The Book of Air and Shadows

resembles Rutger Hauer in
Blade Runner
or an SS recruiting poster. He gave us a big smile, white teeth gleaming in the dim basement, and embraced both of us. Leaving the contractors to their work with a few more words, he ran us up to his office, a tiny cramped room with a view of the terrace/cloister and the playground, and of course he wanted to know about Omar’s head. I think he likes Omar somewhat more than he likes me. No, that’s a lie, but let it sit there on the page. Paul loves me, and it drives me nuts. I am not at all nice to him. I can’t help it. I think it is Izzy’s introjection boiling up from inside me, full of contemptuous disdain.
    After Paul got the whole story out of Omar, and after he’d heard a good deal of tedious data about Omar’s family and the suffering of his relations on the West Bank, Omar excused himself for his noon prayers. Just after he left, an exquisite brown boy trotted in with a message, looking remarkably fine in his school uniform, which is a navy blazer, gray slacks, white shirt, and a white-and-black striped tie. When he had gone I said, rolling my eyes, “Getting any of that now? Peachy buttocks glowing in the dim sacristy lamplight…”
    “Elderly nuns satisfy my residual lusts, thank you,” he said, still smiling. “And speaking of sexual excess, you seem to have got yourself in a jam again over a woman. Who is this Miranda?”
    “No one special, just a client. I only had her stay at my place because some people seemed to be following her.”
    “Uh-huh. You know, Amalie called me this morning. She seemed pretty upset.”
    “Well, gosh, Paul, I’m sorry Amalie’s upset. I know! Why don’t
you
marry her. Then you can be all perfect together and I can sink further into depravity. Me and Miri-”
    “Miri’s worried about you too. What’s all this about Russian gangsters?”
    Another thing that drives me crazy is my family talking about me behind my back. One reason I try to live a blameless life (the sex part aside) is to reduce the zone of gossip, but clearly I have failed in this. I suppressed whatever I might have felt at the time because the entire purpose of my visit was to seek Paul’s counsel in this affair. No one I know has a wider network of contacts at all levels of society in New York, from street bums to the mayor. So I gave him the whole tale-Bulstrode, the Bracegirdle manuscript, the murder, the mugging, the conversation with Miri (although he knew about that already from her), meeting Miranda, her abduction, and the phone call.
    He listened more or less in silence and when I’d finished, he made a rotating motion with his hand and said, “And…?”
    “And what?”
    “Did you? With Miss Kellogg? No, don’t bother to lie, I can see it on your face.”
    “And this is the most important thing to you? That I fucked this woman? The murder, the kidnapping, that’s all irrelevant compared with where I stick my schlong?”
    “No, but where you stick your schlong seems to determine the course of your life, and messes up the lives of a number of people I love. Hence my interest.”
    “Oh, I thought that fucking was the
only
thing the church was interested in. Or were you not speaking ex cathedra?”
    “Yeah, you persist in thinking lust is your problem. Lust is not your problem, speaking ex cathedra, and in a dozen or so years it’ll have taken care of itself. It’s a miserable little sin after all. No, your problem is acedia and it always has been. The refusal to do necessary spiritual work. You always took on the responsibility for every bad thing that happened to our family, probably including World War II, all by yourself…”
    “You were in jail.”
    “Yes, but irrelevant. God wasn’t in jail but you didn’t ask for any help in that direction. No, you took it all on and failed, and you never forgave yourself, and so you think you’re beyond all forgiveness, and that gives you the license to hurt all the people who love you because after all, poor Jake Mishkin is so far outside the pale, so bereft of all hope of heaven, that anyone who loves him must be delusional and thus not worth considering. And why are you grinning at me, you turd? Because you’ve made me say the same thing I always say when you come up here and now you can forget it again, even though you know it’s true. Sloth. The sin against hope. And you know it’s going to kill you someday.”
    “Just like Mutti? Do you really think so?” A high-pitched