by Louis Begley
I had no ready answer other than “of course,” although I wondered how well she had pondered the fate of nineteenth-century expatriated ladies on whom consciously or not she might be modeling herself. Besides, it wasn’t any of my business. Lucy and I got along well, and having her in Paris organizing her dinners and occasionally more ambitious entertainments was pleasant. A case in point was an expedition to Chartres with her and a married couple from Providence on their honeymoon in France. Talking nonstop about the architecture of the cathedral and Henry Adams’s take on it, she barreled down the three-lane route nationale, which the shadows cast by plane trees lining it on both sides had turned into the semblance of a shimmering stream, her four-door Mercedes convertible leaving in the dust the deux chevaux carrying the humbler French and the big sleek Citroëns beloved of French bourgeoisie and government officials, until the gendarmes stopped us at a speed trap about thirty kilometers from our destination. They were polite, and so was she, but, as she said when we resumed our journey, some of the squeak had gone out of her. But only for that morning. By the afternoon we had her in fighting trim again, and the trip back to Paris was even more hair-raising. Her theory was that cops never stop you twice on the same road. Besides, she had a dinner date, and she didn’t want to be late.
As the intermission approached, it occurred to me that I had enough stored-up memories and enough living ghosts—former persons, I called them—encircling me, school and college classmates, people I had worked with at one journal or another, and my literary agent to whom I had remained faithful, and had no need to add Lucy to the crowd. The thing to do might be to stay in my seat during the intermission. Alternatively, I could skip the third piece on the program, a Balanchine ballet I had seen too often to care about missing it, leave the theater, and go directly to dinner. The conscience of a balletomane prevailed. There was no good reason to avoid Lucy, and certainly none to let her drive me away.
Lucy must have turned to see which way I was going when we parted after the first intermission. She was waiting for me at the top of the stairs.
Well, she said, that was fine dancing. Did you enjoy it?
I nodded.
There may be better dancers in Europe, she continued, I wouldn’t know. I don’t go to Europe anymore. But to my mind this company is still wonderful.
I assured her that I agreed, whereupon she asked, Aren’t you going to offer me a glass of champagne?
It turned out she wanted mixed nuts as well. I paid and followed her out to the balcony. There she told me with scarcely a pause between sentences that she had been sorry to read about Bella and should have written, but she hadn’t known her very well, and that she supposed losing her had made me very lonely.
Shocked by the callousness of her remarks, I turned toward the fountain and remained silent.
After a pause she said she remembered that I, on the other hand, had written after Thomas died, which she thought then and continued to think had been a gesture of misguided politeness. Not expecting condolences, she hadn’t answered.
I may have shrugged before replying that I had liked Thomas and had regretted their divorce when I heard about it, as well as, of course, the ghastly accident.
She turned on me.
What do you mean! I couldn’t have gone on living with that monster. You went on seeing him, of course, just like all the rest of my friends. Yup, everything he wanted fell into his lap, including that celebrity second wife, and he never acknowledged that he owed it all to me. Perhaps he didn’t remember. Perhaps he never got it.
I didn’t bother to reply.
My son, Jamie, is a failure, she added inconsequentially. He tries to write screenplays but doesn’t know how. No wonder he can’t sell them. His wife is a Chicana. Naturally they live in a creepy suburb of L.A. When I go out there, he doesn’t even let me stay in his house. I have to go to a motel!
That’s hard, I said.
This time she agreed. Their story is that Thomas never asked to stay with them. Naturally! Why would he have? He stayed in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel and had himself driven out and back! You know that he had absolutely no sense of direction.
I couldn’t help laughing. He may have well chosen the better solution, I told her.
Certainly, she replied, he could afford it.
She must have realized that I was about to say goodbye and changed the subject: I suppose you’re meeting people for dinner. You can tell the truth. I’ve already eaten, so you don’t have to worry about whether I’ll fit in. I eat early these days. Some other evening, though, I’d like to have you over for dinner. What’s your telephone number?
I gave it to her, together with my e-mail address.
She wrote both down in a dog-eared address book and said, I’ll be in touch.
II
THOMAS SNOW: the brilliant investment banker who made a pile of money, gave much of it away, and turned into a Wall Street pundit! We had enjoyed getting together wherever I lived, in New York or Paris, and beginning in the late seventies he came through Paris often. Of course I had followed him on various op-ed pages in U.S. newspapers and occasionally in the Financial Times. Lucy’s speaking of him with such hostility and resentment, which apparently time had done nothing to assuage, brought back before my eyes the young man she introduced to me one afternoon in Paris, some fifty years ago. I was in my study, working on the first chapter of a novel, which in my case meant that I was revising perhaps for the third or fourth time whatever I had written the day before. The telephone rang; I picked up the receiver and heard Lucy speaking very loudly: Hello, I’m practically downstairs from you, at the café on the corner of Vaugirard and Madame. I’ve got someone with me I want you to meet. May we come up? We won’t stay long.
She was one of those people, convinced that you cannot fail to recognize their voice, who don’t give their name when they call. In the event I had realized it was she and repressed my annoyance. Since saying no and feeling badly about it would have been more disruptive, I said, Yes, I’ll be glad to see you.
I lived on the third floor, French style, which is really the fourth floor. There was no elevator. A few long minutes passed before the doorbell rang. I opened the door. The look on Lucy’s face was that of a cat bringing you a mouse. She pushed forward a boyish American and said: This is Thomas Snow. Thomas, here is the great novelist I’ve been telling you about.
We shook hands. It was after six, and he was so obviously embarrassed by her introduction that, contrary to my original intention to get rid of them quickly, I showed them into the living room and asked whether they would like a drink. The whiskey relaxed the young man. A casual question about what had brought him to Paris in January, not a month favored by tourists, opened the sluice gate to a flood of information. He was a GI on leave. Having gotten his master’s from the London School of Economics, where he had gone on a Harvard College fellowship, he volunteered for the draft and was serving as a corporal with the Seventh Army headquarters in Heidelberg. His tour of duty would be over in the summer. In the fall, he’d start at the Harvard Business School.
And afterward?
He had it all mapped out: he wanted to work on Wall Street and had his eye on Morgan Stanley and, if that didn’t work out, Kidder. Beyond that, he had dreams, some more nebulous than others.
That’s quite a program, I said, and turning to Lucy asked where she had met this remarkable future banker.
But I was going to tell you about it, I was just getting to that, Thomas protested. We met at the beginning of the second semester of my senior year, at a party given by your good friend Alex van Buren. I know that you and he are friends because Lucy has told me. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck. She and I hit it off right away. I can’t imagine how we would have met otherwise.
Lucy nodded vigorously and held out her glass, which I refilled.
How interesting, I said. What was Alex doing in Cambridge? He graduated years ago. Ahead of me.
He’d been workin
g at the family brokerage firm, Thomas explained, and the decision was made that he should go to the business school. His father pushed for it.
Actually, Lucy had gotten it slightly wrong. I had known Alex, we had been on good terms, he’d always been very nice to me, but we had never been close. A few years older than I, he had been in the marines and managed to survive Iwo Jima. We had overlapped briefly at the Lampoon; in fact he’d helped me get in, but that was all. I supposed he went to Lampoon dinners. I didn’t. Remembering the conspicuously rich and snobby New Yorkers he’d hung out with, I had to wonder what on earth this young man had been doing at one of Alex’s parties. There was no need to probe: the explanation was forthcoming. It looked as though Thomas had decided to tell me his life story, and Lucy seemed content to let him talk, maternally proud of his polite self-assurance.
He had gotten to know Alex and Alex’s parents, Thomas continued, indeed the entire van Buren clan, over the summers he spent, since his junior year in high school, babysitting and tutoring the van Buren nieces, nephews, and grandchildren in math and history at the family’s summer place in Newport. He was from Newport himself, but not the van Burens’ kind of Newport—the notion that I might think otherwise made him shake with laughter. His father owned the garage where everybody, the van Burens included, had their fancy cars serviced, and his mother was a bookkeeper. She’s my father’s business manager. I’m an only child, he added.
Then you’ve grown up near Bristol, I observed, De Bourgh territory.
He laughed. Yes, a short distance as the crow flies! But otherwise … Anyway, the summer before Alex went to the business school he told me he’d be in touch once he had settled down in Cambridge. Being a really good guy, he did call and invite me to parties he and his roommate gave after football games. Then in February of my senior year he invited me, out of the blue, to a small party without a theme. Just those deadly martinis. By the pitcher. She was there—he smiled in the direction of Lucy—and right away he introduced me. I’ll say it again. He’s a really great guy. I don’t mean just the war-hero stuff. You know he has a Silver Star with three clusters and two Purple Hearts. I mean, he’s never treated me like an employee, nothing remotely like it. He taught me sailing, talked to me for hours about the First World War, which was then my big subject. He reads a lot of history.
That was nice to hear. The decorations were news to me. They showed a modesty that Alex in fact had shared with some of the other returning veterans I got to know at college. You never heard about the Iwo Jima horrors or the Battle of the Bulge or whatever else they had lived through. The generosity toward this young man was mildly surprising; perhaps Alex had turned over a new leaf. But as Thomas talked on about the van Burens’ estate and his wide-eyed astonishment at the tennis court, the near-Olympic-length swimming pool, the boathouse with its sculls and sailing paraphernalia, the kids’ dinghies swinging at their moorings, and the yawl belonging to Alex’s father on which he and Mrs. van Buren would take him and his charges for day sails, I wondered whether he had already seen the De Bourgh establishment or realized that it was in all likelihood no less grand. He wasn’t telling, but he surely knew he was not the sort of young beau Lucy’s friends would expect her to be taking around and introducing to them. In fact, I was willing to bet that his stream of true confessions was intended to make clear he understood such surprise as I felt and had no intention of fooling anyone about his background. He needn’t have worried about that. You couldn’t pull the wool over the eyes of people who were of Lucy’s world and cared about such matters. Yes, he was trim—I learned later that he had been on his high school track team and had specialized in the one-hundred- and two-hundred-meter dash—and respectably taller than she, he had brown hair parted on the side and a nice face with regular features, and he wore a gray-flannel Brooks Brothers suit that was neither too big nor too small for him and a blue button-down shirt just like everybody else’s. If Norman Rockwell had wanted to put on a Saturday Evening Post cover a bright-eyed GI on leave, out on a first date with his future boss’s daughter, he might have used this kid—jazzed up a bit of course. And yes, he spoke correctly and without a trace of a regional accent. That was fine and should go down well with his prospective white-shoe Wall Street employers. But in the De Bourgh context, it was no use. He was a townie. The son of a garage owner and a bookkeeper! That might not have mattered much if the garage—the best in town!—had been, say, in Casper, Wyoming. But the indignity of its being next door, in Newport, of all places, was hilarious and bound to give the De Bourgh parents and Lucy’s brother, and I didn’t know how many uncles, aunts, and cousins, a lasting heartburn. That last aspect of the matter, incidentally, turned out to be something I got mostly wrong. Beyond such divagations about class and caste on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, which were part of my writer’s métier, there was another oddity: there were many bankers and lawyers in Lucy’s milieu in Paris, most of them, to be sure, safely married, but I hadn’t noticed that Lucy was particularly interested in any of them. She played tennis doubles with them and their wives; she went to their parties and dinners; she seemed drawn, however, to the other group of Americans in Paris: writers, painters, and occasional journalists. So why this embryo banker? It wasn’t any of my business. If Lucy had a thing going with this nice boy, tant mieux! He was likely to have a good time and learn a thing or two. I liked him instinctively, and I liked the conceit I’d come up with, that in fine, to use one of the Master’s locutions, all three of us, Lucy, Thomas, and I, belonged to the same world, undifferentiated by class, the grand world to which presidents of Harvard University traditionally welcomed at commencements graduating Harvard College seniors: “the society of educated men and women.” Buoyed by these sentiments, I asked Thomas and Lucy to come to a little cocktail party I was giving at my apartment on Friday of that same week.
I had been living long enough in Paris to become friends with an interesting group of French literary and artistic types, whom I was sure Lucy would like, including a couple of fine music and art critics—and had invited a number of them, as well as some Americans working for the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and Time. The French and the Americans didn’t make much of an effort to mix, but that was par for the course. I kept an eye on Thomas. At first he remained at Lucy’s side, but eventually American journalists who crowded to speak to her in effect shoved him aside. I was about to go to his rescue when I saw that no intervention was needed. He was chatting away with Guy Seurat, the great-grandson of the postimpressionist painter and my best friend in France. I joined them briefly and found Thomas’s French a bit stiff but perfectly sufficient. When I next checked, Guy was introducing him to an editor at Gallimard and his Sorbonne-professor wife. It was a good thing, I thought, that he had connected with the French contingent. Several of the American guests had a history with Lucy. There was no way Thomas could have known that, unless she had chosen to tell him, but such things can sometimes be inferred from the way a man takes your measure, and they hurt.
Sometime before summer I ran into Lucy at a reception at the British embassy. It was a beautiful mild evening. We left at the same time, and when she told me she was going home, I suggested that we walk together. I would leave her at her door and continue to rue de Vaugirard. There is no greater or more exhilarating public space or urban view than that offered by the astonishing ensemble of place de la Concorde, the bridge that crosses the Seine and takes you to the National Assembly, and the vista of Notre-Dame to the east and Pont Alexandre III and the Trocadéro to the west. For a while we savored it in silence. Then she told me that she and Thomas would tour Italy together as soon as he had finished his army service. Her brother was getting married in Bristol on the second Saturday of September. Of course, she’d be there. After the wedding, she’d probably return to Paris. She hoped I’d be there.
I observed that it seemed as though she and that very nice Thomas had something serious going.
He really loves me, she ans
wered. I think he needs me. Perhaps I need him too.
· · ·
A novel of mine was published in the United States in February of the following year, making it necessary for me to go to New York to see my editor and various public relations people at the publishing house, as well as my agent, and do some readings and other promotional events. It was good to get away from Paris. The conflict over the future of Algeria was tearing France apart with a vehemence not known since the Dreyfus Affair. Toward the end of my stay, invited by the Harvard College literary magazine, I gave a talk at the Sanders Theater in Cambridge. The turnout was good, and the audience agreeably enthusiastic. Unbeknownst to me, Thomas had come to hear me and waited to say hello as I left the building on the way to a reception the undergraduates were giving at the magazine. I invited him to come along. On our way to Bow Street, he gave me an enthusiastic, even bubbly, account of his and Lucy’s Italian tour. They had “done” Florence and the Umbrian towns, Venice, Padua, and Rome and then, after a two-day visit to Naples, drove back to Paris, where they parted. He took the train to Le Havre, from which his student ship was sailing. She was due to sail a week later, from Cherbourg. First-class on the France, he told me. Lucky Lucy! But they got back together in Bristol, at her brother’s wedding. Then she left for Paris and Geneva.
I asked what news he had from her.
She’s still in Geneva, he told me. I’ve been getting letters, but we’ve only spoken a couple of times. The difference in time zones seems to get in the way. She didn’t come home for Christmas. I’m worried about her. She’s never explained what she’s doing there. If I can swing it, I’ll go over right after school ends. I’ll have too much work to do it over the spring break.