Crossing the Bridge (10 page)

We talked about what she did when she wasn’t working and she mentioned that the café where I’d stopped during the afternoon was one of her favorite places to go for lunch. She also told me that she spent a lot of time in Paperworks and that the greeting card
artist I’d noticed lived down the street from the house she rented.

“Do you think there is anyone in Amber who considers my father’s store to be one of their favorite places to hang out?” I asked rhetorically.

“Your father’s store has a different function. He provides a service and the community appreciates it. Where the hell else would I have gotten my protractors when I was growing up?”

“You probably only came into the store because you were hoping to get a chance to talk to Chase.”

Iris chuckled, but didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she smiled and said, “That’s only because his cute older brother was always hanging out in the back room.”

I smiled, though I knew that none of what she said was true. If anything, I spent more time behind the cash register than Chase because he would get too distracted talking to customers, and there was no chance that Iris would ever have come into the store looking for Chase’s “cute older brother.” Like every other female of a certain age, Iris thought of Chase as The Boy.

When our meal was over, I asked Iris if she wanted to stop by the coffee bar a few storefronts down.

“I’m okay with it if you are,” she said. “I’m not the one who has to drive for a couple of hours.”

While my day in Lenox had been a pleasant diversion and while I was cheered that there wasn’t any lingering awkwardness from the last conversation we’d had, this encounter was feeling too much like an interlude to me: friend stops in from out of town and you go out for a quick dinner together to catch
up. I hadn’t driven to the Berkshires with any agenda in mind. In fact, I hadn’t even started driving that morning with the intention of going to the Berkshires. But now that I had seen Iris, I needed to know what we were currently doing.

I got us both coffee and we sat down. She took the lid off her coffee, allowing steam to waft up around her chin.

“Always ridiculously hot,” she said.

I looked down at my cup, but kept the lid on it. “Listen, I have to admit that I understood only about every third word of what you were saying that last time I saw you.”

She held the cup to her lips and her eyes shifted focus for a moment. I’m sure she would have been much happier if we had simply pretended that the kiss and the subsequent discussion about it had never happened. She took a small sip and recoiled from the temperature.

“Way too hot,” she said and put the cup back down. “You really didn’t understand what I was saying?”

“I got the message. I just didn’t get the meaning behind the message.”

“It’s not that deep a message, Hugh. Our history is just a little too complicated.”

“I understand that. But, you know, we always had a good time talking and it seems that we’ve had a really good time talking lately.”

“That only makes it more complicated.”

I held up my hands. “I’m not looking for it to be complicated. I just want to clarify something: when you were saying ‘hey, maybe we can get together
every now and then,’ were you defining that as once every four years or so?”

“We’re friends, Hugh. I don’t think about parameters.”

“And neither do I, usually. But to be honest with you, for as long as I’m stuck with this thing with my father’s store, you might be the only real friend I have for hundreds of miles. I just wanted to make sure that we could do this again in the relatively near future.”

She laughed. “I’ll be happy to come out and play whenever I can. And you know, I’ll be down to see my mother every month or so and we’ll set things up then, too. If you remember, the last time we spoke, you were heading for New Mexico.”

“I’m still heading for New Mexico. Just very slowly.”

“That might make these casual get-togethers a little tougher.” She reached out for my hand, squeezed it, and then put hers back on her coffee cup. “But until then, stop by whenever you’re ‘in the neighborhood. ’”

I nodded and burned my tongue on the coffee. This wasn’t what I wanted to talk about or even how I wanted to talk about it.

But it was something.

I’d been in school during my junior year for a little more than a month when Chase and Iris showed up unexpectedly at my apartment door. After two years living on campus, I’d moved to a creaky one bedroom about a fifteen minute walk from the school. I’d had a difficult time with my roommate the previous semester and decided I really wanted to live by myself. At the same time, I didn’t want to live alone, so I moved into a building that housed six other people I knew from Emerson. To me it was a nearly perfect arrangement: I got to have things exactly the way I wanted them in my living space while also having people to go to classes with, drink with, and crawl home much too late with.

Though one wall of the living room had flaking paint and the refrigerator considered its function to be optional, I loved the place. I bragged about it endlessly during my phone conversations with Chase and, for one of the few times in our lives, he actually seemed jealous. He kept telling me that he was going to come up to visit – something he had only done once the two previous years I was away – and I told
him that he was always welcome, never expecting him to take me up on it.

I certainly didn’t expect him to arrive at 11:00 on a Thursday night without calling ahead first. He stood in the doorway grinning, as though he had just performed some huge trick. I looked over at Iris and she simply waved.

After hugging Chase, I told him that he was lucky I was home, that I might have been out at a party, leaving them sitting outside the door for hours. He reminded me that he knew that I always spent Thursday nights alone studying because only then would I be comfortable playing all weekend. I’d had that studying habit since I was ten. I had, in fact, been reading an essay by Camus when he knocked on the door. I then reminded him that he was supposed to be at school the next day and he told me that it was a half day and that as a senior he was morally obligated to take those off. My parents would of course accept this kind of thing, though I wondered if they knew that Iris was with Chase. I had no idea what Iris had told her parents and thought it wouldn’t be cool to ask.

While I had seven more pages of the Camus to read and Chase promised to be quiet, I decided I could finish my work Sunday night. We went to a bar a few blocks from the school and screamed conversation at one another while Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and other Seattle imports played in the foreground. Chase was much more enamored of this angst-riddled music than I was. I simply liked how the songs went from a whimper to a bang without notice and how there was a discernable melody even at the highest decibel
levels. After a while, we let the music and the beer take over, assuming that we would have plenty of time to talk the next day when I finished my only Friday class. Chase and Iris held hands and occasionally said something into the other’s ear, but they seemed content simply to live in that moment. This was yet another sign that Chase had found something with Iris. When I’d been with him on dates previously, he’d always been doing something, always keeping the conversation rolling, and always moving the evening along.

When we left the bar, Chase announced that he was ravenous for something with local flavor, insisting we find some Boston baked beans. When I told him that I had no idea how to find these other than in a supermarket and that I wasn’t sure that this version of baked beans even came from Boston, he decided instead that he wanted tea. I assumed this was a reference to the Boston Tea Party and didn’t bother to ask for an explanation. I tried to convince him that he might want to try other Boston specialties, suggesting a trip over to Little Italy, but he’d decided that he wouldn’t be able to get to bed that night without some real Boston tea. I took him to the nearest diner.

I let Chase and Iris sleep in my bed while I spent the night on the couch. I was nearly asleep when the sounds of their lovemaking came through the door. This was not the first time I had been in the next room while someone else was having sex, but this was markedly different. My roommate the previous year had taken several women back to his room, filling the air with rhythmic pounding and exclamation
and the concussion of bodies flipping athletically. But the sounds that Chase and Iris made were more serene and exponentially more erotic. Iris’ subtle hum of satisfaction, the whisper of a hand moving softly underneath the sheets, a warm chuckle, an intake of breath, the quiet reverence in Chase’s voice the few times he spoke. I found it a little disturbing to be listening to my brother this way (and I truly had little choice) but I also found it somewhat satisfying. I was glad that the two of them had this sexual connection together and I appreciated anew the effect that Iris had on Chase. I think they were still making love when I fell asleep.

The next morning, Chase walked into the living room in his boxer shorts, waking me up as he continued into the kitchen. He rummaged around for a minute and then came back to tell me that I had nothing to eat for breakfast. He walked back into my bedroom and came out fully dressed, telling me that he was going out to “forage.”

As soon as he closed the door to the apartment, I heard the shower go on. A few minutes later, Iris came into the living room with a towel wrapped around her head and wearing the Emerson sweatshirt I’d bought Chase for his last birthday.

“It was really nice of you to let us sleep in your bed last night,” she said, sitting down in a chair.

“I don’t think the two of you would have been very comfortable on the couch. I guess I never thought much about having guests over.”

“Well it was really nice of you anyway.” She smiled and looked around the room.

I’d gotten out from under the sheets, had put my
pants on, and had been folding a blanket when she walked in. Now I sat back on the couch and watched her glancing around. I couldn’t help but think about the sounds she had made while she was making love to my brother the night before. That soft hum was a slightly lower register than her speaking voice and it spoke of feeling something on a deep level. I’d never heard a woman make that sound before and I wondered if it was something distinctive to Iris or if it was something my brother regularly generated from his partners.

Iris’ eyes continued to scan the room and I continued to look at her. I had of course realized that she was beautiful the very first time I saw her (even though at that point I thought she was beautiful and insane), but this was the first time that I realized how sexy she was. Almost certainly, it had much to do with what I had heard the night before, but it also had to do with how she looked just out of a shower. The towel didn’t capture all of the strands of her hair and a few tickled her neck. The sweatshirt was considerably too large for her and led me to think about the lithe body that it covered. I stopped myself from continuing this line of thought. In the past, it had been fine for me to appraise my brother’s girlfriends in this way because I had known they wouldn’t be his girlfriends for very long. But things were different with Iris and I had to consider her in a different way.

Iris rose and picked up the book I’d been reading the night before.

“I don’t get Camus,” she said.

“I didn’t get him in high school, either. I tried
reading
The Fall
in my sophomore year and it gave me a headache.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“But my philosophy professor this year has really helped me to connect with him. I’m kinda becoming a closet existentialist.”

She smiled. “Your secret’s safe with me. I don’t think I could ever be an existentialist, though. I prefer to have a little more meaning with my world-views.”

I promise you that a sentence like that had never come from the mouth of any of my brother’s other girlfriends.

“Well the last great philosopher I embraced was Bullwinkle, so I’m likely to move on again.”

She laughed and said, “When Chase and I first started dating he tried to convince me that he was a Marxist. I tried to explain to him that he really didn’t sound like a Marxist at all. Then he told me he was talking about Harpo Marx.”

“And he is a strict Harpo Marxist.”

“Yeah, I guess he is.”

A few minutes later, Chase returned with a bag of doughnuts and took over the room again. I left for my class around 10:00, but they stayed until after dinner. We talked about many things, mostly inconsequential. At various times during the day, though, completely unbidden, I would remember hearing them together the night before. And for at least a moment, I would have to look away.

I went into the store the next day feeling good. Iris had confirmed her interest in my staying in touch before we parted, the Phish double-CD bootleg had propelled my drive home from Lenox, and I even found Tyler’s greeting of “Morning, Captain” when I arrived cheering.