“Well,” he resumed, “not anymore, obviously. I would have given a lot to take a look at those papers though. God knows what happened to them.”
Here I thought he looked at me in a somewhat disingenuous fashion. All decent lawyers are close-mouthed about their clients’ affairs, nor does mere death spring open their lips, but they are casual gossips compared to us IP lawyers. So I did not rise to the bait, if bait there was, but asked, “Is there something wrong?”
He said, “You mean besides Bulstrode getting killed? Isn’t that enough?”
“You look like you’re carrying more than that, pal,” I said. “I’ve been noticing it the last couple of times too. You’re not sick or anything?”
“No, aside from the fact that I’m fat as a hog and get no exercise, I’m a horse. Arteries like shotguns according to my doc. No, what you’re observing is the physical stigmata of the current market.”
Here I should mention that Mickey and I have different attitudes toward investment. My pile is with a mutual fund started in 1927 that has never paid much more or much less than 7 percent per annum. Mickey calls this irresponsible conservatism, or did when the market was roaring some years ago. He is a hedge fund guy, and he used to regale me with tales of his fantastic returns; no longer. I said, “Well, you still have the industrial fasteners,” at which he barked a laugh.
“Yeah, if I didn’t have to share them with the two dozen cousins. My family suffers from an excess of heirs.”
I sensed he wished not to pursue this subject so I said, “Speaking of which, do you know if the late professor had any heirs? I take it there were no children.”
“There’s a niece: Madeleine or something like that. Picture on his desk. His late sister’s kid, and he doted on her. I expect she’ll inherit whatever he had. Or the longtime companion.”
“Has she been notified?”
“Yeah. She’s coming down this week.”
“From England?”
“No, from Toronto. The sister emigrated years ago, married a Canadian, had the one kid. Ah, here’s our gnocchi. You know, I think I’m getting my appetite back.”
As we dug into the meltingly tender dumplings, I said, “So the manuscript doesn’t actually lead any further-it’s not a clue to something even bigger?”
Through gnocchi Mickey responded, “Bigger than a contemporary reference to Shakespeare? I can’t imagine what that would be. Did he tell you that?”
“He suggested that his manuscript mentioned another manuscript actually by Shakespeare.”
“Oh, right! Pure fantasy would be my guess. As I said, Andrew was utterly desperate to get back in the game. With good reason. When the will is cleared up and what’s-her-name has possession, we’ll take a look at it and see if it’s anything. Although, given the man’s desperation to recoup his career, I rather think it’ll be nothing much.”
We spoke no more of Bulstrode during this meal (in which Mickey actually did get his appetite back and joked about the garbage they had to eat in Texas) or his mysterious manuscript, or even more mysterious demise.
As far as I recall, that is, since the above is a complete fabrication. I have eaten those dishes and drunk such wine at Sorrentino’s, perhaps with Mickey Haas in attendance, and there is a Marco and a Paul, but I am in no position to attest that we ate those things on that day, many months ago. I can hardly recall what I had for lunch last Tuesday, nor can anyone else. I did garner some facts about Shakespeare, but whether on that occasion or later, I could not say. I recall that he was upset, and I recall that it was the first occasion at which I learned of the existence of that young woman. Miranda, not Madeleine, as it happens. Aside from that it is fiction, but even as I wrote it, it became the truth, because in point of fact we have virtually no real memories. We make it all up. Proust made it up, Boswell made it up, Pepys…I have actually a great deal of sympathy for the increasingly common sort of person, often one with a high position, who is caught fabricating. You mean I didn’t go to Harvard Med School? I did not have sex with that woman… It’s not the collapse of morality (for I think there has never been truth based on memory) but rather the triumph of intellectual property, that blizzard of invented realities-artificial lives, Photoshopped photos, ghosted novels, lip-synched rock bands, fabricated reality shows, American foreign policy-through which we daily slog. Everyone, from the president on down, is a novelist now.
I suppose we can blame Shakespeare himself for starting it, because he made up people who were more real, though false, than the people one knew. Dick Bracegirdle understood this, which was why he set out to smash Shakespeare and all his works. I took a history course at Columbia-Haas will recall it too, because I took it on his recommendation-a man named Charlton taught it. It was English medieval history, and although I have expunged the Domesday Book and all the kings and queens from my mind, I recall very well his take on history in general. He said there are three kinds of history. The first is what really happened, and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened, and that is 90 percent of the history in books.
(Anyway, reading over this scene in the restaurant I find I am absurdly pleased with it. Yes, it could have happened that way. That is Mickey’s voice I’ve put there, and I expect that people who know him, if they read the above, would agree. And I find that reality has swum in to inhabit the fiction I created, and I am absolutely sure that if Mickey read it he would say, Yeah, I recall it just like that. So I write the second kind of history here. As did Bracegirdle, I imagine, although he was an honest man, and I am not.)
I should mention now that shortly after this event I stopped into one of those electronics shops on Sixth Avenue to buy a cell phone battery and for reasons I can’t quite recall…no, actually I do recall. As noted, I have a mind more disorderly than I would prefer and have been in the habit of scrawling down random notes about this and that when they occur to me, in the pages in the back of that aforesaid diary. Unfortunately, I sometimes find I can’t read what I’ve written: see urty abt. srtnt would be a typical notation. But while I was in the shop my eye fell on a digital voice-activated recorder, a Sanyo 32, and I thought to myself that here was a solution to my disorder and I purchased it for seventy-two bucks. It is the size of a cell phone and it records two solid hours in high-quality mode. Since I bought it, the last two hours of my life’s sound track has been saved for later listening. It has been invaluable to the present exercise.
After lunch, I ran Mickey back uptown in the Lincoln. He’d drunk most of the wine with the couple of gimlets and he was fairly well oiled. When Mickey gets like this he invariably talks about his three wives. The first Mrs. H. was his college sweetheart, Louise, a strapping blonde from a fine old New England family, who doled out sexual favors standing up under the balcony and the hanging ivy of her Barnard residence hall, as we all did in those days, and somewhat more intimate ones in our apartment. She started letting him fuck her in senior year after she had the ring, another jolly tradition of those times. I recall weekend mornings in the apartment, Mickey in his maroon velour bathrobe (or dressing gown as he pretentiously called it) making fussy coffee with a Chemex, and Louise swanning in, faintly embarrassed at the sight of me at the kitchen table, but carrying it off with class. She usually apppeared on these occasions in black tights with one of Mickey’s oxford dress shirts on top, an outfit I have ever since considered wildly erotic. (Tights were underwear in those days; I have never quite become used to girls racing around town exhibiting their bodies in them-always a certain vibration in the scrotum.) She also appeared without bra, as she was an early adopter of that style, and she had lovely, pointed, jiggly ones too.