Bridge of Sighs

are, and I’d be right where I am. The shit that matters, you’ve got no say in.”
    “You could be right.”
    “Fuck that, I
am
right.” And he downed his second whiskey by way of punctuation.
    “Okay,” Noonan said, “but I’m going to have to close up when you finish your beer.”
    Jerzy nodded, conceding this and every other lousy necessity in a world full of them. “Thanks for staying open. It’s my birthday.”
    “I didn’t know that,” Noonan admitted, wishing him a happy one.
    “Thing is, we never should have fought, you and me,” he said, then drained his beer. He still didn’t reach for his wallet, and Noonan guessed he wouldn’t. It was, after all, his birthday. “I never wanted to, really.”
    “Me neither,” Noonan said.
    “Hell,” Jerzy said, sliding off his stool. “I knew that. Tell me something, though. You ever see Karen anymore?”
    His second cousin, the one he’d beaten at strip poker. Noonan told him no, that he’d seen her a couple of times on the street and said hello, but that was it.
    “I should hope,” Jerzy said. “She’s three hundred pounds if she’s an ounce. We’d have to find somebody else to fight over if we ever decided to go at it again.”
    Noonan told him he didn’t see that happening, and Jerzy said no, he didn’t either, and they shook hands on it, Jerzy’s grip feeling strong in his bad wrist. When the door closed behind him, Noonan locked it, and he never saw Jerzy again. How long, he couldn’t help wondering, had Jerzy been dead inside before he finally allowed himself to drift across that median? Thinking back on that night at Murdick’s, Noonan could see that he’d already been a fatalist, convinced there wasn’t a thing you could do about “the shit that matters.” At twenty, the futility of the struggle had come home to him powerfully. The girl you were fighting over would weigh three hundred pounds in two or three years, so what was the point? Which left the long second act during which nothing changed. Like so many second acts, Jerzy’s seemed unnecessary, especially once you knew the first and third. Sometimes you didn’t even need to know the third. Face it, Noonan’s own second act was dragging a bit. Assuming he was still
in
it and hadn’t drifted, unaware, into his third. His listless affair with Evangeline Lichtner certainly felt like second-act stasis. Was it possible, he wondered sleepily, there’d been more to Jerzy’s second act than he knew? Maybe the daughter he’d seemed fond of had unexpectedly given him a link to a future he hadn’t been able to imagine that night in Murdick’s. Fatalism was difficult to maintain in the presence of a child, so maybe. He hoped so, and he hoped it had been an accident and not that Jerzy steered deliberately into third-act resolution.
    Noonan stuffed the obituary and photos and note back into the envelope, wondering again how it had come to be addressed by Sarah when its contents were pure Lucy. A tiny mystery in the context of the larger one he still thought about from time to time—speaking of long, tedious second acts—what Sarah’s life must’ve been like married for over thirty years to such a conventional, cautious man. Sarah, whose spirit at eighteen had yearned, every bit as much as his own, for adventure. Her mother had been a bit of a free spirit, Noonan recalled, and Sarah had admired that wildness, maybe even imagining she was the same way herself, deep down. But in the end she’d opted for stability and reassurance. And who knew? Maybe she was happy. Some people managed to be, despite all manner of ill fortune, just as a great many of the world’s fortunates somehow contrived to be miserable. A sensible person, Sarah had probably made her peace early on. Even as a girl she’d been determined to take responsibility for the hand she’d been dealt, despite not having cut the cards, and the dealer a known cheat. Determined, also, to make the best of things, to see the glass as half full when it was three-quarters empty.
    Had she married him instead of Lucy, a different sort of peace would have been required, one that would have ensured an even greater misery. True, she’d have been miserable in more interesting places than Thomaston, New York, and she’d have had more of the company that misery is said to love. She probably would’ve gotten on well with his ex-wives, who still got together every year without fail, like survivors, to wonder what there’d