David Jauss

The Bridge

If I had it to do over again, I'd still go to the funeral, but this time I wouldn't wear a disguise.  And if I heard anyone say, "What's she doing here?" I'd just give them my Mona Lisa smile, then take a seat in a pew up front, right beside the grieving widow.  Everyone would be staring at me, but I'd just sit there, ignoring them and looking only at the casket, trying to imagine what he looked like in there after the accident.  And I wouldn't cry, not even once.

As it was, of course, I made a world-class fool of myself.  And I don't even have the excuse of being drunk, since I've been on the wagon for nearly three years now--pretty much ever since he said he'd had enough of me.  I don't know what made me decide to put on that stupid wig and sunglasses, but it wasn't a pitcher of margaritas.  And it wasn't love. Don't you make the mistake of thinking that.

I read about his death in the Sunday paper.  I was just turning the pages, and there his photo was, on the first page of the Arkansas section, right next to a shot of what looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa but was actually a concrete bridge support stuck in a riverbank.  I knew it was him even before I saw his name because of the missing eyebrow.  I was with him the night he lost it on I-40.  We shouldn't have taken the motorcycle out in the rain, but this was right after we were married and we were immortal in those days.  I remember how the bike just suddenly disappeared out from under us, like we'd only been dreaming we were riding it, and we went skidding face first across the wet asphalt.  No helmets, of course.  He's lucky he didn't die then.  Me, too.  I got a road rash you wouldn't believe, but at least I didn't lose an eyebrow.  As he liked to say, you never realize how important it is to have eyebrows until you lose one.  I think he grew the mustache so people would look at it, not his missing eyebrow.  But it didn't work.

I wonder now if the undertaker drew in an eyebrow for him.  He probably didn't, since the casket was closed, but I like to think he did. If I'd still been his wife, I would have made sure he did.

It's funny he died helping to build a bridge.  He loved bridges, especially rickety old ones.  One year he bought us a calendar of covered wooden bridges in Vermont or New Hampshire or someplace like that.  And he once said that if he knew how to take photographs, he'd take a whole book full of shots of old bridges and make a fortune selling it.  He said there was a real market for bridge nostalgia.   And a few times he drove me up to Heber Springs on his bike just so we could stand on this old wooden plank bridge they call the Swinging Bridge and feel it sway a little in the breeze over the river.  He loved that feeling, he said.  He said he felt almost like he was about to float up into the air and fly away.  Other people went to the Swinging Bridge to fish, but he went there just to stand.  Frankly, I never thought the bridge was that big a deal.  But I didn't say that to him, of course.  I think he knew, though, because once when we were standing there, swaying in the wind, he started to sing, real slow and somber, that old song "Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water," and stupid me, I thought he was joking and started to laugh.  He stopped singing right away then, and when I looked at him, I could tell he was hurt.  I told him I wasn't laughing at him, that I was just thinking of a joke I'd heard at work, but I don't think he believed me.  He was very smart, even if he did do some dumb things.  Anyway, I've always felt bad about laughing at him that day.  I should have known better.  I should have remembered he had a deep, serious side.

According to the paper, what happened was, a cable on a crane snapped and dropped the bridge support on him.  He'd been guiding the base of it into the hole they'd dug for it in the riverbank.  The coroner said he probably died instantly, but it took his co-workers and paramedics seven hours to dig him out from under the concrete column.  They had to jackhammer their way through it.  Sometimes when I close my eyes I can hear what it must have sounded like.  Like a machine gun, only louder.  And I wonder if he heard it, if only for a second, and tried to figure out what that sound was.

It shocked me to hear that he'd been killed, but what shocked me more was that the paper said he'd remarried just a few months before.  Why none of my friends told me, I don't know.  I wouldn't have minded.  I'd have been happy for him, and I would have gone to his wedding just the same as I went to his funeral.  Only I wouldn't have worn a disguise to the wedding.  I would have come as myself.  I would have waited in the reception line like everyone else to shake her hand and kiss him on the cheek.  I would have said, "I hope you'll be happy this time."

I don't want you to get the wrong impression.  I stopped loving him long before he stopped loving me.  When he told me he'd had it, we were already history as far as I was concerned.  But not loving someone doesn't mean you hate them.  And I didn't hate him.

I didn't hate her either.  In fact, the reason I started crying at the funeral was that I felt sorry for her.  Even from where I was sitting, a dozen or so rows behind her to the right, I could see her lips and chin were quivering, and once when she reached up to adjust her black veil, her hand just fluttered.  She was trying so hard not to cry that I felt I had to do it for her.  And did I ever do it.  I've always been a loud crier, but now I was crying so hard that I was gulping air, which made my sobs sound kind of like seal barks.  I can't help it.  It's the way I cry.  And isn't crying normal at a funeral?  The way everyone turned and looked at me, you would have thought I was singing "Happy Birthday" or doing a striptease or something.  Even the minister stopped telling lies about him to stare at me.

It was the same minister who'd married us, but it wasn't him who recognized me, it was the wife.  How she knew it was me despite the curly blonde wig and sunglasses, I don't know, especially since we'd never met. Most likely she'd seen one of the photos he took of me, maybe even that one where I was all laid out on a blanket in a bikini like the main course at a picnic.  Or maybe he'd told her about the way I laugh, which is a lot like the way I cry.  He couldn't have told her how I cried.  He never heard me cry.  Not ever.

Anyway, she said my name.  She didn't shout it or anything.  She just looked at me and said it.  Then someone said, "What's she doing here?" and someone else said, "No respect for the dead."  I also heard the word "bitch," and more than once.  And the word "drunk," too.  But like I said, I wasn't drunk.  That's the thing about a reputation: once you've got one, it's got you.  To his friends and relatives, I'll always be the drunk who cheated on him.  He got to start his life over with a new wife, but me, I don't get a second chance.

I could be bitter, but I'm not.  And I suppose I could move away from Little Rock, go someplace where no one knows me.  But I like it here, and I got a good-paying job-lab tech at Baptist Hospital.  I deserve my second chance here, just like he did.

It didn't take me long to stop crying.  One minute I was wailing and the next I was stone silent.  It was not a dignified silence, though.  I was trembling all over, and I could feel my face flush red-hot.

That's when his asshole brother came up to the pew where I was sitting and said, like he was trying to be polite, "Would you please leave?"  I looked up at him, my mouth hanging open.  Of all the people to ask me to leave!

"You've got some nerve," I said.

His face was so red it looked sunburned.

"Now's not the time," he said back, his voice shaking a little.

He got a second chance, too.  My ex-husband forgave his little brother but not me.  When he found out, I told him it takes two to tangle, but he still blamed it on me and me alone.

"I'm not going," I told his brother now.

The minister cleared his throat then and asked if he could resume the eulogy.  The last I'd heard, he'd been saying something about the corpse having been a loving and devoted husband.

I stood up.  "Go right ahead," I said.  "Lie your ass off.  The bastard left me."

Well, you can guess how people reacted to that.  No one likes the truth.  For a few seconds, there was nothing but arms and elbows and legs and shouting, and then I found myself outside, laying facedown on the sidewalk, my wig ripped off, my dress torn, and my head throbbing.  There was a small crowd standing on the top step looking down at me, mostly men but also a couple of stocky women.  One of the women was his brother's wife.  She shook my wig at me and said, "You didn't even have the guts to face us.  You're pathetic."  I rose onto my skinned knees then and reached up to touch my eyebrows.  They were still there.  Then I started to laugh.

"Get out of here," a man's voice said.  "Now."

But I couldn't stop laughing.  I stood up then, and my head went woozy, and for a moment I felt like I was back on the Swinging Bridge, my husband by my side, both of us swaying there in the breeze, so light somehow that the slightest puff of wind could lift us up off that bridge and into the blue, blue sky.  And then I felt like I really was floating up into the sky, just like a balloon or a saint, and he was floating there beside me, holding my hand.  I knew that any second I'd drift back down to the earth, to the cracked concrete sidewalk, the scowls and jeers, to the realization that I'd been an utter fool and always would be, but I didn't care, at least not then.  I was with him, and they weren't.  I was with him, and he was holding my hand, and it felt so real, so real and so right.

(Photograph by N. Harter)