Man Who Was Late

by Louis Begley

  During my last visit here, I crossed the river on the Pont des Bergues, doubled back, and near the place de la Fusterie noticed in a store window a sweater—red bordering on orange—like none I had seen before.

  I go in. Walls done in some dark wood and tall mirrors. I am the sole client. A profusion of merchandise of unique quality and exorbitant cost surrounds me. Spread on counters, draped on tailors’ dummies, are clothes for men accustomed only to silk and cashmere, full-fashioned and ample on their bodies. Their feet, encased in slippers of soft leather, sink in rich carpets. How has my life brought me to this place? I think of mother cursing my father’s ledgers, an abyss opening at the end of each month. Undeterred, I ask for the sweater. A tall man, with the voice of a “better person,” as my mother would have said, brings it to me. It is single-ply cashmere; he recommends it for summer evenings, but finds me hard to fit. My shoulders do not balance the incipient thickness in the waist. All this he tells me with the greatest kindness, and at last finds a solution: I will have a sleeveless model (thus eliminating the complication posed by the length of sleeves); there is one in my color in a size that will be just right. My father preferred sweaters without sleeves, considering that they were more comfortable under a suit coat. Perhaps for that reason, ever since such things have been within my control, I have only sweaters with sleeves and deprecate men who wear any sort of sweater at all with their suit. All this, on an impulse, I divulge to the salesman. He claims to understand me perfectly: how one dresses is a matter of such very personal feelings. Then Monsieur Motte (by this time I know his name) shows me an overcoat of black cashmere—generous, light, and, he assures me, particularly warm. He promises I will not feel the bise on the Pont de la Machine even in the dead of winter. What can I say? I buy the sweater and the overcoat—sending the latter to New York—pay the stupendous price in specie so as to rise higher yet in Monsieur Motte’s esteem and direct my steps to the Hôtel des Bergues, crossing this time on the bridge where my new garment is to be of such succor.

  The water is of an extreme limpidity until, approaching the herse that guards the machine, it becomes an opaque hell boiling so violently that I draw back from the parapet. I reflect on my quite unneeded new coat and how readily I have bought it to please the courteous salesman who knew how to flatter solemnly and amuse. A poor person would find it far more difficult—perhaps impossible—to extract from me such a sum.

  A day or two before I first heard Véroniqueas name mentioned, in Jack’s presence, I told Prudence a gratuitous lie: I pretended I didn’t know why in France Indian summer is called l’été de la Saint-Martin. There was no going back on falsehood; how could I explain anything so grotesque? But to me it was clear why I had lied, and I wondered whether Jack, who kept so quiet, understood as well: it is that I am without charity (therefore without love) and full of envy. On that hill above a vineyard, my friend and his wife united since so long ago by such affection, I could not bear to tell the story of the man who gave his coat to a beggar.

  After that terrible night—two more Seconals eventually brought Ben sleep—he went out to run his errands. The light was intolerably bright. In a shop next door to the hotel he found, among watches, Swiss army knives, and wood carvings, dark glasses in an imitation tortoiseshell frame. He bought these. So screened, he turned away from the river and stopped at the cigar store. He intended to buy only four of the Montecristos with little tails that reminded him of the three little pigs and that he liked for those tails as much as for their taste and slender form. He had calculated that, considering the plans he was making, this was the number he needed, but his acquaintance, the elderly lady in charge of the humidor whose tirades against Davidoff had formed a bond between them, seemed surprised, so he quickly excused himself and confirmed that indeed he would take his usual box of Especials. The pharmacy was on the other side of the street, at the end. Ben knew that it too was an establishment directed by women. He entered, removed his dark glasses, and explained to the youngest of them that, doubtless because of the rough handling of luggage at the airport, the tops of the bottles of his sleeping pills and hay-fever pills had come off in his toilet kit, that apparently his shaving lotion had leaked, and he was faced with leaving in the afternoon for Morocco—where he would remain until the end of the month—with soggy paste in place of the medication he badly needed. He showed her the bottle of Seconal and the dismal traces of the accident and offered to pay for a telephone call to the doctor in New York whose name appeared on the label. The white-coated figures consulted. His interlocutor returned and asked where he was staying. He told her, adding that he was well known at the hotel, and volunteered to let her see his passport. That turned out to be unnecessary. She would be pleased to sell him thirty Seconals (the number noted on the tube he had shown her) and as many tablets of a Swiss antihistamine closely resembling the one to which he was accustomed, to use as needed. He thanked her and asked about Dictaphone tape. That could be purchased a few storefronts away, in the direction of the quai des Bergues.

  A sense of elation that had the taste of tears overcame Ben. His charms were working. What remained to be done was easy and restful. In his hotel bathroom, there were twenty-six Seconals in a box to which he had transferred them. He had at least that many tranquilizers. If he took the lot with a bottle of burgundy, having first given orders not to be disturbed for any reason, there was no chance of failure. At the concierge’s desk he opened the Montecristo box, took out a cigar and lit it, then asked that the package be put in his room, and walking, contrary to habit, very slowly, since it was hot and he wanted to enjoy the cigar, made his way down to the park known as the Promenade de la Treille, which slopes steeply below the Hôtel de Ville.

  In the shade, seated on a bench, regretting that he had not brought another Especial, he watched the children and their nursemaids. Swings, red and white rubber balls, sandbox toys, children’s hair, the starched striped uniforms—were they all so heartbreakingly fresh because of a special property of the light, now that he had taken off his sunglasses; because the mild hangover from which he still suffered had made the scene mysteriously distant; or because he was having a last look? He remembered the boat pond in the Luxembourg Garden, and certain winter and early spring Sunday mornings at the Ninety-sixth Street playground when, aching from scotch whiskey and wine, and not sleeping pills, he had watched the twins ride their tricycles round and round the jungle gym. He knew most of the mothers on the other benches and the occasional au pair who consented to work on a weekend. Fathers came infrequently, except perhaps after church as part of a family outing. Lawyers and bankers, were they at the office, perfecting yet another draft of an indenture? Was their hangover more severe than Ben’s, or were they engaged in male rites of such high solemnity that their good spouses (for that was how they affected to call them), more reverential than Rachel—but he, Ben, in any case knew no rites for that day or any other—had tiptoed away with little Christopher, Kate, and Marian, enjoining them not to disturb Papa? An exception was a man whom Ben knew and felt disliked by, so that they never shared a bench: tall and very thin, sharp legs in well-pressed suit trousers, hat with a high crown and a tiny feather on his balding head, he read the Sunday Times from the beginning to end, refolding each section carefully, while his twin boys clad in green snowsuits tormented Sarah and Rebecca. The memory was unconnected to the present scene except by the azure of the sky; could it be that the winter sky in New York had the same acute purity? Whatever the answer, Ben began to cry and hastily retreated. It occurred to him that he would walk along the Corraterie, where Jouve had placed the bank for which Baladine worked, and so he returned to the hotel, crossing the Rhône over the Pont de l’Île.

  It was midafternoon by then. He ordered a chicken sandwich and white wine to be served in his room, cried again until abruptly all self-pity left him, finished lunch, and dictated to the end of the tape he had bought. And—with the exception of the note I mention below—that account is the last to
have come from Ben. The rest I learned the following week, having arrived in Geneva from Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, where I left Sean’s boat, Prudence, and the girls. The Swiss police had summoned me; I was named as next of kin in a note on the desk of the hotel room.

  Ben was dead, of course, but not according to plan. Apparently, instead of taking a short nap when he had finished lunch and exhausted his new tape (he wanted to experience once more the joy of innocent sleep), and then dining lightly, again in his room—after which he intended to down the pills with a bottle of Vosné-Romanée—he fell into a torpor so profound, probably induced by a few Seconals he had taken to make sure that sleep did not elude him, that, when he next called room service, it was to ask for the following morning’s breakfast. Between that time and the moment, some hours later, at which he left the hotel, he must have written the words “I will end it this morning” on that sheet of letter paper dated August 13, which the police found together with my name and telephone number. The day concierge remembered greeting him and noticing that he was wearing dark glasses. Two English couples on holiday, who happened to be on the Pont de la Machine, observed a well-dressed and very pale man, with such glasses, bent over the parapet, as though he were studying the turbulence below. Moments later, with what they described as astonishing agility, the man had climbed on the parapet and executed a beautiful dive, arms opening seconds before he hit the water. It was they who called the police and waited, in a crowd that quickly gathered, for the team that removed Ben’s body from the teeth of the great herse.

  About the Author

  Louis Begley is a lawyer and lives in New York City. His previous novel, Wartime Lies, was the winner of the 1991 PEN Hemingway Award and the Irish Times—Aer Lingus Book Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. An international success, Wartime Lies also won the Prix Médicis Etranger, France’s most coveted prize for fiction in translation.

  A Fawcett Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1992 by Louis Begley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Fawcett Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-72709

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76125-5

  www.ballantinebooks.com

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