“I thought you were.”
“I was the realist, actually,” she said. “Don’t you remember?”
“I guess not.”
Her life was perfect, she told him, except that it had taken her too long to get pregnant.
“Two miscarriages,” she said. “That was a drag. I got really blue after each one.”
“I remember how you got blue. You got real blue. Some weeks I could barely go near you, I remember.”
“Not true, you’d bring me chamomile tea in bed.”
“And it would make you cry!”
Sally laughed loudly. “I know, terrible!”
“And then you’d stay up for forty hours writing an epic poem that wasn’t due for a month.”
“All that morbid poetry I pressed on you, trying to be Sylvia Plath.”
“You always got yourself out of it.”
“Didn’t have a choice. And after the pregnancies I learned to keep the blueness in its own private room,” she said. “Its own private suite, in fact. Walk-in closet and everything.”
“High thread counts on the sheets?” he asked.
“The best.”
“Eight hundred?”
“See, that’s just like you to know something like that,” she said.
“I’m a journalist. A hazard of the profession is to remember things you no longer have any use for…. So after the miscarriages, did you stay in the room long?”
“I’d order room service. We’d have coffee, me and Blue, and when guests arrived I’d close the door behind me. Lock it from the outside.”
“How was Edward with it?”
“A saint.”
“Good.”
“It was his mother who was the problem. Elizabeth. My mother-in-law? She started treating me differently.” Scott squinted, not fully understanding. “Hard to say how, just kind of colder. Like the suit that she’d picked out for her son wasn’t the one she’d thought she’d ordered from Brooks Brothers.”
Sally leaned back in her chair. “But then we never really got on exactly swimmingly. I’m a Jew. They’re classic WASPs, cocktail hour and everything. They name their dogs after liquor.”
Scott laughed.
“When their last Lab, Brandy, died, they got a new one and called her Old Pale.”
“As in VSOP?” Scott laughed. “You always make me laugh.”
“Almost,” she said.
She looked away, took a sip from her tea. “So. Elizabeth. Drove me crazy. Always putting her hand on my belly and saying, ‘There’s a bun in the oven.’ Stupid phrase. And why do people think that once a woman is pregnant, they’re suddenly allowed to touch her? I wasn’t even showing!”
Scott looked into his glass, feeling bad; how many round bellies he’d touched without asking. He’d never thought—he used to be proud when people had pressed their palms to Martha’s nine-months-pregnant belly, as if it were some special achievement that others might adore. He wondered if Martha resented it; she hadn’t seemed to.
Sally said, “‘Hands off, bitch!’ That wasn’t exactly going to help the situation.”
“No,” Scott said, grinning.
“So when I said, ‘Hey, Betty, that bun? It came out half-baked. Not even a quarter baked, actually.’”
“You said that?”
“Yes, I was pissed. And because Edward obviously couldn’t bring himself to tell his mother. They’re such tightwads with the emotions. So I said it, and Edward choked on his martini, and his mother blanched. She looked at Edward and he got all formal with her about the facts. And that was that. Not another word. She only wanted to know from him whether we could try again, anything preventing that? Once they knew that there was no reason why not, it was never mentioned again.”
“Not even an ‘Are you okay, Sally?”
“Nope.”
“Sounds so cold,” Scott said.
“I think it’s just the way they are. She’s actually all right, we get along okay, I guess, and she’s devoted to Edward, her one and only.”
“But your two miscarriages.”
“Yeah, I made Edward write a letter to his parents after the second one.”
“Really.”
“I couldn’t go through that again. So he wrote, and I slipped into my private suite and stayed quite a while. After that one.”
He reached across the table to squeeze her hand and she smiled, sweet and sad, at him.
“How did you get out of the room?”
“I don’t know honestly. Comes a time when you just have to, well, sally forth!” And she laughed and he laughed.
He couldn’t remember laughing as much in so long.
He said, “And now you have Arthur.”
“Yes, I do, my perfect little man.”
When she said this, Scott felt suddenly warm inside—his smile on the outside turning up in the deep inside because his old friend was clearly so happy.
“He really is perfect,” Sally said.
“Of course he is.”
“No, diagnosed,” Sally said. “When he was born, I asked the doctor if he was okay. I always expect the worst. But the doctor, this was the next day when our pediatrician came in to examine him, I asked if everything was okay, expecting something along the lines of ‘I’m not really liking the sound of his heart murmur,’ but instead the doctor locked his eyes on mine and said, ‘He is perfect.’”
“Like the werewolf’s hair,” Scott said.
“Ha!” she said, “Warren Zevon, exactly!”
Another of their favorites from that time, that time when songs felt so important.
“So that is an official diagnosis,” Scott said. “Perfection.”
“Official.”
As if on cue, this was when the perfect child had appeared in the kitchen and Sally had remarked on the time and lifted her perfect child into her lap.
“Hey,” Sally said, reaching for a juice-filled sippy cup. “Last time we talked, forever ago, you told me you had an idea for a novel. Did you ever write it?”
“Still an idea. I may one day. Too busy making ends meet for now.”
“Don’t wait,” she said.
“I know what you’re going to say next.”
“Then hear it again, dearest of old friends: ‘Don’t wait. Don’t think it’s morning when it’s late afternoon.’”
This was from another book she’d given him way back at the University of Brighton. He knew the passage well.
*
The Hotel Gansevoort in the Meatpacking District lay a few blocks south of Chelsea Market, which housed the Food Network. Scott was in town to interview its executives and producers for the magazine Fast Company about the business of food as entertainment. He didn’t think much of the subject, which was partly why his editor had assigned him the story. He preferred more straightforward business and environmental reporting. He’d taken a long walk after saying good-bye to Sally, feeling light and refreshed. He sat at the hotel bar with a glass of white wine, a chicken Caesar salad, and a folder of magazine and newspaper clippings. Between bites, he slogged through an article in Gourmet magazine about the chef Emeril Lagasse; apparently the signal moment when food stepped over into entertainment was Lagasse’s merging of the cooking show format with a Tonight Show format, complete with a band.
Scott had initially wished he hadn’t taken this assignment, but with his book proposal to write about Key West—that uncommon community and the environmental issues it faced—still unsold, he’d had no choice. Now he was glad he had; he’d run into his old friend and had spent a lovely afternoon with her. Always better to get out of the house, better to say yes despite his inclination to say no, to hole up in his office. He was now very happy to have taken this assignment. He’d do an especially good job on it now; in a superstitious way that annoyed him, he felt he owed it to the story that had reunited him with his old friend, as if it had somehow been cosmically engineered. It was just good karma to do an especially attentive job here.
&nbs
p; Scott questioned why he always ordered the chicken Caesar salad, which was never very good. He’d ordered it a hundred times and never thought to question it before. He supposed he liked that it was always pretty much the same no matter where you were. He was a creature of routine and predetermination.
Back in his room, he called Martha at home in Cleveland, after she’d have fed the kids and walked the dog.
“Quiet, Chekhov,” Martha said after saying hello. Their golden Lab was a barker. “I swear, he knows it’s you when you call.”
“I doubt that.” Scott thought the dog not very bright as dogs go, but the family did cherish the creature. “How was your day, my love?”
“You don’t want to know.”
True, but he said, “Of course I do.”
“I spent half the morning trying to get our Time Warner bill down. Now half the channels we wanted we don’t get. So they’re sending someone out tomorrow. Who knows when. But I have to be here. Finished paying bills. Worked. Groceries. Picked up Will from camp. Then Susan. She watches too much television.”
Will and Susan were both enjoying the last weeks of summer camp. Martha, a writer as well, had given up her newspaper job to have the kids and had just in the last year been picking up assignments she could write from home—for parenting magazines, health columns.
A familiar silence ensued, one they were both easy with.
“You mentioned bills. How are we?”
“The same. Fine. For now.”
“Right.”
“How did your day go?”
“Fine,” he said.
After a long silence, he said, “I ran into Sally Forth on the street.”
“Really? How is she?”
“She’s great. She and Edward finally had a long-yearned-for baby.”
“That’s wonderful.”
Silence.
“Okay,” he said. “Well.”
“I’m going to watch some television and go to bed,” she said.
“That sounds like a good idea.”
Silence.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then.”
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too, sweetheart.”
After he hung up, he tried to read more articles in preparation for his interviews, but he couldn’t concentrate. He felt tired from the day but it was too early to sleep. His mind returned to the pleasure of the afternoon. Scott thought of the smell of Sally’s hair when he’d hugged her good-bye and kissed her cheek, little Arthur on her hip. So unchanged … He nearly swooned from the memories that the smell returned to him, and with such immediacy. He hoped she hadn’t seen—she did give him a look, but an inscrutable one. She said, “Give me a call when you’re back in town next time, okay?” He promised.
Scott decided to return to the bar. Perhaps a whiskey would relax him enough to focus for a little longer on the stories he needed to be up on for tomorrow’s interviews.
*
The bar was crowded and loud with conversation. He squeezed into the single vacant seat, and it felt good not to be alone in his own head up in the hotel room. He gave up trying to read and signaled for the bartender.
“Another?”
“Yes, but a different one this time,” he said.
He scanned the bottles. “Make it the Macallan,” he said with what he felt was appropriate grandiosity. He’d always loved the arrogance of the “the.”
He sighed deeply. Sally could right then and there be the girl she’d been in Bristol, where they’d loved to stroll the Atlantic coastline. They’d met that fall of their junior year abroad, her long hair blowing in the cool, autumn sea air.
The bartender asked Scott if he’d like another, and he looked at his glass in surprise. It was empty. He hadn’t remembered even pausing to consider the flavor.
“Yes, but maybe something peaty this time.”
“We have Laphroaig.”
“Perfect.”
On the train from London to Scotland with Sally that one time, when they’d entered into Scotland, a new ticket taker walked the aisles, conversing with the passengers and marking tickets with hole punches. A jovial, large, dark-haired man in a blue uniform and cap. When he took Sally’s ticket to mark it, he spoke a full paragraph, a long collection of sentences, laughed like a man who enjoyed good food and drink, then carried on his way. Scott looked to Sally and she covered her mouth to conceal laughter and snorted hard through her nose.
“What?” Scott asked. “What did he say?”
“Scott, I have no clue! But it was English! It was the English language. And I didn’t understand a word he said!” She rested back in her seat, held his hand, and said, “I am going to love Scotland, I just know it.”
What a fun trip that had been—though neither of them had ever been so cold. Perhaps February wasn’t the right month to venture so far north after all. Sally insisted that the best time to visit any city was off-season—that’s when you could get to know a place because you met the real people.
And another thing she insisted on: they would not get a room. They would sleep in the train station if need be. They were both poor, and travel was not the time for rooms anyway. This would save money, and she loved the romance of tramping. This became an increasingly unappealing prospect as they walked shivering along dark streets. They found a bar whose windows were steamy and they hustled inside. Sally very quickly made friends with a couple their age, students at the University of Edinburgh as it turned out. These people, Scott was relieved to find, they could understand. The young man had curly dark hair and his girlfriend had very blonde, very short hair and crystal blue eyes. He had asked where Scott and Sally were staying.
“We don’t have a place,” Scott had said. “She wants to sleep in the train station.”
“And that is what we’ll do,” Sally said.
“Are you mad?” the new acquaintance said.
Scott only tilted his head at Sally.
“That’s nonsense. You’ll stay in our room.”
“No,” Sally said.
“Are you serious? Thank you!” Scott said.
Sally sighed and turned away.
Scott smiled at their new friends.
The young woman said, “Sally, don’t you think you’ll be a wee bit cold?”
“Do you fancy whiskey?” the young man said.
“Of course!” Scott said.
“I have a bottle of the best, my favorite, anyway. Much discussed here.”
And soon they were in the dorm room of these two wonderful Scots, drinking Glenmorangie. The conversation went on so long that the young man finally asked if they’d like a coffee, which seemed pleasantly contrary to Scott. When they finished the coffee, the happy couple stood and said, “Okay, then, we’re off. Have a good trip.”
“What?”
“You’re staying here, I’ll stay in her room,” their new friend said.
Scott almost wept with gratitude. He tried to express this. They were utter strangers. Scott was undone by the generosity but more by the trust. The dorm room was a tiny single, and he had been wondering how they would all fit, but he hardly cared as the room was so warm and the whiskey so delicious and the coffee so soothing. Sally embraced them both and said, “You have to be the sweetest people in all of the United Kingdom.”
“Cheerio,” he said and the girl had said, “Ha a guid rin.”
Sally turned to Scott, covering her smile, then said, “I love Scotland.”
Scott finished his Laphroaig and signaled the bartender. He asked if they had Glenmorangie, and they did.
“Do you think they’d mind if we fucked?” Sally had asked.
“Sally, I don’t know if I feel comfortable with that.”
“Why? I’ll be on top. We won’t mess up the sheets. You like me on top.”
“I do! But it’s been such a long day, and these sheets are so warm and cozy.” What was this material—flannel? Flannel sheets, he’d never experienced this.
“Okay, you win this time.” She kissed him and she turned on her side and he spooned into her warm, naked body and they fell happily asleep.
“One more Glenmorangie, please,” Scott said.
But the bartender said, “Sure?”
Scott hesitated only a moment but said, “Yes, please, but then the check.”
Was he already slurring? He was once an eager and ebullient drinker of all beers and wines and spirits. But no longer. He and Martha had both tapered off considerably after Susan was born. He had a cocktail on the weekend, but rarely if ever during the week. A glass of wine with dinner most nights but that was it.
The bartender poured the second Glenmorangie.
Scott lifted his whiskey and inhaled its fumes. He sipped. It wasn’t as he’d remembered even the last one to be. He tasted again. It seemed to have turned. He wondered if the company had been eaten by a conglomerate and done something to cut costs. It wasn’t what they’d drunk in Scotland, and it was no longer his favorite single malt.
He struggled over the check. First how much tip to leave. Then the addition. He scribbled out the first effort and rewrote what he thought was the correct number. He scratched his room number and stepped off the bar stool, composed himself, then concentrated on walking straight. He found the elevators, made it inside. He walked the long, dark corridors to his corner room, but when he reached the door he failed to stop completely and slammed into the wall.
“Sideways gravity,” he said, repeating something Sally had once said when they were stumbling home from the pub, laughing, drunk on scrumpy, the West Country cider they both loved.
Inside, Scott kicked off his shoes, tossed his blazer over the desk chair, and fell facedown on the still-made bed. When his head stopped spinning, he’d undress. That wouldn’t be for several hours, as it happened, and upon waking in the lighted room, it was a good ten seconds before he could place where he was.
He struggled through the morning interviews with the fog of his hangover making him slow and ineffective. The effects of the city, compounded by his headache, made him anxious to leave. He arrived at LaGuardia four hours before his flight, hoping he could catch an earlier one back to Cleveland.
In Short Measures Page 28
