The Measures Between Us (10 page)

“I know. I wasn't trying to make you feel guilty. I was just remembering.”

He strolled to the table and stood behind her chair and ran his fingers through her hair. Early in her pregnancy she'd been worried about her highlights, whether the dye might be poisonous to the baby. Great, she once joked to Henry, I'll be fat
and
ugly. Her obstetrician said that she could continue to color her hair as long as the dye didn't touch her scalp. Even so, she'd stopped, and the blonde touches had all but grown out, leaving it her natural brown. She hated the color, despite Henry saying he liked it better.

“Next year,” he said, “we'll take the baby. In a stroller.” Words like
stroller
and
diapers
and
car seat
—even
baby
—still sounded strange to him, and he wanted them not to jangle. Repeating them as much as possible, he hoped, would make him feel comfortable with the new language. He didn't want to be an impostor when the baby arrived. Lucy, he had noticed, rarely voiced those words.

She shifted her head deeper into his open palm, an almost
imperceptible assent. Henry was glad she wasn't saying anything, and he took her silence as the very beginning of forgiveness. He kept his hand cradling her head, his gaze out the window at the grim sky. In Hopkinton, thousands of runners were stretching, setting their watches, and hoping they didn't cramp up. They were listening to their iPods, getting lost in familiar anthems. Peace comes minute to minute, Henry realized. It was so tempting to expect more, tempting but useless.

Lucy broke the silence. “You'll have to go to the Tam alone,” she said. “I might miss that more than the actual marathon.”

She was referring to a bar near the marathon route, a narrow storefront with a green sign in the shape of a cloverleaf. Lucy always liked to have an afternoon drink after they'd watched their fill of runners. The first year she suggested it, she apologized, because she said it seemed so indulgent. After all, she said, it's not as if either of
us
just ran twenty-six miles. They continued the routine year after year, building a little, improbable piece of their lives.

Lucinda would order red wine, merlot, and Henry drank whiskey on the rocks. The bartender had an Irish accent and an ever-present Marlboro, its smoke curling lazily up to the pressed-tin ceiling. He got to know them after a couple years, acknowledging their entrance by asking, “Who's winning your marathon?” The last syllable of the word sounded like
ton.

He was more of a baseball fan, he said, mostly to Henry. “Running I don't care for—where do you score the points?”

“I guess the challenge is in the time, the endurance,” Henry said.

“It's not for me,” he said, shaking his head. “Give me the Red Sox against the Yankees, at Fenway in the bleachers. Beer and
peanuts. I'd be a happy man. Put Pedro on the mound and I'll kiss ya even though you're a man. I like watching the kids put up those K signs. God bless 'em and their energy.”

They stayed for two or three drinks, and often they had the place to themselves. Sometimes they'd talk and sometimes not. Sometimes the only sounds between them were Henry cracking open walnuts he'd grabbed from the bar. Their feet brushed underneath the table, and neither remarked on it or even moved. Not even the bartender ruffling pages of the
Herald
could intrude on their unexpected happiness.

Lucy, Henry remembered, still lightly massaging her head. Lucinda in the weak light of the bar, her bangs falling carelessly over her forehead. Her slender fingers resting on the tabletop. She's in her jean jacket, the one that makes her ten years younger, instantly. Tourmaline earrings stud her earlobes. There's a butterfly clip in her hair. She's nearly done with her wine, there's only a shallow pool left, a remnant of the languid hour they've just spent together. She's in no hurry to finish, and periodically she traces the stem of the wineglass with her forefinger. Maybe she'll order another. Maybe they'll use the empty glass as a cue to leave. She's wearing nail polish, chipped around the edges. She's wearing a silver chain with a single pearl pendant. The stone falls into the well of her collarbone as if that's where it belongs, as if that's the oyster where it was bedded.

“Do you remember Rosie Ruiz?” Lucy asked, jarring Henry from his reverie.

“The woman who cheated,” he said. “She got on the T.”

Lucy nodded. “I always felt like if she figured out how to sneak onto the subway during the race, then she deserved some sort of prize.”

“But she got caught,” Henry said. “She didn't really figure it out.”

“Yeah, but she almost got away with it. It wasn't until later that they put it all together. Remember? A few days after the race, they realized what happened.” Lucy turned a page of the newspaper. “Do you think she had to give back the wreath too? Wouldn't it already have wilted?”

Henry smiled, though his wife couldn't see him. He didn't want to move, didn't want her to move. Their fight of the night before felt faraway and innocuous. She shifted to the right a little, and Henry stayed still. He lowered his head, kissed the top of hers. His lips lingered on her hair. Then he turned and left the room, before anything could shatter their fragile forgiveness.

Henry passed several neighbors as he walked through the neighborhood to the street he would watch the marathon from. He and Lucy weren't close to anyone in the immediate area, so he did little more than nod and mumble a greeting. There had been the usual welcomes and invitations when they'd first moved in, but most of their friends lived elsewhere, scattered by jobs and love. Both Henry and Lucy preferred it that way, installing a kind of anonymous zone around their home. It was possible they would feel different once the baby came, he thought, when neighbors might offer to babysit or help out with errands they were suddenly too busy and too tired for. Yet for the time being he liked being a stranger. Grad school was community enough; he didn't need any more at home.

When he arrived at Commonwealth Avenue, he planted himself in an open spot, staring down the block like everyone else for signs of the first runners. Some people had brought lawn
chairs; others listened to portable radios they cupped to their ears. High above, a news helicopter hovered, its pilot already seeing the mass of racers smudging up the course. One family pumped hand-drawn signs in the air. Henry could tell the runners were close when the police motorcycles rumbled by and shaved the crowd back, the cops shouting through their megaphones for everyone to make room. The growling bikes excited the children in the crowd, who stared wide-eyed as the bulky machines and their stern drivers sped past. Then the flatbed trucks rolled by, piled with photographers and TV cameramen, so many they were almost spilling off.

Finally the runners came, in their neon-striped sneakers and flimsy tank tops, big black numbers pinned to their chests. They were always so skinny, all tight, sinewy muscle, and they looked too insubstantial to have so much of a production bubbling around them, the cheering crowds and the police and the photographers and smiling newscasters. They weren't like football or basketball players, giants who seemed to draw attention like magnets. No matter how cool the temperature they were invariably drenched in sweat, their hair matted to their skulls, their shirts pasted to their skin. They reached for the cups of water people held out, gulping it down all in one motion and then tossing the empty cups to the curb. Some splashed the water on their faces and the backs of their necks, others squeezed packets of protein gel into their mouths. Along with the rest of the crowd, Henry cheered them on, but he didn't think they could hear anything except the blunt command of their brains. They must be in a haze. How else could they absorb so much pain without quitting?

Fifteen minutes after the initial men, the first woman appeared,
igniting another round of cheers, especially among the women. The female runners were even more slight than the men, as if all the training, all those hundred-mile practice weeks, had stripped their bodies to only what was essential. They had no hips, no long hair, and their breasts were flattened against their chests under tight sports bras. Their thighs and arms and stomachs were little more than cords of muscle, and even their mouths appeared drained of any excess material. They were taut as rubber bands. Henry wondered whether their boyfriends and husbands minded.

“Dr. Wheeling.”

Henry recognized the voice immediately. He knew before he turned around that he would see Samantha Webster, one of his students.

“Samantha,” he said, facing her. “How are you?”

“Oh, fine,” she said. “I was just about to leave. I was walking to my car when I saw you, so I thought I'd say hi.”

Samantha wasn't the most gifted of his students, nor was she struggling. Henry had always suspected that she wasn't destined to remain in the field, that a few years from now she would discover what it was she actually wanted to do with her life and leave the vagaries of graduate school and psychology behind. She'd finish her coursework, maybe even begin collecting research for a dissertation, then move on to something else. For some reason, perhaps because she was very pretty, he thought that a man would entice her away from completing her degree. A man who'd distract her from textbooks with trips to Thailand and Nice.

“Are you here alone?” Samantha asked.

Henry nodded. “How about you?”

“Yeah. I almost bailed, on account of the clouds, but I've
watched every year since I've been in Boston and I didn't feel like breaking my tradition.” She absently rolled up the right sleeve of her windbreaker. “It's nice to have little routines—that's why people go to church, right?”

“One reason, I suppose,” said Henry. “Plus, you know, God and all.”

“Oh, right,” Samantha smiled. “God and all.”

“Don't let me keep you from getting home,” Henry said.

“I wasn't in any rush, I was enjoying my aimlessness,” Samantha said. “Were you finished watching, too?”

“I guess so,” Henry said. “I like to see the first few hundred or so, and the first women. After that it's a little monotonous. There aren't too many surprises.”

“That's true. It's not like watching the final minutes of a basketball game. Not too much tension.”

Henry shifted his feet awkwardly. A woman in the crowd shouted, “Go Jimmy!” How nice it must be to hear your name yelled; a little extra fuel.

“Do you want to go get a cup of coffee or something?” Samantha asked.

Henry was surprised at how natural the invitation sounded. That is another thing about beautiful women, he thought. They are allowed to do things the rest of us can't. It wasn't uncommon for him to have a beer with a group of students after a seminar, but it was always in the context of school, as if venturing to a bar was simply an extension of class. They went to a local pub under the pretense that they had more to discuss, though inevitably, amid the drinks and salty snacks, the conversation veered away from experiments and articles to lighter, more laughter-filled subjects.

“Sure,” he said. “Lead the way.”

The two of them crossed the street toward a handful of restaurants and shops. Samantha chose a sports-themed café called the Finish Line, and she and Henry took a table by the window. “We can still see the runners from here,” she said, “in case I start boring you or something. You can just nod and pretend to listen.”

Henry laughed. “I doubt that'll happen. It's nice to run into a familiar face.”

They both ordered sandwiches and beer, and when the mugs came Samantha raised her glass to toast. “To the marathoners,” she said. “And to the fact that we don't have to do it.”

Henry clinked his beer with hers and took a long sip.

“Do you come every year?” she asked.

Henry nodded. “I don't live too far from here, just over on Driscoll Street.” The restaurant was empty except for the two of them and a waiter leaning on the bar, flipping through a magazine. A jukebox in the corner played Bruce Springsteen. Outside, along the course, the crowd had thinned. Determined young boys and girls held out water and orange slices for the runners, their parents too proud of their efforts to make them head home.

Still looking out the window, he said, “My wife and I usually watch. But this morning, she …she didn't feel like it. So I walked over myself.”

“Maybe she's watching on TV,” Samantha said.

“Maybe, though I doubt it.” Henry pictured Lucy as he had left her, sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. Her mug of decaf was untouched. She was enjoying the silence of the empty house, the sight of a bird swooping in toward the feeder.
Why did the marathon have to be today, Henry thought, so soon after their fight? The timing seemed cruel.

“I'm sort of in awe of those runners,” he said, wanting to change the subject from his wife.

“Why?” Samantha asked.

“Twenty-six miles. I couldn't do that. Not even close—I'd quit after four, maybe three.”

“Twenty-six miles, 385 yards,” Samantha corrected, finishing her beer. “You could. You'd surprise yourself. You look like you're in good shape, plus your adrenaline takes over.”

“That's nice of you to say.”

“You know,” said Samantha, “I was thinking of running today.”

“The marathon?” he asked. “Really?”

She nodded. She motioned to the waiter for another beer, and after he brought her a fresh mug she said, “I used to run cross country, in college. I was pretty serious about it—went to NCAA meets and everything. Our team traveled to Florida every year to train in the winter. We stayed in this really shitty motel in Tallahassee and tried to get the pay movies for free.”

“I had no idea,” Henry said. “You don't seem like a runner.”