“Tom.”
“What?”
“Stop shaking.”
It was Bernhardt speaking quietly to me, whispering kind words to make my fear go away. I grasped his hands tightly in mine. I was glad to be held. I felt that if set down, I might crumple over and fall from the heights and absolutely collapse. I said to the man, “Don’t let go of me,” and he promised, “I won’t.” Then Bernhardt hoisted me higher in his arms, a quick little lift as he tossed me around, shifting his own posture while readjusting the load — me, that is — in order to get better purchase, a more comfortable grip.
I can say in fairness that at that point, in that instant of being shaken around and arranged in Bernhardt’s arms, I felt truly and strangely like a young child, myself as a child at, I would guess, roughly eighteen or twenty months in age. What I mean is that I felt the man’s authority, his enormous strength. How did this come about? My own position, hoisted aloft in midair, was one of relative powerlessness. Yet this powerlessness, or helplessness, my lack of volition, my childlike perspective, whatever we want to call it, was in fact a complex state, in that it was not at all what it seemed; on the contrary, I was, in the ways that children can be, quite powerful, because I was free during those moments suspended in Bernhardt’s arms, free to see the world as a place of my own making.
Richard Bernhardt, in spite of — because of — his most sinister qualities, his pressing, carnal threat, was doing a wonderful job accommodating my deepest longings and torments.
You see, that night at the Pancake House, perched high with feet hanging and my head rising upward to float closer and closer to the ceiling and lights, I felt, for a short while, as if I were becoming what every normal child most truly is: an inventor of reality.
I did what any average, middle-aged man might do in this situation. I tried to make eye contact with a mature woman.
I turned my gaze away from the youthful waitress standing so beautifully before the kitchen doors, away from other diners staring at this girl or huddled, more or less oblivious, in friendly alliances around square tables covered with blue cloths. The jukebox music played. There was talking and laughing, a quiet turmoil of noise made by people who looked and sounded as if they were pleased to be done with the day and out of the house. What were they all talking about? They appeared, my friends in their socioprofessional cliques, infatuated with one another. In particular there was, at one table, a great amount of interest in whatever Sherwin Lang was saying. Lang, like many alcoholics, is intelligent and a great pontificator; he is one of those lovely, well-preserved drunks whose talk is never boring and always — for reasons I can never quite pin down, though undoubtedly related to his sonorous, low-pitched speaking voice — always comforting. It is probably true that for some, the man’s alcoholism makes him attractive; he has the bearing of a rake or a lost father, and naturally this causes women to fall precipitously in love with him. I have to admit that he is one of my favorite people. Tonight his table companions were listening intently to him, and who could blame them? “Take spaceships and unidentified flying objects,” he was saying now over buckwheat pancakes and a bottled beer, his third or maybe fourth. “In my view, these are perfect instances of the phenomenon we’re concerned with. What are spaceships if not ideal, visionary mislocations of human erotic desire? The existence or nonexistence of flying saucers is finally immaterial. Read Jung on this if you can stand reading Jung.” He chuckled and let his companions acknowledge, with their own show of polite mirth, his preeminence as a thinker on matters relating to psychoanalytic doctrine and the canon; then he continued, “What matters to the true believer are the structures of longing and paranoia surrounding the various controversies and all those, you know, those suspected conspiracies and whatnot that make up what passes for narrative in this issue. Neither saucers nor government cover-ups can be satisfactorily confirmed, and therefore the entire debate operates at the level of exciting metaphor.”
“Dr. Lang, are you saying that people have UFO sightings as a substitute for working through their sexual hysterias?” The speaker was Leslie Constant, a third-year postdoctoral Institute trainee who had come to us from England, where she had grown disenchanted, understandably, with traditional British Object Relations Theory.
Sherwin drank from his beer, then went on in his accustomed manner of the scholarly dignitary granting an interview, “Well, not exactly, though I think it is pretty generally accepted that forbidden sexuality will express itself in complex, often frightening belief systems.”
“Like religion?” prompted Leslie.
The table went quiet; it was possible that Leslie’s question was too general, too obvious; was, in other words, a breach of academic decorum and restraint. Sherwin sipped again from his beer. His movements when he drank — the hand outstretched though clearly comfortable and relaxed, gliding along through space toward the glass bottle; and his long fingers showing, as his hand progressed toward the beer, their handsome nails; and then the fingers softly, gently, affectionately touching the dark glass, encircling and clasping it, feeling it; finally, hand and arm working together to raise, neither recklessly quickly nor conspicuously slowly, in other words not evidently self-consciously from an onlooker’s point of view, the precious, all-important amber bottle — were movements made by a man intensely concentrated, at least whenever watched while drinking, on physical precision and the demonstration, acted out almost as a performance, of sobriety, dignity, and masculine beauty. He drank. The force of his personality was awesome. I have often surmised that this may have been a function less of his intellect than of his hair, swept back from the high forehead in a great black-and-gray mane that put one in mind of a nineteenth-century mathematician or poet-philosopher. His coat as well was cut in a style that looked antiquated somehow, snug at the waist and featuring narrow lapels riding out at severe angles from a four-button front that fully cloaked most of his exquisite wine-red tie. Sherwin’s colleagues around the table nodded their heads while he told them, “Religion as ritualized communal orgasm — so much has been written on this. But, you know, religious practice is not primarily useful as a gateway to ecstatic states. Rapture is for the mystics and shamans and snake handlers, right? I think most observance is really more a way of conceptualizing day-to-day life as what it actually is for many people, a progress of meaningful failures.”
“Do you really believe that, Sherwin?” It was Leslie Constant again, daring to speak Lang’s Christian name and, in this way, assume a peer role and mildly undermine her supervisor’s guru status — a potentially dangerous tactic with this man. He did nothing to show that he minded grilling by the trainee, perhaps because it was still early in the evening. Or maybe Leslie’s English accent made her sound literate and shrewd. Sherwin regarded her with a look full of appreciation and, well, appetite — he smiled; and it was clear from his eyes, or I should say it was clear from Sherwin’s decision to smile at Leslie in that generous, charming, menacing way he has, that the man enjoyed knowing the woman was in love with him.
“Sexual hysterias in general tend to manifest as social trends, and come and go in cycles.” Sherwin was getting into teaching mode; once he has started, it can be hard to stop him. “In order to see this clearly, we have to reconsider the notion that psychological functioning shares the same growth curve as technological innovation. It is true that technology is one of the great expressions of the human spirit. As we all know, to be human is to make things. Bombs or poems or cures for diseases, what’s important is making something. And if a thing can be made, it must be made!” At this point Sherwin placed his hand, open and with the palm facing downward, firmly on the tabletop; and the effect of this swift, almost unnoticeably subtle gesture, as he spoke, was a perfect demonstration of the man’s total ability to orchestrate — much in the way that a symphony conductor at the podium will use his head and body and conductor’s baton to organize the various musical strains into a seamless and singularly emotional, spectacular whole — the precise effects of his words on his listeners. Everyone at Sherwin’s table leaned in close, and you could tell by looking at Leslie and Mike Breuer and Elizabeth Cole — Elizabeth so beautiful with her dark hair spilling over her ears — you could tell that for these three, the noises in the restaurant and all the miscellaneous activities and comings and goings of waitresses, all the busy distractions — including me up in Bernhardt’s arms, watching the world, flapping insanely and kicking like a monstrous baby — these noises were, for the English trainee and the two clinical therapists sharing a pancake dinner with Sherwin, temporarily, profoundly out of awareness.