Addie lived under Williamsburg Bridge. She preyed on the bridge workers. We became involved by accident. I had just walked my bicycle up the long ramp smashed with beer bottles and was about to get on and ride the span into Manhattan when I heard a mew and

saw her on one of the cat walks. About six o'clock on Sunday in Spring. I was returning from a trip to see my grandmother in a nursing home. Addie mistook me for a lingering bridge worker, forgetting it was Sunday. She wasn't attractive though she was young (twenty one) and had a firm body with a plump ass. She purred. I allowed myself to be seduced. It was death under the bridge in gutted Williamsburg. She lived in the cellar of a

deserted five floor walkup on a street of deserted buildings. I loved her body on a rotting couch. You're my lover now, she said. The bridge hung over us. I was not fated to cross it again. She sold my bicycle. Gram probably died, I never went out there again. What happened to my flat on Saint Marks Place, my Brendel Beethoven concertos, my friends?  I simply vanished and after a while was forgotten doubtless. I would notice Manhattan's skyline across East River all June through Addie's broken windows. Our life together was idyllic. She preyed on bridge workers and I kept house, shopping at the little bodega and cooking omelets on an old Coleman camp stove. We drank peach wine. Sumac grew into the house, rain and moonlight fell through the roof.

 

I have to back up. Addie had a lover. When she told me You're my lover now, a few days later she hung this man, a bridge worker in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds, from a pipe in the cellar. We buried the corpse in an adjoining lot. She said, I kill my old lover when I get a new one.

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Spring moved into summer. Our wonderful life together seemed on the verge of going on forever. But then she said to me one July evening, Don't you trust me? She was stringing me up in the cellar. I'd come this far. There was no turning back from mangy Addie the bridge whore. She hung me off the same pipe and in the dying light I saw her new lover watching with avid eyes: a Puerto Rican kid in a hard hat. They buried me in the trash- filled lot and already the July stars were out and the kid hot screwing her on the not yet cold earth.