Heroic Measures by Jill Ciment Read Free Book Online

friends,” Gurov reflected, “it wouldn’t be a bad thing to make her acquaintance.”
    The first thing Ruth notices is that the little dog, which she had remembered as vital to the story, isn’t nearly as important as she imagined. The Pomeranian is only a prop—an excuse really—for Chekhov to get the lovers to meet.
    He beckoned invitingly to the Pomeranian, and when the dog approached him, shook his finger atit. The Pomeranian growled: Gurov threatened it again.
    The lady glanced at him and at once dropped her eyes.
    “He doesn’t bite,” she said and blushed.
    “May I give him a bone?”
    After their first tryst, before either is aware of the profound love awaiting them, “the lady with the pet dog” sits dejected on the hotel bed, weeping with remorse, while Gurov, a little bored and impatient, cuts a slice of watermelon and eats it “without haste,” Ruth’s favorite line in the story. She would try to get her tenth graders, mostly teenagers from the Jacob Riis projects, who had never been in love, though some of the girls were pregnant, and who didn’t know where Russia was, never mind Yalta, to understand the perfection of that detail, the promise of trans formative love implied in the callous act of enjoying a watermelon slice while the woman you’ve just made love with cries. Chekhov doesn’t mention the Pomeranian in this scene, but Ruth knows the little dog must be somewhere in his mistress’s hotel room bearing witness.
    She can hear sirens on First Avenue; a helicopter passes overhead. She looks down again, but she can no longer focus. Who can concentrate on a slice of watermelon with everything that’s going on?

ALEX SURFACES. THE LIVING ROOM’S ONLY light source is the muted television. Ruth has covered him with a blanket. He rises from the sofa to look for her. It’s not until he locates Ruth—wherever he wakes up, whatever the hour—that he feels oriented.
    She’s asleep in their bed, supine, breathing evenly, her face empty of worry. The reading lamp is shining. Her glasses rest askew on her nose. Her
Portable Chekhov
lies tented on her chest. He has loved her for so long that he can no longer distinguish between passion and familiarity. He slips off her glasses, puts away her book, douses the light, and returns to the living room. The windows face north, in the direction of the tunnel. If ten thousand gallons of gasoline had exploded, surely he’d see a red glow. The night sky is as monochromatic as always.
    He goes to his studio, the back bedroom facing the air-shaft, and switches on the lamp over his worktable. He never approaches his unfinished tome, especially in the middle of the night, without wonder and fear. Wonder that it’s still alive; fear that, with the next mark, he will kill it.
    Sending away for their FBI files had been Ruth’s idea. When the Freedom of Information Act declassified the cold war documents in the late nineties, all their old lefty friends, even those who had traded in their manifestos for the Torah, had sent away for theirs. You couldn’t dine at someone’s house without the files coming out, if they weren’t already on display, next to the photo album. The length of the dossier was a point of pride, the bigger the better, a vita of activism, proof that the wizened hostess, who had to use a magnifying glass to read about her glory days, had once been a tigress. “Nine hundred and six pages,” she would tell her guests. “What a waste of taxpayers’ money. A school could have been built for what it cost to spy on me. Who knew I was so important?”
    When his and Ruth’s files finally arrived, three years after they sent for them, he could see that Ruth was a little disappointed by the page count. “How could Bernice”— the wizened hostess—“merit over nine hundred pages when all she did was sign a few petitions?” Ruth had said, and he understood. Didn’t he feel the same way when a less deserving artist rated a bigger review?
    At