A Bridge of Years (21 page)

Tom
watched Soderman pull down the blinds, cutting off a view of the Con
Ed stacks on Fourteenth Street, while someone else produced a wooden
box containing a quarter ounce of seeded brown marijuana and a
package of Zig-Zag rolling papers. Tom was amused by the solemnity of
this ritual, including a few doubtful glances in his direction—was
this new guy trustworthy? He bustled over and said, "Let me roll
it."

Smiles.
Joyce asked, "Do you know how?"

He
pasted together two papers to make a double-wide. His technique was
rusty—it had been a long time—but he produced a creditable
joint. Soderman nodded his approval. "Where did you learn that?"

He
answered absently, "In college."

"So
where'd you go to college?"

"In
the agricultural heartland of the Pacific Northwest." He smiled.
"A match?"

He
meant only to establish his camaraderie, but the dope went instantly
to his head. Coltrane's sax, radiating from a single speaker, became
a great golden bell-like instrument. He decided he liked Lawrence
Millstein for liking this music, then remembered the diatribe in the
bar and Joyce's warning
—
Don't
make him mad
—
implying
something about his temper and what she might have seen of it.
He looked at Joyce where she stood silhouetted in the door to
Lawrence's ugly kitchen. He recalled the half promise she had made
him and thought about the possibility of holding her in his arms, of
taking her to bed. She was very young and not as sophisticated
as she liked to believe. She deserved better than Lawrence
Millstein.

The
Coltrane ended. Millstein put on something Tom didn't recognize,
fierce bop, an angry music recorded with the microphone too close to
the trumpet—it sounded like a piano at war with a giant wasp. The
party was getting noisier. Disoriented, he moved to a vacant chair in
one corner of the room and let the sound wash over him. There was a
knock at the door; the dope was carefully hidden; the door eased open
—it was some friend of Soderman's, a woman in a black turtleneck
carrying a guitar case. Shouts of welcome. Joyce went to the
turntable and lifted the tonearm. Millstein shouted, "Careful
with that!" from the opposite end of the room.

Joyce
borrowed the guitar, tuned it, and began picking out chords and bass
runs. Pretty soon there were five or six people gathered around
her. She was flushed—from the drinking or the dope or the
attention—and her eyes were a little glassy. But when she sang, she
sang wonderfully. She sang traditional folk ballads, "Fannerio,"
"Lonesome Traveler." When she spoke she was tentative, or
shy, or sardonic, but the voice that issued out of her now was
utterly different, a voice that made Tom sit up and stare. He had
liked her without guessing she had this voice bottled up inside. The
look on his face must have been comical; she smiled at him. "Come
play!" she said.

He
was startled. "Christ, no."

"I
heard you diddling that guitar you carried into town. You're not too
bad."

Soderman
said, "The repairman plays guitar?"

If
he'd been a little more sober he would never have accepted. But
what the hell—if he was lousy it would only make Joyce look good.
Making Joyce look good seemed like a fairly noble ambition.

For
years he'd taken his guitar out of its box maybe once a month, so he
wouldn't lose what little skill he had. He'd been serious about it in
college—serious enough to take lessons with a semialcoholic
free-lance teacher named Pegler, who claimed to have led a folk-rock
outfit in the Haight in 1965. (Pegler, where are you
now?)
He
took the guitar from Joyce and wondered what he could possibly play.
"Guantanamera"? Some old Weavers ballad? But he recalled a
song he'd taught himself, years ago, from an old Fred Neil
album—counted on inspiration and luck to bring back the chord
changes.

His
singing voice was basically charmless and the dope had roughened it,
but he managed the lyrics without groping. He looked up from his
fingering halfway through the song and realized Joyce was beaming her
approval. Which made him fumble over a chord change. But he picked it
up and finished without too much embarrassment. Joyce applauded
happily. Soderman said, "Impressive!"

Lawrence
Millstein had drifted over from a dark corner of the room. He
offered, "Not bad for amateur night."

"Thank
you," Tom said warily.

"Sentimental
shit, of course."

Joyce
was more rankled by the remark than Tom was. "Must be a full
moon," she said. "Lawrence is turning into an asshole."

"Reckless,"
Soderman observed quietly. Tom sat up.

"No,
that's all right," Millstein said. He made an expansive gesture
and spilled a little Jack Daniel's from the glass in his hand. "I
don't want to interrupt your lovefest."

Tom
handed away the guitar. It was dawning on him that he was in the
presence of an angry drunk.

Don't
make him mad.
But
Joyce seemed to have forgotten her own advice. "Don't do this,"
she said. "We don't need this shit."

"We
don't
need it? Who—you and Tom here? Joyce and the repairman?"

Soderman
said, "You spilled your drink, Lawrence. Let's get another one.
You and me."

Millstein
ignored him. He turned to Tom. "You like her? Are you fond of
Joyce?"

"Yes,
Larry," he said. "I like Joyce a lot."

"Don't
you fucking call me Larry!"

Instantly,
the party was quiet. Millstein picked up the attention focused
on him; he forced a smile. "You know what she is, of course,"
he went on. "But you
must
know.
It's an old story. They come in from Bryn Mawr wearing these
ridiculous clothes—ballet flats and toreador pants. They have
bohemian inclinations but they all shop at Bonwit Teller. They
come here for intellectual inspiration. They'll tell you that. Of
course, they really come to get laid. Isn't that right, Joyce? They
see themselves in the arms of some nineteen-year-old Negro musician.
You can get laid in Westchester just as easily, of course, but
not by anyone nearly as
interesting."
He
peered at Tom with a fixed, counterfeit smile. "So just how
interesting
are
you?"

"Right
now," Tom said, "I guess I'm a little bit more interesting
than you are."

Millstein
threw down his glass and balled his fists. Joyce said, "Stop
him!" Soderman stood up in front of Millstein and put a
conciliatory hand on his shoulder. "Hey," he said. "Hey,
calm down. It's nothing. Hey, Larry—I mean,
Lawrence—"

Joyce
grabbed Tom's hand and pulled him toward the door.

"The
party is fucking over!" Millstein screamed.

They
ducked into the hall.

"Come
home with me," Joyce said.

Tom
said that sounded like a good idea.

She
undressed with the unselfconsciousness of a cat.

Pale
streetlight came glowing through the dusty window. He was startled by
her small breasts and pink, pleasant aureoles; by the neat angle
of her pubic hair. She smiled at him in the dark, and he decided he
was leading a charmed life.

The
touch of her was like a long, deep drink of water. She arched against
him as he entered her; he felt rusty springs unwind inside him. She
had put her glasses on the orange crate by the bed and her eyes were
fiercely wide.

Later,
as they were drifting into sleep, she told him he made love like a
lonely man.

"Do
I?"

"You
did tonight.
Are
you
lonely?" "Was lonely." "Very lonely?" "Very
lonely."

She
curved against him, breasts and hips. "I want you to stay here.
I want you to move in."

He
experienced another moment of pure free-fall. "Is the apartment
big enough?"

"The
bed is big enough."

He
kissed her in the dark.
Charmed
life,
he
thought.

Nineteen
sixty-two, a hot summer night.

It
was night all over the continent now, skies clear from the Rockies
east to the coast of Maine, stars shining down from the uncrowded sky
of a slightly younger universe. The nation slept, and its sleep was
troubled—if at all—by faint and distant dreams. A dream of
Mississippi. The dream of a war that hadn't quite started, somewhere
east of the ocean. The dream of dark empires moving on its borders.

JFK
slept. Lee Harvey Oswald slept. Martin Luther King slept.

Tom
Winter slept and dreamed of Chernobyl.

He
carried this nugget of discontent from the night into the morning.

I
am a cold wind from the land of your children,
he
had thought. But he looked at Joyce—eating a late breakfast at a
cheap restaurant at the end of a dirty, narrow, sunlit street— and
didn't want to be that anymore. This was history and history was good
because it was immutable; but he worried that he might have brought
an infection from the future— not a literal disease but some
turbulence in the timestream. Some dark, stalking irregularity that
would unravel the fabric of her life. Maybe his certainties were
absolutely false. Maybe they would all die in the Soviet attack that
followed the missile crisis.

But
that was absurd—wasn't it?

"Sometime
soon," she said, "you're going to have to tell me who you
are and where you came from."

He
was startled by the suggestion. He looked at her across the table.

"I
will," he said. "Sometime."

"Sometime
soon."

"Soon,"
he said helplessly. Maybe it was a promise. Maybe it was a he.

His
name was Billy Gargullo, and he was a farmboy.

He
had lived in New York City for ten years now, but hot nights like
this still reminded him of Ohio.

Hot
nights like this, he couldn't sleep. Hot summer nights, he left his
tiny apartment and moved like a shadow into the streets. He liked to
ride the subway; when the subway was crowded, he liked to walk.

Tonight
he rode a little, walked a little.

He
had left his shiny golden armor safe at home.

Billy
seldom wore the armor, but he often thought about it. The golden
armor was at home, in the tenement apartment where he had lived for
the last decade. He kept the armor in his closet, behind a false
wall, in a box no one else could open.

He
wore the golden armor seldom; but the golden armor was a part of him,
profoundly his own—and that was troublesome. He had left a
great many things behind when he came to New York. Many ugly, many
shameful things. But some ugly and shameful things had come with him.
The armor itself was not ugly or shameful—in its own way it was
beautiful, and when Billy wore it he wore it with pride. But he had
come to suspect that his
need
for
it was shameful . . . that the things he did when he wore it were
ugly.

This
wasn't entirely Billy's fault, or so he told himself. The Infantry
had performed certain surgeries on him. His need for the armor was
real, physical; he wasn't whole without it. In a sense, Billy
was
the
armor. But the armor wasn't entirely Billy: the armor had its own
motives, and it knew Billy better than any other creature in the
world.

It
sang to him sometimes.