Mike saw us and smiled — as if he knew I was speaking well of him — and Rebecca whispered in my ear, “He seems like a nice man.”
“Mike is nice,” I agreed. And why not? The man is, I would say, extraordinarily friendly and companionable for an ego psychologist — it’s his Protestantism leaching through the analytic attitude, in the form of a seductive, earnest affability. People always wish to confide in Mike, because they identify him as trustworthy.
“Who’s the guy dressed like Abraham Lincoln?” Rebecca asked me. She was pointing.
“That’s Sherwin Lang.”
“Oh.”
“Sherwin is one of my favorite people,” I said.
“How come?” asked Rebecca. We were, at this point, directly above Lang’s table; and I could see, looking straight down, that Sherwin and Mike had well-defined bald spots. Sherwin, as I may have mentioned, wore his hair long and brushed back from his forehead. I saw now that this was a ruse. No amount of styling and combing will ever conceal significant hair loss. Lang’s skull was surprisingly apparent from above; and the similarity — in shape, circumference, and approximate position — between his and Mike’s baldness patterns was, I thought, striking, particularly considering the different techniques each man adopted in relation to his bald spot, and what these techniques revealed about the men in relation to one another. Mike, wearing his hair crew-cut short, appeared from overhead to be the more honest and forthright fellow — a man without evident disguises. Lang’s hair was deliberately forged into a kind of mane, combed into those high black-and-gray swells that seemed poised to crash over and swamp his white and unprotected grotto of naked head.
“Sherwin’s an interesting person,” I said to Rebecca as, together, we peered down at the drinker and the former seminarian. These two men, buddies over many years, functioned socially as complements to one another, and were therefore, in my opinion, good examples of what I like to call compatible incompatibles. How often do we see this in friends and married couples? It’s the story of Jack Sprat and his wife, that old rhyme about the economies of attracted opposites. But the fat wife/skinny husband situation also hints at the ways in which manifestly dissimilar individuals recognize in one another the most basic, hidden affinities. When we love a person who is strange to us, it is not as a rule mere strangeness that brings us into deeper affection; on the contrary, we feel moved by what is shared and historicaclass="underline" a certain kind of good or bad home, perhaps, the childhood full of love or the childhood without friends, a lonely mother or the father who drinks, the craving for solitude and a terror of solitude, all the exciting and providential things that make the groundwork for what we call, for lack of a better name, personality.
Was it possible that Mike Breuer, this sober father of three, with his clear blue eyes and toothy smile, found in Sherwin Lang a cathartic, operatic expression of his own dilemmas, fantasies, and fears?
And, for his part, did Sherwin “use” Mike to feel more at home in the world?
And where did I fit in? How did my career as a balding man correspond to Sherwin’s, to Mike’s? Peter Konwicki, one table over from Sherwin, showed baldness of a comparatively different sort — sweeping and absolute, as if the treacherous workings of Konwicki’s mind obviated the need for hair in any style or amount. I cautioned Rebecca, “That man over there wants to destroy me. He claims to like children, but he’s a fiend.”
Rebecca squeezed my hand. It felt to me that we were growing closer up here in the air, and so naturally I wondered if it would be appropriate for me to warn her, as well, about myself.
“Uh, listen,” I began; then blathered, somewhat maniacally, at the waitress, “I’m confused. I don’t know what I want. Do you understand what I mean? How could you? You’re young and you have life ahead of you. I act like a baby in public. I spit water at my colleagues. I prop trash cans against their doors so that the trash will spill into their offices, then I knock and run down the hallway. I think it’ll make me happy to play these tricks, and people will laugh, but no one ever appreciates my jokes, and I wind up depressed. Later I break down in tears during important meetings. My marriage is in trouble. The problem is that I don’t know how to be a man. I’m the right age to be a man, but does that make me a man? Jane puts up with my ridiculous theories about — about — everything under the sun! Why am I so afraid of children? Why can’t I talk to Jane about a child? Is it because I want to be the child? I want to be the child! I want to be the child! Why do I think I can help people? Children can’t help people! Children are the ones who need help!”
What had brought this on? Why was I having this interview with myself, blurting these embarrassing things? Quickly, I tried to achieve a little composure. “I only thought, Rebecca, that if you’re going to fly with me, if you’re going to be up here where everyone below can see up your dress, and not down there clearing tables and collecting tips, I thought you should know what sort of person I am.”
Rebecca looked straight at me and said — I liked her for this, though was uncertain how to take it, exactly—“I figured you were royally screwed up when you couldn’t decide between pancakes or eggs for dinner. Pancakes or eggs? What’s the big deal? You looked like you were about to have a nervous breakdown. It was funny.”
“Funny?”
“Yeah.”
“It wasn’t funny when it was happening,” I told her, sadly, and felt, as I almost always do, misunderstood. But she said — incredibly, I thought, for a high-school student—“I know you were in pain. But other people’s pain is funny, don’t you think?”
I knew, then, that I was going to fall for this girl. I could feel it coming on. I gazed at her face beside mine. Everything about Rebecca seemed right to me. I had an urge to laugh. What is more enjoyable than a brand-new infatuation? I felt uncomfortable in a thoroughly pleasant way. Were my hand and fingers damp against hers? Could she feel my nervousness? Rebecca’s eyebrows were dark. Did she pluck them? What did girls do, these days, in the way of erotic grooming? Her cheeks and the bridge of her nose showed freckles sprayed across the skin. Eyes were brown but appeared black in her freckled, damp face.
I asked her, “Are you feeling better? Is your stomach settled? Do you want to glide down to the kitchen and get a ginger ale?”
“I’m okay. I’m used to throwing up. I do it all the time at home. You’ll probably advise me to see a psychiatrist.”
“I would never tell anyone to see a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists are medical doctors. They emphasize diagnostics and pharmacology. I’d tell you to talk to that man in the flannel shirt.”
“The fat guy smoking a cigarette?”
“Dan Graham specializes in eating disorders and substance abuse problems.”
We were over the fish tank, positioned at what aviators call twelve o’clock, headed like a pair of tangled-up Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons past the cash-register counter, out across the open, middle part of the restaurant, toward windows overlooking town and, rising above town and the river, College Hill. Richard Bernhardt was our mooring. Fog had thickened and city lights were indistinct. Every now and again thunder rumbled. Rain from the north was taking its time getting here. There was no horizon line visible outside the windows, only fogginess and, permeating the night, a radiant, atmospheric glow, the city in the mist. The hospital roof alone was visible on the skyline, a beacon in the outer dark.
Indoors, down below Rebecca and me, Dan Graham exhaled smoke, then tipped cigarette ashes onto the floor. It was easy to see, from above, how huge and round the man was. Smoke from his cigarette drifted up, pooling beneath the ceiling. I got a whiff of the smoke, and for some reason that had nothing to do with unwholesome aspects of the habit, this smell of cigarette made me sad for Dan. He appeared, as smokers do, with their puffing and dragging, their attention to the rituals of striking the match and applying the flame and so on, quite alone — an obese, preoccupied man without a friend in the world. And it was true: no one was talking to Dan. To his left and his right were people who had pulled chairs close together; and there were, at Dan’s table, three empty chairs left by analysts who, finished eating, had pushed their seats back, gotten up, and marched away in search of better tables with better, more healthy and outgoing people at them. The party was disintegrating into a collection of isolated small parties.