A Bridge of Years

The Coltrane ended. Millstein put on something Tom didn’t recognize, fierce bop, an angry music recorded with the microphone too close to the trumpet—it sounded like a piano at war with a giant wasp. The party was getting noisier. Disoriented, he moved to a vacant chair in one corner of the room and let the sound wash over him. There was a knock at the door; the dope was carefully hidden; the door eased open —it was some friend of Soderman’s, a woman in a black turtleneck carrying a guitar case. Shouts of welcome. Joyce went to the turntable and lifted the tonearm. Millstein shouted, “Careful with that!” from the opposite end of the room.

Joyce borrowed the guitar, tuned it, and began picking out chords and bass runs. Pretty soon there were five or six people gathered around her. She was flushed—from the drinking or the dope or the attention—and her eyes were a little glassy. But when she sang, she sang wonderfully. She sang traditional folk ballads, “Fa

“Lonesome Traveler.” When she spoke she was tentative, or shy, or sardonic, but the voice that issued out of her now was utterly different, a voice that made Tom sit up and stare. He had liked her without guessing she had this voice bottled up inside. The look on his face must have been comical; she smiled at him. “Come play!” she said.

He was startled. “Christ, no.”

“I heard you diddling that guitar you carried into town. You’re not too bad.”

Soderman said, “The repairman plays guitar?”

If he’d been a little more sober he would never have accepted. But what the hell—if he was lousy it would only make Joyce look good. Making Joyce look good seemed like a fairly noble ambition.

For years he’d taken his guitar out of its box maybe once a month, so he wouldn’t lose what little skill he had. He’d been serious about it in college—serious enough to take lessons with a semialcoholic free-lance teacher named Pegler, who claimed to have led a folk-rock outfit in the Haight in 1965. (Pegler, where are you now?) He took the guitar from Joyce and wondered what he could possibly play. “Guantanamera”? Some old Weavers ballad? But he recalled a song he’d taught himself, years ago, from an old Fred Neil album—counted on inspiration and luck to bring back the chord changes.

His singing voice was basically charmless and the dope had roughened it, but he managed the lyrics without groping. He looked up from his fingering halfway through the song and realized Joyce was beaming her approval. Which made him fumble over a chord change. But he picked it up and finished without too much embarrassment. Joyce applauded happily. Soderman said, “Impressive!”

Lawrence Millstein had drifted over from a dark corner of the room. He offered, “Not bad for amateur night.”

“Thank you,” Tom said warily.

“Sentimental shit, of course.”

Joyce was more rankled by the remark than Tom was. “Must be a full moon,” she said. “Lawrence is turning into an asshole.”

“Reckless,” Soderman observed quietly. Tom sat up.

“No, that’s all right,” Millstein said. He made an expansive gesture and spilled a little Jack Daniel’s from the glass in his hand. “I don’t want to interrupt your lovefest.”

Tom handed away the guitar. It was dawning on him that he was in the presence of an angry drunk.

Don’t make him mad. But Joyce seemed to have forgotten her own advice. “Don’t do this,” she said. “We don’t need this shit.”

“We don’t need it? Who—you and Tom here? Joyce and the repairman?”

Soderman said, “You spilled your drink, Lawrence. Let’s get another one. You and me.”

Millstein ignored him. He turned to Tom. “You like her? Are you fond of Joyce?”

“Yes, Larry,” he said. “I like Joyce a lot.”

“Don’t you fucking call me Larry!”

Instantly, the party was quiet. Millstein picked up the attention focused on him; he forced a smile. “You know what she is, of course,” he went on. “But you must know. It’s an old story. They come in from Bryn Mawr wearing these ridiculous clothes—ballet flats and toreador pants. They have bohemian inclinations but they all shop at Bonwit Teller. They come here for intellectual inspiration. They’ll tell you that. Of course, they really come to get laid. Isn’t that right, Joyce? They see themselves in the arms of some nineteen-year-old Negro musician. You can get laid in Westchester just as easily, of course, but not by anyone nearly as interesting.” He peered at Tom with a fixed, counterfeit smile. “So just how interesting are you?”

“Right now,” Tom said, “I guess I’m a little bit more interesting than you are.”

Millstein threw down his glass and balled his fists. Joyce said, “Stop him!” Soderman stood up in front of Millstein and put a conciliatory hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, calm down. It’s nothing. Hey, Larry—I mean, Lawrence—”

Joyce grabbed Tom’s hand and pulled him toward the door.

“The party is fucking over!” Millstein screamed.

They ducked into the hall.

“Come home with me,” Joyce said.

Tom said that sounded like a good idea.

She undressed with the unselfconsciousness of a cat.

Pale streetlight came glowing through the dusty window. He was startled by her small breasts and pink, pleasant aureoles; by the neat angle of her pubic hair. She smiled at him in the dark, and he decided he was leading a charmed life.

The touch of her was like a long, deep drink of water. She arched against him as he entered her; he felt rusty springs unwind inside him. She had put her glasses on the orange crate by the bed and her eyes were fiercely wide.

Later, as they were drifting into sleep, she told him he made love like a lonely man.

“Do I?”

“You did tonight. Are you lonely?”

“Was lonely.”

“Very lonely?”

“Very lonely.”

She curved against him, breasts and hips. “I want you to stay here. I want you to move in.”

He experienced another moment of pure free-fall. “Is the apartment big enough?”

“The bed is big enough.”

He kissed her in the dark. Charmed life, he thought.

Nineteen sixty-two, a hot summer night.

It was night all over the continent now, skies clear from the Rockies east to the coast of Maine, stars shining down from the uncrowded sky of a slightly younger universe. The nation slept, and its sleep was troubled—if at all—by faint and distant dreams. A dream of Mississippi. The dream of a war that hadn’t quite started, somewhere east of the ocean. The dream of dark empires moving on its borders.

JFK slept. Lee Harvey Oswald slept. Martin Luther King slept.

Tom Winter slept and dreamed of Chernobyl.

He carried this nugget of discontent from the night into the morning.

I am a cold wind from the land of your children, he had thought. But he looked at Joyce—eating a late breakfast at a cheap restaurant at the end of a dirty, narrow, sunlit street— and didn’t want to be that anymore. This was history and history was good because it was immutable; but he worried that he might have brought an infection from the future— not a literal disease but some turbulence in the timestream. Some dark, stalking irregularity that would unravel the fabric of her life. Maybe his certainties were absolutely false. Maybe they would all die in the Soviet attack that followed the missile crisis.

But that was absurd—wasn’t it?

“Sometime soon,” she said, “you’re going to have to tell me who you are and where you came from.”

He was startled by the suggestion. He looked at her across the table.

“I will,” he said. “Sometime.”

“Sometime soon.”

“Soon,” he said helplessly. Maybe it was a promise. Maybe it was a he.

Nine

His name was Billy Gargullo, and he was a farmboy.