He got up, drank water, and tried to return to sleep but he could not. His heart raced. His breathing became quick and shallow. He felt an urgency to get back to Martha, to their small rented apartment in Rhinebeck. He dressed, folded the sheet and blanket, and wrote a note apologizing that he had to make a surprise departure. All was well, he just needed to get back upstate pronto. Thanks for all.
Once safely on the West Side Highway in the gathering light, the pressure eased. Scott tried to understand the nature of his attack. It was his new life as a parent. All these things … He would find his car gone—stolen or towed, irresponsibly parked. He worried about Susan, who had a cold when he drove off. He felt guilty abandoning Martha with their infant. He had work to do. The pressure in his chest seemed to ease with each mile north along the Taconic Parkway, but then the oil light went on and the engine overheated. By the time he reached a gas station, the car was smoking. He prayed it was only a lack of oil. He dreaded taking their twelve-year-old Vovlo to the mechanic because it always needed something they could scarcely afford.
*
Scott studied the dates on his legal pad. That had been the last he’d seen Sally—fall 1996—till this most recent reunion. Her form, vanishing in the white terrycloth robe. He had no contact with her for five years after that odd, abrupt departure. None. He thought of her any time a news story from Paris or London or Scotland came up. When certain songs played—“Melissa” from Eat a Peach, or anything by the Doors or Simon and Garfunkel—he thought of her. He thought of her once the hard cider market opened up in the United States because they’d drunk so much scrumpy in England. He thought of her whenever he saw a volume of Emily Dickinson. But these thoughts were like flashes, fire and powder, followed by pleasant smoke quickly dispersing in the breezes of his increasingly lucky life. He’d reached her by phone after 9/11 to ensure that she and Edward were fine. They’d caught each other up. And now this past trip, the chance meeting on West Fourteenth.
When they had spoken by phone four years ago, he’d been toying with an idea for a novel and had described it to her then. She had been enthusiastic about it at the time and encouraged him to write it. He almost started it, but he couldn’t in good conscience spend time on a venture one had to presume would deliver little if any income. Some of his books sold well enough to earn out their advances, and Martha would bound into his office with a royalty check that had miraculously, it seemed, arrived in time to get them out of a financial pinch. But he couldn’t justify writing fiction with a wife (who’d given up her work), two kids, and a mortgage on a house that, really, was more than they needed. He needed all the writing artillery available for his journalistic work.
Scott tore the legal sheet out of his pad, with the dates written in a column below her name, Sally, underscored: 1983–84, 1990, 1996, post-9/11, and now July 2005. Scott folded it, reached into a drawer for a folder, slipped the sheet in, and labeled the folder’s tab “Sally.” He then filed it in its own green file folder. Scott was an aggressive organizer and filer and backer-upper, having once misplaced notes for a long story for Esquire. He thought one more time about her, smiled at her contented life with Edward and her perfect son.
Scott was now able to focus on his article for Fast Company and food as an entertainment business. He hoped his book editor would buy his proposal to write about Key West and give him the money he needed to write about that uncommon place. If that didn’t go through for enough money, he didn’t know what he would do.
They were perpetually broke, it seemed. Living from scant book advance to the next freelance piece.
They always got by, though, and would continue to do so. With this, he thought of Sally’s admonition from just three days earlier, in her kitchen, with Arthur in her lap. Don’t wait. Don’t wait. At forty-two, he was, as Sally would have put it, half-baked. When he was fully baked, he didn’t want to look back and realize that he hadn’t even tried to do what he had once most wanted.
So, that night, after reading to Will and saying goodnight to Susan, who was currently deep into Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and kissing Martha, already in bed and turning pages in a book, he went downstairs.
He was a creature of routine, and she’d called out, “Not coming to bed?”
He said, “I have some writing to do.”
Then he did something he rarely did: he poured himself two shots of an expensive bourbon he’d bought to have on hand for guests. Last Christmas someone had given them a silicone ice tray to make extra large, square ice cubes. He had filled it, but now they had shrunk. He used one anyway and refilled the tray so that they would be fresh tomorrow if he found that he could actually get words down tonight.
He wrote the first three hundred words of the story he had described to Sally four years earlier, a story that had been unconsciously ripening. The words came easily, as though his brain had already been writing it on its own in its own secret quarters. He had put on Mozart’s Requiem because that was the mood of the dark love story he’d conceived. When the last of the bourbon was gone, and the water from the ice cube had melted and been consumed as well, Scott stopped writing.
For the next nine months, five nights a week when the family’s schedule allowed, and when holidays or travel didn’t intervene, Scott sat at his desk at 10 p.m. with a bourbon, played Mozart, and wrote until the glass was dry. He could usually draw it out for ninety minutes, by which time he’d have five hundred new words. He had so little hope for his story, and felt so guilty about spending his free time on it, that even in his own mind he referred to it as his “secret project.”
He reread the Reynolds Price novel Sally had quoted from, A Generous Man, so that he could find the “Don’t wait” passage; he’d forgotten that it was sexual in nature:
He took his hand back to his own fat crotch, cupped the fullness there. “This won’t stir a warm rice pudding, not now, no more. Remember this, son. It won’t cost you nothing but it cost Rooster Pomeroy most of the sweetness life can afford—don’t wait, don’t wait. Don’t think it’s morning when it’s late afternoon.”
The passage led him to find an old high school poetry textbook to reread Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” This would work its way into the story he wanted to tell, he knew.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust
Once, two weeks into his secret project, Martha, in nightgown and bathrobe, ventured to his third-floor office with its oddly shaped spaces and slanted ceilings, to ask what was he was doing up here. He stopped the music as though he didn’t want to share even that.
“Just some personal writing,” he said.
She frowned. “Is it something you can share?”
“I hope so. When, or if, I can finish it.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Of course.”
“Okay,” she said, with a look of concern.
PART II
In 2009, Scott returned to New York to meet with his agent and his new editor. He had been with the same house and same editor for all of his nonfiction books, but that editor was unable to convince her superiors that they could successfully publish Scott’s fiction. However, his agent was able to sell the short novel about love and work to a small literary publisher.
He had emailed Sally hoping he could see her and tell her the good news, but he didn’t hear back from her. It had been five years since they’d shared iced tea in her kitchen. Arthur would be eight. Scott had been worried—why wouldn’t she respond?—but he didn’t pursue it beyond the one email.
Life had become busy. Susan, now a high school senior, was in the midst of searching for colleges, and Martha carted her to various states looking for a good fit. The previous spring the two had gone as far south as Georgia, followed by se
cond trip to the East Coast. Scott remained home, hoping Susan would stay in state at a university they could afford. When she was away, it was up to him to tend the house and dog, get Will to and from school, make dinners. When Martha returned, he would have one trip or another that couldn’t be avoided, and Martha would take over the house.
Will, at fifteen, stood nearly as tall as Scott. He was a good kid, but the duties of parenting always threw new challenges at him and Martha—most recently a drinking incident they hoped they’d taken care of properly. Will’s grades were Bs and better, his friends were good kids, so they didn’t worry too much about him. And besides, the endless driving, the juggling of two cars (Susan now needed one of them), school, sports, made life uncommonly busy.
All of which was why he hadn’t worked harder to stay in touch with Sally until he reflected on it much later.
It had taken Scott four years first to finish and then to revise and revise again his novel, and then sell it, and then wait eleven months for its actual publication, while continuing to write freelance articles and nonfiction books. He currently studied nitrogen, which had a complex relationship with the world in terms of explosives, the health of soil, the poisoning of rivers, and the health of one’s body, and had begun the actual writing of the book, the reporting work mainly done.
Thus it would be three additional years till he (along with Martha) reconnected with Sally, summer 2012, seven years after he’d last seen her at the corner of West Fourteenth Street. He reached out by email, asking if this address still worked. It did, she responded, she’d been using it for years, and this time she included her cell phone number. He texted that he and Martha would be in town; he missed her and hoped they could reconnect.
Her response by text worried him. “Yes, I’ll be in town then. Would love to see you. Have I got a story to tell you.” He’d texted back immediately “Good or bad?” but she hadn’t responded.
*
So much had happened in the three years since the last trip to New York when he’d reached out to her. His novel had gone virtually unreviewed—but favorably where it had been, such as in his hometown paper—and managed to sell a little more than five thousand copies, not embarrassing, but the kind of number that would make the sale of a second novel more difficult than the first. Scott didn’t care. He had written it because he had wanted to, from the pressure within, from Sally’s push, and he had done so without hope.
Happily, one of those five thousand copies sold had been given as a Christmas gift to a young executive at Paramount Pictures, who had passed it on to a superior, who grew interested in acquiring it. That executive subsequently moved to the Weinstein Company, working directly under Harvey Weinstein, who became interested in the project. A bidding war between Paramount and TWC ended favorably for Scott. Scott’s agent warned him that the $50,000 should be considered found money and not to expect more because this happened all the time and that the movie would not likely be made (but in that event, he would make a considerable sum). Scott pretended to agree but secretly held his breath. He emailed his mentor, a novelist who taught at Princeton, that the rights to his novel had been sold, to which his mentor sent back a brief, dispiriting email: “That’s nice, Scott. Send me an invitation to the opening.” But Scott would never forget standing in his foyer, holding the nine-by-twelve envelope with his agent’s return address. He had called to Martha and asked if she wanted to see something. She did. And so, a month after the movie was green-lighted, they opened the envelope and, paper-clipped to a formal statement of the option money less the agent’s 15 percent, was a check for $382,500. They must have stared at if for a full minute. It seemed unreal. He still didn’t quite believe it, even as he stared at the check. He’d never seen a check so large or even close to it. Lack of money had dogged them their whole married life. He and Martha were so nervous about it, they both went to the bank to deposit it. They took separate cars in case one of them got hit. They waited in line with their deposit slip and unthinkably huge check. The cashier didn’t even blink. Scott took a photo of the deposit receipt before putting it into his wallet.
He and Martha treated themselves to an expensive lunch immediately after, with a pricey bottle of wine, then returned to their empty house—Susan had chosen nearby Oberlin College, Will was a junior in high school—and had the most aggressive sex they’d had in years, and only woke when Will pounded up the staircase and disappeared into his room.
Two days later, an officer of the bank called to discuss how they planned to manage the money. They hadn’t really had time to think about it. But when they caught their breath, they decided to spend it on something Martha had longed for—a place of their own in New York City. She had spent virtually her whole life in the suburban Midwest and longed to get out while they could still enjoy it. Now that she was writing more, she wanted to have a place of their own in the city through which all the great writing seemed channeled. She was eager to return to her own work. And a nervous Scott acquiesced. It was 2012, and the real estate market remained depressed, so their timing was perfect. With their newfound cash as collateral, they were able to secure a mortgage on a four-hundred-square-foot studio apartment on Perry Street in the West Village. He did have to admit that it boosted the ego, to have their own small patch of Manhattan. By the time the movie based on his novel appeared, and disappeared without much of a trace, he and Martha were frequently ensconced in New York.
With Will now a senior in high school and Susan having moved into her sophomore year, he and Martha would soon be able to spend more time in the city, far from the provincial suburbs of the Midwest. Scott’s income from writing (he had been paid handsomely to write the first of four versions of the screenplay of his novel) had never been better; moreover, the sheer accumulation of books now brought in royalties more steadily, money that required no work at all and that seemed like its own kind of magic. He considered returning to fiction after the nitrogen book was done.
Before he and Martha drove to New York (they were still transporting larger items to their new apartment), Scott sent Sally an email outlining all of what had happened since they’d last seen one another. He kept it subdued because if he told it with the astonished exuberance that he actually felt, it might seem like gloating. She didn’t respond.
*
They met in a small park on Bleecker Street north of West Eleventh, with stone and sandy gravel and tables for al fresco eating and gathering, not unlike Parisian courtyards in which he and Sally had drunk strong, bitter coffees all those years ago.
They approached simultaneously from opposite directions on Bleecker. Sally had dressed in black, which seemed to intensify her dark blond hair, pulled into a ponytail, black Jack Purcell sneakers, black T-shirt. The tight jeans and the way she pulled her hair back enhanced her gaunt appearance, and her once fleshy arms, to Scott so voluptuous, were now taut with muscle. But, grinning, she held out her hands, palms up, in a kind of shrugging gesture—it’s me! here I am!—and gave both Scott and Martha a strong hug and kiss.
The July afternoon was thinly overcast, the temperature mild and comfortable, and so they sat at an empty table.
“So how are you guys?” she said. “Some year it’s been for you!”
“It has, but what’s going on with you?” Scott asked. “You said you had a story.”
“Anh!” she said and shooed the question away with one hand. “First you. Tell me about your place! That’s exciting!”
And so they did, Scott and Martha alternately describing how they found it and what they did to it and how happy it made them. Sally grinned and seemed happy for them.
“And all this from the Hollywood money? Do you realize how rare that is?”
“Yes, completely,” Scott said. “I don’t know if you read the book, but—”
“Scott, silly, of course I read it.” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “I emailed you about it, didn’t I?”
“I don’t think so. I’m sure I’d hav
e remembered.”
Scott had mailed the first copy he’d received to her. He had dedicated the book to Martha, because it had been his goal when he and Martha first dated and courted; he made his first unsuccessful attempts and she had stuck with him, always encouraging. He wondered if Sally had hoped for at least an acknowledgment since she truly had been the catalyst on that long-ago visit in 2005. Now he wondered if he should have a had a discussion with Martha about this, or at least figured out some way to acknowledge the person who had instigated it.
But he also was nervous that she would be embarrassed for him, because her field of expertise and her work were the great Russian writers. She taught War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, at the master’s level at Columbia University—“The Lady with the Dog” and The Cherry Orchard, and Pushkin and Gogol, with occasional forays beyond Russia, Jude the Obscure and Tess, of course, and the Americans, Melville and Hawthorne. Scott had no illusions that he was creating great American literature at the level of his own heroes—but, yes, a good yarn, an entertainment, he thought of it, a story compelling enough to make it to Hollywood. But he worried that Sally had thought it trifling because she’d spent most of her life immersed in the great literature.
“Maybe it went into a spam folder,” Scott offered.
“Maybe.” Sally must have spotted a tic in his expression because she reached back over to re-squeeze his hand. “Aww. Really, I did like it. I was proud of you. And you should be proud of it. Honestly, Martha,” she said, releasing the hand and looking to Martha. “How anyone writes is amazing to me.”
“He works hard,” she said.
“Both of you, no doubt,” she said.
Scott said, “Are you writing?”
“Me? No.”
In Short Measures Page 30
