Bridge of Sighs (71 page)

Since Mr. Berg’s turn as Ahab, Lucy had reluctantly come to share Noonan’s sense of foreboding, and he was particularly concerned when told that Mr. Berg’s novel was finished. “He’s not even revising?” That was one of the things Mr. Berg had been stressing all year. “Writing
is
revision,” he reminded them every time he handed back their essays, each awash in red ink, and he always insisted they make every single correction he’d suggested before moving on to the next assignment.

“Apparently it’s word perfect,” Noonan said. “Dictated by the Holy Ghost.” That, Mr. Berg had told them, was the claim Kerouac had made to his editor when he delivered
On the Road.

According to Sarah, her father submitted the book in early January to a handful of New York publishers—only the best houses of course and their best editors, men already associated with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Ellison—and had immediately commenced racing through the mail every day. By February, upon further reflection, he acknowledged that perhaps his expectations had been unrealistic. The size of the manuscript, the density of its prose, the sheer number of its characters and the complexity of their interconnecting conflicts might
hint
at greatness, but the editors he’d chosen, the busiest and most important men in New York, couldn’t be expected to judge its brilliance until they’d read the whole thing. He’d initially imagined them tearing it out of the box and diving right in, but it now occurred to him that the book might have been routed through the infamous “slush pile” of manuscripts submitted by unknown, unagented writers. From this pile it might take weeks, even months, to emerge. Though he’d been very explicit in his cover letter that the manuscript was intended only for the eyes of the editor to whom it was addressed, it might possibly be read first by a junior editor, and a less experienced and discerning reader might not realize what he held in his hands. Mistakes happened, which was why, the more he thought about it, he came to regret trumpeting the novel’s imminent publication to that dolt of a principal, Watkins. He didn’t doubt the end result, but a delay of any duration guaranteed that Watkins and his colleagues in the English department would constantly inquire, and he’d have to say he was still waiting for a response and then endure their envious, small-minded snickers. Worse, it meant his ex-wife would be permitted to live that much longer in the bliss of her ignorance. He’d hoped she might commence the process of bitter regret in a more timely manner.

The first rejection came on the Ides of March, a form letter stating that the book didn’t suit the publisher’s needs at this time. Since the letter was unsigned, there was no way to tell whether the book had been read by the editor he’d selected or by someone else, though Mr. Berg felt confident it must be the latter. He’d been right! Mistakes of this sort not only happened, they happened to him. Another rejection came later in the month, also an unsigned form letter. This one caused him to suffer yet another doubt. Since he’d sent the manuscript off, an even better ending had occurred to him, so he sat down and composed a letter for all the remaining editors, outlining the new ending and explaining why he thought it might conceivably be an improvement over the old, though of course he’d understand if they were wedded to the original. Was it Hemingway who always said, “First thought, best thought”?

This letter’s only immediate effect was to generate another form rejection. The day after Mr. Berg received it, a note appeared on the honors classroom door, canceling class without explanation and giving everyone a reading day in the library. But at the end of that period Lucy observed him leaving the principal’s office, his face ashen. Had he requested the meeting or been summoned? Had they patched up their disagreement over the Jewish mothers, or was their conflict deepening? Noonan saw Watkins later in the day, and he seemed in excellent spirits. All of this had happened on a Friday. By Monday Mr. Berg was his old self again—manic, sarcastic, mock-confidential, insulting, over the top. But according to Sarah he’d spoken hardly a word all weekend. On Saturday he’d sat on the front porch in the bitter cold, gripping the arms of a wicker chair with white knuckles until the mailman came. He’d taken an envelope into the study and closed the door. Sarah didn’t see him again for the rest of the day.

N
OONAN WAS NOT
in love with Nan Beverly and didn’t see any reason why he should be, though his was a distinctly minority view. Almost all the other boys in the school were openly envious of his good fortune. After all, Nan had been going out with him for over six months, much longer than she’d dated anyone else. They couldn’t understand why either, because he didn’t seem to be working that hard to keep her. He didn’t even buy her presents. And when she flirted with other boys in the hopes of making him jealous, a tactic that had never failed her, he didn’t seem to care, and it was always the would-be rival who ended up slinking off. Lucy wasn’t jealous—he had Sarah, after all—but he did subscribe to the consensus view that his friend had no idea how lucky he was.

“You shouldn’t lead her on,” Sarah told him one day when they were walking home from school and Lucy was home sick with a cold. They’d not been alone much since the night he’d given her a ride on the Indian. It was winter now, too cold for her to paint in his unheated “studio” above the Rexall and too cold for the motorcycle, which meant he couldn’t offer her a lift at the end of their foursome evenings. Unless he was mistaken, she was relieved that there were so few opportunities for them to be alone, as if their conversation that night had been too intimate, that they’d come dangerously close to…what?

“How am I leading her on?” he said. He hadn’t told Nan he loved her, nor even implied it, so far as he remembered. Of course he hadn’t come right out and told her he didn’t, but was he obliged to make such a declaration? Sarah seemed to think so.

“It’s just that she really likes you,” she said.

“Well—”

“And you don’t like her nearly so much.”

“You know this?”

“I do.”

“So…what? You’re saying I should break up with her?”

“No, I’m saying she’s vulnerable. If you were honest with her, she could move on to somebody else.”

“That would leave me without a girlfriend,” he couldn’t help pointing out. And it would also be the end of their comfortable foursome.

“I’m your friend.”

“But you’re Lucy’s girlfriend.”

“So tell Nan you just want to be friends.”

Unfortunately, that simply wasn’t true. Though he wasn’t in love with her, he was still looking forward to the day in the not-too-distant future when she’d give herself to him. She probably would’ve done so already, if he’d pressed. He was tempted to point this out to Sarah and maybe get a little credit for gentlemanly restraint. Anyway, in his view, if Nan was vulnerable to anything it was her own vanity. And if Sarah was also worried about protecting her innocence, she was mistaken there as well. In the time they’d been going out, Nan had become increasingly obsessed with sex, or at least the idea of it. “Do you think they’ve done it yet?” she often asked him of this or that couple. To Noonan these constant speculations were as tiresome as the name-the-kids game she was always playing with Lucy.

In the beginning he thought Nan found sex talk exciting, a kind of verbal foreplay, but he gradually came to suspect that she was deeply anxious and even more deeply conflicted. On the one hand, she didn’t want to have sex before her friends did, but neither did she want them to precede her into that promised land. She’d been among the last to get her driver’s license, which had been embarrassing enough. She refused to visit Noonan’s squalid flat above the Rexall, though on nights when her father let her have the Caddy she liked to drive him out to the old Whitcombe Estate and park in the trees near the entrance. Most nights there’d be two or three other cars in the vicinity, cars they’d sometimes recognize as belonging to friends. At first they’d just necked in the front seat, but lately things had gotten more interesting in the back. Nan now let Noonan put his hands up under her sweater and bra, which was nice, and sometimes they left the car running and the heater on, and she’d take the sweater and bra off, which was nicer still. It was a big backseat, yet Nan wouldn’t recline all the way, claiming that they might be tempted to go too far. He suspected the real reason was that she liked to keep an eye on the other cars. Whenever they’d done as much as they were going to do in the backseat and crawled back into the front, she’d wipe the foggy windshield clear and wonder out loud exactly what people parked nearby were doing. She hated to think it might be more interesting and exciting than necking and groping, but she was also distressed, he could tell, by the possibility that she was the only girl out here with her shirt off and her breasts exposed. What she really would’ve liked was to sneak a peek through those other fogged-up windows, not to actually watch anybody making out, but simply to see if they were ahead or behind her on the passion curve. Nan wanted to be somewhere in the safe middle. Her problem was that the middle, when it came to sex, was hard to locate. Worse, it changed week to week.

Of all the couples she was curious about, none occupied her thoughts more frequently than Lucy and Sarah. “How far do you think they’ve gone?” she asked at least once a week. He told her he had no idea, though in truth he’d wondered the same thing. Lucy, he’d bet, was terrified of sex. Sarah, he imagined, was not. He supposed Lucy’s fear was trump, but who knew?

“They haven’t yet,” Nan told him triumphantly one night in the backseat as she hooked her bra in back and adjusted her breasts in it. Noonan had some painful adjustments of his own to make. “I asked Sarah this afternoon, and she said they hadn’t.”

“There,” he said. “Now you know.”

Then she was visited by an unwelcome thought. “She could be lying.”

“I doubt it,” Noonan said, and it was true; he did. Though wishful thinking might have been part of it.

“Everybody lies sometimes,” Nan said, suddenly serious, her eyes glistening.

Which made Noonan wonder if Sarah was right and Nan
was
vulnerable to something other than her own vanity. It was possible, and he didn’t want to hurt her. He did want to have sex with her, though, and Sarah’s advising him to walk away struck him as monstrously unfair. Okay, it was true. He didn’t love Nan. But he needed a more compelling reason than that. That very compelling reason was Sarah’s to give, but so far she hadn’t, or even hinted at it, and he doubted she ever would. Though when he scrolled back over their recent conversation, one thing did stand out. When she’d said that she was his friend, and Noonan had said, yes, but you’re Lucy’s girlfriend, she hadn’t confirmed that as a fact. She’d just said he should suggest to Nan that they be good friends. Did she expect him to prove himself as good and decent and selfless as her present boyfriend before he could hope to replace him in her affections? He hoped not, because he
wasn’t
that good or decent or selfless. That much should’ve been obvious. After all, he was his father’s son.

T
HERE WAS
no shower or bathtub in his flat above the Rexall, just a commode and a small sink from the days when the whole floor had been rented as office space. Back in the fall the lack of plumbing fixtures hadn’t mattered much because he showered every day after practice. On Saturday or Sunday he went home with a full bag of dirty laundry and used the washer and dryer. He promised his mother that when football season was over she’d see him more often because he’d need to shower there, though when the time came he joined the Y instead. It didn’t cost that much and was only a block away. He also discovered a Laundromat around the corner where one of the dryers, if you knew the trick, worked for free, so he actually went home less, not more. After the first snow he’d put Dec’s Indian up for the winter, and the Borough was just too far away to walk there, or so he told himself. But the real reason he seldom went home anymore was that he couldn’t bear to be around his mother, whose deepening serenity he found very unsettling. At Nell’s, his father reminded him from time to time that she missed him, that it had been a long time since he’d been to see her, and he always promised to visit, his father’s wry smile suggesting every time that he knew he wouldn’t.

But in late March his brother David found him at Ikey Lubin’s and said that his mother wanted to see him, that she couldn’t understand why he’d stayed away so long, that she had something she needed to talk to him about. He’d promised to stop by on Saturday afternoon, and because he’d said this in front of the Lynches, he actually did, lugging along a big bag of dirty clothes. It was supposed to snow like hell that night, the last big storm of the winter, so it would be good to get that job over with. He could find out what his mother wanted, assuming she still remembered, while his clothes were tumbling. Once there, though, he decided he couldn’t face her yet and went directly into the laundry room and got a giant load going in the washer, then climbed up on the dryer, crossed his legs and read Ralph Ellison, whom they’d be discussing in honors the following week. He’d just transferred his stuff into the dryer when the door opened and there she stood.