In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

  “Where’s the story?” she asked, joking. Sort of.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Good, then I can go back to bed.”

  “I’ve got the first draft of one, but it’s not ready.”

  “Can I read it?” she asked, yawning.

  “If I can come in,” he said, grinning (this time it was plain why he was here).

  “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

  “Yea, verily, Grims, I’d never lie to you.”

  This she believed but she said, “Let me see it, I want it here in this room.” Since he wouldn’t have lied, he’d be able to go to his dorm room, which was on the other side of the quad, and this would give her time to brush her teeth and prepare for sex without any unpleasant consequences afterward. He was panting a little by the time he got back, rushing, no doubt afraid she’d fall back asleep, which she had. But she’d left the door unlocked and he found her naked underneath the sheets. She noticed he’d taken the time to brush his teeth, too, which she found sweetly thoughtful, given his aroused, semi-inebriated state. Mercifully, he truly was famished for sex, finished quickly, and just as quickly, she was asleep, waking at nine in her room alone. She stretched, and the memory of the night came to her. She looked to her desk and saw, happily, his pages. She retrieved them and tucked herself back in beneath her warm comforter to read, her favorite thing to do on waking.

  These pages were okay (she always enjoyed reading them, good or bad). It was very first drafty, as he said. When she recalled the sex, though, she figured he’d had about as much lasting pleasure from her as she had by the time she’d finished reading, so in a way it worked out even.

  But it had been the first story he’d given her, that first time when he’d arrived with that story and she, overjoyed, had seduced him, that set the bar for all the visits that followed. It would be work-shopped in Blackmore’s class, rewritten and rewritten again, but the following morning after he’d left, the draft had transported her. It was a real story, an original work that was completely his, unlike any of the writers he loved. It was the beginning of a world that she knew was unique to his psyche.

  The story concerned the drowning of a thirteen-year-old girl at a community pool. The girl had been swimming with her neighbor (and, secret from the adults, her boyfriend, also thirteen), when an epileptic seizure carries her under. The boyfriend—they had only kissed, but had done much of that, and had exchanged vows of their forever-love—had gone to the concession stand to buy candy, a package of Now & Laters, her favorite. His mother, their chaperone this July day, had been reading on a lounge chair and was taken from the reading only by urgent whistles and calls to clear the pool as four lifeguards pulled the girl from the water. The neighbors, the parents of the drowned girl, had kept the epilepsy a secret. While no one could be blamed, blame and guilt are inevitable.

  Both families attempted, unsuccessfully in their own way, to cope with the tragedy. Only at the end did Em reveal that the story has been narrated by the boy, from his adulthood decades later, as he details the enduring consequences for him personally (he blamed himself for not only her death, but all of the damage). Seeing the ways families damage themselves, intertwined with the powerful effects of young love cut short, made the story end with kettledrum finality; the combination of damage and love from the vantage point of the boy, young and old, created the kind of additional layering of meaning that couldn’t have been common among nineteen-year-olds.

  I never wanted to know the provenance of his fictional stories, preferred to keep them purely in the magical realm fiction transports me to. But here I was seriously tempted. I did not ask, though, and he did not offer.

  Blackmore thought the story,“Now and Later,” so good, he asked Emerson to send it to Esquire, and he, Blackmore—at the time fifty, an accomplished and nationally recognized novelist—would call Rust Hills’s attention to it, the magazine’s fiction editor. Hills rejected the story because, at nearly twenty thousand words, it was too long; but he had admired it enough to encourage Emerson to feel free to submit more work to him. Emerson published it his junior year in Duke’s literary journal, which he was editing by his senior year. And the association with Hills would ultimately lead to Emerson’s first nonfiction piece for the magazine and his start as a journalist.

  But the power of that story, for her, reading it that Sunday morning, so undid her that she wrote him a long letter about it. A long, serious critique, mainly admiration but with questions she had, and thanking him for the best work he’d done to date.

  And that was how sex went between them as well. He would arrive with a story and they would have sex. They didn’t date and they rarely socialized. The stories and the intimacy they gave the friendship for the most part squelched the nausea she’d initially felt when she saw him with other girls. She had her own relationships, more sexual than romantic. But it would be years before she realized how unusual and lucky it was to be so sexually compatible with a man as she felt with Emerson. She simply enjoyed it, and never demanded anything from him other than to be the first to read his stories. Of course, he didn’t always arrive with a story, but arriving with a story had become something of a secret handshake between them. The sex felt better when he had a finished story to offer her.

  Only once did things end badly. It was early February of that same school year. Emerson had not only remained in bed after their love-making, which was unusual, but he furthermore slept in. Perhaps because he was nervous about the story and wanted to be there when she read it or, more to the point, nervous about her response to it.

  She didn’t even finish it.

  “Get out,” she told him.

  He woke, squinted and rubbed his eyes.

  She held up his pages and tore them in half. She dropped them in the wastebasket.

  “Grims, that’s my only typed copy.”

  “I want the handwritten copy as well.”

  “Did I write something wrong, is anything in it not true?”

  “That’s the problem, it’s too true. I will not be written about. You will not write about me, and you will not write about us.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it’s my life. What happened last summer is mine. And it’s private.”

  “But the story is fiction.”

  “No, the names have been changed. Everything in here happened.”

  “Is the story itself no good?”

  “I didn’t get far enough to tell.” Her heart raced as she tried to be reasonable. “There’s a difference between personal fiction and memoir veiled as fiction or taking events in my life and making them yours. You need to understand the difference.”

  “You can’t tell me what to write,” he said.

  “Then this is the last we see each other.” She paused. “Get out.”

  “Jesus, okay, I won’t write about you and me, I won’t write about you at all.”

  “Thank you.”

  She stood by the bed in her white terrycloth robe, arms folded.

  He lifted his eyebrows and said, “Come back to bed? Could do with a little send-off.”

  “Get. Out.”

  Realizing for the first time that a woman’s anger is not quickly doused, he dressed and left the room, carrying his shoes to put them on in the hallway rather than endure her heat a moment longer than he had to.

  That had been the first week in February. On Valentine’s Day she found daisies on her bed. She didn’t see him again till after spring break. It got so close to the end of term, she wondered if she’d done something permanently wrong, or worried that she’d asked something genuinely unreasonable. Indeed, she wasn’t quite sure of the reasons for her visceral response to being written about.

  The night was warm and she was dressed in her favorite light blue cotton T-shirt, windows open, sheets only, comforter no longer needed. She woke at the knock. He always knocked though she rarely locked her door. She looked at her clock, glowing red in the dark. One-thirty
, almost.

  “Grimsley, it’s me. You awake?”

  She opened the door just wide enough to show one squinting eye.

  “I don’t have a story.”

  “Come on in,” she said, sleepily. “I was getting worried you’d never come back.”

  He watched her strip her shirt off, took great pleasure in the form of her perfect body, the arch of her back, her angular shoulders and wing-like blades, and her graceful movements rolling into bed and pulling the sheet over her. She smiled at him and said, “Well, come on, then, Romeo.”

  “God, I missed you,” he said later, by then on his back, both of them giddily spent.

  Seven

  What I did next is easy to say. I went to see him at the reception. Why I did it is considerably more complicated. What happened as a result did change my life and I can only pray it didn’t damage anyone else—most of all Em—though I shudder when I think of it. I truly was interested only in his welfare at this point, speaking my mind and trying to help, though you may not believe me. I understand why you wouldn’t, given my erratic behavior in the afternoon, before I saw how sad he was. It wouldn’t be the first time a teller’s motives for the story were questioned or the first time a narrator’s reliability could, and should, be considered. Be my guest. Judge for yourself.

  Know this, this I believe: in my heart, I went only to say what I did.

  I’d gone home, heated some leftover chicken and potatoes. Watched the news. I tried to read but couldn’t keep my mind on it. I felt churned and sad inside. I felt worried for my friend; he was clearly in serious doldrums, a big boat on an endless, mirror-still ocean, not a breath of wind to fill his strong sails. But I also felt something I almost never felt. I felt lonely. Alone. It had been a long time, years and years ago, when a traveling buddy headed south to Switzerland and I stayed a few extra days in a rat hole in Antwerp. Such a lovely city but I was lonely there. That, and when my mother died, but that was a bad patch so vast as to be beyond description in actual words, at least in my capacity with them, though others have tackled grief well (I read all I could at the time).

  As I said, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m part of a family I love, in the place where I’ve been most all my life. I have few material cravings; and only one true and modest addiction—buying first-edition hardcovers; how could I not buy Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom the day it was published? The latest by DeLillo or Roth or Toni Morrison? I looked forward to anything David Foster Wallace published and will forever lament when I think of that anguished soul, and that I will never read a new book by him again. I take one major trip a year—this spring it’s Israel, already planned, with a friend from work who’s single like me (or the trip that was supposed to be; all travel being up in the air right now). I like my work and my colleagues, I’m paid well enough to afford what little I need, and will in three years finish the payments on this small house I own just a five-minute drive from Duke.

  I couldn’t get him off my mind. I knew, knew, I would never see him again. I kept picturing how ashen he went when we said good-bye. I needed our last meeting, probably ever, to be better than that. It didn’t have to be good-bye forever. There were never any strings to our relationship and I wanted him to know that if he was in trouble, he had a friend in Grimsley down here in Durham. No strings, not ever.

  So I waited till 9:50, arrived at the Washington Duke Inn five minutes later, hoping to catch him leaving the reception rather than going in and finding him. If I’d missed him, I could call his room, I figured.

  I parked in the left lot where I always parked. I’d earlier changed into jeans and a shirt, wore my Jack Purcells, so I wasn’t dressed for a reception even if I’d wanted to go in.

  I didn’t have to. When I entered the inn, Emerson was leaning on the check-in counter. He turned with an envelope in his hand and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He literally started when he saw me standing there.

  “Grimsley,” he said.

  He looked nervous, so I said, “It’s just your old friend Grimsley with one last thing to say and then I’ll be off. Promise”

  “I was going to have a drink at the bar.”

  “I love the bar here, but could we just walk? I’d rather be alone.”

  We exited through a back door to a patio where conversation and ice rattling in glasses were soft. We took the steps down to the right, passing a row of golf carts to the path surrounding the practice putting green. The air remained warm and still and sweet.

  “First, I want to apologize for the way I behaved this afternoon. I feel terrible. It wasn’t right. You just brought me back to those days so powerfully that …”

  “I know, Grims—me, too. But I just couldn’t possibly.”

  “I’m glad you couldn’t possibly. That’s very much you.”

  We strolled slowly. He looked at me then and said, “You didn’t have to drive all the way here just to say that. And I hope you know no apology is necessary.”

  “No, that was not what I needed to say.” Silence. “Two things, one angry, one sad, and since I don’t want to end angry, I’ll start with that.”

  “Angry?” he said. “What did I do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Explain, then.”

  Here, I stopped so that I could face him, the fine features of his face softly and clearly lit, partly from the moon, partly from the hotel’s lighting, which he faced; my features would be dark from his vantage. “I was going to say disappointment, but it’s anger.”

  “At what, please.”

  “That you haven’t been better, that you haven’t done more, done what you set out to do, done what so compelled me to you always. Telling stories.”

  “Ah that.”

  “Yes, that.”

  “I tried, you know, but it turned out not to be my lot. And you have no right to put that on me. Life is hard, and fast. Kids arrive. The need for money bears down. We make our choices and live with them.”

  He turned, not wanting to face me, but strolled slowly, not fleeing and not lashing out.

  “Emerson, stop.” He did. I went to him, and now I stood on the other side so that he could see my face. I wanted him to see my face when I said it.

  “Take. Yourself. Seriously.” He looked puzzled. “You took yourself seriously once. Do you remember what you did?! You were the son of a factory worker in Chicago and you wrote to Terry Sanford, the president of Duke University; he was this state’s governor before he came here and became a United States senator after. No slouch, in the smarts and influence department. You had the balls to write him a letter personally and it was so appealing he set you on a course toward that A.B. Duke scholarship.”

  “Me and twenty-five others.”

  “But you got it, and you got here. Do you remember what charisma and ambition you had? You flew when you were here. You were prized by one of the country’s great writers. You became a great writer. You went from dirt in Chicago, to the upper echelons of Manhattan and LA. You have a beautiful wife and healthy kids and you tell me you’re fucking bummed out at life? How dare you complain?”

  “Sorry, Grims, I just can’t accept blame for how I’m feeling. It is what it is. But if what I think you’re telling me is that I need to write again, I’m grateful.” Then he said, “It was hard for me when I lost my dad. He died just three months after he retired and I could never help him the way I ought to have.”

  “Okay, so maybe that’s where the sadness I see comes from, but I don’t think so. You loved your dad and he loved you and that’s a damned lucky thing and it’s also better that you outlived him and not the other way around.”

  He turned and walked. I jogged after him. “Like I said,” I went on, “I don’t know why or what happened, I don’t know anything about your life, but somewhere along the line, you clearly stopped taking yourself seriously. What I saw today and what I heard, I know. So I’m begging you as your old friend, and lover, please, take yourself seriously again.”


  He said nothing, which was like him. He was always thoughtful, always listened. Whether in the classroom, or struggling through a personal problem, he first took in whatever information was available, listening before responding. There had been a big drug bust that involved a number of friends his senior year; he was asked to write about it for the university newspaper but didn’t know where his allegiances should lie. He sought the advice of professors, me, David, and other friends, absorbing our words first before taking what he needed or knew to be useful and only then writing his opinion piece. So I knew he heard me.

  We strolled again in silence.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’m ready for the next.”

  “I suspect it’s related to what I just said. But I don’t know you well enough anymore or what’s happened in your life, but it’s just what I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I saw today how sad you are.”

  He flinched. “Sad? I’m not sad, I’m just, well, in a spot in my life. Collista says we’re both going through our midlife crises.” He put his hands deep in his pockets. He said to the sky, “This too shall pass.”

  “Crisis maybe, but midlife has nothing to do with it,” I said. “Sad, way deep down. It’s so far down, you can’t even see it anymore.”

  He chuckled a little. “You think?”

  We’d come to a division in the path, one that led back to the patio, the other I could take around the building to the parking lot. I stopped to face him.

  “It’s as plain as your face to me.”

  “So you came all this way to tell me I’m depressed?”

  “No, I came all this way to let you know that your old friend is still true and here for you. Anything you need.”

  I was still, after all these long years, in love with him.

  I took a breath. “I got so shaken with worry when you said goodbye, that this really would be the last time I saw you, I had to find you.”