The Book of Air and Shadows (13 page)

Number three was, or is, Dierdre, who was his editor at Putnam, a Kevlar and piano-wire item, who pursues perfection in all things. She is now (we are back on our drive) the main subject of complaint, for Dierdre is à la mode to the max. For Dierdre to have the wrong refrigerator, attend the wrong party, appear at the wrong club or resort, or have the wrong sort of house in the Hamptons, would be a kind of social cancer,
and she now wishes to produce a perfect child, at which Mickey is rather balking, having three already. He told me a long anecdote about…

You know, I forget what it was about. Tiles? A German appliance? Conception strategies? Who gives a shit, but the point was that she was costing him a bundle, as was the first wife and the first set of kids, and the boy from Marilyn (Jason) was acting up, and he was spending a fortune in special schools and psychiatrist bills, and because of the market and the too numerous fastener heirs, he was seriously pinched. (I offered a loan, got laughed at, ha-ha, it’s not that bad yet.) Such bitch sessions are a normal part of my friendship with Mickey. I suppose he’s listened enough to mine, although I have had only the one wife. The peculiar thing, though, about Mickey’s wives is that, by chance, I have fucked each of them, although not ever during the period in which they were married to him. I would never do that.

Louise and I had a single long afternoon about two weeks before she got married. She said she loved him and wanted to have his children, but simply could not bear the thought of never doing it with another man and she said she always had a sneaker for me (her word) and wanted to see what it was like before the gate clanged shut. She was a somewhat nervous lover, and it was clear that Mickey had not proceeded past the introductory course, whereas Mrs. Polansky had given me an entire curriculum. That was it, and she never mentioned it, or sought more, and I don’t think she ever told Mickey, even when he took up with Marilyn.

Who I’d met at a literary cocktail to which I was invited by one of my clients, about six months before he hooked up with her. She was ranting on about
fascists
in her English lit department, and I made a mild comment about how that word had a technical meaning and it was not particularly wise to use it in so broadly figurative a sense, lest we be unguarded if the real thing came along again, as it very well might, since it had its attractions, obviously. She laughed at me, because to her
fascist
was what you called someone you disliked, and their response was always to deny it. Nobody except some brainless hicks in Indiana or Idaho ever admitted to actually espousing fascism. For obvious reasons, I have read deeply in the history and literature of that philosophy, and, being a
little drunk, gave her a massive dose. I don’t think she’d ever heard a coherent argument that did not start with
her
assumptions, but with a completely different set—that sexual and racial oppression were natural, for example, and that it was as absurd to be ashamed of them or to suppress them as it was to be ashamed of sex; that absolute power to grind the faces of one’s enemies was delightful and also not something to be ashamed of; that democracy was pitiful; that it was ecstasy to bind one’s will to that of a leader; that war was the health of the state….

When I was finished, she asserted that nobody could possibly believe any of that shit, and I pointed out that, historically, many people did, that it had in fact been wildly popular some decades ago among people just as smart as her, including Martin Heidegger and my grandfather, who, I informed her, had been a member of the Waffen-SS. She thought I was joking, I assured her I was not, and I invited her to my place to see my collection of inherited Nazi memorabilia, something that I am almost certain she had never previously been invited to do. She came along, I showed her my stuff and told her my stories. It had a perverse erotic effect on her, for I suppose it represented the instantiation of the famous line by Plath, although every woman does not love me and I am not an actual fascist. She did actually want the boot in the face, however, in the form of violent sex and some other rough stuff. I don’t much care for that sort of thing, but I felt obliged to play the gentleman (in a manner of speaking) on this occasion. She was a sewer-mouth orgasmer, another thing I don’t much like, and I did not call her again, nor see her until Mickey invited me out for a drink to meet his new amour sometime later and there she was. We pretended we had never met.

Dierdre publishes a client of mine. We met at my office, something to do with this author using characters that had appeared in previous work jointly copyrighted with another author. We exchanged glances. She was wearing a shimmery blouse and very tight slacks, and when she rose to rummage something out of her briefcase, I admired her ass and the thin thighs that depended from it, and the clear-cut interesting space between them, as wide as a pack of cards. She gave me another look as she returned. This was, I must admit, a
Sex and the City
sort of thing. I called
her, and the usual. She turned out to be one of those women who likes to get well impaled on one and then masturbate. She had no padding at all and left a painful bruise on my pubic bone from the grinding. As against that, she was a nightingale, which I rather enjoy, a long series of tuneful notes during her several drawn-out climaxes. We had a few dates—this was about five years ago—and then I called and she was busy and called again and the same, and that was it. I did not regret the termination. I think she found me a little stuffy, and I found her a little shallow. When I met her some months prior to her wedding to Mickey, she also pretended not to have met me, and perhaps she had indeed forgotten our routinized little fling.

Somewhat depressed now by these reminiscences, I vouchsafe them only to lay the groundwork, necessary to the unfolding of this tale, of my increasingly pathetic yearning for the erotic. Dierdre was sexy but not erotic; there is no deep life in her. Ingrid is erotic, if a little detached, there is always a distance when we’re together and I suppose that’s why I visit her. Artists, I have found, are often like that; it all goes into their work. My estranged wife, Amalie, is far and away the most erotic woman I have ever known, the life force boils out of her, and everything she touches attains beauty. Except me.

Does “erotic” have an antonym? Thanatotic, perhaps. Is that a word? Clearly the thing is itself real, for don’t we all delight in death? Violent death especially, what pleasure! Don’t we show it in all its fictive detail to our children tens of thousands of times? Although not the reality: no, NASCAR racing excepted, here’s the one remaining area where we acknowledge the difference between IP and Real Life. Real death is the last embarrassing thing. And there’s surely an aesthetics of death, the opposite of all those sprightly Impressionist scenes and the luscious nudes of Boucher, an aesthetics that I believe reached its apogee during the regime for which my grandfather made the supreme sacrifice. Contra Mies, this appeal has nothing to do with mere functionality. The American P-47 Thunderbolt was an effective and formidable weapon, arguably the best fighter-bomber of the war, but it
looks
like something out of the Disney studio, plump and bulbous, as if it should have its prop emerging from a
smiley face. The Stuka on the other hand looks just like what it is: terror from the skies. Again, the Sherman tank looks like something a toddler would pull on a string; the Panzer VI Tiger is obviously an elaborate machine for killing human beings. Not to mention the terrific uniforms, the regalia. And this thing here in my hand.

The Germans call it a
Pistole
-08, a
null-acht
, but everyone else calls it a Luger. This is in fact the very item brandished when Mom and Dad met: yes, she lied about that, for here it is. It is a special presentation model awarded to old granddad when he won the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords. God knows what it’s worth, thousands and thousands to the peculiar little men who collect this shit. On the left side of the walnut grip is an inlaid diamond lozenge quartered red and white with black letters inlaid in the center

and on the right side we find an inlaid miniature in silver of the decoration; the recipient’s name, his rank, and the date are engraved on the receiver. Himmler apparently conferred it with his own pudgy white hands. My mother was unclear as to what the medal citation was, but it involved killing a truly spectacular number of Russians while commanding a panzer regiment on the eastern front during the late summer of 1943. It still makes me sweat a little to look at it and hold it, it is so totally awful a thing, but for some reason I have never been able to sell it or toss it in the river. It’s loaded too, with the original Parabellum 9 mm. And I know it works. Perhaps I will do some plinking with it later. I am a pretty good pistol shot as a matter of fact. My brother, Paul, taught me how during a leave after his first tour. I met him down at Fort Bragg and we went out into the piney woods one afternoon and blazed away with a military Colt .45 and a Soviet Makarov 9 mm he had picked up in Vietnam. He taught point-and-shoot combat style, speed above everything because the average pistol target was seven feet away or less.

Anyway, I dropped Mickey off at Columbia, and as he left the car he
said, “Let me know when the niece calls—if she finds that manuscript, tell her I’d love to have a look at it.”

I said I would and we drove off south. On the ride back I thought about my long relationship with Mickey Haas, especially its sexual aspects. I had to acknowledge a certain contempt for the man, which is, I believe, inevitably a part of any really intimate long-term friendship. My brother, Paul, would call this feeling part of our fallen state, that we cannot love unreservedly, that we must consider the beloved less than we believe ourselves to be, in at least one way. I suppose this is, though hurtful, a good thing. We all have a tendency toward self-worship, and one of the prime functions of a good friend is to keep this in check. I know he thinks I am a dull old dog, and not nearly as smart as he is. Perhaps true; certainly I am not nearly as famous. I don’t write popular best-selling books, I am not worshipped by legions of students, I am not a premier member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters, nor do I have his Pulitzer Prize. He must also think I am something of a fool for love, or at least sex. He is certainly privy to the tale of my peccadilloes, save the three exceptions I have noted. He was terribly affected when Amalie and I broke up. She’s perfect for you, he said at the time, listing her virtues. He was correct. Too perfect for me by far, but it’s hard to get that notion across to another.

Several days later, according to my diary, Ms. Maldonado put through a call; I had alerted her to its possibility and stressed the importance thereof. The voice was young, pleasant, somewhat throaty. You know what this is about then, eh? The
aboot
and the terminal syllable marked her as a Canadian. Foreign—nearby, as the ads used to say. I found it immediately attractive, and I invited her to drop by the office, but she demurred. She’d rather meet me in a neutral place, for reasons she would explain when we met. Where, then? She was working, she said, in the New York Public Library, in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room of the Rare Books Division. I said I had some things to clear up, but that I could meet her there at four. She said she looked forward to meeting me.

I resumed my task of the day, which was suing some poor slob of an
artist on behalf of a giant corporation. This is the daily bread of the IP lawyer. Someone had appropriated the logo of a national chain to comment on the madness of consumerism. The original logo is a little risqué (tits), and the artist had made it more so, and it had shown up on popular posters and T-shirts and the corporation was not amused. I can do cease-and-desist orders of this type in my sleep, or on this occasion, with my mind on my coming date with the mysterious heiress of Bulstrode, whose name I now knew was Miranda Kellogg.

Omar dropped me off at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the great beaux arts pile of the library at a quarter to four. The two stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, who according to New York lore are supposed to roar when a virgin ascends the steps, were mum. I took the elevator to the third floor and arranged admission to the locked Astor room, just off the main reading room. Memories here: I spent a significant portion of my middle-school years sitting at those long wooden tables. I would subway up from Brooklyn and stay the whole day, supposedly researching a school paper (this was before the Internet, of course, and before Mrs. Polansky struck) but mainly enjoying the anonymity, the company of strangers and scholars, and the utter un-Mishkinity of the place. My first really adult experience.

I spotted her right away, at a long table in one corner. Apart from a gentleman manning the official desk, she was alone in the richly paneled room. Her hair was blond, worked into two miniature braids pinned up over the ears. Amalie wore her hair that way when we were courting, and absurd as it is I have always been a sucker for that style. Her neck was bared and deliciously vulnerable; women’s necks are, in my view, the most underrated secondary sexual characteristic in our culture, and one that always gets me in the vitals. I stood there for minutes just watching her turn pages. Then, in the mysterious way that has never been successfully explained to me, she became conscious of my stare and turned abruptly. Our eyes met. I nodded. She smiled dazzlingly and rose and came toward me. She didn’t really look like the young Amalie, not feature by feature, but she had that same leonine grace; somewhat shorter than average, she wore a short gray skirt and a beautiful glowing pink
silk blouse. Dark stockings, elegant ankles. She held out her hand and I grasped it. She had grape green eyes, just like Amalie’s. She said You must be Mr. Mishkin. I’m Miranda Kellogg. I couldn’t speak for a moment. Electricity ran up my arm and I am afraid I held the grip a little too long. This is ridiculous, I recall thinking.