A Bridge of Years

Ben couldn’t move. He drew a deep breath into his raw lungs and hoped he would be able at least to speak.

Eight

Greenwich Village, Manhattan, in the gathering heat and tidal migrations of the summer of 1962: by the end of June Tom Winter had learned a few things about his adopted homeland.

He learned some of its history. “The Village,” named Sapokanican by the Indians and Greenwich by the British, had been a fashionable section of Manhattan until its prestige migrated north along Broadway at the end of the nineteenth century. Then an immigrant population had moved in, and then radical bohemians drawn by low rents in the years before the First World War. If his time machine had dropped him off in the 1920s he could have walked into Romany Marie’s in one of its several incarnations—on Sheridan Square or later on Christopher Street—and found Eugene O’Neill making notes for a play or Edgard Varese dining on a ciorba aromatic with leeks and dill. Or he might have arrived in 1950 and encountered Dylan Thomas drunk in the White Horse or Kerouac at the Remo considering California—these public lives only an eddy of the deeper current, a counterpoint to American life as it was understood in the movies.

Rents had climbed since then; a slow gentrification had been proceeding ever since the subway linked the Village to the rest of the city in the 1930s. Genuinely poor artists were already being shouldered into the Lower East Side. Nevertheless, it was 1962 and the scent of rebellion was strong and poignant.

He learned that he liked it here.

Maybe that was odd. Tom had never considered himself a “bohemian.” The word had never meant much to him. He had gone to college in the seventies, smoked marijuana on rare occasions, worn denim and long hair in the last years that was fashionable. None of this had seemed even vaguely rebellious—merely routine. He moved into a white-collar job without anxiety and worried about his income like everybody else. Like everybody else, he ran up his credit debt and had to cut back a little. He was troubled—like everybody else— when the stock market tottered; he and Barbara had never set aside enough for an investment portfolio, but he worried about the economy and what it might mean for their budget. Barbara was deeply committed to ecological activism but she was hardly bohemian about it, despite what Tony thought— her approach, he sometimes thought, was brutal enough to put a hard-nosed corporate lawyer to shame. She told him once that if she had to wear a Perry Ellis skirt to be credible, she’d fucking wear it: it wasn’t an issue.

And when the structure of life and job collapsed around him, it didn’t occur to Tom that the system had failed; only that he had failed it.

He was surprised and delighted to discover another attitude here, not only in Joyce but generally, in the Village: a consensus that the world outside was a sterile laboratory and that its only interesting products were its failures, its rejects, and its refugees.

He was as poor, certainly, as any refugee. Joyce put him up for a few days when he arrived—until Lawrence objected— and persuaded him not to sell his guitar. She had found a part-time job waitressing and lent him enough cash for a room at the Y. She told her friends he was looking for a day job and one of them—an unpublished novelist named Soderman—told Tom there was a radio and hi-fi shop on Eighth with a Help Wanted sign in the window. The store was called Lindner’s Radio Supply, and the owner, Max Lindner, explained that he needed a technician, “somebody to work in the back,” and did Tom know anything about electronics? Tom said yeah, he did—he’d done a couple of EE courses in college and he knew his way around a soldering iron. Most of what Max’s customers brought in for repair would be vacuum tube merchandise, but Tom didn’t anticipate any trouble adapting. “The back” was a room the size of a two-car garage; the walls were lined with tube caddies and testers and there was a well-thumbed RCA manual attached to the workbench on a string. The smell of hot solder flux saturated the air.

“My last guy was a Puerto Rican kid,” Max said. “He was only eighteen, but there was nothing he couldn’t strip and put back together twice as nice as the day we sold it. You know what they did? They fucking drafted him. Six months from now he’ll be building radar stations in Congo Bongo. I did my bit on Guadalcanal and this is how the army repays me.” He looked Tom up and down. “You can really do this work?”

“I can really do this work.”

“You start tomorrow.”

After work, his first priority was a place to live.

Joyce agreed. “You can’t stay at the French Embassy. It’s not safe.”

“The what?”

“The Y, Tom. It’s nothing but faggots. Maybe you noticed.”

She gri

She raised her eyebrows. “Virtue?”

To celebrate his job they had come to Stanley’s, a new bar on the Lower East Side. Tom had begun to sort out the geography of the city; he understood that the East Village was even more subterranean than the West, a crosstown bus away from the subways, the Bearded Artist a recent immigrant, which was why Stanley’s sometimes offered free beer in an effort to build a clientele. Lawrence’s apartment was nearby and Joyce’s not too far from it and anyway nothing was happening tonight in the gaudier precincts of Bleecker and MacDougal.

Tom was pleased about the job, a little nervous about the evening.

Joyce offered him a cigarette. He said, “I don’t.”

“You’re very light on vices, Tom.” She lit one of her own. The office where he worked at Aerotech had been designated smoke-free; none of Barbara’s friends smoked and the salesmen at the car lot had been encouraged not to. He’d forgotten what a fascinating little ritual it could be. Joyce performed it with unconscious grace, waving the match and dropping it in an ashtray. In an hour, when the bar filled up, the air would be blue with smoke. The stern disapproval of C. Everett Koop was a quarter century away.

“At least you drink.”

“In moderation.” He was nursing a beer. “I used to drink more. Actually, I wasn’t a very successful alcoholic. My doctor told me it was too hard for me to drink seriously and too easy to stop. He said I must not have the gene for alcoholism —it just isn’t in my DNA.”

“Your which?”

“I’m not cut out that way.”

“Hopelessly Presbyterian.” She drew on the cigarette. “Something’s bothering you, yes?”

“I don’t want to fend off a lot of questions tonight.”

“From me, or—?”

He waved his hand—no, not her.

“Well, people are curious. The thing is, Tom, you’re not a label. People come here and talk about nonconformity and the Lonely Crowd and all that jazz, but they’re wearing labels all the same. You could hang signs on them. Angry young poet. Left-wing folksinger. Ad executive reclaiming his youth. So on. The real, true ciphers are very rare.”

He said, “I’m a cipher?”

“Oh, definitely.”

“Isn’t that a label too?”

She smiled. “But no one likes it. If you don’t want to hang around, Tom, you have some options.”

“Like?”

“Like, you could go somewhere else. Or you could tell everybody to fuck off. Or we could go somewhere else. Now or later.”

She sat across the table from him, one hand cocked at an angle and the smoke from her cigarette drifting toward the ceiling. The light was dim but she was beautiful in it. She had tied her long hair back; her eyes were pursed, quizzical, blue under the magnification of her glasses. He could tell she was nervous about making the offer.