by Louis Begley
What do you mean? he asks.
I am mourning the death of love. It’s that which I mind, not his going away, not anymore. When he is away, there are hours upon hours each day when I don’t think of him at all. Intermissions of the heart.
Then Charlie adds, Did you look at his eyes? He is on drugs again. That’s why he had to leave the table.
Les très riches heures … Abruptly, vacations end for grownups as well as children. Charlie feels completely fit. He decides to return to New York and work as before. When Toby tells him that he would like to stay on in Boston rather than take back the old job in Charlie’s firm, Charlie responds with great calm. The opportunity to learn about film is not to be missed, Roland is an artist, Toby should think of Billington as his weekend home. He is to bring friends if he likes, just make sure they don’t piss on the bathroom floor. To Max he remarks, I know I won’t see him if he has to take the bus. That’s why I am giving him the jeep and putting it in his name. The parking tickets will be his too.
The University Press has sent Max’s manuscript to colleagues in the United States and England for comments. He is to some degree surprised, at first, and then overwhelmed by the warmth and admiration they express. The dean asks Max to think of resuming teaching during the spring semester. The book seems ready for publication, and even if Max wishes to polish certain passages there is ample time for that before Christmas. Max feels that, possibly for the first time, the Law School considers his presence on the faculty justified by something other than successful completion of the academic obstacle course and standard good behavior. He accepts the dean’s suggestion gratefully. Shortly afterward, upon the retirement of the revered incumbent, Max becomes the fifth Elijah Wooden Professor of Jurisprudence. Camilla congratulates Max on acceding to such a distinguished chair and hurts his feelings: she giggles that the name fits him to a T.
Roland has an apartment off Central Square. The neighborhood is on the raffish side. He has had to install bars in the windows and attach an iron pole to the front door. At the end of the pole is a hook that enters an eyebolt screwed into the floor. The point is to buttress the door against neighbors who might wish to kick it in. In the circumstances, Max thinks Roland was very good to move out of Highland Terrace so promptly. Not that there is much to worry about so far as Roland’s personal safety is concerned. He has acquired a used Harley-Davidson and dresses in black jeans, black boots, and a leather jacket. One can’t distinguish him from the local hoods.
Boston attracts visiting Brits like flypaper. The wardens of Oxford and Cambridge colleges lodge with the president of Harvard or in the Houses; luminaries of popular culture manage as best they can. Max notes their tribal aversion to hotels. The spare bedroom at Highland Terrace, Max’s study, and the vast couches in the living room afford nights of healthful slumber to a series of men and women of all ages, friends of Camilla’s, her parents’, or Roland’s, related to celebrated writers and politicians, and quite garrulous at breakfast. The world is so very small; that’s what they keep repeating. Roland organizes the dinners: these are protracted affairs at his place with no defined point of beginning or end. The music is brutally loud. One eats ribs from a soul restaurant next door, Thai soup, and pappadum. Max thinks it’s the last place on the eastern seaboard where adults smoke pot. Toby reinforces that view. They often sit side by side at these parties. It’s nice to know they go back a long way. Occasionally, Toby brings along a third-year law student from Boston University, who is taking Roland’s course not for credit. He is a shy fellow, with glasses and an oddly tight, muscular body. Max and he discuss affirmative action cases, which are all the rage, and this boy Mike is studying in his constitutional law class. Toby asks Max to vouch for Mike to Charlie before Mike’s first visit to Billington.
It’s not always easy for Max to interrupt his work in order to accompany Camilla to Roland’s parties—there seems to be one every evening—and it’s harder still to remain until they end. Camilla loves to stay up. Of course, she doesn’t need to be at the Fogg until eleven, whereas he teaches a nine o’clock class. Fortunately, she doesn’t mind if he doesn’t go or sneaks away early. He leaves her the car. At that hour, it’s easy to catch a taxi at Central Square, and not particularly dangerous.
THE REVIEWS OF Max’s book are extravagantly favorable. What’s more, they appear in the principal newspapers and magazines of general circulation, not only in legal journals. He is told that he may have a best-seller on his hands. Toward the end of the semester, Max is asked to do a cover article on the crisis over racial quotas for the Sunday Times Magazine. The deadline is tight. He has no experience with this sort of writing and finds it difficult to lay out his arguments in the space he has been given. Obliged to work late, he realizes that at three or four in the morning Camilla is still at Roland’s. The following night he makes himself wake up nearly every hour to fix the hour of her return. By the time the garage door opens and then slams shut, the sun has risen. One evening when she goes out, hot with shame he opens the box in which she keeps her diaphragm. It’s empty. Over the next several weeks he repeats the act he loathes each times she goes out alone. The result is the same. Finally, he puts a scrap of paper where the diaphragm should be. On it he has written, “With whom are you using it?” She is still asleep the next morning when he leaves for the Law School. Since it is rare for her to be back from the Fogg before six, he does not hurry home. But she is there when he returns, preparing dinner. He wonders what to expect. With Kate, he fought constantly. Camilla and he have never quarreled. She accepts the gin he offers and asks, Didn’t your mother tell you never to touch other people’s belongings?
Of course.
How right she was. I wear it every night, to find out whether I am allergic to it or something else is wrong.
So that’s it. He apologizes and half-believes she has told the truth. They do not refer to the incident again.
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND approaches and so does the Harvard commencement. Camilla must stay in town. There is so much to do. The Fogg is preparing a special event for the overseers and the committee to visit the Fine Arts Department. Max asks if she will mind his going to Billington without her; he has an unpleasant premonition of stagnant Cambridge heat, his own drowsiness as he grades examination papers, hours to be spent in the evenings waiting for Camilla to return from the museum, and telephone calls from noisy restaurants somewhere in the North End. I am stuck here eating the most dreadful pizza. Will you be an angel? Jump in the car and join us. No? Roland will take me home then, on his bike.
Camilla won’t mind in the least. In that case, he will return only in time for the commencement, when it’s his duty to march in the academic procession as the Wooden Professor. Toby telephones. He is sick with an unpleasant summer flu, too groggy to drive. Can Max give him a ride? They get a late start. On the turnpike, Max lets the Jaguar soar. He hasn’t had a speeding ticket in years. To hell with it, if he is caught. The night is his time of day: black solitude, enchantment. He glances at Toby. The boy is asleep with his mouth open. A while later, Toby wakes up. He asks Max to stop the car. They both urinate by the side of the road, in the amber nimbus of the parking light. Onward. Max keeps the car stereo very low, so they can talk. Toby tells him he has seen his father; he came to Boston with his new wife, a Lebanese Muslim who has been to college in Mount Holyoke. Not much older than Toby, but a funny throwback to the fifties. Plucked eyebrows, shiny brown hair done up in curls and sprayed to stay put like a wedding cake, skin soft and creamy, perhaps because she is too plump, lots of rings, and these incredibly correct clothes. Everything on her matches the yellow blouse or the fingernails, and it all comes from Hermès. The new deal is Toby gets an allowance from a trust—so much per month, enough to live the way he lives now and pay medical insurance. Just don’t call Papa; if he wants to be in touch, he’ll call you. Boy, were they ever worried about insurance! Is there some way I can sue to get some of his real money? I’m the only child—so far.
No way. He’ll just keep eating halvah and shrivel.
Toby dozes off again. When he wakes, he tells Max he is scared. The job with Roland is just lugging equipment around and working the projector. Maybe the kids get something out of it, like a diploma to clip to a résumé. Who will want to hire an assistant to a guy teaching about film? He doesn’t see Roland ever making a film again; he’s gotten too weird, out of touch. He should have followed Charlie’s advice: go to Cooper Union or Pratt, learn the basics, become a designer. Charlie is the only one who thinks about his future.
It’s not too late, Max assures him. Charlie can get anyone into the program, even this late in the year. He asks whether the allowance from the trust will cover tuition and the cost of living in New York. Toby replies that if the school will take him he supposes he can work for Charlie part-time, maybe even stay with him. The vision of Charlie’s happiness when he learns that this is what the boy wants is so intense that Max decides to say nothing more about it. The boy might think he is walking into a trap. Instead, he inquires about Toby’s mother. She too is a part of the trust. Enough to pay for her and a nurse for life.
AFTERNOON of Commencement Day. Sky absolutely spotless, as though it had been washed down. Max heads for Highland Terrace, slightly tipsy from the rum punch served in the Harkness Quadrangle for Law School students and their parents. Shouldn’t drink the stuff on an empty stomach, but the buffet reeks of mayonnaise and tuna. Horror of horrors! One of Max’s own classmates is in the crowd on the lawn. Now that the classmate has explained it, the reason for his presence becomes clear—even plausible. He has a son, who was moreover in a class that Max taught; of course, Max failed to connect the son with the parent. Yes, the proud father explains, he had the boy in the second year of college! One wife, one child, and one house. The classmate laughs. He works in the mortgage loan section of a Hartford insurance company. Serves him right. He must have used that one-wife line one thousand times. At home, Camilla is waiting in the cool shade of the garden. She serves Max a glass of iced tea with mint. With her, there are really no preliminaries: she is leaving for London; there is a post at the National Gallery she can’t possibly turn down. He absorbs the news, and also the realization that she is not asking whether he might be willing to move to London as well, to be with her.
Camilla observes him as he stares at the wisteria, which has begun to bloom. He is red in the face, but that’s from the heat. Already he has pushed the resentment down into his gut, where it will rot like a field mouse in a snake. His fingers lie quiet and flat on the glass table. She averts her eyes. When she looks again, she sees that he has fallen asleep.
SHE DEPARTS next week, just as she had moved into the old Sparks Street apartment, with one large, heavy suitcase sufficient to contain all her paraphernalia—the blue jeans of which she takes such excellent care, velvet skirts in many shades of pastel, little-girl long dresses, wool socks, and underwear rolled up in tiny balls—bending under its weight until Max wrestles it from her hand and lifts it into the trunk of a waiting taxi. Everything else remains with Max: the see-through birdhouse outside the upstairs bedroom window, disaffected while its clientele feeds off the summer’s bounty, the marks left by cigarettes burning at the edge of the Chinese Chippendale coffee table, a profusion of arrangements Max thinks he has neither the energy to undo nor the science to continue.
Later that summer the quickie divorce comes through. They meet at the office of the lawyer who handles Max’s trust. When the papers have been signed, she holds out her hand to Max and then her cheek, which he kisses.
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! are her parting words.
V
MY DEPARTED tenants’ spoors are everywhere, I complained to Charlie. Such odd people. They have lined all the drawers! White linoleum, with red strawberries! Not just here, in the kitchen, but even the bureau drawers. In my bedroom, all through the house. Look: a vegetable juice machine! An electric knife sharpener and a wall bracket for the Dustbuster! The thing itself is in the pantry, plugged into the outlet, gathering force. You can hear it breathing. Do you suppose someday they will drive up to the door, use the set of keys they forgot to return, and take away all these gadgets? Come to think of it, these aren’t really spoors, they’re more like abandoned pets! What people do when they leave a rented house at the end of the summer—a dog tied to the cherry tree so he won’t make them feel bad as he races after the car.
We were having a cup of tea at the kitchen table. I had returned to Billington for the first time after two years’ absence from the house and from Charlie.
AFTER THE DIVORCE, my principal sensation was embarrassment: the near certitude that she had made a fool of me. Hiding would be easier, I supposed, in Cambridge than during weekends in Billington. Fortunately, the real estate agent—contacted on my behalf by Charlie—quickly found a best-selling writer eager to rent the Billington house from year to year. His real goal was to buy a place in the valley; if my present mood continued, why wouldn’t I, in time, sell my property to him? On his side, the package deal included a wife, seemingly ready to keep up the garden, and two small children with turned-up noses. I liked thinking about the children; they would learn to swim in my swimming pool, and later on in the year, zipped up in snowsuits, matching knitted ski hats on their heads, they would slide down the meadow on my Flying Eagle sled. I had been careful to point out its presence in the garage. The picture was rather like what I might have imagined for the issue Camilla’s birth control device had stopped in its tracks.
Toby was in Cambridge during the summer of my divorce, hanging out, as he put it. We saw each other often. I would find him waiting in the kitchen when I came home from my office at Langdell. He would have prepared a surprise, one of the recipes for sherbets and Italian ices he was always trying out. Sometimes the Cambridge heat was so heavy that, instead of eating the surprise in the garden, We turned on the air-conditioning and took refuge inside. We talked about Camilla nostalgically, as though we had known her very long ago; I assumed he wanted to comfort me without letting his purpose appear. Pratt had indeed accepted him as a special student; he would be working for Charlie part-time. But he wasn’t planning to live with Charlie. When his allowance and salary were put together, there seemed to be enough to pay for a place of his own, yet another studio walk-up.
My mother was the last—perhaps the only—person to whom I had written and telephoned regularly, without a specific reason. My other correspondence has all been in the thank you and recommendation for a job or for a grant category. I have never known how to “keep up” on the telephone. It was, therefore, no surprise to realize that I had again lost touch with Charlie. For all the bluster about my being an object of his predilection, Charlie was equally silent and absent. Our friendship seemed to have retreated to its previous place in the limbo of insignificant connections, with one difference so far as I was concerned: whereas previously I had expected nothing from him, I now feared that in future dealings I would have to come to terms with habits and expectations that the Billington context and Camilla’s presence had created. That was a pity.
My other link to Billington and Camilla was also severed at the end of that summer by a departure, but more comically and in circumstances I could not easily put out of my mind. Boston University had not renewed Roland’s teaching appointment. Neither he nor Camilla nor even Toby had mentioned that setback, although, since one of its consequences was that Toby likewise had lost his job, it must have weighed in Toby’s decision to prepare himself at Pratt for another career. Roland finally told me about it, when he appeared at Highland Terrace late one afternoon with various household utensils he had borrowed from Camilla and wished to return. He was going back to England, to look into some British Arts Council opening that sounded promising. Would I like to have his motorcycle? He wasn’t taking it along. A large lump of spite directed at Roland had built up inside me, and I was tempted to
turn him down brutally. On the other hand, quite irrationally, I didn’t want this last meeting to end quite so soon. I reconsidered, and said that if I tried it out and found I could handle such a powerful machine I would buy it.
No, I mean to give it to you. You have been very patient and very kind as well.
I said it would have to be a purchase. As I had expected, he didn’t put up much of a fight.
Later, over pizza at Camilla’s favorite restaurant in the North End—we went there on the Harley-Davidson to test, under Roland’s supervision, my ability to drive it in Boston traffic—when we were well into the second bottle of a Piedmont wine, I put the question. Had he been sleeping with Camilla?
No, or rather, yes. Once or twice, years ago, even longer ago than Greece. Greek prehistory. He laughed.
And here?
Never. By the time I thought of it, she was banging Toby. Mad about him. An experiment that didn’t work. I suppose no harm in your knowing it now.
During the winter that followed, I rode my motorcycle to Langdell and to dinner parties in Cambridge and Boston, at which I was once again the object of attention deriving from considerations other than my professorial eminence. It was just as well that the machine amused me. My pleasant habit of walking after dark across the Common and on Brattle Street had become dangerous. Knifings, attacks with fists and boots, and bullet wounds now frequently accompanied transactions I used to think of as having essentially a financial nature—the surrender of the contents of one’s wallet to young men in urgent need of cash. In her bedroom, on the second story of a Brattle Street house, too terrified to cry out, the adolescent daughter of friends had been raped while the parents calmly dined downstairs. Had she screamed and been heard, what would my colleague, a small and gentle man, have done? I asked myself. If he had tried to fight off the aggressor, should one not imagine a scene of even greater horror: the wounded father forced to look on as the mother as well as the daughter were sodomized, mutilated, and killed? My bedridden landlady’s presence in the main part of the house, the comings and goings of her nurses, whose car wheels on the driveway gravel made a shrieking noise in the taut night silence of Highland Terrace, did nothing to reassure me. I thought these women were a magnet for violence, predestined victims of unspeakable butchery into which I would somehow be drawn. It seemed grotesque to install bars in my windows—the widow had not done it—or an electric alarm system. I was too fond of sleeping with my window open; besides, weren’t those contraptions apt to begin to whine because of a dip or surge in the electric current?
