Bridge of Sighs

  “It’s not fair,” Nan said. “Why should they be last?”

  Noonan agreed it wasn’t fair.

  “No, I mean it,” Nan insisted.

  “So do I.”

  “Somebody should do something.”

  “Somebody should.”

  “But nobody ever does,” she said sadly, her gaze turning inward. “We all stood and watched Perry beat up that Mock boy. Nobody did anything.”

  “I wasn’t there,” he reminded her, not trying to absolve himself, just putting this on the record.

  “You’d have stopped it,” she said. “I know you.”

  Noonan was grateful for her good opinion but doubted it was justified. True, he wouldn’t have wanted to see Three Mock beaten, but if he’d stepped in it would’ve been for the pleasure of seeing Perry’s fat nose gush bright red blood. Not the best of reasons. All in all, he was just as glad he hadn’t been there.

  Next, having decided she was with someone who could protect her, Nan announced she wanted to go to Murdick’s, a place she’d been hearing about all her life.

  “I don’t think you’d like it,” he said. “Especially on a Saturday night.”

  But she insisted, and it was only a couple of blocks away. The street looked like it had been plowed earlier in the evening, though another foot of new snow, or close to it, had fallen in the meantime. Snow-covered cars were parked crazily everywhere, front and rear ends sticking out into the street as if the drivers had all been drunk when they arrived, which many of them probably were. Inside, music was throbbing, and a woman shrieked with what Noonan hoped was hilarity. “Let’s go in,” Nan told him.

  “You don’t want to do that.”

  “It sounds like they’re having fun.”

  “Your father wouldn’t like you being here.”

  This, of course, was the wrong thing to say.

  “If you don’t take me, then I’ll go by myself.”

  But at that moment the front door swung open, and Dec Lynch emerged, unzipping as he did. He looked half in the bag and didn’t notice them a few feet off. Arcing his stream over the railing, he tilted his head back, nearly losing his balance, so he could catch falling snowflakes on his tongue, his urine hissing in the snow.

  When he’d finished and zipped up, Noonan said, “Hi, Dec.”

  He swiveled, locating Noonan by sound. “Bobby,” he said, offering his hand. Noonan, not that fastidious, shook it. “You better not be riding my bike around in this weather.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Good. Don’t.” Then he noticed Nan. “Hey there, Cupcake,” he said, having apparently forgotten completely that a moment before he’d been standing there with his dick in his hand. “You stopped crying, I see. You coming in?”

  “No,” Nan said, tugging urgently on Noonan’s sleeve.

  BACK DOWNTOWN, Nan had made up her mind. “I want to,” she said. “Tonight.”

  “It’s cold as hell up there,” Noonan said. They were again in front of the Rexall, and he was hoping she’d forgotten the place wasn’t heated. “It’s worse than cold. It’s ugly. I only have a sleeping bag.” Also, I’m in love with your friend Sarah, my own best friend’s girlfriend. I kissed her earlier tonight and can still taste her lips on my tongue.

  “That’s okay,” she said.

  “That’s what you say now.”

  “I want to,” she said.

  He saw her wrinkle her nose at the stale urine smell in the dark entryway, and halfway up the steep, narrow stairs she hesitated, clearly frightened. Maybe, he told her, this wasn’t such a great idea. No, she was sure. She said this grimly, as if she meant to learn about all of life’s tawdry ugliness, including sex, in this one night, so she could be done with it.

  Over the months Noonan had learned not to pay any attention to his place, but now he couldn’t help seeing it through Nan’s frightened eyes. It was huge, like an airplane hangar, and everything was exposed—insulation, pipes, crumbling brick walls. The ceiling had tiles missing, where you could see the crawl space above. Dec’s motorcycle sat by the far wall, resting on its kickstand. Back in November he’d needed Lucy’s and Perry Kozlowski’s help to wrestle it up here, and since then it had been leaking oil onto an old bath mat. In the center of the room sat a ratty sofa, bowed in the middle, and an old footlocker serving the dual purpose of coffee table and clothes bin. Beyond this his unrolled sleeping bag lay on its thin strip of foam padding.

  But the most embarrassing detail was the commode, in full sight only a few feet away, and next to it a small, permanently stained sink in the process of detaching itself from the wall. When the toilet flushed, the sink jumped and banged as if someone was out in the hallway pulling on it with all his might. At least Nan wouldn’t be witnessing that. Noonan couldn’t imagine a circumstance extreme enough for either of them to make use of the commode tonight. Truth be told, he himself used it only the last thing at night, with the lights out, before sliding into the sleeping bag.

  “Oh, Bobby,” was all she could say, and he could tell she was more deeply affected by where he was living than anything else she’d witnessed on their tour of the West End.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You get used to it. And it won’t be so bad when the weather warms up,” he added when he saw her shiver, whether from the cold or moral revulsion he couldn’t tell. For some reason her revulsion, if that’s what it was, made him proud. Deeply embarrassed, sure, but mostly proud.

  Then Nan saw the easel set up by the tall rear windows that overlooked the alley below. She knew that Sarah had used part of the cavernous space as a studio back in the fall, but Noonan could see that the whole arrangement seemed more intimate now. She’d imagined interior walls, and there weren’t any, nothing separating the part Sarah used from the part he used. You could still smell her turpentine and linseed oil, which he’d discovered he liked, and her brushes all stood at attention in jars.

  He later would wonder if it was Sarah’s residual presence there that kept Nan from backing out. For the longest time she quietly studied the evidence, of what, she couldn’t quite imagine. Finally, she took a deep breath, turned to Noonan, put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  Unlike the earlier kiss, he paid attention to this one, which was nothing like the kisses Nan offered when she knew other people were watching. Those were dramatic, cinema inspired, moist and fully adult, whereas this was dry and frightened and full of the little girl Nan hadn’t been in a long while. And what exactly did it mean, he wondered, to prefer a kiss you couldn’t remember to one you could?

  Nan must have felt his hesitation, because she said, “Bobby? Don’t you want to?”

  The answer to that was yes and no. He said only yes.

  SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN she woke him, struggling frantically in the sleeping bag and crying, “Let me out! Let me out!” He told her to quit thrashing, but she was beside herself, and he finally had to pin her arms at her sides. “Calm down. Let me unzip us.”

  Though wild eyed and uncomprehending, she finally quit struggling. “Hurry,” she whimpered as he worked to unsnag the zipper.

  “You’re okay,” he assured her, knowing she wasn’t. When he finally freed the zipper’s metal teeth from the cloth, she became frenzied again and elbowed him in the mouth getting out of the bag. She made it to the toilet just in time, and she looked so pitiful heaving into the bowl that Noonan found he couldn’t watch, so he busied himself by rummaging through his footlocker for a washcloth. By the time he found one and wet it in the sink, the worst was over.

  “I want to go home,” she said, her voice sounding hollow in the bowl. He put the moist towel in her hand, and she used it to wipe her mouth. “Don’t watch,” she told him. “Go back over there.”

  He did as instructed while she got shakily to her feet and flushed the toilet, the sink jumping and banging against the wall as if possessed. When it finally stopped Nan again said, “I want to go home.”

  The green face of the alarm clock read 5:
17. “It’ll be light in another hour,” he told her.

  “I want to go home now.” She’d grabbed her elbows and was shivering in the cold, a frightened child. This, Noonan thought, was what Sarah had foreseen and tried to prevent. “Please, Bobby…I hate it here. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

  He was about to say You did, then thought better of it. Sex was only part of what she couldn’t do, which also included his squalid flat, Murdick’s, the Hill and he himself. She’d vomited all that, along with Larry’s gravy-drenched fries. Last night, the West End had served her vengeful purpose as a means of getting back at her family, but in this black hour before dawn her courage had failed her utterly. Instead of teaching her parents a lesson, she’d taught herself one, and now she wanted that old world back, her own pink bedroom in her own Borough house, even her own angry, bitter mother.

  “Where are my clothes?” she said, bewildered, even more childlike.

  They were in a pile at her feet, but when Noonan stepped toward her to pick them up, she hissed “Stay away!” and put one hand over the pale patch of her pubic hair.

  “Okay,” he said, taking a quick step back. “Okay.”

  “You get dressed, too.”

  He was as naked as she was, of course, and it occurred to him that when they’d made love she hadn’t actually seen him. Her expression now was identical to the one she had last evening when Larry, in his threadbare gravy-stained T-shirt, had joined them in their booth. It would’ve been funny if she weren’t so truly frightened.

  “Turn around, okay?” she said. She was holding her panties out in front of her, prepared to step in but unable to do so until his back was turned, as if covering herself would somehow make her more naked instead of less. “Don’t watch.”

  Noonan did as he was told, dressed quickly, then waited for her to finish. When he figured she must be done, he turned around and discovered she wasn’t. She was standing there in her bra, about to pull her sweater over her head, which she again refused to do until he turned around.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, crossing the room to the sink and flipping on the light switch.

  “Turn it off!” she snapped, though she was fully clothed now.

  He did, but not before glimpsing his bottom lip in the cracked mirror. Her elbow had burst it like a grape, and there was blood on his chin and around his mouth. “Look what you did,” he told her, hoping she’d see the humor in the situation or, failing that, at least acknowledge that he, not she, was actually the injured party.

  “Take me home” was all she said.

  WHEN THEY EMERGED into the street below there was light in the east. Noonan couldn’t believe how much it had snowed. Two feet had been predicted, but this looked closer to three. The parking meters had completely disappeared under snowbanks the plows had pushed up. A car wearing a tall snow hat was idling across the street in front of the theater, and he didn’t recognize it until the horn tooted.

  “That’s my father,” he told Nan, but if she heard him she gave no sign, standing, frozen, in the doorway. Upstairs, all she’d wanted to do was get home, but now, confronted by all this, she looked like she meant to just stand there until the snow melted. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

  His father rolled down the window and watched knowingly as he scrambled over the enormous snowbank.

  “What are you doing here, Dad?” he said, leaning against the car.

  His father flicked his cigarette into the snow and peered around him at Nan, who hadn’t moved. Only her head was visible above the snow. “Waiting for you to come down. Would you have preferred I come up?”

  “No,” he conceded.

  “I was going to give you about five more minutes. What happened to your lip?”

  “An accident.”

  “What’s the matter with her?”

  “Nothing. None of your business.”

  “That what you plan to tell her father?”

  “She had a fight with her parents last night, so she stayed with me.”

  “And?”

  “And now she wants to go home.” Suddenly, an intuition. “Did her father call you?”

  “Me and everybody. He wanted to know where you lived, but I thought it might be better if I came here first.”

  “Thanks,” Noonan said, meaning it.

  “He gave me an hour to find you. If his daughter isn’t back in”—he consulted his watch—“fifteen minutes, he’s calling the cops.”

  By the time Noonan returned to the doorway, Nan was crying again. “Put your arms around my neck,” he told her.

  “I don’t want to,” she said. “I don’t love you anymore.”

  “I’m going to carry you over the snowbank, is all. Then I’m taking you home. Your father’s getting ready to call the cops.”

  “Poor Daddy,” she said, snuffing her nose. “Everybody’s going to know what we did.”

  “Nan, listen to me. We got trapped by the storm. There was no phone. That’s all anybody needs to know.” Across the street, his father got out of the car and stood watching them. “We need to go, Nan,” he said. “Try to forget last night. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “We shouldn’t have done it.”

  “But we did.”

  “What a horrible thing to say.”

  “Nan.”

  “You don’t even like me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It’s Sarah you really like, I can tell.”

  “We need to go now.”

  “I don’t know why I ever liked you. All my other boyfriends were nicer to me than you. They’re all still in love with me, too.”

  “I’m going to pick you up now, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  When he did, she linked her arms around his neck. “What if I have a baby?”

  “You won’t.”

  “What if I already am?”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say What if you’re already a baby? but he didn’t. “You’re not pregnant, Nan.”

  When they got to the car, his father handed him the keys and opened the door for Nan, who just stood there, confused, as if he expected her to drive.

  “Slide across,” Noonan told her, suddenly very impatient. She hadn’t even acknowledged his father’s existence.

  “Easy,” his father said.

  Noonan ignored this. “Where will you be?”

  “At the diner,” his father said. The lights, Noonan noticed, had just come on down the block, and Larry was once again moving around behind the counter. “You hungry?”

  Noonan decided to tell the truth for once. “Yeah,” he said, looking at him.

  He smiled. “If her old man doesn’t shoot you, I’ll buy breakfast.”

  SINCE THIRD WAS one of the few East End streets that had been plowed, Noonan took it, even though it meant passing by Ikey Lubin’s. He was not anxious to run into any of the Lynches, who would put two and two together if they saw him with Nan at this hour of the morning. It was about the time Ikey’s opened for business, and sure enough, Big Lou Lynch was lumbering across the intersection.

  “Just keep going,” Nan said, purposely looking off in the other direction.

  He considered this. The man was probably half asleep and wouldn’t recognize the car anyway. Then again…He slowed, rolling down his window. “Hi, Mr. Lynch,” he said.

  Lucy’s father broke into one of his big, goofy smiles. Then he saw who it was, and the smile disappeared, which meant the Lynches had also gotten a middle-of-the-night phone call. Big Lou peered across at Nan, then back at him, clearly wounded that she hadn’t said hello.

  Noonan could tell he was wondering if this meant she wouldn’t be coming to Ikey’s anymore. “I’m taking Nan home,” he said. “But I’ll swing by on the way back and help you dig out.”

  “We can manage okay, I guess,” Mr. Lynch said, still regarding Nan fearfully.

  “It’ll be an all-day job,” Noonan told him. They’d have to shovel not only the sidewalk in fro
nt of the store, but paths out through the snowbanks and the parking lot. “Another shovel will make it go a lot quicker.”

  “What about your own house? Won’t your mom—”

  “My brothers will take care of that.”

  “Bobby,” Nan said. She was crying again.

  “Okay, then,” Mr. Lynch said, stepping back. “I guess we could use you.”

  “He knew,” Nan said as soon as the window was rolled up.

  “Knew what?”

  “What we did.”

  “Nan,” he said, “it was just sex. You were the one who wanted to.”

  “We’re supposed to be married first.”

  “Well, we weren’t. I’m sorry.”

  “My husband’s going to know,” she said, crying harder now.

  Noonan had no idea what to say to that, but it was a relief to know that whatever future she was imagining didn’t include him.

  THE SKY WAS LIGHT by the time they arrived at Nan’s. All of the Borough streets, even the little ones, had been plowed, and there were half a dozen pickups with snow-blade attachments opening up driveways. The Beverlys’ elbow-shaped drive was already plowed, so he pulled right up to the house. Mrs. Beverly, wearing an overcoat, was standing like a statue between the inner and outer doors. Seeing her there, Nan opened her door and stepped out before the car had come to a complete stop. It was so slippery that she almost fell, but then she found her balance. “Wait,” he said, taking his key out of the ignition, though she was already running to her mother, who pulled her inside and quickly closed the door, as if the air outside were not just cold but poisonous.

  That left Noonan sitting by himself in the drive, wondering whether duty dictated that he follow and knock on that emphatically closed door or be grateful for the clean getaway that apparently was his for the taking. Before he could decide, he saw Mr. Beverly in the rearview mirror coming toward him from the general direction of the garage, its door wide open. Noonan got out to meet him, maybe even offer to shake hands, and struggled to get his footing on a mound of packed snow, still holding on to the handle. Instead of waiting for him to come around the vehicle onto a level surface, Mr. Beverly, his face twitching with anger and fatigue, not to mention, Noonan supposed, a nonstop litany of wifely abuse, came up to him on the bank of snow beside the car. Mr. Beverly was several inches taller and had an athletic build, though according to Nan the only sport he managed gracefully was water-skiing. Staring at Noonan’s busted lip, he said, “Did you strike my daughter?” as if the visual evidence suggested this was the only valid conclusion to be drawn.