by Louis Begley
1965! The year of the vaginal orgasm! Junior League Bacchantes rampaging through the parlors of the Colony Club! Diane was very advanced. Her women’s group decided that diaphragms are demeaning, because the Frau does all the work: she has to stick the thing up her pussy before she is one hundred percent sure she will need it, she must lie down and spread her legs and take it, and finally, when it’s all over, more work. The gadget has to be taken out, powdered, and put away in its little box. The solution was to have me wear a condom. That brought the curtain down on my performance. Soon she got a lawyer, a cute little fellow in a derby hat who made house calls—I am referring to an unfortunate time I hit her—and in record time we were divorced.
Am I boring you? he asked while I paid that part of the bill which was not included in my board. Because now we will come to the interesting part, what Scotty Reston would call the watershed event.
There was nothing one could get to drink in the lobby at that hour. I suggested going up to my room, where I had some cognac. We sat down in the two armchairs. It was a strangely chilly evening. Fatigue or excitement, I found I was shivering. I turned on the electric heater.
My condition hadn’t escaped Charlie’s attention. Are we afraid to be alone with the satyr? Ah, that’s better, nothing like a glass of brandy before an open fire! Ha! Ha!
The watershed turned out to be the Vienna woods. I went to Vienna in June, right after the divorce, to look at the Sparkasse and some other Otto Wagner work.
There were ideas of design passing through my head. I was prescient, or I had simply looked at the photographs very well: whichever it was, this work, once I had actually seen it—stared at it as if in a trance—became the grain of sand around which gradually formed the pearl of my artistic invention. Absolute truth, although expressed bombastically. Do you know my Union Bank building in New York? It rises over Madison Avenue exalted and yet humble; every element in its design is a call to order and an echo; I have conceived it so that the surrounding motley structures all take comfort in its presence.
I said truthfully that I found the bank building exceptionally beautiful.
Well, that was what I did downtown. The Vienna woods was where I went to drink wine with an architecture student who had been recommended to me as a combination assistant and guide. Bronzino portrait of a young man, but dressed in a green corduroy suit and reincarnated as a specialist in sex disorders! The diagnosis that had eluded Diane’s New York Hospital guru he made the moment we met. One evening, when all the stars were out and the cuckoo sang in the lilac trees, he began the therapy. I have not swerved from the road he traced.
Is this—I mean your having become a homosexual—generally known?
Having become? I prefer being. It’s known among the upper set in Sodom, and if one queer is onto a secret, in the next five minutes the rest of the world is informed. If you mean have I come out of the closet, the answer is no! I would like to lead a mass movement back into the closet; it’s so cozy.
And you’re all right in sex now, the impotence was just with women?
I have told you to read Krafft-Ebing for details, cutie pie. I don’t mind talking about girls; that’s good clean locker-room fun. The homo stuff is strictly personal!
He leaned over and massaged my knee, as if I had reminded him that it had been neglected since before dinner.
His glass was empty. Apropos of closets, he inquired, is that where you keep that venerable brandy? You seem to be saving it for a rainy day!
I got up and poured him an enormous shot.
He scratched extensively and continued: I will explain to you the presence of Toby, so that he will be spared your hysterics when you meet again. Rest easy, I didn’t seduce him that summer when we met at the Joyce caravanserai. It’s not my form. He went back to school in Switzerland, but at the end of the year, he ran away. Disappeared for six months or more! His father had the Interpol and every other kind of police looking for him. Not a trace. Then, one day, out of the blue—that’s not a pun—he rang my office in New York. Fortunately, I picked up the telephone myself; my secretary might not have put him through. He said he was at a pay phone in the city—he refused to say where—and that he would come to see me if I had clean clothes put in a hotel room where he could first wash and rest. I had some things delivered to the Waldorf, down the street from me, and the next day I saw him. He was a mess. I have kept him with me ever since. Do you believe in the fatal irony of names?
I am not sure I know what you mean.
How odd! I should have thought its incidence would be painfully familiar to a manikin whose ma and pa had the pretention to call him Maximilian! I am obsessed by it. You see, my parents, God rest their souls, were avid readers of Proust. And yet they called me Charles! Private joke or imprudent respect for family tradition? Because I am in fact Charles III. Both my paternal grandfather and great-grandfather had that name, but that was AP, avant Marcel. You see, just like Odette, Toby is a pissing tart, and the little bugger isn’t even my type.
HE’S GOT A HEADACHE, but I don’t think he’s hung over; that almost never happens, said Toby the next morning. He said we should go ahead without him.
Miss Wang had asked if she could take that Sunday off, to do laundry and visit her friend at Beijing University. The latter project involved many miles of pedaling. The Chinese I knew used the word “friend” asexually; there was no indication whether this one was a man or a woman, a question that gnawed at me, as this was not the first such expedition. Her wishing to see a girlfriend, in preference to traipsing around Beijing with me and sharing a couple of meals, I found quite natural. If it was a man, her choice did not merely annoy me; a bizarre failure of logic made me consider it foolish, almost unreasonable. What could an afternoon with some deadly serious, bespectacled law student or teaching assistant offer that could compete with me? Even taking account of the total lack of privacy that prevailed at Beida (that’s how the university was commonly referred to), I was able to imagine, of course, a certain activity there other than conversation, one from which I had refrained—I assumed that the decision had been mine exclusively—but didn’t the delicious tension between us, the fruit of that denial, offer an adequate reward? It occurred to me that if Miss Wang had told me the previous morning about seeing her friend at Beijing University, I might have been less enthusiastically optimistic about her chances at Harvard.
I suggested to Toby that we return to the Forbidden City by what I called the back way: the lively street parallel to Chang An, north of the hotel. We walked past the bicycle repair shop, the establishment where mechanics hammered on mysterious large motors—was this an attempt at repair or the process of turning them into scrap? Elderly men and women, bent almost in half from rheumatism or a lifetime of bearing loads of merchandise, shuffled along, winter vegetables in bags made of netting on their backs. Some looked out of windows or stood in doorways, puffing on long clay pipes. When we got to the canal, other old men were at their t’ai chi exercises, eyes unseeing, as though they were acting out a dream.
The morning was warm and sunny. In one of the courtyards of the palace, there were stone tables with chairs on both sides at which old men who had surely retired long ago played chess. We sat down to watch a game.
Charlie said he talked to you last evening.
That’s right. He explained a lot of things I hadn’t understood.
He’s a good egg. I am very lucky.
I asked Toby whether he liked chess.
No, I just play backgammon and checkers. But it’s fun to look at them play.
Then he asked, Are you very disappointed?
By what? I replied cautiously.
Not the gay stuff, that’s just how it is. For guys my age, it’s not such a big deal. I mean my not going to college and all that. You’re a professor, so you must think I’m kind of going down the tubes. You had that hurt expression when I told you yesterday.
My official role as a pedagogue was not something I thought abou
t much in civilian life, outside Langdell Hall, but suddenly I realized that for this poor child—it would be necessary to accustom myself to the fact that he had turned into a young man—I represented constituted authority: a censor who keeps the gates of education and normal life as an adult.
So I said to him, It was a very unexpected meeting. It took me a while to get used to the two of you showing up here all of a sudden, when in my mind you were still on the shore of Lake Como. Don’t pay attention to the effect of surprise. I don’t think you’re finished: there are many ways outside the university to prepare yourself for life, and you have a good start with your languages and travel. If you use your head and read as much as you can, you will do just fine. You must be learning all sorts of things at Charlie’s office and from being with Charlie. Who knows? If you feel the need of it, there will always be time for college or a professional school later.
I was pretty badly screwed up, but it’s true, Charlie is teaching me a lot, if I can stick to it.
He gave me a big open smile, which seemed genuine, like when he told me it was all right to paddle along at his side in the swimming pool at the Rumorosa.
IV
RUN SLOWLY, horses of the night! How often would I whisper those words to myself during the first decade of my prosperity? That wish was not granted to me. Instead, events, experiences, time itself accelerated, like grains of sand when the beach is whipped by a storm. Perhaps it was the effect of the contrast with my previous mode of existence. I had been used to living like a superannuated graduate student: in small spaces, taking measured steps. Perhaps it was my age. So little had changed inside me, and yet, in a couple of years, I would, with so much of my past unperceived, really not felt, turn fifty.
Slides of jumbled vacations—uncherished, neglected, almost embarrassing—one has resolved to set in order someday. Let me stand aside and display them. Look at Max as I see him now, such as I was then in the distant whirlwind.
VESPASIAN WAS NUTS to say money has no smell. It’s like the mating stuff that skunks spray, except it draws the rich, the not so rich, and the famous of both sexes; gays too. Now that Max is wealthy, they’re all over him. Such easy manners: colleagues who have never spoken to him outside of faculty meetings, those Brattle Street and Beacon Hill intellectuals he doesn’t know even by sight, invite him for meals and drinks, or to watch sports on television—the latter invitations he never accepts—as though he had always been there, an intimate friend of the household. Max has finally discovered the secret password of the Western world; Arthur and he are still friends, but, in his new circumstances, what is to stop Max from getting into Ali Baba’s cave on his own?
Max is respected, possibly liked, at the Law School; that’s because he doesn’t ask for favors or belong to either of the cliques that wish to transform the place. Teaches conscientiously. His letters to the graduate studies committee and the financial aid office, followed by casual visits to assistant deans who manipulate decisions of this sort, have the desired effect. Miss Wang is admitted, with a full scholarship. The housing office assigns her to a regular dormitory: he insists on it, in preference to a room in one of those communal apartments in Somerville or Waltham; he knows that Chinese graduate students stick together like steamed rice. That would be a waste of the Harvard experience, he tells her. The point is to be with Americans, working through the same problems as they; there is more to a legal education than reading casebooks.
That’s also the argument he eventually uses to get her out of his own place. When he sleeps with her, the night of her arrival, it’s as though some terrible thirst were at last slaked. He thinks he is filling to the brink the lithe, violent tube that passes for her body. It’s also keeping a wordless pact made in the Forbidden City. It seems that neither of them had doubts about its terms.
But he isn’t ready for a Chinese concubine, just as he doesn’t keep a dog or a cat. It makes him nervous that she washes his shirts and scours the bathroom, although the cleaning woman has just done it, that she likes to sit in his lap. She thinks they should eat at home: the smell of the vegetables she stirs in the frying pan for dinner clings to her skin. There is a way she has of bringing him cups of tea when he works at his desk that makes him unable to concentrate. When he packs her off to the Harkness he gives her a key and tells her she must call before she comes over.
In no time at all, she asks if she may introduce a new friend. He is a Chinese scholar, that’s what he calls himself, at the Business School; same model, Max thinks, as the friend he imagined she might have at Beida. They have dinner à trois in the Chinese restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue across the street from Wigglesworth. The scholar insists on paying. Miss Wang continues to sleep with Max, but it’s all much lighter now; they have a good time when they talk, like in Beijing; her first examinations are approaching, and he helps her get prepared. One day, he receives a letter from Miss Wang. It covers two large sheets of pink paper with flowers in the upper-right-hand corner. The handwriting is beautiful; there are really no mistakes in her English. She thanks him for her new life and apologizes. The scholar and she are in love. She is returning the key to Sparks Street. It’s just as well, considering how much time Camilla is spending there.
SHE HAS BLOND HAIR, green eyes, and long legs. Doesn’t use deodorant; or perfume, either. First woman he has known whose armpits aren’t shaved. An English girl, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Backed by a first-class degree from a women’s college at Oxford, she does something or other at the Fogg. It turns out to be conservation of prints and drawings. The father is a fashionable don at Oxford. He teaches philosophy and publishes catchy articles in the New York Review of Books. Mother, a psychoanalyst. They know everybody; that’s made clear when Max meets Camilla at the Kahns’ Sunday lunch.
Camilla and Max go to his apartment directly from lunch. He still lives on Sparks Street, looking for something larger. Would she like a brandy? He puts a recording of Dido and Aeneas on the turntable, makes sure that she sits down on the sofa, where he can be beside her, and not on an armchair. His visits to England have been very brief. The way she talks is amusing. Is it the Oxford accent, or an abbreviated form of speech that’s even more refined? At times, during lunch, he didn’t understand what she was saying. He fiddles with the snifters, which are too large, and the bottle.
She says, Aren’t you taking me to bed?
He has never made love like this before. There are no preliminaries. The borders that are crossed he would have thought were lifetimes away.
It’s six o’clock. She picks up her clothes, urinates loudly leaving the bathroom door open, uses his toothbrush, and tells him she may be found in the telephone book.
He calls—the next day.
THE MARRIAGE to Camilla is contracted carelessly.
She loves gardens. The apartment on Highland Terrace they move into, really the wing of a large house, belongs to the aged widow of a Medical School professor, a cousin of the Storrows. It has a brick-lined patio. Around it, beds where the widow’s gardener has planted perennials. The widow agrees to give them a right of first refusal; as she has no intention of selling the house, it will be of use only when she dies. Camilla is very cheerful. She whistles when she is in the house, wears jeans and Max’s worn-out shirts, and bicycles to the Fogg. She has replanted the handkerchief-sized garden. The gardener—initially skeptical—approves of the result, and weeds and waters when they are away. She is keeping the apartment very bare; Max has so many books one doesn’t need anything except a bed. A bed they have. Other furniture arrives later. Max has never been so happy.
Camilla longs for the country. Her parents live in an ancient stone house, a half hour outside Oxford; that’s how she was brought up. If they only had a place to get away to on weekends, and for at least a part of Max’s lovely, long vacations. Of course, the Fogg remains open, but something can be worked out.
They have bought a Jaguar two-seater. With the top down, they explore the towns on the North Sh
ore and also, with less confidence, the South Shore around Cohasset. It’s dreadfully suburban; Dover would do, if it weren’t so full of stuffy types who work for insurance companies or on State Street. Charlie Swan comes up with a solution: they must head farther west, to the Berkshires, where he owns a house in Billington. The way Camilla drives, they can be there in under two hours. He knows of just the property for them, on a hillside, across a narrow valley from his place, with a view straight into the sunset. The garden is a succession of terraces held up by old brick walls. They have, of course, seen a good deal of Charlie and Toby. Max never really lost contact with them after the meeting in Beijing; Camilla knows Charlie from Oxford and London. He and Toby come to Camilla and Max’s wedding dinner, which is given by the Kahns.
