Donald Antrim - The Verificationist

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.

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.