From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Wednesday, May 09, 2001 5:03 PM Seventeenth post Eocene (part 2 of 2) The rest of the chapter continues the story of the narrator's real life. Andrea got an advanced degree. Their relationship becomes long-term and he thinks of asking her to marry him -- but he doesn't want the state or church to be involved, and he admits that she'd say no anyway. He gets his degree a year later; she has started studying Russian. She gets on well with his parents and he's ashamed of having been ashamed of them. Then the calamity (from his point of view): she wants to go to Paris for three years to study Russian. He just got a good job in power station design so he doesn't want to go. He feels it difficult to be supportive, but "He was anyway powerless, and she determined." I guess he's starting to discover why people get married, and why it has nothing to do with the church or the state. On her last evening there, they go out, she takes him to the Forth railway bridge. "The Tallahatchie Bridge fell down", he tells her, quoting a song. He thinks about the old tradition of people throwing coins from trains going over the bridge -- the same custom that the narrator has created within the dream Bridge. On the way back, she drives on the road bridge, he looks at the railway bridge and sees the long, dotted row of lights on a passenger train, flickering as they pass through the girders of the bridge; they look like "meaningless Morse" to him. I agree with a previous suggestion that these are probably his inspiration for the airplane signals (puffs of smoke) in his dream, and it may explain why the airplanes are conpletely silvered over (so that they look like trains). It doesn't explain why there would be three of them. He tells her that the railway bridge takes three years to paint. It's obvious that he's peeved that she's going. He moves up in his career and starts to buy one car after another, each more expensive than the last. He travels around the world; there's a mention of him being 25. He always finds excuses not to visit Paris, but goes on vacations with Andrea. He knows that she's seeing someone else in Paris and feels jealous. After that, there's the first actual mention of him sleeping with other people -- there's a six month relationship with someone he gets bored with, and he sleeps with an old school pal of Andrea's. (That last is a bit sad.) The girl he stays with for six months is called Nicola; people make jokes about their names, calling them imperialists, and asking when they were going to claim Russia back. That last is undoubtedly a clue towards the narrator's real name, but one I can't be bothered to figure out; feel free to post it anyone who knows it. His mother dies, and when he tries to call Andrea about it a guy picks up the phone, then when he gets to talk to Andrea she apparently hangs up. He's angry and hurt, he goes to the funeral; stopping by the brdge and thinking that it's the same color as her hair. She meets him as he's leaving the funeral, says that she got cut off and couldn't get back in touch with him, though she tried all sorts of things. He's relieved and grateful, he turns to his father and cries tears "for his mother, for his father, for himself." Though I get the impression that they were mostly for himself; he didn't start crying until finding out that Andrea still loved him after all. She is staying in France a fourth year; again she asks him why he won't come to Paris. He sleeps in the same room as his father because his father has been sleepwalking and he doesn't want him to hurt himself in his sleep. (Like father, like son I guess.) She tells him that the guy who answered the phone was Gustave, and that he'd like him. He gets along well with Andrea's father, wondering why when the guys an upper-class conservative, and thinking that it's because neither of them take anything entirely seriously. He now refers to revolutionary socialist orthodoxy as "theological". He starts sleeping with a lot of women and drinking a lot. He steadily gets richer. Andrea says she's coming back soon but he's doubtful. Andrea's father dies of a heart attack while driving; he thinks that isn't such a bad way to go as long as you don't hit someone. He goes to the funeral and somehow expects Andrea not to be there, but she's there. He's moved at the oration and thinks that ten years ago he'd have sneered at being moved by words spoken by a minister about an upper-middle class barrister. (A question for Brits; is Andrea's father really upper-middle class, or upper class? Based on the way he describes her lifestyle, I might have guessed the second. I wonder whether he's supposed to be setting the bar for being upper class higher now that he himself is getting uncomfortably close to it.) Andrea's mom tells him that he'll be the closest person to Andrea now. He and Andrea go on vacation together and find a big hollow round tower called Penielhaugh; he pushes boulders away from the door and they climb it. At the top they finally talk about her future plans, he asks that if her asked her to marry him, would she say yes. She says that she thinks she wouldn't. She says that she's marry him, if anyone, but it just isn't her. He says that he doesn't suppose it's him either (ha!) but finally gets the courage to tell her openly that he doesn't want to be away from her for so long again. She says that she doesn't think that they'll have to, that she's attached to both Edinburgh and him, but that she'll always need her own place, and that she's easily seduced by other people. They have sex -- again she initiates each stage -- and she gives him a silk scarf to mop up with, because she's having her period. Now we know where the handkerchief in the dream of the Bridge came from. Finally she asks if he really loves her, he shrugs and says he does, and she says that he's a fool, and that she's fickle and selfish. He says she's generous and independent. The problem is that her stated opinion of herself can be wrong, and his opinion of her can be true, and that their relationship can still be screwed up because of their power imbalance and his reaction to it.