Heroic Measures (14 page)

Under a cone of incandescence, Alex’s hair is as white as a barrister’s wig. He sits at his worktable, arguing in his head with Ruth—
Ten thousand was your salary for years; Ten
thousand dollars was more than I earned for four years of combat; We can’t move without help
. He looks around his studio at what he’ll be moving—stacks of FBI memos, flat files heavy with prints, a palette table mountainous with dried paint, racks of paintings. Even if he hires men to bubble-wrap the paintings, no one can help him with the herculean task of deciding what to discard and what to keep, what was worth the effort and what wasn’t, who he was and who he isn’t.

He opens his paint jars with new urgency. Page fifty-one still needs illuminating. Employing the stencil he finished cutting two nights ago, he begins ornamenting the manuscript’s border, his brush wet with cadmium red. The FBI memo at the center of this collage is especially beautiful—the blacked-out shapes are like tire marks on snow. He reads between the marks.
Cohen née Kushner, Ruth (b. 1930) Arrested November 15, 1954, disobeying court order: marching without a permit: Citizens Against the H-Bomb. January 26, 1955, at 1:55 p.m., informant observed subject, Ruth Cohen, speaking at a rally against the Korean War. Subject, Ruth Cohen, suspended for six months without pay for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee
. She hasn’t changed. He visualizes a portrait of Ruth—on the kind side of middle-age, sporting her red cat-eye glasses and crowned by wild black defiant hair—in the only blank area left to do on page fifty-one, but before he can capture her in paint, the image dissolves into what it is—an old man’s memory. Yet it’s not nostalgia he feels; it’s arousal.

•    •    •

Alex’s body heat wakens Ruth. She must have dozed off reading. Her glasses are still on. Her
Portable Chekhov
presses on her chest, as heavy as a brick. Alex is naked and erect. Only as he envelops her, does she realize that he must have taken a Viagra with dinner (he needs to take it with food) and their fight ruined the evening. Either he’s forgiven her or, just as likely, he can’t bear to waste the pill, let alone such a triumphant erection. She pulls her nightgown free of her arms and head and flings it into the night.

DOROTHY HIDES IN THE BACK OF HER CAGE
. A hypnotic, alarming odor is escaping from under the Wee Wee pad. Normally, when Dorothy smells death—a run-over squirrel, a squashed baby bird—she yearns to roll upon it and perfume her fur, but this is different. This smells like something that will never wash off.

“What’s the body still doing here?” asks the nurse, as she carries in a new patient, a beagle with three legs and a bandaged stump.

“No more cooler space,” answers the orderly. “Tito from the morgue says he’s never seen anything like it and he’s been here twenty years. We lost eight dogs, six cats, and an iguana this afternoon.”

“At least take her out in the hall. How would you like to sleep next to a corpse?” says the nurse.

The orderly puts on rubber gloves, lest the smell get on his skin, and removes the Wee Wee pad. Dorothy’s view is unobstructed. The corpse’s grin is now a grimace; the lidded eye sockets have sunken like potholes. The gloves slide death off the table and carry it away.

The air immediately freshens. Dorothy turns in a circle,
as if she were making a bed in tall meadow grass rather than on a hard cage floor. She curls up as best she can, but she can’t find a comfortable position: she’s too despondent. She misses her spot on the big bed, Alex in the middle, she and Ruth on either side.

RUTH REACHES FOR HER GLASSES BUT THEY
aren’t on the nightstand. She squints at the floor, straining to see if they fell during the night. The sun hasn’t yet cleared the chimneys. She can barely distinguish carpet from floor.

“What’s going on?” Alex asks.

“I can’t find my glasses.”

Getting up, he walks naked to Ruth’s side, eases himself onto his knees, and looks under the bed, while Ruth suddenly remembers where her glasses were last—on her forehead, before she and Alex made love.

“Do you see them?” she asks.

“Not yet,” he says, hunting behind the nightstand. He finds a nickel and a length of dental floss, but no glasses.

She palpates the bedcovers, roots between the sheets, gropes under the pillows. Finally, her fingers feel the thick plastic temples wedged between the headboard and the mattress. Careful not to pull too hard, lest something snap, she excises her frames from the crevasse and lifts them into the daylight. They are miraculously undamaged, save for a missing lens.

“I found them,” she tells Alex, who is still on his knees, hunting. “The right lens fell out. Do you see it anywhere? Look near the headboard.”

She puts on her glasses to help search, too, but rather than one eye of clarity, she gets two eyes of disorientation. A moment later, Alex holds up what Ruth assumes is her lens. She offers him the one-eyed frames. “Can you fix it?”

“I can try. Where’s your other pair?”

“This is my other pair.”

In the kitchen, showered and dressed, Alex tries stubbornly to repair her glasses (no matter how much tape he employs, the lens keeps popping out), while Ruth, still in her robe, puts up the kettle. Despite the fact she’s boiled water in this exact spot for forty-five years, without her glasses she feels vulnerable and baffled and oddly suspicious of yesterday’s good fortune, and then she remembers that the ladies’ letter is still in her pocket.

“Let’s give the ladies a little while longer, at least until we get back from the hospital.” But Ruth knows her benevolence is such a tiny gesture, like a rich man buying a dollar raffle ticket for a good cause.

Ruth fetches Dorothy’s blanket, while Alex looks for his gloves. She wears her glasses, despite the dizzying sensation of seeing half the world in clarity and half in speculation. Before they leave the apartment, she checks with Alex, “You have your hearing aids? I’ve only got one good eye today.” At the top of the spiral staircase, she takes his arm and says, “Don’t run down, Alex, stay with me.” Even
though she’s walked down those steps for four and a half decades, with one lens in and one lens out, she feels as if she’s descending Mount Zion.

In the cab, on the ride uptown, she finally takes off her glasses to rest her eyes. Outside her window, the city is but light and shadow. Stopped for a signal (she has no idea where) she hears a siren on her left, then another on her right, then a third up ahead, and a fourth behind her, as if inciting one another to howl like neighborhood dogs.

“You hear that?” she asks Alex.

“I don’t hear anything,” he says.

“Turn up your hearing aids.”

“I hear them,” the cabbie says.

Ruth slips her glasses back on to peer outside. Better one eye than none. To give her good eye the best advantage, she rolls down the tinted, streaked window. The signal changes and cold air rushes in. It feels especially harsh and biting against her naked, blind eye. The wind sets Alex’s hearing aids to whistling. He looks around, lost, deaf to everything but that thrilling note. She closes the window. An elevator may not be a fountain of youth, but it’s an elevator.

“Is something happening?” Alex asks her.

“Let’s go get our dog, Alex. There will always be something happening,” she says.

In front of the hospital, Alex helps her out of the cab. She doesn’t entirely trust her perceptions. The curb looks both near and far.

She and Alex present their picture IDs to a new guard, a short fat woman whose tight, leather walkie-talkie holster looks like a string tying together two sausages. Alex
goes through the metal detector first, waits for Ruth on the far side.

As she starts through the gate, without depth perception, she feels like a camel trying to fit through the eye of a needle.

In the crowded waiting room, Alex gets in line to inform the receptionist that he and Ruth are here to pick up Dorothy, while Ruth sits down on the only vacant chair. To her left is a thin man with a limp rabbit saddled over his knees and to her right is a woman whose eyes are such a bright red from crying that the rims look as if they’re bleeding. A stoic, stricken boy of about twenty, probably her son, walks toward her, holding out a cafeteria tray draped over with a Wee Wee pad. No one has to tell Ruth what’s underneath. She takes off her glasses. She prefers light and shadow. But even without glasses, she can still distinguish Alex amid the blur of beasts and men, his unstoppable feet tapping as he waits to take their dog home.

DOROTHY KNOWS ALEX AND RUTH ARE NEARBY
. She doesn’t guess it; she doesn’t wish it—she
knows
it. Wet nose to the bars, she stands at her cage door, and calls for them as loudly as she can, so they can find her. Her ward-mates, the pug and the beagle, join in. To lift her voice above the trio, Dorothy barks in falsetto. One door down, a Great Dane, a Saint Bernard, and a pit bull add their baritones. Then a basset hound howls and the beagle bays and a Pomeranian yaps until, all up and down the corridor, the patients find their voices.

“Why are they going crazy again?” says the orderly wheeling a food cart behind the nurse. “You think something new happened, they know something we don’t?”

“They know it’s time for breakfast,” the nurse says.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales
is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Jill Ciment

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by
Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York, and in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ciment, Jill, [date]
Heroic measures / Jill Ciment.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37825-5
1. Human-animal relationships—Fiction. 2. Missing
persons—Fiction. 3. Television feature stories—Fiction.
4. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.C499H27 2009
813’.54—dc22        2008034624

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