The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  “This would be bad Russian peoples?”

  “Yes! Gangsters. What happens, day before yesterday, in evening, I am going to club, in Brighton Beach, for Odessa peoples, you know? Have Russian bath, play cards, drink a little. So two of them sit by me in steam, they have these tattoos, dragons, tigers, this is showing they are zeks, from prison in Siberia, they are proud of this, you understand. These not cultured peoples in the least. So they ask me do I know Jake Mishkin. I say yes, I say Jake Mishkin fine upstanding American citizen, heavy-weight lifter. They say we don’t care about this, we want to know what he does, is he connected, what his business. I say, hey, I see him in gym I am not colleague of his. Then they want to know other things, all kinds I can’t understand what they are saying, some woman, name I never heard of, Raisin Brans or something, so I tell them-”

  “Raisin Brans?”

  “Yes, some name like that, on the box, I can’t remember…”

  “Kellogg.”

  “Yes! Is Kellogg. I say I don’t know no Kellogg, I don’t know any private business from Jake Mishkin and I don’t want to know, and they say I should keep my ears open and find out whatever with this Kellogg and Jake Mishkin. So what I do? I come talk you like a man: Jake, what is with you, all of sudden gangsters?”

  “I don’t know, Arkady,” I said. “I wish I did know.” Whereupon I told him about the attack on me and Ms. K. and the theft of the briefcase, although I did not expand on what was supposed to be in it. But Arkady was after all a Russian and he stroked his chin and nodded. “So what is in briefcase, Jake. Is not drugs?”

  “Is not drugs. Is papers.”

  “You can give them so they leave you alone?”

  “I can’t. It’s a long story, but I would like to know who your zeks are working for, if you have an idea.”

  “You didn’t hear it from me,” said Arkady. He was nibbling at his lip, and his eyes were all over the place. Seeing him like that, this big, confident man nervous as a sparrow, was nearly as shocking as the attack by the thugs. After a pause and in a hoarse voice he said, “They work for Osip Shvanov. The Organizatsia.”

  “The who?”

  “In Brighton Beach. Jewish gangsters. You know about this? Twenty years ago the Americans say to Soviets, you are keeping Jews against will, this is like Nazis, you are persecuting, let them go. So the Soviets say, okay, you want Jews, we give you Jews. Then they go to Gulag and they find every criminal what had Jew marked on passport, they say you go to America, you go to Israel, have nice trip. So some come here. Of course most Jews got out from Soviet Union was regular peoples, my accountant is one of these, very nice man, but also very many criminals, and they go back to old doings, whores they have, porno, drugs, what-you-call, extortions. These very bad peoples, like these Sopranos you have on cable, but Sopranos are stupid and these are very smart, are Jews! And Osip is worst of all of them.”

  “Well,” I said, “thanks for that information, Arkady.” And I got up to leave, but he gestured to stop me and added, “They come here too. These men, yesterday morning, and ask me if you going come here today, and they just sit. I could not eat my lunch, they are watching me like animals. So, Jake, I’m sorry, but I think you should not come here to train anymore. I will refund membership, no hard feelings.”

  “You’re booting me out? I’ve been coming here nearly twenty years, Arkady.”

  “I know, I know, but you can go other places, you can go to Bodyshop-”

  “What! Bodyshop is pretty boys and girls in designer outfits and fat guys on treadmills reading the Wall Street Journal. Bodyshop sucks.”

  “So someplace else. You keep coming here they make me to spy on you and if I say no…I don’t want my place burned up and I have family. I mean it, Jake. You don’t know these peoples. If you got something they want, is my advice give it to them.”

  I saw Arkady had a point, so we shook hands and I left, with my gear in a Nike bag. I felt like I’d been expelled from school because someone else cheated. But the mention of family was what had really struck home. I recalled that I had one too.

  My diary says simply “A.” in the slot for six-thirty on the day in question, which was the first Wednesday in November, so it was my evening to dine en famille at my ex-wife’s brownstone on East Seventy-sixth Street, our arrangement on the first Wednesday of every month. Not exactly “ex,” because officially, in the eyes of the state, the church, and my wife, we are still married. Amalie will not agree to a divorce, partly on religious grounds, but mainly because she believes we will get back together after I cure my mental illness. She thinks it would be shameful to desert me while I am sick in this way, and the fact that my mental illness is philandering does not signify. I don’t know anyone else who has this sort of relationship, although I don’t for a moment believe we are unique. My three law partners have, I think, eight or so wives among them, and in every case I have been treated to the whole litany: the insanity, the vicious revenges, the manipulations of children, the financial extortions, and I find I cannot produce a fair exchange of marriage-hell narratives. I do suffer excruciatingly, but through my own fault rather than via the malice of my wife, for she is generous, kind, and forgiving, and so I have to carry the whole fucking load myself. Jesus had a point, you know: if you really want the evildoers to suffer, just be nice.

  These dinners are an example. What could be more civilized? A little family sits down to a meal and demonstrates that despite whatever differences Mommy and Daddy are having there is still love, the daddy who has left the family still loves them very much, or to put it another way (as I recently heard my daughter explain it to her brother), “Daddy likes to boink ladies more than he wants to stay with us.” In the wrong, in the wrong! Even the babes can see it, even Niko, who has only the faintest interest in other humans, can draw this fact into his vast mental library, and feel (assuming he feels anything) contempt.

  I know there is no point to my boinking of ladies, as does my wife, for as I believe I have already mentioned, Amalie is in that department the acme of delight. How does she know she is tops, having so little experience besides me? Answer: she is great friends, intimate friends with my sister, who is an encyclopedia of the fuck, and she has I believe conveyed to Miri every lubricious detail of our sex lives with her Swiss clinical frankness, and Miri has assured her that she lacks nothing in that department, and further, that I am the Asshole of the Western World for cheating on such a prize. I can’t bear it; but I go anyway to these ghastly meals, as penance maybe. It doesn’t work.

  Before I went over, I had the driver take me, as on many of these occasions (penitentially perhaps), to an obscure little shop off First Avenue in the Forties that sells very expensive orchids, and I bought one for Amalie. She collects them, and although she could buy out the Amazon herself with her own money, I think it is still a nice gesture. This one was pale green with magenta speckles on the usual pudendalike blossom, a Paphiopedilum hanoiensis, endangered in its native Vietnam and illegal as hell. I believe Amalie knows these orchids are smuggled, but she always accepts them, and it gives me a perverse pleasure to see my saint debauched by her lust for flowers.

  Rashid dropped me off and the door was opened to my ring by Lourdes Munoz, my wife’s servant, a refugee from the Salvadorean wars. Amalie essentially saved her life through one of her do-good charities, and in contrast to the dictum that no good deed goes unpunished, which always works for me, the result of this selfless charity was the creation of the perfect house-servant and nanny. Lourdes does not trust me and has been proven correct. I got the usual stone-faced greeting, had my raincoat taken, and entered my wife’s home with my orchid.

  I heard the sound of laughter coming from the living room and followed it in, with a little dread building up because I knew the source of the fun, recognizing as I did the loudest contributory voice. The family tableau, minus Dad: Amalie in her working costume of pale silk shirt and dark tailored slacks, her hair piled on her head in its golden coils, sitting
in her leather sling chair with her feet pulled up under her; on a leather sofa soft as thighs sits Miri, my sister, and on either side of her my children, Miri and Imogen as beautiful as the dawn, pink and blond, and then there is poor Niko, our dark little Nibelung. Both children love their aunt Miri. Imogen loves her because she is a font of stories about celebrities. Miri knows everyone (that is, everyone rich and famous) in New York, and a good many in London, Rome, Paris, and Hollywood, and sometimes it seems she has been married to or had affairs with around 10 percent of this population. She has a Rolodex the size of the nosewheel on a 747.

  Niko likes her because Miri was married briefly to one of the most famous stage magicians in the world, and learned during this time to do sleight of hand, a skill that fascinates him. She claimed that the man was as stupid as one of his hat rabbits, and if he could make things disappear so could she. She’s pretty good at it, for it is generally hard to attract Niko’s attention, and this she can do nearly as well as Amalie or Lourdes. Also she burns with love for them; she can’t have children of her own apparently and so aunting is one of her chief joys.

  The laughter died away as I entered the room. They all looked at me, each in their different ways, except for Niko, who hardly ever looks at me. He was still staring at my sister’s hands, which semiconsciously twirled and vanished several small colored sponge balls. My daughter’s look challenged me to be something I was not, a perfect father to complement her own perfection, and my sister’s was, as usual, ironic and tolerant. She is no longer the most beautiful woman in the city, but she is still pretty rare and has the means to preserve and enhance her looks to the fullest extent medicine and fashion allow. She was wearing black Dior head to toe and glittered with chunky jewels. As for Amalie, she can never help herself, she always smiles at me with love in her eyes, before she recalls the situation and retreats behind her formal Swiss persona. Still a lovely woman, Amalie, if no longer exactly the one I fell in love with. Two kids and the strain of marriage to me have added soft flesh on the body and lines on the face. I could not help thinking of Miranda at that moment, and the long-sought second chance.

  I kissed them all on both cheeks in the European fashion that has long been our family custom (Niko flinching slightly as usual) and presented my orchid. Polite thanks from Amalie, eye-roll from Imogen and Miri (and it is exactly the same expression of amused contempt on both lovely faces; is it genetic or was it taught?) and from Niko a brief recitation in his curiously robotic voice of the taxonomic position of this particular species, and the details of blossom morphology that make this obvious. Niko is interested in orchids, as he is in nearly any complex subject requiring memory and a minimum of human relationship.

  I asked Miri what they had all been laughing about when I came in and she retold the story of the world-famous actress and the woman famous for breasts-and-appearing-on-talk-shows and how they were getting face packs at the same high-end salon when their tiny dogs got into a dogfight, and it was a fairly amusing story about dripping mud and flying fur and screaming homosexuals, and she continued it as we went down to the dining room and sat around the oval teak and glass table. Amalie had cooked our dinner herself, a kind of cassoulet made with chicken sausage, lamb, and white beans, one of my favorite meals as it happens, with an artichoke salad and a bottle of Hermitage. Given what her time was worth nowadays, it was probably among the most expensive meals on earth. Niko had his bowl of Cheerios, which foodstuff comprises 90 percent of his diet.

  During dinner, Amalie and I struggle to keep the conversation flowing, and some of what we talk about is business. My wife, despite her disdain for making money (or perhaps because of it), is a financial whiz. She publishes an on-line report called Mishkin’s Arbitrage Letter, in which she tells her fifteen hundred or so subscribers where the currency markets are going during the next week. Naturally, the smart players take her info into account, which changes the market, and the even smarter players are taking that into account and planning their yen-dinar-renminbi swaps accordingly, in an infinite regress that makes some of them billionaires. I consider myself a useless parasite compared with people who do real work, like writing songs, but I am a civil engineer compared with these guys. Amalie, however, has no problem charging twenty-five grand a year for a subscription, since she pumps maybe a third of her profits into good works. I occasionally run into people who have business in this rarefied world and they often ask me if I know that Mishkin. I always say no, but feel an odd pride all the same.

  The meal ended and Aunt Miri went off to play with the kids, as is the custom. Having none of her own she has her fill of adult conversation. Lourdes served coffee; Amalie and I could now talk companionably about our children. We are civilized. She asked about Ingrid. She knows about Ingrid, we are very open about this aspect of my life. I said Ingrid was fine, and she said, “Poor Ingrid.” I asked her why and she said, “Because you have a new woman.” I felt the blood rise to my face, but I pasted on a smile and asked her why she thought that, and she sighed and said, “Jake, I am neither stupid nor unobservant. In the years when I trusted you, of course, I never looked for these signs, or misinterpreted them, but now that I know to look it is all very transparent. Who is she?”

  “No one,” I lied. “Honestly.”

  She stared at me for a long moment, then dropped her eyes to the table and sipped her cooling coffee. “Whatever you say,” she said. She put the cup down and rose and walked out of the room without another word or look. Lourdes came in and started clearing the plates, also ignoring me.

  Then the Invisible Man went upstairs to the children’s playroom. Niko was at his computer with headphones on, and Miri and Imogen were watching MTV, sitting closely together on a ratty velvet love seat, made rapt by glitz.

  Feeling more of a jerk than usual, I upped the fool ante by asking Imogen if she had done her homework and without taking her eyes off the screen she answered in a tone laden with tedium, “I did it at school.” I thought of asking for it. I also thought of taking the aluminum ball bat in the corner and smashing the television, and the computer, and holding the children hostage until they gave in to my demands. Which is for everything to be different, for me to have the love and admiration of my children and the devotion of my wife, but also the thrill of romance, and to never grow up and forever fly in and out on a wire, dressed in green tights…

  Instead I sat down next to Miri and studied for a while the tiny scars of her face-lifts and the peculiar shiny dead areas left by the Botox and I was nearly overcome with compassion and I reached out and grabbed her hand. Miri is, I suppose, the person I feel closest to in the family now. We were a refuge for each other all during childhood, and she turned out even worse than me, so we have a basis of understanding. I was thinking about how she always came and grabbed my hand when Dad was on one of his rampages; I have no idea what she was thinking now, if anything, but she squeezed my hand back, and we stayed that way for a while watching the soft-core porn that our civilization uses to entertain the young. Then a little tune played and Imogen pulled out her cell phone, checked its tiny screen and disappeared for an episode of chat with some acolyte.

  Miri muted the set, turned, and gave me an appraising look. “So who’s the new lady?” she asked.

  “You too?”

  “It’s obvious. You have that fevered look, and you’re less morose than usual. You need to grow up, Jake. You don’t want to end up like one of those old farts chasing little girls.”

  “Oh, that’s rich, getting recommendations on continence from you.”

  “Don’t be nasty, Jake. We’re a pair of sluts, you and I, but I at least don’t have a family I drag into it. And especially doing it to someone like Amalie.”

  This was not a conversation I wished to have at the moment, so I said, “How’s Dad?”

  Miri is the only one of we three who retains any contact with the old gangster. She is parsimonious with information about this relationship, however, perhaps at his insistence. T
hat would be like him.

  “Dad is fine. I saw him about three weeks ago. He looks good. He had to get a stent put into a coronary artery.”

  “I hope they used an especially corrosion-resistant material. Brick would be my suggestion. Where was this meeting, by the way?”

  “Europe.”

  “Could you be more specific? Cannes? Paris? Odessa?”

  She ignored this. “He asked after you and Paul.”

  “Oh, that was kind of him. I hope you conveyed to him that he’s always in our thoughts. What’s he up to nowadays?”

  “This and that. You know Dad, he always has some kind of hustle going. You should go over and see him. Take Amalie and the kids.”

  This made me laugh. “That’s a good idea, Miri. I really can’t think of anything that would be more sheer fun than such an expedition.”

  “You know,” said my sister after an offended pause, “have you ever noticed that your wife is never sarcastic? You might take a tip from that. You might try a little forgiveness too. I mean you sure get a lot of it.”

  “And religious advice tonight as well. Are you sure you’re not Paul in drag?”

  “If you’re going to be shitty, then I’m leaving. I need another drink anyway.”

  She tried to pull her hand away from mine, but I held on and she fell back on the love seat.

  “What?”

  “I just thought of something I needed to ask you. In your dealings with the demimonde have you ever come across a Russian gangster named Osip Shvanov?” I was watching her face closely as I asked this and I saw a little tremor run across its sculpted surfaces. She licked her lips with a pink tongue-tip.