A Bridge of Years (10 page)

Of
course, it was silly and maybe even dangerous to stop and talk. This
was New York, after all. Strange men were hardly in short supply;
their strangeness was seldom subtle or interesting. But Joyce had
good intuition about people. "Sharp-eyed Joyce" Lawrence
had called her. "The Florence Nightingale of love." She
rejected the implication (though here she was again, perhaps: taking
in strays), but accepted the judgment. She knew who to trust. "You're
lost," she said.

He
looked up at her and managed a smile. A certain effort there, she
thought.

"No,"
he said. "Not really. I figured it out. New York City. I'm in
New York. But the date . . ." He held out his hands in a
helpless gesture.

Oh,
Joyce
thought. But he wasn't an alcoholic. His eyes were bright and clear.
He might have been schizophrenic, but his face didn't radiate the
pained perplexity Joyce had seen in the faces of the schizophrenics
she'd met. (There had been a few, including her uncle Teddy, who was
in a "care home" upstate.) Not an alcoholic, not a
schizo—maybe he had taken something. There were some odd pills
circulating around the Village these days. Dexadril was popular,
LSD-25 was easy to come by. An out-of-towner who had picked up
something at the Remo: that was possible. But not really a tourist.
The man was dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt open at the collar,
and he wore the clothes comfortably; they weren't some outfit he had
cobbled together for an afternoon of slumming. So perhaps he is One
of Us after all, Joyce thought, and this fraternal possibility moved
her to sit down next to him. The bench was wet and the rainwater
soaked through her skirt; but she was already wet from dashing out of
the West Fourth Street station of the IND. Okay to be wet on a cold
afternoon at dusk because eventually you'd find a comfortable place
to get dry and warm and then it was all worth it. "You look like
you could use a cup of coffee."

The
man nodded. "Sure could."

"You
have money?"

He
touched his left hip. Joyce heard the change jingle in his pocket.
But his face was suddenly doubtful. "I don't believe I do."

She
said cautiously, "How do you feel?"

He
looked at her again. Now there was focus in his eyes— he understood
the drift of the question.

"I'm
sorry," he said. "I know how this must seem. I'm sorry I
can't explain it. Did you ever have an experience you just couldn't
take in all at once—something so enormous you just can't comprehend
it?"

The
LSD, she thought. Down the rabbit hole for sure. A naif in chemical
wonderland.
Be
nice,
she
instructed herself. "I think coffee would probably help."

He
said, "I have money. But I don't think it's legal tender."

"Foreign
currency?"

"You
could say that."

"You've
been traveling?"

"I
guess I have." He stood up abruptly. "You don't have to buy
me a coffee, but if you want to I'd be grateful." "My name
is Joyce," she said. "Joyce Casella." "Tom
Winter," he said. Early in the month of May 1962.

She
bought coffee at an unfashionable deli where no one would recognize
her: not because she was embarrassed but because she didn't want a
crowd chasing this man—Tom Winter—away. He was dazed, numbed, and
not entirely coherent; but beneath that she was beginning to
sense a curious edge, perhaps the legacy of whatever journey had
brought him here, or some ordeal, a tempering fire. She talked about
her life, the job she'd lost at Macy's book department, her music,
relieving him of the need to make conversation and at the same time
letting her eyes take him in. Here was a man maybe thirty years old,
wearing clothes that were vaguely bohemian but not ragged, a traveler
with traveler's eyes, who wasn't skinny but had the gauntness of
someone who had ignored meals for too long.

He
didn't want to talk about himself or how he'd arrived here. Joyce
respected that. She'd met a lot of folks who didn't care to talk
about themselves. People with a past they wanted to hide; or people
with no past, refugees from the suburbs with grandiose visions of the
Village inferred from television and all those self-righteous
articles in
Time
and
Life.
Joyce
herself had been one of these, an NYU undergraduate in a dirndl
skirt, and she respected Tom's silence even though his secrets might
be less prosaic than hers.

He
did say where he was from: a little coastal town in Washington State
called Belltower. She was encouraged by this fracture in his
reticence and ventured to ask what he did there.

"Lots
of things," he said. "Sold cars." "It's hard to
picture you as a car salesman." "I guess other people
thought so, too. I wasn't very good at it."

"You
lost your job?"

"I—well,
I don't know. Maybe I still have it. If I go back."

"Long
way to go back."

He
smiled a little. "Long way to come here."

"So
what brought you to the city?"

"A
time machine," he said. "Apparently."

He
had hitchhiked or ridden boxcars, Joyce guessed, a sort of Woody
Guthrie thing; maybe that was what he meant. "Well," she
said, "Mr. Car Salesman, are you planning to stay awhile?"

He
shook his head no, then seemed to hesitate. "I'm not sure. My
travel arrangements are kind of vague." "You need a place
to stay?"

He
glanced through the window of the deli (
strictly
kosher
,
like the sign in the Peace Eye Bookstore over at 10th and Avenue C).
Evening now. Traffic labored through the shiny wet darkness.

"I've
got a place," he said, "but I'm not sure I can find the way
back."

Joyce
suspected he was right. Coming down off some towering LSD kick,
he'd probably bounce around Manhattan like the little steel ball in a
pachinko machine. Joyce asked herself whether she was convinced of
his harmlessness; she decided she was.
Taking
in strangers,
she
scolded herself—but it was one of those acts Lawrence had called
"blinks of connection" in a poem. The grace of an
unexpected contact. A kind of touch. "You can sleep on my sofa
if you want. It's not much of a sofa."

The
offer seemed to provoke fatigue in him. "I would be very happy
to sleep on your sofa. I'm sure it's a wonderful sofa."

"Very
courtly," she said. "It came from the Salvation Army. It's
purple. It's an ugly sofa, Tom." "Then I'll sleep with my
eyes closed," he said.

She
lived in a little railroad apartment in the East Village where she
had moved from the dorm at NYU. It was two flights up in a tenement
building and furnished on no budget at all: the ugly purple sofa,
some folding chairs, a Sally Ann standing lamp from the Progressive
Era. The bookcases were made of raw pineboard and paving bricks.

Tom
stood awhile looking at the books. They were nothing special, her
college English texts plus whatever she'd picked up at secondhand
stores since then. Some C. Wright Mills, Frantz Fanon's
The
Wretched of the Earth,
Aldous
Huxley— but he handled them as if they were specimens in a display
case.

"Read
anything you want," she said.

He
shook his head. "I don't think I could concentrate."

Probably
not. And he was shivering. She brought him a big bath towel and a
cotton shirt Lawrence had left behind. "Dry off and change,"
she said. "Sleep if you want." She left him stretched out
on the sofa and went into the "kitchen"—a corner of the
room, really, with a sink and a reconditioned Hotpoint and a cheap
partition—and rinsed a few dishes. Her rent was due and the
severance check from her department store job would cover it;
but that would leave her (she calculated) about seven dollars to live
on until she picked up some music work or another job. Neither was
impossible, but she would have to find a gig or go hungry. But that
was tomorrow's problem—today was today.

She
left the kitchen passably clean. By the time she'd finished Tom
was asleep on the sofa—stark stone unconscious, snoring a little.
She picked up his watch from the wooden crate table where he'd left
it, thinking, It must be late.

Then
she did a double-take at the face of the watch, which wasn't a watch
face at all but a kind of miniature signboard where the time was
written in black numerals over a smoke-gray background.

9:35,
it
said, and then dissolved to
9:36.
The
little black colon winked continuously.

Joyce
had never seen such a watch and she assumed it must be very
expensive—surely not a car salesman's watch. But it wasn't a
foreign watch, either. It said "Timex" and "Quartz
Lithium" (whatever that was) and "Water Resistant."

Very
very
strange,
she thought. Tom Winter, Man of Mystery.

She
left him snoring on the couch and moved into the bedroom. She
undressed with the fight off and stretched out on the narrow
spring-creaking bed, relishing the cold air and the clank of the
radiator, the rattle of rainwater on the fire escape. Then she
climbed under the scratchy brown blanket and waited for sleep.

Mornings
and evenings, she loved this city.

Sometimes
she slept five hours or less at a time, so she could have more
morning and more night.

Nights,
especially when she was out with Lawrence and that crowd, she would
simply let herself be swept up in the urgency of their conversation,
talking desegregation or the arms race in some guitar cafe; swept up
by the music, too, legions of folk singers arrowing in on Bleecker
and MacDougal from all over the country these days; in
sawdust-floored rooms filled with her poet friends and folk friends
and "beat" friends, earnest Trotskyites and junkies and
jazz musicians and eighteen-year-old runaways from dingy Midwest
Levit-towns, all these crosscurrents so fiercely focused that on some
nights she believed the pitch-black sky might open in a rapture of
the dispossessed and they would all ascend bodily into heaven. Nights
like that had been common enough this winter and spring that she was
eager for summer, when the pace would double and redouble again.
Maybe Lawrence would publish his poetry or she would find an audience
for her music. And they would be at the eye, then, of this luminous
vortex.

But
mornings were good, too. This was a good morning. It was good to wake
up and feel the city waking up around her. Since she had lived in New
York the rhythm of the city had become a stabilizing pattern. She had
learned to distinguish the sound of morning traffic from the sound of
afternoon traffic, both distinct from the lonelier siren sound of the
traffic late at night. Morning traffic woke her with promises.
She did not dislike the city until noon; at noon it was coarse, loud,
unruly, plain, and chokingly dull. Lunch hours at Macy's she had
written songs about the night and morning city, little spells against
the crudity of midday.

Tom
was still asleep on the sofa. Joyce was faintly surprised by
this. She had imagined him vanished in the morning, like a
dream, like smoke. But here he was: substantial in his rumpled
clothes. She heard the clank and moan of the bathroom plumbing; he
stepped into the kitchen with his face freshly washed and his eyes as
wide and dazed as they had been the day before.

"New
York," he said. "Nineteen sixty-two."

"Congratulations."

"It's
amazing," he said.

"You
really
are
from
out of town."

"You
could say that." His grin was big and a little silly. "Feeling
better this morning?" "Better. Giddy, in fact."

"Uh-huh.
Well, don't get
too
giddy.
You probably need breakfast."