A Bridge of Years (4 page)

He
turned back to the house.

Tony
called after lunch with another dinner invitation, which Tom could
not gracefully decline. "Come on over," Tony said. "We'll
stoke up the barbecue." It was an order as much as an
invitation: tribute to be paid.

Tom
left the dirty dishes in the sink. At the door he paused and turned
back to the empty house.

"You
want to clean up, go ahead." No answer. Oh, well.

It
was a long drive to Tony's place. Tony and Loreen lived in the
Seaview district, a terrace of expensive family homes along the
scalloped bay hills south of town. The neighborhood was
prestigious but the house Tony lived in wasn't especially
flashy—Tony was very Protestant about overt displays of
wealth. Tony's house, in fact, was one of the plainer of these homes,
a flat white facade which concealed its real, formidable opulence:
the immense plate glass windows and the cedar deck overlooking the
water. Tom parked in the driveway behind Loreen's Aerostar and was
welcomed at the door by the entire family: Tony, five-year-old Barry,
Loreen with cranky eight-month Tricia squirming against her
shoulder. Tom smiled and stepped into the mingled odors of
stain-proofed broadloom, Pine-Sol, Pampers.

He
would have liked to sit and talk a while with Loreen. ("Poor
Loreen," Barbara used to say. "Playing Tony's idea of a
housewife. All diapers and Barbara Cartland novels.") But Tony
threw an arm over his shoulder and marched him through the spacious
living room to the deck, where his propane barbecue hissed and
flamed alarmingly.

"Sit,"
Tony said, waving a pair of tongs at a deck chair.

Tom
sat and watched his brother paint red sauce over steaks. Tony was
five years older than Tom, balding but trim, the creases around his
eyes defined more by exercise and sunshine than by age. It would be
hard, Tom thought, to guess which of us is older.

It
was Tony who had come roaring out to Seattle like an angry guardian
angel—six months after Barbara moved out; five months after Tom
left his job at Aerotech; three months after Tom stopped answering
his phone. Tony had cleared the apartment of empty bottles and frozen
food wrappers, switched off the TV that had flickered and mumbled for
weeks uninterrupted, scolded Tom into showering and shaving—talked
him into the move back to Belltower and the job at the car lot.

It
was also Tony who had offered, as consolation for the loss of
Barbara, the observation "She's a bitch, little brother. They're
all bitches. Fuck em."

"She's
not a bitch," Tom had said.

"They're
all bitches."

"Don't
call her that," Tom had said, and he remembered Tony's look, the
arrogance eroding into uncertainty.

"Well
. . . you can't throw your life away for her, anyhow. There are
people out there going on with their business —people with cancer,
people whose kids were smeared over the highway by semi trucks. If
they can deal with it, you can fucking well deal with it."

This
was both unanswerable and true. Tom accepted the chastisement and had
been clinging to it since. Barbara would not have approved; she
disliked the appropriation of public grief for private purposes. Tom
was more pragmatic. You do what you have to.

But
here he was in Tony's big house beside the bay, and it occurred to
him that he was carrying a considerable load of guilt, gratitude, and
resentment, mostly directed at his brother.

He
made small talk while the steaks charred over the flames. Tony
responded with his own chatter. Tony had bought the propane barbecue
"practically wholesale" from a guy he knew at a retail
hardware outlet. He was considering investing in a couple of rental
properties this summer. "You should have talked to me about that
house before running off half cocked." And he had his eye on a
new sailboat.

This
wasn't bragging, Tom understood. Barbara had long ago pointed out
Tony's need for physical evidence of his worth, like the validations
punched into bus tickets. To his credit, he was at least discreet
about it.

The
problem was that he, Tom, had no such validation of his own; in
Tony's eyes, this must render him suspicious. A man without a VCR or
a sports car might be capable of anything. This nervousness extended
to Tom's job performance, a topic that had not been broached but
which hovered over the conversation like a cloud.

Tony's
own reliability, of course, was unquestioned. When their parents died
Tony had staked his share of the estate on a junior partnership in an
auto dealership out on Commercial Road. The investment was more than
financial: Tony had put in a lot of time, sweat, and deferred
gratification. And the investment had paid off, handsomely enough
that Tom sometimes wondered whether his own use of the same
inheritance—for his engineering degree, and now the house—was
ultimately frivolous. What had it bought him? A divorce and a job as
a car salesman.

But
he was not even a salesman, really. "For now," Tony said,
carrying the steaks in to the dining room table—Topic A surfacing
at last—"you are strictly a gofer, a lot boy, a floor whore.
You don't write up sales until the manager says you're ready.
Loreen!
We're
gettin' hungry here! Where the hell is the salad?"

Loreen
emerged dutifully from the kitchen with a cut-glass bowl filled with
iceberg and romaine lettuce, sliced tomatoes, mushrooms, a wooden
spoon and fork. She set down the bowl and went about tucking Tricia
into a high chair while Barry tugged at her dress. Tony sat down and
poured himself iced tea from a sweating jug. "The steaks look
wonderful," Loreen said.

Tom
spent the salad course wondering what a "floor whore" was.
Loreen fed Tricia from a jar of strained peas, then excused herself
long enough to install the baby in a playpen. Barry didn't want the
steak even after she cut it for him; Loreen fixed him a peanut butter
sandwich and sent him out into the back yard. When she sat down again
her own steak was surely stone cold—Tony had just about finished
his.

A
floor
whore, Tony explained, was a novice salesman, viewed mainly as a
nuisance by the older hands at the lot. Tony shook his head. "The
thing is," he said, "I'm already getting some flak over
this. Bob Walker—the co-owner—was very much opposed to me putting
you in this job. He says it's nepotism and he says it frankly sucks.
And he has a point, because it creates a problem for the sales
manager. He knows you're my brother, so the question becomes, do I
handle this guy with kid gloves or do I treat him like any other
employee?"

"I
don't want any special treatment," Tom said.

"I
know! Of course!
You
know
that, / know that. But I had to go to the manager—Billy Klein,
you'll meet him tomorrow —I had to go to him and say, Hey, Billy,
just do your job. If this guy fucks up then tell him so. If he
doesn't work out, you tell me. This is not a featherbed. I want the
maximum from this man."

"Sure
enough," Tom said, inspecting the greasy remains of the steak on
his plate.

"There
are basically two things I want to make clear," Tony said. "One
is that if you screw up, I look bad. So as a favor to me, please
don't screw up. The second is that Billy has a free hand as far as
I'm concerned. You answer to him from now on. I don't do his job and
I don't look out for you. And he is not always an easy man to please.
Frankly, he wouldn't piss down your throat if your guts were on fire.
If it works out, then fine, but if not—
what
the hell are you smiling at?"

"
'Piss down your throat if your guts were on fire'?" "It's a
colloquialism.
Jesus,
Tom, it's not supposed to be funny!"

"Barbara
would have loved it."

Barbara
would have repeated it for weeks. Once, during a phone call, Tony had
described the weather as "cold as the tits on a brass monkey."
Barbara laughed so hard she had to pass Tom the receiver. Tom
explained patiently that she'd swallowed her gum.

But
Tony wasn't amused. He wiped his mouth and slapped the napkin down on
the table. "If you want this job you'd better think a little
more about your future and a little less about your hippy-dippy
ex-wife, all right?"

Tom
flushed. "She wasn't—"

"No!
Spare me the impassioned defense. She's the one who ran off with her
twenty-year-old boyfriend. She doesn't deserve your loyalty and you
sure as shit don't owe it to her."

"Tony,"
Loreen said. Her tone was pleading.
Please,
not here.

Barry,
the five-year-old, had wandered in from the back yard; he stood with
one peanut butter-encrusted hand on the armoire and gazed at the
adults with rapt, solemn interest.

Tom
desperately wanted to be able to deliver an answer— something
fierce and final-—and was shocked to discover he couldn't produce
one.

"It's
a new world," Tony said. "Get used to it."

"I'll
serve the dessert," Loreen said.

After
dinner Tony went off to tuck in Barry and read him a story. Tricia
was already asleep in her crib, and Tom sat with Loreen in the
cooling kitchen. He offered to help with the dishes but his
sister-in-law shooed him away: "I'm just rinsing them for
later." So he sat at the big butcher-block table and peered
through the window toward the dark water of the bay, where
pleasure-boat lights bobbed in the swell.

Loreen
dried her hands on a dish towel and sat opposite him. "It's not
such a bad fife," she said.

Tom
gave her a long look. It was the kind of bald statement Loreen
was prone to, couched in the slow Ohio Valley cadences of her youth.
Her life here, she meant; her life with Tony: not so bad.

"I
never said it was," Tom told her.

"No.
But I can tell. I know what you and Barbara thought of us." She
smiled at him. "Don't be embarrassed. I mean, we might as well
talk. It's all right to talk."

"You
have a good life here."

"Yes.
We do. And Tony is a good man."

"I
know that, Loreen."

"But
we're nothing special. Tony would never admit it, of course. But
that's the fact. Down deep, he knows. And maybe it makes him a little
mean sometimes. And maybe / know it, and I get a little sad—for a
little while. But then I get over it."

"You're
not ordinary. You're both very lucky."

"Lucky,
but ordinary. The thing is, Tom, what's hard is that you and Barbara
were
special.
It always tickled me to see you two. Because you were special and you
knew it. The way you smiled at each other and the way you talked. The
things you talked about. You talked about the world—you know,
politics, the environment, whatever—you talked like it mattered.
Like it was up to you personally to do something about it. I always
felt just a little bigger than life with you two around."

"I
appreciate that," Tom said. In fact he was unexpectedly grateful
to her for saying it—for recognizing what Barbara had meant to him.

"But
that's changed." Loreen was suddenly serious. Her smile faded.
"Now Barbara's gone, and I think you have to learn how to be
ordinary. And I don't think that's going to be real easy for you. I
think it's going to be pretty tough."

Tony
didn't apologize, but he came out of Barry's room somewhat
abashed and eager to please. He said he'd like to see the new house
and Tom seized on the offer as an excuse to leave early. He let Tony
follow him down the coast in the electric-blue Aerostar. Moving
inland, up the Post Road and away from the traffic, Tony became a
glare in Tom's rearview mirror, lost when the car angled around
stands of pine. They parked at the house; Tony climbed out of his van
and the two of them stood a moment in the starry, frog-creaking
night.

"Mistake
to buy so far out," Tony said.

"I
like the place," Tom offered. "The price was right."

"Bad
investment. Even if the market heats up, you're just too damn far
from town."