A Bridge of Years

Klein punched a button on his desktop intercom. Ti

The customer was protesting that he hadn’t been offered enough on his trade-in, an ’87 Colt. Alberni said, “We’re being as generous as we can afford to be—I know you appreciate that. We’re a little overstocked right now and lot space is at a premium. But let’s look at the bright side. You can’t beat the options package, and our service contract is practically a model for the industry.”

And so on. Focusing the customer’s attention on the car he obviously wants, Klein said. “Of course, we’ll make money on the financing no matter what happens here. We could practically give him the fucking car. His trade-in is very, very nice. But the point is that you don’t leave money on the table.”

The customer tendered another offer—“The best we can do right now,” he said. “That’s pretty much my final bid.”

Alberni inspected the figure and said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take this to the sales manager and see what he says. It might take some luck, but I think we’re getting close.”

Alberni stood up and left the room.

“You see?” Klein said. “He’s talking them up, but the impression he gives is that he’s doing them a favor. Always look for the edge.”

Alberni came into Klein’s office and sat down. He gave Tom a long, appraising look. “Toilet training this one?”

“Tom has a lot of potential,” Klein said. “I can tell.”

“He’s the owner’s brother. That’s a whole lot of potential right there.”

“Hey, Chuck,” Klein said disapprovingly. But Alberni was very hot in sales right now and he could get away with things like that.

Tom said nothing.

The intercom was still live. In the next room, the customer took the hand of his nervous wife. “If we put off the cedar deck till next year,” he said, “maybe we can ante up another thousand.”

“Bingo,” Alberni said.

“See?” Klein said. “Nothing is left on the table. Absolutely nothing at all.”

Tom said, “You eavesdrop on them? When they think they’re alone?”

“Sometimes,” Klein said, “it’s the only way to know.”

“Isn’t that unethical?”

Alberni laughed out loud. Klein said, “Unethical? What the hell? Who are you all of a sudden, Mother Teresa?”

He clocked out at quitting time and took the highway to the Harbor Mall. At the hardware store he picked up a crowbar, a tape measure, a chisel, and a hammer. He paid for them with his credit card and drove the rest of the way home with the tools rattling in his trunk.

The northeastern end of the house, Tom thought. In the basement. That’s where they live.

He microwaved a frozen di

He rinsed the container and threw it away.

Nothing for them tonight.

He changed into a faded pair of Levi’s and a torn cotton shirt and took his new tools into the basement.

He identified a dividing wall that ran across the basement and certified by measuring its distance from the stairs that it was directly beneath a similar wall that divided the living room from the bedroom. Upstairs, he measured the width of the bedroom to its northeastern extremity: fifteen feet, give or take a couple of inches.

In the basement the equivalent measurement was harder to take; he had to kneel behind the dented backplate of the Kenmore washing machine and wedge the tape measure in place with a brick. He took three runs at it and came up with the same answer each time:

The northeastern wall of the basement was set in at least three feet from the foundation.

He pulled away storage boxes and a shelf of laundry soap and bleach, then the two-by-four shelves themselves. When he was finished the laundry room looked like Beirut, but the entire wall was exposed. It appeared to be an ordinary gypsum wall erected against studs, painted flat white. Appearances can be deceptive, Tom thought. But it would be simple enough to find out.

He used the chisel and hammer to peel away a chunk of the wallboard. The wallboard was indeed gypsum; the chalk showered over him as he worked, mingling with his sweat until he was pasty white. Equally unmistakable was the hollow space behind the wall, too deep for the overhead light to penetrate. He used the crowbar to lever out larger chunks of wallboard until he was ankle-deep in floury rubble.

He had opened up a hole roughly three feet in diameter and he was about to go hunting for a flashlight for the purpose of peering inside when the telephone buzzed.

He mistook it at first for some angry reaction by the house itself, a cry of outrage at this assault he had committed. His ears were ringing with the effort of his work and it was easy to imagine the air full of insect buzzing, the sound of a violated hive. He shook his head to clear away the thought and jogged upstairs to the phone.

He picked up the receiver and heard Doug Archer’s voice. “Tom? I was about to hang up. What’s going on?”

“Nothing … I was in the shower.”

“What about the videotape? I spent the day waiting to hear from you, buddy. What did we get?”

“Nothing,” Tom said.

“Nothing? Nada? Zip?”

“Not a thing. Very embarrassing. Look, I’m sorry I got you involved in this. Maybe we ought to just let it ride for a while.”

There was a silence. Archer said, “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you.”

“I think we’ve been overreacting, is all.”

“Tom, is something wrong up there? Some kind of problem?”

“No problem at all.”

“I should at least drop by to pick up the video equipment—”

“Maybe on the weekend,” Tom said.

“If that’s what you want—”

“That’s what I want.”

He hung up the phone.

If there’s treasure here, he thought, it’s mine.

He turned back to the basement.

The house hummed and buzzed around him.

Four

Because it was Monday, because she had lost her job at Macy’s, because it was a raw and intermittently rainy spring day—and maybe because the stars or Kismet or karma had declared it so—-Joyce stopped to say hello to the strange man shivering on a bench in Washington Square Park.

The gray, wet dusk had chased away everybody but the pigeons. Even the nameless bearded octogenarian who had appeared last week selling “poetry” on cardboard box bottoms had moved on, or died, or ascended to heaven. Some other day the square might be thronged with guitar strummers, NYU kids, teenage girls from uptown private schools making (what they imagined was) The Scene; but for now the park belonged to Joyce and to this odd, quiet man who looked at her with startled eyes.

Of course, it was silly and maybe even dangerous to stop and talk. This was New York, after all. Strange men were hardly in short supply; their strangeness was seldom subtle or interesting. But Joyce had good intuition about people. “Sharp-eyed Joyce” Lawrence had called her. “The Florence Nightingale of love.” She rejected the implication (though here she was again, perhaps: taking in strays), but accepted the judgment. She knew who to trust. “You’re lost,” she said.

He looked up at her and managed a smile. A certain effort there, she thought.

“No,” he said. “Not really. I figured it out. New York City. I’m in New York. But the date …” He held out his hands in a helpless gesture.

Oh, Joyce thought. But he wasn’t an alcoholic. His eyes were bright and clear. He might have been schizophrenic, but his face didn’t radiate the pained perplexity Joyce had seen in the faces of the schizophrenics she’d met. (There had been a few, including her uncle Teddy, who was in a “care home” upstate.) Not an alcoholic, not a schizo—maybe he had taken something. There were some odd pills circulating around the Village these days. Dexadril was popular, LSD-25 was easy to come by. An out-of-towner who had picked up something at the Remo: that was possible. But not really a tourist. The man was dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt open at the collar, and he wore the clothes comfortably; they weren’t some outfit he had cobbled together for an afternoon of slumming. So perhaps he is One of Us after all, Joyce thought, and this fraternal possibility moved her to sit down next to him. The bench was wet and the rainwater soaked through her skirt; but she was already wet from dashing out of the West Fourth Street station of the IND. Okay to be wet on a cold afternoon at dusk because eventually you’d find a comfortable place to get dry and warm and then it was all worth it. “You look like you could use a cup of coffee.”