THE DRINKING PARTY

By Stephan Foy

The last authenticated appearance of the Wandering Jew was on the Brooklyn Bridge on the evening of April 16, 1958, a Wednesday.

He was standing in under the southeast arch back there. That flamingonecked lamp crashed the yellow light off its enamel shade and sent it down in a cone under the vaulted gloom of the night arch to blacken the small form of the stoop-shouldered man.

If you stand on the bridge in the winter when the dark comes early and the offices are still working there's so many lights the city's a forest of Christmas trees for lights, a blizzard of lights, but the black it sits in is so real that the sheets of windows become walls of dominoes riveted up with braille that must dam back the nothing, and the city still lies at the bottom of the night like a dime under a boulder.

In the early morning though, or in the evenings of middle-year when the sun outwears the office day, then the industrial angles of the gray buildings frame no perforation of the night; seen from the bridge then, the bone-colored buildings that take the sinking sun in bloody draughts down under the glass ribs look-have a different mood.

Bridges rest on sinister things. No river submits its back to a bridge without the assuage of blood or immurement. Peter of Colechurch was supposed to have sprinkled the wet mortar of London Bridge with ladies' blood to keep it standing six hundred years. Many poor men died in the caissons under this bridge.

So that's where he stood, right in there. No, seriously. But your hand is awfully cold. Are you all right? You're sure? It's cold up here at night.

No, that was the last time he was seen. Lonely. watching Manhattan. He stood up here, above the dirty river that slides out of its own black mouth into the sea. That's the new Narrows Bridge. See it out there, a long way above the water, its span is all beaded with lights like a wet spiderweb. The ocean's beyond that.

I don't know what he was doing here. Just waiting. But you look cold. Come on, skinny, we'll go back. You are so. Agathon's play won the prize, I was told, and he was supposed to have old friends in for a drinking party. But I'm afraid we're too late.