Possibly, the wind might carry me away from Jane. Out over Battlefield Grove, for instance, with its gloomy walking trails through dense, uncut forest, and its prominent, hilltop cannon aimed directly, perpetually, toward the prehistoric burial mound in the valley below.
It occurred to me that flying on the wind was a precious, extremely literary idea — not in the least the sort of psychological concept I can feel good about — and that, furthermore, even if it were truly possible to travel through the air, a very short journey of this nature would, undoubtedly, leave me sick as a dog, as they say.
At this point I knew that I had gone into an emotionally disassociated state — exactly the kind of out-of-body condition that is seen among victims of trauma or abuse.
Bernhardt, whether alert to this fact or not, was attempting to destroy me, apparently through some form of metaphoric patriarchal rape. The intimacy between us was real and devastating. I was, I felt, in danger of a psychoneurotic splitting off — a costly form of self-protection — the proof of which was my thoroughly tactile appreciation of the man’s proximity, of his body’s pressure, its aggressive and hot contact with mine; and, simultaneous with this recognition of our physical linking, my utterly convincing sensation of incorporeal ascension and a perceived flight, or something like a flight — a subjective projection of, I suppose, for want of a better word, the Self — out from my body, away from the hideous man, toward the restaurant’s foam-tile ceiling, toward the roof and around the room. I say “the man” rather than “Richard Bernhardt” because I believe that, to a large extent, the threat to my sanity was not personal in the usual meaning of that word, but generic and rooted in unconscious life.
I loved this awful man, and he was deeply in love with me. In order to bear this knowledge and the attendant physical violation, our embrace, I had no recourse but escape into a transient psychotic breakdown and its exhilarating symptoms. Was this, my withdrawal from tenderness, what was meant by “astral projection”? Could I, in this momentary awakening to love, break the bonds of gravitation, soar heavenward, and explore the unknown, infinite Universe?
It was certainly worth a try. There was nowhere to go but upward. Freedom waited. But no, the ceiling was in the way. And beyond the ceiling’s high-wattage lighting fixtures and plain white tiles would come, I suspected, a formidable roofing structure. Wood and steel, bolts and nails and tar paper. But could these ordinary building materials really be obstacles? Already I was gaining elevation, and the world, as I saw it, was changing shape and form. The fact that I knew my liftoff to be an illusion — a cluster of persuasive somatic sensations expressing sexual fantasies as externalized visual and auditory distortions, to be exact — did not lessen the shock I felt when I looked down and saw my colleagues. These kind men and women, Manuel and Maria and Dan Graham and Sherwin Lang and Elizabeth Cole and, well, Peter Konwicki and his child psychologists, all these more or less friendly spectators were growing, to my eyes, smaller in size; they looked like people seen from an airplane ascending rapidly after its takeoff. But this is, I think, greatly reductive. To speak at all concisely about an hallucinatory episode is to risk the impression of something that might yield to intellection and the premeditated interventions of the Will. It is another matter altogether to realize, in that moment of flight from passion and from one’s body — in that moment when your ears are loudly ringing and your stomach is doing its somersaults; when your friends and associates have turned suddenly and strangely into freakish dolls arranged around play-size tables; when your mouth has gone dry while your skin and clothes feel warmly damp all over; when your blood is racing while your heart in your chest beats so fiercely and so erratically that you fear it may fail; when you wonder, in other words, if this is how it feels to approach death, because it is conceivable that this is no ordinary anxiety attack, not at all, possibly this is something incredible and dreaded, something longed for and unstoppable and terribly, terribly final — it is another matter entirely to realize, when reflecting on rare nightmares like these, how weak and incomplete human intellection really is.
Here came the ceiling. I didn’t dare look. I breathed the smells rising off Bernhardt, his shaving lotion and bad clothes, the man’s rich scent of flowers dying in old water.
Was he hard?
As I grow older, I find that sexual excitation does not necessarily result in erection, per se, but in a roiling, washing, deep-in-the-pelvis warmth, as if the body has learned, over the years since adolescence and early manhood, to slow its responses, to suspend, dramatically, the sexual act and its completion, and instead remain, somewhat restfully, somewhat fitfully, in a condition of lovely, lingering anticipation. Then time decelerates, and this is a blessing. Those of us in middle or late age are by now familiar with the quickening hours, the faster and faster rushing past of days, months, the seasons of life. What’s a year anymore? It is sex, I have found—sex! — or, more precisely, this state of being in awareness of sex, that gives a solid check against the clock, a countermeasure, in the brain, to the rapidity of the body’s decline toward weakness, disease, senescence. If you think about what I am saying, if you concentrate on it, you will certainly recall, in your own experience, those precious moments that stand so alone in time: the glance across a room at the man or woman who will become the new lover: a kiss anticipated: the kiss.
The sun had descended outside and sex was everywhere around me. The kitchen doors swung open and a waitress, lit from behind by super-radiant, industrial-strength fluorescence, came through with a coffeepot in one hand and milk, one of those small stainless-steel creamers, held high before her in the other. She looked young; I flew down for a better view. Light spilled from kitchen to dining room, causing this waitress’s medium-length skirt, as she entered, to become, briefly, translucent. Outlines of her legs showed. The girl’s hair, ribboned, backlit, and fair, glowed in the light that framed her shadow thrown before her on the floor. I was not the only man watching the girl, her body in light. It was as if that light from the kitchen had been set up and aimed to capture this entrance with milk and coffee. Then the waitress, taking her time, admired by men, hesitated a moment while the swinging doors closed behind her. One door, then the next, on her left, then her right, clicked on its hinges, tipped shut. She did not look down or backward toward the doors. She stared ahead into the dining room and her shadow on the floor vanished as doors closed and there was no way to tell what she might have been thinking. Her dress reasserted itself and became opaque and plain around her. She knew where the doors were and she let them go and that ended our show.