“What time is it now?”
“Don’t you wear a watch?”
“I don’t.”
“I don’t either.”
“Hmm,” I said.
She said, “The clock in the kitchen says it’s a little before nine. But that clock’s always fast.”
I badly wanted her as a traveling companion. What could be sweeter than levitating through the roof alongside this mature young woman with the cascading hair?
“I’m due for a break at nine,” she said. How nice it is, really, when a woman decides to, as they say, keep hope alive.
“Take a break now.”
“I’ll get in trouble.”
“No you won’t.”
“Yes I will. You don’t know what it’s like around here, Tom. The managers watch every move you make. They know everything. They know if you drink a soda or eat a candy bar out of the cabinet. They know if you sneak out back for a cigarette. If you haven’t changed the milk in the creamers, they know. They know how long you stay in the bathroom.”
“I’ll have you back on your feet in ten minutes,” I said — a classic example of the male’s willingness to make wild assurances to the female. In my favor was Rebecca’s unhappiness in her job.
And I thought, Please come flying.
She gazed around the restaurant. She peered to her left and she peered to her right.
Please.
She considered.
Please, please.
She stared down at her shoes. She stared at them for a long time. Was she thinking about leaving the earth? Was she thinking about leaving everything behind?
Was she, in other words, a Krakower Institute Young Woman of Strength?
She folded closed the menu pad and tucked this, along with her pencil, into the roomy apron pocket stitched to the front of her blue dress. She looked up. She was answering my prayers. She swept back her hair, getting it out of her eyes, and she raised her hand to me. Her arm reached up across what seemed a great, almost insurmountable distance: I was in the sky and she was far below; and the visual impression, from such giddy heights, was of Rebecca’s arm stretching beyond its normal or actual capacity, coming up toward me like something shooting straight from the ground, growing fast from its roots, up toward the clouds like the beanstalk in the children’s tale. Here her arm came, white and beautiful.
There was her hand.
Quickly — I was afraid that if I hesitated she might lose heart and change her mind; or, even if she did not change her mind, we might reach too slowly for one another and, reaching too slowly, drift apart in midair, I veering out over the fish tank and across the room, she sailing away over the bar or into the kitchen or God knows where — quickly I let go of the hanging pot lid and, as best I could, waved my hand at Rebecca. Perhaps it is true that in those moments when we are about to touch, for the first time, another person, those moments while we wait to feel, against our own hand, the touch of another’s with its strange fingers lightly brushing nails against our palm, so that the skin tingles not only on our hand but even in the most unexpected places, the small of the back or the slightly raised arch of a foot or the vulnerable, soft inside fold of a knee — perhaps in these moments when the routine comings and goings of life give way to some different condition, that condition of being on the verge of touching someone new, maybe at these times we feel more alive—are more inscrutably, unfathomably alive — than during any other. That was how I felt, tingling and breathless, as I reached down to clasp Rebecca’s hand in mine. She must have felt the same way or nearly the same way, because when our hands joined she shuddered and I heard her exclaim, “Ah, ah,” as, inch by tiny inch, her heels lifted off the floor, then her toes, and she floated up to meet me.
“Hello,” I said.
“Am I in the air? Am I really in the air?” she asked.
“You are.”
“Is this flying?”
“It is.”
“We’re so high up. Lord, everyone is so small down there. Is this the ceiling? What happens if I bump my head? Can they see us from those little tables?”
“Sherwin can see us. And Peter Konwicki knows we’re up here. He doesn’t miss a thing.”
“What about the man holding us? Will he mind my being up here? Won’t he get tired?”
“Don’t worry about Richard. He’s very strong and determined. We have to trust him.”
Holding Rebecca, my heart sped up and the world inside the restaurant slowed — everything got slowed down, or things as I saw them broke down, something like that. How to describe this? I could see, intensely and clearly, fish swimming in their tank beside the cash register. I saw the colors on the fish. Bernhardt gently shifted his grip around me, and my breaths became slower and steadier, slower and deeper; and I saw a shiny spoon dangling in the air beside Rebecca’s head; and I saw, too, in great detail, as if photographically enlarged, rust in orange and brown blotches on the spoon. Light from above threw brightness across Rebecca, heat over the two of us. Peter Konwicki’s voice rose loudly above others’ in the noisy space: “He’s unprofessional and shouldn’t be allowed to have patients!”—followed with “Anybody can hang out a fucking shingle these days!” The air in the Pancake House was sweet with confectionery smells of food cooking. It was hard to say, in that first moment of Rebecca’s ascension, what anything seen or heard had to do with any other thing, or with me, or with her.
At first things between us were awkward. It was like we had met in the sky for a blind date. We were holding hands and our movements together were the commonplace, embarrassed gestures made by people making guesses about one another’s limits and desires. I tugged on her hand and she waved her arm, then pulled on me, and I floated over near her breast. I got my balance and frowned in a way intended to show her that I was not thinking about her breast. She kicked her feet; I tilted my body away. We were trying to avoid taking liberties. It was a dance of avoidance. You can see this kind of dynamic at work whenever a man teaches a woman with whom he is recently acquainted how to fish or shoot pool or throw a ball, and always the question is: “How much, and in what ways, can I feel her?”
Another way of asking the question might be: “What is this woman’s body telling me, if her body is telling me anything at all, about her readiness to accept me as a lover?”
“Stop kicking,” I told her.
“Sorry.”
“You don’t have to stick your arm out like that,” I said.
“I don’t?”
“Try this,” I suggested, maneuvering her gradually closer, in order to gain leverage and twirl her, if I could and she would be willing, partway around, facing away from me.
“Mind the rusty spoon,” I told her.
“I see it.”
She settled back toward me and I got a faceful of her hair. Wasn’t this what I had wanted all along? Rebecca’s hair’s smell was wonderful but difficult to classify — spicy in some way, and, for want of a better word, smoky, the perfume of wood burning in fireplaces.
“Do you build fires at home?” I asked her.
“Why do you ask?”
“Your hair. It smells like woodsmoke.” I took a deep breath. The scent of Rebecca’s black hair was an antidote to Richard’s cologne and sweaty clothes and his breath in my face.
“We have a fireplace, but we don’t use it. Probably everything in our house smells like soot, because the house is so old and moldy and rotten and gross.”
She kicked a couple of times, and I gave her hand a squeeze, then said, “You don’t smell like soot to me.”
“Thanks,” laughing.
I felt good. I felt happy and relaxed with my new friend. I said to her, “I know what you mean about smells in old houses. I love the eighteenth-century buildings along the riverfront.”