WHAT AT FIRST WAS AN ORDINARY COOL, MOONLIT NIGHT, a fog came and smothered. A drastic fog, it climbed the banks of the Willamette River to roll across, to take and hide the Irvington Neighborhood, where a block away from storefront glare and crawling traffic on Broadway, apartment two-stories lined the next street, Schuyler. A cabdriver there, early on the pickup, stretched his legs, conceding the weather had slowed him down, would cut his pay for the night. He rested on the right front fender, gave hawkish attention for anyone leaving Tillamook Court. Behind him, the dome light emblazing ROY'S CAB CALL 555-1212 seemed likely to attract nothing more than weepy fog.
The building door opened. A tall woman, lean--the cabby guessed her a looker up close--paused, clasped her gray overcoat, then left it open. Her wool sweater, which might have been basic black, was more than offset by her pants--blue textured Matka silk that flashed even in the foggy air as she hastened toward the cabby, the sidewalk.
His wristwatch showed 1:58 am. He unslouched, tugged the brim of his sat-upon cap. "You call for a taxi?"
The handsome woman, keeping from him the transitory joy of eye contact, turned right. "No, sorry," she said several steps away.
Her stride was with purpose. This was the last Kim expected to see of her apartment or what went with it. She scowled at the blurry street lights. That cabdriver, Why was he there? Were the gods toying with her again? Checking if she had lost nerve?
They would see. And they would be her only audience--this fog gave such sweet anonymity. She had held back, off and on, for weeks but soon with blissful seconds of wingless flight, pointing her toes--let the gods grade her high on form--it would end.
Yes, the gods saw this coming. They offered her signs all the time. Washing dishes, she would meditate on a sharp knife edge--far too slow, she knew that much--and music on the radio would segue, no pause, to Don McLean's "Starry Night." Poor Vincent. Beautiful, tortured Vincent.
Or she would be at the library picking up a new Grafton for the insomnia. On the bookshelf, completely misplaced, some agent for the gods had left PDR for Prescription Drugs.
So for the next half hour, Kim devoured the esoterica of phenobarbital, among other pharmaceutical choices, wondering how she could collect enough pills. And coincidence or not, Kim was now the same age--thirty-six--as Marilyn Monroe when that famed sister joined the exclusive sorority.
Kim shivered. Not that it mattered. She had no need to be warm again. Warm could stay away. All she needed was to walk less than two miles to the Broadway Bridge, where removing shoes she would have a railing to ease over and let go.
Then twenty yards distant, brake lights from the first passing car flared in the tumbling fog. White backup lights, then beside her, a power window came down.
"Excuse me, Miss, the idea of a date tonight fit your schedule?" He clicked on the headliner lamp. The man, older, looked like he could afford the car.
She lowered her head. "No, thanks, I'm out for a walk." She gathered her coat flaps. Was this the last judgment from the relentless gods, this man suggesting she was a whore? The gods got that wrong. She had no use for money, not after tonight.
He seemed to be smiling at the hesitancy she felt standing there, her best silk pants almost garish in the situation. Wearing a jogging suit, he leaned her way in the cream leather seat, arm and hand riding the maple veneer trim. "I got a few hundred dollars, what do you say, we go some place nice?"
This would be her last chance to do sex. And if this guy tested positive on every retrovirus known to man, did it matter? No, not for Ophelia adrift in the Willamette when the sun rose. It didn't matter, not really.
He pinched the remote fob on the ignition key, reached over, inched the door ajar like it was some bank vault.
She was inside.
"No names, please," she said, buckling in. "We don't need names for this." On the cushy leather seat, Kim noted the new car smell. A wedding ring glinted before he snapped off the light. "Nice car," she said.
"Jaguar. New model, leasing gets you in so easily." His face fell into a habitual smile, one that he perhaps had mastered. Kim guessed stockbroker or bank loan officer.
"You mind we run down to QwikBuy? I'm out of cigarettes," he said.
"No."
"I saw you walking back there, thought, Why is she out this late?"
Kim rested her head against the padded door pillar, noted the muted sound, Classical 88.8, what she listened to when she tired of song lyrics.
"Then I rolled down the window, saw your face in all this fog, wondered if I could make you happy."
"Listen, I'm beyond happy, okay?"
"I know a motel over on Sandy. It's clean."
"Take me there."
They eased into the half-empty parking lot. A big yellow, black, and red QwikBuy sign hissed above and cut the fog.
Kim peered inside. "I'm here all the time, stay put."
"Okay, as long as you're not having second thoughts."
"Your brand?"
"Picayune 100s. One pack's fine.
"Any special flavor on condoms?" Her wry smile was equal parts her not caring and the idea of being a step ahead of him.
"Hmmm. Lady's choice." He offered a twenty.
Kim rushed the snacks, candies, aspirin, cough drops to a corner shelf with its yin-yang combo of tampons and condoms.
Vikings. Nippled reservoir, no blowing off the sheath. Kim left those alone. Who would want a boring hydraulic engineer's latex fantasy?
She grabbed another box. Pyramids. Flat black latex. Sexy, but odd.
Put them back. The choices. Ribbed and colored. Lubricated plain. Lubricated with spermicide.
Sheers, "The next best thing to nothing at all." Those she took.
The cashier, she had seen elsewhere. Tall, outdoorsy, over-the-collar nutmeg hair. She glanced at the Jag. Her companion seemed troubled.
"This," she said, package of Sheers on the counter. "And one pack Picayune 100s." Then Kim remembered. The parked van on Weidler weeks ago. This cashier guy, arms on the passenger-side window, talking with, she must have been his wife. The guy's facial stubble, how he dressed did not fool Kim--they lived out of the van.
He gave Kim a slow count on the change, like he was new to the employ of QwikBuy. Kim wanted to imagine him happy. She knew better.
They checked into The Breakers, a utility motel out on Sandy Boulevard. The night clerk, a Sikh with a flawlessly tied white turban crowning his thin dark face and darker beard, asked if adult movies might be of interest. Kim's companion answered no and paid the thirty-five in cash.
In room 104, he dead-bolted the door, skinned the cellophane from the cigarette pack, lit up, and then in the lone Naugahyde chair sat, moving nothing more than hand and cigarette.
She shrugged off her coat.
He stared. With an exhibitionist's appetite, Kim unclasped the silk pants and steadying herself, one hand on the dead TV, slipped them from her lithe legs.
Her unsmiling companion sucked and blew from the Picayune lodged in his fingers.
A drafty chill snuck over her skin and she longed to be warm in bed, body on body, fast-bound for a leg-shuddering climax.
But for now she had to be this stripper. In the orangy light, his eyes did no more than climb her legs and fasten on the mystery of the lacy white keystone at the confluence of her thighs. She did not have all night and pulled the sweater over her head, tossed it, and shook her hair.
"Well, you going to do anything besides smoke?" Kim was down to teddy and panties. "I didn't come here for goose bumps."
He crushed the cigarette to a disfigured butt. "Listen, maybe you'll think I'm crazy, but how are you with just talking. I'll still give you two hundred."
Her jaw slackened. She studied him hard. So much for the promise of that arty Jaguar the other side of the hollow door, its engine ticking away, cooling down.
"Oh, a sense of humor, these gods, I'm with a eunuch."
"I don't mean anything personal, I just feel like talking."
"I could be doing better things."
"What?" He flared up another cigarette. "Out walking in the fog, mulling things over."
Kim slipped in the bed, side nearest him, pulling a thin blanket over her legs. She pushed her hair back with both hands and scowled. "I've given up on thinking."
He tapped the cigarette pack, held it out. She had quit more than a year ago, but it did not really matter. She imbibed the Zippo flame, took a short drag, let the smoke play at her throat and nostrils, then leak out.
"So tell me, your tramp steamer of worry, what's it called?"
"Oh, reasons a guy my age stays awake at night."
"Reasons being?"
"Well, my business partner is a crook. Have to engineer our parting without it costing me everything."
"And?"
"Item two, our son, an only child I should add. Supposed to go to college this fall. Now that truly seems a dream. In with the wrong crowd. Pretty much a waste. I don't know him anymore."
"That it?" She dangled the cigarette over the Premier Cable ashtray on the night stand, and with the index finger of her other hand tapped off ash.
"Oh, one more. My sound-sleeping wife. She's either having an affair, which I doubt, or, I suppose, is now interested in things other than sex. It's been months."
"Hmmm. Sounds like you've got too many distractions to do any bungee-less bridge jumping tonight."
"Suicide? Why do you bring that up?"
"I don't know. I was headed for the Broadway Bridge."
He said nothing.
Kim crushed the spent cigarette, motioned for one more.
"Listen, put it this way. I can't jump your bones, I can't have any silliness before I off myself. See what you've done?"
"So, you gonna wait, another night?"
She held the lit cigarette out sideways, eyeing the orange ember, as if mesmerized. He had not openly rejected her. No, it was behind the casual, wealthy front, this tense middle-aged man wanting to talk. Talking, thinking, talking, thinking--just more dust bunnies for her mind. And to jump she needed an empty mind.
"Who knows? Can't hump now. Can't jump now," she said.
"I take it world's not done you any favors."
"I'm no judge on that. Listen, I want to ask you a question."
"Shoot."
"My guess is you've never been unfaithful to your wife. Or, if you have, it was a room-spinning alcoholic haze, right?" His eyes averted hers. "Anyway tonight, you get this idea--pick up some woman, take her to a cheesy motel room," Kim said, wanding the room with her cigarette. "No sex, you stay faithful to the wife you're thinking about leaving, am I right?"
"Possibly. It was just your face back there, something about your eyes gave me this chance."
Kim's head angled over: No way would she indulge him for any replay now. "Say, you could drive me to the bridge."
"Why? You said you won't jump."
"Probably not. But a few weeks, I get my head empty again, I might."
"So you still need to go to the bridge?"
"My personal test. See if I can look, not touch, too."
"I'd feel badly, you went ahead."
"You should feel bad. Messed with my timing." She kicked back the bedding, exposing her legs again, oblivious to any chill.
"That cigarette, what are you doing?"
Kim gripped the cigarette between her thumb and fingers like a surgeon's scalpel, aimed it down and not breathing brought it near her left thigh. Her eyes attended the ember like a mandala. The gods had to admit her intentions were sincere now. She eased it closer so a point of pale skin turned warm orange.
"This won't be a lengthy procedure," she said with a sharp intake of air.
"I were you, I'd think about that more."
She pursed her lips, exhaling softly, as softly as she gave the cigarette ember to her skin. Her thigh stung.
Her eyes blinked and stayed open. A red mark appeared on the hollow of her thigh, the pair of which might have held him fast. She rolled sideways, squelched the cigarette in the ashtray.
"There," she said. "Now the bridge."
"That wasn't because I only wanted talk, was it?"
"No, a souvenir--oh, that smarts--reminds me this close I came and, zigzag, what it was, it left me."
They both got in the car and soon headed west on Broadway. The time at the motel, though brief, allowed the fog to lift and restore sharpness to the neon signs. Block after block with, at that hour, more cars parked than moving, the car lapped up pavement. Then the lighter on the dash popped.
"You know, my last boyfriend smoked Picayune 100s," Kim said, apropos of nothing more than memories--men who sometimes changed her plan, which now, revamped, was unfolding faster, with less consequence than when she left the apartment intent on a simple, final walk through the swirling fog.
"That good or bad," he asked.
"Oh, no morality to it all. Just another coincidence. They happen all the time."
Outside, on the right, a tubular staff towered, held aloft a green, yellow BP sign with halogens that bathed, by the near gas island, a silver Outback and its driver, stock-still, staring ahead. His not driving anywhere, his probably waiting for change reminded Kim of tossing coins with the I Ching back at the apartment. The gist of which was crossing a river. An odd sensation between her shoulder blades told her the gods were in on what she was doing. But the hexagram said crossing a river to meet a great man. How could she do that and still jump? She was out of time to decipher that. She had to get on about it, leave the apartment.
But now, seated next to this man, amid the casual wealth of his car, the looming Broadway Bridge in sight, Kim needed no more convincing the gods were for real. She had to go along, help them; she had to nudge this ripe situation.
"Can you wait for me the other end of the bridge?" she said, for was he not, without question, her great man?
"Sure, I can do that. What about where the bicycle crossing turnout is, the other end?"
"Perfect," Kim said.
The approach, this end, to the massive iron-plate drawbridge, however, gave him precious little room to pull over. Before closing the door, she leaned in--said a rushed good-bye--to let her hand once more indulge the soft feel of the leather seat. What might have been his skin.
In its retreat, the fog thickened along the river banks. Beneath the shroud of mist, fog horns crooned, one here, one there. She started the slight incline of the bridge walkway. His car taillights sped forward, broken glimpses between bridge chords, then dissolved in the fog envelope.
She tugged her coat flaps to blunt the wet, cutting chill. A freight train air horn blared from the opposite river bank. The night air was spiced, she guessed, with the off-odor of rehydrated bird droppings that speckled the riveted structure next to her. She was back to those purposeful steps from earlier outside the apartment. Once at the crown of the bridge, she could look, see what she might do.
Below, fog had filled in the river, enticing her with a vaporous blanket into which she might toss herself. She stroked the rough chipped paint of the railing pipe. It was something to remember: Another foggy night might be the time to jump.
That delicate sear on her left thigh wanted to be touched. And oddly, both of her legs felt strong, vibrant as she approached the crown of the bridge. Was it the truck rumbling by, trailing diesel fumes, that sent tremors beneath her feet, that brought her legs alive?
No, she had thought too much about jumping. The lithe musculature of her legs was disobeying her in excitement at this last moment: They would propel her over the railing into the fog bank.
Kim hugged herself, fearful the gods were ready to play one last trick. Tease her, say a great man was on the other side and then at the top of the bridge short-circuit her brain for one fateful misplay.
She slid her tongue on her teeth, found the last essence of
tobacco from the cigarettes they shared. Up there, invisible, was he standing beside the open car door, emergency flasher counting off too many seconds? Did he believe she would not jump? Did he think she shammed him with the burn and the vow, that maybe it was some tipoff she would do away with the rest of her body too?
Her legs ached with desire, a desire she gave into.
She ran. Like a gawky teenager, she ran. Her long steps echoed across the wooden planks of the boardwalk and cool air stuck in her throat.
Then winded, droplets on her face, she was at the bridge crown and held the railing with both hands, her body draped to rest there.
She panted. She had not run so hard since she was a teenager. Was this like being a teenager again? Panting after those golden moments when she made out for the first time? Her head hanging over, she sought out the river, saw nothing but steam and realized her legs wanted to run more. She rubbed her hands into her face, tasted the salt of her own tears.
Kim thought again about that lonely man the other end of the bridge and how he might be suffering with every minute, unsure if he would next hear a water splash. She raised her body from the rail and ran.
A passing car honked. Did the guy think a woman odd running, coat flapping, through the fog at three in the morning? She waved. She felt generous. Her great man waited.
Then, the end of the bridge. Her throat tightened as if what her eyes did not see, she could call out from the fog. The turnout for the bicyclists was empty of cars.
There, with the downslope of Broadway left and Lovejoy right from the Y-intersection, she remembered he had said her eyes gave him a chance. She bounced the button for the crossing signal bicyclists used.
Where was he?
She walked a small circle on the sidewalk, waiting.
Why couldn't he stop?
Maybe she would see him again. More probably, the hexagrams would not let it be.
She crossed the road sans bicycle, looked down on Union Train Station. Before the station portico, the outside dome lights of two taxicabs glowed misty. She could take a cab. She walked faster. That would be safer.
"Damn," she said, and it was not the money he skipped paying on her mind. It was simply that now she found she had lost something, something she would have never missed if only she jumped.