In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

“Okay,” Scott said. “So what’s the story.”

  “Hm, where to begin,” she said. “My story or his?” She looked off, then back at Scott. “My story really begins four months ago, when I got a call from New York Presbyterian saying that Edward was in the ICU. No, let me back up to calling his office and finding out he’d been let go five weeks earlier. Then he disappeared for two days. Then I get the call that he’s in the ICU at New York Presbyterian.”

  Slack-jawed, Scott asked, “What happened?”

  “He got hit by a bus!”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “No!” Sally said and laughed. “He honestly got hit by a bus! It happens!” Sally slapped the table. “The M101 at Seventy-Ninth and Lex.”

  “How?”

  “I guess if you stagger around drunk in the middle of the afternoon on the Upper East Side it can happen.”

  “What was he doing staggering around on the Upper East Side?”

  “His story?” she asked. Martha had yet to remove a cupped hand from her mouth. “His story is that he fell in love.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right, he fell in love with somebody not me.”

  “He fell in love?”

  “With a fucking little girl who works at Starbucks.”

  “What?” Scott asked.

  “Ha, this is a good one,” Sally said, almost delighting in the preposterous nature of her circumstances. “So I get to the hospital, and he’s knocked out on drugs and a little banged up, but not terrible. Considering,” and here Sally laughed again, “he’d just gotten run over by a bus!”

  Neither Scott nor Martha laughed.

  “Anyway,” Sally continued, “I get to the hospital and find out that he’s not in any danger and the nurse gives me all his stuff, his clothes in a plastic bag. And I’m sitting in the room waiting for the attending and his phone starts pinging. So of course I dig it out of the bag and look at it. And it’s someone named Miranda and she’s texting ‘Where are you?’ and ‘Why won’t you respond?’ and ‘I’m not mad at you, just tell me you’re okay.’ But this is part of a really long chain, so I swipe down and this tramp is texting nude selfies to him. And then she texts again, the phone vibrates in my hand.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I texted her back.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Fuck no, I’m not kidding.”

  Her vehemence, all humor gone, jolted Scott.

  “I texted, ‘I’ve been in an accident and am at New York Presbyterian in room seven-oh whatever it was.’ Thirty-minutes later, this little girl with purple hair walks in and gasps when she sees me.”

  “You keep saying little girl. How old is she?”

  “I don’t know, thirties, but she’s tiny is what I meant.”

  “What happened?”

  “I looked at her, covering her face, and said, ‘Don’t worry, he’s gonna live.’ And she started crying and ran away. The coward.”

  “Holy shit,” Scott said. “So where do things stand? Are you going to be able to work this out?”

  “We tried counseling. I honestly thought when he got another job that would put things right, that with Arthur, who’s only ten for God’s sake, I thought we could work it out. I told him I wanted to try. He said he tried but claims he was too depressed.”

  “Depressed.”

  “Because he’s still in love with her!”

  “Where do things stand?”

  “We’re still together, for Arthur’s sake. But we are history.”

  Scott sat back, flummoxed. Martha stared intently at Sally, unable to come up with any words.

  “You wake up one morning one person,” Sally said, “with a pretty clear future stretching out before you, and by the time you go to bed that night, it’s as if that future was a fake backdrop that just fell down like a curtain. What looked like a Frederic Church landscape turns into a bad neighborhood in Detroit.”

  Scott reached across the table and held her hand and looked at Sally and she took his hand in both of hers. Martha looked away.

  *

  After protracted exclamations of disbelief and sorrow—really, what can one say? Sally knew this more than anyone—all agreed they needed a change of venue. It was such a fine day, they decided to walk the High Line, the old elevated train platform that had been transformed into a park. Sally said she walked it often, for solace.

  As they walked south, Sally explained that, for now, she’d go back to teaching. She couldn’t return to Columbia, but she’d been able to pick up adjunct work at NYU and the New School. This was mainly to get out of her own head—with Edward once again employed, money was not the issue. She could at least immerse herself in stories and poetry and the lives of students, other people. “And not dwell on myself,” she said. They returned to the southern end of the High Line, at Gansevoort Street and descended. “But enough about me!” she said and laughed a low, burbling kind of laugh, not a happy laugh.

  By the time they reached the last step, Sally transformed and said, “This is your new hood! How do you like it?”

  “We love it,” Martha said.

  “We’re not far from our place,” Scott said, putting his arm over Martha’s shoulder. “Come see it?”

  “Hell, yeah. I’d have asked if you hadn’t offered.”

  They walked the eight blocks to the apartment building on Perry Street. Scott turned the key in the front door, then the foyer door, and they took the stairs one flight up to their apartment. As he waved the women in, he realized he’d forgotten to turn off the coffee machine, and the burnt smell hung in the air. He walked to the other side of the room, past the bed, to open one of the two windows that looked down onto the street. The kitchen had just enough room for a small table and, immediately behind this, the bed, a sitting chair in the corner. Not much, but just right for them.

  Sally peeled off her sneakers, walked slowly through the kitchen, and flopped into the club chair in the corner. “Nice place! You done good !” Martha sat cross-legged on the bed and Scott sat beside Martha against pillows. They talked about their work, their kids. And by 5:30, Sally said she had to pick up dinner and get back to Arthur.

  “Actually, we have to pick up dinner, too,” Scott said.

  Martha said, “Weren’t we supposed to meet Cat uptown for a drink?”

  “I cancelled.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t want this to end abruptly. And we don’t really want to hike all the way to the Upper East Side, do we? Do you mind?”

  “Mind?” she said, as much to herself as to Scott and under her breath so that Sally wouldn’t hear, “Like I love hanging out with your old girlfriends.”

  “Hey. I didn’t really want to see her, I just felt obligated because I promised I would.”

  “Wait a minute,” Sally said, slipping on her sneakers without having to retie them. “The Cat? Are you still in touch with her?”

  “Sort of. Not really. I got back in touch with her after we got this place and were in the city more frequently.”

  “Wow, how is she?”

  “Good, she said. Third marriage, this one happy, two kids. You never met her, did you?”

  Sally stared at Scott as if he were dim and said, “No, never got that chance.”

  “Right,” Scott said.

  “How do you know her?” Martha asked.

  “Scott left me in Paris for her.”

  Scott said, “You left me, remember?”

  “You know what I mean. Whatever.”

  Martha said, “Although this is fascinating, I’m exhausted, and hungry, can we get going?”

  They shopped at Chelsea Market, and when all had found what they needed for their dinners, they parted. Sally gave Martha a hug first, then Scott, and a kiss on his cheek. “Stay in touch, huh? Call me when you’re back in town?”

  “Of course,” Scott said. “I’m so glad to be back in touch with you.”

  “Aw, you,” she said. She pinched
his cheek hard, almost shaking it.

  *

  That night Scott fried steaks, made a salad, and opened a bottle of red wine. He and Martha ate by candlelight, talking about their work. (Martha hadn’t been interested in rehashing Sally’s dire circumstances.) After, they sat on the fire escape outside their apartment and drank a small glass of grappa and watched the people stroll by. Then they dressed for bed and turned on the TV to watch The Graduate. When the movie was over, Scott still wasn’t tired, but Martha had already fallen asleep. He poured a second grappa and tried to read. But he kept thinking about Cat. He’d stood her up. He’d ignored the several texts she’d sent. Why? Why did he feel such a need to see her in the first place?

  We can’t hold feelings for this long, can we? he wondered. Could he still be angry after nearly thirty years? Or did he have something to prove? The memory was still there, of course, but not the feelings, and especially not the pain. It wasn’t as if there was a live wire in there with current still running through it. But then, what?

  He thought back to the last time he’d seen Cat, when he’d gotten his first book contract at age thirty, twenty years ago. He’d walked from his publisher’s office all the way uptown. He wanted to share the good news with her. And she’d been happy for him. But during the half-hour conversation, it became clear that her second marriage wasn’t working out any better than the first. Scott left feeling bad. He’d wanted to go there, to see her in person, to tell her he had an actual book contract, but this was not really the news he wanted to share. He didn’t recognize it till after and he felt ashamed. The actual reason for the visit was to say, “See, I’m not a loser. I’m going to be a writer, just as I said.”

  Twenty years ago, Scott thought, propped on pillows beside his sleeping wife in a Manhattan pied-à-terre he’d never in his dreams imagined having.

  The previous March, he and Martha had splurged on a week at the Breakers in Palm Beach with the kids. He wondered even now about that. He knew he was hoping to see Cat. He knew her family still had a house in the north end of the island and that they belonged to the Breakers, that she had kids and would very likely be spring-breaking it with them. This had been the very place he had visited in March 1983, still ensconced in Cat’s generous family. She rode horses and competed in equestrian events in the nearby village of Wellington. Mrs. Delouvrier had invited Scott to join them in Palm Beach for spring break his sophomore year at Princeton. He and Cat had flown down together, and he had fond memories of the Breakers, the narrow island, and thought it would be a luxurious, relaxing place for the family to vacation.

  Susan, a penurious college sophomore, eagerly embraced a week in Palm Beach. Will, a senior in high school and heading the following year to Ohio State, was a quiet, bookish teenager who preferred reading and writing and drawing to company. He’d had many friends in high school but seemed now to need only his one best friend, who’d gotten into Princeton. Now that they could afford it, Scott wished Will had set his sights on an Ivy League school. Princeton had served him well. It had been where he’d first laid eyes on Catherine Delouvrier, daughter of a real estate magnate in Manhattan—a privileged Upper East Side childhood she had tried to distance herself from.

  He’d seen her in the quad, on an early September evening, the sun low and golden, the air summer-warm, and she spun in place while her diaphanous flowered dress rose up about her like a parachute, exposing strong, milky calves. Her hair was long and thick and black, which made her blue eyes especially bright and seductive. Her left incisor was reversed and gave her a snaggle-toothed smile, an imperfection that somehow made the rest of her beauty more authentic and natural. Even their difference in height—she just over five-feet, he six-two—hadn’t deterred the initial visceral attraction and his determination to meet her.

  He guessed correctly from the bangles on her wrists, the beads, the jingling ankle bracelet, and the clothes, that she’d been to the same Grateful Dead concert that he had the previous night at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. Maybe he was still tripping, but he felt immediately in love with her.

  And when she said, “I was at the show. Wasn’t it amazing? Can you believe opening with ‘Playing in the Band’ and then, oh my God, ‘Crazy Fingers’?”

  “Yes!” Scott said, as if she’d confirmed his love with that.

  “I can get us a tape of the show,” she said. “I have a friend who tapes.”

  “Yes,” Scott said. Yes, and yes, and yes.

  And they had been together all his sophomore year and her freshman year—he lived off campus and she rarely slept in her dorm room. They traveled the eastern seaboard following the Dead, both of them barely getting by in school. And when the school year came to an end, her father—an imposing figure even at five-six with a round head, abundant wavy salt-and-pepper hair, and great tufts of nose hair that Scott had to force himself to stop staring at—got him a job in the business, where Scott ran errands, helped to write brochure copy, and was even allowed to sit in on meetings on a forty-story, multi-use building going up in Midtown.

  On the weekends, they’d all drive out to the house in Sag Harbor to swim and play tennis and sail a little thirty-foot sloop, a wooden boat her father had restored in his youth and kept in immaculate shape.

  To a middle-class boy from suburban Illinois, the wealth was astonishing. And he’d never had more fun.

  When he held her close, she craned to look up at him. And she’d smile her snaggle-toothed smile and her blue eyes would twinkle and she’d bob up and down on the toes of her small feet, like an exotic fish approaching the surface for a kiss. And he’d bend to touch his lips to hers. Blameless, with no responsibilities, nothing but fun to be had.

  Until the last time she’d truly smiled at him, smiled with a sadness that showed the depth of her love for him, the afternoon of his departure. That last day in mid-August at the country house, the end of a dream. The smile was there, but it was sad because he was leaving. And not just leaving the East Coast but rather returning to the Midwest before flying to England, where he’d spend a year at the University of Bristol (a junior year abroad had long been in the plans, and he couldn’t back out now). Until then, the longest they’d spent apart had been one week, over the Christmas break. He determined not to cry, which was hard when he saw a drop fall from the corner of her right eye, slip down around the nostril of her petite nose, and hang on the edge of an upper lip. He kissed her again and tasted the salty tear.

  Her mother, Jean, whom Cat still called Mommy, was every bit as imposing as Mr. Delouvrier, though in the severe, matronly way of the wealthy. She had hired a driver to take Scott back to the city. And it was in this black town car that he allowed himself to weep. He wept and wept, not caring what the driver, who cast uneasy glances at him from beneath the visor of his cap, thought. He would have to wait until Thanksgiving, when Mr. Delouvrier brought his wife and daughter with him as he checked in on his London concerns. After that he would see her again when he returned at Christmas.

  And he did. And they were true in their hearts to one another. And because they’d lasted these four months, he saw no reason they wouldn’t last another six, through winter and spring till she could join him in Europe, a trip they’d already begun to plan. Sally rarely brought her up, and Scott didn’t either. If Sally cared when he went to see Cat in London in late November, she hadn’t let on. Scott kept a photo of Cat on his desk, even though Sally spent many nights there. And he figured Cat was allied with him in this way, too, in her own innocent way—that fidelity of the heart was all that mattered. He had no illusions.

  He called her once a week, usually his midday, her morning, before classes, and it was always a pleasure to hear her sweet, high voice, scratchy from sleep, and her girlish laughter. Once in the spring, over the Easter break, he’d traveled to north London to spend the holiday with Andy, one of his flatmates. He’d left Andy’s house after lunch on Saturday to find a phone booth at the end of the street. He’d called her and a guy a
nswered who put her on the phone when Scott asked for her—“Sure, hey Cat … Cat, wake up, phone”—and she said, “Hi, Scott,” but after some niceties she began weeping, and he tried to calm her and tell her everything would be okay.

  When he’d hung up, he was sick to his stomach, physically ill, wondering if he’d heave on the roadside just outside the bright red phone booth. He’d been prepared for the idea of it, but the actual sound of the two voices, in bed—no. By the time he’d reached Andy’s house, he’d collected himself.

  He couldn’t even call Sally, because her boyfriend was visiting for the week, and he was suddenly so grateful for middle-class Andy and his kind, British parents in their saggy jumpers offering him glasses of sherry and Andy’s younger brother teaching him how to throw a cricket ball. Scott who’d been a starting pitcher on his high school baseball team, showed the brother, Keith, pronounced “Keef,” how Americans pitched. Keith loved the power one could use by whipping the ball, unimpeded by the stiff overhand hook of the cricket mandate—a good metaphor for American abandon and force compared with British restraint, Scott thought. By the end of the week, he was back at the university and Sally was ever Sally and they spent all that first night back in a pub till last call, talking. He told her about the phone call and she was genuinely sympathetic; and she told him about her week, scant details before moving on. She didn’t seem to have had a great week with her boyfriend—which Scott tried not to be happy about but was. Sally went with him back to his room and they made love, and he felt better, and everything returned to the way it had been. She read him Emily Dickinson that night—“Slant of light,” he would never forget. “Shadows hold their breath!” she’d exclaimed. “Isn’t that the best?” She seemed giddy. “But it’s such a grim poem,” he said. “I know!” she had said. And she read until he was asleep and probably well beyond. The day-in and day-out of university life carried on, as the long, cold spring finally warmed and the nights stayed bright till nine.

  And before they knew it, their school year abroad was done. Sally had long known that Scott had set the rendezvous date with Cat for July 6 in Paris, which gave them two and a half weeks to meander through France on the way to the city he’d never been to. They connected with his high school buddy John, aka Wilhelm, in Calais, who met them at the ferry from Dover. They rented a car and drove through northern France, spent two lazy days on a beach in Deauville, then headed west to the summer house of a friend of John’s, Philippe, on the rocky coast of Brest in the northwestern corner of France. The weather was unseasonably warm, and they spent several days sunning on the beaches. They toured sites, ate cheap delicious food and drank cheap delicious wine during long lunches, and had eau de vie with a cigarette after, and Sally and Scott would make love in their cheap room on wilted squeaky mattresses, then nap till dusk. In the evenings, more amazing food and wine and John always found some alleyway bar or club that no Americans knew about. And all too quickly it was time to head to Paris; Philippe and John headed west toward Belgium, planning to travel south through Germany, while Scott and Sally hopped a train to Paris. They had five days in Paris before Cat arrived from New York. As for Sally, she had friends who were renting a house on an island off the west coast of Greece; she had booked a flight to Athens on the day before Cat was to arrive and would travel north to Corfu.