The Book of Air and Shadows

sex; that absolute power to grind the faces of one’s enemies was delightful and also not something to be ashamed of; that democracy was pitiful; that it was ecstasy to bind one’s will to that of a leader; that war was the health of the state…
    When I was finished, she asserted that nobody could possibly believe any of that shit, and I pointed out that, historically, many people did, that it had in fact been wildly popular some decades ago among people just as smart as her, including Martin Heidegger and my grandfather, who, I informed her, had been a member of the Waffen-SS. She thought I was joking, I assured her I was not, and I invited her to my place to see my collection of inherited Nazi memorabilia, something that I am almost certain she had never previously been invited to do. She came along, I showed her my stuff and told her my stories. It had a perverse erotic effect on her, for I suppose it represented the instantiation of the famous line by Plath, although every woman does not love me and I am not an actual fascist. She did actually want the boot in the face, however, in the form of violent sex and some other rough stuff. I don’t much care for that sort of thing, but I felt obliged to play the gentleman (in a manner of speaking) on this occasion. She was a sewer-mouth orgasmer, another thing I don’t much like, and I did not call her again, nor see her until Mickey invited me out for a drink to meet his new amour sometime later and there she was. We pretended we had never met.
    Dierdre publishes a client of mine. We met at my office, something to do with this author using characters that had appeared in previous work jointly copyrighted with another author. We exchanged glances. She was wearing a shimmery blouse and very tight slacks, and when she rose to rummage something out of her briefcase, I admired her ass and the thin thighs that depended from it, and the clear-cut interesting space between them, as wide as a pack of cards. She gave me another look as she returned. This was, I must admit, a
Sex and the City
sort of thing. I called her, and the usual. She turned out to be one of those women who likes to get well impaled on one and then masturbate. She had no padding at all and left a painful bruise on my pubic bone from the grinding. As against that, she was a nightingale, which I rather enjoy, a long series of tuneful notes during her several drawn-out climaxes. We had a few dates-this was about five years ago-and then I called and she was busy and called again and the same, and that was it. I did not regret the termination. I think she found me a little stuffy, and I found her a little shallow. When I met her some months prior to her wedding to Mickey, she also pretended not to have met me, and perhaps she had indeed forgotten our routinized little fling.
    Somewhat depressed now by these reminiscences, I vouchsafe them only to lay the groundwork, necessary to the unfolding of this tale, of my increasingly pathetic yearning for the erotic. Dierdre was sexy but not erotic; there is no deep life in her. Ingrid is erotic, if a little detached, there is always a distance when we’re together and I suppose that’s why I visit her. Artists, I have found, are often like that; it all goes into their work. My estranged wife, Amalie, is far and away the most erotic woman I have ever known, the life force boils out of her, and everything she touches attains beauty. Except me.
    Does “erotic” have an antonym? Thanatotic, perhaps. Is that a word? Clearly the thing is itself real, for don’t we all delight in death? Violent death especially, what pleasure! Don’t we show it in all its fictive detail to our children tens of thousands of times? Although not the reality: no, NASCAR racing excepted, here’s the one remaining area where we acknowledge the difference between IP and Real Life. Real death is the last embarrassing thing. And there’s surely an aesthetics of death, the opposite of all those sprightly Impressionist scenes and the luscious nudes of Boucher, an aesthetics that I believe reached its apogee during the regime for which my grandfather made the supreme sacrifice. Contra Mies, this appeal has nothing to do with mere functionality. The American P-47 Thunderbolt was an effective and formidable weapon, arguably the best fighter-bomber of the war, but it
looks
like something out of the Disney studio, plump and bulbous, as if it should have its prop emerging from a smiley face. The