Man Who Was Late

by Louis Begley

  How did this end? I asked him.

  It hasn’t. It can’t. I have advised my clients to wait. As soon as Madame Mère has her next attack of angina, which can’t fail to come, the whole gang, including the family notaire, will be in such a funk over the French tax audit of the estate that they will agree to anything we ask, provided they receive ready funds that can end up in their numbered Swiss accounts.

  In fact since early March, well before that visit, domestic arrangements no longer gave him comfort. Gianni’s mother in Marseille was sick, probably dying. Ben told him to go there at once and look after her as long as was necessary; Madame Hamelin, the concierge, could bring the morning croissants and oranges and newspapers, make his bed, and do the laundry; he didn’t want a temporary replacement, even if it was Gianni’s best friend who had once worked for the Count de Vogüé. In the evenings, when he didn’t have a dinner to go to—it seemed to him he was invited less than in the past, except, of course, to business affairs—often he did not get home until after the great charcuterie at the corner of the boulevard du Montparnasse had closed. But even if it was open, a paralyzing anguish he was not proud of stopped him from buying oeufs en gelée, pâté, and pickles, gripping a baguette of bread under his arm, and, so equipped, proceeding to a comfortable and solitary meal at the small table near the window from which he had a view on the garden. Was it that he did not want the amiable woman with rapid gestures who dispensed those items to rank him with the other men, so sour and careful, also waiting to buy their lonely supper? The days were becoming longer: he disliked thinking of the figure he might cut carrying a filet of provisions as he walked back toward the rue Férou.

  The same disabling embarrassment made him shun restaurants where he was known and the grating solicitude of the headwaiters’ inquiries: Will Monsieur dine alone or will “Madame”—which one, he wondered—be joining Monsieur later? The Coupole became his refuge; he could go there late, seek out the maître d’hôtel, who was his friend, mumble something about not having liked the play or having come directly from the airport, and order a full bottle of burgundy and grilled andouille—Ben liked, even in the worst of times, to eat always, in each restaurant he frequented, the one dish in which he believed it excelled. After a while, the roar of conversations surrounding him and the wine he had drunk induced a sense of tolerant detachment. When he saw an acquaintance pacing the aisles of the huge room in search of a table about to be vacated, usually someone who was not, like Ben, accustomed to being seated at once, he lowered his eyes to avoid recognition and comments on being alone. The waiter brought him a brandy and then another. The maître d’hôtel sometimes stopped by to complain about the pain in his feet. It would be well past midnight. Gently, the suppressed hope for an impending miracle—the woman with an expert mouth, painted the color of the plush banquette she leaned against, might fix him with her eyes and send a note suggesting they leave the restaurant together, or, like deus ex machina, a nearly forgotten college friend might suddenly hail him, a chic woman on each arm—turned into tipsy indifference.

  Ben would walk back toward the rue du Cherche-Midi, past the middle-aged whores leaning against parked automobiles. Across the boulevard glittered rue Vavin; within its short span, the devastating, cold solitude of the hotels where one could take them. In the other direction lay New Jimmy’s. What was the point? It was like dining with the Cockney: revulsion at watching her eat followed by revulsion brought on by repetitious exertions in bed and the new question their encounters were posing. Would she again give him crabs? The first onset of itching had puzzled him, as did the immobile colorless dots among his pubic hairs. He borrowed tweezers from Gianni and removed one of them for examination under a bright light; the sight of the energetic, curled little legs revived memories of lectures on this and related subjects during basic training at Quantico. A pomade he acquired from a scholarly pharmacist near the Madeleine—Ben thought the neighborhood was appropriate for this sort of purchase—proved highly effective. In the end, Ben decided that the best policy was to repeat the treatments when necessary and let the Cockney cling to the belief that her own puzzling itch, which she mentioned with satisfaction, was but a natural manifestation of her desire for Ben and the expanding group of men producing the same effect. Discussing the affliction, eventually sharing the pomade with her, seemed risky: it could be taken either as an invitation to greater familiarity or as a humiliating reproof, like the boorish effort he had once made to correct her table manners. On the other hand, if he asked that she shave, like her friend Marianne, he risked adding flame to her already excessive fervor. Was he an udder attached to a garrulous milking machine?

  At home, he watched over his supply of Black Label scotch, ordering it from the Nicolas at the rue de Sèvres by the half case. He believed he shouldn’t go to the Coupole too often. What would the waiters imagine? Would the way he dressed, his neatly barbered appearance, the generous tips he left, and his choice of good wine save him from demotion, or would he become one of the regulars—men and women found at the Coupole and the Lipp evening after evening, behind the same little table, glasses automatically set before them and refilled, reading Le Monde or staring blankly, dining off Baltic herring? It was the charcuterie dilemma posed in slightly different terms.

  Guy Renard had a new girl, with whom he had not yet slept; he was either not going to parties or not offering to take Ben along. Once those parties had been Ben’s chief amusement. Ben still waited daily for Guy’s telephone call; sometimes it reached him at the office, frequently a good bit later, at home, when he had already had a couple of whiskeys, taken a bath, and half decided on the evening’s dreary course. Guy would propose dinner, just the three of them, but first a scotch at Ben’s. Guy talked and Ben poured. The girl stood with her back to the fire, submissive long legs within reach of Guy’s hand; he caressed her like a horse. The bistro was usually somewhere on the other side of Paris. Guy would drive, careening around corners, taking shortcuts up wrong way streets. They left the car on the sidewalk, carelessly; parking tickets were still cheap in Paris and could be fixed by practically anyone. They drank at table, afterward at Paprika, where there were gypsies, and again at Ben’s. Ben knew that Guy needed an audience and that the audience bored the girl; he was tired of being that audience; he didn’t want the friendship to wear out; his own boredom was hard to repress—at times he would offer Guy and the girl a drink when they arrived and in a short while ask them to leave. He would invent a subsequent engagement of his own, with which one of the beautiful Americans he knew so well? Ben would not say. This was, Ben thought, as good a way to maintain his independence and social authority as any other. Before departing for Marseille, Gianni had prepared a vast store of Dutch cheese crackers and macadamia nuts. When finally alone, Ben raided that store, replenished the ice in the bucket, and drank and read until he fell asleep over his book.

  He was rereading The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Years ago, in the course of a boisterous meal, he had recommended that text, located so strangely between dream and Rilke’s recollections, as a cure for my nostalgia for Paris and certain other places I had known in Europe; he said I was suffering from unseemly illusions about what might have been, typical in a henpecked husband. It is true that I had been jealous of his constantly popping over to Paris or London or, for that matter, to Sydney and Tokyo, lingering there, amassing impressions and anecdotes, while I trudged up Madison Avenue to take the children to school, down Madison Avenue to the magazine, and then back up the same route for our early family dinner.

  Read the Notebooks, he said, you will see what Paris is really like when you are alone, your work, like some acrobat’s performance finally over, and you have let down your guard—perhaps because you are tired, perhaps because you are sad. Uncertainty and fear ooze out of walls of buildings, out of the walls of your elegant hotel room, even if the housekeeper has remembered to put the standard bouquet of roses and carnations with the director’s compliments on the de
sk next to the room-service menu and laundry lists. You drift past houses, along boulevards, like a blank piece of paper.

  Of course, he added, in prescribing Malte I assume that you are sufficiently neurotic, which is as yet unproved. The best treatment for other cases of sedentary wanderlust is to meditate on original sin and the dreary ubiquity of evil—if you don’t believe me, then read Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage”!

  Ben was not always able to keep literary references or analogies in check, so that a book that held his attention had a way of infiltrating his daily life. In consequence, his fixation on the Notebooks during the spring of 1970 was probably unfortunate. If challenged or if his mood changed, he would have been quick enough to point out the preposterous imperfections of the analogy hinted at. Like Malte, he was sad and lonely, but he was not helpless or racked by fever—I would have added, perhaps mistakenly but with some considerable confidence, that his depressions were not very frequent. In any case, the elegant house he rented from my cousin Olivia was as different as possible from the dingy furnished room the destitute Danish nobleman inhabited in the rue Toullier; when Ben, his manservant being absent, with his own hands, to take the chill off the spring evening, lit the fire his respectable concierge had laid in the splendid fireplace and helped himself to another drink, the scene had only the search for warmth to connect it with the smoking iron stove in a fifth-story room where weary Malte must force himself to rest his head on his armchair, “for there is a certain greasy-grey hollow in its green covering, into which all heads seem to fit.” Nor did Ben have to slink into a crémene for a frugal meal or dream of having enough money to eat at Duval’s—a chain of restaurants now defunct that Ben would have disdained to enter. Nevertheless, when Ben, for his own reasons, stayed away from the Coupole and dined on junk food and whiskey instead of striding joyously into all the restaurants where he would have been welcome as a valued habitué, Malte was at his side, and it was Malte who perched timorously at the edge of the leather seat, hands gripped white with tension, when Ben actually took out his car to run an errand or make a visit in some neighborhood where using a taxi would have been too irrationally inconvenient or because, as often happened, a taxi simply could not be found. For Ben was suffering again from that irritating inability to steer his car that had afflicted him when he first settled in Paris. He considered consulting a Parisian “alienist,” but the vision of Malte in his “tolerably decent suit” among the doctors of the neurological ward of the Salpêtrière provided a literary, and therefore acceptable, reason for delay; to satisfy his practical side, he also thought that, when Gianni returned, he might ask him to drive or engage a chauffeur.

  Sometime in April, Ben received an invitation to a party the Decazes were giving on the second Saturday in May. There was to be dancing; he supposed it was their major social effort of the year. Without giving much thought to whether he would in fact attend, Ben told his secretary to accept and was surprised that Paul nevertheless telephoned him twice to make sure that nothing had gone amiss, and they could count on his finally coming to their house.

  Excerpts from Notaben 298, dated 8/5/70:

  Friday night. Across America, young couples going out, receiving friends, feeling left out if they don’t. Single, lonely men and women and old people hide in their rooms. On weekends or vacations in the country, Rachel and I would keep our ear to the ground: Are the Abthorps not giving their Fourth of July picnic this year or have they not asked us? And the Parkers and the Smiths? These questions we sometimes put to each other, for instance, after the third drink, or when we had just made love and it was easy to say how much better that was than doing X, Y, or Z, or when Rachel was writing down the list of whom we might invite to dinner. Was there anyone to whom we “owed”? But the real question was left unuttered: Have we become a couple so awful that no one can have us? We enter a house and the milk curdles, the phonograph needle scratches the Louis Armstrong record, the nursemaid runs screaming back to Ireland.…

  Perhaps not this Friday night. All the right dinner parties have been canceled: the hostess is on a bus to Washington in her tie-dyed T-shirt and sandals, to protest Kent State and the “incursion.” If they are lucky, Ron Ziegler may deliver himself of another pronouncement about the forces of history. The nation shakes with shame and fury. “Incursion” is such an elegant and precise word: in the military context, it means a hostile inroad or invasion, esp. one of sudden and hasty character, a sudden attack. In other contexts, its use can strike one as quite droll. For instance, Dr. Johnson’s “The inevitable incursion of new images.” I verified this in the OED, struck by wonder that these Nixon people had such a thing in their vocabulary. Of course, they say “incursion” because they want to make invading Cambodia sound like a light, temporary activity, almost gay and frothy; invasion has a different texture and connotation—like Hitler marching into Poland or Napoleon into Russia. Long time, lots of dead people, quite the wrong image. But I am beating about the bush to avoid declaring here, in the cozy privacy of Olivia’s study, whether I too would have taken the bus or train with the young Abthorps—or old Olivia. You bet she is there; probably spending the night with Joe Alsop! Never let politics get in the way of having a good dinner and catching up on gossip, that’s what I say. The fact is that I would have gone—in some other direction!—for instance to Tokyo, like in October ’68. Signing petitions, letting one’s name appear in newspaper advertisements, helping pay for those advertisements, are all very well, but a sensitive nature shrinks from the promiscuity of demonstrations; one’s vocal chords are too tender for all that shouting and chanting. Leave it to the wellborn hippies—Sarah and Rebecca and Prudence and Cousin Olivia; they have the common touch.

  Besides, when you come right down to it, who am I to explain to Gov. Rhodes how to run the great state of Ohio? He would listen to one sentence and ask me what country I come from!

  Question: Isn’t Malte lucky to be able to recollect all those family ghosts—punctually appearing in pompous dining rooms or at the far end of some greensward—and have all those dropsical chamberlains and melancholy masters of the hunt to think about, even while he has the heebie-jeebies wondering about Paris? These visions add up to a lace-collar, heavy-cream Danish childhood. My visions are unmentionable or have been blotted out. I am less daffy, but have nothing. I am like Tarzan, a droll apeman who missed a boyhood, but I don’t know how to swing from tree to tree or be loved by Jane.

  Tomorrow is Paul and Véronique’s fete. If I go, I will get to hear the assembled avocats and notaires of Passy explain to me the finer points of military strategy. You would think there is not one of them who did not learn realpolitik at Henry Kissinger’s own knee. It’s nice though that everybody here thinks of me as le gentil américain.

  The note of which this is a part is exceptionally long and digressive—I suppose he was up most of the night, the bottle and ice within easy reach—containing, in addition to material about Véronique, a hodgepodge of literary allusions interspersed with remarks on the correct pricing and distribution of Scandinavian state bonds and reports of developments concerning a certain Agnès who shampooed Ben’s hair at Desfossé’s celebrated establishment before Monsieur Bruno would cut it. It appears that Agnès had not been unaware of the effect her legs and other anatomical characteristics had on her client or of the charm of Ben’s wit when he discoursed in the barber chair (which charm was accentuated by the generosity of the petit cadeau he pressed into her warm, soft hand upon departing). She showed her gratitude by letting her bosom rest against Ben’s shoulder while she massaged his scalp and her intelligence by announcing, so that Ben could hear but Monsieur Bruno could not, that on Thursdays after work she usually took tea on the terrace of Fouquet’s. The rest, Ben found, was easy, especially as Agnès had no ambition to introduce Ben into her social life or to enter his (such as it was).

  The next morning, May 9, he rose late, opened the window, and felt the air. It was a warm day. He thought of driving to the park
in Saint-Cloud, going for a walk in the long shady alley that leads to the Rond de Chasse, so often deserted even on a spring weekend, and then returning to lunch off dry sausage, eggs with mayonnaise, and sardines under a chestnut tree at the guinguette near the Balustrade. I knew the place. He had taken Prudence and me there during our visit; although the season was over, surprisingly we found the place open; the small room adjoining the kitchen, never used in season, was heated by a fireplace. We had noticed that the waitress set these very dishes and a bottle of Rhône wine on the table without being asked. It was apparently Ben’s normal fare. They had engaged in a conversation I had been able to follow only partially—about the woman’s daughter, who had unaccountably left her job, perhaps in that very establishment, although her marriage was delayed because the fiancé had been laid off, and the woman’s leg, which, judging by the way she limped, was badly in need of repair. It made one feel guilty to be sitting at the table while she lurched back and forth from the counter bringing the bottle of Evian Prudence asked for, the cornichons she had forgotten, and cold chicken after Ben finally inquired whether there was anything different we might like to eat.

  But this Saturday morning, he was slow getting started and slow reading about Cambodia in the newspapers. By the time he was ready, it was past noon. He vacillated about getting dressed: if he was really going to Saint-Cloud, cotton trousers and a sweater were enough; on the other hand he disliked not wearing a necktie in the city, which meant he should wear a coat, which in turn made him lean toward flannels. He calculated how long it would take to cross Paris by car if he took the avenue de Versailles, and the countervailing risk of delay by construction work if he stuck to the Left Bank quays. Then he realized that he could not count on taking his walk and still getting a meal at the guinguette—they would have run out of bread or meat or coffee—and that to drive all the way there and afterward have to look for lunch in Paris would spoil the pleasure of the outing. He walked instead along the rue de Vaugirard to the Luxembourg Garden, watched the tennis disdainfully—it seemed the French had a congenital learning disability when it came to that game—and, later, children sailing boats. The woman who rented them to children was there; a fresh little breeze made the boats heel and then gracefully come about; a wave of personal unhappiness mixed with joy at the sight of what seemed to be the happiness of others—the nicely dressed children and their nicely dressed parents, so pleasantly united, addressing civilized remonstrances one to another—overcame Ben. He sat down on one of the green iron chairs. This was not unlike the boat pond in Central Park, except that the boats were fancier than the ones he had given to the twins; many were remote-controlled. He considered briefly the unlikely prospect of buying such a toy for himself, and a beret, and joining the group of experts, retired postal employees, he surmised, who were busy with some very serious racing.