The Book of Air and Shadows

story? In a way, if only as evidence of how early my training in sexual dissemblage began. I suppose there is nothing quite so explosive as an affair between a teenaged boy and a woman of a certain age, in which the peak capacity of the male is matched by the hunger of the female. The French exhibit a certain awe at such affairs and have a whole literature on this subject, but in America it is (Mrs. Robinson!) treated only as farce.
    Our particular affair was farcical enough, for our major problem was finding a place to do it in. She lived with her mother and I lived with Mickey Haas, neither of us had a car, I was destitute, as I’ve mentioned, and a librarian’s pay did not run to springing for hotel rooms. Miss Polansky and I had been acquainted for years, and she had been an interested observer of my adolescent growth and the accumulation of heavy musculature that attended it. She was a small, pale woman with silky colorless hair that she wore in a ponytail, making her look younger than her age. Unusually, for that era, she was divorced, which added a certain spice to my fantasies about her, which began at about age twelve. As I (falsely, I suppose) reconstruct it, she brought me along quite skillfully, using my interest in theater to turn my thoughts toward the sort of erotic life not generally available in high schools at the time. She gave me books, plays: Williams, Ibsen,
Tea and Sympathy
, erotic French poetry, and
Ulysses
, these last on loan from her private collection. It is in any event not hard to seduce a teenage boy in a book-smelling, steam-heated library on a drowsy winter afternoon. She didn’t mind the pimples. She complimented my eyes. Sexy, she said, bedroom eyes.
    The primary seduction occurred in the staff room at the library. She had a fifteen-minute break, the other librarian was at the front desk. We did it in a chair, close to a radiator that hissingly leaked steam, although it had nothing on Mrs. Polansky. I lasted only a few minutes but that was enough to send her into a remarkable paroxysm, during which, because she did not wish to attract the attention of the library patrons, she caused volumes of air to issue from between her clenched teeth, since which time I have always found the whistle of escaping steam to be lubricious. I did not get to hear her full-throated cry of ecstasy until the city began closing libraries on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and I was able to start using my old room in the family apartment while Mutti was working at the hospital.
    We had a window of about three hours between noon and when my sister returned from school, of which a good deal was consumed by the subway ride from uptown Manhattan to eastern Brooklyn, so that we were clawing off our clothes from the instant the front door clicked shut. Mrs. Polansky was not the noisiest orgasmer I have ever encountered, but she was a contender, producing at the peak a series of deep, loud organlike groans; and it was only to be expected, given the farcical nature of our affair, that one day, after our typical exertions and having arranged our clothes for the world, we should have encountered Mutti sitting at the kitchen table. She’d taken the afternoon off for some reason, and I never knew how long she’d been sitting there. Her face was unreadable as I introduced Mrs. P. as a math tutor helping me with my algebra. Ruth extended her hand and Mutti shook it, quite correctly, and offered coffee.
    I haven’t thought of that afternoon in quite some time. I really don’t like thinking about that apartment at all, especially the kitchen.
    Back to Mickey and his wives. Louise, as I said, was the first, and lasted the usual seven years. By then it was the height of the sexual revolution, and Mickey wanted his share, which was not all that hard for a professor to pick up, and so then there was Marilyn Kaplan, the eternal grad student. By this time Mickey had a couple of kids and a dog in his big Scarsdale house, and so it cost him a bundle to slake his lust for Marilyn. Of the three wives, Marilyn is the most classically beautiful: big black eyes, glossy long chestnut hair, and the great American girl body, long legs, thin waist, cannonball breasts. She was a staunch feminist of the high 1970s school, utterly contemptuous of the male gaze, while attracting it without cease, and waxing great upon the advantages it conferred. She produced another child, and after some three years vanished with a fellow from, I