The Bridge (3 page)

“What? Go our separate ways?”

“Yes.” The waitress comes to take our empty plates and we look to her like a lifeline, as though she could save us from ourselves. But she just clears the dishes and leaves us to stare at each other.

“You could be some kind of psycho killer for all I know. I don’t even have a cell phone to call for help if you try to use my skin for a lampshade or something.”

“No?” He looks pleased, almost. “Mine’s at home, too. Didn’t think I’d be needing it today.”

“Why are we even bothering, Henry? This is ridiculous.”

He looks at me. And then he does something terrible. He taps the back of his hand against the back of mine. With that big paw of his I was admiring earlier and wanting to touch. Well, I’ve touched him. He is just as warm as I imagined, even so briefly, and I can see the goose bumps rising up on my own arm.

“Because I don’t want you to die, Christa.

She doesn’t say anything for a long time and I begin to wonder if I’ve finally scared her away. Her thumb rubs the place where I touched her, on the back of one tan hand. Her fingernails are short and neatly filed, unadorned with polish. I wonder what her hands would feel like, if I wrapped them up in mine. If I took the place of her thumb and stroked. They would be warm, I think, and strong.

It’s hard to understand why anyone would want to snuff out the vibrance that radiates off her. Satellites orbiting the earth are probably picking up her signal. Me, I’ve never had that kind of energy. My brother, Jack, was the one who shined like that. He was the perfect decoy—sucking up all the attention so I could fade into the background and disappear.

But Christa—she’s not the type to disappear, or she shouldn’t be. There’s a buzzing in my skin in the place where her hand touched mine. I want to recoil from that vibration and at the same time I’m ashamed to say that I’m hungry for it. Maybe it’s pure sensory deprivation, but I want more.

I won’t ask for it. But I won’t let her climb up on that bridge again either. At least not today.

“I don’t have much to offer you,” I tell her. “But we can do this one day. And then we’ll see. Okay? We’ll see if it changes anything.”

She shakes her head in a way that shifts her hair over her face. There are streaks of copper in it and also strands of gray. I wonder, suddenly, what she looked like after chemo, when all her hair fell out. It’s difficult to picture her without eyebrows or lashes—denuded, softened, fragile. But she did look like that once. She went through all that, once.

Was anyone there to help her? Did she let them if they were? She doesn’t seem like the type to be comfortable with vulnerability. Which means I’ll need to be very careful with this perverse drama we’re enacting. She might be perfectly okay with
being
someone’s savior, but being rescued herself? No, she wouldn’t approve of that at all. I can tell that much about her already.

But that’s okay. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s how to make my intentions invisible.

“It’s not going to change anything for me, Henry. I know what I have to do. But maybe it will change something for you.”

I do my best to smile. “Maybe.” I know it won’t. But it can’t hurt for her to think it will.

Our first stop is the Staten Island Ferry. Christa insists that we take a city bus to the terminal because it will be “a good experience” for me. I can’t imagine how covering myself with exhaust fumes and fast food crumbs will make me feel any better about the world, but I go along with it. If saving the poor little rich boy is how she wants to imagine this, who am I to get in her way?

“I don’t have change, though, or a…a card. A MetroCard.”

She hustles across the street toward the bus stop. “I thought you brought your wallet.”

“I did, but—”

“Wait.” She stops me at the curb. “Please don’t tell me you never ride the subway.”

“Well…”

“Wow.” She shakes her head. “Never? How do you get around? To work and everything?”

“I have a driver.”

“A driver.” She says it quietly. “So you’re not just rich. You’re like
rich
rich.”

What else can I do but shrug? I can’t remember the last time I was with someone for whom having a driver was strange.

“Does he have a name, this driver of yours?”

“Charles.”

“Oh yeah? I hope he wears a top hat.”

“Actually, he’s rather fond of a cap he got from the Guyana cricket team. You wouldn’t believe how much that man knows about the game of cricket.”

“So…what? You talk to him while he drives you around the city?”

The bus pulls in, exhaling a plume of smoke behind it.

“Sometimes. He’s an interesting guy.”

Christa gives me a funny look. “I’ll use my pay-per-ride card for both of us, okay? I didn’t bother getting a monthly because…well…you know.”

We get on the bus and I’m surprised by how crowded it is so early in the morning. What are all these people doing up already? They’re dressed and groomed for daytime, as though they’ve been awake for hours. What would I normally be doing on a Saturday at this time? Sleeping. Thinking ahead to some desultory brunch with work friends. Going to the gym, where I’d carry out the careful routine prescribed to me by a professional trainer. I had to hire someone to give me goals, having none of my own to speak of.

I did go through these motions, though, despite the fact that they carried all the appeal of a plateful of gray ash. I’d been hoping, I suppose, that I could make myself normal by doing what everyone else did.

I rarely stopped to wonder about this whole different set of
everyone elses
. To consider what would it be like to go through this other set of motions—awake at dawn, heading to work on a Saturday, riding the bus pressed up against the flesh and smells of strangers. Would it be more or less depressing, overall?

Christa leads the way to the back, which is populated by a row of rough-looking black men conversing in loud voices. We find the last two seats, facing each other across the aisle. My seat is sandwiched between two of the talking men, one of whom smells so strongly of cigarettes I almost feel like I’m smoking one myself.

The seat upholstery is stained with spilled coffee and discarded gum, but the bus is pleasantly cold and the floor is clean. It jerks onto Second Avenue with a grunt of steam and the men who quieted when we shuffled in resume their conversation.

“Yo, you saw that motherfucker Davis?” the man on my right says. “Comin’ up on me in the warehouse like why you just sittin’ there?’ I say, ‘I’m on break, son.’ He like, ‘Break end two minutes ago.’ I said, ‘Yo, fuck you, man. Check your goddamn watch.’”

“You say that? For real?” In his animation, the man on my left—the smoker—catches me in the ribs with his elbow. I resist the urge to rub at the bruised spot with my hand.

“Hell yeah, I said that. Why not? Bitch don’t own me. He might think he do but he don’t.”

“Man, you gonna lose that job.”

“Yo, fuck that fucking job.”

Their voices get louder as the bus pulls into the next stop. Across the aisle Christa stares at me, a half smile on her face. A small child sits on his knees beside her, facing the window and crunching Cheerios. Occasionally he spits one out of his mouth and into her lap.

“Mama! Mama! Look dat. Fire truck! Mama!”

His mother glances up from her smartphone long enough to pat his back. “Fire truck. What color is it?”

“Red! It red. Go woo-woo!”

She smiles. “Woo-woo, that’s right.”

I know Christa doesn’t have children, but did she want them, at some point? Did cancer get in the way? Suicide certainly would take on a new dimension if kids were involved.

At the hospital there was a woman who’d swallowed a bottle of pills with her two-month-old baby in the room. The doctors said it was postpartum depression, but that didn’t stop the other patients from judging her. Even among our sorry ranks, that was the ghetto realm of suicide—for a mother to leave her child behind.

But I looked in that woman’s eyes and recognized what I saw there. A despair so deep and wide there would be no crossing it. How could you burden a baby with that abyss? Killing herself would have seemed to her, in that dark place, like the kindest option.

Under Christa’s bench across the aisle is an overstuffed navy blue backpack. I look around at the passengers seated nearby and try to puzzle out whose it could be. A banner ad above the window—“If you see something, say something”—shows a backpack abandoned in exactly the same position beneath a subway seat.

Isn’t it just a matter of time before something like this happens in America? In New York, which is so densely populated a terrorist could cause major damage just by walking out into the street with a homemade bomb? Everybody thinks it won’t happen to them, but this is exactly how it
could
happen. How it
will
happen. On a quiet weekend morning, when you’re distracted with something else. It will come at you, blindside you, and you won’t be prepared.

A man seated to Christa’s right leans down and picks up the backpack. I hadn’t noticed him before; he’s young, maybe college-aged, with a prominent pimple on his chin. He unzips the bag and pulls out a browning banana.

The bus lurches onto the street again, and Christa automatically reaches up to keep the little boy beside her from falling. The contact of his pudgy arm against her hand seems to shake her. Her half-smile slips, replaced by a flash of sorrow so quick you’d almost miss it if you weren’t looking closely. The child’s mother thanks her, and the smile returns and then just as quickly fades away again. It’s like watching sunlight ripple over water.

The guy on my right turns and breathes directly into my face. He must have had an everything bagel for breakfast because suddenly it feels as though someone has painted my nose with garlic and onions.

“Check this out. I met this girl the other night and oh shit—”

He’s about to continue when an elderly white woman comes teetering down the aisle.

“Nobody gave her a seat?” The smoker says. “Damn.”

He’s getting up to assist her when the bus stops abruptly and she sways, knees buckling beneath her.

“Whoa!” The man to my right flies out of his seat and grabs her by the elbow just before she goes down. His friend quickly takes her other side, lifting her up. They both wear beige construction boots, cargo pants, and dark hoodies. They are each at least a foot taller and broader than the woman between them.

“You all right, ma’am? You okay? Come sit down.”

They settle her into the seat beside me, and all she can say is “Oh. Oh.” She pats her neatly pinned hair and her handbag. Her birdlike shoulder trembles next to mine.

“Her okay, mama? Her fall over?” The child climbs down from his seat and offers the old lady a Cheerio.

Marlboro Man bends down and pats her knee. “You okay. You gonna be just fine. Little man here give you a snack. Right? You have a seat and just rest here a minute.”

She nods and thanks them, and the little boy sits back down, and I have to shut my eyes. I have to shut them tight against the strange look of hurt and hope in Christa’s eyes across the aisle. I keep them shut until we reach our stop.

The ferry terminal is surprisingly festive. Despite a steady flow of Saturday commuters, it retains an air of summer, as though the riders were here on holiday. We shuffle onto the huge orange boat, tourists in our own city, and take our seats on an outside bench on the upper deck. Christa says the view is best from up here. I tell her I have to take her word for it. Although I grew up in New York, I’ve never been to Staten Island.

“Seriously?” Christa eyes me. “But you’ve been to Brooklyn?”

“Yes, and the Bronx. Not Queens, though.”

“Man. You need to live a few more days just to cover all the boroughs.”

It’s cold outside on the ferry deck, and calls to mind the wind up on the bridge tower. I was cold then, too, and facing the deeper cold of the East River, but somehow I couldn’t make myself care. My body reacted as a body would—shivering, heart racing from the climb up the cables—but it was like watching an actor on a movie screen. I was sitting in the audience eating popcorn while he stood on that frigid concrete. From my theater seat I wondered if he would even make it to the water when he jumped, or if he’d slam up against the protruding lip of the tower column as he fell. If so, his body would lie there, broken, instead of serenely floating away. I tried to calculate how far out he would have to dive to avoid that end, whether he would need a running start.

Here, though, on the ferry, the cold penetrates. It’s me sitting on this bench next to Christa, whether I like it or not. She stares out at the Manhattan coastline, silent.

“Why did you choose this?” I ask. “Why this ferry out of all the places we could have gone?”

She leans her head back against the wall and closes her eyes. There are laugh lines around those eyes, which at the moment strike me as rather tragic, and a sprinkling of freckles. “I like the water.”

“That’s the only reason?”

She turns her face toward me and when her eyes open, when they look into mine, I feel a terrible jolt in the pit of my stomach.

All this time I have been assiduously avoiding looking at her body. There’s nothing more distasteful, to me, than the low look in a man’s eyes when he takes stock of a woman, part by part. I see how women shrink back from these assessments, how they disappear inside themselves. What are you supposed to do, as a man, when other men do this? They want to talk about tits, and they expect you to join in, and what are you supposed to say? That you identify more with the women? It’s a good way to make yourself an outsider.

The thing is, I can
feel
Christa’s body beside mine. I don’t even need to look. It emits a weird electro-chemical pulse that causes my body, in turn, to react with a kind of heated buzzing.

I’m not an idiot. I know this buzzing is called attraction, but it’s so bizarre and appalling under the circumstances that the best I can do is retreat to a Spock-like distance and observe it. How it’s sitting right here with me like the cold wind is doing. Asserting itself where it’s not wanted and where nothing can be done about it.

She still hasn’t answered my question about why we’re here on the ferry. Instead, she asks one of her own. “Why were you up on that tower this morning, Henry?”

I thought we’d been over this. There’s no more detail to offer her. Nothing that would make sense to anyone but me.

“Because from where I’m sitting,” she goes on, “you have everything a person could need. Money. Your health. You’re still young. You’re good-looking. You seem like a nice enough man. Why would you do it? Why throw that all away?”

It’s what anyone would say. It’s what everyone
did
say, after my first attempt. Somehow it’s worse, though, coming from her. “You don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t.”

I push up from the cold seat and move to stand by the railing. From somewhere above, a foghorn booms and the ferry backs out of the terminal and into the harbor. Lower Manhattan slowly recedes, and Christa comes up to stand beside me.