Heroic Measures Read online

  “You are a miracle wiener,” the doctor says, feeding her the last of the crumbles. She swallows them before she remembers to chew. All that’s left to savor is the juice on the doctor’s fingers. She licks up every last drop, and when the taste is gone, she washes his fingers in gratitude.

  “GOOD MORNING, EVERYBODY,” SAYS THE basset-eyed newscaster—freshly shaved, powdered, and clad in a new shirt and tie. To unshaven Alex and barely awake Ruth drinking their morning tea in front of the television, he looks as if he’d slept like a baby. “Before I bring on my first guest, a forensic psychologist and consultant for Homeland Security, to help answer the question—Is Pamir a suicide bomber or not?—let’s see what the American people think. Here’s how our viewers responded to this morning’s polling question. Seventy-seven percent say yes, Pamir is a suicide bomber, twelve percent say no, and eleven percent isn’t sure. We’ll be right back to see if the experts agree.”

  “Nothing’s new,” Alex says.

  “At least my wish didn’t come true,” Ruth says, answering the phone before he’s even aware it’s ringing. From his end of the sofa, he studies her expression, trying to decipher who’s calling so early on a Sunday morning. She closes her eyes as if to listen with great concentration. When she opens them, her fishbowls are brimming with joy.

  “Dorothy’s walking!”

  “Our girl’s going to be okay?”

  “She took five steps!”

  He reaches for Ruth’s free hand, squeezes. “When can she come home?” he asks.

  “Not until tomorrow morning, but we can visit her after eleven today. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she says to the doctor. Alex watches her gently settle the phone back in its cradle as if she were putting it down for a nap. “Dr. Rush said it took a bribe of sausage to get her to take the five steps.”

  “Imagine if he’d have offered her pâté.”

  “He said she’ll have to be confined to her crate for two weeks, but after that, we need to encourage her to walk.”

  “Two weeks of breakfast in bed; we may never get her up.”

  “The doctor called her a miracle wiener.”

  While Alex showers, Ruth leaves the television on, though she’s no longer watching. She’s stocking her purse with provisions for the day—cell phone, keys, the folded newspaper sheet with the open house addresses, paper and pen to take notes, and Dorothy’s squeaky hot dog. The doctor said they could bring one of her toys. The plan is for them to look at the two downtown apartments—the junior two-bedroom in need of TLC and the one they can’t afford—before catching the bus to the hospital. When the phone next rings, it’s almost time to leave. She picks up the bedroom extension hoping Lily’s calling with news from the bidding war front.

  “So what’s going on with this madman loose in New York?” asks her younger sister, Thelma.

  In stereo, Ruth hears Thelma’s television blasting the news in Fort Myers, and her own blasting the news in the living room. She closes the bedroom door. “We know nothing more than you do,” she says.

  Three years ago, Thelma retired from the post office in Queens and moved south with her new boyfriend, Teddy, to a senior community, Camelot Gardens. “It has two pools, a clubhouse with a media room, and when the time comes, assisted living, and it’s all pet-friendly,” Thelma had told her. Ruth has yet to visit. She loves her sister, but she can’t bear Teddy, and Dorothy despises Thelma’s two teacup Yorkies, Happy and Muffin. After their parents died, the sisters had little in common, except their love for their dogs. When Ruth and Thelma discuss their dogs, all the intimacy is back.

  “We had such a scare with Dorothy, but she’s going to be fine,” Ruth says. “I just got off the phone with her doctor.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Thelma says. “What happened?”

  “Her back went out. She had to have emergency surgery. We didn’t know if she’d ever walk again, but she’s already taken five steps. Her doctor called her a miracle wiener.”

  “There’s a woman in my Scrabble group who has a dog with three legs and she’s says the dog gets around beautifully When can Dorothy come home?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Are you and Alex still going through with the open house?”

  “We had it yesterday.”

  “You let strangers into your home with a suicide bomber running loose?”

  “I doubt if he’s house hunting.”

  “So, did you get any offers?”

  “We think so, but it’s so far below our asking price, we’re not sure if we should take it.”

  “How much?”

  “Nine hundred thousand.”

  “Oh my God, you’re rich!” Thelma screams.

  Muffin and Happy start barking.

  “You know it buys nothing here,” Ruth says.

  “Move to Camelot Gardens. With your money, you could afford a Lavender Court Villa; it’s top of the line. I haven’t been inside one, but they all have pool views and granite countertops. And there’s an arts and crafts room in the clubhouse where Alex can set up an easel.”

  “Alex needs his privacy to work.”

  “Hell, with your money, buy two units and let him paint in one. You’d live like a queen.”

  After the sisters say good-bye, Ruth can’t help but wonder if she and Alex should reconsider Florida. Not Camelot Gardens of course, but somewhere near—though not too near—her sister. She tries to imagine her and Alex in Fort Myers, clad in their dark New York clothes, and Dorothy with her bad back, crossing six lanes of traffic and then miles of sun-blistering parking lots just to have a bite out or to pick up some milk and bread.

  Alex fills his overcoat pockets with his provisions for the day—cash, wallet, antacids, allergy pills, extra hearing aid batteries, a comb, and Stim-U-Dents, while Ruth gathers up her gloves and scarf. Before walking out the door, they check the television one last time for the very latest news on Pamir, lest their path cross with his this morning.

  “It’s a big myth that suicide bombers are raving lunatics,” says a double-chinned woman with badly applied lipstick captioned “Forensic Psychology Professor and Consultant for Homeland Security.” “Anyone can become a suicide bomber. This is normal psychology, normal group dynamics. Normal people, given the right circumstances or the right set of friends can become suicide bombers.”

  “Is she telling us it’s peer pressure?” Ruth asks.

  “She’s telling us that they haven’t a clue where Pamir is.”

  HALFWAY DOWN THE BLOCK, ALEX BECOMES aware of sounds he hasn’t heard in years—his own footfalls in slush, singing from the Pentecostal Church, a flock of pigeons taking off, voices of passersby, and distant sirens. He doesn’t entirely trust his hearing aids, but to his old soldier’s battle-alert ears, the sirens sound like a full barrage. “Do you hear them?” he asks Ruth.

  “What?”

  “Sirens.”

  “No more than yesterday.” She takes his arm; the brisk air feels so good on her cheeks and throat; she’s so happy they’re not in Florida. “Doesn’t knowing we’re looking for the three of us make all the difference in the world? Wouldn’t it be something if the junior two-bedroom turns out to be nice? It would almost be an even trade if we take Yellow Rubbers’ offer. We’d even make a little profit if Harold’s Ladies came through. And it’s so close by: we wouldn’t have to change pharmacies.”

  The building is a nondescript six-story box near the corner of Avenue C and Second Street. Ruth takes note of the façade—faux brick, graffiti, only two casement windows per floor, no windowsills, no stoop. The front door is unpainted steel.

  She reads the directory next to the intercom. It doesn’t bode well for the co-op’s stability. Names have been crossed out, scratched out, and written over, a pentimento of transient identities. Open House is printed on a paper scrap taped beside 2G.

  She hesitates before ringing.

  “We’re here already, Ruth. We might as well look.”

  She presses the bell,
while Alex positions himself against the door to push as soon as the lock-release buzzer sounds.

  The intercom crackles unintelligibly. The buzzer is louder than a truck horn. The steel door vibrates as if it were about to explode: Alex shoulders it open.

  “We’re inside,” Ruth shouts back at the intercom. The lobby is big, but she’s appalled at the color, Pepto-Bismol pink. The elevator smells of cigarettes. A low, thrumming rock-and-roll bass line greets her when the elevator opens on the second floor, despite it being nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. She squares her shoulders and knocks on 2G.

  A tall young man with lanky black hair and a blade-thin face answers the door. By his bare feet, Ruth surmises he’s not the broker.

  “Come in and have a look,” he says, and then disappears into one of the bedrooms, where a television is playing.

  Ruth steps into the living room, a long narrow space the proportions of a tunnel, the light at the end of which is a single casement window. The furnishings are spare and missing cushions and legs. Japanese cartoon posters are stapled to the walls. Though Ruth has never been inside a fraternity house, she imagines this is the décor. She peers into the kitchen. It isn’t wide enough to turn around in. She inspects the bathroom—no tub, only a shower. A large tea-color rust stain encircles the drain. She wanders into the first bedroom, empty save for an unmade bed. The barefoot young man didn’t bother to make his bed for the open house? She heads into the second bedroom, astounded to find it crowded—Alex, the barefoot young man biting his nails, two Russian gentlemen in camel-hair coats, a couple with a baby, and the young woman who, only yesterday, asked to lie down on their bed. Ruth recognizes the knee-high boots. All eyes are on the young man’s television, a vast flat screen that fills one entire wall. The basset-eyed newscaster’s face is as large as the moon. He wears the expression of an oracle about to make a prediction. Across his brow is written Breaking News—Target: New York City. “Fifteen thousand yellow cabs service New York at any given hour,” he says. “Let’s face it, every cab is now a potential ground zero.”

  “What happened?” Ruth asks.

  “Pamir’s carjacked a taxi,” Alex tells her.

  “Who can tell one rag-head cabbie from another? They’ll never catch him now,” says one of the Russians.

  “Maybe he’s heading back to the tunnel to finish the job?” says the other.

  Ruth recognizes the “the sky is falling” tactic to scare away the competition. The Russians are what her father— a dreamy, deeply religious egg peddler who refused to make an extra nickel off the World War II black market— used to call war gonifs. Her mother called her father the village schlemiel.

  “Maybe he’s driving out of town and will become someone else’s problem?” says the nail-biting young man.

  “Maybe he’s going to Queens. Isn’t his wife in Queens?” says the thoughtless girl in the knee-high boots.

  “Don’t they have the cab’s medallion number?” Ruth asks.

  “Pamir locked the driver in the trunk. They don’t know which cab it is,” Alex says.

  “The mayor’s ordered all taxis back to their garages by ten,” says knee-high boots.

  “Pamir still has forty-eight minutes to go,” says the first Russian. “And who knows if he’s acting alone? A lot could still happen.”

  “He can make himself a few dollars on fares and tips before he blows himself up,” says the other.

  “Or gives himself up,” says the nail-biting young man.

  Lily was right, Ruth thinks, the television news shouldn’t be on during an open house.

  A satellite image of Manhattan shimmers on the screen. The grid of streets is golden-yellow, the buildings infrared squares. The basset-eyed newscaster turns to his newest guest, “Professor and Author of The Universal Theory of Traffic.” “How do you get fifteen thousand cabs off the streets by ten o’clock?”

  The professor’s beard is so thick and wild he appears to be peeking over a hedge. “You don’t,” he says, turning around to face the satellite image: the back of his head looks exactly like the front, but without eyes. “Traffic behaves like liquid. Think of the infrared squares as islands, and the yellow grid as tributaries. Imagine each taxicab is a drop of water suddenly moving against the tide. Rip currents might occur, backing up traffic for hours, gigantic waves could flood intersections.”

  The basset-eyed newscaster, who’s been listening with the solemnity of a bright, if cloying student, faces his audience again, the tableau of house hunters crowded around the screen. “New York is beautiful from outer space, folks, but today, that golden grid isn’t made up of yellow brick roads.”

  “Maybe it’s not such a wise idea to go apartment hunting today,” Alex says as they exit the pink lobby.

  “Maybe it’s the wisest time of all to go hunting. Did you see the poor seller’s face when everyone but the Russians left? He looked ready to give away his apartment. I hope we didn’t look like that yesterday.”

  As soon as they reach the corner, and can see in all four directions, Alex checks if the color cadmium yellow dark has disappeared from the otherwise gray cityscape, but Yellow Cabs are still plentiful. He watches a woman come out of the Lower East Side Bake Shoppe and hail one, so enjoying the muffin she is eating that she doesn’t bother to check if Pamir is her driver or not. Alex wants what that woman’s eating, a muffin so tasty you forget reason.

  “Let’s sit down somewhere warm, Ruth, enjoy a muffin and a cup of coffee, and wait until ten. It’s almost a quarter to. Once the cabs are off the streets, we’re bound to know more.”

  As they step into the bakery, the same acuity he had with hearing earlier, he now has with smell. He can distinguish cinnamon, sugar, coffee, burned caraway seeds, toasted wheat and earthy bran.

  “A bran muffin and a coffee,” he says to the woman behind the counter.

  “You sure you want a bran muffin and a coffee?” Ruth asks. “You don’t want an English muffin instead?”

  “The world may end today, I want a bran muffin.”

  “A tea and an English muffin for me, please,” she says.

  They eat at a table by the window. Alex yanks down his muffin’s waxed-paper skirt while Ruth sugars her tea. “I hope we can still get to the hospital today,” she says, adding another spoonful. “Do you think Dorothy somehow knows we’re coming?”

  “She knows.” He takes a big bite, stunned at how good it tastes. It’s as saturated with flavors as the air is with scents. He chews with concentration and pleasure, and as he does, he remembers relishing a pumpernickel loaf between skirmishes on the German border, how fear had made everything taste so good.

  “Oh my,” Ruth says.

  He looks up from his muffin and follows her surprised gaze out the window. There isn’t a Yellow Cab in sight. It’s as if he’s seeing a dear old friend he’d known only in a blond toupee, suddenly bald. He turns to the man at the next table, hunched over a laptop. “Can you get the news on that?”

  Without so much as glancing up to see what might be going on outside, the man reads his screen. “Police just found Pamir’s taxi abandoned under the FDR near the Queensboro Bridge.”

  “How do they know its Pamir’s?” Alex asks.

  “The cabbie was still in the trunk.”

  “Alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pamir?” Ruth asks.

  “Long gone.”

  Ruth would like nothing more than to go home and climb under the covers until it’s safe to visit Dorothy, but she’s also anxious to see the other apartment before anything else happens. She suspects that her anxiety isn’t only because Pamir’s still out there. On the contrary, had he been caught, there would be no rush to look at the built-in bookcases and window seat on their way to the hospital; they could no longer afford them. As ashamed as she is to admit it, she’s a little relieved he’s still out there.

  She rises from her chair. “Let’s go look at the other apartment.”

  “I haven’t fi
nished my muffin,” Alex says.

  “You can finish it on the way.”

  On the corner of Second Avenue and Second Street, Ruth realizes that the apartment shares the block with the old cemetery, a half-acre sanctuary of trees, marble headstones, stone walls, a wrought-iron gate, and a plaque that reads: Marble Cemetery 1830—A Place of Internment for Gentlemen. Living on the same street as the cemetery is even better than living near the park. These gentlemen don’t ride skateboards and play boom boxes. She quickens her stride. The building is on the south side, catching all the sun. It’s still a half dozen doors away, but she can already see it overlooks the sanctuary. She tamps down her excitement. They haven’t even been inside. The façade is nothing to speak of—standard turn-of-the-century brick—but the exterior has been recently painted, a tasteful sand color with black trim. The front door is rosewood. The directory is framed under glass: all the names are neatly typed. She presses the intercom bell beside the realtor’s card. “We’re here for the open house,” she shouts into the speaker.

  “Take the elevator to the top floor and turn right,” the intercom answers back with crystal clarity.

  The lobby is simple but attractive; black and white tiles, wainscoting, white walls, and a small French Provincial bench. She rings for the elevator. When the door opens, a fox terrier trots out, followed by a preoccupied man talking on a cell phone.

  “Dogs must be allowed!” Ruth says to Alex.

  The elevator is slow, but steady. The sixth-floor walls are the same cream white as the lobby. The corridor is so quiet Ruth can hear blood banging in her ears. She knocks on the apartment door. The realtor, a tall young woman in a black bubble haircut, invites them inside. Ruth’s sure she smells something delicious baking until she realizes it’s only boiled cinnamon. Alex wanders into the bedrooms to see if one would make a good studio, while she starts in the living room, curious to see the floor-to-ceiling bookcases and the built-in window seat. The room is already crowded with milling overcoats and gleaming, overheated faces and wet shoes, and one familiar pair of knee-high boots. No one seems alarmed by the latest news; they seem far more interested in the crown molding. But then again, the television is off. She sits down on the window seat’s Chinese-red cushion. The view is just what she hoped it would be: sanctuary and sky.