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 creative act was rewarded, with the better part of the money going to the actual creator. Unfortunately this was, I informed her, hardly the rule; rather the opposite was in fact the case. Well, said she, you must fix that.
And she said it with such confidence-first, assuming such a fix was possible, and second, assuming I was the man for the task-that I was amazed. Perhaps I gaped. She smiled: light filled the dreary room and the dreary place in my head. I felt an unfamiliar shock. To recover, I asked her if she was ever really wicked herself. She said she tried to be, because everyone said it was such fun, but it was not fun at all, more sick-making than anything else, and she hated to be poked by men she didn’t know.
Poked? I questioned the word. A little idiomatic slip; she meant pawed. In any case, this is what had drawn her from stuffy old Zurich to naughty New York. Her family was devoutly Catholic and so was she, she supposed, but she craved a little more zing in her life. Is that right? Zing?
It was, I assured her. And I informed her that today was her lucky day, because I was certainly among the wickedest men in New York and I would be pleased to take her among the depraved in their fleshpots, to provide zing but no poking. Unless she desired it, which was, of course, my wicked plan, but I did not voice this then. Her eyes lit up and again that smile. Waves of goodness broke upon my bitter brow.
Thus began my first date with Amalie. The building manager took his time getting up to the office, for which I blessed him in my heart, and we spent the interval talking about the one thing we found that (remarkable!) we had in common, which was that we were both Olympians. She had competed for Switzerland (alpine skiing) at Sapporo. And about our families, or rather about her family, which was like something out of Heidi. (Later, when she got her bag back she showed me pictures of colorfully parkaed upper-middle-class Switzers on the slopes, in front of the chalet, eating fondue. No, a lie, none eating fondue, but they did eat fondue, 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.