Redemption Read Free Page A

and then the glow was gone and she was looking at me searchingly.
    â€œAll right,” she said. “I’m not being very pleasant. You’re absolutely right. You saved my life. I would have done it, but I won’t do it again. Do you live here alone—in this big place?”
    â€œAll alone. We bought the apartment some forty years ago, when I got my first teaching job at Columbia. It was very inexpensive then. Well, what wasn’t? When my wife died three years ago, I simply went on living here. My memories are here. At my age, you don’t have much more than that—looking backward.”
    She was staring out of the living-room windows, where the view opened onto the Hudson River. One of the old Dayline ships was chugging by, and closer to the Jersey shore, a tanker, high in the water, was putting out toward the harbor and the sea. The wind made the river choppy, and each small wave was topped with a golden glint of sunlight.
    â€œIt’s so beautiful,” she said.
    â€œYes—it is. The first time I considered doing what you were thinking of last night, I looked out of those windows, as I had a thousand times before.”
    She nodded.
    â€œBreakfast, Elizabeth. Not philosophy. We don’t know each other well enough for that. I make coffee, and I have milk and dry cereal, four different kinds. The coffee’s instant and I cheat by making it in the microwave.”
    She had two cups of coffee and two bowls of cornflakes and sliced banana. One of the nicer things about my age is that women trust you; they figure that the libido has shrunk to a point beyond threat. She asked what I had taught, and I explained that I was a lawyer who avoided both clients and courtrooms by teaching contract law in a university law school. She was well educated, college and then a master’s in American art. She wanted to talk. That didn’t surprise me. People talk to me easily. She talked to me about the day that led up to the bridge. She talked about her failed marriage, but the last straw was quite literally a matter of Lalique goblets. Life is filled with non sequiturs.
    Her ex-husband, a broker on Wall Street, had come to her apartment unannounced the day before. It began with a gold bracelet. Her mother, who had died six years ago, had left her some money—almost all of it gone by now. Elizabeth had married the son of wealthy parents; and the heavy bracelet, which had cost her three thousand dollars, was a gift to him on the first anniversary of their wedding. Three thousand dollars for a bracelet was outside my scale of values and probably outside of hers, as well; but in her husband’s world the scale was different, and I didn’t interrupt. Her husband had a fancy for gold jewelry, but he never wore the bracelet she had given him. She took to wearing it herself. Now he remembered it, and he came for it.
    â€œIt was the last indignity,” she said. “No, the goblets were the last—but you don’t want to listen to this.”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œI’m keeping you from your work. I’m a stranger to you. I don’t know why I’m here talking about these things.” She rose to look around for her coat.
    â€œI have no work,” I said gently. “Please don’t go—not yet—please. I have an obligation to you.”
    â€œWhat obligation? You kept me from a stupid suicide. I have an obligation to you; you have no obligation to me.”
    â€œHave you been able to talk to anyone else about this?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIt’s very important that you talk—important to you and to me, as well.”
    â€œIke,” she said, but she was having difficulty with the name. “You do want me to call you Ike?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhy don’t you let me go?”
    â€œGood heavens, I’m not keeping you here. Put it to my curiosity about goblets.”
    Her question answered itself; she