Heroic Measures

by Jill Ciment

Ruth orders the sampler plate, not out of curiosity, but because she can’t bear to make another decision today.

  “Did you get any nibbles on the apartment?” Rudolph asks as soon as the waiter leaves.

  “We have a bidding war,” Ruth says.

  “That’s marvelous!” May says.

  Ruth shakes her head. “The first offers were so low we couldn’t accept them. As long as Pamir is out there, we’ll be lucky to get our asking price. You can’t imagine our day. The phone didn’t stop ringing. We never knew if it was the realtor or the doctor calling. It was touch-and-go with Dorothy for a while.”

  The waiter arrives with the salads; all the plates are swimming in oil.

  “She asked for the dressing on the side,” Rudolph says, as the glistening leaves are set before May.

  “I asked for light dressing,” Alex says. “And where’s my wife’s salad?”

  “I didn’t order one,” Ruth says.

  “I thought it came with the meal,” Rudolph says.

  “The sampler plate is an appetizer,” the waiter explains. “It doesn’t include a salad.”

  “Bring her a salad anyway,” Rudolph says.

  “With or without dressing?” the waiter asks, smiling at Ruth with such stilted politeness that it borders on contempt.

  “I don’t care,” Ruth says.

  • • •

  Alex’s feet start tapping as he waits for his lightly dressed salad to arrive. He dreads the conversation coming up. The fate of his unsold work stirs up such anguish.

  “I have to ask,” Rudolph says. “What kind of a person shops for an apartment during a red alert?”

  Ruth begins. “This one girl, twenty, twenty-five at the most, asks if she can lie down in our bed.”

  “Under the covers?” Rudolph asks.

  “If we weren’t standing there, probably. She wants to see the view from our pillows. She agrees to take off her boots first.”

  “That was thoughtful of her,” May says.

  “She makes herself at home, sprawls across our mattress like a queen. She doesn’t move for eight minutes. I checked my watch.”

  May and Rudolph laugh in horror.

  “I need to do something with my old work,” Alex blurts out.

  The new salads arrive: May’s is dry, Alex’s is barely glazed, and Ruth’s is an island of lettuce in a sea of dressing.

  Under the table, Ruth settles her hand on Alex’s knee to still his feet, but she receives a jolt of his anxiety instead.

  “Alex,” Rudolph says, starting right in on his salad. “You need to concentrate on the new work. May and I have a good feeling about this next show. These FBI pieces are timely. There’s interest. Why confuse the old with the new?”

  “Maybe he’s right,” Alex says to Ruth.

  “We’re selling our apartment tomorrow,” Ruth reminds him.

  “The collectors want high concept these days. We finally have an angle with your FBI pieces, Alex. Everyone’s nostalgic for the Cold War. It reminds them of a time when the worst enemy imaginable was a gorgeous Russian spy in James Bond’s bed, or Rocky and Bullwinkle’s Boris and Natasha. Picture a Saturday-morning cartoon show about a squirrel and a moose and a cell of Jihadists?”

  May drizzles an eyedropper of dressing on her salad. “Rudolph’s right. People used to spend hours in the gallery studying the paintings, asking questions. Nowadays, they sweep in talking on their cell phones, and if they don’t get the artist’s intention between calls, they lose interest.”

  “This next show could put you back on the map,” Rudolph says.

  What map? Alex wasn’t lost to begin with, Ruth thinks.

  “It’ll open up so many more opportunities,” May adds.

  “They’ll be fighting to get your old work,” Rudolph says.

  Beneath the tablecloth, she can feel Alex’s feet finally come to a rest: unlike her, he seems ready to drop the subject of his old work despite their agreement that the paintings can’t move with them.

  The waiter arrives with the dinners.

  “We haven’t even finished our salads,” Rudolph says, annoyed. “Come back later.”

  “The dinners will only get cold,” May says.

  “Can you keep them warm in the kitchen?”

  “They’ll get dried out,” May says. “Leave my chicken, please.”

  “Leave my fish,” Alex says.

  “Take mine back,” Rudolph says. “I like my salad first.”

  “What are we supposed to do with all the paintings?” Ruth asks, turning to Alex. “Pack them up like the dishes? It’s like moving a museum! We can’t take care of them anymore, Alex. They need to find a home.”

  “What Rudolph meant,” May says, motioning the waiter to leave, “is that we’ll gladly store them at our warehouse until we figure out what’s best.”

  “That’s what I said,” Rudolph says. He finishes his salad and then samples May’s chicken. “It tastes like lemongrass and KFC.” He looks for the waiter.

  “I told you not to send back your dinner,” May says.

  As they wait for the waiter to return with Rudolph’s dinner, Ruth stares down at her sampler plate, aching to thank May for her kindness, but she knows that if she does, she’ll only embarrass the men. Their friendship depends on the unspoken agreement that the gulf between their finances, even in the guise of free storage, is never openly acknowledged.

  Alex stares down at his fish and rice, now as appetizing to him as rocks and sand. Nothing is really resolved. He can’t shake the feeling that once his old canvases are warehoused, they’ll be forgotten, even by him. Their conception once mattered to him as much as his own life. While he painted, the battles he experienceed were as intense as any in the war—sometimes more so. In his studio, he was both the hero and the enemy.

  “Did either of you catch the interview with Pamir’s hostage?” May asks.

  “Terrorists don’t take drugs,” Rudolph says, looking around for his dinner. “If they took drugs, they wouldn’t need to be terrorists.”

  “Don’t let Rudolph fool you, he’s as scared as the rest of us,” May says. “He keeps an inflatable kayak in the guest bedroom in case of a dirty bomb. The plan is for the three of us to portage it to the Hudson, assemble it amid crowds running amok, and then paddle to New Jersey, flinging off those who try to cling to our stern.”

  “May scoffs but when I bought it, she was the one who insisted on a watertight compartment to carry ample supplies of iodide pills and canned food.”

  “If you’re going to build a bomb shelter, you might as well stock it,” May says.

  Rudolph’s dinner finally arrives.

  “The plate is very hot,” cautions the waiter.

  The sauce, pudding-thick, is bubbling, but Rudolph takes a bite of his chicken anyway. He chases it with ice water. “You need nuclear fission to get food that hot,” he says.

  “All the more reason to have an ample supply of iodide pills,” May says. She turns to Ruth and Alex. “Have you found a place yet?”

  “We just started looking,” Ruth says. “Everything is so expensive.”

  “You should get the hell out of here while you can,” Rudolph says.

  “Maybe the stairs are a blessing, at least they’re forcing you to make a decision,” May says. “We talk about leaving all the time. Move the gallery to Santa Fe. But our son despises Santa Fe, so we do nothing about it. You know what a weekend like this does to us? Nothing. Rudolph checks to make sure the kayak’s inflated and all I feel is lassitude. I’m like a gazelle caught in a lion’s jaw—limp, numb, resigned to my fate. Our son thinks the only reason Osama hasn’t struck again is because he has the Hollywood syndrome. Now that he’s had an extravaganza, he’s not going to settle for a small, artful, independent feature.”

  “Before we all run off to the South Seas, remember, this is the dreck we’ll be eating,” Rudolph says, spearing the last of his chicken, and then pushing away his empty plate.

  “It is
awful, isn’t it,” May says, setting down her cutlery. She’s barely touched her food.

  Alex’s perch is long gone and Ruth’s dinner is just crumbs now, though she has no memory of what anything tasted like.

  Rudolph reaches for his fork and begins picking at May’s untouched chicken. “Didn’t you say that the Times gave it a good review?”

  The waiter appears. “Would you like to hear about our desserts? Tonight we have fried mango sorbet with guava syrup and cheesecake.”

  “They make cheesecake on the equator?” Rudolph asks.

  “I believe our cheesecake comes from Passaic, New Jersey.”

  “The check, please,” May says, quietly handing the waiter her credit card as he leaves.

  “We’ll pay the tip,” Alex announces.

  “I wouldn’t tip this guy,” Rudolph says.

  “Is Dorothy allowed visitors?” May turns to Ruth.

  “We forgot to ask.”

  On the street, the two couples hug good-bye.

  “You’ll call us about Dorothy?” May says.

  “Thank you for everything,” Ruth whispers.

  “Next time dinner’s on us,” Alex announces.

  “Let me know when you want the paintings moved,” Rudolph says.

  “Good luck tomorrow,” May adds.

  Ruth, a head shorter than May, and Alex, almost two heads shorter than Rudolph, watch their friends start west toward Fifth Avenue, the waist-length braid swinging behind them.

  “I know she was only trying to be kind,” Ruth says. “But how could anyone imagine that facing five flights of stairs at our age is a blessing?”

  “I’m not sure the warehouse is such a good idea,” Alex says.

  They turn and head east toward the projects.

  The temperature has risen: the air feels almost balmy. Ruth unknots her scarf, undoes the top button on her overcoat: she’s always the hotter of the two. Alex puts on his red baseball cap. It’s a little after eight, early by East Village standards. The Saturday-night crowd isn’t even awake yet. The dominatrix haute-couture shop, the trance music store, the drug paraphernalia stand are all empty. Tompkins Square, lit by old-fashioned arc lamps, looks especially inviting. Ruth takes Alex’s arm and they enter the park. The snow on the path has already melted, but above them, in the latticework of elm branches, whiteness abounds. It’s a white Alex would mix with Chremnitz white and a touch of hansa yellow.

  When Ruth looks up, it’s not the snow she notices; it’s the black pieces of night between the white branches. At this time of year, the sky usually looks as low and gray as a tin ceiling, but tonight, it looks exactly like what it is— infinite.

  On warm winter Saturday evenings, the park’s normally overrun with suburban teenagers, blasting music and skateboarding, but tonight, the only other souls are the elderly Italian couple who run the cheese and ravioli shop and the homeless chess player who frequents the library on cold days. He and Ruth have discussed books. He, too, is fond of the dead Russians.

  “It’s so quiet,” he says to no one in particular.

  “Maybe they should close the tunnel permanently,” the Italian husband says.

  “Maybe they should close all the bridges and tunnels and leave us our island,” his wife says.

  Alex and Ruth exit the park and cross the street to the newsstand. They barely glance at the evening headlines, No Bomb in Baltimore. It’s the classifieds they want. Ruth pays, while Alex hoists up the voluminous Sunday Times, clamps it under his arm, and, like a schoolboy carrying a schoolgirl’s heavy books, walks her home, all the way up the mountain of steps.

  The phone machine has no new messages. Ruth isn’t sure if she’s relieved (the hospital didn’t call, Dorothy must be holding her own) or disappointed (no one has made another offer). Alex turns on the news, while she sits at the kitchen table to scout the real estate pages, a section thicker than the international news, for a two-bedroom elevator co-op below Fourteenth Street. She takes a pen from her purse to circle any possibilities. Out of the thirty-three two-bedroom open houses taking place downtown tomorrow only one is listed for under a million dollars.

  Junior 2 Bedroom

  Great for students or first-time buyers

  Needs TLC

  Price Reduced!

  $900,000

  What is there to do but circle it? She searches the next tier of prices.

  Dazzling Sun-Filled Corner Two Bedroom

  Built-in Bookcases!

  Window Seat Soaks Up Morning Sunshine

  $1,100,000

  She not only circles this one, but draws a big star beside it. It’s higher than they wanted to go, but …

  “Any news?” she shouts over the television.

  “The mayor just gave another press conference. He wants New Yorkers to call the hotlines only if they have a credible sighting. The FBI has received over ten thousand calls. Did you find anything?” he shouts back.

  “Someplace that sounds too good to be true. Do you think all the sightings will affect prices? Don’t prices go up if everywhere is dangerous? Or does the market stay flat if sightings happen in all the neighborhoods? Do you remember what Lily said?”

  Alex comes into the kitchen and peers over her shoulder. She’s drawn a big black star next to one of the listings. He knows that to draw a star that black on paper as absorbent as newsprint, she must have pressed very hard on her pen. He reads the fine print: One million and one hundred thousand.

  “We can’t afford it,” he says.

  “We can if we learn from Harold’s Ladies. If we like the apartment, let’s offer a hundred and fifty thousand less than the asking price, two hundred less if the news is still bad tomorrow morning. If we don’t take advantage of the panic, someone else will. What’s the worst that can happen? The sellers will laugh in our faces? We laughed at Harold’s Ladies, and look at us now.” She puts down her pen. “My God, I almost wished for bad news. Do you know what the worst that can happen is?”

  “We’ll have to put off moving for a few months?”

  “That my wish will come true.”

  In bed, after she sets the alarm for seven, Ruth reaches for her Portable Chekhov and opens to the page that she’d been reading last night when she fell asleep. The lady with the pet dog is crying once again, though in a different hotel, many years later. This time rather than eat a slice of water-melon, Gurov takes her in his arms and experiences such compassion “for this life, still so warm and lovely, but probably already about to begin to fade and wither like his own. Why did she love him so much?” The lovers take council and try to figure out a way to spend more time together without secrecy and deception, despite living in two different cities, and his having a wife and a daughter and a job at the bank, and her having a husband and a Pomeranian, if the little dog is still alive.

  Ruth already knows the lovers’ fate—she taught the story almost every year—yet every time she nears the story’s end, Chekhov creates anew the hope that this time things will turn out differently, this time “the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin: and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that what was to be most complicated and difficult for them was only just beginning.”

  Sunday

  QUEEN FOR A DAY

  DOROTHY NOW SHARES A SEMIPRIVATE ROOM with a bulldog recuperating from having eaten a penny, a poodle passing kidney stones, a Mexican hairless with a sinus infection, and a pug in a leg cast. Cages line the green walls. Dorothy’s is stacked atop the bulldog’s—she can smell him trying to pass the penny. Unlike intensive care with only the Chihuahua’s faint breath for company, this ward is alive with barking. Whenever the nurse walks by, all the dogs vie for her attention, but Dorothy knows a trick the others don’t. As the nurse passes her cage, Dorothy wags her tail to beat the band. “Look at you,” the nurse invariably stops and says, “twenty-four hours out of back surgery and doing the shimmy. You go, girl, shake that booty.”

  This m
orning though, a medical student with clammy hands accompanies the nurse. He takes Dorothy from her cage and sits her on a cold steel examining table.

  When she wags her tail for him, he’s not impressed. She looks up at the nurse.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie, you have to try to walk today.”

  The nurse helps her up, supporting Dorothy’s hind-quarters, while the medical student walks to the head of the table and calls, “Dorothy!”

  Once again, she wags her tail for him—faster, harder— but wagging her tail doesn’t even elicit a smile.

  The nurse gently sets her down. “I’ll be right back.” She shouts into the corridor, “Mauricio, give me a little sausage from your McMuffin.” When she returns she’s holding what to Dorothy’s nose smells like life itself. Dorothy hasn’t eaten in thirty-six hours. Her entire world narrows to that smoky meaty scent. The sausage is passed from the nurse’s long black fingers to the student’s pale ones.

  “Try calling her now,” the nurse says.

  The pale fingers hold out the crumble of sausage. “Dorothy!”

  With the nurse’s help, she’s able to get traction on the table surface: she takes a step, sways.

  “One more, baby, one more,” the nurse whispers encouragingly.

  Dorothy lurches toward the enticing morsel. She doesn’t quite reach it, but she manages two more steps.

  “I’m going to get Dr. Rush,” says the medical student.

  He leaves with the sausage. Where is he taking it?

  “Aren’t you something,” the nurse says, “I bet you’ll be ready to go dancing by tonight.”

  The doctor with the kind blue eyes comes in. Dorothy can smell he now has the sausage. “A hot dog eating a sausage? Sounds a little like cannibalism to me.” He tilts up her snout and shines a pinprick of sun into her eyes. He cups a cold steel bell to her heart and listens. Dorothy follows the traces of meat in the air: the sausage is in his left hand. Finally, he offers her the morsel, but he holds it just out of reach. She rises to her feet again, this time without the nurse’s help, takes a step, sways, takes another, totters, but keeps going until she reaches the meat.