The Book of Air and Shadows

he held office hours all morning. I called him and he was in and yes he’d be glad to have lunch with me, at the faculty club for a change. I have always found the dining room on the fourth floor of Faculty House at Columbia one of the more pleasant places to lunch in New York: a beautifully proportioned airy chamber, with one of the best views of the city from its high windows, and a perfectly adequate prix fixe buffet, but Mickey prefers our usual Sorrentino’s. I think it’s because he likes to get somewhat drunk at our lunches and prefers to do this out of sight of his peers. Perhaps he also enjoys having my limo sent for him.
    Just before we reached the club, my cell rang and it was my sister.
    “You were right,” she said. “Osip would really like to meet you.”
    “That was fast,” I said. “He must owe you a favor.”
    “Osip doesn’t owe favors, Jake, he collects them. As a matter of fact,
he
called me and asked me to set it up. That’s not a good sign.”
    “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said I, not at all sure. “Where and when?”
    “Do you know Rasputin’s? On Lafayette?”
    “You have to be kidding. That’s like meeting John Gotti in a Godfather’s Pizza place.”
    “What can I say? Osip has a sense of humor. Anyway, he says he’ll be there after ten tomorrow tonight. I would say ‘be careful,’ if it weren’t too banal for words. But you
will be
careful, won’t you? If not, I assume you’ll want to rest beside Mutti in Green-Wood. I’ll send the most vulgar wreath imaginable.”

    I recall that Mickey and I had the roast beef and shared a bottle of Melville cabernet, so appropriate, he joked, for a professor of English. Mickey was actually in a pretty good mood, and I asked him if his financial position had improved at all and he said it had: here followed a blizzard of information about hedge funds and REITs and commodities trading that went in one ear and out the other. Sensing my disinterest, he politely changed the subject and asked me what was new with me. In answer, I drew out the copy of Bracegirdle’s letter I had picked up from Ms. M. that morning and slid it across the table. “Only this,” I said.
    “This is it? The Bulstrode thing? Good God!” Naturally he could read the Jacobean scrawl as easily as you read Times New Roman, and he began to do so at once, rapt, and ignored the waiter when he came to ask about dessert, a unique occurrence in my experience. Twenty or so minutes passed as he turned the pages, occasionally making a quiet exclamation-“Holy shit!”-and similar while I drank coffee and gazed at the diners and played eye games with an attractive brunette at another table. My inner theater was showing what it usually did after a meeting with my brother: a thoroughgoing denigration of him and his works, who did he think he was playing the great blue-eyed white god descending upon the ghetto unasked to bring salvation to the darkies! It was absurd, nearly obscene, nearly Nazi in its colossal arrogance. The sad pleasure of this shadow play ceased only when Mickey beside me said “Wow!” loud enough to draw the attention of the brunette and several others.
    He pounded the papers with a stubby digit. “Do you realize what this is?”
    “Sort of. Miranda read it and explained its value, although I’m sure I don’t have a scholar’s sense of it.”
    “Miranda Kellogg? She’s seen this?” He seemed a little upset.
    “Well, yes. She’s the legal owner of the original.”
    “But you have custody of it at present?”
    So I related the events of the past twenty-four hours. He was stunned. “That’s terrible,” he said. “Absolutely catastrophic!”
    “Yes, I’m extremely concerned about her.”
    “No, I meant the manuscript, the
original
,” he said, with a callousness worthy of a lawyer. “Without that, this is valueless,” he added, tapping the pile of copy paper again. “My God, we have to get it back! Do you have any idea what’s at stake?”
    “People are always asking me that, and my answer is ‘not really.’ Ammunition in some literary squabble?” My tone was cold but he ignored it, for this was a new Mickey, no more the laid-back gentleman-scholar, amusingly contemptuous of how his confreres struggled to climb the greasy poles of academe. He had the fire in his eye. The new Mickey expatiated upon the colossal academic value of Mr. B.’s screed; I listened, as to someone describing the details of a complex and tedious