A Bridge of Years

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."

The man nodded. "Sure could."

"You have money?"

He touched his left hip. Joyce heard the change jingle in his pocket. But his face was suddenly doubtful. "I don't believe I do."

She said cautiously, "How do you feel?"

He looked at her again. Now there was focus in his eyes— he understood the drift of the question.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I know how this must seem. I'm sorry I can't explain it. Did you ever have an experience you just couldn't take in all at once—something so enormous you just can't comprehend it?"

The LSD, she thought. Down the rabbit hole for sure. A naif in chemical wonderland. Be nice, she instructed herself. "I think coffee would probably help."

He said, "I have money. But I don't think it's legal tender."

"Foreign currency?"

"You could say that."

"You've been traveling?"

"I guess I have." He stood up abruptly. "You don't have to buy me a coffee, but if you want to I'd be grateful." "My name is Joyce," she said. "Joyce Casella." "Tom Winter," he said. Early in the month of May 1962.



She bought coffee at an unfashionable deli where no one would recognize her: not because she was embarrassed but because she didn't want a crowd chasing this man—Tom Winter—away. He was dazed, numbed, and not entirely coherent; but beneath that she was beginning to sense a curious edge, perhaps the legacy of whatever journey had brought him here, or some ordeal, a tempering fire. She talked about her life, the job she'd lost at Macy's book department, her music, relieving him of the need to make conversation and at the same time letting her eyes take him in. Here was a man maybe thirty years old, wearing clothes that were vaguely bohemian but not ragged, a traveler with traveler's eyes, who wasn't skinny but had the gauntness of someone who had ignored meals for too long.

He didn't want to talk about himself or how he'd arrived here. Joyce respected that. She'd met a lot of folks who didn't care to talk about themselves. People with a past they wanted to hide; or people with no past, refugees from the suburbs with grandiose visions of the Village inferred from television and all those self-righteous articles in Time and Life. Joyce herself had been one of these, an NYU undergraduate in a dirndl skirt, and she respected Tom's silence even though his secrets might be less prosaic than hers.

He did say where he was from: a little coastal town in Washington State called Belltower. She was encouraged by this fracture in his reticence and ventured to ask what he did there.

"Lots of things," he said. "Sold cars." "It's hard to picture you as a car salesman." "I guess other people thought so, too. I wasn't very good at it."

"You lost your job?"

"I—well, I don't know. Maybe I still have it. If I go back."

"Long way to go back."

He smiled a little. "Long way to come here."

"So what brought you to the city?"

"A time machine," he said. "Apparently."

He had hitchhiked or ridden boxcars, Joyce guessed, a sort of Woody Guthrie thing; maybe that was what he meant. "Well," she said, "Mr. Car Salesman, are you planning to stay awhile?"

He shook his head no, then seemed to hesitate. "I'm not sure. My travel arrangements are kind of vague." "You need a place to stay?"

He glanced through the window of the deli (strictly kosher, like the sign in the Peace Eye Bookstore over at 10th and Avenue C). Evening now. Traffic labored through the shiny wet darkness.

"I've got a place," he said, "but I'm not sure I can find the way back."

Joyce suspected he was right. Coming down off some towering LSD kick, he'd probably bounce around Manhattan like the little steel ball in a pachinko machine. Joyce asked herself whether she was convinced of his harmlessness; she decided she was. Taking in strangers, she scolded herself—but it was one of those acts Lawrence had called "blinks of connection" in a poem. The grace of an unexpected contact. A kind of touch. "You can sleep on my sofa if you want. It's not much of a sofa."

The offer seemed to provoke fatigue in him. "I would be very happy to sleep on your sofa. I'm sure it's a wonderful sofa."

"Very courtly," she said. "It came from the Salvation Army. It's purple. It's an ugly sofa, Tom." "Then I'll sleep with my eyes closed," he said.



She lived in a little railroad apartment in the East Village where she had moved from the dorm at NYU. It was two flights up in a tenement building and furnished on no budget at all: the ugly purple sofa, some folding chairs, a Sally Ann standing lamp from the Progressive Era. The bookcases were made of raw pineboard and paving bricks.

Tom stood awhile looking at the books. They were nothing special, her college English texts plus whatever she'd picked up at secondhand stores since then. Some C. Wright Mills, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Aldous Huxley— but he handled them as if they were specimens in a display case.


"Read anything you want," she said.

He shook his head. "I don't think I could concentrate."

Probably not. And he was shivering. She brought him a big bath towel and a cotton shirt Lawrence had left behind. "Dry off and change," she said. "Sleep if you want." She left him stretched out on the sofa and went into the "kitchen"—a corner of the room, really, with a sink and a reconditioned Hotpoint and a cheap partition—and rinsed a few dishes. Her rent was due and the severance check from her department store job would cover it; but that would leave her (she calculated) about seven dollars to live on until she picked up some music work or another job. Neither was impossible, but she would have to find a gig or go hungry. But that was tomorrow's problem—today was today.

She left the kitchen passably clean. By the time she'd finished Tom was asleep on the sofa—stark stone unconscious, snoring a little. She picked up his watch from the wooden crate table where he'd left it, thinking, It must be late.

Then she did a double-take at the face of the watch, which wasn't a watch face at all but a kind of miniature signboard where the time was written in black numerals over a smoke-gray background.

9:35, it said, and then dissolved to 9:36. The little black colon winked continuously.

Joyce had never seen such a watch and she assumed it must be very expensive—surely not a car salesman's watch. But it wasn't a foreign watch, either. It said "Timex" and "Quartz Lithium" (whatever that was) and "Water Resistant."

Very very strange, she thought. Tom Winter, Man of Mystery.

She left him snoring on the couch and moved into the bedroom. She undressed with the fight off and stretched out on the narrow spring-creaking bed, relishing the cold air and the clank of the radiator, the rattle of rainwater on the fire escape. Then she climbed under the scratchy brown blanket and waited for sleep.



Mornings and evenings, she loved this city.

Sometimes she slept five hours or less at a time, so she could have more morning and more night.

Nights, especially when she was out with Lawrence and that crowd, she would simply let herself be swept up in the urgency of their conversation, talking desegregation or the arms race in some guitar cafe; swept up by the music, too, legions of folk singers arrowing in on Bleecker and MacDougal from all over the country these days; in sawdust-floored rooms filled with her poet friends and folk friends and "beat" friends, earnest Trotskyites and junkies and jazz musicians and eighteen-year-old runaways from dingy Midwest Levit-towns, all these crosscurrents so fiercely focused that on some nights she believed the pitch-black sky might open in a rapture of the dispossessed and they would all ascend bodily into heaven. Nights like that had been common enough this winter and spring that she was eager for summer, when the pace would double and redouble again. Maybe Lawrence would publish his poetry or she would find an audience for her music. And they would be at the eye, then, of this luminous vortex.

But mornings were good, too. This was a good morning. It was good to wake up and feel the city waking up around her. Since she had lived in New York the rhythm of the city had become a stabilizing pattern. She had learned to distinguish the sound of morning traffic from the sound of afternoon traffic, both distinct from the lonelier siren sound of the traffic late at night. Morning traffic woke her with promises. She did not dislike the city until noon; at noon it was coarse, loud, unruly, plain, and chokingly dull. Lunch hours at Macy's she had written songs about the night and morning city, little spells against the crudity of midday.

Tom was still asleep on the sofa. Joyce was faintly surprised by this. She had imagined him vanished in the morning, like a dream, like smoke. But here he was: substantial in his rumpled clothes. She heard the clank and moan of the bathroom plumbing; he stepped into the kitchen with his face freshly washed and his eyes as wide and dazed as they had been the day before.

"New York," he said. "Nineteen sixty-two."

"Congratulations."

"It's amazing," he said.

"You really are from out of town."

"You could say that." His grin was big and a little silly. "Feeling better this morning?" "Better. Giddy, in fact."

"Uh-huh. Well, don't get too giddy. You probably need breakfast."

"Probably." He added, "I'm still broke."

"Well—I can buy us breakfast. But I have to meet Lawrence at noon. Lawrence might not appreciate knowing you slept here." Tom nodded his acceptance without asking who Lawrence might be—very courteous, Joyce thought.

She locked up and they descended to the street. The sky was bright and the air was almost warm—which was good, because Tom didn't have a coat to throw over his cotton shirt. She started to recommend a thrift shop she knew about —"Once you get some cash." But he shrugged off the problem. "I'll worry about money later."

"That's a good attitude."

"First I have to see about getting home."

"You don't need money for that?"

"Money's not the problem."

"So what is the problem?"

"The laws of physics. Mechanical mice." Joyce smiled in spite of herself. He went on, "I can't explain. Maybe I will someday. If I find my way back here."

She met his eyes. "Seriously?"

"Seriously."

She ordered up a coffee-shop breakfast for both of them. Cutting into her budget a little—but what was money for? Tom insisted on buying a newspaper and then he sat marveling at it, turning the pages reverently . . . not reading it so much as inspecting it, Joyce thought. Personally, she hadn't picked up a paper since the John Glenn launch in February. She said, "Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?"

"I've never been accused of poetry before."

"What you said about mechanical mice. And, hey, this is the Village. Poets are like cockroaches around here."

"My God, it is, isn't it? 'The Village.' " He looked up from the paper. "You play music?"

"Sometimes," Joyce allowed.

"I noticed your guitar back at the apartment. Twelve-string Hohner. Not too shabby." "You play?"

"A little bit. From college. It's been a few years, though."

"We should play sometime. If you come back."

"Guitar players must be as common as poets around here."

"Well, they're like snowflakes. No two the same." She smiled. "Seriously, if you come around this way again . . ."

"Thank you." He looked at his watch and stood up. "You've been awesomely generous."

"De nada. Besides, I like you."

He touched her hand for a moment. The touch was fleeting but warm, and she felt a little internal tingle—mysterious, unexpected.

"I might be back," he said.

"Goodbye, Tom Winter."

He walked into the pale sunlight, wavered a moment in the doorway, then headed unsteadily east.

Find what you're looking for, she thought. A parting wish. Though it didn't seem too likely.

Probably, she thought, I'll never see him again.

She sipped her coffee and glanced at the paper, but it was all bad news: two men had been murdered in an alley not a block from her apartment. While she slept, Death had been out walking the streets.

This was a shivery thought and she looked up once more, craned her neck to spot Tom down the street; but he was already gone, lost in the morning traffic and out of reach.