A Bridge of Years (38 page)

She
exhaled a long wisp of smoke. "My uncle was in Italy. He never
talked about it. Whenever I asked him about the war, he got this
really unpleasant expression. He'd stare at you until you shut up. So
I knew this was basically bullshit. It kind of made me mad. If Ray
wanted to live out some heroic existence, why not just do it? It
wasn't even what you could honestly call nostalgia. He wanted some
magic transformation, he wanted to live in a world where
everything was bigger than life. I said, 'Why don't you
go
to
Italy? I admit there's not a war on. But you could live on the beach,
get drunk with the fishermen, fall in love with some little peasant
girl' He said, 'It's not the same. People aren't the same any-

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more.

Tom
said, "Is this a true story?" "Mostly true." "The
moral?"

"I
thought about Ray last night. I thought, What if
he
found
a tunnel? What if it led back to 1940?"

"He'd
go to war," Tom said. "It wouldn't be what he expected,
and he'd be scared and unhappy."

"Maybe.
But maybe he'd love it. And I think that would be a lot more
frightening, don't you? He'd be walking around with a permanent
hard-on, because this was
history,
and
he knew how it went. He'd be screwing those Italian girls, but it
would be macabre, terrible—because in his own mind he'd be screwing
history.
He'd
be fucking ghosts. I find that a little terrifying."

Tom
discovered his mouth was dry. "You think that's what I'm doing?"

Joyce
lowered her eyes. "I have to admit the possibility has crossed
my mind."

He
said he'd meet her after her gig at Mario's.

Alone,
Tom felt the city around him like a headache. He could go to
Lindner's—but he doubted he could focus his eyes on a radio chassis
without passing out. Instead he rode a bus uptown and wandered for a
time among the crowds on Fifth Avenue. On a perverse whim he followed
a mob of tourists to the 102nd-floor observatory of the Empire State
Building, where he stood in a daze of sleep-deprivation trying to
name the landmarks he recognized—the Chrysler Building,
Welfare Island—and placing a few that didn't yet exist, the World
Trade Center still only a landfill site in the Hudson River. The
building where he stood was thirty years old, approximately half as
old as it would be in 1989 and that much closer to its art deco
glory, a finer gloss on its Belgian marbles and limestone facades.
The tourists were middle-aged or young couples with children, men in
brown suits with crisp white shirts open at the collar, snapping
photos with Kodak Brownies and dispensing dimes to their kids, who
clustered around the ungainly pay-binoculars pretending to strafe
lower Manhattan. These people spared an occasional glance for Tom,
the unshaven man in a loose sweatshirt and denims: a beatnik,
perhaps, or some other specimen of New York exotica. Tom looked at
the city through wire-webbed windows.

The
city was gray, smoky, vast, old, strange. The city was thirty years
too young. The city was a fossil in amber, resurrected,
mysterious life breathed into its pavements and awnings and
Oldsmobiles. It was a city of ghosts.

Ghosts
like Joyce.

He
shaded his eyes against the fierce afternoon sun. Somewhere in
this grid of stone and black shadow, he had fallen in love. This was
certain knowledge and it took some of the sting from what Joyce had
said. He wasn't fucking ghosts. But he might have fallen in love with
one.

And
maybe that was a mistake; maybe he'd be better off fucking ghosts. He
tried to recall why he had come here and what he had expected. A
playground: maybe she was right about that. The sixties—that fabled
decade—had ended when he was eleven years old. He'd grown up
believing he'd missed something important, although he was never sure
what—it depended on who you talked to. A wonderful or terrible
time. When the Vietnam War was fought in, or against. When drugs were
good, or weren't. When sex was never lethal. A decade when "youth"
was important; by the time of Tom's adolescence the word had lost
some of its glamour.

Maybe
he had expected all these wonders assembled together, served
with a side of invulnerability and private wisdom. A vast
phantom drama in which he was both audience and actor.

But
Joyce had made that impossible.

He
had come here wanting love—some salvaging grace— but love was
impossible in the playground. Love was a different landscape.
Love implied loss and time and vulnerability. Love made all the props
and stage sets too real: real war, real death, real hopes invested in
real lost causes.

Because
he loved her he had begun to see the world the way she did: not the
gaudy Kodachrome of an old postcard but solid, substantial, freighted
with other meanings.

He
raised his eyes to the horizon, where the hot city haze had begun to
lift into a comfortless blue sky.

He
bought dinner at a cafeteria and showed up at Mario's, a basement
cafe under a bookstore, before Joyce was due on stage. The "stage,"
a platform of two-by-fours covered with plywood panels, contained a
cane-backed chair and a PA microphone on a rust-flecked chromium
stand—not strictly necessary, given the size of the venue. Tom
chose a table by the door.

Joyce
emerged from the shadows with her twelve-string Hohner and a nervous
smile. Out of some tic of vanity she had chosen to leave her glasses
offstage, and Tom was mildly jealous: the only other time he saw her
without her glasses was when they were in bed together. Without them,
under the stage lights, her face was plain, oval, a little owl-eyed.
She blinked at her audience and pulled the microphone closer to the
chair.

She
began without much confidence, letting the guitar carry her—more
certain of her fingers than of her voice. Tom sat among the quieting
crowd while she ran a few arpeggios and chord changes, pausing
once to tune a string. He closed his eyes and appreciated the rich
body of the Hohner.

"This
is an old song," she said.

She
sang "Fannerio," and Tom felt the piercing dissonance of
time and time: here was this long-haired woman in a Village cafe
playing folk ballads, an image he associated with faded Technicolor
movies, record jackets abandoned at garage sales, moldering back
issues of
Life.
It
was a cliche and it was painfully naive. It was quaint.

But
this was Joyce, and she loved these words and these tunes.

She
sang "The Bells of Rhymney" and "Lonesome Traveler"
and "Nine Hundred Miles." Her voice was direct, focused,
and sometimes inconsolably sad.

Maybe
Larry was right, Tom thought. We love them for their goodness, and
then we scour it out of them.

What
had he given her, after all?

A
future she didn't want. A night of stark terror in a hole under
Manhattan. A burden of unanswerable questions. He had come into her
life like a shadow, the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, with his
bony ringer pointed at a grave.

He
wanted her optimism and her intensity and her fierce caring, because
he didn't have any of his own . . . because he had mislaid those
things in his own inaccessible past.

She
sang "Maid of Constant Sorrow" under a blue spot, alone on
the tiny stage.

Tom
thought about Barbara.

The
applause was generous, a hat was passed, she waved and stepped back
into the shadows. Tom circled around behind the stage, where she was
latching the Hohner into its shell. Her face was somber.

She
looked up. "The manager says Lawrence called."

"Called
here?"

"Said
he'd been trying to get hold of us all day. He wants us to go over to
his apartment and it's supposed to be urgent."

What
could be urgent? "Maybe he's drunk." "Maybe. But it's
not like him to phone here. I think we should go."

They
walked from the cafe, Joyce hurrying ahead, obviously concerned.
Tom was more puzzled than worried, but he let her set the pace.

They
didn't waste any time. They arrived too late, anyhow.

There
was a crowd in the stairwell, a siren in the distance —and blood,
blood in the hallway and blood spilling from the door of Millstein's
apartment, an astonishing amount of blood. Tom tried to hold Joyce
back but she broke away from him, calling out Lawrence's name in a
voice that was already mournful.

Armored,
alert, and fully powered, Billy identified the scatter of blue
luminescence on the apartment door and adjusted his eyepiece to
wideband operation. His heart was beating inside him like a glorious
machine and his thoughts were subtle and swift.

The
corridor was empty. The keen apparatus of Billy's senses catalogued
the smell of cabbage, roach powder, mildewed linoleum; the dim floral
pattern of the wallpaper; the delicate tread and pressure of his feet
along the floor.

He
burned open the lock with a finger laser and moved through the
doorway with a speed that caused the hinges to emit a squeal, as of
surprise.

He
closed the door behind him.

The
apartment was long and rectangular, with a door open into what
appeared to be the kitchen and another door, closed, on what was
probably a bedroom. A window at the far end of the rectangle showed
the night silhouette of the Fourteenth Street Con Edison stacks
through a burlap curtain tied back to a nail. The wall on the
left was lined with bookshelves.

The
room was empty.

Billy
stood for a silent moment, listening.

This
room and the kitchen were empty . . . but he heard a faint scuffle
from the bedroom.

He
smiled and moved through that door as efficiently as he had moved
through the first.

This
room was smaller and even shabbier. The walls were dirty white and
bare except for a crudely framed magazine print of an abstract
painting. The bed was a mattress on the floor. There was a man in the
bed.

Billy
ceased smiling, because this wasn't the man he had followed from
Lindner's.

This
was some other man. This was a tall, pigeon-chested, naked man
snatching a cotton sheet over himself and squinting at Billy in
the darkness with gap-jawed astonishment.

The
man on the mattress said, "Who the fuck are you?"

"Get
up," Billy said.

The
man didn't get up.

He
doesn't know what I am,
Billy
realized.
He
thinks I'm an old man in a pair of goggles. It's dark; he can't see
very well. Maybe he thinks I'm a thief.

Billy
corrected this impression by burning a hole in the mattress beside
the naked man's outstretched left arm. The hole was wide and deep. It
stank of charred kapok and cotton and the waxy smoke of the wood
floor underneath. The hole was black and began immediately to burn at
the edges; the naked man yelped and smothered the flames with his
blanket. Then he looked up at Billy, and Billy was pleased to
recognize the fear in his eyes. This was the kind of fear that would
make him abject, malleable; not yet a panicked fear that would make
him unpredictable.

"Stand
up," Billy repeated.

Standing,
the man was tall but too thin. Billy disliked his fringe of beard,
the bump of his ribs, the visible flare of his hip bones. His penis
and shriveled scrotum dangled pathetically between his legs.

Billy
imagined burning away that sack of flesh, altering this man in
something like the way the Infantry doctors had altered Billy
himself . . . but that wasn't good strategy.

Billy
said, "Where's the man who lives here?"

The
naked man swallowed twice and said, "I'm the man who lives
here."

Billy
walked to the wall and switched on the light. The light was a
sixty-watt bulb hanging on a knotted cord, smoke from the charred
mattress swimming around it. Billy's eyepiece adapted at once to
this new light, damping its amplification. The naked man blinked
and squinted.