Crossing the Bridge (21 page)

“Well, you know Mel.”

I had in fact gotten to know Melanie a bit from my visits to the office and much more from the way Iris talked about her. Certainly, if anyone were going to make a juggling act such as this work, it would be she. She was very centered and methodical and I’d never seen her get flustered. Still, I was sure that there would be times when the dynamic would get awkward between the three adults.

“That’s great news, I guess.”

“It is great news. It’s a long way from
Ozzie and Harriet
, but we happen to
be
a long way from
Ozzie and Harriet
.”

I nodded and decided that Iris was right that this was good news. The household might feel a little crowded from time to time, but the key was that the kid would be in a situation where all of his parents really wanted him. With that in his corner, he could deal with everything else.

The conversation settled for a moment and I felt an ache in my right shoulder that had been bothering me all day. I tried to stretch it a bit as I drove.

“I don’t know what I did to my shoulder,” I said to Iris. “I must have slept on it wrong or something last night.”

Iris reached over and squeezed the shoulder a few times. “I remember the first clandestine night Chase and I had together,” she said. “It was the first time we had actually slept – as in actually sleeping – together and he could barely lift his arm the next day because I had my head on it the entire night. He made some ridiculous excuse about it to your mother the next day.”

She laughed, and I laughed with her, but the casual mention of her sleeping with Chase had caught me off guard. We’d been talking about him less lately and hadn’t really talked about him in his role as Iris’ boyfriend for a while.

I’m not sure why what Iris said now threw me off so much. Chase was always somewhere on my mind and certainly I never forgot how Iris and I had become friends in the first place. But we’d developed such a meaningful present that the past had become a little diffuse. I’d started to think of her as
my
friend and I realized what I was feeling at this moment was a form of jealousy. It was the first time that the mention of Chase’s name had inspired that and I found I wasn’t particularly interested in continuing this line of conversation. I don’t know what Iris thought of my sudden silence or if she thought about it at all, but we didn’t say anything the rest of the way back to her place.

“Some wine?” Iris asked when we got in the door.

“Yeah, wine would be great.”

Iris continued into the kitchen. “I got some of that
Super-Tuscan you were telling me about.”

The dog bounded up to me and I knelt to pet her. “It’s delicious. You’ll love it.”

“I love it already. I had a glass last night.”

I sat on the couch and looked around the room. There were no pictures of Chase here. A shot of her mother. One of her cousin. A very prominently placed photo of Iris with Sam Shepard taken during his visit to see the Ensemble’s production of one of his plays. A number of photographs with no people in them at all.

As we drank the wine, we talked about our plans for the next day and even for the next week. Slowly, the discomfort from my bout of jealousy abated. I was in the present with my new best friend, Iris, and we were talking about the things we were going to do. As long as I looked at things from this perspective, I was totally fine and even relaxed.

A short while later, Iris went to bed and I went to the guest room. There was a quilt on the bed that hadn’t been there the week before, Iris had put a decorative clay pot on the nightstand, and a handmade clock was now up on a wall. These touches warmed the room, made it feel less like a spare and more like a place where someone stayed. I assumed she did them for my benefit and this pleased me. I lay down on the new quilt and looked up at the ceiling. The paint was still chipped from a leak that had happened years before and I found this surprisingly reassuring.

I thought back to the casual way that Iris had mentioned making love to Chase earlier. She wasn’t someone to say anything without thinking. Had she done this to make sure that I understood that what
was developing between us was purely friendship? Or did she do it because she had no reason to think that I would react badly to it in any way?

It was becoming more and more obvious to me that Iris and I saw our relationship in entirely different terms – even as I understood that it would be more perilous if she didn’t feel this way. I understood that the limitations, real or imagined, that Iris put between us allowed me my fanciful thoughts. If she had not exercised this level of caution, I almost certainly would have had to.

And there was the quilt, the pot, and the clock. There were the plans for tomorrow and the next week and, presumably, the week after that. If what was evolving here wasn’t what I fantasized (more often than perhaps I should have), it was still the best the world had to offer me.

When I got up that Thursday morning, my parents were already off to see my father’s cardiologist. I believe this was the third time my father had left the house since coming back from the hospital. I’m not sure what it was about being here when my parents weren’t around, but I found myself exploring again. This time I headed toward the basement.

This level of the house was perpetually “semifinished.” There was carpeting on half of it and my father, in a burst of productivity a couple of decades before, had nailed cedar paneling to the walls of that half. An old Fisher television was in one corner, along with the couch that once sat in the den. My
parents still had the set plugged in and the rabbit ears were pointed in whatever direction had provided snowy reception the last time anyone turned on the TV. Chase and I had loved to come down to the basement to watch this set, though it was less for the quality of the picture than it was for the freedom to jump as hard as we wanted on the couch. I turned the set on, half expecting it to play
Scooby-Doo
or maybe
Sesame Street
. When a morning talk show appeared instead, I shut it off without changing channels. The set wasn’t dusty and neither was the carpet or the couch, which meant that my mother still came down here to clean, even though no one had used this space in years.

I opened the door of the wall unit that held our games and toys. There was the copy of Operation that we would hunch over in the early morning, determined not to let the buzzing sound awaken our parents. There was the copy of Booby Trap, a game that caused Chase to guffaw every time it exploded (even when we were in our teens). There was the copy of Stratego that my father brought home for me for no reason at all, the only time I could ever remember him doing that. I never liked the game particularly much, but I would play it anyway because there was something special about it. I found the big red ball that Chase and I would play dodgeball with (“not against the paneling,” my mother would say, calling down from the kitchen). Deflated, of course, but it looked like it would be ready for another match if an air pump were available. The same basket held my catcher’s glove, some street hockey pucks, and a Nerf basketball. On “Olympics Days,” Chase and I
would pull the basket out and compete until we’d used every bit of equipment, keeping the “medals totals” on a tiny blackboard. I looked up to see some of my Star Wars action figures and Chase’s boxing gloves. My Magic 8 Ball and
Baseball Encyclopedia
and his football helmet and remote control car.

I had forgotten how much time we spent in this basement, even through high school. While we decidedly had the run of the house, this part was truly our turf. Mom could come down to clean (as long as we weren’t in the middle of something) and Dad was welcome to put up some more paneling if the inspiration ever struck (as long as he left us at least one wall to throw the ball against), but the basement was ours. We’d be down there at least an hour a day, sometimes much longer if the weather was bad. And even when we weren’t together, one of us would often be down here.

Across from the television was a collection of boxes that hadn’t been there when I lived at home. I opened the first to find Chase’s schoolwork and report cards. I didn’t need to look at these to remember that they were mostly As, the exception being the C he got from his tenth grade history teacher, “that maggot” Mr. Olafsson, and the Bs he would always get in Art because he thought it was “silly.”

In the second box, I found a bunch of my papers, mostly high school stuff. It was difficult to place archival value on ancient trigonometry tests and a book report on
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, but I’m sure my mother didn’t know which of these things would be meaningful to me and which wouldn’t. There was my speech after I became sophomore class
president. Did I really say things like “We can make the future ours” and “This school can only do for us what we let it do for us,” or did I more effectively edit myself when I actually delivered it? I remember a lot of applause, so perhaps there was one further draft that didn’t make it into this box.

Under a few more quizzes was my acceptance letter to Emerson. I’d applied to three other schools and gotten accepted to all of them, but this was the one I wanted. The letter came a full two weeks after the last of the others, but I refused to consider the option of Ann Arbor or College Park or Syracuse. Emerson was small, it was progressive, it had one of the best communications programs in the country, and it was in a city I loved. The day I received it, Chase talked some guy outside of a liquor store into buying a bottle of champagne for him to give me.

Right underneath the Emerson letter was one of my notebooks. Every time my father’s store would stock a new kind of notebook (different binding, different color, different rule size), I would make him bring me one. I wouldn’t use these for schoolwork, but rather for personal writing: schemes, white papers, opinion pieces, a bit of journaling, stream of consciousness stuff that should be forever stored in boxes. And my lists. There was a time when I attached great importance to itemizing the best of everything. The best rock songs (what ever made me put Sting’s “Fortress around Your Heart” ahead of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride?”). The best movies (a tie between
E.T.
and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
for first place). The best novels, the best ice cream, the best cop shows, the best presidential speeches
(student council not included), the best state governors, the best TV news anchors, and, of course, the best amusement park rides. I had notebooks filled with these and I would review and revise them on a regular basis.

I sat on the couch and flipped through the notebook for several minutes. I had to laugh when I thought about how important these lists once were to me and yet how I had almost entirely forgotten them. I wondered if I should start making lists again. Best Women Who Gave Me the Time of Day? Best Job Exits? Most Annoying Exchanges with a Customer? Or perhaps Best Days in Lenox? Best Music for the Drive Back?

Maybe Best Reasons Why Iris and I Should Remain Only Friends?

I closed the notebook and put it back in the box. I flipped through some more term papers and post-cards before closing it up and putting Chase’s back on top. I’d get to the other boxes at some point in the future.

I walked past the carpeting. I remember thinking when I was much younger that there was some kind of magic involved in crossing from the carpet to the concrete. That it was the dividing line to some other world. What it really was, of course, was the byproduct of some crisis in the store that required all of my father’s attention for an extended period. Once the crisis was over, his desire to finish the basement had dissipated and the floor remained half naked.

The unfinished half served as both a repository for old things no longer useful (both of the discarded refrigerators, my mother’s sewing machine, the console
stereo) and as storage space for Christmas decorations, the aluminum folding table, the forty-cup coffeemaker, and other items utilized during the occasional festivity. And there, too, under a white sheet that had in fact gathered dust, was my woodworking equipment.

This was as close to Zen as I got when I was a kid. I could spend huge stretches (usually when Chase was engaged otherwise; he would be too distracting even if he was just watching TV) carving, sawing, sanding, and finishing. I created pieces that often served little function other than letting me transform them, but also lamps and bookends and even, once, a chair. A number of these were still in the house, but had folded so completely into my image of the place that I hadn’t picked them out as my own inventions since I’d been back.

In the intervening years, one of my parents had drawn the equipment together and pulled it under this sheet, but it hadn’t been touched otherwise. I took the sheet off entirely now and moved things out into an approximation of the workstation I’d used back then: workbench in front of me, belt sander to the left, lathe and band saw to the right. I still had a block of wood positioned in the lathe. It was long and thin and I couldn’t remember what I’d planned for it. I picked up a file from the bench and ran my fingers over it, dislodging sawdust that had been in place for nearly a decade. I’d spent so many hours here building things and imagining building others.