As Max Saw It

by Louis Begley

  Max buys the house Charlie has found. It’s a ruin inside, but that’s just as well because Camilla wants to change everything, and Charlie, who hasn’t accepted a job of this sort in the last twenty years, offers to do the design work. It will be superb, a hymn to their friendship. Fortunately, a farmer’s cottage comes with the house; it’s in good condition, so that Camilla and Max can start their weekend existence immediately. Charlie is spending less time in Europe; he comes to Billington regularly. Both he and Toby are expert cooks. When they are only up for weekends, on Saturday nights, and more often when they are in residence, there is a big dinner at Charlie’s. Naturally, they count on Camilla and Max. Max admires everything about Charlie’s house: a brick Shaker structure, very spare but so graceful that it wears a smiling air of welcome. The collection of American furniture and bric-a-brac delights by its fantasy; a fitting extension, Max thinks, of the eccentric who coexists in Charlie with the rigorous bully. And Max likes Charlie’s guests. They are a mixture of local patricians—stooped, bony men in tired tweeds or gabardine, depending on the season, whose wives have handshakes like lumberjacks—and collectible New Yorkers qualified by money, acknowledged talent, or extreme good looks. Max’s new crowd. Charlie invites “my kind of queer” only: architects or artists and an occasional beauty, like Toby. Except for a few old friends, sometimes referred to as “that adorable creature,” about whose relation to Charlie one might speculate this way or that, Max believes sexual orientation is not a factor that determines Charlie’s favor. None of these men are special friends of Toby’s. Who are Toby’s friends? When and where does he see them?

  Toby joins Max and Camilla on their walks through the woods at the other end of the valley. Sometimes Max and Toby go rock climbing alone. Max thinks that Toby was right when he worried about disappointing him. That is because Max does feel that Toby has let him down. He is not making progress along any road one can recognize. At work, he is Charlie’s man Friday, that’s all. Charlie’s nose is always in some book; his library makes Max envious. Toby reads only magazines. He is sweetness incarnate, but his conversation has not been refurbished; one finds it dull. In a way, it is like his looks—the beautiful face of an adolescent paired with the body of a young man menaced by incipient thickness—at the midriff, perceptible ever so slightly about the cheeks—which is more dangerous than baby fat.

  MAX KNOWS that many years have passed since a treatise examining the intellectual foundations of contract law has been published by a common law scholar. He thinks he can write such a book—a short work, openly speculative in nature, free of academic jargon and the apparatus of footnotes. The reconstruction of the house in Billington has reached a stage at which it is quite possible to think of spending a sabbatical year there in comfort. He can imagine no place where he would prefer to write—lifting his eyes from the text to stare at the empty sky. Reference materials can be shipped to him by the Law School library as needed, or he will make quick expeditions to Cambridge. Camilla agrees; she has been urging Max to spread his wings. The Fogg is good about rearranging her schedule. She will need to spend only two nights each week at Highland Terrace. With the purchase of a Volvo station wagon, chosen despite Charlie’s protest that its name and plum-red color make him think of a vulva, they become a two-car family. The book advances slowly, but Max grows fond of following his thoughts where they lead. The sentences he sets down on paper to express them seem becoming; he rejoices at each small success. When he rereads the text in the spring, he concludes that what he has done is worthy of being continued. He negotiates an indefinite extension of his leave. It occurs to him that he might dedicate his book to the memory of Cousin Emma as well as to Camilla. The former gave him the freedom to write in perfect conditions, the latter his new self-confidence.

  WITH THE RETURN of good weather, the tempo of social activities quickens in Billington and the two adjoining towns where people who count are apt to have their houses. A short distance down the road from Max and Camilla’s stands a bleak structure surrounded by yews. The Rookery, for that is the name on the owners’ notepaper under an embossed crown, is the dwelling of the elderly Lord and Lady Howe. The baron—the third to have the title—descends from a man who grew rich grinding wheat into flour. He is an ornithologist married to an American. Her family made uniforms for the army in a nearby town where rich people no longer live. From late June until early September, the Rookery is the scene of festivities equal to Charlie’s in their standing and power of attraction. The food comes out of a can or the freezer, but it is served by the English butler, one dresses for dinner, and the women withdraw to have coffee in the pink drawing room that has the same view as Max’s study. Through their mothers, Camilla and Lord Howe are cousins. The Rookery becomes the other pole of Camilla and Max’s evening and weekend life. No disloyalty to Charlie is involved: he is constantly at the Howes’, and the titled couple is in the place of honor when Charlie and Toby entertain. By now Max finds it only natural that the friendship between Charlie and Ricky Howe predates by many years Charlie’s decision to buy a house in the Billington valley. He shares the general regret that exigencies of their schedule prevent the Howes from staying in the valley until the foliage hits its reddest peak in October.

  Among the Howes’ houseguests is Roland Cartwright, famous for filming the war in Vietnam and Laos. Great face, like a menhir. His departures from the Rookery are unpredictable, influenced by summonses from producers and backers in Los Angeles and New York. He returns with tales of deals that were almost made. Another relentlessly English voice at the table, but different in range and color: while Camilla and Ricky are laconic, their enthusiasms a jolly mumble, this man’s diction is a compendium of Dickens and the Rolling Stones. It’s lucky that Roland and Charlie are both so amusing: otherwise, when Charlie decides he also wants to be heard, the noise would be intolerable. Roland has shot films everywhere—including a feature in Greece. That’s where he perfected for Camilla the world-famous four-hour Cartwright tour of Athens. The visits to the Acropolis and the Archeological Museum were quite thorough, and yet they had time to eat broiled fish in a taverna in Piraeus before she took the evening plane for London. It comes as a surprise to Max that Camilla had traveled in Greece with Roland, but how much can one learn of anyone’s life? They had met on the site of a dig, where she was writing up labels for shards of pottery and he was filming a scene.

  In spite of his efforts, Roland is temporarily unable to conclude a movie deal. A position might open in the film department of Boston University or MIT, perhaps a specially funded program. He takes to going into town with Camilla. The Volvo is a great help, because it can hold the gear Roland is obliged to pack. He stays in the guest room at Highland Terrace. Sometimes Camilla leaves him there if his business is not concluded during the three-day stint in Cambridge and brings him back to Billington the following week. It’s much less spooky for her to go back to a flat in which one finds signs of human life. The health of the widow in the other part of the house is sinking. According to the gardener, she hardly leaves her bed. A visiting nurse comes at night to spell the cook and the maid.

  ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, Charlie sprains his back playing tennis in the club tournament. The pain is agonizing and spreads to his left leg and then one arm. The pope of lower-back doctors in New York recommends an operation to relieve the pressure on the nerve of damaged and eroded disks. Charlie won’t hear of it; he dislikes cutting and sewing when it’s his own skin. The alternative remedy is rest and, later, when the pain has receded, exercises to be performed lying on the floor. Charlie’s design for a new museum in Rotterdam has won an international competition. The project is fully funded, so that work can begin at once. Fortunately, the next phase is engineering and detailed drawings: these are matters that do not require his presence either in the New York office or on the site. Work conferences can be held around the oak table in his study in Billington; draftsmen’s tables are set up on the glassed-in back veranda. Toby’s reacti
on causes an unexpected difficulty, which Charlie doesn’t know how to overcome. Charlie speaks about it to Max, seeking his counsel. Perhaps he hopes that Max will intercede with the boy. It appears that Toby doesn’t want to remain in Billington with Charlie during this period when people from the office will be streaming in, because he doesn’t want them to think that he is Charlie’s “wife,” looking after him at home. But he doesn’t want to return to the office in New York either. There is nothing for him to do in that place; he has always been with Charlie, at his beck and call, and without Charlie there, he will be visibly useless, the target of office jokes. Max points out to Toby that merely proves his job, at which he is badly needed, is in Billington, helping Charlie to review papers and manage the telephone. Toby is obdurate. He doesn’t need me here for work either, he insists; let him get someone he thinks is qualified.

  Max sees that he will not be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat for his old friend. There’s a problem with Toby, he tells Charlie, you’ve been treating him like a precocious child, and now he thinks he’s grown out of that role. You’ll have to let him fend for himself and find his own place in life, even if you don’t like what he finds.

  Charlie answers: I can’t bear to be without Toby. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth! I will die.

  Of course, he doesn’t. August strikes the Berkshires like a drum. Every bungalow on the Stockbridge Bowl, every converted barn, has been rented. Outside the Morpheus Arms Motel, the NO VACANCY sign flashes red with pride. Busloads of tourists scavenge for antiques and last year’s maple syrup; they invest the lawn at Tanglewood. Charlie refuses to have people from his office or the consulting engineer’s live at his house. Those who have not been nimble enough to find accommodations with a friend arrive in two vans at nine-thirty in the morning and leave by four. Charlie won’t work any later. Every weekday, Max spends the late afternoon at Charlie’s. He swims first, while Charlie is still taking his nap, and then they talk and drink wine in the heavy shade of a red beech. Since Toby’s departure, Charlie has stopped having people to dinner. He claims that it’s too much work, too hard on his back, even though the Polish couple who look after the house customarily wait on the table and wash the dishes. He wouldn’t dream of letting that woman cook food for human consumption. So Max drives Charlie over to the Howes’, when they give a dinner there, or the van Lenneps’. Claire van Lennep is French and still good-looking; it’s a relief from the swill served by Lady Howe to eat at her house. Otherwise, Charlie makes pasta, just for the two of them, and some salad. If the program at Tanglewood is especially enticing they go to hear one piece. Charlie’s back still can’t endure an entire concert.

  THE THING IS that Camilla is replacing two colleagues at the Fogg who simply had to take holidays in August, and the poor thing is working a full-time schedule. There is so much clerical stuff to catch up on that the work spills over into the weekend; in spite of the heat, it’s really easier to stay in Cambridge for the weekend as well than to fight the turnpike traffic, first to the country and then back to town. Roland has landed the job at Boston University. He is preparing his course. He too needs to be in town. There has been a wave of burglaries in Cambridge. Max suggests that the arrangement whereby Roland spends most of his nights at Highland Terrace be made official: he can be their tenant, so long as Max is on leave. The house-sitting in itself will suffice as rent, and he can make an occasional present to the cleaning lady. She adores him anyway. With Roland’s position comes the funding for a course assistant. He hires an overjoyed Toby. That’s better from Charlie’s point of view than any other solution, short of having Toby remain with him, which, for the time being, seems impossible: at least he knows more or less where Toby is and what he is doing. But Toby refuses to become the other house sitter at Highland Terrace. Don’t try to trap me, he says when the suggestion is made. He gets a one-room studio, a fuckpad Charlie calls it, near Symphony Hall. The answering machine’s recorded announcement is, If you recognize my voice, you’ve got the right number. Don’t feel obliged to leave a message.

  On Friday afternoon of the Labor Day weekend, the Volvo deposits Toby at Charlie’s and Roland at the Howes’. Through the window of his study, which is open, Max hears the wheels on the unpaved road and sees the car speed toward the Rookery More than an hour passes. Camilla has not returned; she has not called. Max’s impatience gives way to nervous unease. A paralyzing timidity, not unmixed with shame, of a sort he has not felt in years, makes his body stiff and achy. He cannot accomplish any of the gestures he knows would be automatic in other circumstances—but what are the present circumstances? He does not telephone Camilla at the Howes’ or bicycle to their house. When the car returns, he listens to its doors slam and Camilla’s footsteps on the drive and then on the stair, remaining frozen in the chair at his desk until Camilla stands in the door, calling his name.

  Are you cross because I stayed too long at Ricky’s?

  Did you? I had no idea, of course I’m not.

  Will she believe that he has been hard at work on his book, his vaunted concentration unbroken? Ostensibly, that is the point of the game he is playing, but he doesn’t mean to be believed. He wants her to know that he feels wounded but won’t discuss it. In the meantime, he gets her bags and carries them to the bedroom. Her dress is like a sleeveless blue nightgown with horizontal red stripes. When she takes it off she is bare except for her sandals. She stoops to untie them. At once, Max wants her. Two weeks have passed since they last slept together. She pushes him away: it’s some sort of mushroom inside her, like yeast. Perhaps the heat brought it on, the doctor doesn’t know. She is to let it heal.

  Now it’s impossible to retreat. He whispers, asking for a service she usually performs so willingly.

  Poorest noodle, I can’t; not until I am all well. If you make me I will like it, and I’ll get all wet inside.

  It’s the evening of the Howes’ annual dance. Notables from small islands in Maine and Adirondack camps, and titled persons summoned from more remote foreign villeggiaturas occupy every guest room at the Rookery. The overflow has been billeted, according to rank, with the Howes’ indigenous friends. They have let Max off the hook, because poor Camilla won’t be back from Cambridge until the last minute, and it’s well known that he can’t cope.

  Camilla is in the tub, soaking. His own preparations finished, Max watches her from the distance of the washbasin on which he is perching. She asks him to scrub her back with the loofah and explains how she had some gins with Roland and Ricky while they watched the band set up. Then she and Roland had a dip in the pond. Such a lovely swim; no chlorine to hurt my pussy.

  The gumshoe inside Max is on the case. Of course, when she threw it on the bed, her bikini was dry. They swam naked. But why get excited over that, chump? He checks her oil every night, in your own bed in Highland Terrace! Get the picture? No, Max doesn’t. He will walk out from this B-grade movie. Roland is too old for Camilla; besides, hasn’t Charlie said he is another one of those English queers? If he is banging anyone, it’s Ricky Howe or Toby. Give Sam Spade his check and a tip in cash, and send him home. He is very tender with Camilla, while she is dressing, during the dinner at Charlie’s, and later when she presses her body against his on the dance floor under the green-and-white Saracen tent. Her tongue is in his mouth. He moves his arm a little, so that his fingers can feel the tuft under her arm. Yes, she is sweating. The tongue withdraws. She blows into his ear, very hot, and whispers, Bugger my yeast!

  They will leave for Cambridge late on Monday evening right after dinner—Camilla, Roland, and Toby—just as they came. Camilla will drive. She always manages to stay sober.

  And what a nice dinner Charlie has put together that Monday! The Howes’ guests have departed or have found other distractions, so it’s just the little clan and the van Lenneps. This is something of a promotion for them: Charlie needs compulsively the company of beautiful women. Since Camilla has been away so much, he has had Claire van Lennep help him arr
ange flowers and has discovered how well she reads aloud in French. Ricky has brought some great red wine. No use drinking it at home, the food is too awful, he explains. Charlie’s back is better, but Toby has prepared the main dish anyway—a Lebanese chicken couscous, with lots of mint and coriander. It’s like old times, but no one says so. Instead, they talk about Beirut and what a hopeless mess it has become. Toby’s father now lives in Cairo. Why couldn’t they all go to Egypt at Christmas? He could organize their Nile trip; according to Edwina Howe, it’s only worth doing if one charters a boat with a crew that doesn’t smell like spoiled mutton. The van Lenneps make no comment. Max thinks it’s too bad, the trip is probably beyond their means. But Edwina cries out, Toby darling, do call your father. Of course, it is five in the morning in Egypt and the dear boy has vanished from the room; by the time he returns, they are talking of other things. Max observes that his face is flushed—from the sun or from the stove—and his hairline has receded. Is his hair thinner as well, or does it just look that way because he has allowed it to grow long?

  As the others say good-bye, Max tells Charlie he will stay for a nightcap. They move to the porch and drink brandy. A waning moon hangs in the sky. The lights of Max’s house can be seen on the other side of the valley, lonely but vivid. Only the outside lanterns are on at the Howes’. Charlie begins to cry, and from time to time keens a little. Max leaves his chair, sits down beside Charlie on the sofa, and puts his arm around his shoulders. Shush, he says. He will be back soon.

  That is not why I am crying. I am crying because I have hardened my heart against him.

  After a while, the sobbing stops, and Max removes his arm.