The Longest Ride

make all the difference in the world. A single drop will make a difference.

Yet I remain paralyzed. I don’t know where the bottle of water is, and I’m not sure I’d be able to open it even if I could find it. I’m afraid that if I unbuckle the seat belt, I might topple forward, too weak to stop my collarbone from smashing into the steering wheel. I might end up crumpled on the floor of the car, wedged into a position from which I can’t escape. I can’t even imagine lifting my head from the steering wheel, let alone rummaging through the car.

And still, my need for water calls to me. Its call is constant and insistent, and desperation sets in. I am going to die of thirst, I think to myself. I am going to die here, as I am. And there is no way I will ever get to the backseat. The paramedics will not slide me out like a fish stick.

“You have a morbid sense of humor,” Ruth says, interrupting my thoughts, and I remind myself that she is nothing but a dream.

“I think the situation calls for it, don’t you?”

“You are still alive.”

“Yes, but for how much longer?”

“The record is sixty-four days. A man in Sweden. I saw it on the Weather Channel.”

“No. I saw it on the Weather Channel.”

She shrugs. “It is the same thing, yes?”

She has a point, I think. “I need water.”

“No,” she says. “Right now, we need to talk. It will keep your mind from fixating on it.”

“Like a trick,” I say.

“I am not a trick,” she says. “I am your wife. And I want you to listen to me.”

I obey. Staring at her, I allow myself to drift again. My eyes finally close and I feel as if I’m floating downstream in a river. Images coming and going, one right after the other as I am carried past on the current.

Drifting.

Drifting.

And then, finally, it solidifies into something real.
     

     
    In the car, I open my eyes and blink, noticing how Ruth has changed from my last vision of her. But this memory, unlike the others, is sharp-edged and clear to me. She is as she was in June of 1946. I am certain of this, because it is the first time I’ve ever seen her wear a casual summer dress. She, like everyone else after the war, is changing. Clothes are changing. Later this year, the bikini will be invented by Louis Réard, a French engineer, and as I stare at Ruth, I notice a sinuous beauty in the muscles of her arms. Her skin is a smooth walnut hue from the weeks she’d just spent at the beach with her parents. Her father had taken the family to the Outer Banks to celebrate his official hiring at Duke. He had interviewed at a number of different places, including a small experimental art college in the mountains, but he felt most at home among the Gothic buildings at Duke. He would be teaching again that fall, a bright spot in what had otherwise been a difficult year of mourning.

Things had changed between Ruth and me since that night in the park. Ruth had said little about my revelation, but when I walked her home I didn’t try to kiss her good night. I knew she was reeling, and even she would later admit that she was not herself for the next few weeks. The next time I saw her she was no longer wearing her engagement ring, but I didn’t blame her for this. She was in shock, but she was also rightfully angry that I had not trusted her with the information until that night. Coming on the heels of the loss of her family in Vienna, it was undoubtedly a terrible blow. For it is one thing to declare one’s love for someone and quite another to accept that loving that person requires sacrificing one’s dreams. And having children – creating a family, so to speak – had taken on an entirely new significance for her in the wake of her family’s losses.

I understood this intuitively, and for the next couple of months, neither of us pressed the other. We didn’t speak of commitment, but we continued to see each other casually, perhaps two or three times a week. Sometimes I would take her to see a show or bring her to dinner, other times we would stroll downtown. There was an art gallery of which she’d grown particularly fond, and we visited regularly. Most of the artwork was unmemorable either in subject or in execution, but every now and then, Ruth would see something special in a painting that I could not. Like her father, she was most passionate about modern art, a movement given birth to by painters like Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin, and she was quick to discern the influence of