Behind the candy counter, off to the far side of the aquarium and partly hidden from view, young Bob and young Katharine were in a clinch. I could not see below the trainees’ waists, but I could tell that Bob had weaseled — or should I say “lemured”?—his hands into Katharine’s blouse; and, judging from the fabric bunched up as if yanked out of place by hooks between the girl’s shoulder blades, I’d say he had her bra undone.
Mike and Elizabeth had made progress in their budding relationship. This pair, each married to a spouse working safely outside the local psychological community, nevertheless knew better than to create a fuss or cause comment at the Institute offices. A quick glance showed their subtle courtship under way. Mike, not a terrifically sexy man by anyone’s standards, was doing his best with what he had, posing casually in a fashion that exhibited his well-developed quadriceps — Mike was a runner, and this was his knee-forward, slightly turned-out “hero” pose from classical theater and art. Elizabeth, in response, reached around with one hand to pull her hair back from her forehead. Her ears popped out in relief.
Someone dropped money in a jukebox. A few people — among these were Terry Kropp and a truly lovely woman I had not before noticed — moved to the room’s center, directly underneath Sherwin and Leslie. Who was this woman accompanying Terry? His wife? She was for some reason interested in encouraging Peter Konwicki to get up and dance; to this end she did the thing that a beautiful yet insecure woman will sometimes do if she’s drunk enough and the dance floor is uncrowded and she wants the support of a group, shuffling and wiggling a trail from one man to the other and back again, practicing democracy with her beauty. When she held out her hand to summon Peter, he blushed horribly — his whole head went red — and he waved his hands, palms facing out, as if the prospect of doing the bump with this woman and a fellow analyst, even a recent hire like Terry, was nothing less than mortifying. I felt a surprising rush of sympathy and compassion for Peter Konwicki. Why, all of a sudden, did I feel empathy for this man who wants to abolish my after-school programs? I found myself wishing that he would stand up and dance with Terry’s wife or girlfriend, whoever she was. Peter seemed, rocking back and forth in his tipped-back chair, lonely and a little withdrawn; and I have to confess that, for reasons I could not name, I liked the man, and wanted him to be happy. Isn’t that strange? The music was a pop song I had heard innumerable times on the radio while driving home or to work, several years before; and hearing it now caused me to think about a certain dinner at about that time, during which Jane ordered shellfish that made us both horrendously sick.
Oddly, no waitresses were in sight. Some tables and booths had been cleared, others were in shambles: isolated, unsightly messes of piled plates, cups, and bowls, water glasses stacked into precariously leaning towers on coffee-stained tables. However, no pattern relating the cleared to the neglected tables was apparent. Nor was there any light spilling beneath or between the tall swinging doors leading to and from the kitchen. The kitchen was mysteriously dark. Was the cook on break? The Pancake House & Bar stays open all night, so there must’ve been an explanation for the missing employees. Possibly the staff were out back smoking. I just don’t know.
That teenaged boy and his girlfriend were, as I had earlier dreaded, up to no good. I’d figured the kid for a delinquent in the most humdrum, suburban mode, a habitual dope smoker or serious truant. I had not imagined him to be a thief. But that’s what he was. In the absence of waitresses, etc., this kid was looting the bar, passing beer bottles from the cooler to the girlfriend as fast as she could hide the bottles under her oversized alpine coat. Cold air steamed from the open refrigerator. The kid reached in with both hands and grabbed bottles by their necks. Actually, as stealing goes, I don’t suppose this was a worrisome example. Many adolescents pull exactly these kinds of stunts, then grow up to become responsible and happy. This I know from my practice.
All told, the scene at ground level was what you might expect — an ordinary party broken into factions, staggering through the final stages before collapse. Manuel and Maria sat in their booth looking stunned, as if they could not find the energy to stand and put on coats. I suspect that Maria was waiting to leave with Bernhardt — or, cautiously, a minute before Bernhardt — so that he could get in his purple station wagon and follow her yellow sports car to town. Maria and Manuel watched the dancers, and now and then turned their heads to check out, discreetly, the child-psychology students making out behind the candy counter. Then they peered up at Sherwin and Leslie in the air above the people dancing.
It was this pair, the alcoholic doctor and the orphaned Englishwoman, who presented the evening’s most distressing — or most moving? — picture. I feel some reluctance to disclose in detail what I witnessed, purely on grounds that I might prefer to respect the privacy and confidentiality of my friend and his new mistress. On the other hand, this was a pancake restaurant. What the hell, they were fucking. I had to hand it to Leslie. She’d hoisted herself all the way up Sherwin’s legs. Hers were wrapped around his back. That’s not exactly right: one bare leg was coiled around Sherwin, it’s true, and the other, gripped behind the knee by Sherwin with his free hand, the hand not held by Rebecca, extended up and over Lang’s shoulder. Leslie’s shoe, with its startlingly long and narrow heel pointed toward the ceiling, now and again rubbed against Sherwin’s head. Let me say that I could not, observing from above, see any actual, verifiable genital conjunction. But I could see Leslie’s skirt hiked up, and Lang’s belt unbuckled, his trousers unbuttoned and unzipped. I would have wagered that Sherwin was too drunk to screw, and I would’ve been wrong. The two were pressed together, making digging motions with their hips.
This as much as anything explained, I decided, the air of relative normalcy, the listless dancing and the sitting quietly in booths and so forth, affected by practically everyone below, my former lover and the others acting like nothing out of the ordinary was going on.
Only Bob and Katharine, the exceptions, were young enough — and mature enough, evidently — to take Sherwin and Leslie’s fucking publicly and acrobatically at a height of, I would estimate, ten or more feet off the ground; only these two were the right age to take Sherwin and Leslie as permission to shed inhibitions and act on their own urges.
“Oh my God. Are they doing what I think they’re doing?” Rebecca whispered in my ear. She said, “Should a doctor be doing that? I can’t believe I’m holding his hand!”
“Don’t stare,” I said to her.
“I’m not staring,” she said.
“It’s not polite,” I told her.
She said, “What’s he doing with her leg? Is that his stomach? I think I’m going to be sick again.”
Then Bernhardt spoke. “They’ve been at it a while. It’s hard not to watch a thing like that.”
“Try looking away,” I suggested.
But of course Richard was right. How often are we given the chance to study people we know in the act of making love?
It was with something like reverence, with a kind of sincere, hushed admiration, that Bernhardt and Rebecca and I watched Sherwin with Leslie in their embrace. Leslie wrapped her arms around Lang, clasping hands behind his neck. Sherwin held Leslie’s leg and gently adjusted her, and Rebecca squeezed my hand. I was sure she was squeezing Sherwin’s as well; and I noticed that Rebecca’s breathing, and Richard’s, and mine, had become synchronized with one another’s and the lovers’ own inhalations and their harmonized movements; we were, Richard and I and Rebecca, unable to stop ourselves from responding to, from obeying — in the ways we touched and brushed against one another, softly — the slow, graceful, controlled periodicity of Sherwin’s hips’ backward and forward motions against Leslie, moving so nicely opposite him with her eyes closed and her skirt rolled up. Sherwin pushed into Leslie and Bernhardt pushed against me, and, pushing and hugging, clutching and rubbing, he shoved me right up against Rebecca. Rebecca turned, much as Leslie had pivoted her body to accommodate Sherwin’s, allowing — I’m referring to Rebecca, not Leslie — her leg to intrude between my legs.