29

Walt Whitman Bridge

We crossed the Delaware by way of the Walt Whitman Bridge, die Whitmanbrücke. The tires of my car hummed below us. I saw the lights of a tanker on the river. A big ship, headed out to sea.

“Boats against the current,” said Clark contemptuously.

I remembered my Whitman translation project from the summer of 1980, how I’d worked on that fucker day after day in my bedroom on the third floor of my mother’s house with my door locked. As I worked I wore a bra and a blue knit top and a black skirt. So I wouldn’t get distracted. When I wasn’t wearing that gear I’d kept it stashed in a secret panel below my window. A nice thing about growing up in an old house: all the hidey-holes. In addition to the skirt and the top I had a few other things stashed in there. A pair of clip-on earrings. A copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. I can still remember the opening paragraph, in which she lamented the sense of dissatisfaction in the hearts of American women. I was well aware, as I sat there translating Leaves of Grass into German, that Betty probably wasn’t thinking of me as someone who was suffering from the problem she was describing.

But you should have, Betty, I thought. You should have.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Boats against the stupid current,” said Clark Gurganis. “From the ending of The Great Gatsby. Isn’t that how it goes?” He ran his hand through his beard. “Something about how we’re all rowing boats against the current but we’re idiots if we think that’s going to do anything.”

I thought about it. At one time I could have recited the passage. But now I couldn’t quite come up with it.

We reached the other side of the Walt Whitman Bridge. I remembered how once there’d been a liquor store situated on the Jersey banks of the river, back when the drinking age had been twenty-one in Pennsylvania but eighteen in New Jersey. I’d made the Jersey run with Casey a bunch of times in high school. We’d felt so sophisticated. We drove back across the bridge bearing our treasure: bottles of Southern Comfort, sloe gin, Kahlua.

“That has got to be the worst book ever written,” Clark said.

I remembered the first time I ever went into a bar—I was with Tripper and Casey and this other friend of ours, Otto. Atlantic City, New Jersey, summer of 1975. We went into a place called the Sand Bar, underage, thinking we were very tough. Ordered four white Russians. Which was Kahlua with milk. A hooker in the corner cast an eye our way and smiled. Four preppy boys from the suburbs, drinking milk at the bar.

“Wait, what?” I said.

Clark pressed the electric window of my Prius all the way down and stuck his head out like he was a St. Bernard. The wind blew his hair and beard around. He opened his mouth and the air filled his cheeks. Then he pulled his head back in and shook his head and said, “Blugh, blugh, blugh.”

“Why do you hate The Great Gatsby?” I said.

He ran his hand down his puffy face. “It’s bullshit,” he said.

“The Great Gatsby?” I said. “Why is it bullshit?”

“All that crap about how you can’t make yourself into somebody else, of course you can. Isn’t that what we’re doing right now, you and me, Judith Carrigan? Takin’ a mulligan! You know, I thought I was a loser because of a thing that happened. But now I realize it was a gift. A chance for me to finally be myself.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Who’s that?”

“A veterinarian,” he said.

“That’s your true self, a veterinarian?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I was gonna be one, then I got mixed up in all this bullshit.”

The road divided before me. I had to choose between the Atlantic City Expressway and the Black Horse Pike. I went with the latter. Because it was more deserted.

“I don’t know,” I said to Clark. “I guess I look at it a different way.”

“Yeah,” said Clark. “You’re some expert?”

“I’ve seen some things,” I said.

“What do you know, about what I gotta be,” he snapped, then heaved a sigh. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be. I’m like, whoa. You can’t imagine what I been through. At that place.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.” He was considering some issues. I took another look at him. Even though he was my age, or nearly, something about the man seemed like an overgrown baby, beard notwithstanding. He was puffy and pink. It had seemed like an act of mercy, giving him a ride. Now I wondered.

He laughed. “You know, even the name of that book shows you how stupid it is, Great Gatsby. He isn’t so great.”

“What, you think they should have named it, like, The Above Average Gatsby? The Pretty Good Gatsby?”

He laughed again. Clark raised and lowered the window on his side of the car like he had never seen electric windows before. Then he reached around to scratch his left shoulder blade with his right hand. He was certainly twitchy, I thought. I remembered how he’d squirmed when he saw the approaching beacons of the police.

“The Stupid Gatsby,” he said. “The Lousy Gatsby.”

“I wasn’t trying to insult you before,” I said. “When I asked you about it. I’m just curious why you think it’s such a bad book.”

“Seriously?” said Clark. “It’s like he says, whoever you are when you’re twenty years old, that’s who you’re stuck being forever. Gatsby leaves Fargo or whatever, turns himself into a billionaire so he can impress this girl, right? And that means he has to die? I mean, fuck. I would love a million dollars. What’s the point of living if you have to stay in North Dakota forever? Our whole lives are just one big second chance!”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” I said to the stranger. “Sure, you can start over. But everybody needs a past. Otherwise you just turn into a ghost.”

“That’s not true!” said Clark angrily. “Don’t be fuckin’ talking that way!”

“I’m not talking any way,” I said. “I’m just saying, you have to be careful. Or you wind up having two lives instead of one.”

“I want to have two lives,” shouted Clark. “That’s the whole point!”

“Nobody gets to live twice,” I said.

“So what, you think everybody just has to stay the same, forever? Whatever awful thing you did, that’s who you are for good?”

“Not exactly,” I said. I thought about my mother. I saw her name on that stone.

“Then what?”

“Where I live in Maine,” I said, then paused. “Where I used to live in Maine, there’s a marina. By the marina there’s a sign: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR WAKE.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So. It’s like that.”

I reached down to the radio and turned the switch. I found WXPN, Temple University’s jazz station. It was playing old tunes from the 1930s—Coleman Hawkins, by the sound of it. “You carry the past with you. Even if there’s a before, and an after, in your life. It’s still the same life. The trick is to build a bridge between that and what comes later. So you have a sense of wholeness? I mean, everybody needs a past.”

“Depends on the past,” said Clark.

I stared into the beams of my headlights. “We are who we have been,” I said.

“Man, I hope not,” said Clark.

The Coleman Hawkins tune on the radio ended, and something else began. It sounded like a player piano. Old-time rinky-tink. Clark cracked his window again. The wind rushed in.

I stared into the beams of my headlights. “But the past still makes us who we are,” I said.

“Just stop it,” said Clark. “You’re trying to trick me.”

“Of course I’m not—”

“Just be quiet. I don’t want to hear about it!”

“You don’t have to shout.”

“I do have to shout!” he shouted. “You’re trying to tell me I can’t start over! But you don’t get to make that decision! I do! Okay, Judith Carrigan? I do. So you can shut the fuck up.”

“There’s no reason to get angry.”

“You’re the one who made me angry!” said Clark. “You and your Lousy Gatsby.” He reached down and snapped off the radio. “And this music from a hundred years ago! You’re trying to suck me back into the past, Judith Carrigan. Well, I’m not fucking going.”

I didn’t say anything, but I could feel my heart pounding. We drove for a long time, not talking. I stared into the dark, and I realized how far we were from anyone. All around us now were thick forests.

“I’m not trying to suck you into the past,” I said quietly. “I’m just saying you have to make peace with it.”

His leg started thumping, up and down. I couldn’t tell if he was aware of it or not.

“Pull over,” he said.

“What?”

“I gotta go,” said Clark. “Pull over.”

I could feel my heart beating in my breast. “Why don’t we wait until we get to—”

“I gotta go now, goddammit,” said Clark. “Pull over.”

I slowed the car and pulled us over to the side of the road. There was an old barn there, its roof caved in. I put the car in park.

Clark got out of the car, then paused to look at me. “You go too,” he said.

“I don’t have to go,” I said, although this was not actually true. It was well past time.

“Come on now, Judith Carrigan,” he said. “We should go together. To show we trust each other.”

There was a silence between us. I turned off the engine and got out of the car and walked toward the barn. “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to go on this side, and you go on that one.”

“Sure,” said Clark. “Whatever.” I walked around the back of the barn through tall grass. The night was full of sounds—crickets and cicadas, creatures croaking from the woods. Over my head, the sky was abundant with the stars of late summer. I looked at my watch. It was midnight.

I squatted in the tall grass. Then I headed back to the car.

Clark wasn’t there when I got back. I got behind the wheel and looked toward the barn. But there wasn’t any sign of him.

The Prius didn’t make any noise as I inched it forward. I was on battery power, and the car was almost silent.

The car edged toward the curb. I looked back at the barn, but there wasn’t any sign of him. I punched the pedal to the floor, and the car took off down the Black Horse Pike.

Okay, I thought. So that was a mistake. I’d been so freaked out from the funeral, and from my surreal rescue of Rachel, that I’d allowed myself to become stupid with self-pity. So many terrible things had happened to me, many of them the result of my own choices. I’d acted all along like being trans was some terrible curse, and that dealing with it demanded all this insane subterfuge. But half of the trouble that had befallen me was a result of that subterfuge itself. In so many ways, I had simply traded one secret for another. Maybe, I thought, there would be hope for me yet if I simply lived my truth out in the open. It was possible that the biggest transformation in my life was not going from male to female; it was going from a person burdened by secrets to a person who had none.

My heart felt like a human hand was squeezing on it. I rolled down the windows and let the air blow my hair around. I smelled pine trees, and tar. I raised one hand to my chest and held it there. In that moment I remembered that portrait that Rachel had painted of me in college. I would never be a saint, of course. But I had known what it was like to feel the presence of something larger than myself.

Something moved in the rearview mirror.

I looked up and saw his face, grinning at me. Gurganis was in the backseat.

I wanted to tell him about the thing that I felt in my heart. It was so large. But I couldn’t talk. His fingers wrapped around my throat, and with those fingers he squeezed my life to nothing. He cried out with a low moaning sound, as if he were the one whose life was ending.

A loon called to its mate from a dark pond. I know where you are.

Tripper stood before the old X-ray machine. He had been there before.

“Wanker,” said the voice. He looked around the destroyed infirmary room. It hadn’t been touched. The sheets of plywood still stood against one wall. The rotted beds for the sick were all in a row.

“Show yourself,” he said. His shoe stubbed against something, and he reached down. A perfectly round white rock was there on the ground. He picked it up. It was heavy.

Now everything was quiet. He remembered Casey being moved to tears by the old operating theater, the long table, the dark stains of blood on the floor. He’d been annoyed by Casey’s weepiness back then. What are you crying for? he’d said critically. He would have liked to have been able to tell Casey that he’d been wrong, back then. There’d been plenty to cry about.

Now everything was silent again. He stood still, listening, but there wasn’t a sound except the far off wailing of a police siren.

“Hello?” he called. Tripper felt sweat dripping down his temples. She did not respond.

“Look, I’m sorry that you’re dead,” he said.

She didn’t respond.

“It was an accident. You know that now. I was trying to protect Benny from harm. Was that so unforgivable? Because of that you’re going to haunt me now?”

There wasn’t even an echo of his voice in the old medical wing. The broken plaster and the rotted beds sucked up all sound.

“Maisie says we should tell the truth, just come clean. Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That we should just come clean?”

He stood there with the white rock in his hand, looking into the near darkness. Something creaked in the corner.

“Who’s there?” he said. “Is that you?”

The footsteps came again.

“Show yourself,” he said. He stood there listening. The sirens drew nearer. Water was dripping somewhere.

“See, I don’t know if telling the truth makes any difference anymore. We’ve lived our lives. I didn’t get to live the life I wanted either. You’re that, and I’m this.”

There was another creak in the corner. Tripper said it again. “You’re that, and I’m this.” He turned toward the corner. A cold wind blew across his face.

“You want to punish the guilty party?” he said. “Show me the guilty party and I’ll punish them.”

Then something white flashed past his legs. Tripper shouted. Now a figure was before him, raising its arms out in the shadows. It was coming for him. He raised his arm and threw the rock toward the specter. The words on the shimmering wall read INCOMING PATIENTS HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY. The mirror shattered as the stone hit it. The shards flew in every direction.

“Ugh,” said Tripper as one tore into his leg. He collapsed on one knee. There was another slash in his belly, and Tripper rolled to the floor. He put his hands on his wound, the blood gushing into his fingers. Then he raised his hands to his face and looked at it, his own blood.

A white cat crept back into the room and stood by him. She reached out tentatively with one paw, then batted him in the face. “Ow,” said Tripper. The cat batted him again, as if slapping him first on one cheek, then the other.

“Bloody hell,” said a voice, and the girl tiptoed into the operating room. In one hand she held the Nixon mask. Her boyfriend, the guy with the tattoos, was right behind her.

“What’s all this?” he said.

“Wanker busted the mirror,” said the girl. “I was just fuckin’ with ’im, and now he’s bloody murdered himself.”

“Ugh,” said Tripper, turning to the couple. He had seen them before. “Help me.”

“Should we ’elp ’im?” said the girl.

“Fuck this,” said the boy. “Let’s bolt. Come on.”

“Help me,” said Tripper again.

The girl took one last look at him, then threw the Nixon mask onto the floor. Her boyfriend grabbed her hand, and then the two of them ran down the hall.

Tripper listened to the sound of their steps receding. He reached down once more and felt the blood pulsing into his fingertips. He was surrounded by the shards of the broken mirror. “Help me,” he whispered. “Someone.”

There was a quiet purring. The cat looked at Tripper with her green, unforgiving eyes. She touched the empty mask on the floor with one paw, to see whether there was anything inside.