A Bridge of Years

by Charles Robert Wilson

  The offer seemed to provoke fatigue in him. “I would be very happy to sleep on your sofa. I’m sure it’s a wonderful sofa.”

  “Very courtly,” she said. “It came from the Salvation Army. It’s purple. It’s an ugly sofa, Tom.”

  “Then I’ll sleep with my eyes closed,” he said.

  She lived in a little railroad apartment in the East Village where she had moved from the dorm at NYU. It was two flights up in a tenement building and furnished on no budget at all: the ugly purple sofa, some folding chairs, a Sally Ann standing lamp from the Progressive Era. The bookcases were made of raw pineboard and paving bricks.

  Tom stood awhile looking at the books. They were nothing special, her college English texts plus whatever she’d picked up at secondhand stores since then. Some C. Wright Mills, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Aldous Huxley— but he handled them as if they were specimens in a display case.

  “Read anything you want,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think I could concentrate.”

  Probably not. And he was shivering. She brought him a big bath towel and a cotton shirt Lawrence had left behind. “Dry off and change,” she said. “Sleep if you want.” She left him stretched out on the sofa and went into the “kitchen”—a corner of the room, really, with a sink and a reconditioned Hotpoint and a cheap partition—and rinsed a few dishes. Her rent was due and the severance check from her department store job would cover it; but that would leave her (she calculated) about seven dollars to live on until she picked up some music work or another job. Neither was impossible, but she would have to find a gig or go hungry. But that was tomorrow’s problem—today was today.

  She left the kitchen passably clean. By the time she’d finished Tom was asleep on the sofa—stark stone unconscious, snoring a little. She picked up his watch from the wooden crate table where he’d left it, thinking, It must be late.

  Then she did a double-take at the face of the watch, which wasn’t a watch face at all but a kind of miniature signboard where the time was written in black numerals over a smoke-gray background.

  9:35, it said, and then dissolved to 9:36. The little black colon winked continuously.

  Joyce had never seen such a watch and she assumed it must be very expensive—surely not a car salesman’s watch. But it wasn’t a foreign watch, either. It said “Timex” and “Quartz Lithium” (whatever that was) and “Water Resistant.”

  Very very strange, she thought. Tom Winter, Man of Mystery.

  She left him snoring on the couch and moved into the bedroom. She undressed with the fight off and stretched out on the narrow spring-creaking bed, relishing the cold air and the clank of the radiator, the rattle of rainwater on the fire escape. Then she climbed under the scratchy brown blanket and waited for sleep.

  Mornings and evenings, she loved this city.

  Sometimes she slept five hours or less at a time, so she could have more morning and more night.

  Nights, especially when she was out with Lawrence and that crowd, she would simply let herself be swept up in the urgency of their conversation, talking desegregation or the arms race in some guitar cafe; swept up by the music, too, legions of folk singers arrowing in on Bleecker and MacDougal from all over the country these days; in sawdust-floored rooms filled with her poet friends and folk friends and “beat” friends, earnest Trotskyites and junkies and jazz musicians and eighteen-year-old runaways from dingy Midwest Levit-towns, all these crosscurrents so fiercely focused that on some nights she believed the pitch-black sky might open in a rapture of the dispossessed and they would all ascend bodily into heaven. Nights like that had been common enough this winter and spring that she was eager for summer, when the pace would double and redouble again. Maybe Lawrence would publish his poetry or she would find an audience for her music. And they would be at the eye, then, of this luminous vortex.

  But mornings were good, too. This was a good morning. It was good to wake up and feel the city waking up around her. Since she had lived in New York the rhythm of the city had become a stabilizing pattern. She had learned to distinguish the sound of morning traffic from the sound of afternoon traffic, both distinct from the lonelier siren sound of the traffic late at night. Morning traffic woke her with promises. She did not dislike the city until noon; at noon it was coarse, loud, unruly, plain, and chokingly dull. Lunch hours at Macy’s she had written songs about the night and morning city, little spells against the crudity of midday.

  Tom was still asleep on the sofa. Joyce was faintly surprised by this. She had imagined him vanished in the morning, like a dream, like smoke. But here he was: substantial in his rumpled clothes. She heard the clank and moan of the bathroom plumbing; he stepped into the kitchen with his face freshly washed and his eyes as wide and dazed as they had been the day before.

  “New York,” he said. “Nineteen sixty-two.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “It’s amazing,” he said.

  “You really are from out of town.”

  “You could say that.” His grin was big and a little silly. “Feeling better this morning?”

  “Better. Giddy, in fact.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, don’t get too giddy. You probably need breakfast.”

  “Probably.” He added, “I’m still broke.”

  “Well—I can buy us breakfast. But I have to meet Lawrence at noon. Lawrence might not appreciate knowing you slept here.” Tom nodded his acceptance without asking who Lawrence might be—very courteous, Joyce thought.

  She locked up and they descended to the street. The sky was bright and the air was almost warm—which was good, because Tom didn’t have a coat to throw over his cotton shirt. She started to recommend a thrift shop she knew about —“Once you get some cash.” But he shrugged off the problem. “I’ll worry about money later.”

  “That’s a good attitude.”

  “First I have to see about getting home.”

  “You don’t need money for that?”

  “Money’s not the problem.”

  “So what is the problem?”

  “The laws of physics. Mechanical mice.” Joyce smiled in spite of herself. He went on, “I can’t explain. Maybe I will someday. If I find my way back here.”

  She met his eyes. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  She ordered up a coffee-shop breakfast for both of them. Cutting into her budget a little—but what was money for? Tom insisted on buying a newspaper and then he sat marveling at it, turning the pages reverently … not reading it so much as inspecting it, Joyce thought. Personally, she hadn’t picked up a paper since the John Glenn launch in February. She said, “Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?”

  “I’ve never been accused of poetry before.”

  “What you said about mechanical mice. And, hey, this is the Village. Poets are like cockroaches around here.”

  “My God, it is, isn’t it? ‘The Village.’ ” He looked up from the paper. “You play music?”

  “Sometimes,” Joyce allowed.

  “I noticed your guitar back at the apartment. Twelve-string Hohner. Not too shabby.”

  “You play?”

  “A little bit. From college. It’s been a few years, though.”

  “We should play sometime. If you come back.”

  “Guitar players must be as common as poets around here.”

  “Well, they’re like snowflakes. No two the same.” She smiled. “Seriously, if you come around this way again …”

  “Thank you.” He looked at his watch and stood up. “You’ve been awesomely generous.”

  “De nada. Besides, I like you.”

  He touched her hand for a moment. The touch was fleeting but warm, and she felt a little internal tingle—mysterious, unexpected.

  “I might be back,” he said.

  “Goodbye, Tom Winter.”

  He walked into the pale sunlight, wavered a moment in the doorway, then headed unsteadily east.
r />   Find what you’re looking for, she thought. A parting wish. Though it didn’t seem too likely.

  Probably, she thought, I’ll never see him again.

  She sipped her coffee and glanced at the paper, but it was all bad news: two men had been murdered in an alley not a block from her apartment. While she slept, Death had been out walking the streets.

  This was a shivery thought and she looked up once more, craned her neck to spot Tom down the street; but he was already gone, lost in the morning traffic and out of reach.

  Five

  The desk clerk glanced at the ledger as he handed her the key. “Room 312, Mrs. Winter.”

  Barbara was startled. Had she really signed that name? She took the key and shot a sidelong glance at the page where she had, yes, written Mrs. Barbara Winter in neat script.

  The motel was a three-story brick bivouac set back from a dismal stretch of highway maybe an hour’s drive from Belltower. She had considered driving straight through; but Tony’s call had reached her this afternoon at a conference in Victoria, B.C., and it was late now; she was tired; her car was tired, too. So she had stopped at this bleak roadside place at 10:30 p.m. in a light rain and signed her married name to the register.

  Room 312 smelled of dry heat and disinfectant. The bed creaked and the window blinds opened on a view of the neon vacancy sign reflected in the slick wet parking lot. Cars and trucks passed on the highway in clusters of three or four, their tires hissing in the rain.

  Maybe it’s stupid to see him.

  The thought was unavoidable. She’d been having it intermittently since she climbed into the car. It echoed as she shrugged out of her jeans and blouse and stepped into the shower stall, washing away road dirt.

  Maybe it was stupid to see him; maybe useless, too. Rafe had taken it well, with a minimum of pouting; but Rafe, twenty-three years old, saw the six-year gap between them as a chasm, was threatened by the notion of her lingering affection for Tom. She had obliged him by keeping contacts to a minimum … until now.

  It was stupid to risk her relationship with Rafe—which was all the relationship she had at the moment, and one she was desperate not to lose. But she remembered what Tony had said on the phone:

  I can’t do anything for him this time.

  The words had gone through her like a shot of cold air.

  “Please,” she said out loud. “Please, Tom, you dumb bastard, please be okay.”

  Then she climbed under the cold motel sheets and slept till dawn.

  In the morning, she tried the phone. He didn’t answer.

  She panicked at first. Scolded herself for having spent the night here: it wouldn’t have been that much farther to drive. She could have gone on, could have knocked at his door, saved him from—

  What?

  Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? The great unanswered question.

  She checked out, stowed her luggage in the trunk of the car, pulled into the sparse dawn traffic droning down the highway.

  Since she left Tom she had spoken to his brother Tony exactly twice. On both occasions he had asked for her help with Tom.

  The first call had been months ago. Tom had been drinking, the job had fallen through, he owed back rent on his apartment. If Barbara had known she might have tried to help … but by the time Tony put in his call the situation was nearly resolved; Tony had arranged for a job in Belltower and Tom had dried out. “I don’t think there’s anything I could do to help,” she’d said.

  “You could come back to him,” Tony had said. “Much as it pains me to say so. I think that would help.”

  “Tony, you know I can’t do that.”

  “Why the hell not? For Tom’s sake, I mean.”

  “We broke up for a reason. I have another relationship.”

  “You’re shacked up with some teenage anarchist. I heard about it.”

  “This isn’t helping, Tony.”

  And Tony responded, “You must be the best cooze in Washington State, Barbara, because I can’t figure out why else my brother would be racked up over you,” and hung up. Barbara hadn’t expected to hear from him after that. Surely only desperation would lead him to call again.

  Presumably, desperation had. Tony’s second call—yesterday’s call—had been routed up to the Conference on Forestry and the Environment in Victoria by one of the board members at World Watch, an advocacy group Barbara worked for. First came a warning call from Rachel, her coworker: “Barb, do you really know this guy? He says he’s related to your ex. He says, ‘I know she works for this pinko organization and I need to talk to her now.’ Some family thing. He said it was urgent so I gave him the hotel number, but I wondered—”

  “It’s okay,” Barbara said. “That’s fine, Rachel. You did the right thing.”

  She waited ten minutes by the phone, standing up Rafe at the Jobs or Oxygen seminar. Then Tony’s call came up from the switchboard. “It’s about Tom,” he said.

  Barbara felt a sudden weight at the back of her neck: a headache beginning. She said, “Tony … didn’t we have this conversation once?”

  “It’s different this time.”

  “What’s changed?”

  “Just listen to me, Barbara, will you do that? Save up all the psychological crap until I’m finished?”

  Barbara bit her Up but said nothing. Underneath the insult was some urgency: from Tony, a new thing.

  “Better,” he said. “Thank you. I’m calling about Tom, and the reason I’m calling is that I think he’s going off the deep end in a serious way and this time I don’t know what to do about it.”

  Urgency and this confession. Barbara said, “Is he drinking again?”

  “That’s the weird thing. I don’t think he is. He’ll disappear for days at a time—but he comes back clean and he’s not hung over. He’s holed up in this house he bought out on the Post Road. Hardly sees anybody. Reclusive. And it’s cutting into his life. He’s missed time at the lot and the sales manager is seriously pissed at him. Plus, it’s things I don’t know how to explain. Did you ever meet somebody who just didn’t give a fuck? You could say hello, you could tell them your uncle died, and maybe they say something sympathetic, but you can tell they just don’t care?”

  “I’ve met people like that,” Barbara said. Like you, you asshole, she thought.

  “Tom ever strike you as one of those?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s what he is now. He has no friends, he has no money, he’s on the brink of losing his job—and none of this matters. He’s out in some other dimension.”

  Didn’t sound like Tom at all. Tom had always been a second-guesser—obsessed with consequences. Because of the way his parents had died, she guessed, or maybe it came from some deeper chamber of his personality, but Tom had always feared and distrusted the future. “It could still be alcohol.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Tony said. “I don’t care how subtle he is about it, I know when my brother is juicing. This is something altogether else. Last time I went to the house, you know what happened? He wouldn’t let me in. He opened the door, flashed me a big smile and said, ‘Go away, Tony.’ ”

  “He’s happy, though?”

  “Happy isn’t the word. Detached. You want me to say what I think? I think he might be suicidal.”

  Barbara swallowed hard. “That’s a big leap.”

  “He’s signing off, Barbara. He won’t even talk to me, but that’s the impression I have. He doesn’t care what happens in the world because he already said goodbye to it.”

  The phone was a dead weight in her hand. “What does Loreen think about this?”

  “It was Loreen who convinced me to call you.”

  Then it was serious. Loreen was no genius but she had a feeling for people. Barbara said, “Tony, why? What brought this on?”

  “Who knows? Maybe Tom could tell you.”

  “You want me to talk to him?”

  “I can’t tell anybody what to do anymore. I’m way past that. If
you’re worried, you know where to find him.”

  Buzz and hum after Tony hung up.

  Her marriage was over. She didn’t owe Tom anything. Unfair, to have this dumped in her lap.

  She packed her bag and took it to the lobby, found Rafe and explained the situation as kindly as possible. He said he understood. He was probably lying.

  Her hand shook when she put the key in the ignition.

  She had to pull over a couple of times to check the gas station map of Belltower. By the time she found Tom’s house it was almost ten o’clock, Sunday morning. Peaceful out here along the Post Road, clear skies and summer coming on fast. Barbara stepped out of the car and took a deep lungful of cedar-scented air.

  The house looked peaceful, too. Very clean, almost pristine. The roof was moss-free and the siding looked practically scrubbed. Tom had let the lawn go a little bit, however.

  She put her car keys in her purse. I didn’t think I’d be this nervous.

  But there was no turning away. Up the walk, knock on the door. Primly, tap-tap-tap. Then, when no answer came, harder.

  The sound echoed and died in the Sunday morning air. No response but the shushing of the trees.

  She had bolstered herself for every eventuality but this. Maybe he went out somewhere. The garage door was down and locked—no way to tell if his car was inside.

  No way to tell if he was still alive. Tony’s words came back like a curse: I think he’s suicidal. Maybe she had come too late. But that thought was gruesome and unwarranted, a product of her own fears; she put it firmly out of mind. Probably he had gone out for a while. She decided to wait in the car.

  After half an hour trying to find a comfortable place on the upholstery—and getting a little hungry around the edge of her nerves—she caught a glimpse of motion in the nearest window of the house.