He could see that she was thinking about it, testing it, as we do with a limb lately out of a cast, gingerly, afraid to let it take the weight. “No,” she said, “and if the money’s burning a hole in your pocket why don’t you just give it all to me? I could live for three months on-”
“No, that’s not the point, Carolyn. The point is experience, for once, not prudence, red meat not ramen fucking noodles!” With that he grabbed her arm and hustled her across 116th Street.
“Let go of my arm!”
“No, if you won’t come along of your own free will, I’m kidnapping you. This is now a major felony.”
“What if I scream?” she said.
“Scream away. The cops will arrest me, and they’ll get the whole old book and manuscript story out of me, and then where will you be? Up shit’s creek is where, instead of dressed in a gorgeous new dress drinking champagne in a fine restaurant. You better choose right now, baby, because here’s the bank.”
He found a cocoa silk-and-linen Varvatos jacket on sale for three-fifty and some linen slacks and a nubbly black silk shirt and woven Italian loafers to go with it and she was yelled and chivied into a Prada ruffle-front flowered dress, a matching silk scarf and shoes, a couple of sets of devastating La Perla underwear, and a big panama hat with an upturned brim like an English schoolgirl, all of which did not leave much change from a thousand bucks, and then they had lunch at the Metropolitan Museum and took in the Velázquez show and then went to an afternoon concert at the Frick that he happened to know about because his mom had tickets from her library mafia and had pressed them upon him (go, take a date!), another example of magic, because he’d been carrying the damn things around in his wallet for two weeks with no intention of going and now here it was that very afternoon. So they went, and it was the Concerto Vocale doing a program of Monteverdi sacred music. They sat in folding chairs and were lifted, to the extent their spiritual development then permitted, up to the divine regions.
Crosetti was no stranger to this world, his mother having made sure that American barbarism was not an option for him, but his covert glances at Carolyn revealed a person stunned. Or bored senseless, he really couldn’t tell; and after the concert he was hesitant to ask her which it was. But she said, after one of her long intervals of silence, “Wouldn’t it be nice if the world was really like that, the way that music says it is, just flowing along in beauty?” Crosetti thought it would be exceedingly fine, and used the Hemingway line about it would be pretty to think so, without attribution.
They walked down Madison and he got her into pretending to be not just temporarily rich and to select choice items from the windows of the great boutiques, and when they grew tired of that he steered her down a side street and into the first restaurant they encountered, because he was sure that anyplace they went to would be perfect and this one was, a tiny boîte specializing in provincial French cuisine, where the patron took a liking to the nice young couple and kept sending out exquisite little tastes from the kitchen and recommended the wine, and watched them eat the entrées, beaming; and except that he did not actually break out singing in an accent it was exactly like, as Crosetti noted, The Lady and the Tramp. Which she had actually seen, it turned out, and they talked about that and about other Disney movies, and about the films he loved and the ones he was going to make, stuff he hadn’t ever told anyone, and she talked about beautiful books, their aesthetics, their structure and the cryptic subtle beauties of paper, type, and binding, and how, as she put it, she wanted to make things that people would be handling and loving a thousand years from now.
He had to wave a hundred-dollar bill in the rearview mirror before the cabby would consent to take them to Red Hook, something he had never done before, nor ever dreamed of doing, and they arrived in the dark industrial street, and when the cabby had roared away with his C-note, Crosetti grabbed Carolyn Rolly, spun her around, and planted a good one on her wine-and-coffee-tasting mouth, and she kissed him back. Just like the movies.
Unlike, they did not tear off their clothes as they staggered up the stairs, into the loft, and into bed. Crosetti had always thought this a cliché and unrealistic; such a thing had never happened to him nor to anyone he knew who was not either drunk or cranked to the gills. So it was not going to happen in his movie. Instead, he sighed deeply and she sighed. He held her hand lightly, as if it were a dried blossom as they slowly ascended. They entered the loft, they kissed again. She pulled away and rummaged in a drawer. She’s going to light a candle, he thought, and she did, a simple plumber’s candle, which she stuck carefully in a saucer and set by the bed. Crosetti did not move. Then she looked straight at him, her face set in its lovely grave lines and silently and slowly took off her new clothes in the candlelight, folding them tenderly, which was exactly the way he would have shot it, maybe a little more blue coming in from the window, and as he thought this he laughed.
She asked him why he laughed and he told her, and she told him to undress, that this was the part they didn’t show in the regular movies, this was the fade-out. But after they were in bed together he thought of the horrible uncle and was abashed and too tentative until she used her nails and a harsh urgent command to unleash the animal. They did not practice safe sex, which he considered a little odd, a thought he entertained just before all thinking ceased.
After that, the director was out of the building for a long time. When he returned, Crosetti was on his back, feeling the sweat and other fluids drying on his skin, staring up at the tin ceiling. The candle was only an inch high. He had nothing to say, and his mind was quite blank: dead air, white screen. They’d had the setup, the development, the first plot point (discovering the manuscript), the second plot point (this incredible evening), and now what? He had no idea what the third act was going to be, but he was starting to feel fear. He’d never had anything like this happen to him, except in dreamland. He reached over to caress her again but she held on to his hand and kissed it. She said, “You can’t stay.”
“Why not? Are you going to turn into a bat?”
“No, but you can’t stay. I’m not ready for…mornings. And all that. Do you understand?”
“A little. I guess. Well, Red Hook at…where’s my watch? Threeten a.m. with a roll of cash and smelling like a bordello. That sounds like fun.”
“No,” she said, “I’ll wash you.”
She took him by the hand and led him to the sink behind the screen, lit two candles set in wall sconces made of tin cans, and filled the sink with steaming water. She stood him on a thick straw bath mat and washed every inch of him, slowly, with a washcloth and Ivory soap. Then she drained the suds and washed him with clear water, kneeling lightly on one knee like a courtier before the prince. She had small flattish breasts with broad pink nipples. Despite the night’s epic exertions he hardened painfully under this treatment. It had an unnatural appearance, like one of her bookbinding implements, something suitable for burnishing leather to a high gloss. She looked up at him and said, “You can’t go out in Red Hook at three a.m. in that condition.”
“No, it would be unwise,” he said in a hoarse croak.
“Well, then,” she said.
He noticed that she held it at the base with two fingers, the other three extended, like a duchess sipping tea. Her dark little head moved slowly back and forth. How did they learn how to do that, he thought, and also: Who are you? What are you doing to me? What’s going to happen?
THE BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (6)
Thus I began my lyfe as an ordnancer of the Tower 10s. the moneth wage, prentice wages that but beggars cannot be chusers. We took lodgings two mean roomes in Fenchurch St. by Aldgate, verey poore were wee but had liverie from the Tower so saved on my cloathes. One yeare spent thus: in the winter of the second yeare came a chill & my mother sickened & wee had not coales enow to warme her. Methinkes she wase besydes wearied from her sorrowes. Alas to come to this end through no fault of hers: all ways a good, sober, virtuous woman & no papiste neither, a
s I asked her then, she sayinge no sonne but I did pray for the sowles of my dead babes & for the sowles of my parentes as wee learnt in the olde religion a great sinne I know & wille burn in Hell for it though I praye God not. Soe she died 2nd February AD 1606 & is buried in St Katherine Colemanchurch. Now you know, my Nan, that after that sadde tyme you gave me comfort soe that I wish to marry you but your father sayeth what, nay nay, no man can marry on prentice wages how will you keepe my daughter & I hadde no answer & and left sad & wast sad many daies.
Comes now Thomas Keane saying ho Dick what say you to Flanders? For I am off to-morrow to deliver four cannon royal to the Dutch at Sluys & shoot em too against Spain. Come & be my mate & matrosse: wee will eate cheese & drinke genever & blaste papiste dogges to Hell. I answer him yes by G-d & my hand on’t & the thynge is settled. We must needs goe from the Tower at night for the Kinges majestie had late made peace with Spain so ’twould be thought ille to arme Spaines foes. But some at court (that Prince Henry I think mee who after untimely died) thought it a shame on England to shrink cowardly from warre gainst wicked King Phillipe who pressed so cruel on the reformed faith. Besides the Dutch had payed for the gonnes before this so wase it justice too, for the King would not yield a pennie backe & thus we went for the honour of England besydes.
Wee brought out the cannon & theyre carriages braken all in peeces & all necessaries as: 500 shottes, rammers, worms, port-fyres, &c. by barges & then to the Pool where mariners swayed them into the holte of the ship Groene Draeck a saloop of 6 gonnes belonging to Captain Willem van Brille. Soe with a fair wind wee sayled down river. A three-daye voyage wee had & a goode enough sea for winter not too colde & wee ate fresh: bread & cheeses, pickel-herrynge, ale. At Sluys a flat dreare place to my eye all brick dun or red & verey goode businesse since the Spanish have tooke Ostende these many moneths tis the onlie port in western Flanders. Soe we off-lade the gonnes & placed them on theyre carriages.
Nay I am too longe about my foolishe youth & I fear I have but little tyme. My wound now gripes me more than before & the surgeon saith it is fowle & gives me two daies no more.
7
Yes, ridiculous. Did I give the impression that I am a famous lecher about town? Not true. I seem to keep falling in love, which is not the same thing. Yes, Dr. Freud, I am compensating for withdrawal of maternal affection, and yes, Dr. Jung, I am unable to make peace with my negative anima, and yes, Father, I have sinned through my own fault, in what I have done and what I have failed to do. Yet it is not, I must insist, merely sex. I have never had a better sexual relationship than the one I had with Amalie, but clearly, it was not enough. From very early in our marriage I was in the habit of having one on the side, and as I believe I’ve already noted, there is no shortage of such opportunities in New York City.
Ingrid, my current girlfriend, is a good example, and the clever and impatient reader may be thinking, Oh, he’s avoiding getting to Miranda, he’s stalling. This is true, and tough shit. I may die, but I am not actively dying like poor Bracegirdle; perhaps I have all the time in the world.
Ingrid was happily married for nearly twelve years to Guy, a successful television executive, and by all accounts a prince among men, and especially princely compared to many others in that business, but one day in his fifty-second year he got out of bed, walked into the bathroom and began to shave, whereupon something popped in his brain and he died right there. No symptoms, perfectly healthy, good blood pressure, low cholesterol, but dead. Ingrid spent the next three years in the most intense mourning, after which her naturally sunny disposition burst through again, and she decided to get on with life. She had not gone out at all during those three years but now accepted an invitation to one of those anonymous award or fund-raising galas that enable the rich to mingle with the creative and thereby draw some of the divine afflatus into their desiccated lives. She went to a spa and got done, had her hair cut at the salon of the moment, bought a new outfit and made her appearance.
She has such a nice appearance: just forty, quite tall, perhaps too fleshy to dance at the highest levels, which is why she switched early to choreography. Her hair is boy-short and light brown, very fluffy, and she has those long wolf eyes in gray. Terrific wide mouth too with a little overbite, which I find quite attractive. And the dancer’s body. I was at the party too, being myself a rich person needing a whiff of the real stuff, and as soon as I saw her, I grabbed the arm of my law partner Shelly Grossbart, who knows everyone in the music business, and asked him who she was. He had to think for a moment before he said, “Christ, that looks like Ingrid Kennedy. I thought she was dead.” He made the introductions. We chatted about dance and intellectual property and actually had a fascinating conversation about the extent to which dance was protected by the laws of copyright. I found her intelligent and amusing; I suppose she found me likewise.
Later in the evening, the two of us having consumed what I suppose was the better part of two bottles of Krug, she caught me up with those long gray peepers and inquired whether she could ask a personal question. I said she could and she said, “Do you like to fuck women?”
I said that, given an appropriate other, I rather did.
“Well,” she said, “I actually haven’t had any sex since my husband died three years ago and you seem like a nice man and lately I’ve been having these incredibly horny feelings and just masturbating doesn’t seem to work.”
I replied that it didn’t for me either.
And she said, “So if you don’t have any STDs…?” I assured her in the negative, and she continued, “I live in Tarrytown and I always take a room when I come to these things so I don’t have to drive home drunk, but tonight I was hoping to meet a halfway decent man whom I could take upstairs to it.”
Yes she was drunk, but not off-puttingly so. We slipped out of the ballroom without further discussion and took the elevator. She was, and is, a laugher, in my experience the rarest orgasmic sound. Not yucks, as at the Three Stooges, but a rippling glissando somewhere between what you produce when you smack your funny bone and the joyous hysteria of tickled little girls. It takes some getting used to but is truly delightful, like you’re with a real friend and not engaged in yet another grim skirmish of the war between the sexes.
So it began. Ingrid and I have little in common. We mostly talk about our former spouses, these sessions occasionally ending in tears. I used to have several Ingrids at one time, but no longer. I believe this is not through any sudden impulse of fidelity but simple exhaustion. Some men I know (and I believe Mickey Haas is one of them) delight in the maintenance of a network of deceptions, playing one woman off against another, provoking operatic scenes, and so on, but not me. I am not even a decent rake. It’s simply that I have no power of resistance, and while it is conventional to suppose that it is the man who does the pursuing and wooing, I have not found this to be so. The little story above about me and Ingrid is not at all unique, not even that unusual. They look at you, they make remarks, they hold their bodies in a certain way, and perhaps there are secret pheromones too; the availability is in any case announced and one says, Oh, why not? Or I do, at any rate.
The only real campaign of seduction I have ever carried out was directed against my wife, Amalie, née Pfannenstieler, and I will have to tell about this too before continuing with the story of Miranda.
(Pretend that time is suspended for now, Miranda and I are still in the paneled room at the library, our hands touching, the electricity flowing like Boulder Dam, pheromones beading up on all slick surfaces…)
So-my first job out of law school laboring as an associate at Sobel Tennis Carrey, on Beaver Street in the financial district. The firm had a modest practice in trademark and copyright, but anyone could see then-some twenty years ago that was-that intellectual property was going to be big, and I was working like mad in the usual manner of young associates. This was during the high tide of the sexual revolution, the first time in recent history when any reasonably well-set-up young fellow could hav
e sex ad lib with females other than whores or courtesans, and in pursuit of this delicious horror I repaired nearly every night to one of several saloons (meat markets, they were amusingly called) in the East Village and uptown to continue and extend my revenge on the girls.
One Saturday morning, hungover and having detached myself from my meat market conquest of the previous evening, I went down to my office to complete some work I had scanted so as to get a good start on my Friday-night hijinks. I was in the firm’s library, quite alone in the office, when I heard a distant tapping, which I soon determined was coming from the office’s locked outer door. Investigating this, I found a young woman standing in the deserted hallway. I recognized her as someone who worked at Barron & Schmidt, a financial outfit with whom we shared the fourteenth floor. We had often risen on the elevator together, me dull with the night’s excess, she quiet and neatly turned out but carrying that look on her features that parries the male glance nearly as well as a Pathan burka.
She introduced herself and told me she had locked herself out of her office. I could see she was wretchedly embarrassed by it, especially as it was a trip to the john that had occasioned the flub. Charming little blossoms of red had appeared on her cheeks as a result of conveying this tale. She had fine, white-blond hair gathered in little twisty braids wound around her ears, rather a Pippi Longstocking effect, and she was wearing white jeans and a black Kraftwerke T-shirt, the black-letter text nicely distorted by her pretty pointy breasts, a Saturday outfit quite unlike the proper and cryptomammary suits she always wore to work. Her eyes were preternaturally large, just short of goggly, her mouth a little pink bud. She looked about seventeen but was (as I found later) nearly twenty-six. She was about five inches shorter than I was, tall for a woman, and had an athletic body (winter sports as I also learned-she was Swiss), slim of waist, with legs to the chin.
The Book of Air and Shadows Page 14