The Book of Air and Shadows (12 page)

When Mickey talks about his work he drops twenty years and resembles more than he usually does now the youth I met in that scabby apartment on 113th Street. I confess that I can’t imagine such a transformation in my case, should I wish to expatiate on the intricacies of, say, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He loves his profession, and I admire him for it. And am a little envious too, I suppose. But now, as he mentioned Bulstrode, his eyes clouded. And was that moisture? It was hard to tell in the friendly gloom of the restaurant.

“Well,” he resumed, “not anymore, obviously. I would have given a lot to take a look at those papers though. God knows what happened to them.”

Here I thought he looked at me in a somewhat disingenuous fashion. All decent lawyers are close-mouthed about their clients’ affairs, nor does mere death spring open their lips, but they are casual gossips compared to us IP lawyers. So I did not rise to the bait, if bait there was, but asked, “Is there something wrong?”

He said, “You mean besides Bulstrode getting killed? Isn’t that enough?”

“You look like you’re carrying more than that, pal,” I said. “I’ve been noticing it the last couple of times too. You’re not sick or anything?”

“No, aside from the fact that I’m fat as a hog and get no exercise, I’m a horse. Arteries like shotguns according to my doc. No, what you’re observing is the physical stigmata of the current market.”

Here I should mention that Mickey and I have different attitudes toward investment. My pile is with a mutual fund started in 1927 that has never paid much more or much less than 7 percent per annum. Mickey calls this irresponsible conservatism, or did when the market was roaring some years ago. He is a hedge fund guy, and he used to regale me with tales of his fantastic returns; no longer. I said, “Well, you still have the industrial fasteners,” at which he barked a laugh.

“Yeah, if I didn’t have to share them with the two dozen cousins. My family suffers from an excess of heirs.”

I sensed he wished not to pursue this subject so I said, “Speaking of which, do you know if the late professor had any heirs? I take it there were no children.”

“There’s a niece: Madeleine or something like that. Picture on his desk. His late sister’s kid, and he doted on her. I expect she’ll inherit whatever he had. Or the longtime companion.”

“Has she been notified?”

“Yeah. She’s coming down this week.”

“From England?”

“No, from Toronto. The sister emigrated years ago, married a Canadian, had the one kid. Ah, here’s our gnocchi. You know, I think I’m getting my appetite back.”

As we dug into the meltingly tender dumplings, I said, “So the manuscript doesn’t actually lead any further—it’s not a clue to something even bigger?”

Through gnocchi Mickey responded, “Bigger than a contemporary reference to Shakespeare? I can’t imagine what that would be. Did he tell you that?”

“He suggested that his manuscript mentioned another manuscript actually by Shakespeare.”

“Oh, right! Pure fantasy would be my guess. As I said, Andrew was utterly desperate to get back in the game. With good reason. When the will is cleared up and what’s-her-name has possession, we’ll take a look at it and see if it’s anything. Although, given the man’s desperation to recoup his career, I rather think it’ll be nothing much.”

We spoke no more of Bulstrode during this meal (in which Mickey actually did get his appetite back and joked about the garbage they had to eat in Texas) or his mysterious manuscript, or even more mysterious demise.

As far as I recall, that is, since the above is a complete fabrication. I have eaten those dishes and drunk such wine at Sorrentino’s, perhaps with Mickey Haas in attendance, and there is a Marco and a Paul, but
I am in no position to attest that we ate those things on that day, many months ago. I can hardly recall what I had for lunch last Tuesday, nor can anyone else. I did garner some facts about Shakespeare, but whether on that occasion or later, I could not say. I recall that he was upset, and I recall that it was the first occasion at which I learned of the existence of that young woman. Miranda, not Madeleine, as it happens. Aside from that it is fiction, but even as I wrote it, it became the truth, because in point of fact we have virtually no real memories. We make it all up. Proust made it up, Boswell made it up, Pepys…I have actually a great deal of sympathy for the increasingly common sort of person, often one with a high position, who is caught fabricating. You mean I
didn’t
go to Harvard Med School? I did not have sex with that woman…. It’s not the collapse of morality (for I think there has never been truth based on memory) but rather the triumph of intellectual property, that blizzard of invented realities—artificial lives, Photoshopped photos, ghosted novels, lip-synched rock bands, fabricated reality shows, American foreign policy—through which we daily slog. Everyone, from the president on down, is a novelist now.

I suppose we can blame Shakespeare himself for starting it, because he made up people who were
more
real, though false, than the people one knew. Dick Bracegirdle understood this, which was why he set out to smash Shakespeare and all his works. I took a history course at Columbia—Haas will recall it too, because I took it on his recommendation—a man named Charlton taught it. It was English medieval history, and although I have expunged the Domesday Book and all the kings and queens from my mind, I recall very well his take on history in general. He said there are three kinds of history. The first is what really happened, and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened, and that is 90 percent of the history in books.

(Anyway, reading over this scene in the restaurant I find I am absurdly pleased with it. Yes, it could have happened that way. That
is
Mickey’s voice I’ve put there, and I expect that people who know him, if
they read the above, would agree. And I find that reality has swum in to inhabit the fiction I created, and I am absolutely sure that if Mickey read it he would say, Yeah, I recall it just like that. So I write the second kind of history here. As did Bracegirdle, I imagine, although he was an honest man, and I am not.)

I should mention now that shortly after this event I stopped into one of those electronics shops on Sixth Avenue to buy a cell phone battery and for reasons I can’t quite recall…no, actually I do recall. As noted, I have a mind more disorderly than I would prefer and have been in the habit of scrawling down random notes about this and that when they occur to me, in the pages in the back of that aforesaid diary. Unfortunately, I sometimes find I can’t read what I’ve written:
see urty abt. srtnt
would be a typical notation. But while I was in the shop my eye fell on a digital voice-activated recorder, a Sanyo 32, and I thought to myself that here was a solution to my disorder and I purchased it for seventy-two bucks. It is the size of a cell phone and it records two solid hours in high-quality mode. Since I bought it, the last two hours of my life’s sound track has been saved for later listening. It has been invaluable to the present exercise.

After lunch, I ran Mickey back uptown in the Lincoln. He’d drunk most of the wine with the couple of gimlets and he was fairly well oiled. When Mickey gets like this he invariably talks about his three wives. The first Mrs. H. was his college sweetheart, Louise, a strapping blonde from a fine old New England family, who doled out sexual favors standing up under the balcony and the hanging ivy of her Barnard residence hall, as we all did in those days, and somewhat more intimate ones in our apartment. She started letting him fuck her in senior year after she had the ring, another jolly tradition of those times. I recall weekend mornings in the apartment, Mickey in his maroon velour bathrobe (or dressing gown as he pretentiously called it) making fussy coffee with a Chemex, and Louise swanning in, faintly embarrassed at the sight of me at the kitchen table, but carrying it off with class. She usually apppeared on these occasions in black tights with one of Mickey’s oxford dress shirts on top, an outfit I have ever since considered wildly erotic. (Tights were underwear
in those days; I have never quite become used to girls racing around town exhibiting their bodies in them—always a certain vibration in the scrotum.) She also appeared without bra, as she was an early adopter of that style, and she had lovely, pointed, jiggly ones too.

The assumption at these matinees was always that Mickey was the big stud with the mistress, while I was the poor but honest sexually deprived grind, and didn’t we all giggle at this play! In fact, at the time I was getting rather more sex than I could handle from a woman named Ruth Polansky, a thirty-six-year-old librarian at the Farragut Branch of the New York Public Library. This I kept secret from my roommate and everyone else, out of embarrassment for myself and a credible fear for Ruth’s job. Is this germane to the story? In a way, if only as evidence of how early my training in sexual dissemblage began. I suppose there is nothing quite so explosive as an affair between a teenaged boy and a woman of a certain age, in which the peak capacity of the male is matched by the hunger of the female. The French exhibit a certain awe at such affairs and have a whole literature on this subject, but in America it is (Mrs. Robinson!) treated only as farce.

Our particular affair was farcical enough, for our major problem was finding a place to do it in. She lived with her mother and I lived with Mickey Haas, neither of us had a car, I was destitute, as I’ve mentioned, and a librarian’s pay did not run to springing for hotel rooms. Miss Polansky and I had been acquainted for years, and she had been an interested observer of my adolescent growth and the accumulation of heavy musculature that attended it. She was a small, pale woman with silky colorless hair that she wore in a ponytail, making her look younger than her age. Unusually, for that era, she was divorced, which added a certain spice to my fantasies about her, which began at about age twelve. As I (falsely, I suppose) reconstruct it, she brought me along quite skillfully, using my interest in theater to turn my thoughts toward the sort of erotic life not generally available in high schools at the time. She gave me books, plays: Williams, Ibsen,
Tea and Sympathy
, erotic French poetry, and
Ulysses
, these last on loan from her private collection. It is in any event not hard to seduce a teenage boy in a book-smelling, steam-heated
library on a drowsy winter afternoon. She didn’t mind the pimples. She complimented my eyes. Sexy, she said, bedroom eyes.

The primary seduction occurred in the staff room at the library. She had a fifteen-minute break, the other librarian was at the front desk. We did it in a chair, close to a radiator that hissingly leaked steam, although it had nothing on Mrs. Polansky. I lasted only a few minutes but that was enough to send her into a remarkable paroxysm, during which, because she did not wish to attract the attention of the library patrons, she caused volumes of air to issue from between her clenched teeth, since which time I have always found the whistle of escaping steam to be lubricious. I did not get to hear her full-throated cry of ecstasy until the city began closing libraries on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and I was able to start using my old room in the family apartment while Mutti was working at the hospital.

We had a window of about three hours between noon and when my sister returned from school, of which a good deal was consumed by the subway ride from uptown Manhattan to eastern Brooklyn, so that we were clawing off our clothes from the instant the front door clicked shut. Mrs. Polansky was not the noisiest orgasmer I have ever encountered, but she was a contender, producing at the peak a series of deep, loud organlike groans; and it was only to be expected, given the farcical nature of our affair, that one day, after our typical exertions and having arranged our clothes for the world, we should have encountered Mutti sitting at the kitchen table. She’d taken the afternoon off for some reason, and I never knew how long she’d been sitting there. Her face was unreadable as I introduced Mrs. P. as a math tutor helping me with my algebra. Ruth extended her hand and Mutti shook it, quite correctly, and offered coffee.

I haven’t thought of that afternoon in quite some time. I really don’t like thinking about that apartment at all, especially the kitchen.

Back to Mickey and his wives. Louise, as I said, was the first, and lasted the usual seven years. By then it was the height of the sexual revolution, and Mickey wanted his share, which was not all that hard for a professor to pick up, and so then there was Marilyn Kaplan, the eternal
grad student. By this time Mickey had a couple of kids and a dog in his big Scarsdale house, and so it cost him a bundle to slake his lust for Marilyn. Of the three wives, Marilyn is the most classically beautiful: big black eyes, glossy long chestnut hair, and the great American girl body, long legs, thin waist, cannonball breasts. She was a staunch feminist of the high 1970s school, utterly contemptuous of the male gaze, while attracting it without cease, and waxing great upon the advantages it conferred. She produced another child, and after some three years vanished with a fellow from, I think, Berkeley, an epicene bisexual of flawless politics, or so I gathered. As Mickey explained it, the problem was largely intellectual: he simply was not on her level with respect to literary theory. This was something nearly as important to her as sex, at which, according to Mickey, she was the dominant partner and of boundless energy and inventiveness.

I heard her lecture once. Mickey took me, a lecture called something like “Privileging the Text in the Late Comedies: Speech Act Theory and Discursive Formation in Shakespeare.” I did not understand one single word of it, and told Mickey so, and he tried to explain to me about Foucault and Althusser and Derrida and the revolution in the study of literature of which Marilyn was an ornament, but I could see that his heart was not in it. Mickey’s problem, I gathered, was that while he could talk the current critical talk, and did it surpassing well, his heart was not really in it, for he
loved
Shakespeare, and loving anything was apparently a bourgeois affectation concealing the machinations of the oppressive patriarchy. Marilyn thought she could change him, thought she could blow some fresh air into his paternalistic, bourgeois view of literature, but no. And he had never made her come, not like Gerald-from-Berkeley could, or so she told him. She left him the kid, though.