In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

  “How did you know her blood type? I’m not even sure I know mine. Certainly don’t know my wife’s.”

  “There were a lot of tests when we were trying to get pregnant, and it’s one of the less common ones.”

  Scott shook his head. “I can’t believe it,” Scott said.

  “It’s a guilt I will carry on my shoulders till I die. I mean, she was bipolar, she wasn’t well, but I’d clearly sent her over the edge.”

  “Bipolar?”

  “Yes, diagnosed after we married. She battled depression. Type two bipolar, not off the rails, but severe depression alternating with severe euphoria.”

  “I didn’t know that.” As he said these words, he recognized they did not come as a surprise.

  “It doesn’t lessen the guilt. I still loved her, still do.”

  They were silent for more than a minute.

  Scott sensed Edward smiling and turned to him. He was smiling, a sad smile. Feeling Scott’s gaze, Edward said, “It’s just. It was so Sally.”

  “What was?” Scott asked softly.

  “She even gave multiple meanings to it. Or something, I don’t know. But it was very Sally of her. You’re a writer. I think you’ll appreciate this.”

  “What?”

  “Well, clearly she didn’t want to be naked for whoever found her.” Edward shook his head at his martini glass. “I mean she could have put on anything. She could have worn clothes. She could have put on one of the one-piece bathing suits she wore on vacations after she had Arthur.” Edward shook his head and snorted.

  “What.”

  “She’d put on a yellow polka-dot bikini,” Edward said.

  Scott took a slug of a nearly full Manhattan.

  Edward lifted his eyebrows at Scott. “This requires some explanation. This wasn’t an ugly joke. It was a rebuke to me.”

  Scott took a breath and said, “Go on.”

  “She’d brought that bikini on our honeymoon. And I wouldn’t permit her to wear it. I mean, I couldn’t force her not to wear it, but I put my foot down fairly hard.”

  “Why?” Scott asked.

  “Because I was an ass. I felt it wasn’t appropriate for where we were staying. We got into our first married fight. She went into one of the resort shops and bought the most heinous and expensive, frilly, gaudy one-piece suit she could find. It made her look like something in a Disney cartoon. Wore it the whole time. To piss me off. She was strong. She was not easy, but I do miss that Sally.”

  She was the easiest person on Earth! Scott thought. Scott turned away, faced the bar. What was he talking about?

  Edward again put his hand on Scott’s back.

  “Bubbakins!”

  Edward turned, stood, and said, “My tulip!” He kissed her on the mouth and hugged her.

  Scott stood to see a sprite of a woman, five-three if that, with a purple bob and a silver stud in her lip, dressed in a black tank top, jeans, and colorful sneakers. He didn’t know what to do.

  Edward said, “Sugarplum, this is Scott. But we’ve been discussing some rather sad business.”

  She frowned at Edward and Edward nodded in response. “Oh, honey, don’t.”

  Even in these brief moments, it was clear to Scott how in love they were with each other. That they already had their own shorthand language. Edward’s face had noticeably flushed when he’d seen her. Edward had found his perfect match—unlikely as she was.

  The sprite looked sadly at Scott. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Wanting only some formality to maintain his balance, he said, “I’m Scott.”

  “I’m Miranda.”

  “I know. It’s good to meet you.”

  *

  Scott strode quickly north along the High Line, buzzing from the news that Sally could possibly be out here as much as from the two Manhattans quickly drunk. He could help her, Edward had said. And she him. Scott had told Edward that he’d been looking for Sally on the High Line because she said she walked it daily. Edward confirmed that she still had limited custody of Arthur during the week, so she walked the High Line every day to pick him up from his school in the lower West Village, and then walked back home with him. He was all but certain they took the High Line from the Gansevoort entrance to the West Twenty-Third exit. Scott asked for his bill, but Edward insisted on picking up the drinks. Scott, feeling an urgency to leave, thanked Edward, thanked him for everything. He shook Miranda’s small hand and departed.

  He hoped on this clement evening, on this former railway, like the Museée D’Orsay, he thought, she might be walking …

  Alas, nothing but maddening pedestrians moving too slowly, clogging the pathways.

  He headed to Le Gigot, ate a lonely salad at the bar, and returned to the apartment. He was too keyed up to read, so he watched television, first pouring his allotted three fingers of bourbon and then taking three sleeping pills.

  The following day, he did his best to keep to his routine, though he found concentrating difficult. He told himself that he was just going to see his old friend, to try to help her out of wherever she was.

  School, of course, the school hour—why hadn’t he thought of this all these weeks? He imagined surprising her when she was with Arthur. He was eager to see Arthur; what would he look like now? He’d see them—“What a coincidence!”—then ask to walk home with them, and then he and Sally could talk over green iced tea just as they had ten years ago.

  Scott reached the Gansevoort entrance at 3:15 and sat on the steps to wait, checking his watch frequently. At 3:40, he spotted her many blocks away. His heart raced, and now he knew why.

  They approached slowly. Sally and, to her left, Arthur, who’d grown tall, with a mop of golden hair. Soon it was clear that they were not two but rather three. He kept expecting the woman on Sally’s left to either pass or fall back, but as they grew closer it was clear they were together, a younger woman with fair, light-brown skin, wearing a white cardigan, unbuttoned all the way down, and a green skirt. Who could she be? Scott wondered. Arthur hardly needed a nanny at his age. From this distance, Sally looked exactly as good as she had the previous year. Absolutely unchanged, though now in jeans, sandals, and an untucked blue Oxford cloth shirt. Cuffs buttoned, he noted.

  When they crossed the street to approach the steps where Scott stood, he crouched and held out his arms. Arthur made a face. The other woman remained neutral. Sally stared at him as if she didn’t recognize him. But she did and said, “Scott. Hi.”

  “What a coincidence!” he said, hands still out, smiling.

  “Yes,” she said, and smiled. But it was only a half smile—that is, only one side of her smile worked. It jarred Scott to the point of speechlessness.

  Sally gave him a gentle hug and said, “How have you been?”

  Her voice had changed, as if the dentist had left cotton beneath her tongue.

  “I’ve, um, been fine.”

  The two on either side of Sally seemed uncomfortable. When Sally failed to introduce Scott, Scott said, “Arthur, I haven’t seen you since you were three. My name’s Scott.”

  “Hey,” he said and offered him a limp hand.

  To the other woman he said, “I’m an old friend of Sally’s.”

  “Anna,” she said and held out her hand.

  They stood there.

  Sally looked to Anna and said in her new muffled voice, “The piano lesson is at four?”

  “Yes.”

  To Scott, Sally said, “We’ve got to get Arthur to his piano lesson.”

  Arthur, arms folded, maintained a skeptical distance.

  “Okay,” Scott said.

  As Sally began to walk and Scott moved aside to let them pass, Scott said, “Is there a time that I could come to see you? I’m in the city for a while.”

  “Sure,” Sally said. “Email me.”

  “Email? I did. Many times.” And texted, many times, staring at the phone for five minutes hoping dots would appear.

  “Oh,” she said. “I must have missed
it. I’ll look again.”

  “Good to see you,” she said, with an easy and self-contented smile. And they walked up the steps to the High Line.

  Scott followed, slowly, as in a dream, as if up from a grave. Anna turned to look back at Scott once when he’d reached the first landing. When he reached the High Line, he stopped and let them walk. Anna turned back once more, and when she saw Scott standing still, staring, she spoke into Sally’s ear, then turned and hurried back to Scott.

  “This has happened before,” Anna said to Scott. “Do you know the situation?”

  “Yes, I was in touch with Edward just yesterday.”

  “I’m a nurse. Mr. Adams hired me,” Anna said.

  “To look after Arthur?”

  “Well, really, to look after them both. She’s on medications. And she’s not always reliable. But it’s the effects of the blood loss. She had something of a stroke, or many small strokes, before they could get enough blood back into her. I’m sure inside she’s very glad to see you. I just didn’t want you to think … Well, I just wanted you to know why she probably wasn’t as you expected.”

  “Thank you for coming back to me. For telling me.”

  She stared into his eyes and said, “I’m sorry.”

  Scott nodded once. Anna hustled to rejoin them. Scott watched till they were obscured by pedestrians. He turned. He sat on the top step. Elbows on knees, head in hands. He rocked slowly back and forth.

  *

  Scott was areligious, but he believed in something rather than nothing, some force. Something incomprehensible, directly unknowable, but a force, whatever had willed the universe into being. Lucky his whole life, he naturally construed it as a benevolent force. A force that makes a man return for a ring he doesn’t need, to prevent what might otherwise have happened. Now he felt otherwise. It was an amoral force, or worse. A force he now detested, and he felt an anger within him as big as the force that he wanted to annihilate.

  After seeing Sally exactly where he’d expected, he knew in his soul that this force was possibly worse. But it was an actual force, one that willed people into being, one that crossed their paths. Had he simply been too young to see it? Sally’s neon vividness was gone, as if someone had yanked out the cord. Her skin and eyes had dulled. Her smile had been cut in half. It was a shadow he saw, the mannequin version of Sally. But no, she had recognized him. Was there hope? Not right now, anyway, he realized. And not for him, either.

  Scott had always sought comfort in bookshops. After seeing Sally, he had walked in an aimless fashion toward his favorite in the neighborhood, Three Lives & Company on the corner of Waverly and West Tenth, with its welcoming bright red doors.

  He would read the jackets of new books, note who was blurbing whom, then read at least the first three pages of any books that caught his interest. On this day, to have thirty distinct and unique voices in his head to cover his own angry voice felt like his only option beyond doing something he’d regret. Walking the city streets forced him inside himself; when walking he needed to keep the noise and commotion that was New York out of his head. The voices of others in books could silence completely his own voice and he could lose sight of who he was and even that he was.

  The bookshop had wood flooring, worn by the shuffling foot treads of browsers. Crown molding made the place feel casually ornate. The cashier’s desk seemed more a secret warren than a space for commerce. The many walls of bookshelves, books set out on tables and other pieces of furniture from another era, old books and new, made it a warm, quirky space inhabited by the owners and their salespeople, who could make knowledgeable recommendations on books or simply chat, especially if you lived in the neighborhood. Scott had been here enough that the tall older man with graying hair shaved closely to his tanned scalp, said “Good afternoon!” with recognition. Scott didn’t know his name, though he and the gentleman had talked books on a previous visit, and sales, and the fate of such lovely bookshops as this. It was a shop, he thought, not a store. A bookshop. You shopped for and found the right book here.

  The shop played soft music, an eclectic though linked mix, streamed in by Pandora. And so it was that, as he set down a book of short stories by Margaret Atwood and lifted a nonfiction paperback of Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest investigation of the environment, that Cat Stevens’s “Tea for the Tillerman” faded out, and the sounds of a different guitar followed. And the opening lines, almost in the way that certain smells can bring you back to a specific place, and therefore time, returned him to those steps on Montmartre beneath the white domed church, the smell and sound of Paris in the 1980s, the food and the wine and the cherry-scented pipe smoke.

  It’s a still life watercolor

  of a now-late afternoon

  Why this, now? How? What kind of force sends out personal messages via song verses in bookshops? Pandora—what an appropriate name, Scott thought. The force in all its random malevolence. This was no coincidence. He should have straight-armed it, said no, and departed, instead of listening when he recognized it.

  But he’d had heard the song a dozen times, at least, in the thirty years since Montmartre, and he never failed to think of Sally. Every time. As when someone mentioned Scotland, he thought of her.

  And you read your Emily Dickinson

  And I my Robert Frost

  He for the first time listened to the lyrics, paid attention to them, in the way he might have listened to the young Sally read him Eliot or Yeats in bed, or Emily or Robert, all of which she had, to his great … what? His great joy, he knew only now. That had been joy. Joy. He’d always thought of the song as a sweet, soft, happy song, because he had been happy when he’d first heard it. So happy. Filled with joy. But it wasn’t the wine or the song or the sun setting over Paris. It was her. Her all along. One of the happiest moments of his life. The steps of Montmartre, and the musicians from Laos, and “The Dangling Conversation.”

  Like a poem poorly written

  We are verses out of rhythm

  Couplets out of rhyme

  In syncopated time

  Now he heard the song spoken, a conversation, as if from Sally’s now distant mind and voice as she used to read to him.

  Lost in the dangling conversation …

  In the borders of our lives.

  The song faded and the Kingston Trio began “Scotch and Soda.” Midway through this song, the tall man with the closely shaved head, the owner, put his hand on Scott’s back and said, “Can I help?” with genuine emotion.

  Scott’s neck had fallen slack, and his eyes hovered over pages he couldn’t see. The owner gently removed the book from his hands. Tears dotted the pages and would, if left in Scott’s hands, become wet enough to ripple the paper. But the man showed clear concern for Scott and, with the regular customer still slack-necked, put his hand on the regular’s back and said again, as to a neighbor, rather than a customer. “Can I help, friend?”

  Scott clenched his eyes and took a deep breath. Willed the tears to stop, looked to the man, and said, “No. No you can’t.”

  He left the bookshop, stumbled to the right of the door, and fell against the glass display window, neck arched, clenched eyes toward the sky with his new understanding, tears falling over his temples and coldly onto his ears. After a few choking sobs that were the beginning of the inevitable paroxysm he did not try to stop, Scott crouched against the wall, held his head in his hands, and sobbed.

  Gone, gone.

  Pedestrians paid little attention except to avoid tripping over his jutting knees. A child from another part of the country, his part, the Midwest, would have asked her mother: Why is that man crying? But this was New York, and he was just some guy weeping, and no such child passed.

  Rising eventually to his full height but still supported by the bookshop’s display window, he smeared the tears off his face. He removed a folded handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose, folded it, returned it to his pocket. He had two healthy children who were good people. He had Martha,
who remained his best friend, if from nothing else then the foundation of being together for nearly three decades, no matter what secret life she had created beyond him. He would tell her he was coming home. He would convey somehow that they should let their breach scar over and try again. She had said that she wanted this. That she didn’t want him to leave. He would call her and tell her he was catching the first flight home, okay?

  And she, he knew, would say, “Of course, Scott, it’s our home, all of ours.” This was something, to have made something with his wife, to have created children who were good out in the world, to have written books that were still in print and read. This was important.

  He walked back to the apartment. It was not yet 5 p.m.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is dedicated to the two people who first read the opening novella in this collection and encouraged me: Laura Yorke (my agent) and Mary Brinkmeyer (my friend). Thank you for your invaluable reads and comments. It gives me special pleasure to note that my friend Laura and I sat side by side at our graduation from Duke, in May 1985.

  This book is in memory of my mentor, at Duke and beyond, Reynolds Price, who gave me the tools I needed to make my living as a writer, the only thing I ever wanted to be. It was in fact his memorial service in May 2011 that sparked the first novella. And while the character in the novel who plays my mentor’s role is not nearly so generous, magnanimous, and wonderful as Reynolds himself was, some details in the novella are autobiographical, or semi-autobiographical. In the process of working my way through the story—which began as an essay attempting to understand my relationship with him before my thoughts were hijacked by the voice of my heroine—I have used two lines from his published works, both from essays in his collection, A Common Room: “Letter to a Young Writer” and “A Single Meaning.” Needless to say, I recommend those essays, especially to young writers. I have also quoted from a letter he once wrote to me, then a young writer who shared some similarities with the fictional young man in the story. I have always been fascinated by the interplay of fact and fiction and the fundamental nature of story to our humanity, and so I endeavor here to explain the specific uses of fact. Even a casual reader will note several thematic similarities running through all stories; I’ve eliminated any that were accidental. All elements of all the stories, however, should be and must be construed as fiction, which of course they are.