Bridge of Sighs

said. “You get used to it. And it won’t be so bad when the weather warms up,” he added when he saw her shiver, whether from the cold or moral revulsion he couldn’t tell. For some reason her revulsion, if that’s what it was, made him proud. Deeply embarrassed, sure, but mostly proud.
    Then Nan saw the easel set up by the tall rear windows that overlooked the alley below. She knew that Sarah had used part of the cavernous space as a studio back in the fall, but Noonan could see that the whole arrangement seemed more intimate now. She’d imagined interior walls, and there weren’t any, nothing separating the part Sarah used from the part he used. You could still smell her turpentine and linseed oil, which he’d discovered he liked, and her brushes all stood at attention in jars.
    He later would wonder if it was Sarah’s residual presence there that kept Nan from backing out. For the longest time she quietly studied the evidence, of what, she couldn’t quite imagine. Finally, she took a deep breath, turned to Noonan, put her arms around his neck and kissed him.
    Unlike the earlier kiss, he paid attention to this one, which was nothing like the kisses Nan offered when she knew other people were watching. Those were dramatic, cinema inspired, moist and fully adult, whereas this was dry and frightened and full of the little girl Nan hadn’t been in a long while. And what exactly did it mean, he wondered, to prefer a kiss you couldn’t remember to one you could?
    Nan must have felt his hesitation, because she said, “Bobby? Don’t you want to?”
    The answer to that was yes and no. He said only yes.
             
     
    S OMETIME BEFORE DAWN she woke him, struggling frantically in the sleeping bag and crying, “Let me out! Let me out!” He told her to quit thrashing, but she was beside herself, and he finally had to pin her arms at her sides. “Calm down. Let me unzip us.”
    Though wild eyed and uncomprehending, she finally quit struggling. “Hurry,” she whimpered as he worked to unsnag the zipper.
    “You’re okay,” he assured her, knowing she wasn’t. When he finally freed the zipper’s metal teeth from the cloth, she became frenzied again and elbowed him in the mouth getting out of the bag. She made it to the toilet just in time, and she looked so pitiful heaving into the bowl that Noonan found he couldn’t watch, so he busied himself by rummaging through his footlocker for a washcloth. By the time he found one and wet it in the sink, the worst was over.
    “I want to go home,” she said, her voice sounding hollow in the bowl. He put the moist towel in her hand, and she used it to wipe her mouth. “Don’t watch,” she told him. “Go back over there.”
    He did as instructed while she got shakily to her feet and flushed the toilet, the sink jumping and banging against the wall as if possessed. When it finally stopped Nan again said, “I want to go
home.
”
    The green face of the alarm clock read 5:17. “It’ll be light in another hour,” he told her.
    “I want to go home
now.
” She’d grabbed her elbows and was shivering in the cold, a frightened child. This, Noonan thought, was what Sarah had foreseen and tried to prevent. “Please, Bobby…I hate it here. I thought I could, but I can’t.”
    He was about to say
You did,
then thought better of it. Sex was only part of what she couldn’t do, which also included his squalid flat, Murdick’s, the Hill and he himself. She’d vomited all that, along with Larry’s gravy-drenched fries. Last night, the West End had served her vengeful purpose as a means of getting back at her family, but in this black hour before dawn her courage had failed her utterly. Instead of teaching her parents a lesson, she’d taught herself one, and now she wanted that old world back, her own pink bedroom in her own Borough house, even her own angry, bitter mother.
    “Where are my clothes?” she said, bewildered, even more childlike.
    They were in a pile at her feet, but when Noonan stepped toward her to pick them up, she hissed “Stay away!” and put one hand over the pale patch of her pubic hair.
    “Okay,” he said, taking a quick step back. “Okay.”
    “You get dressed, too.”
    He was as naked as she was, of course, and it occurred to him that when they’d made love she hadn’t actually seen him. Her expression now was identical to the one she had last evening when Larry, in his threadbare gravy-stained T-shirt, had joined them in