Crossing the Bridge (28 page)

“Okay, this is getting a little more intense than I can handle,” I said.

She smiled at me and leaned forward.

“Do you really not like to talk about yourself that much?”

“I’m fine with talking about myself. I just think that talking about myself – like this – with you is a little tough.”

“Why?” She tilted her head and I could swear that her eyes got a slightly deeper shade of blue.

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“No,” Iris said with a cajoling laugh. “What did you mean by that? Really.”

At that moment, I realized I’d been waiting for this opportunity. I had fantasized situations where I told Iris how I felt about her. In every one of those fantasies, Chase was not a factor. Perhaps the only time in my life when that was the case. If I thought of him at all, I imagined that he had moved on from Iris, in fact condoned what I was doing.

I was all nervous energy at this point. I’m not sure I even realized right away that I had moved to sit next to her or that our knees were touching.

“Because – I can’t believe I’m telling you this – I think about you a lot. More than I should, frankly. And when you say things like you’re saying about me, it makes me think things that I really shouldn’t be thinking.”

Her smile softened and the look of amusement left her eyes. But that other look was still there.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said quietly.

“I really don’t think you do.”

“Yeah, I do. Hugh. I think about you, too. It’s weird for me because I’m so in love with Chase, but I do think about you. It’s impossible for me to be
around you as much as I am and not think about you.” She paused for several seconds. “Can I tell you something?”

“I’m gonna have to reserve judgment on that.”

“When Chase and I split up a couple of months ago – for reasons I still don’t understand – I was feeling really awful. I just completely didn’t understand what happened. But in the middle of it, I realized that one of the things I was feeling awful about was that I missed you. Not being with Chase meant that I wasn’t going to see you anymore and that shook me up. I seriously thought about calling you, but I thought you might think I was calling for a different reason.” “I almost called you,” I said, my throat a little dry.

“I wish you had. It would have meant a lot to me. I needed you.”

I didn’t want to wrap my mind around what she was saying. I didn’t want to consider the implications. Any of them. At that moment, all I wanted to do was kiss her. I leaned toward her and she moved toward me at the same time. Our lips met tenderly and we kissed in slow motion for a long time. It was the moment in my life when I realized that it mattered who you were kissing when you kissed like this. My hand found its way to the bare knee I’d been admiring since she walked in the door and I pulled her closer. Everything was unhurried. From my perspective, I just wanted to live in this space and I didn’t care what came next. But there’s no chance at all that we would have stopped there if we hadn’t heard Chase’s car pulling up the driveway.

The sound jarred us, as though a stage hypnotist
had snapped his fingers. As we sat back on the couch, Iris looked at me with an expression that spoke of both embarrassment and regret. She didn’t need to tell me that she didn’t know what came over her, just as she didn’t need to tell me that we couldn’t allow it to happen again. To her, she had only surrendered to a bit of temporary abandon, nothing more.

I don’t think that I ever felt emptier than I did at that moment.

It was cool for early July. As I got out of my car for my midtrip stop (I didn’t really need a break on the drive to Lenox, but I liked that diner I’d found in Enfield and the woman who always helped me there – it had become part of the process for me), I wondered if I should have brought a sweatshirt along. Iris and I were planning to see an outdoor performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
that night and it would be considerably cooler in the Berkshires. As it turns out, it didn’t matter.

Neither of us was pretending that we hadn’t had that middle-of-the-night phone conversation. Iris held me just a little bit longer than she usually did when I kissed her hello and as we walked and drove through the afternoon, we each mentioned numerous times how much we enjoyed this weekly foray. For my part, I wanted to make sure that Iris understood that she was important to me and that, regardless of any awkwardness from our talk on the beach, I still considered her a critical part of my life. I’m assuming that she felt somewhat the same way, because she
was more openly affectionate with me than she’d been in the past, touching my arm while we spoke, at one point grabbing me around the shoulders and at another gently bumping me while we walked.

She made dinner for me that night, keeping it simple because we had to be at the theater by 7:30. One of the rituals that had evolved between us was that we didn’t debrief each other on the events of the week until dinner on our first night, turning our first afternoons into a running set of observations about whatever we might be doing. While we ate, I told her about firing Tab and the others and about the progress I’d made on the display cases. She talked about the beginning of rehearsals for the Ensemble’s September production and about a mildly traumatic trip to the veterinarian. I’d come to appreciate these conversations because they indicated how much we had drawn ourselves into the fabric of each other’s lives. She could tell me that Tab was taking up space without ever having met her and I could anticipate her dog’s response to an unnecessarily aggressive vet.

Toward the end of the meal, Iris became quiet and seemed more focused on her wine.

“You know what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately?” she said. She smiled, eyes downcast, almost bashful. “That time when we kissed on the couch.”

“You’ve been thinking about that?” I asked tentatively. We had never once talked about this.

“I have. I mean it’s not like I haven’t thought about it before. It’s just that it’s been on my mind a lot the last few days.”

I took a sip of my wine, thinking that not responding might be the only appropriate response.

“That kiss had a lot in it, didn’t it?” she said. “It was illicit. It was innocent. It was warm. It was intense.”

“It was over much too soon,” I said, surprising myself that I would be this candid.

She looked up at me. “It was?”

“For me it was.”

“Chase came back.”

“I know. I was never less happy to see him.”

She began to inscribe lines in the condensation on her wineglass. “That was a strange day,” she said. “Chase noticed that I was a little preoccupied, but I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about. I think that was the most dishonest thing I ever did to him.”

I nodded. I wrestled with myself over telling her how much that kiss meant to me, how much it redefined kissing for me. But I wasn’t sure why she’d brought this subject up and I felt like I needed to wait to find out.

“I’d imagined kissing you before then,” she said.

“You had?”

She shook her head. “A few times. It would just come into my head. I really liked you, Hugh. I always did. I liked talking to you, especially on those afternoons when you would babysit me for Chase.”

“I loved that time.”

“You know what I thought about after that day? And I thought about it a lot. I thought about what we were going to be like over the course of our lives together after that kiss. I really believed that Chase and I were going to get married. I imagined you and me dancing at my wedding. I imagined you coming
for dinner while Chase was away on business and the two of us taking the kids for ice cream. I imagined the four of us – me and Chase and you and your wife – at some lakefront resort when we were in our fifties.

“And in all of these cases, I imagined that we’d have a little thing that passed between us that acknowledged that kiss without ever saying a word. Didn’t quite work out that way, huh?”

I was feeling a true loss of equilibrium. I had believed in the moments after we kissed that Iris had made every effort to erase it from her memory. And even after what we’d begun here – whatever it was that we’d begun here – I was still convinced that she would have preferred it if that kiss had never happened.

“I obsessed over it,” I said.

“You did?”

“Truly obsessed over it. The first couple of weeks after, I could hardly think of anything else. It was just so confusing.”

“Why?”

I paused for several seconds, looking down at my dinner plate, looking up into her eyes. “Because I was crazy about you. And the kiss brought so many things into focus. It confirmed so many things I was feeling. And none of it really mattered because you had Chase – and I had Chase – and I just had to live with that. I was actually angry with him for a few days before I came to my senses enough to realize how irrational that was.”

She reached out and squeezed my hand. She left a
tiny patch of moisture from where her index finger had been playing with her glass.

“Our kiss this spring was different in a lot of ways,” she said. “At first I had to ask myself if I’d done it because you were Chase’s brother and I was trying to reach out to him a little. I convinced myself that wasn’t it. But that left me with something that was a lot scarier.”

“By stopping the way you did, you probably saved me the anguish of having to go through that myself.”

“I guess I did. Though I’d be lying if I said I was doing it with you in mind.”

“And I’d be lying if I said I understood it at the time. It took me a little while to catch up to you.”

She tightened her lips and then took another sip of wine. I felt like I’d said the wrong thing to her, but I couldn’t understand what I’d done.

“Needless to say, I’ve thought about that one a lot, too. Especially since we see each other every week now.”

For a moment, I thought she was going to tell me that it was too hard to keep seeing me this way and I felt a wave of sadness. I knew if she said this that I would have to fight desperately to change her mind.

“We have a good thing here,” I said.

She smiled at me. “It’s a very good thing. A very good thing. I’ve kinda come to depend on it.”

I think in that moment I realized that I would never be living in Tucumcari or anywhere else in New Mexico. I had no idea where I was going to wind up next, but it had to be somewhere within driving distance of Iris.

“Me too,” I said.

Again, she reached out for my hand and this time she held it. After a few beats, she looked at her watch. “I’m not really in the mood for Shakespeare,” she said.

Instead, we refilled our wineglasses and moved to her living room to watch her DVD copy of
The Graduate
. About twenty minutes into the movie, she leaned against the opposite side of the couch and put her feet up on my leg. I massaged them for a while and then just held them for the rest of the film.

When I went to bed that night, I tape-looped our dinner conversation. In the past few hours, I’d seen two new faces from Iris: first, the tentative one as she drew her finger along the wineglass, and then the contented one as she lay on the couch and I rubbed her feet. Both were of course beautiful, but both suggested that there was so much more of her to see than I’d seen already. I wanted to know all of her expressions. I wanted her to continue to surprise me with her observations of the past. But more than anything, I wanted her to share a future with me. That future might be nothing more than DVDs and walks through farmers’ markets, but I needed it.

Since I was playing all of this in my head, I wasn’t asleep when Iris came into my room a couple of hours later. She opened the door and I propped myself up on one arm.

“Is everything okay?” I said.

I sat up and she sat down next to me on the bed, reaching a hand up to touch me gently on the face. She ran her fingers slowly down my cheek and let them rest on my lips.

“I need to kiss you again,” she said.

I kissed her fingers and then she pulled me toward her. She kissed me hungrily, as she had that night in Amber. Unlike that time, though, I was eminently aware of how much I wanted her, how much these kisses – and her desire to give me these kisses – meant to me. Without moving away from her, I pulled myself out from under the sheets and we were lying together, our bare legs intertwined, my hand rubbing her T-shirted back while her fingernails played over my naked shoulders. She moved both hands to cup my face and she dotted me with quick, deep kisses.

I was nearly senseless with desire, but at the same time, these kisses – their urgency and their tenderness – held me fast. The sensation of her lips mesmerized me, as did the look in her eyes in the moonlight as she pulled back from me and then kissed me again. It was the first time I’d really noticed her eyes while we were kissing and it was perhaps the proximity of our eyes together that was the most dizzying feeling of all.