The Bridge (6 page)

The nice thing about knowing you’re going to die is that you can eat all the hot fudge you want and not worry about whether your ass is going to need its own zip code. I figure the creatures at the bottom of the East River have seen worse, so I order a double and wait outside on the steps for Henry.

The eastern tower of the Brooklyn Bridge looms high above the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory and its neighbor, the swanky River Café. Both sustained heavy damage after the last hurricane hit New York and were closed for a long while. I try to picture the river rising and surging up over the wooden pier, slamming against the stairs where I now sit. I could have just come out here then and been swept away by the storm. But I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know I was sick again yet. I was holding on to the hope that things were turning around and might in the end be okay.

But it’s like that, isn’t it? You get a short reprieve and you think, oh, there are moments of peace, moments of happiness. A tree changes colors and its leaves fall down over you like butterflies and you feel for that one instant that the world is a good place, that it’s worth sticking around for.

But then a wave of awfulness sweeps up over you, out of nowhere, in places you thought would never be touched, and you’re covered in filth, and you have to shut down. You have to.

Henry comes out of the ice cream shop with a coffee sundae and a handful of napkins, and we head over to Pier One to sit in the grass. A water taxi lumbers up to the dock and dispenses a dozen or so travelers. Along the railing, people photograph each other with the bridges and skyline behind them. Two little boys run back and forth beside us, chasing their dad as he tries to get a kite up into the air.

“Dad! Dad. Dad. Dad. Over here. Over here.”

“Look out, Dada! The tree! The tree!”

Their father unfurls the string, lifting the kite into the wind and then calmly adding another spool. The string is soon so long, the kite flies hundreds of feet in the air. Over the Watchtower building. Over the traffic on the BQE. Almost as high as the east tower on the bridge.

“Why did you choose the Manhattan side of the bridge, Henry? When you like the Brooklyn side better?”

“I wanted to land in the water.”

I nod and spoon some fudge into my mouth. I’d forgotten how salty it is. With a start, I realize that I might have never tasted this again, if things had gone as planned this morning.

“I scoped out the Brooklyn side, too,” I say. “But who wants to fall on a bunch of construction trucks?”

“Nobody.” Henry turns his spoon around and licks the convex back. “That’s not romantic at all.”

“Is that what you were after?” I ask. “Romance?”

He shrugs. “I’m not above it.”

“No. I suppose not. Me, I just wanted to feel that feeling for minute. Of being free, you know what I mean? I know it only lasts a second, but I wanted to see what it’s like to fly.”

“Why not try skydiving?”

I snort. “Good one.”

“I’m serious though, Christa.” He puts his empty sundae cup down the grass. “You’re not like me. There’s nothing wrong with you, chemically. You’ve had a lot of bad breaks and some shitty people in your life, but you could survive this cancer. You could go on to find some good people. To have a nice life. Why would you throw that all away?”

“You obviously haven’t seen a mastectomy scar.”

“Really? That’s what this is about? Because you lost your breast?”

“I didn’t lose it, Henry. It’s not like, oh dear, where’d my breast go? It was cut off. And the other one’s going to get cut off, too. And I’ll be a middle-aged divorcee from a family of addicts with two ugly red scars where my tits used to be, and that’s if I’m even lucky enough to survive this round.”

“But if you do…if you can…”

I shake my head. “Listen, you know how I said depression can be like a tornado?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, for me, it’s not so much a tornado as it is a drought. A big empty desert and no sign of water anywhere.”

“There’s no one who can give you water?”

“No. I don’t want them to. I can get my own damn water.”

“But it’s not possible, Christa. This is too big to handle on your own. Why won’t you let anyone help you?”

“Because they can’t. Everyone’s too busy dealing with their own heartache. They don’t have time for mine.”

“You’re talking about your sister and your mom?”

“Sure. But my ex-husband, too. I tried to make him the kind of guy who wanted to be married, who wanted to settle down and raise children. I gave everything I had to that little mission, but he didn’t move a single fucking inch, in all our years together. The bottom line is, he didn’t want to. He didn’t care enough. Just like my mom didn’t care enough to stop using drugs and my sister doesn’t care enough to quit drinking. People make their messes and the only way I have any connection to them at all is if I help clean them up. I don’t make messes of my own.”

“So you’re disappointed in other people, is what you’re saying. But it’s yourself you’re trying to kill. Why is that? Why not push your ex-husband off a bridge? Wouldn’t that make more sense? Or your mother?”

“Too late. She’s already dead.”

“Well, shit.” He laughs grimly. “And there’s no one else?”

“Who would I ask? I’m old enough at this point to have some family or a husband to get me through a thing like this. But I went through the last round of treatment alone because I didn’t have those things, not really. I asked for some practical help, sure, but I couldn’t ask a friend to sit up with me night after night—all my friends have their own families to take care of. Their own children. I’m a grown woman, I should be able to—”

“I know. It’s like I was saying. Who is it appropriate to reach out to, for this kind of thing? When you don’t have parents who can deal with it, or a partner?”

“What about your brother?”

“I’m not going to call him back from Guyana to be my nursemaid. He has his own life to live. What about your sister?”

“I haven’t seen her in three years. She left in the middle of my last treatment. Which was no great loss to tell you the truth, since every time she showed up to supposedly help, she was drunk.”

He sighs quietly and looks out over the water at a day cruise rumbling by. “So I guess we’re at an impasse.”

“Probably. Listen, I appreciate your concern, Henry. Honestly. But let’s just…let’s drop it for now. Okay? Let’s just lie down. I’m so tired all of the sudden.”

He looks at me pensively for a moment, and then nods. When I ease back onto the grass, he follows, lining himself up beside me and staring up into the sky.

The kite is directly overhead now, a multicolored speck against wispy white clouds. With their dad occupied, the boys have moved on to blowing bubbles using long tube-like wands. The older one fills the wand and then turns in a circle, holding it out to the wind. His brother chases the bubbles it releases, skipping and stomping and slapping at them with his little hands. They float over us as we lie here in the grass, so that what I see is kite, bubbles, clouds, blue sky, and bridge.

And Henry. Lying beside me with his eyes closed, breathing. Would it be bad if I climbed into the crook of his arm to sleep?

I try it, and he doesn’t push me away. Instead he turns his face toward me, and presses his mouth against my hair. I feel the intake of his breath, the soft exhalation. His arm around me is warm and sure, and his heart beats strong, strong. I don’t want to feel the stirring in my body in the places his body touches mine. I don’t want to feel the heat of him beside me, or to crave that heat. To want to burrow inside it and look for sustenance there.

I try not to think about tomorrow. About where he’ll be. Where I’ll be.

I was so certain this morning. So completely sure. And now?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

When we wake up, maybe an hour later, the boys and their dad have gone. Along the pier’s railing a garish wedding party is having their picture taken. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so much pastel tulle in my life, except for the last time I was here at the pier—where wedding parties such as these are a mainstay. A white stretch Humvee limo waits for them on the street.

Henry and I stumble past on our way to the subway. It’s getting late now. Only an hour or so until sunset, and it’s time to check in to the hotel. To swim. And then to sleep. And then…well, I don’t care to think about that.

Foot traffic is heavy this time of day, as tourists make their way to Grimaldi’s and Jacques Torres. We get stuck behind two teenage girls—one black and one white, holding hands, ambling along the narrow sidewalk under the bridges.

“Yeah, but Gandalf knew there was a ring in there,” one of the girls says. “That’s why he sent Bilbo in the first place.”

“So you think he, like, engineered the whole thing?” the other asks.

“I don’t know. ’Cause when Frodo says he’ll take the ring to Mordor, at the council? Remember Gandalf’s face?”

“Oh God, that totally broke my heart.”

“I know! Like he knows what he’s sending Frodo into. It’s so—”

“But he knows Frodo can do it, too, right? It’s not like he’s sending him to certain death, or—”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t know
for sure
.”

“Yeah.”

Along the sidewalk, inverted U-shaped bike racks hold clusters of bikes, loosely secured with chains. The girl on the right reaches out to a bell on one of the bikes and rings it, loosing its metallic peal. Her friend laughs and throws an arm over her shoulder, and they veer off across the street toward the chocolate shop.

“Let’s go this way,” Henry says. He leads me down the last few blocks to Empire-Fulton Ferry Park.

Against the buildings to our right, the fading sunlight is a bright, burnt gold. It makes the red and yellow bricks look lit from within, as though they generated their own heat. I want to press my face against those bricks, to see if they feel as warm as they look.

Henry guides me to the left, down a path that overlooks a cascade of boulders on the shore of the river. An old man stands on one dry rock, tossing pebbles into the water.

We follow a meandering path to a slightly hidden overlook, separated from the water by a railing and a hill of elephant grass.

The wind is more intense here, at this bend in the river, and chilly as nighttime approaches. It plasters my hair against my face no matter how hard I try to pull it away. Henry touches my arm, and turns me so that the wind blows my hair straight back. He considers me for a moment, and then reaches into his pocket and takes something out. I think he’s going to get a tissue or something, but when he opens his hand, there’s something in it that’s shiny and light green. In my confusion it takes a minute to recognize it: the jade hairpin I admired earlier, at the sunglasses stall in Chinatown.

His expression should warn me, but for some reason I’m too stunned to make sense of the gravity in his gaze as he steps closer. As he threads his fingers into my hair, and eases the pin into place. He secures the lock away from my eyes, and I see myself in the reflection of his sunglasses: dark-haired, hesitant. He’s so close I can smell his skin. The scent of sage and citrus in his soap, the sharp sweetness. I don’t remember the last time someone gave me a gift. I pull him in for a hard hug.

He tenses at first, but after a moment he slides his arms around me. As he did on the grass at the pier. Warm and sure, and alive. Alive.

Behind him the city glows in twilight. The sun begins to dip behind the buildings in Manhattan, bathing the river, the park, and us in a shifting play of color.

Henry tucks his cheek against the side of my head and I feel his jaw working there, the gritting of his teeth. His fingers knead into my back.

Those fingers—God. His breath in my hair. I press tighter and he stumbles backward a step, into the cold railing. I don’t know what’s happening. I wasn’t expecting… I wasn’t ready…

He grips the back of my neck and pulls away, and when he looks into my eyes I feel his trembling.

I am so angry at him. Furious. That he’s so fucking resigned, that there’s nothing I can do to shake or move him. Especially when this is who he is—a man who would give a gift so effortlessly, so easily, to someone he barely knows. I have reasons for wanting to die, but his? How could they possibly be good enough? How dare he want to snuff out this light?

His mouth opens, in alarm maybe, and goddamn it, I kiss him. Not even delicately. I shove my tongue into his mouth and he gasps and loses his footing. We almost trip over each other’s feet before he braces us against the fence with his hips.

He’s hard. Jesus Christ, I can feel it. Every curse I can think of floods my brain and I want to spit them all into his mouth because Oh my fucking God, I feel him, I feel him.

He makes a sound in his throat that makes me want to claw his clothes off, and his hands run up and down my back, over my ass, pushing me deeper against him.

“Christa.”

Cars rush by on the bridge above us. A plain drones overhead. A couple approaches from the center of the park. I see them in my peripheral vision but I can’t stop. I can’t stop kissing him.

He’s the one who has to pull back, who breaks the kiss and drops his forehead to my shoulder. His chest is heaving. I can smell the sweat and heat on the back of his neck.

I don’t know when I last felt this…this…if I’ve ever—

“Christa,” he says again. “What—”

But I can’t talk about it. Not yet. Not now. I turn and start walking as fast I can toward York Street.

The York Street F-train station is one of those old-school subterranean nightmares that seems to burrow four thousand feet below the surface of the earth, and it’s just as dank and echoey as you’d imagine such a place to be. We walk down what feels like fifty staircases to reach the platform, and when we finally arrive at the Manhattan-bound track, Christa turns on me.

“You think you’re so special, Henry. But you’re not. You’re just another hard-luck case with a bad set of DNA, and you don’t have the balls to deal with it head on. You don’t have the courage to ask anyone for help, or to let anyone get close to you, and that’s why you were up there on that tower this morning. That’s why you want to jump. Because you’re too afraid to just let yourself feel it. To let yourself feel anything.”

I step back as if slapped. “What?”

“You heard me, motherfucker.” She steps forward and jabs me in the chest.

“Don’t curse at me.”

“Why the hell not? Maybe it’ll wake you the fuck up. You don’t think it’ll hurt people, when you die? Your brother, maybe? Your parents? They might be shitty, but I’m sure they love you. You don’t think it will tear their hearts out that you left them like this? You don’t think that will haunt and devastate them the whole rest of their lives? Who do you think you are, to inflict pain like that?”

“How is that different from what you’re doing, Christa? You have a sister. Maybe she showed up drunk to your treatments, but at least she was there. Your friends were, too, filling your prescriptions and cleaning your apartment, but you didn’t let them anywhere near your heart all that time.”

She shakes her head, as if by instinct—a fierce, immediate
no
. “You’re one to talk, Henry.”

“You think I don’t know that? That’s the difference between us. I know what I’m doing. You have no idea. You haven’t thought it through at all. One day your sister will come out of her haze and where will you be? Gone. And what about your friends? Your aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers? Your ex-husband?”

I don’t know which of us I’m mad at. I don’t know what the fuck to feel. A wave of bile sweeps over me. Through me. It burns, it’s nauseating. I can’t stand it.

“At least I know the consequences of giving up like this,” I say. “Who I’m going to hurt. But I have to. It’s too
much
. This life, I can’t stand it. The good parts and the bad parts equally. It just hurts too fucking bad, Christa.”

I’m shaking suddenly. When did I start shaking? She takes another step toward me and I move back by instinct, and stumble and start to fall. And then she’s grabbing me, pulling me back from the tracks.

“Goddamn it, Henry. Damn it.” She has me in a bear hug now and she’s pulling me, pulling me, and I don’t want to be but I’m crying. Great hiccupping, embarrassing, absurd loud tears in the middle of the subway platform which is not abandoned at all, but full of people. Full of people staring at us and then politely looking away. The train barrels into the station, bathing us in a hot foul wind, and when the doors ping open, Christa drags me inside.

Some old disheveled maniac shambles through the door just before it closes. He’s not wearing any shoes, and his feet are filthy. The too-sweet scent of antiseptic cleaner mingles with the musty, ancient smell of his clothes. The train pulls forward on the tracks and it’s too late to leave the subway car; we’re trapped in here with him.

“Ladies and gentleman.” His voice is ragged and metallic, rusty with lack of use, and he clears it again, more strenuously this time. “Ladies and gentleman, I’m very sorry to disturb you. I am a United States veteran. I lost my home in a fire last year, and I’m struggling to get back on my feet. If you can give a little something, I’d be most grateful. I could use a hot meal and a place to stay. In exchange I’ll give you a little song, and you see if you can find it in your heart to help me out tonight.”

It shames me, this speech. My own judgment of him. My disgust. Who the hell am I? I talked Christa into living one more day and for what? So I could torment her, make her see me like this, breaking down in a fucking subway station. Letting her kiss me. Kissing her back. Letting myself taste her and feel her and for what? I know I’m going back up on the bridge tomorrow. I know I’ve got nothing to give her. Who the fuck am I to pass judgment on this guy?

He starts singing, and abruptly the entire car descends into silence. His voice is deep, melodic, and so fraught with despair it’s difficult to hear him and continue breathing.

The song he sings is by the Eagles—"Desperado.” A song at once so ridiculous and so utterly moving, I don’t know what to do with myself.

Beside me, Christa stares at him, a look of total incredulity on her face, and as he passes away from us, to the opposite end of the subway car, she starts to laugh. One immense bark of hilarity that she quickly covers with her hand. Then she buries her face in my shoulder and trembles with it—her whole body electric with laughing. Like everything she does, like everything she feels, it’s contagious. It spreads through me like wildfire, and I feel it, I feel it. The tragic humor, the loss, all the regret.

When he comes our way again, I stuff a fifty dollar bill into his hat.

I know it’s a bit obscene to rent the penthouse suite at the Gansevoort, but I get the feeling Christa hasn’t seen much comfort in her life, and I’d like to give her some, even if it’s only for one night. I’ve screwed up the rest of this day; at least I can offer this. I duck into my adjoining room, a smaller affair with a king-size bed and a hushed, temperate stillness. We bought bathing suits on the way over at a low-rent chain store in Chelsea. Christa chose mine. It has a parrot on it.

She’s asked for a half hour alone to take a shower before we swim, and I can’t argue. When I rolled out of bed this morning, I certainly didn’t expect to end the day with grass stains on my jeans and dirt under my fingernails.

Of course it’s impossible, once my clothes are off and I’m standing under the hot spray, to not imagine Christa doing the same just a few yards away. Which is not at all advisable under the circumstances. In sixteen hours I don’t think I’ve done a single thing to convince her to stay alive. If anything, I’m making it worse. At least before we met we were both able to recede into numbness. It was cold and gray in that place, like moving underwater, but at least there the edge was off. Now, it’s all edge. I feel and I want, and adding actual sex would only make it worse.

It shames me that I’ve never been kissed the way she kissed me today. I’ve never kissed back that way, either. So ravenously, so thoughtlessly I didn’t even feel like myself. Or rather, I felt so strongly like myself it took a while to recognize it—that man has become such a stranger to me. He’s ferocious and untethered and entirely
too much
. Thank God I found the strength to break away or I would have devoured her, I know it. She’s all up in my chest and stomach, like a knotted rope pulling tighter and tighter. Her maddening frankness and her bitter laughter and her mouth. Her mouth.

I have no right to any of this. I’m not entitled to want her like I do. I’m not entitled to want anything as much as I want it, and that is exactly why I need to get through this night, do what I can to help her, and then get back up on that fucking bridge tomorrow.

Before I do something I can’t take back. Before I ask something of her that she can’t give and won’t want to.

I turn the water to cold and stand there, shaking, until all of this burning inside is frozen out of me.

I sit on the loveseat in my swim trunks and T-shirt, waiting for Christa’s knock at the door, and watch the twilight glimmering on the Hudson. There’s an old-fashioned sailing boat called the Clearwater that runs along this river—introduced by Pete Seeger to teach schoolchildren and open-minded adults about conservation. College students can volunteer on the sloop for a week or a semester at a time, and when I was young I was desperate to do it. I wanted to get dirty and do something important, to be around other kids who believed the world was fixable—that it was essentially good, and could be saved. Instead, I let my father convince me to take summer classes to make up for the time I missed while I was in the hospital.

“Work will take your mind off things,” he said and I went along with it. Because I knew, down deep, that he was right. That if I stepped off course for even one moment, I would fall into an abyss I could never climb out of. On the Clearwater sloop and other places like it, students learned to question the logic of American corporations and ask why they felt entitled to do things like dump millions of barrels of toxic waste into our water supply. Such questions motivate some people to become agents of change—to figure how they could save the world from itself. But me, if I start questioning? I’ll never be able to stop. If I start hoping, if I start trying to change things and believe they can be better, I’ll be kicked hard in the teeth and left for dead.

To be fair, I reached that point anyway. But at least before the monotony of work lost its talismanic charm, my father bought me ten good years of half-living. Does that count for something? I don’t know.

I stand up from my chair and head for the door to Christa’s room. God willing, she’ll be dressed in her swimsuit by now and ready to go upstairs to the pool.

I rap on the door and from within she calls, “It’s open.”

The suite is absurdly lavish, especially for New York, where every square inch costs money to occupy. She’s on the couch in front of a blazing fireplace, wearing a plush white robe.

“Christa?”

She’s crying. There’s no reason why that should shock me, given where we are, and why. But it does. Immediately I’m off balance and I have to sit to collect myself. The cushions depress with my body weight and tilt her toward me. Or perhaps she was already reaching. In any case, as soon I’m beside her she’s leaning into me, and my arms are around her, and she turns into my chest and lets out a long shuddering breath.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

My hand smoothes over her hair. It’s wet from the shower, and so full and fragrant I want to bury myself in it. It’s an improvement over the East River, I’m sure she would agree, but I don’t want to do that to her. Dive into her the way I would do if let my guard down for even one minute.

I need to rein myself in. Just make it through the next twelve hours without doing any damage. I can help her, I know I can. As long as I don’t ruin it—ruin her—with my own sick intensity, which no one in their right mind would be able to handle.

“You’ve been waiting? Why didn’t you knock?”

She shakes her head against my chest, and my T-shirt absorbs the wetness from one thick lock of hair.

“I don’t know.” Her arm is around my back, hot against my skin. “I just needed a minute, I guess. Did you know we’re right by the High Line here? It’s just a few blocks away. I can almost see it from the window.”

An abandoned elevated train track transformed into a community walkway and garden, the High Line is one of my favorite places in the city. “I almost suggested it, you know, as one of the places I could bring you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I guess I wanted to swim instead.”

She pulls back to see my face and I’m lost. I know it and I can’t stop it. The ground under my feet is slipping, I can’t find any purchase and her hand is on my face. Her eyes are wet from crying, and her mouth…

I just need to feel it. Just for a moment. I promise myself that’s all it is. A momentary digression, and then we will stand and go up to the pool.

But when I touch her lips with mine, a great flood opens up in my chest and swallows me. It swallows me. I’m gripping her, grabbing her hair and driving my tongue into her mouth.

I don’t know what I expect. For her to push me off? To stumble to her feet and back away and order me to leave? I brace myself for these things—prepare myself for her refusal, her rejection, which she would have every right to—but she doesn’t do them. She makes a sound that rips my heart open and climbs onto my lap.

“Henry.”

It’s the most devastating word anyone has ever spoken, and she says it right into my ear. I can’t take it, any of it. Her breath against my neck, her wet hair, her bare thighs around my legs. She’s trembling and it’s too much, how I want her. I want to throw her down on the floor and fuck her, I want oblivion and it’s too much.

She reaches between us and strokes a hand over my erection and kisses me, and it’s so intense I groan into her mouth, and just like that, it’s gone. I’m softening in her hand, I can feel it, and she’s shrinking back into herself, and all I can do is shut my eyes.

She sits very still on my lap, and lowers her head to my shoulder. “I’m sorry. Did I do something? Was it—” She touches her chest and that does make me open my eyes. “Did you feel this and—”

“Oh my God.” I grip her arms tight, realizing what she must have thought. That I recoiled from her body, from the scar there. “No. Christa, no. It wasn’t that. It was…it was…”

But she’s shaking her head, rising, pulling the bathrobe double-over to cover herself, to protect herself from my eyes.

“Christa!” I grab her arm and yank her back down to my lap with such force I surprise both of us.

She stares at me, wide-eyed. “Please don’t. Please. I’m begging you. Don’t tell me it’s okay. Don’t tell me I’m pretty anyway. You were disgusted, and that’s okay, but please, for the love of God, don’t make it worse by being an awkward mess and lying to me.”

“I’m not—”

“See, Henry, you’re doing it. Stop
arguing
. You lost your erection because you—”

“I didn’t
lose
it. It’s not like oh, anybody see an erection lying around? I seem to have misplaced it.”

She blinks for a moment, and then laughs at this callback to her breast joke. Thank God.

“It went away because that’s what happens to me. I tried to tell you.”

She pauses. “Yeah. You did…”

“But?”

“I didn’t think it would happen, now, you know, because it felt so…for me, it felt so…”