Crossing the Bridge (24 page)

I didn’t have time for this and I knew if I went any further, I could be here for hours. I turned off the machine and looked at the piece that had now stopped spinning. It was going to take some work to turn this into anything, but I promised myself I’d get back to it tomorrow.

“So here’s a little bit of news,” Tyler said as we sat at the Cornwall. It had become something of a habit for us to go out for a drink after work on the nights we closed the store together and we’d decided to keep the date even though we’d been out to lunch only the day before. “I hadn’t wanted to say anything to you because I’m a little superstitious about this kind of thing, but I’ve started seeing someone. Her name is Sarah.”

“Great,” I said. “When you say ‘seeing someone,’ does this mean you’re getting involved with her or just going out on a few dates?”

“I think we’re getting involved. It hasn’t been that long – you’d probably say that it was only a few dates, in fact. But yeah, I think we might be getting involved. She gets to me, you know?”

“Yeah, I hear you. This is good news. How’d you meet her?”

“You’re going to laugh, but I met her in the store.”

“Please tell me you weren’t reading the cards to her.”

“Hmm, I’m gonna have to think about what it means that you thought that. No, nothing that ridiculous. She just came in a couple of times and we talked – I took care of every customer while we were doing so, boss – and we wound up deciding to go to a movie. It sorta grew from there.”

“So the message here is that if I stick around long enough my dream woman might come through the door?”

“No, but if you stick around long enough
my
dream woman might come through the door. At least you’d get to say hi to her.”

I raised my beer glass in an approximation of a toast. “This is good for you. I hope things go well with this.”

“Thanks. It’s actually feeling good. It’s been a while, you know?”

It was nice to see Tyler’s expression when he talked about this woman. It mirrored the one he wore when he talked about his career. I found his enthusiasms encouraging.

“Do you ever think about what you would do with the store if it were yours?” he said.

“If you’re asking if I ever think about what’s wrong with the store, then yes, all the time.”

“But do you ever think about what you’d do with it? Don’t get me wrong, I think your father has done
a very good job with the place, but it isn’t what I would do.” He shrugged. “But what the hell do I know. I haven’t been running it successfully for thirty years.”

“The very first thing to go would be that radio station,” I said. “I’d replace it with an iPod dock. We’d play soft stuff, but listenable stuff, you know? Lucy Kaplansky, Lucinda Williams, David Gray, Matt Nathanson. And I’d turn the volume up. Maybe all the way to ‘3’.”

Tyler laughed. “You can do that now, you know. It’s not like your father has the place monitored or anything.”

“Except that one day he’ll walk into the store, hear Mark Knopfler, and have another heart attack.” The truth is, I didn’t really think about how easy it would be to make that change. Since I’d been back in the store, I’d followed nearly every one of my father’s hard-and-fast rules to the letter. I didn’t even reorder the BlisterSnax after the first box sold out.

“I’d do something about the display cases in the front,” Tyler said. “That white Formica finish might have looked fresh in the seventies, but now – it just looks like it came from the seventies.”

“What about the
stuff
in the display cases? I think interest in those things faded about the same time as people stopped using the word ‘trinkets.’”

“Amazingly, we actually sell some of that stuff.”

“Which says everything that needs to be said about the people who come into this town. I’d bring in more handmade stuff. Import some things from Italy. Go to a craft show or two. Read a catalog that’s been printed in the twenty-first century.”

“Wackier toys.”

“And cooler cards. Definitely cooler cards.”

“The magazines could be merchandised better.”

“The candy rack should be moved.”

“Higher level paper goods. The people around here can afford it.”

“And change the name.”

Tyler put his beer down on the table. He’d been holding it close to his mouth but not drinking during this entire exchange. “What?” he said.

“You don’t think ‘Amber Cards, Gifts, and Stationery’ is a bit on the ridiculously obvious side?”

“It tells people what the store is.”

“In other words, it’s pedestrian?”

“I mean if you change the name, you still need to make sure people know what’s inside.”

“I guess that leaves out calling it ‘Graceland.’”

Tyler finally took a sip of his beer and I made eye contact with Phil the pirate.

“We could do this, you know,” I said.

“You want to change the name of the store?”

“Not that. But some of these other things. Certainly the simple stuff like the music, the candy, and the magazines. But some of the other things, too. Bring in some new vendors. My dad’s credit line is great.”

“What about the sale?”

“What about it?”

“Doesn’t screwing around with the store at this point throw things off a little?”

“I’m not sure that they can be thrown off any more than they already have been. It might even help. And if nothing else, it’ll keep me entertained.”

“Gutsy move.”

“Desperate move. As long as I’m stuck here, I might as well do something with my time. And maybe we’ll get lucky.”

I had been home for the spring break of my junior year for less than an hour when Chase sat on my bed and told me that he’d split up with Iris. I sat on the floor with my back propped up against the wall with my Eric Clapton poster and spent the next hour trying to get him to tell me how it had happened and why. Chase offered soliloquies and babbling, but no cogent reason other than to take full, regretful responsibility for it. Since he seemed so upset about it and since he seemed to think it was entirely his fault, I asked him why he didn’t try to do something to patch things up between them. All he would say was that he’d ruined things and that the damage he’d done could never be repaired. I briefly considered the possibility that he was putting me on, but he wasn’t kidding this time. Eventually he went into his room and played a Nirvana CD at a volume that suggested that he wanted Iris to hear his anguish all the way across town.

That night, he asked me if I wanted to go out with him and some of “his guys.” Though I hadn’t met any of them before, I recognized several from Jim Krieger’s New Year’s party – Chase’s lacrosse
teammates who had played their drinking game until they passed out. While I had done a great deal of drinking in college, I wasn’t entirely sure I was a match for this group. My goal had always been to achieve a certain level of blissed-out-edness and then to carefully maintain this state throughout the evening, like steering a sailboat toward a fixed point. For this group, it was about racing a hydrofoil into as much turbulence as possible before flipping over and bailing out. By the time we’d left our first stop, a boisterous joint across the river, everyone else had slammed a half dozen shots of tequila and a pitcher of beer apiece. It was intimidating in so many ways.

After Chase and his friends took turns pissing into the river not a few hundred feet from where we’d had our first long conversation about Iris, we headed up the highway to a club I’d never visited before. There this group met up with their flannel-shirted brethren to mosh to alt-rock covers played by an incensed band sporting Kurt Cobain haircuts. I got within five feet of the edge of the mosh pit, but couldn’t convince myself to go farther. It wasn’t as much that I was frightened as that the angst and pseudo-angst repelled me. Eventually I retired to the second level of the club while I waited for Chase and his guys to emerge from the mass of furious boys. At one point, I saw him carried atop the pit, pumping his fists and screaming the lyrics to some Chris Cornell tune. When the pit swallowed him back up, I didn’t see any of the group again for nearly an hour.

Though it would have been unsportsmanlike for me to say so, I was ready to go home at this point. But there were other stops to make. The first
involved an all-night diner where the group ate huge stacks of pancakes and bacon while heckling the waiter, hurling insults at each other at the tops of their lungs, and annoying the other patrons. I was certain the manager was going to throw us out, and I think if it had been earlier in the evening and the diner was fuller, he might have. I was surprised that Chase participated in some of this, but I wrote it off to his being upset over Iris.

By this time, it was 2:30. I was working on only a couple of hours of sleep because I’d had a paper to turn in before heading from Boston and I was starting to wear down. But we weren’t quite finished. First, we had to go to an alley between a sporting goods store and a bar on River Road where Chase and his guys participated in one of the most distasteful competitions I’ve ever witnessed: the vomit-off. Chase seemed a little disappointed that I chose not to join in, but for once, he was not going to cajole me into doing something stupid. Standing at the “starting line,” they gagged themselves, awarding points for distance and “style.” I nearly got sick to my stomach witnessing this and turned my back while they argued over who “won.”

I didn’t get up until nearly two o’clock the next day. My father was at the store and my mother was with her sister. Chase was shooting baskets on the driveway. He smiled when he saw me, clapped me on the shoulder, and then handed me the ball. I took a couple of shots and any lingering fog from the night before began to dissipate. Eventually we settled into a game of H-O-R-S-E, which I won, and then a game of one-on-one, which Chase took easily. Afterward,
we sat on grass that snow had covered only a week and a half earlier. Chase asked me if I wanted a beer and I cast him a disparaging glance. He just laughed and leaned back to look up at the sun.

We sat there for a long time. Talk about baseball and new music quickly evolved into a lengthy conversation about Iris. Chase told me about things they’d done over the past weeks, speaking as though nothing had happened to interrupt their time together. At the end of this, he told me that it had been three days since he’d last seen her and his expression darkened. Again, I tried to get him to tell me what happened and again I failed. I couldn’t be sure whether shame or confusion prevented him from talking to me about this, but he seemed utterly incapable. He went off on a long stream of consciousness disposition about love and about what it meant to him before, during, and after Iris. He talked about missing her and wondering what she was doing, but never once would he entertain my suggestion that he call her. I’d never seen Chase indecisive and he wasn’t being indecisive now. In fact he was adamant in his belief that whatever had transpired between them was final, even though it caused him more pain than he’d ever felt before. We talked until my mother pulled up to the driveway, after which Chase patted me on the knee and approached her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder.

By Wednesday of that week, after a few more conversations of this type, I thought about calling Iris myself. Partially, I wanted to do this to see if I could get any sense from her of whether she’d be willing to talk to Chase. But I was also partially wondering
how she was doing. I’d come down from Boston the weekend before anticipating seeing both of them. By this point, I no longer considered her to be simply one of Chase’s accessories. If Chase was hurting this much from the breakup, then there was a very real chance that she was hurting as well. And that meant something to me. I’d even nearly convinced myself that she would be expecting me to check in on her, that our relationship had developed to the point where she would want me to make sure that she was okay.

In the end, I couldn’t do it. What held me back was the fear that I wouldn’t know what to say once I got her on the phone or perhaps that she might even be hostile toward me, seeing me as an agent for “the enemy” and railing at me.

But there was something that overrode this concern: the glimmer of recognition that my intentions in making this call might not be entirely honorable. That in fact a part of me wanted to hear from Iris that things were irreconcilable between her and my brother. That she was available. Once that thought entered my mind, and once I found that I couldn’t easily shoo it away, I knew I couldn’t speak to her.

By Sunday afternoon, it didn’t matter. While my mother prepared an early supper and I got ready to drive back to Boston, Chase surmounted whatever obstacles he’d placed in the way of reaching out to Iris. He bounded into my room, threw himself on my bed, and told me that he’d just finished talking on the phone with her for an hour and a half and that they were seeing each other that night. I could swear I even saw his eyes glisten for a moment when he said
how relieved he was that he hadn’t completely lost her. I hugged him when I heard the news and gave him a playful punch in the stomach to lighten the moment.