Heroic Measures

by Jill Ciment

  “Eight eighty-six. They’re bid surfing, trying to ride the crest of the big round numbers.”

  “Harold’s Ladies?” Alex asks on the extension.

  “They’ll only make another offer if we switch to a sealed auction. They want the final bids opened at their lawyer’s office. They want an end in sight. My guess is they’ll offer nine even.”

  “What about Yellow Rubbers?” Ruth asks.

  “She’s willing to go along with whatever you decide.”

  Alex tries to decipher from Ruth’s frazzled, obstinate, confused expression if she’s made a decision any more than he has. Her hair is so thin these days, a puff of white smoke around the noble outline of her skull. The muted television’s light plays over her face like refracted water. He can see her thinking, her gray irises swimming back and forth across the fishbowls of her glasses. He’s looked into those fishbowls for over half a century: there’s not one secret left. He knows the forces at war in Ruth’s features, the frown of righteousness and the knit brows of pragmatism. He counts on Ruth to guide them. Even if the needle on her moral compass is spinning wildly, Ruth will find her way.

  He hears his wife—whose ethics has been his bedrock and his muse and his shackles, who wouldn’t lie about her beliefs to the House Un-American Activities Committee even when it cost them friends, passports, his first retrospective, almost her beloved teaching job—say to Lily, “Tell all of them we’re still at the hospital and see how high Yellow Rubbers will go.”

  “I don’t know if I’m wishing that it’s just a horrible coincidence and Baltimore is safe,” Ruth says to Alex as they wait for Lily to call back, “or if I’m hoping the truck is rigged to explode so that the Mugging Principle will hold and we’ll be able to afford an elevator. Who would wish for such a thing? Who would make up such a principle? If everywhere is dangerous, prices go up? There must be a couple just like us in Baltimore who are watching TV, praying that what their realtor told them is true: as long as Pamir’s on the loose in New York, Baltimore’s market won’t crash. A plague must be visited upon both houses and then, only maybe, we can afford to stay in our neighborhood? I fought my whole life for peace and now I’m wishing Baltimore blows up so that we don’t have to change pharmacies? My God,” she says, shaking her head in surprise and self-disgust. “Old age robs you of every last illusion, even the belief in your own goodness. What’s next? Will I be wishing for gasoline trucks to start capsizing in Los Angeles or Miami so that we can move to Sutton Place and have a doorman?”

  Ruth studies Alex, sitting beside her on the sofa, to see if he agrees, though she’s not exactly sure what she wants him to concur with—that there’s a couple just like them in Baltimore or that it’s okay to wish a bomb on them? She puts her hand on his thigh. She can feel the muscle tighten and jump; his feet start tapping. They’re always tapping, his unstoppable feet and his tireless legs, legs that never give up, ready to climb not just the five flights of stairs but the whole ladder to heaven, two rungs at a time. Whenever she needs to feel that force, she touches his thigh.

  “I don’t give a good goddamn about goodness. Would it be so bad to have an elevator and a doorman?” he says at last. “Don’t we finally deserve some peace?”

  DOROTHY AWAKENS IN HER CAGE. DEATH IS nowhere in sight. She feels as if she’s been cut in two, and then stapled back together. To her left, strung with tubes, lies the faintly breathing Chihuahua, and to her right, garroted in an Elizabethan collar, lies the Pomeranian, his eye packed in blood-soaked cotton.

  A face, cratered as the moon, appears above Dorothy. “So you finally woke up, little hot dog,” says the doctor with the kind blue eyes.

  He opens her cage and reaches inside, but he doesn’t pick her up. He cups her numb back feet in his warm hands instead. She senses him trying to squeeze life back into them; she feels pressure, though she’s not sure if the pressure is in her feet or in her desire to please. He checks her incision, running the length of her back, and then prods the base of her spine. His fingers patiently knead her tail. The pressure returns, though this time, the warm pads of his fingers spark her tail to life. She can feel the tip rousing itself

  “Dorothy, are you trying to wag your tail? Can you wag it again? Come on, little hot dog, wag your tail. You can do it, yes you can. Wag your tail. Give me one little wag.”

  Dorothy senses him finally give up. He starts to close the cage door. She doesn’t want him to go. She can’t be alone with the faint breathing and the blood-soaked eye. She musters every ounce of strength and will, obstinacy and faith, and manages to thump her tail once, loudly, against the bars.

  AT THE TOP OF THE NEWS HOUR, FOUR O’CLOCK sharp, the phones on the coffee table begin chiming again. Ruth mutes the television and reaches for her extension, but Alex stops her.

  “Lily will call back,” he says. “I’m not sure of anything anymore, Ruth. Should we sell? Stay? Flee? Do terrorists take drugs? But as flummoxed as I am, one thing I know for certain. Lily will call back. It’s time to figure out what we want.”

  Ruth feels as lost as a penny in a well.

  “The silent auction is off,” he says. “Why the secrecy? Do we want to go to Harold’s Ladies’ lawyer’s office Monday morning, and practically have heart attacks as he opens each of the sealed bids and announces our fate? Once they’re opened, Ruth, there is no turning back. And this bid surfing must stop. Enough. The Parkas’ shenanigans are going to drive away any serious buyers. From now on, we only accept bids in increments of five thousand. And as far as the co-op approving of Yellow Rubbers seeing her clients in the apartment, how many clients do you imagine are willing to climb five flights of stairs, I don’t care what kind of services she performs.”

  “I agree, no silent auction,” Ruth says. “It’s humiliating to have the bids opened at their lawyer’s office, to treat us like dishonest children. How do we know they won’t switch the envelopes? But the bid surfing is keeping things alive. Harold’s Ladies, the Parkas, Yellow Rubbers, they must be as anxious about the news as we are. They must be nervous wrecks, jumping every time the phone rings. Let them jump. Let the phones ring. Let fatigue set in. Anything but quiet. If it’s too quiet, they’ll be able to think. If they think, they’ll change their minds. You were right all along, Alex. Who would buy an apartment this weekend?”

  The phones start up again.

  “I’ll tell Lily,” she says, picking up her extension. “Hello.”

  “Dorothy’s wagged her tail,” Dr. Rush tells her.

  “Dorothy’s not paralyzed! She’ll be able to walk?”

  Alex grabs his extension. “That’s such good news!”

  “Yes, it’s very good news, but I have to caution you, we’ve seen no movement in her back legs.”

  “You mean,” asks Ruth though she knows perfectly well what the doctor means, “Dorothy will be able to wag her tail but not walk?”

  “We don’t know. We just have to wait and see.”

  “Is she in any pain?” Alex asks.

  “We’re making her as comfortable as we can. I’ll call if there’s any change.”

  Cradling the receiver, Ruth says, “At least she’ll be able to wag her tail and let us know if she’s happy or not.”

  Alex aims the remote at the television and clicks volume, but Ruth steps into his line of fire. “She made it through the surgery and now she’s wagged her tail. Let’s take some pleasure in that. I need a break.”

  She takes the remote out of his hand, replaces it with his wineglass from lunch, picks up her own, empty save for a drop of Merlot, and clinks rims.

  “To Dorothy,” she says, and then defiantly throws back her head until the ruby of wine rolls down her glass’s mouth into her open lips. It’s a gesture Alex knows so well; she’s been using it to celebrate victories for as long as he can remember.

  Ruth puts down her glass and settles beside him on the sofa. They hold each other.

  At this hour, when the sun first dips below the western rooft
ops, their living room has an especially soft light. The windows, as far as he and Ruth know, are the originals. The panes were already as yellow as old paper and as scratched as old eyeglasses when they moved in. When the late-afternoon sun enters the room, the ancient glass acts as a filter to diffuse the harshness of the horizontal rays until the room and everything in it looks covered in white powder.

  When the phone next rings—the bedroom extension, the cordless in Alex’s studio, the original olive green wall mount in the kitchen, and the two on the coffee table before them—the light appears to shatter.

  “I tried calling earlier,” Lily tells them, “but there was no answer and then your line was busy. Harold’s Ladies need an answer by five. They called the animal hospital and found out that visiting hours are over at four-thirty.”

  “You can tell them now,” Alex says. “We don’t want a silent auction.”

  “Are you sure? Are you watching the news? Baltimore is a false alarm. Witnesses say a seagull flew into the truck driver’s windshield. He’s in the hospital. No bombs.”

  “Isn’t that good news?” Ruth asks.

  “For Baltimore,” Lily says.

  “Are we sure about our decision?” Ruth asks, as soon as they hang up.

  “Nothing’s changed,” Alex says. “All that’s happened is a bird flew into a windshield and everyone panicked.”

  “You’re wrong, Alex,” Ruth says. “I changed. I couldn’t wait to take advantage of Baltimore’s troubles. When an accident there affects real estate here, when a dead seagull can elicit such terror in us, everything’s changed.”

  The phone rings again.

  “I’m sorry to call back so soon, but Harold’s Ladies left another message on my cell,” Lily says. “They’re offering nine hundred and fifteen until five on the dot.”

  “Tell them you couldn’t reach us,” Alex says. “Tell them we already left the hospital. Tell them we never turned our cell back on. Tell them we’re old and forgetful. Tell them anything. We’re taking the night off.”

  Saturday Evening

  CEASEFIRE

  ALEX AND RUTH HAVE A DATE TO DINE THIS evening with Rudolph and May, their oldest friends as well as Alex’s gallery dealers. The two couples meet every other Saturday, usually at one of the coffin-narrow, ten-table ethnic restaurants in the neighborhood. They always arrive just as the kitchen opens, six sharp. If they dine any later, the loud, ebullient crowd takes over, and Alex and Rudolph, despite twelve thousand dollars’ worth of hearing aids between them, can’t make out a word of what’s being said.

  Rudolph is tall and concave with features that look chipped from flint. May is as flat and thin as a popsicle stick with a gloriously thick gray braid worn down her back. Now seventy-six, the braid finally reaches the base of her spine. Despite May’s family’s wealth, bluebloods from Boston, she always looks shabby, whereas Rudolph, a rag-picker’s son, dresses like a count.

  Rudolph and Alex grew up together in Washington Heights, two bright, ambitious immigrants’ sons seeking entry into New York’s culture. Where Alex’s talent was for painting, Rudolph’s acumen was for marrying May and then parlaying her respectable inheritance into a vulgar fortune. In the early fifties, when Rudolph could finally afford to buy his own gentility, he opened a gallery. His first exhibition was Alex’s war paintings, canvases Alex had worked on since his discharge, battles of color composed on stretched, army-green canvas tents. Rudolph came up with the exhibit’s title, Drawing Fire. For being Alex’s first and most steadfast patron, Rudolph has earned Ruth’s loyalty and love.

  May, on the other hand, was more problematic for Ruth. When the men first introduced them, Ruth knew she had to make this friendship work. She wore her best dress from Macy’s, polished her teacher’s pumps, and sported her new red cat-eye glasses, while May showed up in an old powder-blue cardigan from Bonwit Teller and tennis shorts. A thin but icy frost blanketed their exchanges for decades until Dorothy came along. When Ruth saw May get down on her hands and knees to address the new puppy at eye level, she finally understood that those regal manners, which she thought feigned, were genuine and extended to animals: May spoke to Dorothy as an equal.

  Tonight at dinner, a decision must be made. Ruth and Alex plan to ask May and Rudolph for their help finding a small museum, or even a foundation, where Alex can donate his older work. They can’t continue to store it when they move. Resolving what to do with Alex’s unsold work fills Ruth with relief, whereas it fills him with anxiety.

  They turn up Second Avenue in search of Xza-Xzu’s, a new restaurant May read about in the Times. Ruth has no memory of what cuisine Xza-Xzu’s serves. She isn’t even sure which continent she and Alex are headed to. She studies the faces of passersby to see if anyone else is troubled by the possibility that Pamir might be lurking among them, but no one seems to care. The shops are full, the bars packed. They find Xza-Xzu’s shoehorned between a Polish diner and a Korean vegetable stand. When they open the door, incense and peppery spices sweeten the blast of heat. A little bell announces their arrival. The interior is as dark as a movie theater. Ruth can’t see where she’s going, though she can hear Rudolph’s baritone greeting, and May’s demure hello, coming from the back of the den. She follows the voices. Rudolph and May are wedged in a corner table, trying to read menus under a light no brighter than a dashboard’s.

  “Dorothy’s in the hospital; she had back surgery,” Ruth says, before she and Alex even take off their coats and sit down. Rudolph and May are, for lack of a better term, Dorothy’s godparents. Should anything happen to her and Alex, Rudolph and May have promised to take Dorothy. They adore her and dote on her whenever she visits, to the disgust of their fifty-three-year-old son, a failed film producer, who still lives with them.

  “Oh, no,” May says. “Will she be all right?”

  “Why didn’t you call?” Rudolph says.

  “We were sitting down to dinner last night. You know how Dorothy always gets to the table before us,” Ruth says. “We found her in the kitchen, unable to walk. She couldn’t even crawl away from her urine. When Alex picked her up, she shrieked. We used the cutting board as a stretcher. The tunnel had just been closed but no one knew why yet. It took us two hours to get to the hospital, then the guard wouldn’t let us in because Dorothy’s collar kept setting off the metal detector.”

  “They have metal detectors at an animal hospital?” Rudolph asks.

  “All the signs look good,” Alex says. “She made it through the surgery and wagged her tail.”

  Ruth can see May’s eyes brighten with tears. She doesn’t want to give her false hope. “The doctor cautioned us that wagging her tail doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll be able to walk.”

  “The doctor also told us that as long as Dorothy has one live wire running down her spine, there’s hope,” Alex says.

  “He said if she feels pain there’s hope,” Ruth corrects him, though she knows how pointless and petty she sounds: when it comes to Dorothy, she wants the record straight.

  “In either case, there’s hope,” May kindly intervenes.

  A tall, slender waiter with Asian eyes, tobacco-brown skin, and dyed blond hair twisted into what look like corn stalks, hands Ruth and Alex menus. “If I can answer any questions,” he says in a British accent.

  “What kind of cuisine is Xza-Xzu’s?” Rudolph asks.

  “Pan-equatorial,” the waiter says.

  “Who has an appetite in such heat?”

  “Would you like to start with a glass of palm wine? It’s our house special.”

  “Bring us a bottle,” Alex says, usually the least adventurous of the four when it comes to new tastes.

  “It’s been a long day,” Ruth says. “Dorothy’s surgery was at seven, and the open house started at eight-thirty.”

  “You had the open house?” Rudolph asks.

  “People actually came?” May asks. “Were they aware of the tunnel?”

  Rudolph turns to May. “Who didn’t know about th
e tunnel?”

  “They knew,” Ruth says. “They came because of the tunnel. They were looking for a fire sale.”

  The waiter brings the palm wine and pours a splash into each of their glasses.

  “It’s sweet,” May says, tasting hers.

  “It’s like Manischewitz mixed with coconut milk,” Rudolph says.

  “May I take your orders?” the waiter asks.

  “What’s not spicy?” Rudolph asks.

  “What can be made without salt?” Alex asks.

  “We can steam the Galápagos fish and put the sauce on the side.”

  “What kind of fish?” Rudolph asks.

  “Wild salmon,” the waiter says.

  “Isn’t salmon a cold-water fish?”

  “I’ll have the Tarawa chicken,” May says, closing her menu.

  “How many spices can they grow on Tarawa? It’s an atoll. I’ll have the same,” Rudolph says. “Does it come with a salad?”

  “Yes, and coconut rice.”

  “I’ll have mine without dressing, please,” May says. “And no rice.”

  “Pour it on mine,” Rudolph says.

  “Is there some other fish you can steam? I’m allergic to salmon,” Alex says.

  “We can steam a Papua perch.”

  “Does the sauce have salt?”

  “It’s equatorial cuisine. I believe everything has salt,” the waiter says.

  “Without the sauce,” Alex says. “And just a little dressing on the salad.”