There was no question in my mind that Bernhardt was coming. How can I describe this feeling, except as a kind of incessant, scary, wet, plunging battery against my back? The power of this man to hold me, to use me, was fantastic. His body ground against mine. I could feel and hear his fast breathing against my ear. I could smell him. He jerked and I shook. He shook. A sigh came from him. Little by little, his movement against me slowed. Against my back, and through my shirt, warmth and wetness spread itself out. There was so much. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it. The feeling against my skin was odd, shocking and soothing at the same time. Everything was wet. It had been building up in Bernhardt all night, and now it was over. It was finished. Even the man’s panama hat, its brim brushing my neck, could not bother me now. Far below us the dancers twirled, looking over their shoulders from time to time to ascertain the situation near the ceiling, before readdressing themselves to partners and the jukebox music’s rhythms.
Light came dully through the restaurant’s picture windows. It seemed impossible that it could be morning. Would the waitresses come back? Would the cook? I could make out, through fog and the drizzling rain outside, the pale colors on cars in the parking lot, and the gray trunks of the trees encircling the lot. Then the light outside grew stronger, illuminating the rainwater that streamed down the windows, streaking the panes.
Here at long last came the hospital, casting its light over everything. I could see it — I could see its light—outside the window near the booth where Maria and Manuel sat with water and their dregs of cold, black coffee. The huge pyramid coming closer in the sky.
Here it came.
Rebecca forced her leg between my legs. She was communicating to me, with her leg wedged between mine, and through the pressure applied by her hand, her fingers working deep into the joints between my knuckles; she was communicating the effect, on her mind and her body, of watching sex happen. She squeezed my hand so hard it hurt. I gripped Rebecca’s hand, then released it a tiny bit only, to give her the idea that we could do more than hurt each other; we could rub our hands together and feel, through our fingertips and our palms, a version of intercourse, our chaste rendition of what was taking place beneath us in the air; we could, in other words, fuck with our hands.
Sherwin was going hard with Leslie. Manuel and Maria slouched down in their seats. It was obvious that these two had had a love affair in the past, and that their affair, like mine with Maria, was long finished in some manner that prevented its resurrection under any circumstances. They were my friends, and they were friends to one another, and now they were tired. That was why they sat there doing nothing.
All this time, Bernhardt was holding me, not merely physically, but, more to the point — and in the deep sense made famous by the British Object Relations theorists — emotionally. And yet it was difficult to stay relaxed, everything considered.
Sherwin’s hips moved at a pace too rapid for me or Rebecca or Bernhardt to follow or imitate in our breathing; there was nothing for us to do but hang in one another’s arms and sweat beneath the skillets. Sherwin, between drunken thrusts, managed to say, “Excellent”—deep, long thrust—“party”—once again moving into Leslie—“Thomas.”
It was at this point that a strange and unaccountable thing happened. A car drove up and stopped outside the Pancake House. I could not see it, because it parked directly out front behind a small, decorative wall. However, I could hear tires crunching the gravel, and I could make out a rattling sound, the motor dying. I could hear, quite clearly, the car door opening, maybe the driver’s-side door, maybe the passenger’s; and, following this, the expectable metal-and-rubber thud, the door closing. I know by heart these noises made by my own car’s out-of-tune engine, its doors unlatching before slamming not so solidly shut; and I thought that this might be—at last! — our little green sedan driven by Jane to pick me up.
But it was a man, and not my wife, who walked into the restaurant and stood in the doorway looking around the place.
He was dressed in a dark woolen jacket over a white shirt and black or, perhaps, gray or navy trousers. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and had a smallish nose and a beard trimmed short, and he was, as were so many men gathered that night, nearly bald. What hair he had left was clipped on the top and sides, barbered to match the beard. He was noticeably tall and his ears stood out almost as prominently as Elizabeth Cole’s. The man was, by his looks, neither a long-distance traveler nor an insomniac; he appeared, at any rate in my impromptu fantasy about him, as if he had been somewhere in the country for an important dinner that had gone late. He took one look at the scene inside the Pancake House, then turned and walked out.
Here’s the strange thing. The man looked like me. He didn’t look exactly like me, but he looked something like me — like a happier, better-dressed and better-groomed, entirely better-looking and better-fed, more handsome and successful adaptation of me. That is why I recall him, and why I remember the feelings of shame that came over me when I saw that this was not Jane coming in the door to fetch me home; rather it was a man in a well-cut coat who sauntered in and, I suppose, took in, at a glance, as it were, everything required for him to comprehend the situation — the boy and his girlfriend stealing the beer, and Mike and Elizabeth staring into one another’s eyes, and the pathetic dancing at the middle of the room. He saw Leslie fucking Sherwin while the rest of us pretended to look away. He saw me being raped.
What must he have thought? He left the restaurant. He’d seen as much as he needed or wanted to see. What future use might he make of it? Light flooded the doorway as he held the door open. He went through into the light. The door closed behind the man, and a moment later the car door opened and closed, and the ignition started the motor, and the car drove away. Possibly someone was with the man in the car. Possibly kids were sleeping in the backseat. Who knows? The car drove away, but the light outside did not diminish. It came in the windows of the Pancake House & Bar. The light was not sunlight, nor was it the light shining from the man’s car’s headlamps. The light came in the windows, the curtained and uncurtained windows, from east and west and south and north.
Staring into the light, into that glow, I knew — or felt I knew, which in retrospect may be the same or as good; and who can with certainty know what anyone’s future will bring? — that my legs were truly dead, and that I would probably never have a son with Jane, and that my own father had, with my complicity, taken my life from me.
My clothes were soaked with sweat and Bernhardt’s semen. I felt ashamed, and I was shivering. Was I crying? I think I was. Yes. Bernhardt rocked me in his arms.
“Easy does it,” he said to me.
“I don’t feel well,” I said to him.
“You’re going to be all right, Lieutenant,” he said to me.