Bridge of Sighs

different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn’t this why we can’t help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven’t been?
    Love, Sarah.
    Everybody pays.
    “Hey, dickhead!” came the bartender’s voice as Noonan sat staring at the blurred page before him. “No crying in the bar!”
    Always a good rule.
             
     
    I T DIDN’T OCCUR to him until he couldn’t find Albany among the destinations on the big board at Grand Central Terminal that Sarah’s train might be leaving out of Penn Station. Which meant he’d wasted—what, twenty minutes? He’d taken a taxi uptown and now grabbed another, which immediately stalled in crosstown traffic. He used the time to consider how wonderful it was to live in Venice, a city with no cars, and to do the impossible arithmetic of Sarah’s head start. How long had it taken her to compose the letter at the gallery while he was drinking beer in that bar? Did she and her companion—who on earth was the black kid, anyway?—have to check out of a hotel first, or had they gone directly from the gallery to the train station? He assumed, though he wasn’t sure why, that the kid was traveling with her and not just someone she’d met and would leave in the city. Had their timing been good, or would they have to wait forty-five minutes or longer for the next northbound train? There were far too many variables to calculate.
    At Penn Station he didn’t see them in the main hall. According to the board, the only train that stopped in Albany was leaving in five minutes, so he noted the track number and dashed off, elbowing his way through the throngs of people. When he found the right track, the train, hissing loudly in anticipation of its departure, looked to have a good dozen cars. “Hurry,” a woman in an Amtrak uniform said when he loped toward her, apparently having concluded he meant to board, which he was tempted to, except there was no particular reason to believe they were on this train. They were just as likely to be on the one that left an hour ago, or the one leaving an hour from now. Anne, who’d still been at the gallery when he returned, had told him that all Sarah had said was they had a train to catch. The thing to do, he decided, was head down to the end of the platform and then start back, checking each lighted car. The black girl, bless her, would make Sarah easier to spot and maybe the departure would be delayed. All he really wanted to do was tell her she wasn’t alone in feeling cheated, even when, as in his case, life had given more and better than he deserved.
    But as he reached the end of the platform the train began moving and he peered anxiously into each car as it creaked past, his heart, unused to such physical exertion, thudding in his chest, his breathing shallow now. He’d just about concluded they weren’t aboard when he saw them coming toward him in the next-to-last car. If that was the same black girl from the gallery, and if the dark-haired woman in sunglasses beside her wasn’t just a stranger who happened to be occupying the next seat. What was it Sarah had said about unlikely odds? But it
had
to be them for all of this foolish commotion to have any meaning, he thought, for the constellation to
be
a constellation and not just a cluster of random stars.
    It was the girl who noticed him waving. Was it a look of recognition she gave him? Did she nudge the woman sitting next to her? Because she looked up from her book at that moment and saw him through the window as the train picked up speed. Did her look of surprise mean she recognized him, or was she simply alarmed that someone was standing so close to the edge of the platform? The Amtrak woman who’d advised him to hurry was now shouting, “Sir! Sir! Step
back
!” Was it Noonan’s imagination, or did the passenger break into Sarah’s radiant smile in that heartbeat before both the car she was in and the one behind it were gone?
    The Amtrak woman had him by the elbow now. “Sir,” she said. “You have to step back. The train’s gone. There’ll be another in an hour. Are you all right?”
    Out of breath, Noonan tried to tell her he was fine, but his heart was pounding even harder now, as if it meant to leap out of his chest, and he’d broken into a sweat. In a matter of seconds he was drenched, damned fool that he was, running like this when he hadn’t run in years.
    “Sir,” the woman said, “you need to sit down.” She was tugging at him now,