Lang carried on: “All that is neither here nor there except to say that technological and scientific advances are by definition inevitable, yet we are mistaken to expect spiritual or sexual awakenings as a result of breakthroughs in applied fields.”
“You’re saying that people are slow to assimilate to changes in the environment?” This was Elizabeth speaking. Hearing her, my heart pounded in my chest.
Sherwin also was affected by Elizabeth’s voice. He made slow, easeful petting motions with his hand on the table, stroking the table, feeling, with his fingertips, the blue tablecloth; and he said, “The main point is that each generation thinks it has better sex than its parents, who had better sex than their parents. Right? As psychologists, we know that nothing could be further from the truth. But out in the culture, you know, people accept this on faith. Humans in their narcissism apparently must tell themselves that they live always on the verge of a bold new era in which shame and inhibition will be problems of the past.”
“It’s a way of defeating death!” Leslie blurted. She sounded, saying this, like a famous British film actress whose name I could not recall. Lang, amazingly — or maybe not amazingly — let her have the point.
“Yes, Leslie. That’s right.”
Then Leslie, encouraged to go on, raised her voice and said, with sudden, unexpected anger, “But that doesn’t happen, does it? I mean, death comes and takes everything away.”
“We know it does,” said Lang softly to her. He was soothing her. The man and Leslie had reached, in that moment, some deep accord; they were, as people say, in sync. And something in the way each addressed the other made it possible to see that their conversation, that night at the Pancake House, was far from academic; rather, it was an intimate, encrypted courtship: Sherwin and Leslie, with help from Elizabeth and Mike as witnesses — these two accredited professionals standing in, symbolically, as the family that promises to support the “marrying” couple — were, in the space of a few brief statements, telling one another who they were and what they needed. Sherwin would take an educative role, the protector and guide into the fully adult, political world, a temporary father for the younger woman separated from home, orphaned and alone in a foreign country. Hadn’t she just spoken openly and with feeling about death and loss? And hadn’t he allowed her to speak her way toward her grief, then sanctioned her intelligence and her right to participate as a member of the psychotherapeutic community?
The tension around the table, pleasurable, electric, was rising. One had the feeling that Sherwin and Leslie might reach out and touch one another, hold hands like sweethearts. This didn’t happen. Instead, after a hushed, suspenseful interval in which, I think, everyone watching had a chance to recognize the solemn significance of events taking place, Leslie said an amazing and revealing thing. It was one of those mysterious, unpremeditated bombshells people sometimes drop, whenever circumstances make it viable to declare, in a few puzzling, odd, possibly meaningless words, something of the essential and unifying personal logic known in our literature and our hearts as the Self.
Leslie turned and looked hard at Sherwin beside her. Her face was radiant. She gazed at her mentor the way a happy baby gazes at mother. “Maybe,” declared this Englishwoman, “maybe sexual hunger should be described as the terror in love at the beginning of death.”
Everyone had to think about that for a moment. Finally Mike Breuer realized that the time had come for him to perform his “official” symbolic function. I suppose Mike had been cautious, earlier, not to break in on whatever was happening between his colleague and the young woman. In any case, he now said, in a voice that sounded like the voice of a man offering a toast, “Whoa! That sounds damned good to me!” Everyone, including Sherwin, laughed, and the tension around the table was relieved in a completely pleasant way; and then Sherwin announced his answer to the woman who would become his lover: “We live in times of great hysteria. Death will save us.”
This concluded, for the time being, Sherwin Lang’s seduction of Leslie Constant. Lang’s companions understood that important work had been done, understood the pitch and roll of Sherwin’s voice, as he rattled off his last pronouncement, as a form of audible, dramatic cue, or coded instruction; accordingly, everyone at the table lowered his or her head and sat in silence. They were not unlike supplicants, praying.
I peered down, away from all these therapists under the powerful spell of Sherwin Lang, down at my own messy table piled with coffee cups and horrible foods, our preposterous supper.
I looked to Maria. What I needed, I think, was some reality testing, as we are so fond of saying in this business.
Maria, incredibly — and somewhat rudely, I thought — was not paying attention to me. She was talking in subdued tones to the Kleinian beside her, Manuel Escobar.
“Look at me!” I cried at her. Was I very loud? Quiet? Had she heard? Would she care how I felt? I squirmed and thrashed in Bernhardt’s arms. I got red in the face — I mean, my face felt hot — and my holder in his flopping panama hat complained, “Tom, take it easy, you’re going to make me drop you on the floor. I can’t hold you if you bounce around.” Then Maria faced me and I noticed, as I do from time to time, how inviting she looked, her lips red and exquisite beneath bright lights.
I imagined kissing her or maybe nibbling a breast, and she said to me, “Tom, Manuel and I are having a conversation. Why must you always make problems for everyone?”
“I can’t stop thinking about those afternoons we spent in the book and manuscript vault,” I whispered to her, effectively acknowledging the pseudo-oedipal triangle that consisted of this woman, Bernhardt, and me.
“You’re ridiculous,” Maria said. She wore a little smile, and I could see from this smile that she was, as I knew, a woman interested in pain, and that I still had a chance with her after all these years.
How pretty her hair looked, tugged back hard away from her forehead and fastened behind her neck, severely clasped there. Maria’s hair’s different browns and occasional dyed-red strands ran together then spilled behind her shoulders.
“Meet me in the parking lot after dessert,” I said, and immediately regretted it. What was dessert after a meal like ours? And she would never come to the parking lot. It was best to face facts. I’d have no luck with her. Meanwhile Bernhardt, if he and Maria were, as I imagined, in their love affair, Bernhardt would be enraged with me, jealous or at least concerned about his preeminence — therefore humiliated — whether Maria contrived to meet me or not.