The River Between Us
For what must have been the hundredth time that long day I studied the second hand of my watch, a heavy blue-faced Bulova that my wife had spent way too much on for our first wedding anniversary. It had outlasted our marriage and was still keeping perfect time, which was no small comfort. It was now exactly 6:30. Time to go.
 
I left my apartment, rode the elevator eleven flights straight down, entered the crowded sidewalk, shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my cracked leather bomber jacket I’d put on over my polo shirt in anticipation of the evening’s damp, spring chill, and strode quickly but uneasily north up Broadway. Quickly because that’s the way most of us walk in Manhattan. Uneasily because I was meeting my oldest and, honestly, my only friend, who over the past several months had been rubbing me the wrong way. And I was having no patience for that.
 
It was a lovely Friday evening in May, there on the Upper West Side. Storefronts brightly lit below the varied facades of apartment blocks and office towers aglow in the soft twilight; a seagull in slow flight high in the pale violet firmament; the musky perfume of cellophane-wrapped cut flowers in plastic buckets and ripening fruit brimming from their waxed cardboard boxes all lined up on the sidewalk in front of the grocers; cafes spilling out of their wide-open doors and bursting with merriment; the faint, damp, briny scent drifting from the wide Hudson River three blocks west; then, emerging from the roar of traffic, the gentle music from a solitary, wispy-bearded aged Chinese busker in a cracked straw hat squatting on a stool and playing an erhu, bestowing a melodious, wistful touch to the clamor at the end of another day of another week, a poignant ode to our common lot to which we have been delivered and are so briefly bound. I stopped, pinched a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and dropped it into the pilled red felt of his instrument’s opened black case. It was more than I’d earned since I’d collected on my last invoice five months before. I gave it unequivocally. There is no price one can put on such beauty. Besides, the old man could quite possibly be broke. I felt for him; the way things were going for me—one foot on a banana peel, the other on a bar of soap, as my ex might say while not even trying to hide her slight southern drawl as she had assiduously trained herself to do—I sometimes feared more than I was willing to admit that I might end up on the street. It would be a little too ironic. An architect who finds himself homeless.
 
I set off again. I was suddenly in such a rare and buoyant mood that I began to believe that it could last, that my entire ordeal—like the wet and cold winter itself—was finally over. It seemed utterly impossible; it also seemed entirely true. If heartbreak can come so suddenly then why not happiness? But when I arrived at the West End Bar, my spirits sank. I stood outside for the longest time, people pushing past me in and out, seized by a strange kind of paralysis. I gazed straight through my ghostly reflection on the thick glass door, saw the blurry crowd, debated with myself if I could really go through with meeting Ralph. And it was not just because he’d become annoying; Ralph often annoyed me in the best of days. Nor was it because I’d had my fill of him. I’d simply grown accustomed to my solitary life. I’d enjoyed being alone more than anything else all this time, which wasn’t saying much. But why spoil what little pleasure I’d had?
 
I took a deep breath, let it out, pulled the door open, and stepped inside. I was determined to put behind me the isolation to which I had condemned myself. And not just for the past few months but, sadly, I’d lately begun to see, for most of my life. I squeezed my way through a boisterous crowd of strangers. It was overwhelming. But that was not all. What I’d felt faintly the entire afternoon, and what had it had hit me seconds before when I caught that glimpse of my untrimmed beard and unwashed hair in my reflection, looking like a madman—only now did that sickening sensation, that dread, really sink its teeth into me when I saw him: Ralph Keller, his back to me, hunched over the bar. I was dimly aware of some kind of dark aura hovering about him that I was about to walk into and be unwillingly enlisted to join some nefarious scheme of his. Ralph was never much of a schemer to me, so I hadn’t anticipated that. And I was certainly in no frame of mind for any surprises. It was all I could do to not turn around and head back out the door. I just wasn’t up for any of it, like someone about to go under the knife and suddenly waking up and wanting to stop the whole procedure. I reached for the bar and hoisted myself up on a wobbly wooden stool on Ralph’s left and settled in as best I could. It came to me that it might have been the gravity of his bearing that made me fear even more that there’d be hell to pay if I stood him up.
 
“Take a look at this,” Ralph said before saying anything else, elbowing in front of me a big, gleaming coffee-table book. I glanced at the title set in a large serif font: The Great Estates of the Hudson River.
 
“I don’t want to look at any book, Ralph,” I said, elbowing it back across the sticky bar toward him. “Oh, and by the way, hello to you, too.”
 
“You want to look at this one, Anderson,” he insisted, pushing it back my way. “Trust me.”
 
I looked around the bar. There was no one else I wanted to see or talk to, except for maybe Ellen Reynolds, my ex. But that wasn’t going to happen. The sun around which my life had revolved for fourteen years—ten of them as husband and wife—had become a distant star, invisible to my naked eye. I liked to think that I wasn’t even looking for her any longer, that I’d finally decathected. That’s the way Ellen herself might have put it to me—she was an esteemed psychotherapist in the psychiatric wing at the city’s Lenox Hill Hospital and occasionally let slip some of her occupational jargon when she was not at work—and perhaps even applaud me in an awkward, icy way and with that fake smile that former spouses and lovers put on, pushing you farther and farther out into the ethers. Which was exactly where I felt I was. There was no avoiding it. My life in that teeming metropolis had been reduced to a universe of one, a rogue planet that went by the name of Tim Anderson, age forty-two, single or separated, I didn’t know which or if, in fact, there was any difference.
 
***
 
I’d found myself at the West End Bar because a couple of days before Ralph had called me to say he wanted to meet me to tell me about a “spectacular restoration job,” as he’d put it, that was all mine if I wanted it. And you will, as he’d also put it, want it.
 
“I don’t care how spectacular it is,” I said. “I’m done with restoring anything. I’ve told you this before. Don’t you remember?”
 
“Just be there,” he said. “Seven sharp.” Then he hung up before I could get in another word.
 
I’d known Ralph since graduate school at Columbia some sixteen years before. He was there for business; I’d gone for architectural preservation. He’d come to the bar tonight in a khaki suit, which looked like it had been slept in, and not just for one night. The top of his white oxford shirt was unbuttoned around his thick neck, the crooked knot of his red and blue striped tie had been loosened, and his sandy hair, which fell an inch over the collar, looked like it hadn’t seen shampoo or a comb in days. His baby face bore no wrinkles despite our gradual descent into middle age. In other words, except for the suit, which might very well have been the only suit he owned, and the small beginning of a double chin that I noticed once when he glared down at the bottom of his empty glass, Ralph looked very much like he always did all those years ago at school.
 
That Friday afternoon in the hours before I was scheduled to meet him, checking my watch again and again and again, I would wander over to the living room window and gaze down at the swarming streets below. One time I had a Beethoven CD playing, his Pathetique Sonata, second movement. It was one of Ellen’s favorites. Mine, too. I was hoping for a little stress relief. But the music brought to mind not just the sorrow of losing her, which I knew only too well, but also the sorrow I felt about being so much at odds with Ralph, which was new and unnerving. And, also new—or new and unnerving in its lingering effect—was being so much at odds with the work I’d been doing all my adult life, bringing old buildings or parts of them back from disrepair or ruin, making them look as they had when they’d been built a hundred or more years ago, as if the long-dead occupants had just stepped out for a stroll and I’d sneaked in to do a little tidying up.
 
I’d believed it noble work, an occupation approaching that of holy orders, and I’d poured everything I had into the perpetual, and more and more often lost, battles here and there to preserve what remained in the shrinking pockets of old New York captured in the varied eras of architectural representation: Victorian brownstones, Federal brick rowhouses, Gothic and Neo-Gothic churches, and the occasional detached Dutch Colonial, Second Empire, and Greek Revival scattered in the outer boroughs, once remote from Manhattan and pastoral in Whitman’s bucolic splendor. The idea of living in a time when these kinds of places were built and among those who had lived in them had long appealed to my temperament. I found myself a bit of a stranger in the present world. It was why I’d spent so much of my life immersed in antiquity and the picturesque, resurrecting, reconstructing, and preserving that particular—if not sometimes peculiar—way of being in the world and its architectures. In the homes of other people is where I felt most at home. The old world had a mysterious, yet certain and consolidating influence on me like nothing else, a kind of enduring dignity and tranquility to which I, myself, aspired. It was a battle against historical amnesia, defended by the mere but evocative weapons of beautiful artifice: cherubim statuary, urns of aloe, fluted columns, festoons of grapevines and ivy, those tiny seeds in antique windowpanes.
 
Now, the aesthetic lure of that fanciful golden age and the old places that had once captivated and sustained me for years had somehow left me wanting. But for what, I could not say. I gazed down upon the throng below. I had to wonder: how was I—who by any means within my reach should be saving buildings from demolition or disintegration, or rebuilding them brick-by-brick, window-by-window, stoop-by-stoop, roofline-by-roofline to their original stature and beauty—how was I to preserve or restore anything when my own life had fallen apart? I could have been at the top of my game—and earlier I’d believed that after a brief spell of sorrow I would be back at it and continue my ascent—but it turned out that I could no longer bring to my work even a breath of acquiescence, much less enthusiasm, because there wasn’t an ounce of strength or will or sense of duty in me to give.
 
***
 
I glanced at Ralph, then at the book between us that he was trying to get me to open. Ralph had already emptied a pint of Guinness. Through his pudgy, freckled fingers I could see the tawny dregs at the bottom of the glass, the lacey foam clinging to the inside, along with a slight slippery sheen in his eyes when he glanced at me with barely a nod to welcome me to this meager feast. He might have been there a while and had two or three; it would not have surprised me. The bartender winged by and tossed a coaster in front of me, Ralph ordered another round and I ordered what Ralph was having. I wanted to be quick about bracing myself for whatever he was going to try to sell me, get up the nerve to say no, be done with it, and then when I’d had my fill of talking—which would not take long—march right back to my apartment, my safe harbor, my penitential solitude. Ralph once called it house arrest. I suppose he thought he was being funny. But he had a point. The only thing missing was the alarm band strapped around my ankle. I peeked down at my watch. It was now 7:00. I’d give Ralph fifteen minutes. He nodded at the book.
 
“Well?” Ralph said. “What are you waiting for?”
 
“Let’s get our beers first,” I said.
 
“I should think you’d be jumping all over this one,” Ralph said.
 
“You can think whatever the hell you want,” I said.
 
“Thank you,” he said. “I will. And I think this is a damned good gig for you.”
 
I didn’t say anything. In the corner of my eye I saw him look at me, probably wanting to say something about what kind of curmudgeon I had become since Ellen had left. I did my level best to ignore him as I watched with great anticipation our beers being poured from the tap—Guinness takes considerable finesse and patience to prepare properly and I was glad to see the bartender making an effort.
 
Ralph elbowed my arm. “Hey, come on, Anderson. Open it. I don’t have all night, you know.”
 
I let Ralph win. It was pointless to refuse. It would get me nowhere. When I opened the book the spine cracked. Then, slowly turning the heavy, glossy pages, I found myself helplessly drawn back into that faraway but not forgotten world, as if somewhere deep in the folds of my brain there had been a sudden crack. In an instant I fell under the spell of what I saw before me in the dim wash of light of the bar that was somehow tinged with a golden hue. There they were again, those colossal, antique mansions, many of which I had once gazed upon from the Hudson River on those many summer Sundays when my father had diligently, if not coercively, tried to teach me how to sail and navigate the river’s tricky waters in his pokey Danish Folkboat. Then rose an ancient and buried distress signal that now drummed in my ears when I turned the page to one place in particular and Ralph, looking at the photograph with me, had spoken its name at the exact moment I recognized it: Acacia.
 
 
© James Kullander 2025
 
This is an excerpt from the first chapter of the novel The River Between Us by James Kullander.
For what must have been the hundredth time that long day I studied the second hand of my watch, a heavy blue-faced Bulova that my wife had spent way too much on for our first wedding anniversary. It had outlasted our marriage and was still keeping perfect time, which was no small comfort. It was now exactly 6:30. Time to go.
I left my apartment, rode the elevator eleven flights straight down, entered the crowded sidewalk, shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my cracked leather bomber jacket I’d put on over my polo shirt in anticipation of the evening’s damp, spring chill, and strode quickly but uneasily north up Broadway. Quickly because that’s the way most of us walk in Manhattan. Uneasily because I was meeting my oldest and, honestly, my only friend, who over the past several months had been rubbing me the wrong way. And I was having no patience for that.
It was a lovely Friday evening in May, there on the Upper West Side. Storefronts brightly lit below the varied facades of apartment blocks and office towers aglow in the soft twilight; a seagull in slow flight high in the pale violet firmament; the musky perfume of cellophane-wrapped cut flowers in plastic buckets and ripening fruit brimming from their waxed cardboard boxes all lined up on the sidewalk in front of the grocers; cafes spilling out of their wide-open doors and bursting with merriment; the faint, damp, briny scent drifting from the wide Hudson River three blocks west; then, emerging from the roar of traffic, the gentle music from a solitary, wispy-bearded aged Chinese busker in a cracked straw hat squatting on a stool and playing an erhu, bestowing a melodious, wistful touch to the clamor at the end of another day of another week, a poignant ode to our common lot to which we have been delivered and are so briefly bound. I stopped, pinched a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and dropped it into the pilled red felt of his instrument’s opened black case. It was more than I’d earned since I’d collected on my last invoice five months before. I gave it unequivocally. There is no price one can put on such beauty. Besides, the old man could quite possibly be broke. I felt for him; the way things were going for me—one foot on a banana peel, the other on a bar of soap, as my ex might say while not even trying to hide her slight southern drawl as she had assiduously trained herself to do—I sometimes feared more than I was willing to admit that I might end up on the street. It would be a little too ironic. An architect who finds himself homeless.
I set off again. I was suddenly in such a rare and buoyant mood that I began to believe that it could last, that my entire ordeal—like the wet and cold winter itself—was finally over. It seemed utterly impossible; it also seemed entirely true. If heartbreak can come so suddenly then why not happiness? But when I arrived at the West End Bar, my spirits sank. I stood outside for the longest time, people pushing past me in and out, seized by a strange kind of paralysis. I gazed straight through my ghostly reflection on the thick glass door, saw the blurry crowd, debated with myself if I could really go through with meeting Ralph. And it was not just because he’d become annoying; Ralph often annoyed me in the best of days. Nor was it because I’d had my fill of him. I’d simply grown accustomed to my solitary life. I’d enjoyed being alone more than anything else all this time, which wasn’t saying much. But why spoil what little pleasure I’d had?
I took a deep breath, let it out, pulled the door open, and stepped inside. I was determined to put behind me the isolation to which I had condemned myself. And not just for the past few months but, sadly, I’d lately begun to see, for most of my life. I squeezed my way through a boisterous crowd of strangers. It was overwhelming. But that was not all. What I’d felt faintly the entire afternoon, and what had it had hit me seconds before when I caught that glimpse of my untrimmed beard and unwashed hair in my reflection, looking like a madman—only now did that sickening sensation, that dread, really sink its teeth into me when I saw him: Ralph Keller, his back to me, hunched over the bar. I was dimly aware of some kind of dark aura hovering about him that I was about to walk into and be unwillingly enlisted to join some nefarious scheme of his. Ralph was never much of a schemer to me, so I hadn’t anticipated that. And I was certainly in no frame of mind for any surprises. It was all I could do to not turn around and head back out the door. I just wasn’t up for any of it, like someone about to go under the knife and suddenly waking up and wanting to stop the whole procedure. I reached for the bar and hoisted myself up on a wobbly wooden stool on Ralph’s left and settled in as best I could. It came to me that it might have been the gravity of his bearing that made me fear even more that there’d be hell to pay if I stood him up.
“Take a look at this,” Ralph said before saying anything else, elbowing in front of me a big, gleaming coffee-table book. I glanced at the title set in a large serif font: The Great Estates of the Hudson River.
“I don’t want to look at any book, Ralph,” I said, elbowing it back across the sticky bar toward him. “Oh, and by the way, hello to you, too.”
“You want to look at this one, Anderson,” he insisted, pushing it back my way. “Trust me.”
I looked around the bar. There was no one else I wanted to see or talk to, except for maybe Ellen Reynolds, my ex. But that wasn’t going to happen. The sun around which my life had revolved for fourteen years—ten of them as husband and wife—had become a distant star, invisible to my naked eye. I liked to think that I wasn’t even looking for her any longer, that I’d finally decathected. That’s the way Ellen herself might have put it to me—she was an esteemed psychotherapist in the psychiatric wing at the city’s Lenox Hill Hospital and occasionally let slip some of her occupational jargon when she was not at work—and perhaps even applaud me in an awkward, icy way and with that fake smile that former spouses and lovers put on, pushing you farther and farther out into the ethers. Which was exactly where I felt I was. There was no avoiding it. My life in that teeming metropolis had been reduced to a universe of one, a rogue planet that went by the name of Tim Anderson, age forty-two, single or separated, I didn’t know which or if, in fact, there was any difference.
***
I’d found myself at the West End Bar because a couple of days before Ralph had called me to say he wanted to meet me to tell me about a “spectacular restoration job,” as he’d put it, that was all mine if I wanted it. And you will, as he’d also put it, want it.
“I don’t care how spectacular it is,” I said. “I’m done with restoring anything. I’ve told you this before. Don’t you remember?”
“Just be there,” he said. “Seven sharp.” Then he hung up before I could get in another word.
I’d known Ralph since graduate school at Columbia some sixteen years before. He was there for business; I’d gone for architectural preservation. He’d come to the bar tonight in a khaki suit, which looked like it had been slept in, and not just for one night. The top of his white oxford shirt was unbuttoned around his thick neck, the crooked knot of his red and blue striped tie had been loosened, and his sandy hair, which fell an inch over the collar, looked like it hadn’t seen shampoo or a comb in days. His baby face bore no wrinkles despite our gradual descent into middle age. In other words, except for the suit, which might very well have been the only suit he owned, and the small beginning of a double chin that I noticed once when he glared down at the bottom of his empty glass, Ralph looked very much like he always did all those years ago at school.
That Friday afternoon in the hours before I was scheduled to meet him, checking my watch again and again and again, I would wander over to the living room window and gaze down at the swarming streets below. One time I had a Beethoven CD playing, his Pathetique Sonata, second movement. It was one of Ellen’s favorites. Mine, too. I was hoping for a little stress relief. But the music brought to mind not just the sorrow of losing her, which I knew only too well, but also the sorrow I felt about being so much at odds with Ralph, which was new and unnerving. And, also new—or new and unnerving in its lingering effect—was being so much at odds with the work I’d been doing all my adult life, bringing old buildings or parts of them back from disrepair or ruin, making them look as they had when they’d been built a hundred or more years ago, as if the long-dead occupants had just stepped out for a stroll and I’d sneaked in to do a little tidying up.
I’d believed it noble work, an occupation approaching that of holy orders, and I’d poured everything I had into the perpetual, and more and more often lost, battles here and there to preserve what remained in the shrinking pockets of old New York captured in the varied eras of architectural representation: Victorian brownstones, Federal brick rowhouses, Gothic and Neo-Gothic churches, and the occasional detached Dutch Colonial, Second Empire, and Greek Revival scattered in the outer boroughs, once remote from Manhattan and pastoral in Whitman’s bucolic splendor. The idea of living in a time when these kinds of places were built and among those who had lived in them had long appealed to my temperament. I found myself a bit of a stranger in the present world. It was why I’d spent so much of my life immersed in antiquity and the picturesque, resurrecting, reconstructing, and preserving that particular—if not sometimes peculiar—way of being in the world and its architectures. In the homes of other people is where I felt most at home. The old world had a mysterious, yet certain and consolidating influence on me like nothing else, a kind of enduring dignity and tranquility to which I, myself, aspired. It was a battle against historical amnesia, defended by the mere but evocative weapons of beautiful artifice: cherubim statuary, urns of aloe, fluted columns, festoons of grapevines and ivy, those tiny seeds in antique windowpanes.
Now, the aesthetic lure of that fanciful golden age and the old places that had once captivated and sustained me for years had somehow left me wanting. But for what, I could not say. I gazed down upon the throng below. I had to wonder: how was I—who by any means within my reach should be saving buildings from demolition or disintegration, or rebuilding them brick-by-brick, window-by-window, stoop-by-stoop, roofline-by-roofline to their original stature and beauty—how was I to preserve or restore anything when my own life had fallen apart? I could have been at the top of my game—and earlier I’d believed that after a brief spell of sorrow I would be back at it and continue my ascent—but it turned out that I could no longer bring to my work even a breath of acquiescence, much less enthusiasm, because there wasn’t an ounce of strength or will or sense of duty in me to give.
***
I glanced at Ralph, then at the book between us that he was trying to get me to open. Ralph had already emptied a pint of Guinness. Through his pudgy, freckled fingers I could see the tawny dregs at the bottom of the glass, the lacey foam clinging to the inside, along with a slight slippery sheen in his eyes when he glanced at me with barely a nod to welcome me to this meager feast. He might have been there a while and had two or three; it would not have surprised me. The bartender winged by and tossed a coaster in front of me, Ralph ordered another round and I ordered what Ralph was having. I wanted to be quick about bracing myself for whatever he was going to try to sell me, get up the nerve to say no, be done with it, and then when I’d had my fill of talking—which would not take long—march right back to my apartment, my safe harbor, my penitential solitude. Ralph once called it house arrest. I suppose he thought he was being funny. But he had a point. The only thing missing was the alarm band strapped around my ankle. I peeked down at my watch. It was now 7:00. I’d give Ralph fifteen minutes. He nodded at the book.
“Well?” Ralph said. “What are you waiting for?”
“Let’s get our beers first,” I said.
“I should think you’d be jumping all over this one,” Ralph said.
“You can think whatever the hell you want,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “I will. And I think this is a damned good gig for you.”
I didn’t say anything. In the corner of my eye I saw him look at me, probably wanting to say something about what kind of curmudgeon I had become since Ellen had left. I did my level best to ignore him as I watched with great anticipation our beers being poured from the tap—Guinness takes considerable finesse and patience to prepare properly and I was glad to see the bartender making an effort.
Ralph elbowed my arm. “Hey, come on, Anderson. Open it. I don’t have all night, you know.”
I let Ralph win. It was pointless to refuse. It would get me nowhere. When I opened the book the spine cracked. Then, slowly turning the heavy, glossy pages, I found myself helplessly drawn back into that faraway but not forgotten world, as if somewhere deep in the folds of my brain there had been a sudden crack. In an instant I fell under the spell of what I saw before me in the dim wash of light of the bar that was somehow tinged with a golden hue. There they were again, those colossal, antique mansions, many of which I had once gazed upon from the Hudson River on those many summer Sundays when my father had diligently, if not coercively, tried to teach me how to sail and navigate the river’s tricky waters in his pokey Danish Folkboat. Then rose an ancient and buried distress signal that now drummed in my ears when I turned the page to one place in particular and Ralph, looking at the photograph with me, had spoken its name at the exact moment I recognized it: Acacia.
© James Kullander 2025
This is an excerpt from the first chapter of the novel The River Between Us by James Kullander.
Narrated by James Kullander.
Narrated by James Kullander.
Music on this episode:
Piano Sonata no. 8 in C minor 'Pathétique', Op. 13 - II. Adagio cantabile by Beethoven
License CC PD
