Crossing the Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page B

guy,” I said, pointing to the pirate. “His name was Phil; he had a wife and three kids at home and a real affection for macramé. He did the pirate thing to pay the bills, but what he really wanted to be was an ice dancer.”
    “Ice dancer?”
    “It was around the time of the Olympics. And did
you ever see some of the outfits those guys wear? Phil would fit right in.”
    “You have a rich fantasy life.”
    I laughed. “Actually, that’s about as rich as it gets.”
    “What about ‘moving from suburb to suburb in search of thrills?’”
    It tickled me that she quoted a line back at me.
    “It might have been more exciting if I had a better imagination.”
    We spent most of the next hour catching each other up in a top-line kind of way. Iris had put in four years at Mount Holyoke College and spent a lot of time around theater and dance groups, though she didn’t have much talent at either discipline. What she did have, she realized, was a real love of these fields, a sharp organizational mind, and an interest in helping these operations succeed. When she’d graduated, she’d handled a variety of back-office duties for local arts organizations and finally settled in the Berkshires, where she had been for the last three years. She had a dog who made all of the trips back to Amber with her and a surprising affinity for potted plants, of which she had “dozens, I don’t know, probably thirty or so.”
    Not wanting to bore her with my entire travel itinerary over the past ten years, I told Iris only about the longer stops. She listened to my stories with a combination of amusement and disbelief. I could tell that she was having some trouble synching these details with the person I was back when she knew me, but she was too polite to acknowledge this.
    Once we had boiled the last ten years of our lives down to fifty minutes, we came to the point in the
conversation where we were going to have to move on to other things. The first attempts at getting something started fizzled. Three sentences on how Amber had changed in the last decade. A few exchanges on her mother’s failed attempt at a spot on the City Council. She said something about the new IMAX theater that opened just across the bridge and I cringed internally. Was this really everything we had left between us?
    A sudden memory caused me to laugh and to abandon caution. “I remember when I was fifteen my parents took us to a 3-D IMAX theater to see a movie about dinosaurs. At one point, a T. rex reared up on the screen and Chase was so startled that he spilled his entire soda onto his lap.”
    It was the first time that either of us had invoked Chase’s name – although it was ludicrous to think that either of us hadn’t been thinking of him nonstop since meeting on the street. I tried to gauge Iris’ reaction, wondering if this was only going to make things more awkward. I saw just the briefest hesitation on her face and then she started laughing.
    “The poor thing,” she said. “Was he humiliated?”
    “For all I know, he might have been, but of course he kept his cool. He jumped out of his seat when it happened, but then he just brushed off the ice cubes and went back to watching the movie. When we left, he kept pointing to his pants and telling the people waiting in line for the next show that the movie was really exciting.”
    Iris laughed again and nodded her head. Neither of us said anything for a minute or two, but the silence wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as the small
talk had been a short time before.
    “I had my first interview with the director of that dance troupe in Lexington after getting caught in a downpour,” Iris said. It was hard for me to imagine that what I’d just said had caused her to think about times when she had been very wet, but I let it go. Chase’s name didn’t come up again for the rest of the night, but unlike the first hour, it no longer seemed to be because both of us were avoiding it. We’d both nodded