The Book of Air and Shadows

and I ate a lot of it too during our marriage.) I had not realized that there
were
Catholic Swiss, since I associated the tiny mountain republic with grim old Calvin, but of course there are the pope’s Swiss Guards, who are really Swiss, and Amalie’s mother’s brother was one of them. Very
hoch
were the Pfannenstielers. And what of your family, Jake?
    Oh, what indeed? Mother dead by then, Dad “traveling,” brother studying in Europe (I boasted a bit here), sister…I thought of lying, but I never can keep my lies straight (I mean in personal life; as a lawyer I am, of course, a perfectly competent fabricator), so I said my sister was Miri de Lavieu. At that time in New York you would have had to be more or less blind to not know who she was, that, or perfectly out of tune with popular culture. “The model,” I added to her blank look. I asked her if she had ever heard of Cheryl Tiegs, Lauren Hutton, or Janice Dickinson. She asked me if these were also my sisters? I have never met anyone, before or since, as uninterested in celebrity. Not of this world entirely, was Amalie. I should have taken warning from this, but I did not.
    Now came the guy from the building and opened her office, and after she had done some final bits of work we left. I had at that time a BMW R70 motorcycle, upon which I commuted to work in nearly all weathers. She mounted the pillion, I spun up the machine. She placed her hands lightly around my waist.
    Is there anything better than riding on a powerful motorcycle with a girl clutching on behind, her thighs pressing against your hips, her breasts making two warm ovals against your back, which pressure you can subtly augment whenever you like by tapping a little harder on the brakes than traffic conditions require? If so I have never found it. I took her up to Union Square, where in that season there was an immense billboard covering the entire side of a building showing an ad for a liquor that featured a blond woman in a slinky black evening gown. I stopped and pointed. That’s my sister, I said. Amalie laughed and pointed to another billboard, this one showing a bare-chested young fellow in jeans. My brother, she said, and laughed again. I drove on, a little deflated, but in a nice way. I had scored plenty by being my sister’s brother, so lustful are many in the city for even indirect contact with celebrities, and I was a little thrilled by the strangeness of being with someone to whom it meant nothing at all.
    I bought her a meal in a Caribbean restaurant frequented by big-time
guapos
and their molls, noisy with salsa music, and vibrational with contained violence, and then we toured various dives and music clubs, the kind with drug markets in the john and blow jobs available in the alley behind. I was not famous enough to get into some of them, but Miri’s name and the fact that I knew a number of the bouncers from my weight-lifting avocation served to breach the velvet ropes, that and the remarkable-looking woman on my arm. She turned out to be a terrific dancer; I was not bad at the time, but she danced me into the floor. People stared at her with peculiar looks on their faces that I couldn’t quite interpret-contempt, longing? The damned contemplating the saved, perhaps; I’m sure the same look was on my face half the time.
    Long story short: I took her back to her place, a condo sublet on First off Seventy-eighth, and to my immense surprise and dismay, I got a crisp Swiss handshake and a chaste cheek kiss. Same on the second date, same on the third. After that a little light canoodling, but she would not, as we used to say, put out. She said there’d been a boy at school and she’d slept with him and he’d broken her heart and she’d realized then that she was not made like the other girls she knew, not like they showed in the films, she couldn’t bear sex without commitment, she didn’t agree with everything the church said, but she thought it was right on that score, and had been perfectly celibate since. Waiting for Mr. Right? I asked her, and she, ignoring my irony, said yes. This colloquy took place, by the way, in the middle of an infamous club that was practically a petri dish for sexually transmitted diseases.
    At this time in my life, I should add, I was entertaining at least four women, all lovely, all sexually available, and I can barely recall their names and faces now, so completely did Amalie take over my erotic life. And I had always been perfectly