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 casual about allowing my girls to know I had others, it was after all the sexual revolution, and I did the same with Amalie, and amazingly she said I had to stop if I wanted to keep company with her, and even more amazingly, I did. I called up my current ladies one after another and kissed them off, so to speak.
Because-and this is the whole point of this long excursion-being with Amalie was better than sex. It was mystical. It was as if you could lean into a sunbeam and it could support you. Colors were brighter, music was more enticing, everything moved slowly, elegantly, like a grand entrance of ancient royalty, caressed by perfumed zephyrs. I had heard of stuff like this, but I thought it was all figures of speech. The moon did not hit my eye like a big pizza pie, but short of that, all the songs came true.
Eventually, I did seduce her, in the time-honored and honorable old way: that winter we were married, in the Liebfrauenkirche in Zurich, with her large and very proper Swiss family in attendance, banker dad and professor of linguistics mom and the six siblings, all blond and rosy-cheeked, and none of them thinking that she had carried off the prize, but everyone was as polite and correct as could be. My sister and brother came too. Miri happened to be on a fashion shoot in Paris and arrived with her coke-fiend Eurotrash husband, Armand Etienne Picot de Lavieu, and Paul came from his studies in Italy, so it was convenient. Maybe they would have still come had it not been, but that’s something I was not sure of at the time. Dad was uninvited and absent. It was all something of a blur, actually, as I imagine weddings always are to the principals. The only thing I recall is Paul gripping me hard above the elbow and saying, This is a keeper, kid, don’t fuck it up. And that Miri cried and, as far as I could tell, remained drug-free during the event.
We went on our honeymoon to Zermatt and stayed in the family chalet and skied. Or she skied. I mainly fell down and watched her zoom gorgeously down the pistes, and afterward participated in what was then and yet remains the most terrific sexual experience of my life. An orgasmic calliope. She made a sound like doves, the delighted uohh uohh uohh they produce, from almost the moment we started, and she was able to generate a nearly epileptic crescendo in which Time quite stopped, as it is supposed to do in heaven, existence without duration. Naturally, within six months, as I said, I had started sleeping around again, although I was able to keep this secret for many years, taking clever advantage of Amalie’s near inability to think badly of anyone. No excuse, sir: it was evil plain and simple, evil black as night. I did fuck it up, as Paul feared, which is why he grasped my arm so tightly on my wedding day, leaving a bruise.
And having ruined paradise, I have for years desired to return there (without, naturally, having to make any major changes in my spiritual state) and have nurtured a longing for a new and fresh Amalie, but this time one not quite so good, someone more along the lines of me, but not too much like me, if you take my meaning, but with the same electricity and without the unbearable burden of guilt that I bring to relations with my wife. Which is why I have made this long excursion, to make it clear what was happening in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room. A fresh start, and there she was with her tiny blond braids and her Amalie-esque look, shaking my hand with the tingles goosefleshing up my arm.
I asked her what she was doing, and she pointed to a thick volume open on the desk. Something my uncle wanted me to research-family history. I gestured to chairs and we sat down. It was a library, so we had to speak softly, and since we had to, it was necessary for me to have my head closer to hers than ordinary interlocution would require. She wore a light perfume, floral.
“You’re an academic too, I gather?”
“No, I work for the ministry of education in Toronto. This is more of a sideline, and to help him out.”
“But he’s deceased.”
“Yes. I thought I could finish up the work and arrange for a posthumous publication. I think he would have liked that.”
“You were close, then?”
“Yes.”
“Although separated by oceans?”
“Yes.” Then, somewhat impatiently, with a little wrinkle forming across her fine high forehead, “My uncle Andrew was a very important part of my life, Mr. Mishkin. My father left my mom when I was four, leaving us in a very precarious financial position. He was something of a wild boy and not at all interested in fatherhood. He’s dead now, as is my mother. Uncle Andrew, meanwhile, paid for my education, had me over to England during practically every summer vacation starting at age eight and…oh, God, why am I telling you all this? I guess I haven’t quite recovered from the shock of what happened to him. I’m sorry. I hadn’t intended to spill my guts like that.”