I heard her lecture once. Mickey took me, a lecture called something like “Privileging the Text in the Late Comedies: Speech Act Theory and Discursive Formation in Shakespeare.” I did not understand one single word of it, and told Mickey so, and he tried to explain to me about Foucault and Althusser and Derrida and the revolution in the study of literature of which Marilyn was an ornament, but I could see that his heart was not in it. Mickey’s problem, I gathered, was that while he could talk the current critical talk, and did it surpassing well, his heart was not really in it, for he loved Shakespeare, and loving anything was apparently a bourgeois affectation concealing the machinations of the oppressive patriarchy. Marilyn thought she could change him, thought she could blow some fresh air into his paternalistic, bourgeois view of literature, but no. And he had never made her come, not like Gerald-from-Berkeley could, or so she told him. She left him the kid, though.

Number three was, or is, Dierdre, who was his editor at Putnam, a Kevlar and piano-wire item, who pursues perfection in all things. She is now (we are back on our drive) the main subject of complaint, for Dierdre is à la mode to the max. For Dierdre to have the wrong refrigerator, attend the wrong party, appear at the wrong club or resort, or have the wrong sort of house in the Hamptons, would be a kind of social cancer, and she now wishes to produce a perfect child, at which Mickey is rather balking, having three already. He told me a long anecdote about…

You know, I forget what it was about. Tiles? A German appliance? Conception strategies? Who gives a shit, but the point was that she was costing him a bundle, as was the first wife and the first set of kids, and the boy from Marilyn (Jason) was acting up, and he was spending a fortune in special schools and psychiatrist bills, and because of the market and the too numerous fastener heirs, he was seriously pinched. (I offered a loan, got laughed at, ha-ha, it’s not that bad yet.) Such bitch sessions are a normal part of my friendship with Mickey. I suppose he’s listened enough to mine, although I have had only the one wife. The peculiar thing, though, about Mickey’s wives is that, by chance, I have fucked each of them, although not ever during the period in which they were married to him. I would never do that.

Louise and I had a single long afternoon about two weeks before she got married. She said she loved him and wanted to have his children, but simply could not bear the thought of never doing it with another man and she said she always had a sneaker for me (her word) and wanted to see what it was like before the gate clanged shut. She was a somewhat nervous lover, and it was clear that Mickey had not proceeded past the introductory course, whereas Mrs. Polansky had given me an entire curriculum. That was it, and she never mentioned it, or sought more, and I don’t think she ever told Mickey, even when he took up with Marilyn.

Who I’d met at a literary cocktail to which I was invited by one of my clients, about six months before he hooked up with her. She was ranting on about fascists in her English lit department, and I made a mild comment about how that word had a technical meaning and it was not particularly wise to use it in so broadly figurative a sense, lest we be unguarded if the real thing came along again, as it very well might, since it had its attractions, obviously. She laughed at me, because to her fascist was what you called someone you disliked, and their response was always to deny it. Nobody except some brainless hicks in Indiana or Idaho ever admitted to actually espousing fascism. For obvious reasons, I have read deeply in the history and literature of that philosophy, and, being a little drunk, gave her a massive dose. I don’t think she’d ever heard a coherent argument that did not start with her assumptions, but with a completely different set-that sexual and racial oppression were natural, for example, and that it was as absurd to be ashamed of them or to suppress them as it was to be ashamed of sex; that absolute power to grind the faces of one’s enemies was delightful and also not something to be ashamed of; that democracy was pitiful; that it was ecstasy to bind one’s will to that of a leader; that war was the health of the state…

When I was finished, she asserted that nobody could possibly believe any of that shit, and I pointed out that, historically, many people did, that it had in fact been wildly popular some decades ago among people just as smart as her, including Martin Heidegger and my grandfather, who, I informed her, had been a member of the Waffen-SS. She thought I was joking, I assured her I was not, and I invited her to my place to see my collection of inherited Nazi memorabilia, something that I am almost certain she had never previously been invited to do. She came along, I showed her my stuff and told her my stories. It had a perverse erotic effect on her, for I suppose it represented the instantiation of the famous line by Plath, although every woman does not love me and I am not an actual fascist. She did actually want the boot in the face, however, in the form of violent sex and some other rough stuff. I don’t much care for that sort of thing, but I felt obliged to play the gentleman (in a manner of speaking) on this occasion. She was a sewer-mouth orgasmer, another thing I don’t much like, and I did not call her again, nor see her until Mickey invited me out for a drink to meet his new amour sometime later and there she was. We pretended we had never met.

Dierdre publishes a client of mine. We met at my office, something to do with this author using characters that had appeared in previous work jointly copyrighted with another author. We exchanged glances. She was wearing a shimmery blouse and very tight slacks, and when she rose to rummage something out of her briefcase, I admired her ass and the thin thighs that depended from it, and the clear-cut interesting space between them, as wide as a pack of cards. She gave me another look as she returned. This was, I must admit, a Sex and the City sort of thing. I called her, and the usual. She turned out to be one of those women who likes to get well impaled on one and then masturbate. She had no padding at all and left a painful bruise on my pubic bone from the grinding. As against that, she was a nightingale, which I rather enjoy, a long series of tuneful notes during her several drawn-out climaxes. We had a few dates-this was about five years ago-and then I called and she was busy and called again and the same, and that was it. I did not regret the termination. I think she found me a little stuffy, and I found her a little shallow. When I met her some months prior to her wedding to Mickey, she also pretended not to have met me, and perhaps she had indeed forgotten our routinized little fling.

Somewhat depressed now by these reminiscences, I vouchsafe them only to lay the groundwork, necessary to the unfolding of this tale, of my increasingly pathetic yearning for the erotic. Dierdre was sexy but not erotic; there is no deep life in her. Ingrid is erotic, if a little detached, there is always a distance when we’re together and I suppose that’s why I visit her. Artists, I have found, are often like that; it all goes into their work. My estranged wife, Amalie, is far and away the most erotic woman I have ever known, the life force boils out of her, and everything she touches attains beauty. Except me.

Does “erotic” have an antonym? Thanatotic, perhaps. Is that a word? Clearly the thing is itself real, for don’t we all delight in death? Violent death especially, what pleasure! Don’t we show it in all its fictive detail to our children tens of thousands of times? Although not the reality: no, NASCAR racing excepted, here’s the one remaining area where we acknowledge the difference between IP and Real Life. Real death is the last embarrassing thing. And there’s surely an aesthetics of death, the opposite of all those sprightly Impressionist scenes and the luscious nudes of Boucher, an aesthetics that I believe reached its apogee during the regime for which my grandfather made the supreme sacrifice. Contra Mies, this appeal has nothing to do with mere functionality. The American P-47 Thunderbolt was an effective and formidable weapon, arguably the best fighter-bomber of the war, but it looks like something out of the Disney studio, plump and bulbous, as if it should have its prop emerging from a smiley face. The Stuka on the other hand looks just like what it is: terror from the skies. Again, the Sherman tank looks like something a toddler would pull on a string; the Panzer VI Tiger is obviously an elaborate machine for killing human beings. Not to mention the terrific uniforms, the regalia. And this thing here in my hand.