Bridge of Sighs

he said.
    “Nothing,” his father repeated, nodding at the road ahead, his birthmark pulsing. After a moment he said, “Do you have any idea why God made women? Answer me.”
    He had no idea what his father was getting at, so he said no, he didn’t.
    “Then I’ll tell you. God made women so we’d know how to go about ruining our lives. You don’t believe it, just look at me.”
    But Noonan refused to. He, too, stared out through the windshield at the road.
    “You got something to say, D.C.?” He adjusted the rearview mirror so he could watch her response. “You want to correct me, maybe? You got a different view you’d like to express?”
    Noonan turned to look at his mother, and her eyes were full as she shook her head.
    His father nodded in disgust. “Look at her,” he told Noonan. “Take a good look. You want to end up saddled with something like that? That’s your idea of a future?”
    He looked down at the cast on his wrist, wishing it were bigger, heavier, and that he could bring it down on his father’s head like a club. He wouldn’t have cared if his father wrecked the car as a result. If they all died, even his little brothers, that would’ve been just fine with him.
    “I didn’t think so,” his father concluded.
    The last thing Noonan had wanted was to attend military school, but he’d gone willingly enough. The fight with Jerzy Quinn, the fact that he’d become that other person, had frightened him. How was it possible, he wondered, for a person to simply vacate his own body like that and then return to it afterward? Even scarier was his sense that such an ability might be a gift, one he’d have need of again in this life, perhaps often. To look at his father was to be reminded that the fight had exhausted neither his contempt nor his rage. Maybe being sent away from home would be for the best.
    And there was another reason. If he went away, he wouldn’t have to look—knowing what he knew about the West End woman—at his mother. Because when he’d turned around and looked at her in the backseat, though he didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, he’d seen what his father meant.
             
     
    N OONAN HEARD L ICHTNER stirring around upstairs and hoped he wouldn’t find an excuse to come down. Evangeline’s scent, along with the stale odor of their sex, was still in the room. Only then did it occur to Noonan that perhaps it was a foolish thing to have left him alone in the studio with his canvases. How would he feel if he went up in the morning and found his guest gone, his paintings slashed, his New York show up in smoke? Would he
feel
at all? Tonight, watching Lichtner ricochet among his myriad emotions—rage, indignation, pity, affection, confusion—had been exhausting, but he’d been envious, too. That he himself had felt so little physical pleasure with the other man’s wife didn’t trouble him as much as that he felt even less emotionally.
    Rising, he went barefoot to the base of the stairs to listen. For what, the sound of canvases being ripped to shreds? The muffled sound of weeping? But it was quiet above, suggesting that Lichtner had either fallen asleep or, more likely, was lying awake in the dark, brooding on the mystery of his marriage. Why he wasn’t able to fill Evangeline’s life to the brim, as he’d once surely hoped to. If he was honest, he was also contemplating why she no longer was sufficient to his own happiness. How had they managed to disappoint each other so? Was his decision to give up writing novels, something he apparently wasn’t very good at, to do travel articles, at which he’d succeeded, the beginning of their troubles? Had she seen that as cowardice, a premature admission of defeat? And what of Evangeline herself? How had she disappointed him? By not being as beautiful as when they’d married? Was he
that
shallow? Or was it that she no longer needed him, that her passion now was her struggling gallery? If she could make a success of it, she’d be free of him. Was that what she was working toward so purposefully? Or had something else poisoned their affection, the miasma of Venice itself, too many summers spent breathing in toxic vapors from the canals? Blame, yet again, the water? Noonan found himself wondering what they’d been like as kids, and if what ailed adults could be traced back that far. Lucy, at least to judge from his letters, was the same as the boy he’d been, only more so, and Jerzy Quinn’s