by Louis Begley
The rest of the evening I remember more vividly. Before I undressed, he asked to do something we had never done before, right away, in haste. He hurt me, and when I told him, he said he didn’t care, it was a part of the pleasure. Later, in bed, he tried to be nice but I told him it was too late and he gave up. So while I cried he lay in my bed, although there were two beds in the room, utterly silent, stiff from self-righteousness. You couldn’t hear or feel him breathe. It was always like that. Once he began to feel guilty and humiliated he couldn’t even try to make things better.
Chenonceaux was the most distant château we were going to visit. When we walked down the long gallery, the river trembling green and gold under the windows on both sides, I told Ben that my great-uncle Hugh had been one of the convalescent soldiers quartered in that very room during the last months of the Great War; utterly lacking in originality, he married his nurse, a young woman of good family, and settled near her parents’ place in the Perche region of France to raise horses. There was one child, a son; they sent him to Groton and then to Harvard; he, too, made his life in France, was taken prisoner by the Germans when the advance began after the drôle de guerre, and came home only in ’45. From then until his death in ’55 or ’56, he was the Paris banker and mentor for all Americans with bank accounts above a certain size that were validated by the right social connections. He had a daughter, my ravishing cousin Véronique, who was educated first by the nuns in Paris, like her mother, and then at Vassar. That is why I knew her; on weekends she often stayed with my parents in New York. For a number of years now she had been married to a lawyer, handsome and polite in an intensely French manner, and related to everybody. They had an apartment at a fashionable address and a place in the country somewhere near Paris. My mother had seen it and had been favorably impressed. If Ben wished, I would bring us all together during the last week Prudence and I were to spend in the rue du Cherche-Midi—he might like my cousins better than my fellow journalists!
Looking back on the days we spent in the Loire Valley, I think that I had never felt so close to Ben or, allowing for the occasional unevenness of his manner, had found him so tender. He said he was delighted to add two more members of my real family to the imaginary family he worked so hard on constituting; if my cousin’s husband was a lawyer, bankers were his prey. He would give a cocktail party and invite some international financiers for him to meet. Thus, through my intervention, Ben became a friend of Véronique and Paul Decaze.
The entertainment for my cousins took a somewhat different shape from what we had discussed. An urgent message was waiting for Ben when we returned to Paris. Clients of his from Oklahoma, normally busy making mountains of fertilizer in that location, were to visit him in Paris on their way to Morocco for meetings about a project he had had a hand in devising.
A tax accountant, a frustrated constitutional lawyer, and an investment banker lurk inside every writer. I am no exception. I was accustomed to listening hungrily to Ben when he described his deals, to asking questions I considered penetrating, and to following new developments when Ben returned from his victorious campaigns.
Thus I knew that the idea in this case was to improve an ancient but rich mine, to build a plant near its site, with supporting facilities so modern that a mere handful of expatriates at the controls of computers could operate it without the usual local sweepers and bearers, and to transform Moroccan phosphates into a product whose quality would match the Oklahoma stuff’s. The market for this sort of fertilizer was scheduled to boom even as hunger was eradicated worldwide. The Oklahomans looked for huge profits to be realized in the rosy but quite certain future. Ben’s firm would be paid, in cash, “up front,” as he put it, time and time again: when the contracts were signed and sealed, when commercial banks recruited by it lent the hundreds of millions needed for all the works, and at least once more, when the public bought Eurobonds and whatever else might be invented to whet its appetite and repay the bank debt. Ben had been to Morocco dozens of times: not to visit the mine or the plant site, he told me, that was not his style—he claimed to hate industrial reality and boasted about never having set foot in a factory he had helped to finance—but to drink mint tea with the minister of finance, his dear friend Dr. Bensalem, and to moderate the greed of his clients and adversaries.
The Oklahomans assumed that he would accompany them to Rabat as usual. Ben decided against it. There is no absolute need for me to go to Morocco this time; I will send instead my number two, he told me. I don’t want to miss your last days here, but I will invite the clients to the house and the Decazes with them. There won’t be any bankers except from my office—you realize I can’t let the competition romance my Oklahomans. It’s far better for them to keep thinking I’m the only French-speaking American investment banker alive. Your cousin’s husband may get business out of this just the same. I will also invite Guy Renard, for local color and for Véronique to have someone to talk to besides you and Prudence.
Six-thirty on Thursday was the appointed hour. Ben rushed into the house, thanked Prudence for arranging the flowers, and explained that he was just a step ahead of his guests. They had been at his office with him and his number two, brainstorming at a pace so slow that toward the end of the session Ben had found it necessary to keep jabbing his thigh with a sharp pencil to keep his eyes from closing. Then they refused to return to their hotel for a moment of rest—they called it a pit stop—so that the only reason they were not already on the doorstep was that he had told his secretary to delay the cars conveying them to the rue du Cherche-Midi. Then he ran off to his bath—a matter of principle, he said; we were to receive in his place if he was not ready.
By November, night falls abruptly in Paris. Gianni had lit the monumental lanterns above the steps leading to the house and the reflectors illuminating its lovely cream facade. On the garden side, more reflectors made Pomona gleam in the darkness. Pinecones crackled in the fireplaces at both ends of the drawing room. Either the sculptured marble mantelpieces with their inlays of black and pink had been undisturbed since the original owner had had them installed or Olivia had not spared Morgan dollars to replace them; they were splendid.
Gianni served Prudence and me champagne. It was ice-cold, as Ben required, the tulip glasses unmistakably Baccarat. Olivia and Ben would make a perfect couple, I thought, it’s a pity she isn’t forty years younger. Prudence put her hand to my cheek. I drew her to me very hard and held her. She had changed so little: the deadpan researcher I had met at the magazine almost fifteen years earlier and this young matron whose every secret I had explored had the same mountain of yellow hair, parted in the middle and held loosely with a ribbon at the nape, the same scrubbed clean skin, the same impatient speed in gestures. How much longer is this happiness to last, I wondered, what beast is lurking behind some door we will open late or soon? And Ben, when will he strike the tent of this particular circus, press a large check into old Gianni’s palm, and, the house inventory carefully settled, broken crystal and china replaced to Olivia’s beaming satisfaction, his bundles of gaiety, loneliness, and Charvet shirts loaded onto the gypsy wagon, head for some new and urgent engagement?
I did not have much time to linger on these questions. As the doorbell rang, Ben descended the stairs, blowing kisses to Prudence and waving his hand conspiratorially, encased in a blue suit exactly like the one he had worn upon arrival and should have, by all rights, just quit. It occurred to me that he had become thicker in the torso and perhaps even in the waist, a circumstance that might account for the proliferation of these identical garments: Had Ben decided that this ebb and tide of contour must not stand in the way of his donning a favorite cheviot or flannel, so that there existed a lean team and a fat team? I could not tell whether Ben had merely changed his shirt and necktie or had put on just such a twin suit, possibly on the theory that an annoying difference in fit, if there was one, could be endured as the price of not letting his clients perceive that, unlike them, he had thought it necess
ary to change his clothes. Apart from this slight deposit left by rich sauces and wine—I had concluded they were Ben’s way of confirming daily one form of his success, not an addiction—there wasn’t much difference to report in his appearance that was attributable to time and not to art. Alas, he hadn’t grown taller—as he liked to put it, he was a giant but only among other Central Europeans—his hair, a masterpiece of respectful barbering, was still uncompromisingly mahogany brown, the murky, Austro-Hungarian Empire features were perhaps more defined, but dominating them were those same eyes, neither quite green nor gray, with a light, like a held back tear, one used to see in the photographs of the preadolescent, pre-Harvard Ben that his mother so liked to show to visitors. I whispered into Prudence’s ear, “Dressed up like a million-dollar trooper / Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper.…” That song had been played at our wedding. Almost at once, I felt ashamed of the betrayal, but she smiled at me gratefully and lifted her arms. We found ourselves executing a little step and a turn.
Meanwhile, accompanied by Ben, in came the men from Oklahoma. Gianni hovered about them. I was fascinated to observe his vain efforts to separate them from their Samsonite cases and other contraptions, fashioned of black leather and similar in form to traveling cages for small pets. Mine is a bookish sort of journalism: I write about science. The rare interviews I am obliged to conduct are with people rather like the members of, let’s say, the Harvard Club—fortunately more variegated now than when I joined—or the parents at my children’s school. My novel was about the sort of young men the master of my house at college liked to call American orchids. In consequence, neither predilection nor experience—indeed nothing except the contemplation of fellow travelers in airport lounges—had worked to dull my reaction to Ben’s clients. They were not necessarily born ugly and deformed; one supposed they had become such through parallel proclivities of body and soul. Their faces were bespectacled moons, glowing with amiability and high seriousness. Apart from one man, smaller than Ben, whose hollow chest and extreme pallor brought to mind consumption and long-neglected malaria, they carried bellies of the sort that spill over the wearer’s belt in rings too thick for a double-knit suit coat to contain, even if it’s belted and equipped in the back with bellows, like a shooting jacket, which was the case with many of these garments. Propped up in this manner, they distantly overhung trousers that, in turn, yearned for but never quite reached the sensible shoes below, each of which signaled the distinct painful condition of the foot inhabiting it: hammertoes, bunions, or, in the best of cases, Chaplinesque flatness. Ben introduced us to his clients, Gianni reappeared with his tray of glasses, and soon I heard Prudence laugh and cajole. The party had begun. A very polite Chicago lawyer previously concealed behind the bulk of the Oklahomans approached me, explaining he was their counsel, traveling with them the next day to Morocco. For the moment, though, both he and I were physically excluded from their group—they had surrounded Prudence.
Even grotesquely unattractive men can have a powerful effect on certain women. Prudence’s voice was raised: my Manhattan geisha was discoursing on the boiseries of the étage noble and its remarkably well-preserved toile de Jouy. She was moving on briskly to the next subject, the wrought-iron banister—a tour of the house was bound to follow. Ben’s smile was angelically benign. He had taken the short thin man by the arm and was obviously elaborating on Prudence’s remarks for his sole benefit. This, too, was a new experience for me: I had never seen my friend so equably polite, and this in circumstances that I would have thought certain to spring loose his jack-in-the-box harshness and condescension. The lawyer and another man, Ben’s second-in-command, who I discovered was Scott van Damm, the younger brother of a college roommate, had me pinned against the tapestry; I moved us by degrees toward the window, so that the meeting of Odysseus and Telemachus in Eumaeus’s hut that it portrayed might be more conveniently explained by Prudence. During this maneuver, the lawyer continued a tale of blatant corruption of officials in Algeria, where he also did business, which shocked me—I had, like so many of my contemporaries at Harvard, thought the struggle for Algeria’s liberation from the French was our own; those thin, hard-featured revolutionaries had been our heroes. Perhaps for this reason, I stopped listening to him and wondered instead about Prudence: Could she be thinking how well she was managing as the hostess she claimed Ben desperately needed? Before that reverie could become unpleasant, I heard the doorbell. The Decazes had arrived.
Writing today, I find it difficult to avoid letting an anachronistic note of irony or foreboding intrude into a description of the genial, straightforward first encounter between my cousin, her husband, and my host. Ben left the short thin man—the president of the Oklahoma company, I later learned—and greeted the Decazes before I had managed to come to their side. The talk was brisk—in fact a cross-examination of Paul conducted by Ben with hardly any preliminaries and no waste of time. As he inquired into the work Paul did, his law firm, and his experience with American businessmen, I realized that Ben had been quite serious: since I had a cousin in Paris I was fond of, he would help her husband. I supposed, in his mind, it was an elegant going-away present for Prudence and me, consistent with the tendency he had developed to regard my family as being a little on the needy side. And I could see that Ben liked Paul Decaze: he was the sort of Frenchman we then referred to as milk-fed. Born just before the war began or in its early years, brought up on a diet that made them grow to an American size, and athletic, these Frenchmen had clean teeth and a cheerful willingness to speak reasonable English. Ben said, Véronique and you must excuse us; I will throw Paul into the fish tank.
I was alone with Véronique for a moment I was hoping to prolong. She had kept the distinct sort of breathlessness I remembered from many years before, and she was even more unquestionably beautiful. I liked the way she wore her ash-blond hair in a bun that exposed to view her tightly formed, perfect ears; I admired, with a twinge of envy for Paul’s or her revenues—or the way they managed them—the absolutely straight black skirt ending just at the knee, over very pale stockings, and the black knitted jacket worn over a man’s shirt of dull white silk, dangerously open but revealing only a strand of pearls. Her hands ended in long, cared-for fingers. She put her arm through mine as we talked. There was nothing between Véronique and that entrancing shirt.
Mais c’est la petite Madame Decade, comment vas-tu? I saw before us the elongated form of Ben’s friend Guy Renard and, more specifically, his keen face, all profile and modeled to do justice to his name, bent over Véronique’s hand where he deposited a ceremonious and satisfied kiss. Naturally, it’s you, he continued in English, thus confirming the opinion I had formed of my conversational ability in his language. Where but at Ben’s house, he went on, could I risk finding the only young woman in Paris who has ever resisted me, flirting with an American?
But I am practically American myself, Véronique laughed, and this man is my long-lost cousin and Ben’s best friend! Paul is here too, and he really is flirting—with Ben and Ben’s rich clients!
It turned out that they knew each other very well, although I like to think quite innocently, due to family ties between a certain Odile, who had been appropriately receptive to Guy’s attentions, and Véronique’s nearest neighbors in the village near Arpajon, where she and Paul had their country place, so that they were almost certain to see each other—on most weekends, I gathered—when the Count and Countess de Montorgueil entertained.
And it suddenly seemed utterly absurd to Guy that, having introduced Ben to all the elegant women and great houses in his acquaintance, he had never taken him to that particular château, which had no equal in the Île-de-France among properties still in private hands, and that he had never presumed to present Ben to his adorable compatriot. He took out one of those Hermès pocket diaries bound in wine-colored leather without which the French appear so lost and was ready to make concrete plans, when Ben rejoined us, saying, Monsieur Decaze is a fast worker! Before
we know it he will be in Rabat, helping my friends from Oklahoma to work their way out of a French construction contract, and you will end up being very angry at me, he added for the benefit of Véronique, because while these Moroccan expeditions in themselves are profitable and perhaps even amusing, eventually they turn one’s social life into a Sahara. You will never know whether you can count on your husband’s being in Paris.
Guy and Ben now kissed each other. I could not help noting how quickly expressions of joyous surprise at finding Véronique at Ben’s and of resolve to have Ben become a regular visitor in the countryside surrounding Arpajon and its noble dwellings entered Guy’s permanent repertory. Kissing men on both cheeks instead of shaking hands and kissing women on their hands were newly acquired habits I had already begged Ben to abjure; I found them unattractive in an American, even if he was one only by adoption. An ill-timed and unfair irritation was overcoming me; it was as though my plans had already worked too well. Fortunately, Prudence reappeared at the head of the Oklahoma contingent. We drank more champagne; Ben made a toast to phosphates and their miraculous uses; Gianni presented a succession of those truly miraculous round breads, hollowed out and refilled with paper-thin sandwiches of smoked salmon, prosciutto, and Roquefort that are the underpinnings of a Parisian cocktail party. It was the first time the Oklahomans had encountered them. These are pains surprise, surprising breads, Véronique informed the short thin man. If you tell me what hotel you are staying at, I will have a couple of them delivered to you to take to Rabat. An airplane ride won’t hurt them at all!
Scott van Damm had reserved a large table at Chez Joséphine, just down the street. The hour for the clients’ early dinner had come—they were suffering from jet lag, upset stomachs and other perhaps even worse discomforts. Ben asked to be excused from keeping them company; the pretext, that in a few minutes he would have to return to the office to speak to New York, was one that Prudence and I had confidently expected. Quite unexpected was Paul’s offer, enthusiastically supported by Véronique, to go along to the restaurant and take Ben’s place and make sure they had a true Parisian meal.