In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

  “Or shattered parents,” Frank said. “But still. A woman’s life.” He shook his head at his plate.

  “Frank, you were wrong to do what you did. We both know that. But by another token, I don’t know any of us who hasn’t been in a similar position. And all those guys—Grant, Walter, John—they all drove that night. It doesn’t excuse what you did. And with Nick, Jesus.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “She had no business being out in the middle of the road either,” Karen said, rubbing her hands together to warm them. “If it had been me, it would have happened just the same. And it did. In my mind I was in the car, I did it.”

  “And I feel guilty about that. About what I’ve forced you to do, the risk I forced you to take because of my stupidity and bad luck.”

  “You didn’t force me, Frank. And it was an accident.”

  They each had a few more bites, a sip of tea.

  Karen looked up and waited for eye contact. “I’m sorry I said what I did about you not being able to leave me and what it implied. I didn’t mean to threaten you. I was angry and frightened.”

  He stopped eating but stared at the pieces of chicken he was moving around among some peanuts and brown sauce. “It’s true, though. There’s no denying it.”

  “But I would never. You would never.”

  “We’ve seen once-happy couples do some pretty bitter things to one another.”

  “But not us.”

  “No, not us,” Frank said. “But you weren’t wrong: regardless of how the rest of our lives play out, in this we are locked together forever.”

  She reached for his hand. “I’ve never wanted anything else.” But she released it and looked away.

  “What is it, sweetheart?”

  “It’s not just us, though. Dan Jeffries knows.”

  Frank leaned back and sighed.

  “Frank, he knows.”

  “He said we didn’t give him any evidence.”

  “But he could now get evidence. He could press investigators to look harder into the case. What if a detective went back to Len and Melissa? They’d be forced to admit that they didn’t actually see us at the party. That could open up our whole story. He’s a friend of Grant’s. Jesus. I just thought of this. Grant may know.”

  Karen liked Grant, perhaps best of all Frank’s high school buddies, and trusted him completely. But he was a reporter for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, the city’s main paper, his wife a photographer there. Grant asked questions for a living.

  Frank said, “Grant doesn’t know. The newspaper account said that you were driving. I think I even may have mentioned this to the guys. Yes! I did. I told them I had no constraints because you were picking up Nick. I even told him how generous it was of you because you actually like those things, so it’s plausible we did go. And we’re not talking about it and no one is going to ask us to talk about it.”

  “But if there’s an investigation, our story is going to unravel.”

  She put down her fork, no longer hungry.

  “We have to be smart, Karen,” he said. He reached for her hand, and she looked up, her eyes brimming with fear. “Remember what Dan told you. He told you this to help not to hurt.”

  “But what if he changes his mind? What if he gets righteous and feels that as a duty-bound officer of the court he has to do something?”

  “Sweetheart. We have no choice. One hundred percent, remember?”

  *

  The rest of the day seemed almost normal. Karen found comfort in folding clothes and getting the checking account up to date, as things had piled up during the lead-up to the holidays. Frank scoured the kitchen till it seemed all but unused, then straightened the living room, still littered with bits of wrapping paper, errant ribbon, an ashy hearth, and more pine needles that fell increasingly from the tree. In the evening they ate some soup with a glass of wine, some bread, watched the news they’d recorded earlier. They were even able to let The Daily Show divert them for another half hour.

  They’d gotten some good news at the end of the day from their criminal attorney. Sharon Talbott was a tall, slender woman with broad shoulders, long, abundant auburn hair, freckles, and runner’s calves. Tough but without being masculine, Karen thought. The large window of Sharon’s office on the thirty-second floor looked out across downtown Cleveland toward Lake Erie and gave them the sense of competence and success. Frank and Karen had appreciated her frank demeanor, the clipped, definitive way she spoke. She had felt pretty sure that, barring anything unforeseen, Karen wouldn’t do any time, especially if she could get the case moved out of county court into city. She was on good terms with the county prosecutor, said he was a reasonable guy whose office wouldn’t make a case of this. He had political ambitions, she said, and this wouldn’t do him any good, prosecuting someone like Karen, and could make him look bad if he lost, trying to prosecute this upstanding member of the community who already had to bear such a burden. Sharon’s assistant had called to say that, indeed, the arraignment had been moved from the County Courthouse to a court at City Hall. Sharon had been good to her word, and they wouldn’t see her again until Friday, the day after tomorrow, at 2 p.m.

  “I’m absolutely drained,” Karen said when the show was over. Frank glanced at the time, only a little after nine.

  “I’m feeling the same. I’ll join you.”

  As he undressed for bed, Karen descended the stairs in her flannel nightdress. The chilly upstairs had made her think of the bathrobe: plush, sage-colored terrycloth, a gift from Frank she’d opened on that somber, going-through-the-motions Christmas morning. So strange how life insists on going on around you no matter what. She turned on a living room lamp. She lifted the new robe out of its box and shook some green needles out of it. She put it on and hugged herself in it to enjoy its warmth and softness.

  When she reached beneath the lampshade, her gaze caught on the photograph she’d taken of Frank in their first apartment. He sat shirtless at his computer, their first computer, some nineteen years earlier, a trail of cigarette smoke rising from the round glass ashtray at his left. He had been typing so intently he hadn’t noticed Karen and her camera. She lifted the image, which she’d put in a silver frame, to regard the handsome young man she’d married. His long hair, tanned shoulders, so slender back then. Such lofty goals they’d had.

  They’d met at a party in Rhode Island just after she’d finished grad school. She walked into a kitchen at the party of someone she didn’t know, brought by a friend, and saw him leaning against the counter, a beer in one hand and grinning at her. When their glances met, she felt her heart skip, while his grin fell away, then returned even brighter. Had he seen her blush in the bright kitchen? A flush began at her chest and rose in a wave up her neck and across her cheeks so strongly she could feel the heat. He introduced himself immediately. Their conversation lasted all night by the swimming pool outside and ended in sex. That in itself was so unlike her; she’d never in her life had sex with someone she’d just met. Never. And yet it had been so swift and natural and lovely that it left her breathless and, the next day, giddy. Not a trace of regret, only the sense of amazing good fortune. She had almost not gone to the party, had tried to beg off feigning fatigue, but her friend had been insistent. If she hadn’t given in, she’d likely never have met Frank. With school done, she’d planned to return home in a few days. Now it was an evening that she would carry happily in her mind forever, and one that directed the rest of her life and his.

  That first summer living together was a gorgeous idyll; they never tired of the other’s company and their bodies never stopped hungering, could never be fully quenched. One night at a bar, during a thunderstorm, they made out so passionately and uninhibitedly that an actual boat captain, or so he said (he was well into the Dark & Stormys), interrupted their affections and asked if he could marry them. The drunken captain had been so competent with the ceremonial language that the whole bar watched. Frank never forgot the day (it was the day befor
e Memorial Day, easy to remember) and took Karen to dinner to celebrate their “wedding” the following year, which she thought was a hoot the first time and tired the second time—until, before dessert, he proposed, actually got down on his knee in a Manhattan restaurant, like the actor in Moonstruck, their favorite movie, and offered her a ring. That first summer of unbridled, passionate love was unsustainable, a summer spent on beaches and on friends’ sailboats, and in bed, allowing themselves leisure after the successful completion of their degrees. In the fall they moved to New York City. He was going to become a writer, capital W, and she would paint. Karen waited tables and Frank found work as an editorial assistant at a small academic publishing house.

  After eighteen months, their studio apartment on Mott Street in Little Italy had lost its romance for Karen; the bathtub in the kitchen no longer charmed her; finding that ice had formed in the kitchen sink on winter mornings depressed her; generally, the corrosive effects of penury in the crowded city ate away at her. She begged Frank to move, arguing that they’d be much better off where the cost of living was better, near not her roots in Boston (too expensive) but his, if he wished, in Cleveland, an eminently affordable place to live where he still had the support of his mom and dad and many friends.

  In Cleveland, they’d gotten by on odd jobs and freelance work for several more years, but Frank’s literary agent didn’t have any luck selling his novel (the second he’d written), and Karen grew disenchanted with her work acquiring art for a local gallery. It became clear to her that if they were going to have children, they’d have to change. She was thirty-two and he thirty. When she approached him with the idea of actively trying to get pregnant, he resisted, even though they’d both entered into this marriage agreeing that this was part of the long-term plan. Yet how, he asked her, could they possibly have a child given their precarious finances? To which she countered: if they waited till they were financially secure, they might never have a baby. And what if she had difficulty conceiving, she added. Some couples try for years. They lived life for four months with the baby issue as the continuous current separating them, until at last, to her joy, he consented. Three months later, she was pregnant. Frank faced their situation head on, bought secondhand business clothes and hit the pavement. It didn’t take long for him to land a job at an ad firm; he was charming, smart, and talented and the job market was good.

  By the time Nick was born, they had health insurance and a steady, if modest, income. Two years later, they were able to put a down payment on a small house, and after ten years, once Nick was old enough that Karen too could work (teaching art to high school girls), they were able to upgrade to this more elegant brick colonial. Frank had tried to keep writing fiction, but he found he couldn’t write ad copy all day and come home at night and write more, certainly not once they had Nick. Karen knew that Frank was happy and comfortable, loved her and Nick, but that part of him resented what in uncommon moments of frustration he called “this burgher’s existence,” with no goals or ambitions beyond being able to afford Nick’s private school tuition, save for college, and meet all their monthly payments. She knew he had given up his own ambitions for her. How many novelists succeed by age thirty? Almost none. He wasn’t a failure, as he sometimes thought of himself, despite his prominence in the advertising world here, his solid creative work for his firm, and exciting and nerve-racking changes underway in the new digital era. If anyone should feel the failure, it was she. But she didn’t. She was content as an art teacher and mom. Frank just hadn’t given his ambition enough time. He was still developing when she’d asked for a child. He gave ambition up so she could have a baby, and this fact seemed especially and painfully acute right now.

  She smiled sadly at her young husband’s image, set the frame down, and turned off the light.

  *

  Karen rolled onto her side toward him, hugging the pillow. “You can tell me that you love me and that you always will,” she said.

  He rolled onto his side to face her and said, “I love you and I always will.” He kissed her. “Forever.” He ran his hands up and down her leg. She wore nothing under her flannel gown. She knew she was lucky to have remained so smooth and firm and trim after childbirth and into her forties. He rolled onto his back.

  “Mmm,” she said. “Why did you stop?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Didn’t want to start anything I couldn’t finish.”

  “Who says you have to finish?”

  “I’m a guy. Guys have to finish. And of course, if we don’t that’s worse.”

  Karen knew the uncommon stressfulness of the week would make him even more self-conscious about performing. She noticed that he’d become erratic over the past couple of years, a slow diminishing of urgency, of frequency. Perhaps this was the reason the sex was less satisfying for her, or that since it was less satisfying for her, it made it that way for him. But then their sex life had become so routine that she knew this was part of the issue. They made love once a week, on Sunday night, and it was always the same, she always on her back, coming less and less often but urging him to carry on without her—she was fine, it was okay, she enjoyed it. She wasn’t frustrated—it was what it was. They were aging. This was normal, wasn’t it?

  Sometimes it could be twice a week if they went out to dinner and felt romantic afterward and not tired. She remembered when they used to smoke weed in bed and then the sex was especially powerful, but that stopped with the birth of Nick; even when he was sleeping at a friend’s, they feared they’d be called (as they once were when Nick awoke at a friend’s, crying, and with a fever)—what if they were stoned and got that call again. So that was the end of the pot smoking. She didn’t even know how one would procure it anymore.

  Karen snuggled into him, massaging him through his boxers. She began to stroke, having unleashed him through the fly of his boxers, then stronger until he was fully hard, though Frank himself was unresponsive. Frozen, in fact. Had it been that long since she’d initiated sex? She had for decades simply followed his lead.

  “My God,” he said, “where and when did you learn to do that?”

  “Cosmo,” she said. “Does it feel good?”

  “Um, yeah, can’t you tell?” And then, “You read Cosmo?”

  “The girls at school sometimes leave copies lying around. Subtle protests.” She continued her gentle ministrations. “Do you like this? You’re not moving.”

  “I’m paralyzed.”

  She clutched the shaft in her hand. She put her thumb on the tip. She smiled at him. “It’s like a joystick.”

  He snorted. “Very much so.” Then, as she began to work it, he said, with some breathlessness, “Considerably more, actually.” He appeared to her as though he were flattened to the mattress as steel to a magnet.

  “Oh?” she said softly.

  “At this moment, it feels like the very core of my being.”

  “I like that,” she said.

  “You have no idea.”

  She stopped, held onto the shaft, squeezed hard.

  He took a deep breath but was otherwise immobilized. “Sweetheart, with what you have in your hand, you could walk me out onto the roof and send me off it and I would be utterly powerless to resist.”

  “Really,” she said, smiling. “Hmm, I do like that.” She rose to her knees and removed his shorts. She resumed her grip and straddled his thighs. “I have complete power over you.”

  “At this moment, it is absolute.”

  “I did not know this. I think I need to appreciate this … power a little more.” With her hand and arm, she swept her voluminous locks back over her head and descended. As soon as she had taken him into her mouth, smelled the musky-sweat scent, appealing in its animal uniqueness, the strangeness of fellating him made her realize that it had been years since she’d done it. She should do better, she thought, now happily engaged in the project, so new did it seem.

  As his breathing intensified, she stopped abruptly and said, “Don’t come.” Then
she smiled, a bit evilly, as if embracing this power for its own sake, and said, “I want the … core … of your being inside me.”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  She lifted her nightgown over her head.

  “Stop,” he said when her arms were raised. “Stay just like that.” The streetlights flooded in through the partially opened blinds. Light and shadow striped her torso, pronounced the shape of her breasts, and she looked down at them, not only substantial but perfectly shaped, round and plump with large, taut nipples pointing invitingly upward. They had always been part of her life, since they arrived in sixth grade, all through high school and college, the looking. And it rarely bothered her. But over the years, she’d become so concerned they’d eventually sag and stretch, she now corseted them in rigid bras, so much so that she no longer got those looks. They remained still so uncommonly youthful, so beautiful in this light, everything kind of bluish with just the faint blush of pink nipple and aureole.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said. He gripped her waist and she, tossing her gown to the floor, leaned onto her arms to kiss him, stroking his chest with her breasts. He rolled her onto her back, peeled off his shirt, entered her, and began with customary slow back and forth. She smiled and closed her eyes and tilted her head back to expose the full length of her thin pale neck. “God, your cock is so hard,” she said.

  He literally halted.

  “Why did you stop?” she had to say in order for him to resume.

  “Just surprised,” he said and continued. “It’s just not like you. You never.”

  “But you liked it, I can tell.”

  Now he was confused, she felt his hard-on fading, and she opened her eyes halfway and clenched his buttocks. She smiled at him and said, “Fuck me hard.”

  And he did like it, and it did in fact work.

  “Deeper,” she whispered. And now, not really of her own volition, said, “Fuck me. Harder.” And he did, hard until a deep orgasm spread from her cervix to her fingers and toes and nose. She clearly and loudly came, issuing guttural cries, sounds even an actress would be hard-pressed to credibly duplicate—she couldn’t help it, and didn’t care. They were alone in the house. She breathed heavily. And he slowed gradually and then rolled off of her.