Bridge of Sighs

which sprang eternal. The second fallacy, built on the shifting sands of the first, was equally seductive and even more idiotic—that what people thought they wanted today was what they’d want tomorrow. Sarah’s mother filed this under the general heading of “Failures of Imagination,” which was probably the biggest category in the entire history of categories, its origin almost certainly divine. Human beings, she believed, were a failure of God’s imagination. “Look around the Sundry Arms,” she was fond of saying, “and tell me God
intended
this shit.” Divorce, she maintained, made a better sacrament than marriage, if you had to have one. It signaled that at least one person and probably two had come to his or her senses and taken a long hard look at not only their spouse but the institution that had encouraged such irrational behavior. Thinking clearly at last, such people embraced freedom, usually in the guise of adultery, and shortly thereafter you had need of the Sundrys, Arms and Gardens.
    Elaine’s Sundry Gardens was the better of the two complexes, both newer and larger, with unfurnished two-and three-bedroom apartments. The divorced men who moved in there had been clever enough to see what was bearing down on them in time to make modest preparations and draw up an evacuation plan. They’d hired lawyers (or were lawyers themselves), squirreled money away in accounts their wives knew nothing about, taken careful inventory of what they could and couldn’t live without when the inevitable day arrived, making plans to secure what they could and replace what they couldn’t. What they managed to salvage usually fit into a small U-Haul truck that took no more than an afternoon, with the help of an old college friend or two, to load and unload. On the other hand, the shell-shocked walking wounded who moved into the furnished one-bedroom units of the Sundry Arms arrived with little more than a suitcase or two, packed under the supervision of a woman whose Hell Hath No Greater Fury was her lone parting gift. Yet something about them appealed to Sarah’s mother. “Here comes another one,” she’d say when she spotted a bewildered man in the courtyard below, trying hard to follow Harold Sundry’s rolling gait, zigging when Harold zagged. “No idea whether to eat shit, chase rabbits or bark at the moon.” Most of them didn’t look like they possessed enough energy, wit or imagination for adultery, but here they were, so they must have. For weeks they’d be like bugs on their backs, her mother explained, their little legs churning dutifully in the air, seeking traction where there wasn’t any and not even realizing what they really needed, which was for someone to come along and flip them over so they could scurry off again.
    Why her mother actually liked the Sundry Arms and preferred such men to their craftier, more self-sufficient counterparts across the street was something Sarah didn’t like to think about too deeply. One reason, she suspected, had to do with the fact that one of the many things the Sundry Arms men arrived without were the younger women who’d wrecked their marriages, whereas Sundry Gardens men were alone only until their secretaries found someone to sublet their apartments in Chelsea. At any rate, her mother seemed to consider it her duty to cheer up her new neighbors, to help them understand that their stay, though brief, needn’t be joyless. Most of them seemed grateful for her efforts on their behalf. When they left—a month, two months, six months later—it was Sarah’s mother and not their more immediate neighbors to whom they bequeathed what wouldn’t fit into those same suitcases: the half-empty bottle of Drambuie, the like-new Teflon-coated frying pan, the apartment-sized stereo unit. Thanks to their generosity, she was constantly upgrading her possessions, and over the years she’d learned the wisdom of helping these sad, beleaguered men outfit themselves in the first place, knowing that one day soon whatever they purchased would be hers, so why not go top of the line?
    Harold liked Sarah’s mother, too, and his fondness was also profitable. There was a lot of breakage at the Sundry Arms, whose residents seemed to grasp immediately that they’d found a port in a storm. They also imagined that port to be temporary, that they’d be staying only until their wives came to their senses. When they discovered how wrong they were, furnishings tended to go