Crossing the Bridge

by Michael Baron

  “Which wins you Employee of the Month for the sixth time in a row.”

  “Nah, give it to Tab.” He nodded toward the stationery aisle, where she was piling the notebooks on the floor one at a time.

  “So now it’s back on the interview trail?”

  “I’m going into the City on Friday. I have some stuff lined up and I’m hoping to get a few more things going before then.”

  “What’s the market like right now?”

  “Hey, when you’re a summa cum laude graduate from MCS, you can write your own ticket,” he said, smiling. “It’s okay. Nobody’s getting their doors beaten down – even the people who graduated from Yale yesterday. It might take me a little time to find something good, but I’ll find something.”

  “I’m sure you will.” There was no question in my mind that someone would respond to Tyler’s passion and determination and give him a decent entry-level position. Tyler would be pleased and consider himself fortunate, but it would be the employer who received the big break.

  “Hey, I got you something,” I said, reaching under the counter and pulling out a box. Though I seriously wasn’t expecting Tyler to be in the store, I also knew that there was the very real possibility he’d show up, since he hadn’t asked for the time off. I handed him the package.

  “Hey, you didn’t have to do that,” he said.

  “It isn’t a car or anything. By the way, my mother and father wanted me to tell you that they’re getting you something, too, but that they still haven’t found the right thing.”

  “That’s really nice of them.” Tyler tore at the wrapping. Inside was a box of four CDs I’d recorded for him of live performances from many of the bands we’d talked about when we’d gone out for drinks.

  “Wow, this is incredible,” he said.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of downloading, ripping, and burning since our night at the Cornwall.”

  “A seventeen-minute version of ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy? ’”

  “I hadn’t even heard that one myself until I searched for some vintage Traffic.”

  “This is really good stuff. I can’t wait to listen to some of it in my car during my lunch break.”

  “Yeah, maybe I’ll sneak off with you then. I’d let you put it on through the store’s system, but I’m pretty sure my father has attack dogs at the ready in case we try to change his station.”

  Since she moved to the other side of Amber about twenty years ago, my mother’s younger sister Rita has held a Memorial Day party. As the two oldest cousins on this side of the family, Chase and I would get the other kids to do all kinds of precarious and sometimes dangerous things involving rowboat oars, bug zappers, and, as we got older, purloined cans of beer and bottles of rum. As May dawned, we would begin to strategize that year’s stunt, even planning escape routes if things went badly. I hadn’t been to one of these gatherings since Chase died and I hadn’t intended to go this year, either. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good enough excuse for staying away and my mother was surprisingly insistent.

  Before moving to Amber, my Aunt Rita was a First Wave corporate executive at a public relations firm in Manhattan. By the time she was thirty, she’d used a combination of talent, guile, and utter determination to earn a partnership. The same year, her husband, an even more avid corporate climber than she, received a senior vice president’s position at a Hartford insurance company. From what I hear (since I understood virtually none of this at the time), a rather tense standoff ensued. Uncle Chad saw this offer as one he couldn’t refuse while Aunt Rita considered it a violation of their pact to think that she would give up her career for his. In the end, Aunt Rita’s cleverness prevented their marriage from being an innocent victim in this war of ambitions. She found a way to retain her partnership while handling most of her duties from her spectacular new home office in her spectacular new home with three acres on the water in Amber, Connecticut, less than ten minutes from her beloved sister Anna. As time went by, Chad ultimately became president of that insurance company and Rita found that she could make as much money with far fewer hassles by striking out on her own. These days she doesn’t work nearly as hard as she once did, but she “keeps her hand in the business” and still handles some high-powered clients.

  All of which is reflected in Chad and Rita’s living space. The three-car garage (one for the roadster, none for the kids who had moved on to careers of their own), hand-carved dining table that expanded to seat eighteen, and professional kitchen were nearly obligatory. But the freeform, oxygen-filtered swimming pool, the multilevel fieldstone patio, and the hydroponic garden were all nice touches. They’d put in all of these since the last time I’d walked the grounds, and I examined each with a mixture of admiration and consternation as the party got underway.

  It had been considerably less difficult to get my father out of the house for this event than I’d expected. With the exception of doctor’s visits, he hadn’t been in the car since coming home from the hospital. He made a huge display of getting dressed. He sent my mother up the stairs four times for different shirts and it took him an absurd amount of time to descend the three stairs on the house’s front stoop. But he was otherwise compliant.

  Only when we got to my aunt and uncle’s house did I realize why he had agreed to come along. Chad’s brother, Thomas, had suffered a heart attack a couple of years earlier. After perfunctory conversation with a few of the other guests, my father and Thomas settled into chaise lounges on the patio for the rest of the day, trading coronary stories like war veterans. It was hard to believe that they had that much to say (and several times I looked over to find both of them glancing off at the party silently) and it was even harder to believe that my father had been storing these observations until he could commiserate with one of his fellows. He’d said more in those hours than he’d said since returning from the hospital.

  My mother was Rita’s only sibling. In addition to Thomas, though, Chad had three other brothers – Marlon, Henry, and Preston – all of whom had children at various ages in proximity to mine. Since Rita and Chad held regular family functions while I was growing up, these children became unofficial “cousins” with whom Chase and I would entertain ourselves. A few even became friends, though I’d done little more than exchange e-mail with any of them in the last ten years.

  I was standing by myself over near the garden when Liz walked up to me. She was Preston’s oldest child, around four years younger than me. I remember when I was sixteen and she was twelve, she followed me all over the house during Aunt Rita’s Christmas party. I found this – and her – terribly annoying. When I was twenty and she was sixteen, however, I no longer found her annoying and in fact considered her polished, intriguing, and sexy. Sadly, she was toting around a boyfriend who was a freshman at Amherst. We hadn’t seen each other at all since Chase’s funeral.

  “There was a rumor that you were going to be here,” she said as she approached.

  “Rumor? Don’t you mean warning?”

  “Oh yes, that must have been it.” She kissed me on the cheek and held my hand for a minute, smiling.

  “You look great,” I said. “What have you been up to?”

  “A few things,” she said, still smiling. “You know, things. You look good, too. More rugged or something.”

  “Thanks. So what have you been doing? You’re allowed to tell me, aren’t you? It doesn’t involve the CIA or anything like that, does it?”

  Liz laughed. “Hardly. I’m not the high adventure type. Just a bunch of stuff. I’m living in Boston now, doing arbitrage work. The usual MBA thing. Sixty hours a week, dating people from the office because they’re the only guys I ever get to meet, share in a summer place on Cape Cod, the usual.”

  “You like it?”

  Liz laughed again and brushed her straight black hair away from her face. “Yeah, I really do. I mean, there are days, you know? And of course, they don’t pay me nearly as much as I think they should pay me and my bonuses aren’t nearly as h
igh as I think they should be. But it’s exciting. And my boss is a genius. And I’m learning something every day. And I’m on a partnership track, so that’s pretty good, too.”

  I nodded. Somewhere along the line, someone had directed Liz to loosen up a little and it served her well. Where she was once more dignified than any teenager should be, she seemed to be living in the world now.

  “So what have you been up to?” she said. “Where are you living?”

  “At the moment, if you can believe it, I’m living here in Amber with my parents. But it is a very temporary thing.”

  “I heard that your dad was sick. Are you helping to take care of him?”

  “He doesn’t need nearly as much care as he seems to think he needs.” I looked across to the patio where he and Thomas were once again telling tales to each other. “I actually got steamrollered into taking care of his stationery store while it’s on the market. You don’t happen to know a buyer, do you?”

  “Sorry. That’s really nice of you. How can you afford to take the time off work? I’d never be able to do something like that.”

  “I just finished up a thing in Springfield, so I was actually available.”

  “‘Finished up a thing?’ You mean like an independent contractor thing?”

  “No, like a job I hated thing.”

  She nodded her head slowly. I wasn’t sure whether this meant that she sympathized or that she was having trouble processing the information.

  “You were planning to work in the media, weren’t you?” she asked.

  “That was a long time ago. I’ve since found that there are all kinds of things you can do with three-quarters of a communications degree.”

  “You never finished college?”

  “Some things came up. So do you have a town-house in Back Bay?”

  “High-rise. The only way I can get myself to the gym is if it’s in my building. And with the hours I work, I kind of like having a doorman. Are you working toward something now?”

  “I’m working toward the Southwest, ever so slowly. Do you know anything about Tucumcari?”

  “Is that a company?”

  “It’s a town. According to a Web site, it’s my ideal place to live in New Mexico.”

  She nodded a little faster this time (only a little, though) and glanced over toward the patio. “What are you going to do there?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll find out when I get there. Hey, maybe it’ll be something with the media and I’ll fulfill my destiny.”

  She smiled thinly. “They’re putting out the buffet. I think I’m going to get some food.”

  “Yeah, I’ll see you later.” I watched her walk away until two little boys and a little girl kicking a ball and laughing diverted my attention. I looked out on the wide expanse of open lawn that led down to the water to see people talking, a man tossing a giggling baby in the air, two older teens running toward the river, a woman and her daughter playing catch, and various others making their way toward the patio and the food.

  I grabbed a beer and walked around the house to the street. The conversation with Liz had unnerved me a little. Not as much because she seemed so casually dismissive about what I was doing with my life as that it yanked a period in my past from suspended animation. During that period when Chase and I saw Liz and the other “cousins” frequently, we were nothing but potential. Smart kids for the most part, raised in material comfort, believing that we only had to choose a future in order for that future to arise. When I lost contact with these people, I fixed them at that stage in my mind. Occasionally, my mother would mention one or the other, but the update didn’t mean anything to me. Seeing Liz made palpable what I of course understood at some level: that all of these people had moved on to what they were doing with their lives. Including me.

  The houses were very far apart in this neighborhood and most were set well back from the street. It was unnaturally quiet here. I’d hear the occasional splash, a lawn mower in the distance, a car passing. But all I could imagine when I looked at these houses was that every one of them held families just like Rita and Chad’s: an Ivy League educated daughter and son visiting from Manhattan and Philadelphia respectively, where they were stepping up their own ladders with an alacrity that astounded their parents.

  I hadn’t paid enough attention to my instincts to stay away from this party. As my mother was trying to convince me to come, I’d known that I should explain to her that it didn’t feel right. But I’d been more reluctant to turn her down about anything lately, feeling like I’d done a little too much of that since I got back to Amber. I should have been more insistent. I didn’t need more frustration at this stage.

  When I got back to the house, I thought about getting in my car and driving off. I’d at least had the presence of mind to drive here in my own car rather than going with my parents. But I knew that disappearing from the party would be more insulting to them than not going in the first place.

  In the backyard, some of the partygoers were organizing a game of volleyball. Rita and Chad’s son, Marshall, called out to me to join them. I wanted to play volleyball about as much as I wanted to monitor my father’s conversations with Thomas, but again I didn’t feel I could refuse. I took a place in the middle row and hoped things would be over quickly.

  Our team was awful. It included my aunt, someone’s six-year-old son, and Chad’s lumbering brother Marlon, among others. The only athletic-looking person on the team was a girl I imagined to be somewhere in her mid-teens.

  None of this mattered when we were just batting the ball around and none of it should have mattered at all. But when we started playing a game and we started losing badly, I became very agitated. Several people were watching and laughing over our ineptitude and I found myself taking this personally. When the score reached 15 – 4, I decided to do something about it. I ran from the back row to spike a ball over the net. I stopped passing to anyone other than the teen girl. I exhorted my teammates like Michael Jordan in the NBA finals, even as I did everything I could to prevent them from touching the ball. Marshall was drinking a beer while setting up shots on the other side, but I was prowling the court, pent on ramming the ball back at him. We scored nine consecutive points until a shot ricocheted off Marlon’s considerable belly. We took back the serve immediately, though, and won every point after that even as most of my teammates moved toward the boundaries. On the game-winning point, the teen girl set me up with a great pass and I spiked it right into Preston’s face. His sunglasses came flying off and he sat down on the grass.

  “Jeez, Hugh, did you have money on this game?” Marshall said angrily, while going to his uncle’s side. Liz knelt down next to her father and then she and Marshall helped him up. As she did so, she turned to me with an expression that read, “This is what you’re doing with your life?”

  I stood on the other side of the net as everyone left the volleyball court. I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want anyone to see me leave. As the action swirled around me, my aunt walked over and took me by the arm.

  “Had those competitive juices really flowing, huh?” she said.

  My embarrassment inched up. “I guess so.”

  “Preston’s fine. His idea of physical exertion is pressing the intercom button for his secretary. I think you just caught him by surprise.”

  We started walking away from the patio and toward a bench overlooking the river. When we sat down, my aunt released my arm and patted me on the leg.

  “I haven’t seen much of you since you’ve been back,” she said. In fact, I’d only seen her once, when she visited my father after he came home.

  “I’ve been pretty busy,” I said, though I hardly ever felt busy.

  “It’s good of you to help your father out.”

  “It came at the right time.”

  She patted my leg again. “It’s still good of you to do it. I feel so badly for Richard.”

  I nodded and looked around. There wasn’t anyone within fifty yards of us.
r />   “So what are you doing with yourself these days?” she said.

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time in the store. Other than that, I don’t know, some time with Mom and Dad, some time with John Updike, a couple of long drives.”

  “I meant what are you doing? Anna told me that you aren’t going back to Springfield. What are you going to do once they sell the store?”

  I’m sure it had something to do with the setting, that my aunt was a financially successful woman married to a financially successful man who had four financially successful brothers, but the afternoon’s preoccupation with what one (and more specifically, what I) did had worn me ragged. “I haven’t really focused on that yet,” I said dismissively.

  “When will it be time to focus?”

  I turned my body to face her, which also moved her hand from my leg. “It’ll be time to focus when it’s time. I’ve managed to get by so far.”

  “The firm would have had my ass if I’d ever approached my work that way,” she said, looking out toward the water.

  “That’s one of the reasons I don’t work for a firm.”

  “I didn’t realize that had to do with ‘reasons.’”

  I could have continued to defend myself, though I was certain I could never convinced her to see the world from my perspective. Instead, I decided to turn my attention to a sailboat out on the river.

  “I was thinking this morning about all of the mischief your brother used to cause at this function,” she said. “He was such a ball of fire. Chad and I would actually try to guess what kind of prank he was going to pull. He was such an electric soul. Both of you were back then.”