Bridge of Sighs

airborne. Whenever a tenant moved out and Harold had to replace a lamp or chair, he put the new one in Sarah’s mother’s apartment and rotated her used one into the newly vacant space. “Wow,” the new arrivals said, when she showed them her apartment, “yours is nice.” They didn’t quite know what to make of it; she could tell. The layout was identical to their own, as was much of the furniture, but she had been given a special dispensation from Harold to replace the heavy, dark drapes with fancy blinds and the Motel 6 artwork with her own colorful designs. Harold himself couldn’t get over how nice her place looked. “These men are all deeply and easily confused by sleight of hand,” her mother explained.
    Summers, she insisted that Sarah take the bedroom. “Most of the time I fall asleep in front of the TV anyway,” she reasoned, which was true enough, even if it wasn’t the whole story. Sometimes Sarah woke to conversation that wasn’t on the television and realized that what had awakened her was someone knocking. Once she thought she recognized the male voice in the front room as belonging to Harold, but she couldn’t be sure, and other times the voices were definitely not his. These half-overheard conversations were always short, and when Sarah heard the front door open and shut again, she felt certain that she was now alone in the apartment. Sometimes, an hour or two later, she’d hear her mother return. One morning she’d awakened at the usual time and found the sofa empty, only to discover her mother snoring there when she emerged from the shower. Another day, up early for a babysitting job, she’d dressed in the dark and moved quietly around her mother’s sleeping form, slipping out the front door, closing it quietly behind her, then kicking over the two martini glasses somebody had thoughtfully returned, leaving them on the step.
    “How much does your father know about this place?” it occurred to her mother to ask one day. The answer, in fact, was very little. (They were still separated then, and it would be years before her mother got around to filing for divorce.) “That Sundry place?” he asked each September. “She’s still living there?” He was jumping, just as her mother knew he would, to precisely the wrong conclusion. If she still had the same furnished one-bedroom apartment, then she must still be having a tough go of it. Sarah never let on that she spent far more every month on her studio than she did on her apartment. She’d changed studios three times, actually, each time to a larger, better lighted space. And of course her father had no idea about the men—all and Sundry—or the martini glasses, or the large bottle of Beefeater gin she replaced weekly, or that she always bought the largest jar of green olives available at the supermarket, or that she was forever running out of toothpicks.
    As she was about most things, Sarah was of two minds about such behavior. Sometimes she was embarrassed by her mother’s freewheeling promiscuity, but was it any more discomforting than her father’s celibacy? Since his wife’s departure, he hadn’t been out on a single date. Once, when she told him she wouldn’t mind if he had a woman friend, he’d just looked at her funny and said he was still married to her mother. That would’ve been romantic had it not been totally devoid of affection, had Sarah not known that while her father looked forward to the day when economic reality would force her mother to return, he didn’t really miss her. “Being married to your father was a lot like being a nun,” her mother had observed more than once, and Sarah suspected that even if he’d known about the men at the Sundry Arms, it wouldn’t have inspired sexual jealousy. No, he wanted his wife back out of I-told-you-so spite.
    Her father didn’t date or drink, but there was
something.
Sometimes, when she returned home after spending the evening with Lou at Ikey’s, she’d find him asleep in his chair, the phonograph needle bumping the label of one of his jazz records, a strange, sweet smell in the air. Or she’d wake up in the morning and there’d be a stale version of that same cloying aroma lingering in the house. She was about to ask her father about it when she remembered the very first time she’d smelled it in the parking lot one Friday night outside Angelo’s Pizza. There a skinny, shabbily dressed Negro was idling near the entrance, and he’d nodded familiarly