Crossing the Bridge (20 page)

The man nodded and handed me three singles. It became immediately obvious that he wasn’t planning to bitch about my inconveniencing him and I felt a little guilty about speaking so stiffly.

“You’re Richard’s kid, huh?” he said. “You look a little like him. I heard about his problem. How’s he doing?”

“He’s all right. The doctors think he’s going to be fine.”

“That’s good. He’s a good man. Been here a long time, always nice to the customers.”

I wondered if that wasn’t a polite reproach for my tone of voice. I handed the man his change and he pocketed it while at the same time pulling out four dollar bills and putting them in his other pocket.

“Everything’s okay with Ellen, right?” he said.

“She’s fine. Just had something to do with her daughter this morning.”

“That’s good.” He smiled at me. “We’ve become friends, you might say, over the last few years. I come see her every morning during the week. Get my papers and my candy and we catch up a little. Then I’ll go over to the coffee shop and get my French Roast and my blueberry scone and sit there and read for a while. I guess you’d call it a ritual. Been doing it every day since my Dorothy passed nine years ago.”

The man had been doing the same thing every day for nine years. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could become so completely locked into the same habit. Did he mean that he’d been coming to the store and the coffee shop for all that time? Or did he really drink the same French Roast and eat the same blueberry scone every single day? Did he ever buy a Crunch bar or perhaps a Milky Way? I wondered if there was a story behind this ritual. I wondered if his wife used to come into town to get the papers before she died. Maybe she made him blueberry scones on Sunday mornings. Or maybe all of this was new, a way of showing that he’d been able to move on, at least a little, after she died.

I never considered that the small talk we exchanged with customers had any value, but now I thought about the kinds of conversations Ellen had with this man. Was there some role that she had in the ritual that I needed to fill? Had she told Tab about it (and if she had, would it have mattered, since Tab would almost certainly have “spaced it”)? I’m not sure why, but I felt the need to entertain this guy for a couple of minutes. I asked him about his plans
for the day and told him about the fair I’d gone to in Lenox. He told me about his garden and his youngest daughter coming to visit him from Philadelphia and about the books he loved to read. Finally, he pulled the four dollars from his other pocket and told me that it was time for him to get down to the coffee shop. I wondered if they had his meal waiting and if I’d screwed up his schedule by opening the store late.

“Tell your father that Mickey said hi and wishes him the best with his recovery,” he said as he headed toward the door.

“Hang on a second,” I said as I walked around the counter. I took another package of peanut butter cups and handed them to him. “If you’ve really been buying these for the last nine years, it’s about time you got one on the house.”

He smiled, patted me on the shoulder, and walked out the door. On the way back around the counter, I took another package of Reese’s for myself. Breakfast.

The next morning I walked into the den with two mugs of tea, set them on the game table, and set up the chessboard. Without a word, my father turned off the television and sat down at his place. I moved a pawn to Queen Three and we started to play. I wasn’t any better this time out than I had been a few days earlier, but if anything I was even more deliberate and conservative. Neither of us spoke for the first several moves, though my father at one point made eye contact with me as I established the most
rudimentary possible defense. There was the faintest bit of amusement in his expression.

I’d been thinking more and more lately about the women I’d been involved with over the years. They’d been something like the participants in the parade that takes place every Fourth of July on River Road. They’d stop in front of me for a moment or two, do whatever it was that they were planning to do and then move on to entertain someone else. And like a spectator at one of these parades, I would be amused for a moment and even tickled by the spectacle of it all, but I would eventually be left wondering why everyone got so worked up about these things.

As my father began to dismantle me slowly on the chessboard, my thoughts returned to these women yet again. My father took my queen’s bishop and I offered him a wan smile. I considered the fact that he knew almost none of the women I’d been with.

“You liked Gillian, didn’t you?” I said.

He narrowed his eyes for a moment and then looked back down at the board. I wondered if he thought I was trying to do something to distract him.

“Do you remember her?” I said.

“Short brown hair, green eyes, very pretty. Said ‘well’ a lot.”

I nodded and moved my knight back to King Three, where it had been three moves earlier. My father glanced at me disapprovingly.

“I had the feeling that you liked her that time I came back here with her.”

“She seemed very nice. It seemed that she liked you.”

“I think she did. I think we were doing okay then.”

He slid his Queen’s Rook to Queen’s Knight One. I had absolutely no idea why he did that.

“I never told you what happened between us,” I said.

“No, you never did,” he said flatly. I wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic or not. I never explained any of my relationships to him.

“The lease on my apartment came up for renewal.”

“That kind of thing breaks up a lot of romances.”

“It wasn’t the apartment itself; it was what to do with the apartment. You know, do I renew for another year, do I look for something else, do we get something together? I was selling real estate then, so I had a lot of access. What I didn’t have was a lot of inspiration. It was like the lease on my relationship with Gillian had come up for renewal as well. And I knew that I didn’t really love her. She was so easy to like and she made me feel comfortable, but it was like sitting in a Barcalounger, you know? At some point, you have to get up because you can’t sit there for the rest of your life. And on top of everything else, I hated selling real estate. So I told her I was moving on.”

Other than raising an eyebrow, my father didn’t react to this. We exchanged several more moves.

“It was very different with Emily,” I said. “That whole thing in Atlanta was so strange. We met when I got that office managing job at Allied. She could never really understand that the suit-and-tie thing was a phase to me, like a costume change. She was so corporate and type A, and for a while that seemed very exciting and exotic. Do you know what finally killed us?”

“Your car needed an inspection?”

“Yeah, funny. What killed us was that this junior executive position opened up. Emily pushed me like crazy to go for it. I mean, she was relentless. She sent me memos. It would have been comical if it weren’t infuriating. When someone else got the job, she started lecturing me about missed opportunities. I quit Allied two days later and got the hell out of town.”

My father took a sip of his tea and then made another move. Since he barely spoke anymore, it was hard to tell whether his reticence now had to do with his condition or the topic. I hadn’t intended to talk to him about any of this. But I thought that shaking things up a little might actually be beneficial to him. I thought if I told him a little more about what I’d been doing the last few years that it might cause him to reconnect with the world in some small way. And since this was what was on my mind, it seemed the natural way to do it. A part of me actually wondered what he thought. I’d never really gone to him for advice, even when I was living at home. I spoke this way with my mother a little, and it was so much easier to talk to Chase than to either of them. But for any number of reasons, I wouldn’t have minded hearing my father’s impressions now. Instead, he continued to build an attack that I’d never seen before and couldn’t have parried even if I had.

I told him about how Kristina had called me “soulless” the night before I left Minneapolis. I told him how Susan just walked away. I even told him about a woman I met at a bookstore and how my interaction with her haunted me even though we never
dated. All the while, he trapped and captured my pieces. As with our previous match, my defeat was inevitable, but I refused to surrender.

When he at last checkmated me (something that it seemed to me he could have done several moves before he actually did it), he took a final sip of his tea and handed me his mug. I expected him to return to the television, but he sat back at the game table instead.

“Do you know how many women I’ve slept with?” he said.

“You grew up in the sixties, Dad. I don’t know, a hundred and twenty?”

He smirked. It was the most expression I’d seen on his face since he returned from the hospital. “Not everyone participated in free love. I’ve slept with exactly one woman in my life. Which hardly qualifies me as an authority regarding the ups and downs of relationships. But I dated quite a few women before your mother and you know what I learned? Love isn’t hard work. It might be trying, but if it feels like hard work, it probably isn’t love.”

He raised himself up on his arms, walked over to his easy chair and reached for the remote control. I’m sure that little soliloquy exhausted him. I sat at the table for a few minutes thinking about his message. Was he endorsing the breakups I told him about? Was he telling me that I didn’t know anything about love? Was he assuring me that I’d know it when the right thing came along? I had no idea, but the virtual outburst from him left me strangely reassured.

I put the chess set away and made a note to myself to get a book on the game before our next match.

Iris and I settled into a regular pattern. It was hard for either us to get away from our jobs (and spending time in the store was feeling more and more like a “job” all the time) on the weekends, but Tuesdays and Wednesdays were very slow. And so every week, I would drive up to Lenox on Tuesday morning and drive back to Amber late Wednesday night. These trips easily became the highlight of any week and they made what I had in Amber seem more palatable. If contractors were annoying me or if a customer whined, I could always call Iris, complain a bit, listen to a story about some petty thing someone at the Ensemble did, and then talk about our plans a few days hence. In fact, since we’d started to see each other every week, our phone relationship had become much richer. I could see Iris in these conversations. I could imagine her body language during a specific voice inflection. I could visualize her posture at her desk or at a kitchen chair.

We’d been doing this for several weeks at this point. On this Tuesday, we had well-prepared, though utterly unsurprising Mexican food followed by modern dance at Jacob’s Pillow. The performers
dedicated a portion of the program to the music of Brian Wilson, while they set another to Thelonius Monk. It was bracing and graceful and – unlike the meal – completely unpredictable.

“This is a sexy town,” I said as we drove back to Iris’ house.

“You think so? I think it’s a little on the geeky side myself.”

“No, it really is. It’s beautiful, it keeps you guessing, it promises a lot of pleasure, and it delivers what it promises. It’s very sexy.”

“Should I leave the two of you alone?”

I smiled. “I’m complimenting you on your choice of location. You did a good job finding this place.”

“Thanks. It pretty much found me.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that kind of thing happens. You need better bread, though. That’s the one way in which Amber beats this town. I’m bringing you a loaf of bread when I come up next week.”

“You mean your town is better than my town at something?”

“Amber is not my town. It is the place where I grew up and my current temporary residence. But it is not my town.”

“Tucumcari.”

“Or someplace like it. Or no place like it. Who knows? But not Amber.”

“In spite of the fabulous baked goods.”

“Yes.”

Iris laughed. “Hey,” she said, “I forgot to tell you that Melanie is pregnant.” Melanie was a colleague at the Ensemble and a good friend of Iris’.

“With that guy?” Melanie, who is gay, had been
confiding in Iris for months about her desire to have a baby and about the male gay friend she’d been conflicted about doing it with.

“Yeah, Burke. They just decided to make it happen. I’d been wondering why she hadn’t been talking about it as much lately. She’s six weeks. Burke is going to move in with her when the baby is born.”

“Doesn’t Melanie have a partner?”

“She does, but Shelly’s okay with it. They’re all going to live together and raise the kid as a team.”

“That takes unbelievable guts.”