Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

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 have 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.

I invited her in and she made her call to building maintenance and they said they’d send a man around, but it’d be a while. She was truly stranded, since her bag with all her money and ID was locked up in Mr. Schmidt’s office. She was his private secretary and was learning the international finance business. Did she like international finance? No, she thought it was silly. She could not get excited about money. One needed enough, it was horrid to be poor, but beyond that there was something not healthy about wanting ever more and more and more. It was sometimes almost wicked, she said, and cutely wrinkled her nose. She asked me what I did at the firm and I told her and added that I thought I would never make a good IP lawyer because I felt most of the cases were sort of dumb and weren’t really about the true purpose of IP law, which was to make sure that the creative act was rewarded, with the better part of the money going to the actual creator. Unfortunately this was, I informed her, hardly the rule; rather the opposite was in fact the case. Well, said she, you must fix that.

And she said it with such confidence-first, assuming such a fix was possible, and second, assuming I was the man for the task-that I was amazed. Perhaps I gaped. She smiled: light filled the dreary room and the dreary place in my head. I felt an unfamiliar shock. To recover, I asked her if she was ever really wicked herself. She said she tried to be, because everyone said it was such fun, but it was not fun at all, more sick-making than anything else, and she hated to be poked by men she didn’t know.

Poked? I questioned the word. A little idiomatic slip; she meant pawed. In any case, this is what had drawn her from stuffy old Zurich to naughty New York. Her family was devoutly Catholic and so was she, she supposed, but she craved a little more zing in her life. Is that right? Zing?

It was, I assured her. And I informed her that today was her lucky day, because I was certainly among the wickedest men in New York and I would be pleased to take her among the depraved in their fleshpots, to provide zing but no poking. Unless she desired it, which was, of course, my wicked plan, but I did not voice this then. Her eyes lit up and again that smile. Waves of goodness broke upon my bitter brow.

Thus began my first date with Amalie. The building manager took his time getting up to the office, for which I blessed him in my heart, and we spent the interval talking about the one thing we found that (remarkable!) we had in common, which was that we were both Olympians. She had competed for Switzerland (alpine skiing) at Sapporo. And about our families, or rather about her family, which was like something out of Heidi. (Later, when she got her bag back she showed me pictures of colorfully parkaed upper-middle-class Switzers on the slopes, in front of the chalet, eating fondue. No, a lie, none eating fondue, but they did eat fondue, and I ate a lot of it too during our marriage.) I had not realized that there were Catholic Swiss, since I associated the tiny mountain republic with grim old Calvin, but of course there are the pope’s Swiss Guards, who are really Swiss, and Amalie’s mother’s brother was one of them. Very hoch were the Pfannenstielers. And what of your family, Jake?