The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  (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 n
ot 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.

  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 inl
aid 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.