Crossing the Bridge (18 page)

The party started to thin out not long after this. Some people went home. Several others found sleeping arrangements on the second floor. I never found out if anyone shared a room with Chase. By 3:00, the music was off and Iris and I sat on a couch talking with Jim, a girl he had his arm around, and a couple of other people. Both of us had continued to drink, though hardly with the avidity of the early evening. I was definitely drunk, but it was the kind of six-inches-off-the-ground drunk one gets from maintaining a steady high.

“The new year is off to an interesting start,” Iris said to me as things quieted down further. Jim and
the girl said good night and two of the other three people curled up on pillows on the floor. “Chase dropped before the ball in Times Square did.”

“Not likely to happen often,” I said.

“True. He’ll make it his mission to outlast it next time.”

I nodded and Iris leaned back farther, listing in my direction. A couple of minutes later, she leaned a bit more and put her head on my shoulder. I craned my neck to find that she was asleep. A short while after this, I rested my head on hers and fell asleep as well.

The vision of Iris in a sleeveless top and shorts was as arresting as it was transporting. I wondered if she remembered the first time I saw her wearing clothes similar to these and even if she might have worn them now in honor of that moment. It was difficult to stop thinking that way, even as I warned myself against it.

I’d asked her to meet me at the store because I had a few things to discuss with the carpenters before I could disappear. As a result, I gave Tyler the opportunity to whisper upon her arrival, “
This
is the friend you’re spending the day with?” which also meant that I was going to have to deflect questions about her from him later. I wasn’t sure how I was going to react to that interrogation, as I hadn’t spoken with anyone about Iris ever.

“Gee, love what you’ve done with the place,” she said as she gestured toward the back.

“If you like that, wait till you see what I have planned if we don’t sell it in another month.”

She walked over and kissed me on the cheek. This had become such a casual gesture between us, not at all like the first time on that New Year’s Eve more than ten years ago. When I kissed her, I put my hand on her shoulder as I always did, but this time that shoulder was bare and I almost pulled back, not wanting her to think I was crossing a line.

Iris looked around at the slumbering store and asked, “Are you sure they can spare you today?”

“The A-team is on duty. They’ll persevere.”

We walked around the block to my car. It was a radiant day. One of those ideal early June days when you could enjoy the increasing warmth without the oppressive humidity that usually accompanied it by the solstice. I’d been feeling off my game since Aunt Rita’s party, but the combination of the weather and the promise of a full day with Iris encouraged me.

“What are we doing, anyway?” I said when we settled into the car. We’d made no plans.

“Let’s just go,” Iris said.

“Just go?”

“Just go. Something will come to us.”

“Care to pick a direction?”

“Northwest,” Iris said without a moment’s hesitation. I was certain that if I’d asked her four seconds later, she would have offered a different answer.

We drove out of town and onto Highway 9. As we did, Iris reached for the iPod. Hendrix was in the middle of a seven-minute solo on “Red House.”

“Wrong music,” she said. “Okay if I change it?”

“Be my guest. There are more than five thousand songs on there.”

Iris studiously scanned as I drove. “You don’t really listen to Enrique Iglesias, do you?” she asked.

“I was curious. My curiosity lasted until the third cut.”

“Good thing. I almost asked you to drop me off by the side of the road. Ooh, Fountains of Wayne,” she said, switching from Hendrix. “Great summer drive music.”

For most of the next half hour, we did little talking. An update about the play. A modified description of what I did on Memorial Day. Other than that, some singing and a great deal of wind in our hair. As we drove down the highway, Iris pointed to a sign for Asa’s Berry Farm and shouted, “That’s it.”

I shrugged.

“Berry picking at the next exit,” she said.

“This is what you want to do?”

“Of course, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

Asa’s was a mile or so off the highway, a large shed set on dozens of acres. Asa himself wasn’t available (Iris asked), but a middle-aged guy told us that we could pick all the strawberries we wanted for a dollar a pint. Iris seemed to find this exciting and grabbed two oversized buckets for us to fill. The guy told us where the ripest berries were located and we headed off in that direction.

The first thing Iris did when we set our buckets down was pick a huge strawberry and eat it.

“I just love strawberries, don’t you?” she said.

“Are you planning to tell Asa that you ate that berry? It’s stealing if you don’t, you know.”

Iris laughed. “It’s not stealing. It’s expected. They
wouldn’t want anyone out here picking their berries who didn’t just have to have a few.”

I set to the task of filling my bucket. It was a bit daunting to realize that a half hour later the bottom of the bucket was barely full. Of course, I still had more in mine than Iris had in hers, though it was likely that she wouldn’t be needing lunch.

“Don’t they have machines that normally pick these things?” I said.

“Yes, a special kind of machine called a migrant worker.”

“They use those in Connecticut?”

“Did you think they hired college kids at twelve dollars an hour?”

“I can honestly say I’ve never thought about it at all.”

Iris looked down into my basket and said, “You’re way ahead of me. I’m going to have to work faster.” She started pulling berries off the vines with increased efficiency until she accidentally picked a rotten fruit, which bled all over her hand. I looked over at her and laughed, and she looked at her hand, confused for a moment over what to do – until she decided to clean herself on my shirt.

For an instant, this act stunned me. Iris had never done anything like this to me before. She thought it was very funny and she probably thought it was especially funny that I reacted the way I did. I remembered her doing this kind of thing with Chase several times: electric blue paint in his hair, snow melting inside the seat of his pants, cotton candy suctioned to his five o’clock shadow. As much as I always thought of her as the more serious and cerebral of the two, my memories of her were dotted with these acts of
complete silliness and of Chase responding in kind.

I searched the bushes for another overripe berry but couldn’t find one. I decided to do the next best thing, crushing a fruit between my hands and then moving to wipe them on her bare arms. She wriggled away from me and ran off, but I caught her from behind and smudged the juice into her shoulders.

“Not fair, I’m all sticky,” she said.

“And I have a huge red stain on my sleeve.”

“But you’re not sticky – yet.” Seemingly from nowhere, she produced another strawberry and drove it into my cheek. She ran away again and I ran after her. But when I realized that I wasn’t sure what I would do if I caught her, I slowed down, feigning exhaustion and calling, “Truce.”

She turned back and approached me tentatively. “Real truce?”

“Real truce.”

“I can go back to picking berries without fear of retaliation?”

“At least for the rest of the day. I make no promises about the future.”

She leaned over and kissed me on my spattered cheek.

“Mmm, delicious,” she said, before returning to her bucket.

We stayed together until late in the evening. The entire time, Iris retained a girlish buoyancy that I hadn’t seen from her – and only then on occasion – in a decade. Even when she fell asleep in the car on the way back, she seemed younger. It was such a marked contrast to how she appeared during her opening night and I wondered if in some ways it wasn’t a
response to it. Was she trying to show me that she could be as loose and carefree as she had been intense and world-weary after the show? Regardless, I was glad to have this Iris with me. I was glad that this Iris was still alive.

I woke her when we got back to her car. She sleepily apologized for leaving me alone on the ride back. Then she hugged me and held me tightly while she rested her head on my shoulder.

“This was fun,” she said.

“It was. I’m glad you came down.”

“When are you coming back to Lenox?”

“When do you want me?”

“Soon, okay?”

“Definitely soon. I’ll call you after you get back.” She kissed me on the shoulder and got out of the car. “And clean up a little,” she said. “You’re a mess.”

The next morning, I awoke ahead of the alarm. While I showered, I decided I’d take myself out to breakfast before going to the store. I thought about calling Iris to see if she wanted to join me, but I didn’t want this visit to end with a brief coda and I certainly didn’t want to take the chance that things would be different in any way from the day before.

When I got downstairs, I saw that my mother had already left for the day’s errands. She seemed to be getting to these earlier and earlier. I drank a cup of coffee while I flipped through the
Advisor
, which of course took no more than a few minutes. On my way toward the door, I went into the den to say good-bye
to my father. He was in his usual chair in front of the television, the sofa bed unmade with the blankets heaped near the bottom. I was accustomed to this morning scene at this point. Except this time, the television wasn’t on. My father was staring at a dark screen.

“Hey, Dad,” I said. “I’m gonna be heading off in a minute.”

He lifted his arm to wave, but didn’t turn his head.

“Everything okay in here?”

“Everything is fine,” he said vacantly.

It was entirely possible that he was simply deep in thought or that he was practicing some kind of meditation technique to improve his condition. But this wasn’t the impression I was getting and I didn’t like the idea of leaving him this way.

“Do you want me to stay here until Mom gets back?”

He lifted his arm again, though this time he didn’t wave. “I’m okay, thanks.”

These were precisely the kinds of “conversations” we’d been having since he returned from the hospital and I could feel my concern shifting to aggravation. He was much too young to allow himself to become an invalid but he wouldn’t even consider the most rudimentary forms of help. I shook my head and turned to go. If he didn’t want anything from me, then it was ludicrous of me to offer anything.

I’m not sure what made me turn back toward the den. I’m even less sure of what made me think of the chess set that was sitting in a box on a bookshelf. But without saying anything more, I retrieved the box and set the game up on the card table.

I wasn’t a chess player. I knew how the pieces
moved and I understood the basic rules, but that was all I’d really learned. My father would play regularly with Chase, though, with this set of ivory pieces on a leather board, or with a plastic set at the store that they would set up in the back room, alternating trips there from behind the counter to make their moves. I knew my father took this game seriously and could stay focused on it regardless of distractions. He was also very good at it. I was in the room the first time a fourteen-year-old Chase beat him and, as my brother pounced out of the room in exultation, my father sat quietly at the table regarding the final game board in admiration. Their matches became more hotly contested after that, and while the results were relatively evenly split, there was no mistaking Chase’s pride that he could finally keep up with the old man or my father’s pleasure in no longer needing to hold back.