Free Crossing the Bridge by Michael Baron Page B

North on Route 9 and then north again on 91. I had no idea where I was going and I was convinced that it didn’t matter. In fact, I thought that the simple unpredictability of the day would prove to be refreshing in and of itself. I had an R.E.M. album on the iPod and when “Everybody Hurts” came on, I was nearly giddy to hear the original version and not the version that played regularly on the store radio.
    After about an hour, I exited to get some coffee and to go to the bathroom at a diner just off the road. While there, I decided to pull out my atlas to see what lay ahead in this direction. As I followed the map up into Massachusetts, my eyes shifted to the left and landed on Lenox. I could get there in a little more than an hour by switching over to the Massachusetts Turnpike. Iris had said she wanted to stay in touch. This seemed like an excellent way to find out if she meant it. I switched my iPod to The Bravery and jumped back onto the highway, taking the surprisingly good coffee and a homemade cranberry muffin along with me.
    Lenox was in many ways what Amber wanted to be when it grew up. One of the largest towns in the Berkshire Hills, it was the home to dozens of craft shops, boutiques, restaurants, specialty stores, and inns, and drew a huge summertime tourist business from numerous superior performing arts venues, the most famous of which was the Tanglewood Amphitheater. It combined urban sensibility vacationing at its country home with Colonial history. And while it thrived during the summer, it was now very much alive twelve months a year. I’d made a late fall trip
there just six months earlier with a woman I dated for a short while. I wonder what I would have done if I’d run into Iris then.
    A Broadway character actor and one of her former professors at Yale founded the Lenox Ensemble in 1987. In their early years, they did repertory versions of the works of Williams, Albee, and Wilson, among others, and in recent years had concentrated on staging younger playwrights who they believed were doing important work. Last summer they had produced their first commissioned play and were committed to doing two of these every year in the future. I learned all of this from a flyer I found at an inn where I stopped to get some information. I knew how to get to Lenox, but I had no idea how to find where Iris worked.
    The Ensemble’s offices were located in a modest farmhouse about two miles from downtown. The theater itself was in a converted barn a couple hundred yards away. Inside the house was a series of desks where a handful of people in their early twenties made phone calls, typed on computers, and sorted through papers. There were offices to the left and to the back of this. As I entered, Iris came out of one of these talking heatedly with a man who was easily nine inches taller and twenty years older than she was. It had something to do with a problem with scenery and it wasn’t clear whether they were on opposite sides of the argument or at various stages of extreme on the same side. At one point, Iris looked over and threw me a surprised glance before going back to her discussion.
    A guy at a computer asked if he could help me and
I sat in a chair to wait things out. When Iris finished her exchange, she went back into her office and, for a moment, I thought she was either going to ignore me or had forgotten I was there. But then she walked out in my direction, looking considerably more relaxed than she had only moments before.
    “You might be the last person I expected to see here,” she said, kissing me on the cheek.
    “I was in the neighborhood.”
    “Do you define the entirety of New England as your neighborhood?”
    “I needed to get the hell out of Amber.”
    She looked at me, confused. “What were you doing in Amber?”
    “A question I ask myself several times a day, starting from the moment I wake up. Some stuff has happened. Want to hear about it?”
    “Yes, I think I would,” she said,