Bridge of Sighs

probably been sex. It might be true, as her father always let on, that her mother was a disappointing intellectual companion. But her mother had been hinting, too. Sarah had just been too young to catch on, and of course her mother wouldn’t have wanted her to anyway.
    As a teenager, she’d understood why her mother had lovers at the Sundry Arms, and the questions her father asked every September when she returned from Long Island suggested that he understood all too well that the freedom afforded by their separation was, for her, largely sexual. Sarah now suspected his feelings about that must have been ambivalent. He always maintained that once his novel was finished and he was famous, her mother would come crawling back. But hard as it must’ve been for him to admit, he also must have known that he’d never be able to keep up with her in the most important respect.
He talks a good game.
That remark surely burrowed down deep and rankled. His retort took him over a decade to compose and ran to fifteen hundred single-spaced pages. Back then Sarah didn’t understand how he could spend so much time and effort on his novel, only to give up when a handful of editors didn’t like it. Now she did. Those rejections came at him on two levels: first, he wasn’t a very good writer—he didn’t even
talk
as good a game as he’d hoped—and also his wife had been right about that other thing he wasn’t much good at.
    What particularly troubled Sarah about the final year of her mother’s life was that her courage had failed her so swiftly. The year before, she’d been roiling with her usual defiance, declaiming against men like Sarah’s father and against marriage as institutionalized slavery. Then the change. As if one morning she’d looked at herself in the mirror and saw into the future, that before long even the most desperate and befuddled of the Sundry Arms divorcés would stop coming to her for solace. Probably she saw, too, where all the martinis had settled, in the dark bags under her eyes, her sunken cheeks and breasts. Possibly it wasn’t even the bathroom mirror so much as the one on men’s faces, where she didn’t register anymore or, worse, she registered briefly but then didn’t pass the test. Sex had been the currency of her life, and soon she’d be broke. If her husband had talked a good game, well, at least
he
was still in business. That was something you could still do, and maybe even get better at, in your advancing years. Whereas she had
fucked
a good game, which game would soon be over, with nothing to replace it. For all Sarah knew, her father may even have warned her about the day when she’d flirt and no one would flirt back, when men no longer would gather around her at parties for the privilege of looking down her blouse, when she’d have to face what little remained and face it alone. Maybe she’d married Harold Sundry to keep that last part of her father’s prediction from coming true.
    But Sarah’s worst fear was that she herself had played a part in her fatal decision to give up her hard-won freedom and remarry. That final summer she’d been too preoccupied with adolescent concerns to really take in what her mother was going through. And that drawing of her in her bathrobe—looking old and exhausted, as lifeless as the ash on the end of her cigarette. Sarah had spent the summer looking at herself in the mirror, studying her own metamorphosis from girl to young woman. Had she been less self-absorbed, she might’ve eased her mother’s desperation and counseled her against doing anything out of fear. “What you don’t understand,” her mother had told her when she saw the bathrobe drawing, “is that one day you’ll
be
that woman.” One day she, too, would be lost, alone, in search of a destination.
    And was she that now? Certainly her mother’s prediction hadn’t come true in the sense she’d meant it at the time—that one day Sarah would wake up and discover that youth and beauty fled and she was no longer the object of men’s desire, that menopause would erode her self-confidence, leaving her frightened and desperate, grasping at straws. Because Sarah had emphatically
not
become that woman. Time had taken its toll, of course, there was no denying it. Her body had thickened, her hair grayed. Lines had appeared at the corners of her eyes and deepened, and the skin along her neck had grown slack. But menopause hadn’t undermined her, nor had she felt either