Read The Bridge for Free Online

again. It’s like watching sunlight ripple over water.
    The guy on my right turns and breathes directly into my face. He must have had an everything bagel for breakfast because suddenly it feels as though someone has painted my nose with garlic and onions.
    “Check this out. I met this girl the other night and oh shit—”
    He’s about to continue when an elderly white woman comes teetering down the aisle.
    “Nobody gave her a seat?” The smoker says. “Damn.”
    He’s getting up to assist her when the bus stops abruptly and she sways, knees buckling beneath her.
    “Whoa!” The man to my right flies out of his seat and grabs her by the elbow just before she goes down. His friend quickly takes her other side, lifting her up. They both wear beige construction boots, cargo pants, and dark hoodies. They are each at least a foot taller and broader than the woman between them.
    “You all right, ma’am? You okay? Come sit down.”
    They settle her into the seat beside me, and all she can say is “Oh. Oh.” She pats her neatly pinned hair and her handbag. Her birdlike shoulder trembles next to mine.
    “Her okay, mama? Her fall over?” The child climbs down from his seat and offers the old lady a Cheerio.
    Marlboro Man bends down and pats her knee. “You okay. You gonna be just fine. Little man here give you a snack. Right? You have a seat and just rest here a minute.”
    She nods and thanks them, and the little boy sits back down, and I have to shut my eyes. I have to shut them tight against the strange look of hurt and hope in Christa’s eyes across the aisle. I keep them shut until we reach our stop.
----
    The ferry terminal is surprisingly festive. Despite a steady flow of Saturday commuters, it retains an air of summer, as though the riders were here on holiday. We shuffle onto the huge orange boat, tourists in our own city, and take our seats on an outside bench on the upper deck. Christa says the view is best from up here. I tell her I have to take her word for it. Although I grew up in New York, I’ve never been to Staten Island.
    “Seriously?” Christa eyes me. “But you’ve been to Brooklyn?”
    “Yes, and the Bronx. Not Queens, though.”
    “Man. You need to live a few more days just to cover all the boroughs.”
    It’s cold outside on the ferry deck, and calls to mind the wind up on the bridge tower. I was cold then, too, and facing the deeper cold of the East River, but somehow I couldn’t make myself care. My body reacted as a body would—shivering, heart racing from the climb up the cables—but it was like watching an actor on a movie screen. I was sitting in the audience eating popcorn while he stood on that frigid concrete. From my theater seat I wondered if he would even make it to the water when he jumped, or if he’d slam up against the protruding lip of the tower column as he fell. If so, his body would lie there, broken, instead of serenely floating away. I tried to calculate how far out he would have to dive to avoid that end, whether he would need a running start.
    Here, though, on the ferry, the cold penetrates. It’s me sitting on this bench next to Christa, whether I like it or not. She stares out at the Manhattan coastline, silent.
    “Why did you choose this?” I ask. “Why this ferry out of all the places we could have gone?”
    She leans her head back against the wall and closes her eyes. There are laugh lines around those eyes, which at the moment strike me as rather tragic, and a sprinkling of freckles. “I like the water.”
    “That’s the only reason?”
    She turns her face toward me and when her eyes open, when they look into mine, I feel a terrible jolt in the pit of my stomach.
    All this time I have been assiduously avoiding looking at her body. There’s nothing more distasteful, to me, than the low look in a man’s eyes when he takes stock of a woman, part by part. I see how women shrink back from these assessments, how they disappear inside themselves. What