by Louis Begley
Pierre had already called to confirm the loan of his aunt’s apartment on avenue Gabriel. There is no more theatrical street in Paris, with its row of starchy white buildings that seem to preen in the autumn sunlight as they look on the back part of the garden where, as a child, Proust’s Narrator, with his heart in his mouth, would wait for little Gilberte Swann to appear, in a gray winter coat with a little fur collar, accompanied by her formidable governess. Pierre met me at the apartment and introduced me to Madame Marie, the housekeeper. After they had shown me around the place and had gotten my bags to my room—I was to use what had been Pierre’s late uncle’s bedroom, not his aunt’s—we sat down to lunch served and cooked by Madame Marie. Pierre looked well, still suntanned from his summer vacation and more fit than he had seemed a few months ago, when I thought he could no longer conceal a nascent middle-age paunch. I complimented him on his appearance. He had been making an effort, he told me, to swim seriously every day during his vacation with Marianne and the girls in Corsica and to play tennis in spite of the heat. The mention of the family vacation was reassuring. I felt easier about asking where he stood. He said he wasn’t sure. There was no doubt that Marianne had gone to London with a man. In fact, soon after the trip, he figured out who it was. He knew him: the financial director of one of the big fashion houses, divorced, also with two children, wife remarried. But Marianne said nothing about him or the affair, and, except for the trips she took in theory alone, there had been no change in her behavior. Pierre and Marianne slept together less often, but otherwise all was very pleasant and coolly polite. He thought the girls understood what was going on too, but they said nothing. So he was unsure what to do. Speak to Marianne? Wait for it to pass? Perhaps in some way this was an experience she needed after having been so reasonable and so hardworking all her life. Pierre knew that Marianne used to confide in me, as a fellow writer, and it had occurred to him that he might ask me to invite her to lunch, just to see whether she would talk about the situation, but in the end he believed he should be just as cool as she and wait. I saw tears forming in his eyes, so I concentrated for a moment on the bones in the fish on my plate and told him that I thought he was right. Quite obviously, he didn’t want her to leave. And since neither Marianne nor that man seemed inclined to regard whatever was going on between them as needing to be acknowledged or discussed, what better course to follow was there than to give that relationship a chance to end naturally? I said I imagined that someday he and Marianne would have to talk about it, but there was no rush. Pierre nodded. I had only said what he wanted to hear, but overall I think I gave him good advice. Marianne has remained with Pierre, the girls seemed no more disoriented than anybody else their age, and I think that they and Marianne were grateful to Pierre for his patience and discretion. The man faded out of the picture.
Pierre asked whether Lydia would be visiting me soon. I told him we had to improvise. She had devised a very promising experimental treatment for sclerosis of the glomeruli, which are small but crucial capillaries in the kidney, a nasty disease that can attack very small children and leads to kidney failure unless it is stopped. A breakthrough might come soon. She was needed at the hospital and felt nervous about even short absences. Probably I would go to see her in New York more often than she would come to Paris. Perhaps to lighten the mood, Pierre assured me that, so far as my bachelor activities went, the coast was clear. Madame Marie and the woman who cleaned had rooms on the top floor of the building and had very liberal views about the sort of lives men were entitled to lead—so long as Madame Marie didn’t immediately fall in love with Lydia, like everyone else who came in contact with her. In that case, Madame Marie might begin to think she had a duty of loyalty to Lydia: at the very least, she would sulk and give bloodcurdling looks to you and whatever young person might be having breakfast with you in bed. This was unwelcome news. If Lydia managed to get away, I would have hoped to have her in this sun-filled apartment that was more beautiful than any hotel accommodation I could imagine. I had assumed that some sort of omnipresent classical Portuguese cleaning lady came with this magnificent apartment that Pierre’s aunt kept at the ready for her rare visits from Buenos Aires, but stupidly I had not thought that there might be someone like Madame Marie, a retainer who had started in the family when the aunt was still a young girl and took seriously her position of moral authority in the household. The cleaning lady was, indeed, Portuguese, but she too had been in the aunt’s service for many years. How to reconcile Lydia’s visits with Léa’s would require some thought. Meanwhile, Pierre had followed his own train of thought. He told me he had run into the little Morini at dinner here and there. Also, she was doing an article on Right Bank art dealers, and had come to the gallery to talk to him and people on his staff, and he had taken her to lunch afterward, across the street. She talks about you, he said. About your work—she seems to have become a specialist on it—the filming of The Anthill and how she is lining up an assignment to do a story on that, the painting you bought from her and how good it looks in your office in New York, Lydia’s breakthrough project and her hopes of meeting Lydia. She’s a nice girl and very gifted, but she can be as hard to get rid of as a bad case of the crabs when she thinks she has glommed on to something. Pierre’s long nose with which he liked to make little sniffing noises, looking curiously about him, had always served him well. I interpreted the silence that followed as a question. I like her, I said, and I too think she’s gifted. I had to hang her painting in the office because I didn’t think Lydia could stand it. That came as a disappointment to Léa. I think she expected to find it over the fireplace in the living room.
Pierre nodded. Experience proves, he told me, that it’s useful to bring the little Morini down to earth sooner rather than later. She has told half of Paris about her great love—he named the Nobel Prize winner. It doesn’t matter, because his wife doesn’t care. Or maybe she thinks that one vigorous session with Léa per week is good for the old boy’s heart, not to speak of the other organ. The old boy certainly doesn’t mind letting it be known that he can still perform. But suppose the wife did care? The prize money is all very well, but in today’s world it doesn’t amount to much, being a member of the Académie Française is very nice, the lectures at the Collège de France, they are very nice too, but they don’t bring any money, and it’s the wife who owns the apartment in the Palais Royal, the château in Normandy, and the villa on Cap Ferrat. Not to speak of the income that keeps the show on the road.
It was my turn to nod. So Léa had told Pierre. Why wouldn’t she? Whom else she had told outright, where she had dropped hints that were not too difficult to interpret, I would soon find out. I wasn’t convinced about the wisdom of my trying to bring her down to earth. That maneuver might work for a Frenchman, in Paris, because it conformed to a locally accepted doctrine of relations between sexes. The way Léa talked about people showed her to be a shrewd judge. I was afraid that if I told her that we should be grateful for the good time we had had, and from now on were going to continue as good friends, she would know right away I was acting out of character and wouldn’t believe me. She might even think that Pierre was coaching me. In any event, she would have no doubt about my vulnerability and cowardice when it came to Lydia. Léa would be unpredictable, I concluded, if she felt scorned. Perhaps vengeful.
I had dinner with her that first evening at the Balzar, having told Madame Marie in answer to her question that I was going out and it was unnecessary to prepare anything for me. It was a pleasant surprise, by the way, to see that she intended to treat me not as a species of paying guest—Pierre’s aunt had categorically rejected my offer of rent, agreeing only that I could pay the salaries of the staff and the utilities, and, of course, pay for what I ate and drank—but as one who really lived there, over whose needs she would watch, so that every morning she inquired whether I would be having lunch and dinner and how many guests I expected, and proposed a menu for each meal I would be taking. The surprise at the Balzar w
as less welcome. Léa had invited a young woman who also worked for French Vogue,editing the feature that tells readers who has been seen where and with whom; the young woman’s American friend, a lawyer working for a New York firm with an office in the place de la Concorde; and a baby-faced Frenchman whom I took to be another lawyer until I figured out that he was involved in some form of international finance and was the American lawyer’s client. I was there as a special treat, a sort of human baked Alaska, except that they didn’t wait until it was time for dessert. Instead, I was passed around and served as soon as we sat down. In principle, you know, I don’t mind that sort of imposition: I take it for granted that, like all writers with a well-known book or two behind them, I will be used to entertain friends of friends. Recent experience in East Hampton and New York, moreover, had shown that my value as a conversation piece had gone up because of Anthillthe movie, it being easier for guests to grill the writer about the producer, the director, and the stars than to talk about his novels, which they haven’t read—or have forgotten or haven’t liked. Nor did I mind forgoing a romantic tête-à-tête with Léa—as I have told you, I had decided that she was a bore, and I had felt mildly apprehensive about the conversation I would have to keep up alone with her at table before the payoff in bed. I didn’t even mind too much the prospect of footing the bill for this surprise literary symposium, which I supposed was my obligation since I had invited Léa and she had felt free to invite her friends, although, hearing the consensus that we would stick to champagne throughout the meal, I realized that it would not be negligible. I was feeling flush with the film money. I did mind very much the other manifest consensus, that I was the trophy boyfriend of the young woman who had arranged the dinner. There was no escaping the conclusion. That was how they saw me. I hadn’t a doubt that Léa had clued in her very pretty colleague, who would not have hidden that detail from her American friend, and, as for the French financier, my sixth sense and his self-satisfied demeanor had warned me at once that he might be one of my predecessors. In that case, he would have been informed by Léa herself. Was there anyone at French Vogue,I wondered, who didn’t know, save perhaps the charwomen, the bookkeepers, and the cyclists who deliver advance copies of the magazine to charter members of le tout Paris? Who were the Paris partners in that American law firm, which I recognized as one that the Franks frequently used? I decided I wouldn’t ask. Three of the New York partners were men with whom I had been at college or school. Was my baby-faced financier predecessor a supplier of financing to my brother-in-law, Ralph? The range of possibilities was dismayingly wide. And this was only the first evening of what might well be a stay in Paris of two months or more. It occurred to me that perhaps, after all, I had better follow Pierre’s counsel and let the explosion, if there was going to be one, come quickly.
But you didn’t, I interjected.
Of course not, replied North. I was afraid of its consequences and, worse yet, besotted.
I took her home with me that night, North continued, and kept her until the morning, although she hadn’t brought clothes to wear to the office. I said it didn’t matter, she could go in her black suit, or she could make a stop at her studio and change if she really cared so much what she wore. I would order a radio-taxi to take her to the rue de l’Abbaye and wait there, and then continue to the place du Palais Bourbon, where Vogueand other Condé Nast operations are located. All that mattered was that she be there with me through the night in case I woke up and wanted her, whether at that moment or first thing in the morning. She did as I said, and from then on, unless I met her for dinner and brought her home, she let herself into the apartment with the spare key I gave her. Usually I was still up, working or reading; otherwise she would come straight to my bed. I took her to restaurants less and less frequently, and soon refused to go with her to the theater or openings of exhibitions. When we did go out to dinner, I would choose some banal bistro, or better yet one of those old, faintly musty bourgeois restaurants that still exist in certain neighborhoods that have good food but are completely unfashionable, and would pray that no one who knew her or me would happen to be there that evening. Everywhere else we risked being observed and commented on, and possibly photographed for a media gossip page. I didn’t need to explain this to Léa. She continued to insist that discretion was necessary to protect her as well—in addition to monsieur the physicist, and she now mentioned her parents and brothers too as needing to be kept in the dark—but that did not prevent her from pouting about it or saying I was treating her like a cheap little slut I didn’t want to be seen with. Of course, that was really how it was, and I was not the man to deny it. There was no hiding our activities from Madame Marie. The sheets told her and her colleague all they needed to know, Léa not being inclined to take the trouble to avoid leaving traces. Perhaps no one had taught her how. Still, Léa was perfectly dignified when she came face-to-face with Madame Marie in the morning, which happened from time to time, although I had made it known that it was not necessary for her to come down from her sixth floor so early, and had asked for breakfast to be left instead, before she retired, on a tray that I could carry to the bedroom. At the same time, she managed to make herself somehow so insignificant and small that I allowed myself to hope that she was not making much of an impression on Madame Marie. The breakfast that Madame Marie prepared was, of course, for two. To ask for breakfast for one would have signaled to Madame Marie that I was not only a cheat, unfaithful to his wife, but also a coward too timid to make sure his poulegot her morning orange juice, croissant, and coffee.
To make up for the shabby treatment during the week, on a couple of weekends when I didn’t plan to see Lydia, I took Léa on trips to places where I thought I was least likely to run into Lydia’s friends or mine. Those turned out to be Vienna, where Léa had never been, and Bourges, the site of a glorious cathedral that I had never yet gotten to see, despite my love for the high Gothic. Bourges also happens to boast a hotel suitable for clandestine weekend getaways. I will tell you more about Bourges in a moment to illustrate how my sexual obsession with Léa, which I thought was waning, had in fact reached its apogee. And weekends with Lydia? We should have spent them in Paris, in the marvelous apartment on the avenue Gabriel. But we didn’t. I felt squeamish about welcoming Lydia to the bed that was the arena of my nightly exertions with Léa. I met Lydia once in London and, during one visit when I couldn’t avoid Paris, we stayed at the Ritz. I said I was making good on the promise I made when I moved there from the Pont Royal on that fateful Memorial Day weekend. My desire for Lydia when I saw her was not diminished either, and quite possibly we made love more often than we would have otherwise in the same adverse conditions—her fatigue after an overnight flight, my fatigue after a week’s struggle with the director, the producer, and that benighted screenwriter. But sometimes I observed in myself something that disturbed me far more than any signs of slackening of libido or performance, of which there wasn’t any: it seemed to me that there were moments when I resented Lydia’s not being Léa, and that was most probably the reason I made love to Lydia less tenderly. Lydia sensed this, I am certain, and was perplexed, but, as usual when it comes to our sex life, she said nothing.
Now back to Bourges, circuitously: I had a girlfriend in college whose sexual behavior was if anything looser than Léa’s or that of any girl I have known since. She was always ready for anything forbidden or dangerous. I have no idea whether this girl is now alive or dead, so, out of respect, I will call her Daphne. Wild—in the parlance of that time. I recall screwing her during a game of chess we were playing in her parents’ den, both of us fully dressed, I sitting on a straight chair and she astride, going up and down faster and faster, her face pressed against my shoulder, the father’s bowling trophies displayed on a bookshelf directly in my field of vision, the parents in the dining room glued to the television screen, then a time in a cozy nook under the bleachers of Baker’s Field while the sons of Harvard and Yale filed out past us after the game.
There were also the sessions atop a pile of overcoats in a tutor’s spare bedroom during a cocktail party, and in a little clearing in the woods, observed by one of her deplorable cousins who was imperfectly hidden behind some ferns. This was the boy who had initiated her at the age of twelve, and set a standard for performance I could never match. By the way, I could never match the standard set by Léa’s first great love either, a loony genius who apparently never needed to come. After about a year of bliss with Daphne, she fell sick. Forehead, hands, body—all hot as a stove. It was at first taken for flu, so she did nothing about it and continued to hang around my room with her brilliant eyes, burning mouth, and burning you know what. That is when I discovered the extraordinary, unequaled thrill of dicking a body racked by fever. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Later, she turned out to have a bad case of hepatitis and was moved to the hospital where, falsely claiming to be her fiancé, I gained entry to her room outside of visiting hours so that I could anoint her body with creams and taste other refined but undisclosed delights. That certain maladies act as a powerful erotic stimulant is well known from life and fiction. But I have strayed far from Bourges.