In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

  “True.”

  “Lucky me!” he said.

  Somehow the towel wrapped around his waist slid to his feet while he, still facing the mirror, washed the remaining shaving cream from his face; her hands worked their way down the front of his body. He sighed, turned to face her.

  “Grims?”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “No uh-oh. It’s just that I feel toxic from New York City. I’m too frazzled right now.”

  “I understand,” she said and hugged him, her face against the chest for which she just then realized she’d been longing for a full year. She looked up at him. He smiled and leaned down to kiss her. Ah, those lips.

  When the two parted, she said, “Welcome to Spa Feller. We’ll get you detoxed. Posthaste.”

  He smiled—she’d picked up that archaic verbiage from him long ago. He gave her a long hug. “You’re the best.”

  Again, she sensed something difficult coming at her, so she addressed it rather than ignored it. She hadn’t seen her old friend in a year and here he was.

  “You didn’t pick up any bugs in the city I hope.”

  “No.”

  “AIDS is running like an actual plague through New York, moving into the hetero world, I hear.”

  “Precisely why I took precautions. But frankly, Grims, I didn’t have a single meaningful relationship there. This whole past year I’ve been three things: working, drinking, and getting over a hangover, often all at once.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “No, it’s not, but it goes a long way in terms of explaining why I am so lucky to be where I am right now. I honestly feel lucky to have made it out alive.”

  They kissed again and she said, “Let me get you that food you need.”

  *

  It was Friday, late afternoon. She’d taken the day off from work to clean the house and prepare for his arrival and enjoy a three-day weekend. There was enough chicken and mashed potatoes and she also boiled some frozen peas. They shared a bottle of cold white wine at the table in the center of the kitchen. He told her New York stories.

  “Here’s one,” he said. “This embodies the whole of my New York experience and it didn’t even happen to me. A coworker, Frances, sweet girl my age, she and a friend were walking home from an East Village bar at 4 a.m.”

  “I heard that city never sleeps.”

  “They were all coked up, they’d see daylight before they slept. Except for they almost didn’t do either. Guy walks straight up to them on First Avenue and puts the gun straight in Frances’s friend’s face. She thought they were both goners. The friend instinctively stepped to her right off the curb and out of the line of fire. Immediately someone started screaming, not Frances or her friend, just this wild crazy screaming. The mugger got spooked and ran away. Frances’s friend had stepped off the curb and onto the face of a homeless woman sleeping in the street! True story.

  “So right there, Grimsley, it’s all there—the violence, the drinking and drugging, the homeless people. I swear, a month ago I walked right over a homeless person lying in the middle of Park Avenue South, coulda been dead. It was two blocks later that I realized, I just walked over a homeless person and didn’t give it a thought. Not a thought. That was the moment I knew I had to get out of there.”

  She reached across the table and held his hand.

  Emerson had two thousand dollars saved (cash, he noted, though he had credit card debt), and an assignment for Vanity Fair in Los Angeles, where he’d secured an apartment in West Hollywood. He looked at her hand and then at the face he’d seen for the first time nearly six years earlier. It was June. He could have gone home and lived there for the month, but he was glad he’d chosen to return to Durham, that Grimsley was still here for him. He told her this with his eyes then, and she smiled back. They didn’t need to talk. She was always there for him, she was always such a comfort to be near, and he felt lucky.

  “Let’s take a walk around East Campus,” he said.

  They bumped into Sterly on the front porch, returning from work. Sterly was tall and lanky with big curly hair and a blazing smile. A native of Durham, she had that accent Emerson had grown so familiar with when he’d been a student. They hugged, even though they had never been great friends. She was protective of Grimsley and resentful of what she considered his overly casual relationship with her best friend. She never saw the best moments, only the conflicted ones when Grimsley, confused by her own emotions, needed to talk.

  “I hear you’re bunking here for a few weeks.”

  “I hope that’s okay,” he said.

  “Our house is your house,” she said and seemed to mean it. She looked to Grimsley and said, “And Bo is off on a guys’ golf weekend at Hilton Head, so you’ll be seeing me.”

  “I’ll have three to cook for instead of two!” Grimsley said.

  He loved that she loved to cook.

  *

  They walked slowly through the warm evening air, all around the campus, sparsely populated now that school was out, catching up. But also giving in to easy, long silences. She noticed how deeply he was inhaling. He was taking it all in. He loved the air of this place, she could tell. They walked until dusk and headed home.

  When she’d locked the front door, he asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have any whiskey by any chance, would you?”

  “Actually, no, we’re not big drinkers, me and Sterl. Not like we were in school anyhow!”

  Emerson looked at his watch. She knew he was calculating whether an ABC store would be open where he could purchase some.

  “Hey,” she said, “I thought you needed to detox. If you can have that whiskey, then I presume you can do other things as well?”

  She grabbed him by the belt and tugged him to her. They kissed. She hummed and said, “That food and walk have you sufficiently relaxed? My body seriously misses yours.”

  He kissed her again—yes.

  *

  When he woke, she was gone from the bed. He lay awake listening to the birds and smelling the cool morning air, leafy Durham in June. The day was already bright. He smelled bacon cooking. He went downstairs in his boxers and a T-shirt, scratching his head and back and yawning.

  “Look who’s up,” Grimsley said. Sterly took her plate to the sink and said, “Well, you really are making yourself at home.”

  “Think of me as your little brother.”

  She thought about it, smiled back, and said, “I’m going shopping, you want to add anything to the list?”

  “Nope,” Grimsley said. “I’m good.”

  “Em?”

  “No, but thanks.”

  When he was seated and drinking coffee, and Grimsley had begun to scramble eggs for him, he said, “Okay, you were right. Sex is better than drinking.”

  “You’re just realizing that now?”

  “You don’t understand. I feel great. I feel really great. I forgot what it was like to wake up not hungover.”

  She brought him a plate of breakfast, but before setting it down, she put her hand in is his hair and tugged it, back and forth, with genuine concern.

  They spent that whole Saturday outside, Emerson all but literally soaking in the air and trees and water that he hadn’t had in a full year, a year defined by concrete and heat and stink, a little less human every day.

  Grimsley had found an old rock quarry her senior year and, now that school was out, no one would be there. When they arrived, noon sun directly overhead, Grimsley stripped naked and went to the edge of the rock. He’d have undressed himself but he was staring at her back and narrow hips and ass and calves in genuine aesthetic, asexual admiration. She had not changed. She turned, shaded her eyes from the sun—ah, those perfect breasts in the open sunlight. “Well, come on!” Ooh-wn. He loved that. “I gotta show you where to jump.” He stripped too and joined her at the rock’s edge. The heat of the sun felt good on his whole body.

  She pointed to the left. “See that rock there? That’s the only one you got to worry about
.” And with that, she leapt and screamed. She bobbed to the surface, shook her head. “Well?”

  “It’s a long jump!”

  “Chicken!”

  She saw him take a deep breath and she quickly shouted, “Hold on to your balls!”

  And down he plunged into the cool green water. He emerged coughing.

  She said, “You gotta blow out through your nose.”

  When he’d finished coughing, he said, “I’m glad you gave me that first bit of advice when you did, though. Water up the nose I can handle.”

  “I saw a guy not do it and then he had to float on his back moaning sick for twenty minutes before he had the strength to climb back up.”

  She put her head down, showed that perfect white ass, lifted her legs gymnast straight, and sank out of sight like a stone, emerging twenty seconds later ten yards away.

  “There’s a cold spot about ten feet down, feels soooo good,” she said, smiling. She smiled all day long.

  They stayed through the afternoon, sunning on towels in the grass and swimming till trees blocked the sun. They were joined only once for an hour by another couple, who said hi, took off their clothes, and jumped and splashed and sunned but kept to themselves.

  Lying back down in the sun, he said, “I miss living around hippies.”

  “You don’t have to miss them,” she said.

  They showered upon returning home and Emerson took her out for an early dinner at a her favorite place for barbecue, and afterward they fell quickly into their old routine.

  By Sunday, they’d had what felt like a vacation of a weekend. Grimsley roasted a chicken for the three of them. Later, when Grimsley and Em were eating ice cream in bed and watching The Maltese Falcon, Sterly knocked and poked her head in.

  “You are going to work tomorrow, yes?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Because I am too, and I need a good night’s sleep.”

  “Yes, Mom,” Grimsley said.

  Sterly had closed the door, but the latch didn’t catch so the door swung partly open. “I guess she heard us,” Grimsley said.

  “Were we that loud?” he asked.

  Sterly’s head popped back in. “Yes,” she said. “Which would be fine”—pronounced faahn—“if you were sprinters and not long-distance runners.” With that, she closed the door so that it stayed shut.

  They laughed quietly. Grimsley set the last of the ice cream on her bedside table and snuggled into Emerson, returning her focus to Bogey and Mary Astor.

  *

  And on Monday the routine began. He’d lay awake while the girls used the bathroom and readied for work, kept clear of their rituals till Grimsley came upstairs to kiss him goodbye.

  “So, what are you going to do all day?”

  “I don’t know. Read, write.”

  “Sounds like heaven.”

  He smiled sleepily in agreement, and for a moment something she’d said skipped lightly through his mind. Two days earlier, they’d unpacked his U-Haul to return it before heading to the quarry. A television, stereo, and speakers went into the spare downstairs room. A trunk of clothes up to her room. Furniture, a table and four chairs, coffee table, a futon and its frame, boxes of books, boxes of bric-a-brac, and one very heavy sofa that she had trouble helping him carry—all this went into the garage.

  He’d said, when he’d pulled the empty truck’s door down with a clatter, “The thought of filling this thing back up less than a month from now is not something I’m looking forward to.”

  She’d responded, “You don’t have to, you know.”

  He paused, then grinned in thanks, but did not respond beyond that.

  He thought of this until her second good-bye kiss brought him back. “I’ll be home at six. Remember, no smoking inside!”

  “Absolutely, already cut way back.”

  “And could you stop by the store? Grocery list is on the fridge.”

  “You bet.”

  She kissed him a third time, just because, and was gone, and he lay back feeling lucky.

  That morning he picked up working on a short story he’d begun in New York and wrote till noon. He jogged a mile, which would become three by the following week. He hacked so badly after that first awful run, he resolved to stop smoking altogether by the end of the week, and did. He kept to his writing routine even on Saturdays, resolving to finish the story before he left. After his daily run, he’d shower, have a sandwich, and spend the rest of the day reading and doing errands Grimsley needed done. She walked to work, so he had her car. But mostly he stayed home. She made a fine meal every evening and they’d share most of a bottle of wine—but that was all, a serious change from his time in New York. Sterly was rarely there. In the evening, they sometimes went to a movie or to hear a local band and once went to a Durham Bulls game. But more often than not, they sat on the porch swing to enjoy the cool of evening after increasingly warm days. He usually read aloud to her. He loved to read aloud, and she loved the sound of his voice as much as he did hers, though for different reasons. His voice became musical to her when he read. Over the course of a week, he’d read the whole of A Moveable Feast. He’d often choose poetry he liked— especially Shakespeare sonnets or John Donne—followed by gloomy Yates and Raymond Carver stories till she couldn’t bear them any longer and she made him change to P. G. Wodehouse, which she could listen to over and over. They had sex almost every night, with undiminishing pleasure.

  And in the morning it would begin again.

  It was a genuine summer idyll he’d never—never—know again, but, unable to know this, he did not see it for what it was.

  At the beginning of the week of his planned departure, after steaks on the grill, grilled asparagus, cool potato salad, and cold red wine (it was getting too hot to want to use the stove), they had an extra glass of wine and sat on the porch swing, inhaling the rich, heavy air.

  “So,” she said, “when are you going to let me read the pages you’re working on?”

  He’d reached the point where he’d write in the morning and type the morning’s work in the afternoon, slowly, one careful sentence at a time, revising as he went.

  “I’m vowing to finish before I leave. So, before I leave, I hope. Or as a parting story. I’ll want your critique as soon as I reach LA.”

  He looked at her but she didn’t look at him. He loved the straight line of her nose, the straight brown hair always tightly bound with a hair tie into a short ponytail. She was plain, as she always referred to herself, and it was precisely this plainness that was her beauty, rather than the traditional elements most people considered traits of beauty: full lips, high cheekbones, the air-brushed faces of models.

  “Don’t ask me,” she said, not looking at him.

  “How do you know what I’m about to say?”

  “I’ve felt it all week.”

  “Okay, I’ll make it formal. Come with me to LA.”

  Now she turned to him. “I can’t just quit my job and move to some strange city.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “You’ve never once said ‘I love you.’”

  “Neither have you.”

  “Because I know you couldn’t say it back.” She paused, waiting for him to prove her wrong. “Em, I do love you. I love you. I loved you the moment I saw you. The moment.”

  He could only hold her hand.

  “I would marry you right now, you know,” she said. “We’d be good together. Look at us. Look at you.”

  “Then come with me.”

  She looked away, she took a deep breath, exhaled and said, “No. Because eventually you will fall in love with someone and where will that leave me?”

  They both stared out into the street.

  “This is my home, Emerson. I can’t leave it. I can’t leave my mom and her dogs or my work or this land. I won’t be me anymore. But you, you’re rootless, and a writer and can live anywhere.” She gripped his hand, and he looked into her eyes. “This is a good place. You could be really good
here. You could get a job at Duke, keep writing. We could be really good together forever.”

  “Academia would suffocate me.”

  “How do you know?”

  He turned from her insistent gaze and stared out at the street, and she could see, with a fevered aching in her whole body, he was already packing his truck in his mind. And there was nothing she could do about it. He had ambition. And what can one do with Ambition in Durham? She could see it. He was putting the ambition on now, in his mind, cloaking himself in it to save himself from the choice she’d put before him.

  They slept still but close that night, her head on his comfortable chest, but not a word or kiss, and when he woke, she had left for work.

  *

  He thought about this conversation twice. Just twice. Both times with a sickness in his stomach. Once, at the end of that week, as he turned left onto Broad Street and headed toward the highway in a rented truck, everything he owned inside it; but excitement about the journey and the life he was heading into concealed the dread. And then he recalled this moment again, twenty years later, on the other side of the country, in the very place where he’d all but exactly lived out his intended life.

  But how could he have known? We can’t know the future; we can only know the past. Does that young man in the U-Haul envision his older self? Yes, but it is a grand self. He doesn’t envision simply an older version of his current self, wrapped in the trappings he himself has woven, leaving that original living core to struggle ceaselessly against the woven forgery. He certainly doesn’t envision a middle-aged man, alone and weeping at the edge of a church in a place where he was his best self, acknowledging the impossibility of returning to the self he once was in order to change the future. And even if he could return, would he do anything differently?

  Not likely. What was, was inevitable. Orpheus forever turns to look at Eurydice, sending her back to the underworld, ensuring that he will be forever without her. It is Juliet’s only option upon waking to find her love dead—to join him in death because living would be a worse kind of separation.