“Or Thomas.”
“Tom or Thomas? Which do you prefer?”
“Either. It doesn’t matter. Pick one,” I said. Things were getting interesting. What I mean to say is that I am not uninterested, in my professional life, in the business of naming, particularly nicknaming, which I regard as socially acceptable antisocial humiliation.
“What do your friends call you?”
“Friends?”
“Yeah. What do they call you?”
“Tom, I guess. Tom. Tom is fine. Just Tom, Tom,” I repeated like a crazed, levitating obsessive.
“Okay, Tom. I’m Rebecca.”
And what would happen if I told her that I already knew her Christian name? Might she conclude that I had somehow culled information about her private life? Would she think I was a stalker?
A simpler way of asking these questions might be, “Is there any occasion more perilous, more absolutely life-threatening, than those first moments of meeting a new person?”
“You Rebecca, me Tom,” I joked. Predictably, the old Tarzan routine fell flat, and I felt ridiculous for attempting it. How could I be so dumb? Was I made that nervous by Rebecca? I had diminished myself with a corny mode of discourse. Enough was enough. “What were you going to say about Dr. Raab, Rebecca?”
“Well, Tom, I liked Dr. Raab. He developed all these radical surgical techniques. He had a patent on a device that’s used for making collapsed lungs stay attached to the insides of people’s chests. Isn’t that amazing? They always had cocktails at five o’clock on the dot at Johnny’s house. It was pretty obvious that Mrs. Raab had a drinking problem. I mean, you could sit there and watch her face fall apart while she drank. It was like she became a different, older person. In English class we read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and I was convinced that it was about Mrs. Raab. She would pour a glass of bourbon to the top and walk around and never, ever spill. Then she’d lean back in her chair and her face would shatter. My mom and dad don’t drink a drop. My mom’s mom drank so much she died of liver disease. My mom and dad get mad at me if I drink even a little, even though I’m legal. I don’t mind. It’s because they love me. Do you like to drink? Never mind, that’s none of my business. You don’t look like a big drinker. Still, you can never tell about people. I think I want to become a doctor myself. Not a surgeon, though. With Johnny it was as if we’d known each other in the past. It was like we’d been waiting our whole lives to meet each other. We could practically answer each other’s questions without asking any questions.”
“Where is Johnny now?” I asked from over her head.
Her voice dropped, and she sounded, I thought, genuinely grief-stricken, at a loss, when she said, “Junior college.” It was as if she had revealed to me, in saying this, that this boy had sickened and died. Is there anything more painful than the love felt by an adolescent?
She said, “I guess what Dr. Mandelbaum said is true, because I’ve just blurted every last little thing, haven’t I?”
“I really don’t know,” I admitted to her. I was not sure it was a good idea to use a largely unprovable communication theory as the basis for a parlor amusement of the truth-or-dare variety.
Nonetheless I said, without knowing what I meant — without knowing what, if anything, I wished to provoke—“Feelings of mature love often take a long time to come to light, Rebecca.”
And I thought, Love?
“Oh.”
Was she crying? Were there tears? Or was this only an exciting illusion created by the tilted-back angle of her head? Here was a girl who showed a lot of throat. It is always so difficult to judge with certainty the sexual and courtship mannerisms of a younger generation.
“In fact,” I explained to the girl, somewhat in the style of a lecturer in a classroom, “we mainly tell people things we don’t know we’re telling. Let’s take my example. Here I am, as you can see, in Dr. Bernhardt’s arms. Dr. Bernhardt is holding me in the air because he doesn’t want me to throw cinnamon-raisin toast at Peter Konwicki. I don’t really know why Dr. Bernhardt doesn’t want me to throw any cinnamon-raisin toast at Peter Konwicki, who is basically a menace even if he is nice to children, but there it is. Dr. Bernhardt, or Doctor Bernhardt, I should say”—who, I ask, can resist clowning around about people’s university degrees? — “Doctor Bernhardt saw me preparing to start a food fight, which is something I like to do at a dinner party. He therefore picked me up and started squeezing me, and as a result I’ve dropped the toast and flown out of my body, and now here I am in the air over everyone’s heads, feeling sick to my stomach and hanging on to a pot lid!”
What point exactly was I trying to make? Something about the unconscious and its role in interpersonal communication? I was chattering on about other matters entirely. Was I making sense? Rebecca quickly jotted notes in her flipped-open menu pad. I found this comforting. Also comforting was her manner of occasionally looking up from writing, in order to make fleeting eye contact, then saying, quietly and without interrupting my train of thought, “Hmm,” or “Yes, that’s very interesting.”
It was, I realized, a surprisingly dexterous portrayal of classical analytic attitude — surprising, in particular, from such a young person, and with no training in the field.
On the other hand, it was conceivable that Rebecca was merely taking a break to tabulate bills for her customers at tables and booths, only humoring me until she could politely excuse herself and disappear through the massive, swinging kitchen doors.
I could not, I felt, let this happen. It seemed to me that everything, in that moment of hanging on to the pot lid and looking down at shouting and laughing analysts, at orange and pale white fish swimming in their glass tank adjacent to the cash register and candy-bar display, at plates and glasses carried on trays held high by waitresses squeezing between blue tables and the chairs pushed back by people getting up, after eating, to order drinks, slap one another on the shoulder, and generally work the room — everything, by which I mean something, though I’m not sure what, depended on loving Rebecca and seeing her smile.
“Listen,” I said to this girl standing on solid ground, “I’ve got to fly around up here for a while, and I’d be very happy if you’d join me.”
“Me?”
“Why not?”
“I can’t fly.”
“Hey, look at me. Do I look like I know what I’m doing up here?” I said to her.
And I said, “Why don’t you put away that pad and pencil and reach up here and take my hand?”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“It’s scary.”
“I’ll hold you,” I told her, though I was not sure how I would do this while being restrained in Bernhardt’s ferocious, amazing hug. Rebecca understood the problem. “How?” she asked.
“I’ll hold your hand,” was all I could offer.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
But it was clear that she was frightened and did not know what to make of things. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said; and I suggested to her, in calming, professional therapist’s tones — using to advantage, I hoped, the experienced interviewer’s mild, upward inflection, more or less converting the statement to a question, a topic for careful contemplation, suggested less by word choice than by subtle modulations in pitch and volume at the close of the sentence—“All the more reason to try it out?”
Rebecca made an objection that would be difficult, if not impossible, to counter. “I work until eleven.”