“Close your eyes,” I said to Rebecca, who thrashed and struggled like a person drowning.
“I’m going to be sick!” cried the girl.
“You’ll be all right,” I assured her, in spite of the fact that I was feeling queasy myself — as I had been all night since taking off, propelled by Bernhardt on my own flight. Rebecca’s hand in mine felt cold and wet with her sweat. We were both sweating. There was moisture on her face and her arms. I was afraid her hand would slip out of mine.
“Going to be sick,” she said again. Her voice trembled and her long hair fell forward across her face, sticking there. Her face was sallow white. She was clearly wretched. I pulled on her hand and swung her a little distance through the air, bringing her close to a Dutch oven hanging from a thin metal wire attached to the ceiling.
“Throw up into the pot,” I told her, and she leaned her head into the Dutch oven and vomited.
“Good girl, that’s a good girl,” I said while Rebecca heaved and spat. I was trying to calm her. It is embarrassing to throw up in public, and no one who does this wants to feel reprimanded.
Her head hung halfway inside the pot, and her hair draped around its rim, encircling the black outside of the Dutch oven. She reached up with her free hand, gathered the hair into a ponytail, and held it away from the iron cauldron and her neck. Her neck above the blue dress was bare. Rebecca held her hair in her hand, and I saw, on the back of her neck, across the spine and beneath her hairline, the tiny, recognizable pattern of freckles and moles.
It was a detail from Jan Brueghel the Elder’s A Woodland Road with Travelers, one of Brueghel’s small and intimate, perspectival paintings of Dutch peasants in a landscape. A Woodland Road with Travelers shows men and women with their children on a journey, carrying burdens and leading hobbled and swaybacked draft animals that draw broken-down carts piled and overspilling with household belongings and more people, the cart’s drivers and, presumably, the very old who cannot walk over the stones and brambles and fallen leaves and the tree roots that stick out everywhere from the forest floor — a caravan of the poor making their way inexorably along a road that never was a road, underneath old trees that bend down over the heads of the people, blotting out the sun. Deep blue sky, three or four dark birds, the forest’s edge, and one or two painted clouds are apparent in the immediate distance. In the lower left foreground, beneath a tree, lies the bleached, intact skeleton of a fallen horse. The animal’s skull is huge and, as is true of everything in Brueghel’s work, observantly painted. Two finely dressed men — aristocrats? royal messengers? prosperous thieves? — ride on horses past the skeleton, through the trees and into the woods. Do they notice the bones of the fallen animal? Is a dead horse cause for concern? Where are the men going? What danger are they riding toward? The pilgrims with their overloaded carts, on the other hand, mainly travel away from the viewer; and there is a feeling that these good people have left their homes and whatever blood ties exist for them. They plod with their loads toward the break in the forest, toward a town or village with its church steeple faintly discernible, rising up at the vanishing point on the horizon. A few travelers, and a small black, brown, and white dog have stopped to sit and rest beneath the trees in the lower right corner of the scene. The dog peers back along the road, back into the dark woods toward unseen things that have been abandoned or lost in the recent past; and the dog gazes, as well, into the eye of the viewer standing before the painting. Caravans proceed toward and away from the town. The wealthy horsemen ride heedlessly into the forest. The mood of the painting is neither happy nor sad, frightening nor liberating; it is all these things.
If you look at the painting, you will see the dog staring out at you. If you move to the left or the right, the dog’s eyes will find you — exactly as the eyes of figures in paintings are expected to do.
The dog connects the people in the painting to the world outside the painting. It is as if Brueghel’s peasants have been cast out of the living world in order to wander through the painting.
It was Jan Brueghel the Elder’s little dog, I was sure, glaring at me from the naked back of Rebecca’s neck, when Rebecca leaned over to throw up in the open Dutch oven hanging from its strong, thin cable screwed into the Pancake House & Bar ceiling.
What could it mean to be gazed at by a lonely dog inscribed on the neck of a girl vomiting in midair? There was no way of knowing, though I suspect this manifestation of the dog provided a clue about my role as a transitional figure in Rebecca’s life.
It is important in my profession to study these kinds of signs, not as portents heralding so-called real or impending phenomena, but as indicators of unspoken predilections and attractions on the part of the beholder. Readers of symbols are forever at the mercy of desire. I saw an art-historical dog on Rebecca’s neck because I imagined Rebecca herself looking inarticulately, longingly backward, searching through metaphoric dark forests — for a man like me.
She let her hair fall from her hand. She drooled into the black pot. I held her other hand. Rebecca’s left hand was hanging in the air and her right hand was holding my left hand. Our hands were locked together. We were like a pair of worried, unpracticed dance partners. My arms were held in place by Bernhardt’s arms. Rebecca’s hair fell across her back and the dog withdrew from sight. Bernhardt lifted me in his hug. He was my father. I was able to learn from his good example, and to say, calmly, to Rebecca:
“I’m here.”
“Fuck,” she said.
She raised her head and brought up her arm and mopped, with her dress’s long, blue cotton sleeve, her face.
“Do you feel better?” I asked.
“Uhf,” she said.
“Can you try flying?”
“I don’t know.”
In no sense did Rebecca’s episode of vomiting make her less attractive to me; on the contrary, she became more beautiful and sympathetic as a character in my life.
I watched her spit.
“You have some on your chin.”
“Where?”
“There.”
Obviously, I was unable to raise my hand to her face. I wished I could have wiped her off. It would’ve been a brave, intimate gesture. I nodded my head and shifted my eyes.
“Lower,” I said.
She scrubbed with her open hand. With her other hand she held tightly to my hand. Was separation as frightening to Rebecca as it was to me? Was she apprehensive of solitude?
“A little lower.”
“Lower?”
“You’ve got it,” I said.
Her eyes were watery and circumscribed with black shadows. Rebecca’s lips were red.
“You’re beautiful,” I told her.
“I’m sick.”
“We’ll take things slowly,” I promised.
And we did. I gave Rebecca plenty of time to catch her breath, to clean up or at least pat her hair into place and wipe her mouth, that sort of thing, and then we began, hand in hand, a clockwise circuit of the room. Along the way I pointed out people below, telling Rebecca their names and embellishing their stories with friendly Institute gossip, occasionally waving and smiling if the person under scrutiny happened to look up and spy us gliding through the air above everyone’s heads.
“That’s Elizabeth Cole. She’s in her third marriage, to a man named Deavers who is at least half a foot shorter than she is and teaches biology at the high school. The man on her right is Mike Breuer. Mike is a former Episcopal minister. Before that he was a star running back for the Kernberg College Colonels. Now he’s a fine therapist.”