Memories of a Marriage

by Louis Begley

  In May of that year, not long after my return to Paris, my friend Guy Seurat and his doctor wife, Elsa, invited me to spend the long Ascension weekend with them at their house in the Vaucluse, a couple kilometers from the little town of Camaret-sur-Aigues. Standing in a large garden, it had been in Guy’s family until the 1880s, when it passed into the hands of a rich industrialist from Marseilles and his heirs, who had inflicted on it the sort of improvements that have defaced so many similar French residences. The family bought back the property in the 1930s, and Guy, ever since he inherited it from a bachelor uncle, had been engaged in a heroic and not-inexpensive effort to restore its exterior, including removing the modern stucco and replacing it with a crépi—slaked-lime plaster—of a color typical of the region. He and Elsa did much of the work themselves, enlisting friends whenever they could, and I had myself spent one Easter vacation sanding and painting window shutters and uprooting grass from the front courtyard so that it could be replaced, in the eighteenth-century manner, by fine gravel.

  When I arrived by car from Avignon in the late afternoon, Guy and Elsa’s other guests were already there, a couple I didn’t know: a black-haired, pale-complexioned young woman of stunning beauty and a large man dressed in an outfit—lime linen slacks and a red silk shirt worn with a silk paisley ascot—that his kind of French bourgeois considered appropriate for weekends in the country and shopped for at Sulka’s on rue de Castiglione. They were, I learned moments later, Bella and her husband Marc de Clam. Ascension was late that year, and a dry very warm day was followed by the sort of Provençal night that makes you wish dawn would never come. A late dinner was served on a trestle table under a moonless sky by the Seurats’ combination housekeeper and cook, who together with her husband also watched over the property in the Seurats’ absence, a not-inconsiderable responsibility in a part of the country plagued by burglaries. I found myself seated next to Marc. He talked volubly. The failed Generals’ Putsch, an attempt by disaffected high-ranking officers to overthrow General de Gaulle, had taken place a mere three weeks ago; and OAS, the clandestine arm of Algérie Française, the Algeria-must-remain-French movement, had begun its campaign of assassinations and violence. His sympathies clearly lay, if not with OAS itself, then with the pieds-noirs, the non-Muslim population of Algeria in part descended from French colonists, who refused to give up the country they considered theirs. My views were diametrically opposed to Algérie Française and everything it stood for, but I didn’t contradict him. Nor did I ask what kind of link of ancestry there was between him and Armand du Paty de Clam, who would have surely approved of his tirade. I hardly spoke. My thoughts and gaze were fixed on Bella; it was a coup de foudre: lightning had struck, I had fallen in love.

  Dinner ended very late. Another couple, Bernard and Francine Bruneau, had joined us. The housekeeper had gone to bed, so we all cleared the table and scraped and rinsed the dishes before stacking them in the sink and on the kitchen table. As I watched the Clam couple say good night and disappear, I was gripped by envy, precise and humiliating. Guy proposed an after-dinner scotch. I accepted. After some hesitation Bernard and Francine said they too were going to bed. It was what I had hoped for: I was left alone with Guy and Elsa. When the conversation became desultory, I asked them about the other guests.

  It’s a class reunion! cried Elsa. All three of them were at Stan all the way through hypokhâgne. And then Bernard and Marc were together again at Sciences Po.

  Bernard is in business with his father, who is an antique dealer on Faubourg St.-Honoré, she continued, and Marc works for Banque Worms.

  I had frequented enough members of the elegant Parisian bourgeoisie to know that by Stan they meant Collège Stanislas, the most esteemed of French Catholic schools among whose eminent graduates was none other than General de Gaulle, so detested by Marc de Clam.

  And the wives? I asked.

  Francine has twin boys. She left them with the grandparents for the weekend. That’s a job and a half, but she also helps out in the antiques business. She did the École du Louvre.

  And Bella, Guy chimed in, the redoubtable Bella! She went through khâgne at Fénelon and came in second or third in the examination for Normale Sup. Of course she got in and graduated brilliantly. Midway through Normale, she married Marc. She’s never taught. Instead, she’s one of my authors. Two years ago we published her delectable little study of Madame de La Fayette. She’s working on something new now, but she won’t say what.

  “Redoubtable”! I thought I had sensed it: she was as brainy as she was beautiful. Fénelon was the best of girls’ lycées; École Normale Supérieure was the nec plus ultra of French humanities education. The intellectual snob inside me was smiling and nodding approval.

  Your pal Marc has some strong political opinions, I ventured. Is she onboard with them?

  Guy laughed. Certainly not! She’s a closet socialist. She doesn’t pay attention to his politics. None of us do. He’s a special French product: the lovable right-wing nut.

  Elsa chimed in: He has it in his genes. You should hear him on the subject of that traitor Dreyfus!

  We remained silent for a while, gazing at the stars that were so bright one truly believed they were burning. When Guy stretched and said good night, Elsa told him she’d be right up and asked whether I would like another whiskey. A small one, I told her. She poured it and poured one for herself.

  It’s been a tough week, she said. It’s my turn to be responsible for the emergency room, and we’ve had a record load of trauma cases. Car crashes, knife and bullet wounds, plus the usual heart attacks, strokes, kids falling off bicycles on their heads. You may have sensed it, she continued, abruptly changing the subject. It’s not a good marriage. Bella does her best. There are no children; I have a feeling there won’t be any, and it’s just a question of when she will decide she’s had enough. If you can believe it, Marc resents her writing. He claims it makes his colleagues and clients nervous!

  The next day Bernard Bruneau organized an antiques-hunting expedition to Nîmes and Arles. There was general enthusiasm for the project, Bernard and Elsa being adepts of flea markets and provincial dealers, as was apparently Marc de Clam. I begged off. The day was gorgeous and less hot than the day before, and it seemed a pity to spend most of it in a car being driven too fast on the murderous D15. It occurred to me that I should instead get into my own car, head at a reasonable speed in the direction of Uzès, and take a long walk in the garrigue. The mere thought of the aroma of sunbaked juniper, wild thyme, and lavender was intoxicating. I announced my plan and held to it despite expressions of regret and promises to go on a hike the next day and the day after. To my surprise and delight, Bella asked if she could join me.

  It turned out that she had read one of my novels and remembered it well. We talked about my themes. They were, I said, though not necessarily in that order, love and ambition and betrayal and fear of the ravages of old age. Told through events transpiring in New York and New England, with occasional forays by my personages to places I knew best in Western Europe. She smiled and said there were no other serious themes, except perhaps death itself and retribution and forgiveness. I agreed. Retribution could be found tucked in my work. Forgiveness? It was a subject that had seldom engaged my attention.

  We came to a spot where I could safely park the car, got out, and made our way through the scrub. Soon we were in the open, surrounded by a sea of low vegetation alive with chirruping crickets and inhaling the rich smells I had remembered with such longing.

  This is pure heaven, said Bella. I am so happy you thought of doing this and let me come along.

  My reply was going to be some meaningless compliment, but, suddenly emboldened, I told her that Guy had mentioned publishing her book—which I regretted not having read but would read in Paris—and a new book she was writing. Would she tell me the subject?

  I’ve only done preliminary research, she said, but I think I’ll keep going and probably write something. It’s about an unusua
l moment in the history of the émigrés who fled the Reign of Terror. The time spent in the United States by Chateaubriand and Talleyrand, who did not stay for long but saw a great deal and wrote down their impressions, and by Marquise de la Tour du Pin, whose memoirs are wonderful. In Chateaubriand’s case, of course, we owe to that voyage Atala and Les Natchez.

  Those were works I had read, I told her, and had some idea of their influence. I also said, trying to be as modest as possible and at the same time invite her interest, that shortly after college, when I began to think about my first book, I steeped myself for a while in late eighteenth-century American history; I had been particularly interested in what was going on in New England and New York.

  Then we must have lunch in Paris, she said, if you ever have time. I would like so much to test some of my theories—no, they’re not quite that. They’re only some assumptions.

  III

  THE MISSION in Iraq having been “accomplished,” I had half seriously allowed myself to suppose that the next step in that poor country’s 2003 march toward happiness and democracy would include the early restoration to Iraqis of self-rule. Instead, the morning after the ballet I saw on the front page of the NYT a photo of our proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, and his predecessor Jay Garner looking as though they had each swallowed a particularly pungent meatball, and an article to the effect that the United States and Great Britain had decided to delay self-rule. Allied officials—presumably Mr. Bremer—would remain in charge indefinitely. The telephone rang as I was pondering the implications of that high-handed move. It was Lucy, calling to invite me to dinner that very evening. She said she was still at the Park Avenue address. Dinner was at eight. The weather having continued to be unusually mild, I decided to walk there and crossed the park at Seventy-Ninth Street. Eighth floor, the doorman told me. She’s expecting you. The door is open.

  The apartment was as I recalled it from my first visit, soon after Thomas and Lucy came to live in the city: large, with a profusion of fine early nineteenth-century American furniture, rather-less-good portraits of unsmiling men, women, and family groups who had to be ancestors, because why else would one display them in one’s house, and beautiful Oriental rugs. I had assumed, and saw no reason now to change my view, that it all came from Lucy’s family. Although at the time of my first visit her parents were both alive and presumably intended that the big house in Bristol and everything of importance in it should go to her older brother John, she had probably been left all sorts of things by her De Bourgh and Goddard grandparents. After all, she was the only granddaughter. I could also imagine a barn or, given the quality of this stuff, more likely a warehouse, where those two families of slavers turned industrialists stored unneeded furniture, paintings, table silver, and linen to be drawn upon as needed in order to furnish homes of younger sons and daughters. Lucy had at the time of that first visit given me a rapid tour, pointing out the improvements she and Thomas had made after decades of neglect by the bedridden previous owner. When we returned to the library, Thomas was there, having just returned from the office, and offered drinks—a whiskey for her and martinis poured out of a cut-crystal shaker for him and me. I congratulated them on their elegant, indeed luxurious, installation. Lucy shook her head rebelliously, a gesture I remembered as typical when she was going to contradict you and felt strongly about it.

  The location isn’t all that good, she said. Many people one knows consider being even a couple of blocks north of Seventy-Second Street unacceptable as a matter of principle.

  I raised my eyebrows at that.

  No need to make funny faces, she told me. We’re also on the wrong side of Park Avenue. The good buildings are on the other side and get the morning sun. We had to settle for second best not because I wanted to but because my trustee wouldn’t give me one penny more. Just in case you have any doubts about it, that’s where the money comes from. My trust! If we were trying to make do on what Thomas makes at Kidder we’d be living in Harlem or Hoboken and I doubt you’d be visiting us!

  I thought it odd that Thomas hadn’t gotten the job with Morgan Stanley he had hoped for. A moment later, he explained. Kidder had always been his second choice, but it moved to first place when Al Gordon, the head of the firm and a great man, came to Cambridge to recruit him personally and made clear that he and Thomas would be working closely together.

  Lucy’s vision of what their existence would be if they had had to depend on Thomas’s salary struck me as peculiarly noir. I supposed that all good investment banks paid their young people pretty much the same, and yet my cousin Josiah Weld, who had gone to work for Morgan Stanley and was Thomas’s exact contemporary, didn’t seem to live in dire misery. In fact, Josiah’s mother had recently told me how much he earned. It was a modest amount but hardly coolie wages, and when a week earlier I had gone to drinks with Josiah and his wife, Molly, at their apartment on Central Park West and Ninety-Third Street, I hadn’t had the impression that I was slumming—even if it wasn’t Park Avenue, north of Seventy-Second Street! It so happened that the conversation at the Welds’ had turned to how young people were getting by in New York—Josiah’s classmates who, for example, were also investment bankers or lawyers and, like him, had very little money of their own or received minimal help from their families. According to Molly, those who already had children lived in more-or-less-rundown middle-class apartment buildings on the upper reaches of West End Avenue or even on West 106th Street. Lower-middle-class, Josiah corrected her. There wouldn’t be enough bedrooms, she went on, but one could manage. The big problem if you were way uptown was coming home at night. One had to be very careful. That is why, Molly concluded, they had decided to wait a couple of years before they had children. The picture the Welds had given me had seemed on the whole reasonable; it was pretty much what I had expected.

  As for Lucy and Thomas’s spread, it put them in a different league. A Kidder partner, perhaps even Mr. Gordon himself, would have felt quite comfortable ensconced in their apartment. I had a fleeting feeling that the apartment and everything about it spelled trouble. The expense would remain beyond Thomas’s ability to sustain for several years, even if his ascent to partnership was prompt. That meant that Lucy had better be prepared to pay up and be nice about it. I could imagine the envy, if not ill will, of colleagues who didn’t have a trust like Lucy’s to fall back on. As for the effect on Thomas’s mother and father and aunts, uncles, and cousins, assuming any of them were invited to visit, I couldn’t even speculate about it. An unpleasant corollary might be the collectively raised eyebrows of the De Bourgh clan when they surveyed the posh surroundings in which their family fortune had installed the son of the garage owner from Newport who’d been getting the kinks out of their friends’ Jaguars and Bentleys. Would it be the sense of God-fearing satisfaction, because money earned selling human cargoes had been put to virtuous use, giving a promising young man of humble origin a good start? Benign amusement or indignation? Lucy’s own De Bourgh feelings lay just below the surface. I feared that they were unlikely to be simple.

  I shook myself free of these memories. Forty years or so older than the young maîtresse de la maison I had been brooding about, Lucy came into the room and offered me her cheek to kiss. The old Lucy had smelled of L’Heure Bleue and sandalwood soap, her other Guerlain favorite. The new version smelled ever so slightly of mothballs—had the white cashmere she wore been put away for the summer and insufficiently aired out before she put it on?—and if you were close to her when she spoke, as I was to be when she offered me her cheek to kiss, of something sour. Perhaps it was dryness of the mouth.

  Well, well, well, she said, so you’ve actually come!

  Was there any doubt? I replied. I did accept your invitation.

  Ah yes, but the other evening at the ballet you were less than thrilled to see me. An unglamorous ghost from your past who’s inviting you to dinner alone because she hasn’t any glamorous guests she could round up to amuse you. Of course, I didn’t let that
thought stop me, but I fully expected an e-mail saying you were sick or had to leave town or God knows what other fib. E-mails make lying easy.

  Seeing that I was about to protest, she added, Never mind, we’ve time to talk about that later. What would you like to drink?

  I wondered whether she had guessed how close she had come to the mark. The temptation to let her know that I was paralyzed by an accumulation of work and to promise to be in touch as soon as the crisis was over had been powerful. What had stopped me? In part it was a peculiar new form of piety, the sense that I owed it as a propitiatory offering to my dead, more numerous now than the living for whom I had any affection, to be considerate and indulgent even with tiresome acquaintances, and friends who had become nothing more than tiresome acquaintances, as well as with less-than-satisfactory housekeepers, cleaning ladies, typists, personal assistants, accountants, doctors, dentists, and barbers and perhaps even my literary agent and my editor. A more potent reason was that our chance encounter at the ballet brought back memories of a time in Paris that I had long ago put out of my mind. Among them was that of Lucy’s and my passade, which predated by more than a year the afternoon when she brought Thomas to see me. It gave her certain inalienable rights. The setting had been a house party over a three-day spring weekend in a large villa that the partner in charge of the Paris office of a New York law firm had rented outside Deauville. A band of Americans, some of whom I knew, had been invited. Lucy was among them. On Saturday evening there was a lot of drinking, and after dinner we danced to records. Somebody dimmed the lights. I soon discovered that Lucy was a dancer who used her body insistently and to good effect. Almost to my annoyance, I found I was aroused, and clearly she was not unaware of my condition. The tiniest of smiles wafted across her face as she ground against me. After midnight our hostess served a supper of chili. Finally everyone said it was time to turn in, and we all went upstairs. Lucy’s and my rooms were on the same floor. On the landing I kissed her good night lightly on the lips, whereupon she stuck her tongue deep into my mouth. Her hand strayed down to my crotch. When she was next able to speak it was to whisper: I won’t be long! She wore silk pajamas, preferred the missionary position, and, when I murmured that it would be prudent for me to withdraw, she murmured back, You don’t need to, I’ve put in my diaphragm. She was the first girl I had slept with who was so equipped. That’s all that happened. Why was there no sequel, not even the following night, while we were still under the same roof? It’s hard to tell, across the wide expanse of time, but I was a mediocre lover, lacking both talent and stamina, a deficiency that didn’t prevent me from having brief liaisons, sometimes more than one at a time. But these episodes—really that’s all they were—didn’t leave a strong impression on me or, I fear, on the objects of my attentions. As one of them, a British photographer, told me disobligingly, I seemed to enjoy the company of women without liking sex. All that changed with the advent of Bella.