Crossing the Bridge (16 page)

“Anyway,” he said, looking back at me, “this went on until the early evening. I’d been planning on hanging around until everyone left, but when it became
clear that my Uncle Richie wasn’t going until all of the food and all of the scotch was gone, I decided to make my exit. That’s when things got a little crazy. I hooked up with a bunch of other people who graduated with me and we went to Blum’s. You ever been there?”

I shook my head.

“It’s right on the water and they have this back porch on the dock. The guy who owns the place is the father of one of the guys I graduated with. He closed off the porch for us and gave us total access to the bar for as long as we wanted. Once the restaurant closed, the music got extremely loud, the drinks came a lot faster, and the rest was kind of a blur. There was something that went on with whipped cream and I had this really profound walk down the beach with this woman I’ve been trying to talk to since my sophomore year. I think she’s leaving for Seattle this afternoon, but at least I got to talk to her. Mr. Blum paid his staff to stick around and drive everyone home and I think I crawled into bed around a quarter to seven. I remembered to set my alarm, though.”

“Which wins you Employee of the Month for the sixth time in a row.”

“Nah, give it to Tab.” He nodded toward the stationery aisle, where she was piling the notebooks on the floor one at a time.

“So now it’s back on the interview trail?”

“I’m going into the City on Friday. I have some stuff lined up and I’m hoping to get a few more things going before then.”

“What’s the market like right now?”

“Hey, when you’re a summa cum laude graduate from MCS, you can write your own ticket,” he said, smiling. “It’s okay. Nobody’s getting their doors beaten down – even the people who graduated from Yale yesterday. It might take me a little time to find something good, but I’ll find something.”

“I’m sure you will.” There was no question in my mind that someone would respond to Tyler’s passion and determination and give him a decent entry-level position. Tyler would be pleased and consider himself fortunate, but it would be the employer who received the big break.

“Hey, I got you something,” I said, reaching under the counter and pulling out a box. Though I seriously wasn’t expecting Tyler to be in the store, I also knew that there was the very real possibility he’d show up, since he hadn’t asked for the time off. I handed him the package.

“Hey, you didn’t have to do that,” he said.

“It isn’t a car or anything. By the way, my mother and father wanted me to tell you that they’re getting you something, too, but that they still haven’t found the right thing.”

“That’s really nice of them.” Tyler tore at the wrapping. Inside was a box of four CDs I’d recorded for him of live performances from many of the bands we’d talked about when we’d gone out for drinks.

“Wow, this is incredible,” he said.

“I’ve been doing a lot of downloading, ripping, and burning since our night at the Cornwall.”

“A seventeen-minute version of ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy? ’”

“I hadn’t even heard that one myself until I searched for some vintage Traffic.”

“This is really good stuff. I can’t wait to listen to some of it in my car during my lunch break.”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll sneak off with you then. I’d let you put it on through the store’s system, but I’m pretty sure my father has attack dogs at the ready in case we try to change his station.”

Since she moved to the other side of Amber about twenty years ago, my mother’s younger sister Rita has held a Memorial Day party. As the two oldest cousins on this side of the family, Chase and I would get the other kids to do all kinds of precarious and sometimes dangerous things involving rowboat oars, bug zappers, and, as we got older, purloined cans of beer and bottles of rum. As May dawned, we would begin to strategize that year’s stunt, even planning escape routes if things went badly. I hadn’t been to one of these gatherings since Chase died and I hadn’t intended to go this year, either. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good enough excuse for staying away and my mother was surprisingly insistent.

Before moving to Amber, my Aunt Rita was a First Wave corporate executive at a public relations firm in Manhattan. By the time she was thirty, she’d used a combination of talent, guile, and utter determination to earn a partnership. The same year, her husband, an even more avid corporate climber than she, received a senior vice president’s position at a Hartford
insurance company. From what I hear (since I understood virtually none of this at the time), a rather tense standoff ensued. Uncle Chad saw this offer as one he couldn’t refuse while Aunt Rita considered it a violation of their pact to think that she would give up her career for his. In the end, Aunt Rita’s cleverness prevented their marriage from being an innocent victim in this war of ambitions. She found a way to retain her partnership while handling most of her duties from her spectacular new home office in her spectacular new home with three acres on the water in Amber, Connecticut, less than ten minutes from her beloved sister Anna. As time went by, Chad ultimately became president of that insurance company and Rita found that she could make as much money with far fewer hassles by striking out on her own. These days she doesn’t work nearly as hard as she once did, but she “keeps her hand in the business” and still handles some high-powered clients.

All of which is reflected in Chad and Rita’s living space. The three-car garage (one for the roadster, none for the kids who had moved on to careers of their own), hand-carved dining table that expanded to seat eighteen, and professional kitchen were nearly obligatory. But the freeform, oxygen-filtered swimming pool, the multilevel fieldstone patio, and the hydroponic garden were all nice touches. They’d put in all of these since the last time I’d walked the grounds, and I examined each with a mixture of admiration and consternation as the party got underway.

It had been considerably less difficult to get my father out of the house for this event than I’d expected. With the exception of doctor’s visits, he hadn’t been
in the car since coming home from the hospital. He made a huge display of getting dressed. He sent my mother up the stairs four times for different shirts and it took him an absurd amount of time to descend the three stairs on the house’s front stoop. But he was otherwise compliant.

Only when we got to my aunt and uncle’s house did I realize why he had agreed to come along. Chad’s brother, Thomas, had suffered a heart attack a couple of years earlier. After perfunctory conversation with a few of the other guests, my father and Thomas settled into chaise lounges on the patio for the rest of the day, trading coronary stories like war veterans. It was hard to believe that they had that much to say (and several times I looked over to find both of them glancing off at the party silently) and it was even harder to believe that my father had been storing these observations until he could commiserate with one of his fellows. He’d said more in those hours than he’d said since returning from the hospital.

My mother was Rita’s only sibling. In addition to Thomas, though, Chad had three other brothers – Marlon, Henry, and Preston – all of whom had children at various ages in proximity to mine. Since Rita and Chad held regular family functions while I was growing up, these children became unofficial “cousins” with whom Chase and I would entertain ourselves. A few even became friends, though I’d done little more than exchange e-mail with any of them in the last ten years.

I was standing by myself over near the garden when Liz walked up to me. She was Preston’s oldest child, around four years younger than me. I
remember when I was sixteen and she was twelve, she followed me all over the house during Aunt Rita’s Christmas party. I found this – and her – terribly annoying. When I was twenty and she was sixteen, however, I no longer found her annoying and in fact considered her polished, intriguing, and sexy. Sadly, she was toting around a boyfriend who was a freshman at Amherst. We hadn’t seen each other at all since Chase’s funeral.

“There was a rumor that you were going to be here,” she said as she approached.

“Rumor? Don’t you mean warning?”

“Oh yes, that must have been it.” She kissed me on the cheek and held my hand for a minute, smiling.

“You look great,” I said. “What have you been up to?”

“A few things,” she said, still smiling. “You know, things. You look good, too. More rugged or something.”

“Thanks. So what have you been doing? You’re allowed to tell me, aren’t you? It doesn’t involve the CIA or anything like that, does it?”

Liz laughed. “Hardly. I’m not the high adventure type. Just a bunch of stuff. I’m living in Boston now, doing arbitrage work. The usual MBA thing. Sixty hours a week, dating people from the office because they’re the only guys I ever get to meet, share in a summer place on Cape Cod, the usual.”

“You like it?”

Liz laughed again and brushed her straight black hair away from her face. “Yeah, I really do. I mean, there are days, you know? And of course, they don’t pay me nearly as much as I think they should pay me
and my bonuses aren’t nearly as high as I think they should be. But it’s exciting. And my boss is a genius. And I’m learning something every day. And I’m on a partnership track, so that’s pretty good, too.”

I nodded. Somewhere along the line, someone had directed Liz to loosen up a little and it served her well. Where she was once more dignified than any teenager should be, she seemed to be living in the world now.

“So what have you been up to?” she said. “Where are you living?”

“At the moment, if you can believe it, I’m living here in Amber with my parents. But it is a very temporary thing.”

“I heard that your dad was sick. Are you helping to take care of him?”

“He doesn’t need nearly as much care as he seems to think he needs.” I looked across to the patio where he and Thomas were once again telling tales to each other. “I actually got steamrollered into taking care of his stationery store while it’s on the market. You don’t happen to know a buyer, do you?”

“Sorry. That’s really nice of you. How can you afford to take the time off work? I’d never be able to do something like that.”

“I just finished up a thing in Springfield, so I was actually available.”

“‘Finished up a thing?’ You mean like an independent contractor thing?”

“No, like a job I hated thing.”

She nodded her head slowly. I wasn’t sure whether this meant that she sympathized or that she was having trouble processing the information.

“You were planning to work in the media, weren’t you?” she asked.

“That was a long time ago. I’ve since found that there are all kinds of things you can do with three-quarters of a communications degree.”

“You never finished college?”

“Some things came up. So do you have a town-house in Back Bay?”

“High-rise. The only way I can get myself to the gym is if it’s in my building. And with the hours I work, I kind of like having a doorman. Are you working toward something now?”

“I’m working toward the Southwest, ever so slowly. Do you know anything about Tucumcari?”

“Is that a company?”

“It’s a town. According to a Web site, it’s my ideal place to live in New Mexico.”

She nodded a little faster this time (only a little, though) and glanced over toward the patio. “What are you going to do there?”

I shook my head. “I’ll find out when I get there. Hey, maybe it’ll be something with the media and I’ll fulfill my destiny.”

She smiled thinly. “They’re putting out the buffet. I think I’m going to get some food.”

“Yeah, I’ll see you later.” I watched her walk away until two little boys and a little girl kicking a ball and laughing diverted my attention. I looked out on the wide expanse of open lawn that led down to the water to see people talking, a man tossing a giggling baby in the air, two older teens running toward the river, a woman and her daughter playing catch, and
various others making their way toward the patio and the food.

I grabbed a beer and walked around the house to the street. The conversation with Liz had unnerved me a little. Not as much because she seemed so casually dismissive about what I was doing with my life as that it yanked a period in my past from suspended animation. During that period when Chase and I saw Liz and the other “cousins” frequently, we were nothing but potential. Smart kids for the most part, raised in material comfort, believing that we only had to choose a future in order for that future to arise. When I lost contact with these people, I fixed them at that stage in my mind. Occasionally, my mother would mention one or the other, but the update didn’t mean anything to me. Seeing Liz made palpable what I of course understood at some level: that all of these people had moved on to what they were doing with their lives. Including me.

The houses were very far apart in this neighborhood and most were set well back from the street. It was unnaturally quiet here. I’d hear the occasional splash, a lawn mower in the distance, a car passing. But all I could imagine when I looked at these houses was that every one of them held families just like Rita and Chad’s: an Ivy League educated daughter and son visiting from Manhattan and Philadelphia respectively, where they were stepping up their own ladders with an alacrity that astounded their parents.