The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [64]
The only real campaign of seduction I have ever carried out was directed against my wife, Amalie, née Pfannenstieler, and I will have to tell about this too before continuing with the story of Miranda.
(Pretend that time is suspended for now, Miranda and I are still in the paneled room at the library, our hands touching, the electricity flowing like Boulder Dam, pheromones beading up on all slick surfaces….)
So—my first job out of law school laboring as an associate at Sobel Tennis Carrey, on Beaver Street in the financial district. The firm had a modest practice in trademark and copyright, but anyone could see then—some twenty years ago that was—that intellectual property was going to be big, and I was working like mad in the usual manner of young associates. This was during the high tide of the sexual revolution, the first time in recent history when any reasonably well-set-up young fellow could have sex ad lib with females other than whores or courtesans, and in pursuit of this delicious horror I repaired nearly every night to one of several saloons (meat markets, they were amusingly called) in the East Village and uptown to continue and extend my revenge on the girls.
One Saturday morning, hungover and having detached myself from my meat market conquest of the previous evening, I went down to my office to complete some work I had scanted so as to get a good start on my Friday-night hijinks. I was in the firm’s library, quite alone in the office, when I heard a distant tapping, which I soon determined was coming from the office’s locked outer door. Investigating this, I found a young woman standing in the deserted hallway. I recognized her as someone who worked at Barron & Schmidt, a financial outfit with whom we shared the fourteenth floor. We had often risen on the elevator together, me dull with the night’s excess, she quiet and neatly turned out but carrying that look on her features that parries the male glance nearly as well as a Pathan burka.
She introduced herself and told me she had locked herself out of her office. I could see she was wretchedly embarrassed by it, especially as it was a trip to the john that had occasioned the flub. Charming little blossoms of red had appeared on her cheeks as a result of conveying this tale. She had fine, white-blond hair gathered in little twisty braids wound around her ears, rather a Pippi Longstocking effect, and she was wearing white jeans and a black Kraftwerke T-shirt, the black-letter text nicely distorted by her pretty pointy breasts, a Saturday outfit quite unlike the proper and cryptomammary suits she always wore to work. Her eyes were preternaturally large, just short of goggly, her mouth a little pink bud. She looked about seventeen but was (as I found later) nearly twenty-six. She was about five inches shorter than I was, tall for a woman, and had an athletic body (winter sports as I also learned—she was Swiss), slim of waist, with legs to the chin.
I invited her in and she made her call to building maintenance and they said they’d send a man around, but it’d be a while. She was truly stranded, since her bag with all her money and ID was locked up in Mr. Schmidt’s office. She was his private secretary and was learning the international finance business. Did she like international finance? No, she thought it was silly. She could not get excited about money. One needed enough, it was horrid to be poor, but beyond that there was something not healthy about wanting ever more and more and more. It was sometimes almost wicked, she said, and cutely wrinkled her nose. She asked me what I did at the firm and I told her and added that I thought I would never make a good IP lawyer because I felt most of the cases were sort of dumb and weren’t really about the true purpose of IP law, which was to make sure that the