“Is that where you live?” she asked me. Little by little, we were getting to know one another.
“No. South side on the other end of College Hill, in a house that looks like a tugboat. Past the first light after the old municipal swimming pool. How about you?”
“We live on the north side.”
“Near the book factory?”
“I can see it from my window. That’s where my dad works. He fixes the machines.”
“How about that,” I said; and she came right out, as the young will, and asked me, “Do you have children?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No reason,” lying.
“Does your wife want to have a baby?” I could feel her hand’s pressure against mine, Rebecca’s fingers holding my fingers and touching, on my ring finger, the gold band.
“We talk about babies.” I felt, saying this, as if I were making a wrongheaded, compromising admission. Was I giving away information that properly belonged to Jane? Or was I merely regretting this necessary honesty, these polite formalities disguised as intimate disclosures — or was it the other way around, provocative intimacies hidden inside good manners? — in my conversation with Rebecca? Talking to the girl, holding her aloft while she kicked, I felt unfaithful. But to whom?
Rebecca? (Inevitably.)
Jane? (Unhappily.)
Maria? (Hardly, though, in a way, constantly.)
“Boy or girl?” Rebecca asked me. For a moment I was not certain what she was talking about. I was busy regretting my habit of wishing that I might become, briefly and at will, a different, more honorable person. Then I remembered. Children.
“Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter,” I told the flying waitress. It was my second lie in only a minute or two.
Rebecca confided, “I don’t want children. Women are supposed to want children. Maybe when I’m older I’ll want children. Johnny used to always talk about having them with me. After he left for college, he’d call on the phone, in the middle of the night, and start dreaming about the babies we were going to have. Sometimes we’d have a boy and a girl, sometimes a couple of each, and if Johnny had been out drinking then it would be a great big bunch of boys, a baseball team’s worth of boys. It was like he was talking to himself. There I am, one room away from Aunt Sylvia dying from her cancer. It’s the middle of the night and all I want to do is fall asleep and get out of school one day and move far away. Then the phone would ring and it would be Johnny, saying”—here Rebecca lowered her voice and spoke from the throat, imitating a teenaged boy’s deliberately gruff, mock-authoritative delivery, a girl’s imitation of a boy imitating a man—“‘I was just thinking about the two of us having our boys.’ He thought he was being romantic. He thought I should love him for saying those things. How was I supposed to think about the rest of my stupid life? I regret not sleeping with him. He was my boyfriend, it wasn’t like I was going to be forced to get pregnant. If you want to avoid getting pregnant, you can do that easily. I never relaxed. I was always saying no, no, no. I thought sex had to be a big deal. And it is! It is a big deal. I want it to be fun. What did I know at two in the morning when the phone rang and everybody else in the house was asleep or dying? I was mean. Do you think there’s something bad going on with me?”
“Not really.”
“You’re wrong. I’m not normal. I spend all my time being scared. I don’t like people my own age, but I don’t want to get old either. Sometimes I think I’ll be stuck working in this crappy joint for the rest of my life. By the way, you really shouldn’t eat here. They use rancid milk in the pancake batter and the maple syrup is nothing but corn syrup with flavoring, and there’s no real butter, and the cook never takes a bath or washes his hair, and there are roaches living in the oven, and the other day I saw a mouse.”
“Wait a minute. Roaches live in the oven?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t they get cooked?”
“Of course they do. They’re in there baking right now. But there are so many roaches in that oven. New ones keep moving in, and the burnt ones fall in the food.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” I held Rebecca’s hand tightly. I could not tell whether Bernhardt had been eavesdropping on our conversation. He continued to breathe against my neck. Rebecca said, “You seem like a nice man. There’s no reason for you to eat bugs.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean it,” she said; and I could tell, from the way she nuzzled against me, her body in its gingham dress curving softly at the hips as she bobbed up and down in the air, I could tell that she did.
Then Rebecca looked down and her eyes got wide. Her body tensed — I could feel this through her hand in mine — and her face got that expression people’s faces get when something alarming comes into consciousness. Her tongue came out, once, then again; and her mouth stayed open, and she cried, “Oh, my God, we’re so high! I don’t like it up here! Will you put me down? People are staring at us. I want to get down!”
“Don’t look at the ground.”
“I’m dizzy.”
“Look up.”
“I’m scared.”
“Close your eyes and breathe deeply,” I said; and I could see, looking from table to table around the restaurant, that Rebecca was right: we were closely watched.
“I’m going to pass out! I’m passing out!” she cried. I squeezed her hand and shouted at her, “Pull yourself together! You’re going to make me drop you! You’ll make me drop you and Richard will drop me, and then where will any of us be?”
It was a question worth considering. It was unlikely that Rebecca or I, if released and dropped — Rebecca falling away from me, I tumbling from Bernhardt’s arms — would suffer much in the way of honest-to-God physical hurt. We were not in fact terribly far off the floor. At the same time — and here is an important point, I think — we were quite high off the floor. We held one another, we were bound together in dependency; and our flying, this sensation of rising and hovering, was more than an imaginary event, neither dream nor fantasy. It was a complex and convincing ordeal that we created and shared and believed in — Rebecca and Richard and I, along with the analysts watching from their tables — together. You might say that our flying was the sensory and perceptual equivalent of a so-called psychosomatic illness. It is incorrect to say that the psychosomatically ill person fantasizes symptoms. Symptoms and illnesses manifesting psychosomatically — as the physiological “consequences” of obscure or extreme emotional turmoil — are no less real, no less medically verifiable, than, say, a cold or the flu caused by routine viral or bacterial contagion and infection. The true hypochondriac inhabits his condition, feels every ache and every fever. Rebecca and I, held up by Bernhardt, felt every dip and rise, every swift descent over the heads of our sitting and walking friends. Falling from the sky would be a shattering, bitter end to the affair.
“Don’t let go of us,” I pleaded to the man holding me. By then I think I realized that he had no intention of releasing me, that there was, for Richard as well as for me, something significant — something movingly, vividly pornographic — taking place.
“I love you, Tom,” he whispered; and his arms in red sleeves closed tightly around me, reaching around my arms and across the lower part of my chest; and also his hands, Richard’s open, enormous hands, reached down from my chest to cover the soft area over my stomach, and I felt Richard’s fingers extending around either side of me, pressing into my ribs.
I could feel, more and more as the night went on, the overwhelming weight of him, Richard’s whole body pushing against me and squashing me. I was feeling sore all over from the heaviness of Bernhardt crushing me, and it was hard to get air.