The Bridge (5 page)

Pavel Tchelitchew’s
Hide and Seek
hangs across from an elevator at the Museum of Modern Art. Christa and I sit against the wall and study it as people come and go—families, students, tour groups. They smell like egg salad and street dirt and occasionally, farts. Sit in one place long enough and this is what you will be assailed by.

The museum is crowded at this time of day. We waited so long on line in the gray building shadows of Fifty-third Street that I was tempted to call it off, but Christa insisted we stay. Walking up the echoing white steps I remembered all the other exhibitions we could have seen, but there’s only time for one. And there wouldn’t have been time for that, even, if things had gone as planned this morning.

Every once in a while someone stops to stare at the painting as we do, lost in the myriad undulations of faces, trees, leaves, veins. They move on, and we remain—for almost an hour.

“Is this what the inside of your head looks like?” Christa asks, and I actually laugh.

“Kind of.”

“That sucks, Henry.”

“Does it? Sometimes it’s kind of interesting.”

“Except when it’s trying to kill you.”

“There’s that, yeah.”

“Do you ever wish you were an artist, instead of doing…whatever it is you do?”

I think of the piles of sketchpads hiding in my closet at home. Behind a row of identical dress suits. “I used to, when I was younger. I’d go to the park and draw with pencils. Nothing big. Just trees and flowers, sometimes people. Took a class once, but—”

“I’d like to see them. Your drawings.”

I almost say “someday,” but then think better of it. Funny how habitual a sense of future is. It’s hard to let go of, even when you’ve known for months how finite it will be. Still, I want to show them to Christa, and that, too, is persistent—the need to share, to be seen. I try to imagine her in my sterile apartment. Taking the elevator up fifty flights to a high-rise filled with open space, light, and no discernible trace of life. She’d be awkward there, uncomfortable—her jagged edges knocking into all those clean, modern lines.

She’d come to see my drawings and I’d make her an espresso. Put on some music. Kiss her, like in the movies. I’d kiss her and lead her to my bed, and she would taste like raspberries and dark, dark heat.

“Henry?”

What is it about her voice? Its huskiness, maybe, is what gets to me. It’s like hot syrup pouring through my chest, in places that have been shut down so long I forgot they existed. Apparently sex is persistent, too. Desire.

The last thing I expected from this day, when I left home in the dead hours of morning, was to be sitting on the floor of MoMA with a sudden and terrifying hard-on for a woman I just met. I was supposed to be rescuing her, helping her find a reason to live. Instead I’m in the clutches of an ache that’s caught me totally off guard. Out of nowhere, I’m starving.

“Where did you say those dumplings were?”

I’m not sure I’ve ever been inside a dirtier restaurant than the one in which we now find ourselves. It’s packed with patrons, though, and smells like the kind of food you
should
be eating on your last day on earth. What did I eat yesterday? Some cereal. A sandwich. No fanfare at all. Not like this steaming bamboo dish of dumplings the server now brings.

They come with broad spoons to catch the broth inside when you bite into them. The spoons are painted with blue cranes and shaped like small oblong bowls. Christa shows me how to tip one against my lips, how to slip the rich dumpling into my mouth without spilling any broth. I let her show me, even though I’ve eaten these before, because it seems a shame to spoil her pleasure in teaching me.

The dumplings are delicious, of course. They usually are, but today, sitting across the table from her on bonus time, they may in fact be the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. We follow them up with sesame chicken—crispy, salty and sweet—with a side of steamed broccoli and hot jasmine tea.

“You’re not married, are you?” she asks between bites. “I didn’t ask before because you don’t wear a ring, but I guess not everyone does.”

“No, I’m not married.”

“Ever come close?”

“Once. At least at the time I thought so. I was sixteen.”

She narrows her eyes. “Really?”

“I bought her a ring and everything.”

“Where? At a dollar store?”

“No.” A trickle of sauce has fallen on the table. I wipe it away with a spare napkin. “I bought it at a jewelry store, with money from my savings account. My father was furious.”

Christa stops eating and watches me. “Who was she?”

“This girl I knew from camp. Melanie. She’d been my girlfriend for a year, since the previous summer. We wrote letters to each other. Email. Back and forth, every day, all day. She lived in Connecticut. We saw each other in person maybe once a month? She was my first…everything.”

“So what happened?”

“I met her in Central Park one weekend. We went on a horse and carriage ride.” I smirk. “That was my idea of romance at the time. I think I gave her a single red rose.”

Christa smiles. “Casanova.”

“Yeah. I presented the ring. She got really quiet, said she needed to think about it. A few days later she broke up with me. Sent the ring back in the mail in a Ziploc bag. She said I was suffocating her.”

“Oh dear.”

“She was absolutely right. That’s exactly what I was doing. Settling over her like a huge adolescent leech and sucking the love right out of her. I was that starved for it. I thought it was romantic, needing her as much as I did. She didn’t agree.”

“You were young, Henry.”

“I guess.” I pick up my tea, just to have something to do with my hands. “After that I kind of…withdrew. Went to school, did my work. That was it. The rest of the time I spent locked up in my room, listening to music. Watching old episodes of
Three’s Company
and thinking of ways to die.”

“Really? John Ritter wasn’t reason enough to live?”

It’s hard to express my gratitude, for a joke like that. For her steady gaze and complete lack of patronizing pity. “If anybody could have been, it would have been him.”

“And after Melanie, nobody?”

“There were a few, here and there. A woman I met at the hospital and I made a go of it for a while, but we were too broken down to make it work. Then later, a colleague at the office. But I was just going through the motions and she knew it, and it didn’t last long. A few blind dates. Some online stuff. I can fake it for the first few evenings, you know what I mean? I have the clothes, the car, the job.”

“The looks.”

I snort. “Think so? I guess. I have enough on the outside that I can draw them in, when I want to. It’s keeping them around that’s the problem. When I don’t feel like going out. When I stop showering on the weekends. When I gain a little weight. When I can’t…you know.”

“What?” She looks genuinely confused.

“Depression, it…affects you. Affects your body. And some of the medication, it can also…”

“Oh! You couldn’t get an erection.”

I feel the color in my face, but what’s the point of being embarrassed at this late stage? It’s not as if she doesn’t know enough already to run in the other direction. At some point—on the ferry, maybe?—I gave up whatever traces of appropriate behavior I was holding onto. I barely know her, and yet, here we are together on this day that by rights should not exist for either of us. I find, under the circumstances, that obfuscation is impossible.

And not advisable, either. If I’m to save her, she needs to feel that she’s reaching me, and she can only do that if I tell her the truth.

“No. Sometimes, I couldn’t.”

She shakes her head. “That must have sucked, man.”

“Pretty much.”

“It’s been…you know…a challenge for me, too, since my surgery.”

I sip my tea, silent, and wait to see if she wants to continue.

“It’s kind of a buzzkill, you know what I mean? Having a breast removed. For both parties. Not that I’ve tried too often since Sam left. But the few times—seeing the look on the guy’s face when I take my shirt off. It’s just…you know, I’ve prepared them and everything, but they’re never really ready for it. There’s always that little recoil. Followed by a clumsy attempt to conceal it. A bunch of hollow reassurances that I know they don’t feel. They just feel guilty for being disgusted, and—”

“You don’t know that. They might feel bad for you genuinely. They might—”

“I don’t want them to feel bad for me. I don’t want their
pity
. I want them to fuck me. I want them to
want
to fuck me. But that’s never going to happen again. Never. That pure, simple appreciation, such as it is. It’s always going to be filtered by weirdness. By that stupid awkwardness.”

In another life, I might have been able to give her something different than this. To show her what it felt like to be seen—not with pity, but desire.

But the hourglass is hemorrhaging sand. There’s no time left for me, to be that man for her or any woman. Ever again.

“I’m sorry, Christa.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Me, too.”

The afternoon sun is painfully bright, but since neither Henry nor I was expecting to see it today, we haven’t brought sunglasses. There are dozens of open-air stalls in Chinatown, though, and on our way to the Manhattan Bridge pedestrian walkway, we stop at one.

On the sidewalk in front of the six-foot square stand are plastic tubs filled with tiny turtles, illegal to sell and covered from neck to toe in salmonella. Overhead hang oversized knockoff cartoon animals in I Love New York T-shirts. Slightly within is a single counter with crowded rows of jewelry and a carousel of sunglasses alongside it.

As I reach for the sunglasses, a flash from the jewelry counter catches my eye—a simple jade-and-silver hairpin. The milky green of the stone is almost glasslike, at once hard and fragile, like a frozen pond. It strikes me suddenly that although I’ve always loved jade, I’ve never owned any. Which is not surprising since I own very little jewelry. A pair of nondescript earrings and perhaps a hair tie around my wrist are usually the best I can do for myself.

I run a fingertip briefly over the pin and then grab a pair of oversized red glasses from the rack. Henry picks some aviators and we push on through the crowd.

It’s like swimming, in a way—the serpentine glide down Canal Street. The smell of fish rolls out like mist from the many seafood markets, and everything is bumping against you—the shoulders and elbows of people hustling to get somewhere, the errant wheels of strollers, the handlebars of passing bikes. You can’t walk down the street here and not be touched. Whether you want to be or not.

Beside the bridge entrance, someone has built a makeshift shelter of mattresses, blankets and boxes. I wonder what it’s like, sleeping there. Whether people bother the occupant, or whether he manages to fade into the concrete, a living ghost, and come and go unseen. Does he have friends? Family? Is he sick? Scared? There are signs of recent food consumption, which at least says that he hasn’t chosen to climb to the center of the bridge, as we have, and jump. His life, from his perspective, is not hard enough for that. I’m not sure how that makes me feel.

Unlike the Brooklyn Bridge, bikes and pedestrians travel on opposite sides of this crossing. It’s a much less popular destination for tourists, even at two o’clock on a Saturday, and it’s insulated, like the inside of a massive mechanical whale. Everything’s in shadow, encased in womblike gray-blue steel. We walk slowly, virtually alone, full of dumplings and chicken and a sudden soporific quiet.

Beside me, Henry walks with a steady, loping gate. His dark leather shoes look careworn, as though he’s traveled the length of the city and back many times. His tailored cuffs swing back and forth across the neatly tied laces.

Farther down the river looms the Brooklyn Bridge—imposing and magnetic—the tops of its towers fully visible in the harsh afternoon light. It’s hard to believe we were up there twelve hours ago, in the darkness. Henry was a stranger to me then. An impediment to my plan, a vague shadow. He becomes clearer every moment, though. Frighteningly clear.

Now, he’s a living, breathing person. A man. A beating heart resting in the palm of my hand. Now, when I think of someone jumping from the bridge tower, it’s him I think of.
His
body I see breaking against the water, hauled inside the current, carried away.

I watched videos of jumpers, before I steeled myself for my own fall. People who dove off the Golden Gate Bridge, for example. I watched them and tried to prepare myself. For how quickly it would happen. A few seconds, that’s all, and then the collision with water. I knew I probably would go down forty or fifty feet below the surface of the East River, and prayed I’d be dead before I saw what lurked in those depths.

I prepared myself. For my own death.

But not for the death of someone I know and care about. Not Henry’s.

“Why there?” I ask him. He slows momentarily. Long enough to follow my gaze out over the brief expanse of water between us and the Brooklyn Bridge. “Why not somewhere else?”

We’re nearing the center of the Manhattan Bridge now. A tall cage-like fence separates us from the edge. Henry pauses, links his fingers into the hard chain, and looks out over Brooklyn. “It’s not that interesting of a reason.”

“I’d still like to hear it.”

He offers a vague smile to the water below. “My nanny used to take me there.”

There’s a world of sadness contained in that one sentence. I’d like to open that world, take it apart like a diorama and examine its contents. I recognize that desire as greedy. As invasive, even. But I seem to have lost the ability to observe basic rules of politeness with Henry. We seem to have both agreed to a kind of no-holds-barred interrogation of each other, a gradual and relentless barrage of questioning, and it’s emboldened me, dangerously, to think I have a right to the memories most dear to him.

“What was her name?”

He answers, though, God help him. He answers all my questions now without hesitation. “Sharon.”

I look out at the bright blue sky. The white clouds that skitter across it are so cartoonishly fluffy it almost feels unreal. Like the last-minute raving of the man inside the hangman’s noose in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Which one of us is imagining this, I wonder—Henry or me? Whose fantasy are we?

If it’s me who’s dreaming it, I know that I’m not ready to wake up yet. I’m not ready to open my eyes and realize I’m falling, that the impact of water is imminent, that Henry is not real and it all is about to be irrevocably, eternally, unchangeably over.

I remember back in high school, there was a suicide. A girl who was older than I was—Penelope Cannon—someone I didn’t know. She’d found her boyfriend kissing someone else and the next day hanged herself at the local movie theater. They found her in the bathroom, dangling from a water pipe in the ceiling with claw marks on her neck.

It was the idea of the claw marks that stayed with me. The red scrape of her fingernails as she tried desperately in that last moment to loosen the rope.

She changed her mind. Maybe she realized he wasn’t worth it. Maybe she remembered how young she was, how much life she had ahead of her. But it was too late, by the time she saw it. She tried to get out of the rope and couldn’t, and died with the marks of that regret dug permanently into her skin.

Maybe this situation with Henry is so profoundly doomed that it’s short-circuited my normal defenses, but when he stands beside me, I feel him. In my bloodstream like a magnetic force. It makes me want to claw the rope off my own neck, and I’m ashamed of that. I’m ashamed of my own need.

“What was Sharon like?” I ask, because I can’t follow that line of thought anymore. I want Henry to distract me. I want memories from his life to make me forget my own.

He smiles, and there’s warmth inside that smile. I want to crawl deep into that warmth and never come out. “She didn’t know the meaning of hesitation. That’s what I remember. When something was funny, she laughed. When I was hurt, she’d hold me. When I did something bad, she’d make me go sit by myself in a corner. Every time, without question.” He leans on the railing and looks down at the water far below. “You know what’s funny? She smelled like coconuts. Sometimes I catch that scent in the summertime. Suntan lotion? It just makes my heart
hurt
.”

He tries to bite that hurt back, but it’s too big; I can see that.

“What happened to her?”

He takes so long to answer I worry that the wind has swallowed my voice. I close my eyes and feel the swaying of the bridge underneath me. It moves with the weight of the vehicles on it, with the gusts that slam against it. It doesn’t tighten up and resist, the way Henry does beside me. The way I do. Things like us that don’t bend—we break. We’re in the midst of breaking right now, and I don’t know what to do to stop us.

“She moved to California to be with her kids,” Henry says. “When I was eleven. I guess she figured we were old enough to handle ourselves by then, and anyway, it was probably just a job to her. It didn’t mean anything.”

“That can’t be true.” I try to imagine him as a little boy. With those huge hazel eyes. That cowlick on his forehead. I press against him, so lightly maybe he doesn’t even feel it. But I feel it. The slight trembling of his body, the heat that radiates from his skin. “What about your parents? They weren’t—”

“No.” He straightens, dislodging me. “They weren’t.”

“Henry.”

“No, don’t feel bad for me.” He turns to face me. “My mom and dad weren’t especially warm, but they provided for me just fine. Sharon gave what she gave while she was with us, and it was plenty. I’m just looking for something to pin this…feeling on. This chemical, physiological feeling. But there’s nothing to explain it away, not really. I have this, I don’t know, lead blanket on me all the time, that makes everything feel heavy. It’s nobody’s fault.”

“Sharon made you feel better, though, didn’t she?”

He stills, only for a moment, and then shakes his head. “Maybe. But I’m a grown man now. It’s nobody’s job to try to wrestle me out of depression, to save me somehow, or—”

I cast around wildly in my head, because there must be a way to throw him a lifeline, to show that he
could
live if he wanted to. He could make it work. It’s what I’m here to do after all. It’s the whole reason I agreed to this charade.

But what am I going to suggest? That he find a new nanny to take care of him, to hold him when he’s hurt? He’s right; he’s not a child. He shouldn’t go looking for some woman to do that for him. Although God knows he probably wouldn’t have much trouble if he really tried. I’ve known him for less than twenty-four hours, and the sad truth is that I want to be the one to do it. To save him. To make him see how lovely he is. How gentle and sweet.

But I can’t let myself do that again. Try to rescue somebody who doesn’t want to rescued.

I can give him this one day, but the truth is that it might not be enough. Especially if after making him care about me, I kill myself anyway. All my flimsy effort to make him see his value and potential—it might not work. And still I will have to somehow walk away. I don’t know how I’m going to do that.

He leans into the railing, as though called by vertigo, and some instinct makes me link my arm through his, as ballast. He won’t look at me, though.

“I know you’re trying to help, Christa, and I appreciate it. I really do. But you don’t know how…how thick it is, in here.” He rubs a hand absently over his chest. “Nobody should have to deal with that. With bearing the onslaught of it, year after year. Believe me, I’ve tried to let people see it over the years, to test the waters and see if they could handle it. But they couldn’t.”

“You mean Melanie? She was a sixteen-year-old girl. Of course she couldn’t handle it.”

“Not just her. Friends, too. Girlfriends, sometimes. Hell, my own mother wanted no part of it.”

The D train barrels past on the bridge behind us, making all conversation momentarily impossible. After it’s gone, Henry remains silent.

“What did your mother do,” I ask finally, “when you would get depressed? When you were a teenager?”

“She called the doctor. She made sure I had the right pills.”

“But she didn’t try to talk to you about it?”

“She tried. But she’d get frustrated, too, when I wouldn’t respond. She felt I was being selfish. Self-indulgent.”

“Well, you were.”

He looks at me sharply.

“But that’s depression, isn’t it? It makes you selfish. It…it shrinks your world down. Like you’re inside a tornado or something. How are you supposed to care about the things outside that storm? When it’s all you can do to just survive it?”

He keeps his gaze locked into mine, searching for something. I wish I knew what he was looking for.

“Is that how you feel, Christa?”

I give his arm a little squeeze, and then pull away. “You know what I feel?”

“What?”

“I feel like eating all the ice cream in the world.”

He half-smiles, in a way that’s at once so fragile and so intensely herculean, it hurts to see. “Sounds good to me.”