Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

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?”