Donald Antrim - The Verificationist

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.

My idea of Dan’s loneliness came mainly from watching what was taking place at the table behind Dan’s back.

Leslie Constant, the Englishwoman, was gazing at Sherwin Lang. These two were, by this point in the evening, deep in their sexual negotiations, establishing, over bacon and eggs, toast, coffee, and beer, all the important sadomasochistic patterns and dynamics of the relationship ahead: who would come on strong, and who would express a characteristic ambivalence; who would regularly weep, and who would be perceived as the cause of all the tears; who would become doting and remorseful after a fight, and who would rely on casual sarcasm and renewed quarreling to mediate the terms of reconciliation and attachment. Everything — though who can ever really say how things will play out in other people’s entanglements? — seemed contained in the archetypal tableau struck by this man and this woman with their dinner plates and Sherwin’s impressive collection of empty brown beer bottles pushed aside so that nothing might stand between them. Leslie was the designated aggressor. Her elbows were propped on the table and her chin rested in her hands. Her blond head tilted sideways and downward, slightly — forcing Leslie to gaze up in order to make eye contact with Sherwin. She was looking at Lang in exactly the manner of a timorous girl trying out her charms on a handsome, withdrawn adult. Has this stock approach ever failed as a feminine courtship tactic? Sherwin crossed his arms before his chest. He appeared, in his weird, too-tight coat, like a subject for a daguerreotype. Lang held on tightly to his bottle; he pressed himself against the rigid, wooden back of his chair — how else survive Leslie’s intimate onslaught? — the seducing alcoholic in retreat, giving the woman permission to answer his seduction, to push in closer and closer, and to signal, with her body craning toward his across their table, her woundedness, her availability, her readiness to collapse into dependency.

At the next table over, Peter Konwicki seemed to be leading a small, intense, by-invitation-only academic conference; all his child-psychology trainees listed heavily toward their table’s masculine center of power. Konwicki tipped his chair back, using it as a rocker. He crossed his legs. This was a strong move, because it made Peter look precariously unbalanced, yet — with one leg angled up and hoisted over the other, leaving only a single ugly brown shoe touching the floor — daringly in control of his situation. He rocked. The students leaned in. You could say, watching Peter tip farther and farther back in his Pancake House chair, that he was acting out his own inner condition, a state I would briefly describe as an a priori primary process imbalance, regulated by extraordinary superego functioning. This impression of deep psychic instability mirrored in physical disequilibrium was accentuated by Konwicki’s hypermanic talking style: much waving of the arms and hands. He gestured at his followers like a man lecturing to the back rows in a large hall — or, more to the point, I thought, like someone on the street shouting complicated directions to foreigners.

“I want you all to observe closely and pay attention to what you see,” he instructed the students. “We have a rare opportunity, tonight, to witness a man in the throes of what lay people call a nervous breakdown.” At this point Konwicki leaned forward on his tilted-back chair. This allowed him to make quite dramatic rocking motions. He lowered his voice and spoke in a loud stage whisper. “Direct your eyes to the torrentially sweating hands and arms and the rashy contact dermatitis around the neck. Notice also Tom’s violently labored breathing and periodic twitching, and the convulsing of the hips, legs, and feet. These are symptoms of a catastrophic anxiety disorder that is manifestly sexual in nature. The subject has regressed to a classically pre-oedipal position, in order to reorganize psychosexual reality and survive trauma. The fixation on unassisted flight and the collapse of subjective time are diagnosable side effects and, while not common, also not unknown in the literature. Would anyone care to comment on the probable outcome?”