Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  “You disagreed.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t have been much of an argument otherwise. But so far, I’m winning.”

  “That’s true, you are,” Noonan said, turning the key in the ignition.

  “She’s stubborn, though,” his father shouted over the engine roar. “Like somebody else I could name. Have a good time with your friends.”

  Noonan watched him disappear back into the restaurant, wondering what the hell this feeling was. Guilt? Come on. But he continued to sit, the bike rumbling beneath him, until finally he laughed, as much to hear his own voice as anything, then shifted into gear. Only when he was out on the highway did he notice his left saddlebag flapping in the breeze. Pulling into the parking lot of the old tannery, he discovered that it contained his father’s leftover prime rib. Had Maxine put it there? No, he was pretty sure she hadn’t left the bar. The boy, Willie? He didn’t think so. Which meant his father must’ve done it when he went to the restroom or just now when they came out of Nell’s together. Had he been holding a doggie bag? One thing was for sure, Noonan thought. He was going to have to start being more observant where his father was concerned.

  What he should do, of course, was toss the meat into the weeds, thus making the lie he’d told true or at least consistent. But now, with only himself to lie to, the temptation was too great, and he wolfed down every morsel in the doggie bag, wondering if he’d ever tasted anything so delicious. When he was finished, though, he was as hungry as when he started—and angry. At his father? At himself? How could you tell?

  BY THE TIME he arrived at Angelo’s, his friends had already left. “You just missed them,” Jerry said from behind the counter. “They said to tell you they’d—”

  “Be at Ikey Lubin’s,” Noonan told him. Suddenly the predictability of this, something he usually found comforting, dispirited him. Having been treated to a series of unwelcome surprises at Nell’s, there was something demoralizing about returning to these old routines, and he found himself wanting to skip the next six months and wake up in the middle of whatever and wherever came next. By this time next year all of Thomaston would fit neatly in the small rectangle of a rearview mirror.

  But for now, there was nothing to do but join his friends at Ikey’s. They were seated around the small table where the old geezers had their coffee in the mornings, drinking free sodas, Nan and Lucy arguing about what to name their children, a running gag that had originated in honors back in September when Mr. Berg, immediately recognizing how conventional and conservative both were by nature, had jokingly suggested they get married and start breeding. As the semester wore on he’d continued to treat them as a couple, taking every opportunity to suggest how intellectually and emotionally compatible they were, even speculating, after they’d realized they were soul mates and that their destinies were linked, what their children would be like. It was a laughable notion, and as such easy to embrace. There was something in it for each of them. Nan, who’d been unable, even in jest, to conceal her horror at the idea of one day marrying Lucy Lynch and having his children, discovered that by playing along she could appear less superficial without actually becoming so. Or at least that was Noonan’s take on it. She’d had lots of boyfriends, but never a boy for a friend, which made this a whole new kind of experience. Lucy wasn’t interested in her romantically, now that he had Sarah, and that had been mildly disconcerting to Nan at first, but then she realized this meant she could trust him and be at ease with him. For his part Lucy was proud to be linked in the popular imagination, albeit comically, with the prettiest girl in the school, who not so long ago had struck him mute with terror. And of course Mr. Berg was right. They did have far more in common than either of them knew even now.

  Though Noonan played along, the whole what-will-we-name-our-kids riff made him uncomfortable, perhaps because Sarah’s father’s jokes always trailed an undercurrent of cruelty. He supposed it was good that Lucy had loosened up enough to laugh at himself, at the shy, skittish boy he’d been most of his life, though Noonan was far from certain his friend understood that he and not Nan was the butt of this particular joke. The idea that a girl like Nan would ever give her heart to a boy like Lucy was what made it funny. And their mock arguments over names implied her willingness to have sex with him, something nobody could picture without bursting into laughter. Noonan hated that Lucy mistook this as a sign of his growing popularity. But maybe Noonan was the one who was wrong. Maybe the time was right for his old friend to adopt a new public persona. Kids still called him Lucy, but affectionately now, and many seemed to have forgotten that the original intent had been to hurt his feelings. Possibly Lucy himself had forgotten. Maybe his popularity now, like his father’s, was the just result of his genuine good nature. Sarah, after all, had never given any indication that she shared Noonan’s misgivings or seemed at all embarrassed on his behalf, and Noonan was sure she’d never knowingly condone any joke whose purpose, stated or suggested, was the humiliation of her boyfriend.

  And why did Noonan himself play along? His primary reason, he had to admit, was selfish. When Lucy and Nan pretended to be a couple, it made an actual couple of him and Sarah. Whereas the two of them bickered over babies’ names, he and Sarah would find no shortage of real things to talk about. At Angelo’s, or even at Ikey’s, Noonan and Lucy always sat opposite each other, which meant you couldn’t tell, just by looking, which boy was with which girl. Instead of distinct couples, they became a foursome, easy and relaxed. Back in September, when they first started going places together, they’d configured things differently, and it hadn’t worked out nearly as well. With Lucy at Noonan’s right, Nan at his left, and Sarah across the table, it had been abundantly clear who was with whom, while now the pretense that Nan and Lucy would end up together resulted in a more complex, though unspoken, truth—that the joke couples made as much sense as the real ones. At the end of the evening Nan and Noonan came back together, as did Lucy and Sarah, but only after they’d spent much of the evening enjoying the opposite symmetry. Was Noonan the only one who recognized this? He suspected that Sarah did, too, but of course there was no way of asking.

  At any rate, when he stumbled into this at Ikey’s, his already grumpy mood darkened further. If Sarah hadn’t broken into one of her radiant smiles, he might’ve turned around and left. What he really wanted to do was march over and ask Lucy’s girlfriend if she wanted to go someplace, just the two of them. In fact, the impulse was so strong that he was grateful when Dec Lynch, fresh from the shower and smelling of cheap cologne that confirmed he’d spend Saturday night as usual, prowling the Gut, intercepted him in the entryway.

  “Why don’t you just take this?” he said, handing Noonan his wallet, still obviously sore about the outcome of the game. “Apparently you won’t be satisfied until it’s yours, along with everything in it.”

  “I tried telling you,” Noonan said in his own defense.

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t try hard enough. And do you want to know what really makes me crazy?”

  “No.”

  “What really makes me crazy is I know just as sure as God made little green apples that you’re going to wreck my motorcycle.” Noonan had parked it right in front of the store, behind the Beverly Caddy, and Dec stood there regarding it sadly. “I can see the twisted pile of metal in my mind’s eye just as clear as I see you standing there.”

  “Cheer up,” Noonan said. “Maybe I’ll get killed. Blood on the highway.”

  Hearing this, Nan cried out “Bobbeeee!” aghast to hear him even joke about such a thing.

  “No, he’d just walk away without a scratch,” Dec assured her, as if he considered this yet another dimension of the tragedy. “I can see that, too. I’ll be the only victim, as usual.”

  Despite his facetious tone, Dec’s mood seemed every bit as foul as his own, for reasons that ran deeper than a lost bet. The way he stood there in the entryway suggested to Noonan that he couldn’t decide whether to stay or leave and never come back. The
n Tessa Lynch, who’d been in the back, working in the tiny cubicle they’d recently set up for her there under a bare, hanging lightbulb, came in.

  Dec regarded her for a long beat before turning to her husband. “Biggy,” he said. “I’ve got a question for you.”

  Tessa must have sensed unpleasantness in this innocuous statement, because she said, “Don’t start.”

  “No, really,” Dec went on, still looking at his brother. “Why don’t you close this place up for the night? Take your wife out someplace.”

  “I can’t just close the store when it’s supposed to be open,” Big Lou told him.

  “Why not? You own it.”

  “Close the store just because I feel like it?”

  “But you don’t feel like it,” Dec said. “Don’t tell me you do, because we both know better.”

  Noonan noticed that Lucy and the others had gone quiet. This wasn’t the usual, good-natured Lynch bickering. The lone customer at the register also felt the tension in the air, since after pocketing his change he grabbed his six-pack and was out the door before Big Lou could insist on putting the beer in a paper sack.

  “When was the last time you took Tessa anyplace?” Dec demanded.

  Big Lou shrugged sheepishly. “That ain’t what I’m sayin’—”

  “Dec,” Tessa said, and there was steel in her voice that Noonan would’ve paid attention to.

  Dec did not. “I tell you what,” he continued. “I’ll stay home tonight and sell your beer for you. I can’t afford to go out anyway. You and Tessa go out.”

  It was a genuine offer, Noonan could tell, but Dec’s motive for making it had nothing to do with kindness. Had something happened before he arrived, or was the cause of this dispute more remote? Dec was clearly pissed about something.

  “And where would we go, Murdick’s?” Tessa scoffed.

  “How the hell should I know?” Dec said, still looking at Big Lou. “Go someplace out of town. You know you aren’t going to fall off the end of the earth if you cross the county line, right?”

  “Dec,” Tessa said. “You’re the one who wants to go out tonight. So go.”

  Still refusing to look at her, Dec threw up his hands. “Fine,” he said. “But you know what, Biggy? When it happens, it’s going to serve you right.”

  Noonan heard a chair scrape and saw that Lucy had gotten to his feet, his face beet red. He’d never seen his friend mad before, and now he looked ready to combust.

  “Sit down, Bub,” Dec told him, “before you have one of your famous spells and I get blamed for that, too.”

  When Lucy remained standing, Tessa said, “Could everybody calm down? Nobody’s blaming anybody for anything.”

  “Yeah, right,” Dec said, and let the door slap shut behind him.

  Noonan realized that he himself had remained rooted to the spot, and that everybody was looking at him. “You coming or going?” Tessa said.

  “I’m trying to decide,” he replied, the joke falling flat.

  “Tell me about it,” Tessa snapped, and then, when she saw her son’s face, added, “Oh, quit, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I wonder what all that was about,” Big Lou said, staring out at the sidewalk, as if his brother was still there.

  “It wasn’t about anything,” Tessa told him. “Forget it.”

  Lucy finally sat down, but his expression was still furious. Sarah, Noonan noticed, had taken his hand under the table.

  “I don’t know what I done to him,” Big Lou told Tessa when she joined him at the register. “We been doin’ real good, him and me.”

  “Forget it. He’ll be fine in the morning.”

  “You want to go out someplace?” he said.

  “Not tonight.”

  “We could, sometime,” he said, tenderly if without great enthusiasm. “Get Louie to watch the store—”

  “If you don’t stop talking, I’m going to cry. I mean it.”

  He reached out and took her hand, and then they were quiet.

  That left Noonan and Nan the only people in the store not holding hands, so as soon as he sat down, she promptly took his, visibly relieved that the silly bickering was over. “Help us decide,” she told him happily. “Which is better, Truman or Spencer?”

  NOT LONG after Dec Lynch’s angry departure, the rest of them decided to call it a night. Lucy said he thought he might be coming down with something, but Noonan thought it more likely his uncle’s strange outburst had upset him and that he blamed his mother for it as much as Dec. Tessa had already left, and when she did, Sarah had whispered something to Lucy that Noonan didn’t quite catch, but his friend’s facial muscles relaxed a little. Nan was the only one who seemed disappointed the evening was ending so soon, and when Noonan told her he was feeling tired and beat-up after the game, she’d shaken her head in annoyance at both him and Lucy. What they needed, she explained to Sarah, were new boyfriends. She offered Sarah a lift home, but since that was the opposite direction from the Borough, Sarah said she’d catch a ride with Noonan.

  “It’s pretty cold,” he warned her before she climbed on behind him. In fact, he’d been thinking on the way over to Ikey’s that he’d have to put the bike up soon. After the first snowfall, it would be unsafe. But Sarah said no, it’d be fine.

  They rode in silence, Sarah’s arms linked around his middle. Normally she chattered in his ear the entire time she was on the Indian, but not tonight, and Noonan guessed that what had transpired back at Ikey’s had upset her, too. Maybe, he thought, his spirits rising a bit, she’d want to talk about it. Once, when he’d given her a ride home back in September, she’d invited him in and they’d talked quietly on the enclosed front porch for over an hour. Sarah had confided how afraid she was that her mother was about to remarry for all the wrong reasons, and her father might go off the deep end when she finally became another man’s wife, something he’d always insisted would never happen. These revelations had been so forthright, so trusting and intimate, that Noonan had surprised himself by confessing how strained things were between himself and his father, and how the little pill his mother took every day made her vaguely content but more or less out of it. He even told her that the doctor had warned his father not to get her pregnant again, since she couldn’t possibly survive another birth. He’d known better, of course, than to tell her of his threat to kill him if he ignored that warning.

  He hoped she’d invite him in again tonight, because she was the one person he wanted to tell about what happened earlier at Nell’s. But when they turned into her driveway, the downstairs lights were all ablaze, and Miles Davis was leaking from the stereo inside, and her father must’ve heard the motorcycle, because they saw him leap from his chair in the living room and begin windmilling his arms around like a madman. That would have been funny except that Noonan knew Sarah was worried about the smell of what could only be marijuana that greeted her when she returned home on weekend nights, especially when, as now, she arrived earlier than expected.

  He brought the bike to a shuddering rest, but Sarah made no move to get off. “Is it okay if we just sit a minute?” she said.

  It was, it was. He enjoyed the trusting, unself-conscious way she nestled against him on the bike. It was far more enjoyable, in fact, than the passionate good-night kiss Nan had given him outside of Ikey’s. Nan loved nothing more than to kiss for show, and tonight she’d been particularly anxious for him to understand what he was missing as a result of being such a grump.

  “Do you want me to come in with you?”

  “No,” she said. “Let’s just give him a minute.”

  So they just sat there, facing the shabby little house where Sarah and her father had lived since her mother left. Eventually, it dawned on him that Sarah was quietly crying.

  “Do you think we’re all going to end up like them?” she said, and he immediately knew she was talking not just about her present father and absent mother but also about all of their parents—Lucy’s, his, maybe even Nan’s.

&nb
sp; “That’s up to us, I suppose,” he said.

  Mr. Berg, no longer windmilling, came over to the window and peered outside, perhaps wondering why his daughter hadn’t come in yet. But you could tell he was seeing mostly his own reflection, and after a moment he gave up and returned to his chair.

  “He hates Lou,” Sarah said.

  “Your dad?” Noonan said, genuinely surprised. “Really?” He would’ve liked to turn around and face her, but her arms were still wrapped tightly around him, as if she imagined the bike might take off of its own accord. Did she not want him to see her crying? Or was she afraid if she didn’t keep him facing forward that he’d take her in his arms?

  “What kind of grown man hates a boy?” she said. Noonan wanted to say that Lucy was almost eighteen, not a boy anymore, but she added, “He says Lou’s everything that’s wrong with America.”

  “That’s crazy,” Noonan said. The words were out before he could call them back.

  “He says he’s gullible and a craven conformist,” she said. “And something even worse.”

  “Which is?”

  “An innocent. He says there’s nothing worse than that.” She was clutching Noonan even tighter now. “He wants us to break up.”

  “Will you?” Noonan said, his own heart clenching.

  “Of course not.”

  “Right.”

  “He thinks I should be dating you.”

  Did she want his opinion? He couldn’t tell. He also couldn’t tell whether she viewed the idea as repugnant or simply impossible. “I don’t see how it’s any of his business,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything else for a minute. Finally, she put her forehead between his shoulder blades and said, “I hate him sometimes, Bobby. My own father.”

  “You’re lucky,” he told her. “I hate my father all the time.”

  After a moment she said, “Let’s make a pact, you and I. That after tonight we’ll never say such terrible things again.” Only after he agreed did she give him one last squeeze around the waist and climb off the bike. When he started to follow suit, she put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t,” she said, so he stayed where he was. She wiped the tears away with her sleeve, then surprised him by taking his hand. “What if it isn’t up to us?” she whispered, like a scared child. “What if we’re going to end up like them and there’s nothing we can do about it?”