The Bridge (4 page)

“Make me understand.”

“Why?” I rub a hand over my hair, which needs cutting. I don’t know why I agreed to this charade, suddenly. Why am I here with her? What purpose could it possibly serve? I’m supposed to be saving her, persuading her, and all I’m doing is slipping further and further into quicksand. “Why do you care?”

She breathes in deep, closes her eyes, gives her head a little shake. “I don’t know. Honestly? I don’t know, Henry. But you’re here. I’m here. We have the whole day in front of us. What’s the harm in you telling me?”

“The harm,” I say, “is that there isn’t any point.”

“Well, if there’s no point in telling me, then there’s no point in not telling me either. Might as well be depressed and go for a walk, right?”

I narrow my eyes at her sneaky logic. The ferry drags deeper into the open water and as it does, the wind becomes heavy and ponderous. It’s difficult, almost, to hear her. Even to answer her question, I have to shout.

“Let’s say I tell you.” I pitch my voice close to her ear, and I can feel her struggle to stand her ground, to not pull away. I have to brace myself, as well. The weighted rocking of the ferry makes balance difficult. The scent of her hair makes it difficult.

“Let’s say I try to explain what it’s like. What are you going to do? Hand me some platitudes about how life is worth living? You’re hardly in a position to do that.”

“It’s not the same for me.” She holds the railing with both hands and turns her face just slightly toward mine. “I’m going to die anyway.”

“You don’t know that.” I shake my head. “You could get treatment. You could have years left. A lifetime.”

The wind slaps against our faces and blows her hair back hard behind her. I flash back to the first moment I saw her, on the bridge, with the wind whipping that hair. The same line of defiance shoots through her spine now. “No. It won’t be like that. Trust me.”

“Why not?”

“You want to know why I chose the Staten Island Ferry?” She releases one hand from the railing, so that she can face me. The defiance now is in her face, but only partly. It blends there with a vulnerability that would break my heart, if I had one. “I got married here.”

The boats rocks, and I grip the railing to keep from rolling backward. “You’re married?”

“No.” She rubs a hand over her face and looks out at the water. “Not anymore. He left, when I got sick.”

I want to say I can’t imagine anyone could be so cruel, but that would be a lie. I can imagine it all too well.

“His name was Sam, and he never really wanted to get married in the first place.” She shrugs. “We’d been together five years, though. I wanted security. A family. I talked him into it.”

“Did you have friends with you? For the…ceremony?”

“No. We did it during a regular commuter run. Middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. Then we went out for pizza.” She gives a brief, bitter laugh. “But at least I had a ring!”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. Boston, I think? A few months after the wedding, I found a lump in my breast. Sam stuck around for a little while. I mean, he wasn’t a total jerk. He tried. And at least I was covered under his insurance then, thank God.” The wind whips at her hair, and she drags it away from her face and tucks it behind her ear. In a matter of seconds it slides free again. “But it was more than he felt like taking on. All those doctor appointments, and once they said I needed a mastectomy, forget it. After the surgery, he couldn’t even look at me.”

“Is this the first time you’ve been back on the ferry?”

She smiles, and turns her face into the wind. “Yeah. I guess I just thought…I don’t know. I wanted to remember how I felt that day. So full of hope.”

“Christa—”

“But being back here, you know what I realize?” She faces me, and her forced smile dies away. “There is no hope. You can have little moments of pleasure or joy, but they fade, don’t they? Reality comes back, and happy endings don’t happen. Not to people like me, anyway.”

“People like you?” I want to take her hand or something, but it doesn’t seem appropriate. I barely know her. Standing here beside her in this strange time-out-of-time, though, I feel like I do. Maybe it’s because we’re away from land. Floating, we belong to no place and no person, and so, for just these few minutes, we can feel like we might belong to each other. Or at least pretend to. “Do you know Spalding Gray?”

She wrinkles her forehead. “Swimming to Cambodia?”

“Yeah, that’s him. He killed himself, here. Jumped off the Staten Island Ferry. They found his body on the Brooklyn shore two months later.”

“God, I remember that.”

“He talked about this. How relentless life is.”

She is silent for a moment before she speaks again. “So why do you want to jump? Why are you where he was?”

Why not answer? We’re here in this no-man’s land and no one else will hear me. Maybe it will help her. To feel like she’s reaching me, like she’s saving me.

“You know what it is? I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s just…pain. Everywhere. In my body, my heart, my brain. Just this throbbing, awful pain. I go to work in the morning only because I have to. I act like everything’s fine because I have to.”

“And you get away with that?” Her hip is braced against the metal side of the ship. I think how flimsy it is, that barrier between her and open space, between her and the long fall to the water.

“Why shouldn’t I? This isn’t anyone else’s problem. After that first stint in the hospital, everybody walked on eggshells around me, for months. Years.” I cross my arms around myself, trying in vain to keep out the cold wind. “‘Don’t do anything to set Henry off.’ You know what I mean? ‘He’s fragile.’ Can you imagine? I doubt any of them could endure what I deal with in my head every single day. It’s not weakness that makes me want to end it. It’s exhaustion. It’s a normal reaction to being dragged behind a truck, mentally, day after day. But even so, I don’t need to blow apart everyone’s life every time I feel bad—it’s cruel. They don’t understand it—okay. Let them keep it that way. I’ll handle it myself.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Except that you’re not.”

“No? Ending it is one way of handling it.”

“You don’t have anyone that can help you? Anyone you can talk to honestly, who would understand and not be all awkward about it?”

I’ve asked myself this question before, naturally. I do have friends—a few from college, one or two from the office—and my brother, Jack. We go out for drinks occasionally or see a show, but if there’s any talking going on, it’s usually them doing it. They joke about their girlfriends or kids, or talk about sports or work. I can’t imagine how they would react if I started telling them how I was
feeling
. No, they would not understand. It’d take the word awkward to a whole new level.

“Not really. Do you?”

She’s silent for a moment, standing beside me and facing out toward the water. “I used to talk to my sister, Tanya, but then…things changed with her. I have a few friends, but I don’t know… When I got sick, I asked a lot of them. Dishwashing and pharmacy runs and things like that. I pretty much used up all my chips. Maybe they’d listen if I really asked them to, but they’ve got to get tired of it at some point. Sometimes I have a little fantasy where I sit down across the table from someone at the diner, and just, like, tell them everything. Maybe one of my regulars? There’s this guy who comes in every morning at eight and has a buttered English muffin and a cup of orange pekoe tea. He hardly ever talks. Just nods to me, and leaves a five-dollar tip. I imagine just spilling my guts to him.”

“Why don’t you?”

She smiles. “Basic human decency?”

“And you live alone? No roommates?”

“No roommates. Tiny little studio with seventy-two coats of paint on every wall.”

“Do you like your job?”

“You’re full of questions, aren’t you? Sure. It pays the bills, more or less. Keeps me out of my own head for eight hours a day. Do you?”

I shrug. “I’m pretty good at it. I always liked math.”

“Do you have a staff and all that?”

“Yeah. They call me Bert. As in Ernie and Bert? Because I’m so anal and particular.”

She knocks into me lightly with her shoulder, and smiles, and there’s a feeling in my chest like a lightning-dream of falling. I brace myself on the railing.

“Are you nice Bert or mean Bert?”

“Oh, I’m nice. Why wouldn’t I be? It’s bad enough taking these people away from their families sixty or seventy hours a week. I don’t need to be a dick about it.”

She nods and stares out at the water for a moment, silent.

“Do you take medication, Henry?”

“I couldn’t function without it.”

“Oh yeah? Is that so? Seems like it’s really helping.”

That small smile of hers, in profile, it kills me.

She’s much braver than I am. As we stare out into the churning water, she takes my hand.

I consent to a cab to the Cloisters because it’s such a long way. At nine in the morning, traffic is thick along the West Side Highway, but our driver is determined to pass the time by talking to us.

Or talking at us.

“You two on date? Bit early for date, but you know. Is good. Good for relationship. I tell my wife, we go out. We must go out. Put aside kids. We love kids. Kids good. But must also be together. Man and wife. Go to movie. Go to show. See music. Take walk. Is good for marriage. You see? You two, go to Cloisters, good idea. Take walk in fall colors. Very beautiful.”

“Yeah, it’s—”

“You know where you should go? Six Flags. Get out of city. Ride roller coaster. They got what-you-call also. Water park? Big slide. Big giant water slide. Refreshing! Too cold now. But summer, yes.”

He pulls out his cell phone to show us pictures of his kids on the slides while the car weaves in and out of lanes, careening around the turns and blowing through a series of yellow lights.

“You have kids?” he asks.

I shake my head, and he blows through his teeth. “Too bad. Kids make happy. Make smile. Good for heart, no?”

I look out the window. Henry can field this one.

We tried, Sam and I. Or at least I tried and he went along with it. “Just don’t tell me about it,” he said. “Like, when you’re ovulating or anything. I don’t want to feel like a breeding bull or something. Just, you know, put on some lingerie and do what you’ve got to do.”

Romantic as that was, I didn’t conceive in the few months we had before Cancer Town. It was a blessing, I guess, in retrospect.

In the front seat the driver starts humming tunelessly. Clearly we are boring him. “You mind I play music?”

“Go ahead,” Henry says, and I think under better circumstances he might have winked at me. If we were, in fact, two normal people on a date. And then the music comes on—an instrumental cover of “Dust in the Wind” played with a pan flute.

I remember the first time I ever heard this song. I was a teenager and my boyfriend put it on a mix tape for me. I lay on my bed and listened to it over and over and cried because I thought it must have meant he loved me—if he could know the opulence and majesty of my adolescent sadness, and reflect it back to me that way, in a song. Even before the war zone of cancer and divorce, I was a melancholy bastard, motherless and wanting.

It was only later that I realized people find the song silly. Melodramatic and over the top. My boyfriend took it seriously at least, at the age of sixteen, but he left me anyway for a girl who would drink beers with him in the back of his truck, who didn’t cry when they had sex.

C’est la vie
. And so what if
la vie
totally sucks.

I look over at Henry and he’s gazing out the window, listening. His body’s gone very tense and I wonder how it is that I’m able to discern that already, especially when tension is pretty much his natural state. But when he turns toward me, there’s a seriousness in his eyes, and that’s when I forget that I don’t know anything about him, that I’ve only known him for five hours and those hours are probably some of the worst of either of our lives. I forget all that and feel instead a sorrow so intense I don’t know how to contain it. For him, and for whatever it is that makes him so desolate he can’t find a reason to live.

We look at each other for a long while, as the flutist on the stereo begins a long tribute to seventies-era classic rock hits, each one more absurd than the last. When the cabbie starts to sing along to “We’ve Got Tonight,” what are we supposed to do?

We sing along, too.

The Cloisters—a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—is a collection of art and architecture from Medieval Europe. I know this, and I kind of know why I’m supposed to appreciate it, but the real reason I like going is the quiet. I don’t even bother paying for museum admission. I just walk around the outside, up the staircases and through the archways of Fort Tryon Park. Henry has been here before, of course. I imagine it was part of the sort of cultural education wealthy people engage in. But I’m just guessing. We walk around for a while and look at the fall colors before settling on a patch of grass overlooking the Hudson. I lie down on the ground and Henry lies beside me.

“So, you have a brother?” I ask him.

“Jack. He’s in the Peace Corps.”

“That’s exciting.”

“He’s in Guyana. Because of Charles, maybe, our driver? They were always close. My parents hate it, but he’s not exactly the obedient kind. He’s been there for almost two years now.”

“You must miss him.”

“I do, yeah.” He stares straight upward. The fog has cleared, but overhead a cluster of clouds moves slowly across the sky, casting a shadow over the sun. “I’m glad for him, though. That he’s doing something that matters to him. That he’s not here to see…this. Me. And the rest of the family business, doing all the things we do that he despises.”

“What’s the family business?”

“Finance. Investing. He thinks we shouldn’t work with certain companies. Whose moral decisions he disagrees with.”

“And what do you think?” I turn my head to face him, but he keeps staring at the sky. A hundred yards beyond, an ancient rock wall separates us from a cliff drop to the river.

“I get paid a lot of money to not think about it at all.”

“Yeah?” I smile at him. “How’s that working out for you?”

He chuckles. “Pretty bad.”

“So you don’t like your job.”

“Like I said, I like the numbers. I have to force myself to not pay attention to the politics, or I’d get stuck. It’s the same reason I shouldn’t watch the news, although of course I break down and do anyway. It’s just…too much evidence of how heartless people can be. How doomed we are.”

“You ever think about trying to make your work more meaningful? Maybe invest in companies you believe in, like in developing countries? Or companies that deal with environmental sustainability or fair labor or something like that?”

It occurs to me that this might be the way to shift his focus. Maybe he won’t be able to save me, but he could see himself as someone with the power to do good in this world. It’s worth a shot, anyway.

“I’ve tried over the years,” he says. “Maybe not as much as I could have.”

“Maybe it would help you. To feel better, I mean. Less alone.”

“Christa—”

“Okay.” I can see he’s uncomfortable with the direction this conversation is taking, and I don’t want to push him—at least not yet. “I’ll change the subject. Tell me about your parents.”

“Now you’re the one who’s full of questions.”

I watch the sky. A huge blackbird swings across it, cawing, and lands in a tree. “Got to pass the time somehow.”

“They’re fine. Normal people. Busy. Involved in a lot of charitable organizations. Physically fit. Lovers of fine art. That sort of thing.”

“They sound like a blast.”

He blows through his teeth. “Yeah. Laugh a minute.”

“And you have one brother? No other siblings?”

“Actually…” He turns toward me on the grass, leaning on his elbow. “I have another brother. A half-brother. My mother was married before she met my dad. Had a son. But she left them. Met my dad on Cape Cod one summer and ran off with him and they’ve been together since.”

“Do you know him? Your half-brother?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve tried. He won’t answer my letters. I guess she didn’t leave on good terms. He was only a baby at the time.”

“Shit.” I’m no mother, but I can’t imagine doing a thing like that.

“Yeah. You know, I found out when I was pretty young. Like seven or eight? And after that I always wondered, if I made her mad, would she leave us, too? She didn’t though. She got what she wanted, I think, with my father.”

“Which was?”

“Money.”

I wince a little at that. “Yikes. She had you and your brother though, too.”

“Yeah, I don’t think she cared too much about that.”

“That can’t be true.”

He sighs and rolls onto his back. “You’re probably right. But she didn’t spend much time with us. Just enough to make sure we were doing well in school and learning to play the piano and things like that.”

I try to imagine growing up without a mother. Of course I don’t have to stretch my imagination too far since my own mom was barely around. But at least I never doubted that she loved me.

“When did you start…you know. Feeling depressed?”

He shrugs against the grass. “High school. Maybe middle school. They sent me to a lot of shrinks then.”

“And your first suicide attempt, it was…”

“College. I slit my wrists.”

I sit up. “Seriously?”

He shades his eyes against the sun to see me. “Yeah. Why, is that any worse than a bridge?”

I take his hand and turn it, and he allows me. Along his wrist is a jagged vertical scar. I run my finger over it, and he draws in a quick breath. I feel his pulse beneath, the warmth of his skin. I try to imagine that heat draining out of him, the blood seeping out of his body and before I can stop myself, I cover the scar with my hands.

He tenses against me for a moment, and then a small shudder passes through him, which he shakes off. “Why here, Christa? Why was this on the list?”

I release his arm and lie back down on the ground. It’s cold under my back, and firm. “I don’t know. I started coming here after I got sick, when the noise in my head got too loud.”

“To watch the river?”

“Sometimes. And sometimes the sky.”

“Were there ever any good moments for you, when you realized you weren’t going to die that first time? Did you have a chance to, I don’t know, savor life a little bit?”

The cloud overhead passes and the sun comes out again. I turn toward Henry, shielding my eyes.

“Sometimes. Colors looked brighter, you know what I mean? Music was sweeter. I rode my bike around the city a lot, and felt the breeze on my face. But in a way, that was worse. It seemed cruel somehow to feel all that beauty and know it could be struck down for no reason at any time. I turned away from it, I guess. I just…worked. And waited for the other shoe to drop.”

“And it did,” he says. “Didn’t it?”

“Yeah. Although now I have to wonder—did I gain anything by shutting down like that? Maybe at least I could have had a good time before the new crop of cancer turned up. Maybe I’ve been stupid.”

“Oh, definitely.” He taps me briefly on the shoulder. “On top of everything else you feel shitty about, you should also feel shitty about that.”

I smile and touch the scar on his wrist again. “I’m sorry. That you had to go through what you went through.”

He returns my gaze—steady. “I’m sorry you did, too.”

I want to say more but a sound interrupts us—a rhythmic chanting coming from somewhere in the near distance. We both sit up as a line of monks in gray robes crests over the hill. They walk slowly, through the towering stone archways on the path below, hands behind their backs, singing. They smile as they pass us, the only people out in this area so early in the morning, and as they float over the grass, Henry runs a hand, briefly, over my hair.