who remained by her side. They were together, as they’d vowed to be two decades ago, bound forever by their child and their love, their burgher’s existence, and now also by their conspiracy, their obstruction of justice, their ongoing felony.

  Would they make it? She loved none other than Frank. But she didn’t know. An anger now stayed inside her along with everything else that perpetually threatened to corrupt whatever goodness remained. And how could she possibly predict the long-term effects on her son as he moved into adulthood, carrying this secret always—would it calcify or corrode? It was a law beyond her control: an equal and opposite reaction. Things fall apart. She no longer knew if they could endure it.

  She had at last accepted that they had gotten away with something terrible—it was theirs, and theirs alone—and that she would carry an additional terribleness with her always, a terribleness that set what goodness was left in dramatic relief. This blackness and light gave her the understanding, an appreciation even, that when you commit fully, absolutely, to a single conviction—right or wrong, true or false—life pivots, doors slam shut and others open, and you are hurtled forward in directions you did not intend.

  Sally Forth

  PART I

  Scott Carpenter left the throng of Chelsea Market and turned right on Ninth Avenue that languid, overcast afternoon, eager to be in his cool room at the Hotel Gansevoort where he could transcribe his notes for the current magazine story in the white noise of the air-conditioning. The teeming avenue seemed composed not of individuals but of one gray mass he longed to be apart from. He had one more set of interviews tomorrow before he could return home. He pined for home, for Martha, his love still, after all these years; and he missed his kids—sweet nine-year-old Will and Susan, age eleven but already moving toward an adolescence he wished he could keep her from. He looked forward to the solitude of his third-floor office, where he could work in peace and emerge when the smells of Martha’s cooking drifted upstairs to draw him toward dinner, a glass of wine, some television, some reading, and then sleep.

  Sally had seen him first, when he was midway between West Fifteenth and West Fourteenth Streets, he recalled later. She stopped, her arms out, mouth open in amazement but smiling. That’s what he saw. He took an involuntary breath. Sally smiled even when she was sad because she always saw the humor in the sadness as well, which was partly why he had adored her, but here her happiness in this moment seemed unalloyed.

  “Scott?”

  “My God, Sally.”

  “Scott!”

  There had never been a thing about her that didn’t bring a smile or that failed to comfort him in some way. Even her name, Sally Forth, he loved—something of an error on the part of her immigrant parent
s, Russian Jews who changed their name from Fortheim, with hopes of assimilation in central New Jersey in the 1960s and unaware that sally was a verb as well as a name. While Sally was in college, a cartoonist gave a newspaper comic strip this name, which she laughed about when she pointed it out to Scott. That’s how funny she was, she told him—someone named a comic strip after her. And here she was, arms outstretched, mouth agape. New York City so unraveled him that he did what he could to turn it off. But her, he could not turn off. She was as vivid as neon against the dull crowd.

  He hadn’t seen her since well before 9/11—he couldn’t have placed when without thinking back. And 9/11 had been four years ago.

  He’d called her immediately after the attacks to make sure she was all right because she and her husband lived downtown. She was fine, they were unscathed, staying with her parents in New Jersey, and would soon be able to move back downtown. They’d talked for an hour, and he remembered hanging up the phone, smiling and happy.

  How was it that she could leave him laughing in the midst of the country’s greatest tragedy? But somehow she’d always had an alignment with tragedy; an innate sense of it was one of many gears that moved her forward through the years, and this was yet another reason he loved her.

  He didn’t hug her immediately because of the stroller between them.

  Sally said, “Yep! Enough shtupping and look what pops out!”

  He smiled, and so did she.

  “Awww,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Good, good,” he crouched before the child, asked his name.

  “Arthird.”

  “Are-third?”

  “Sometimes I call him Third.”

  Scott tilted his head.

  Sally said, “On the birth certificate it’s Edward Arthur Adams the Third. Which I didn’t want, but I like it now. He’s the third!”

  Scott put his little finger in three-year-old Arthur’s hand and said, “Hi, little one.”

  “Hi!” the toddler answered.

  Scott stood and hugged Sally and kissed her cheek, two moments longer than he needed to in order to smell her hair, grown long again, still golden though darker than it had been in college. And still the same scent, which made his heart race.

  After quick explanations—she now lived in the West Village, he was working on a magazine assignment that had brought him to New York City—she said, “Do you have time? Can you walk home with me?”

  “I do have time, so yes,” he said.

  “Excellent!” she said. “I’ll make us iced tea. I’m melting! God, I hate summers here.”

  She had always been definitive, and he’d liked that, too. Reversing course, he pushed the stroller for her and she snaked her arm through his and pressed her head against his shoulder as though she had been doing this forever. He felt immediately conscious of the physicality, the sense of comfort and ease they’d always shared. She looked at him and he looked at her and she said, “I can’t believe I ran into you!”

  “New York is the city of coincidences, remember?”

  “I gave you that book!” she said.

  “I know.”

  A line from Endless Love. She’d made him read it because she said the sex scenes were so well done. He had agreed. But then when they were having sex, it had made him uncomfortable because he didn’t know if she’d given him the book with hopes of similar sex, which he didn’t think he could provide. He could have asked her. She was direct. But he didn’t because he’d made it clear that he was in love with Cat, his girlfriend back at Princeton. That had been clear. That had been clear from the start, and throughout.

  Sally had also pressed him to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which made him understand that so-called literature could also make for great storytelling. And she made him read Lolita, which was the book that solidified his desire to be a writer. And she read him Rilke and Emily Dickinson and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in bed because she knew he’d never read any of it on his own.

  *

  Sally and Edward’s apartment on Greenwich near West Twelfth Street, spacious by city standards, comprised two bedrooms and a living room, with family photos Scott paused to admire: Sally and Edward’s family in front of a Christmas tree, Edward in his suit and dark glasses, struggling both to smile and to contain a squirming infant version of himself. A photo of Edward in tails and Sally in wedding gown, dancing—a wedding Scott had been unable to attend, since Martha had been due with Susan that week. He didn’t know that he’d have gone anyway; Sally was happy, that was all that mattered, and he was glad for her.

  Her kitchen was big enough for a table with three chairs, where, having navigated the toys and crumbs of crushed Goldfish that littered the floor, he sat across from his long-ago friend drinking green tea over ice and hearing about her life as a new mom—“no more tenure-track rat race at Columbia,” she’d said, “the students, what a horror show, even at the MFA level”—in New York City and her beloved banker husband.

  “I’ve become a terrible wine snob,” she said. “It’s terrible. What finally having a little expendable cash can do to a wannabe poet.”

  “Hardly a wannabe.”

  “Well, one volume by a small press does not a poet make.”

  “You’re either born one or you’re not. Publishing has nothing to do with it.”

  She smiled at him as she had long ago.

  He chalked up his disorientation that afternoon to the city, but looking back on it later that night in his hotel room, thinking of her, it was really the memory of riding a train from Brest to Paris, both of them college juniors on a year abroad. Paris, where they didn’t have sex that one morning and things changed, and not long after that they were back at their different colleges for their senior year, then off into their adult lives. They rode a lot of trains back then. From Bristol on the west coast of England, where they went to school, to Bath; from Bristol to London (frequently); from London to Brighton on the southern coast; from London to Scotland (once). They sat between trains to smoke cigarettes and listen to Simon and Garfunkel and the wind blew her hair so that it trailed like a banner and made her eyes water so that they sparkled, and Paris was ahead of them and their whole lives were ahead of them, and now here they were: successful adults, two parents with partners they loved, sitting across from each other, drinking iced tea. Staring into each other’s faces, smiles undiminished.

  “The Third will stay down for at least an hour,” Sally said. “Every successful relationship has a third thing—I was just reading this the other day. Edward and me and now Arthur, the third thing!”

  “If you need to get things done—I remember how valuable these nap-time hours are.”

  “What could be more valuable than this?” she asked. And then her face—long and narrow with thick golden eyebrows, wide blue eyes, a rather large but chiseled nose he quite liked, full pale lips—suddenly became a mask of shocked recognition. And she slapped her cheeks with two hands.

  “I conjured you here, to West Fourteenth Street.”

  He relaxed and said, “You conjured me.”

  “Yes!”

  She vanished again and returned with a photograph. “Two days ago, cleaning out our bedroom closet, I came across some old photos, this among them. Tell me, Scott, what are the odds?”

  “You never did believe in coincidences,” he said, taking the photograph from her and smiling at it. A broad, sandy beach, northern France, Deauville. They were in beach chairs, sunning.

  “I saw that photo and remembered how gorgeous you were,” she said, resuming her seat. “And I willed you here. You’re still gorgeous, by the way. You’ve aged well. Just so you know. You still have your hair, so you’ll be keeping it.”

  They both leaned forward, close enough that she could reach out and rake her fingers through his hair. He continued to stare at the photo despite her touch. He knew that if he looked up, he’d want to kiss her. She’d had that effect on him from the beginning. And she was the gorgeous on
e, not him. That long hair lit by the sun. Those amazing breasts. Long meaty legs.

  “You were so funny,” he said. “You bought a yellow polka-dot bikini.”

  She leaned back, and he could finally look up. “When your childhood transistor radio played that stupid song endlessly and years later you run across a yellow polka-dot bikini in Deauville, France, how can you not buy it? I saw it as a personal and cultural obligation.”

  Scott chuckled and shook his head.

  “I still have it,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “How can you throw out a yellow polka-dot bikini?”

  He laughed again.

  She said, “But I don’t foresee any bikinis in my future, dots or no.”

  “Why?” he asked. She was thinner now than she’d been. Then she’d had a fleshy voluptuousness that he loved; Manhattan had made her lean.

  “Stretch marks, general aging. Sagging tits. You know.”

  Scott couldn’t stop looking at the photograph of this girl, twenty at the time. He said, “Speaking of the latter, I was always trying to get you to take off your top, as I recall. We were in France. Women were eating topless at cafés.”

  “I might have but not with your friend there. What was his name?

  “John, but we called him Wilhelm.”

  “Wilhelm! That’s right. I liked him, he was funny.”

  “You asked him to take this photo,” Scott said.

  “Expressly for the purpose of using it to … conjure you up!” she said, jabbing her finger at him as she spoke. “Twenty years later.”

  “Is there something you needed specifically? Is that why you ‘conjured’ me?”

  “My life is great, so no. But whyever it happened, I’m glad it did.”

  She reached across the table for his hand. He set the photo down to take it.

  And they talked for three hours, so unconscious of the time that when little Arthur toddled into the kitchen and crawled into Sally’s lap, Sally looked at the microwave clock and said, “My God, four o’clock. How did that happen? He never sleeps that long.” They had spoken of nothing, of their lives. Sally had met Scott’s wife once years ago, but she said she felt she knew her because Scott had written Sally ardent letters when Scott and Martha had met. “I loved your letters from the front lines of love,” Sally said. “You always were the romantic.”