by Louis Begley
As we were parting he asked me: Do you understand them better?
Not yet, I told him.
Well, said Alex, let me add to your confusion. A month or so after that day of drama, when Thomas already had an apartment and had moved into it, we had lunch at the club. We chatted about Jamie and the difficult time he was going through and how he, Thomas, in his mind had been going over and over the breakup and the chronology of his awful marriage. I was commiserating with him, conscious, I must say, of the role I had played in that affair, when all of a sudden Thomas said, Stop, Alex! I’m going to tell you something that may make you think I’m crazy. If I had my life to live again, there is still no way I could stop myself from marrying her.
X
THERE WAS TO BE no immediate attempt on my part to find an answer to the question Alex had asked while we were saying goodbye. No, I wasn’t sure I understood Thomas and Lucy better, and I wasn’t sure that I cared. A great impatience had overcome me. The moment I got home, without even checking telephone messages, I sat down at my desk and started work on the real book, stored in my laptop, that was nearing completion, and banished all thoughts of Lucy and Thomas. Their book, I had told myself as I walked west and then uptown after I had dropped off Alex, was a pipe dream; and in comparison with the crisis faced by the characters I had invented, the travails of Lucy and Thomas, however real, were unconvincing, perhaps even lacking in authenticity! Had Tolstoy ever said that all unhappy marriages are alike? If he hadn’t, he should have: I felt I had stumbled on an important truth. Whether or not I had, I worked hard that afternoon and early evening, didn’t allow my mind to wander, and by nine o’clock I had overshot my daily target of twelve hundred words. Tired and drained of ideas, I had a bath, put on a CD of Haydn sonatas, a recent present from a German friend, and made myself a dinner of scrambled eggs, soft Vermont goat cheese, two peaches—the first ripe ones I had been able to find at the supermarket—and a half bottle of Côtes du Rhône. I ate at the kitchen table. In the state of relaxation induced by the music and the wine, I surrendered guiltily to my fixation on Lucy and Thomas.
Alex had told me that the last time he saw Thomas was toward the end of January 1998, less than two weeks before the accident in Bahia. That put it less than a year after my own last meeting with Thomas and Jane, in Paris, in mid-April 1997. Thomas claimed that the Supreme Court had made a fatal mistake by ruling that Paula Jones could pursue her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton while he was still in office. They’ve opened a true Pandora’s box, he said, and put the country on the road to a wholly unnecessary constitutional crisis.
Jane found Thomas’s position unprincipled and shocking. If there is anything to the story that woman has told under oath, why should he get away with that sort of behavior just because soon after it took place he was elected president?
No reason, he answered, except that there will be no end to the way he will be harassed. Don’t forget that this fellow Kenneth Starr has all the right wing nuts in the country egging him on. He’ll put every piece of Clinton’s dirty laundry on public view, all of his mostly revolting sexual peccadilloes, and do serious damage to his presidency. It’s all right with the American public if the president wastes his time on the golf links. But sex! They’ll crucify him for it, even though it’s a pastime that takes less time and is probably better for you than golf.
The service at the restaurant on avenue Montaigne to which Thomas had invited me because of a review Jane had read praising the genius of its celebrity chef was desperately slow. It being a Tuesday, when French museums were closed, Thomas had arranged for them a private visit of the royal apartments in Versailles. They were running late, and our meal ended in slight disarray, with promises to get back together before they left Paris but no concrete plan. On the way back to my apartment, walking first along Cours Albert 1er and then the quays, I wished I had eaten less and renewed my vow to avoid gastronomic lunches with visiting Americans, even those I liked a lot. In fact, we didn’t see one another again during that visit. I would have normally looked them up when I came to the States for the summer, but I flew nonstop to the West Coast, where I taught a class in a creative writing program at Berkeley, and from there I went directly to Sharon. I called when I finally passed through New York on my way back to Paris, but they were out of town. That missed opportunity was the last one; when I next traveled to New York, he had been dead for months. The obituary ran in the Herald Tribune as well as the New York Times, and there were substantial articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist. All of them included a vivid description of the accident. Thomas had been swimming off a Bahia beach and was killed by a speedboat with a water skier in tow. The driver, alone in the boat, had been steering with one hand, his head turned in the direction of the skier, whom he didn’t want to lose from sight. Both the boat and the skier ran over Thomas, the boat most likely killing him at once, while Jane, who had waded deep into the water as the scene unfolded, wailed and wailed.
These random memories, as in truth everything I recalled about Thomas, were vivid, but it occurred to me that because of the fascination Lucy held for me, and perhaps also because I remembered Thomas so well that I could, in a sense, take him for granted, I had been focusing almost exclusively on her. I had liked him and had enjoyed his company; that seemed to wrap it up. But it was becoming clear that if I was going to understand what had happened to him and Lucy as a couple, I had better try to think about him more analytically. Whether I was up to it I couldn’t tell, for reasons not unrelated to how I read and write. For example, I’ve never thought I knew what a novel—somebody else’s or mine—is “about,” a failing that has made it difficult to earn a modest supplementary income as an occasional book reviewer or to answer journalists wanting to know what message readers should take away from my most recent book. My stock reply to that last question—one that is in fact quite sincere and not a lame attempt to coin a koan—is that a book is about what it says. Similarly, my characters are the sum of their actions and words as reported by me, so that a string of defining epithets—handsome, intelligent, ambitious, courteous, shy—doesn’t add much that a reader would find valuable. If a further gloss of that sort were required, I doubted that I could do better than something on the order of “godlike Thomas, beloved of Hermes and swift to climb.”
For the truth was that Thomas had climbed with rare skill, and few people could bear witness to his ascent more authoritatively than I, who had invited the polite and garrulous GI on leave to what must have been his first Parisian cocktail party and, some forty years later, was his guest at the hottest restaurant in Paris and saw him offer to Jane, whom a gossip columnist might have termed, however unjustly, a trophy wife, golden apples from the highest branch of the tree of success. I am not thinking only of the suite at the Ritz, the black BMW driven by a chauffeur in uniform that had brought them from the hotel to the restaurant, and into which they climbed en route to a palace normally overrun by tourists and schoolchildren that they would visit in peace and quiet accompanied only by a senior curator. Those were perquisites of a very rich man, of whom there are so many, and Thomas had indeed become very rich. I supposed he had made handsome gifts toward the restoration of the château, perhaps he was on the board of the American association that had done so much for Versailles. It was also possible that in his case it was sufficient to be who he was. But the day before, he and Jane had lunched at the Élysée Palace with the president, who wanted to quiz Thomas about the root causes of the Mexican debt crisis of the 1980s and the restructuring that followed and more generally the lessons it held for banks lending to Russia. And two days later, Jane and he were having dinner with the head of the Banque de France, someone Thomas had gotten to know well who was interested in some of the same issues. It was clear, and indeed it had been clear to me for a long time, that through unusual gifts and force of personality Thomas had risen to a sphere that was frequented by only the rarest of financiers and that he had ascen
ded as a self-made man. I thought of his occasional accounts of the crisis that had engulfed first Mexico and then one country south of the border after another, the conclusions he had drawn, and the process of making his ideas sufficiently acceptable to government officials who were his clients for them to take the actions he thought necessary. They were intellectual and dispassionate, and very unlike the war stories told by other high-level investment bankers—for instance, my cousin Josiah—those heroic boasts about huge deals whose fate had hung on a thread before they were rescued by a telephone call they had made in the dead of the night. Once in a while I had heard Thomas as well speak about the human aspect of his business exploits, but the hallmark of his anecdotes was invariably wistful self-deprecation.
Why then have I allowed myself to think that Thomas had “climbed,” with all the denigrating implications of that expression? Where were my egalitarian, left-of-center ACLU biases and pretensions? The finger pointed at the unreconstructed snob inside me, who could not take his eyes off a damning piece of evidence: barely hatched, the self-made man had had the temerity to marry a highborn heiress. These sour thoughts took me back to the afternoon when Lucy first brought him to my apartment and my amusement at her having a beau who was of all things a townie! And, as I pondered my offhand response, I had to conclude that my choice of the odious verb had been spot on: of course, Thomas had climbed, and Lucy wasn’t wrong to rail that he had wanted to arrive and had used her as a stepladder. He had taken advantage of her social position and her modest fortune, which at the time must have seemed to him pretty grand. But how could it have been otherwise if they were to marry, or even—inconceivable at the time—simply live together in sin? Could he have avoided meeting her family and friends? Would she have liked to spend her and Thomas’s summer vacations and Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other holidays with Mrs. and Mrs. Snow Sr. in their aluminum-shingle colonial somewhere on the wrong side of the tracks in Newport, in preference to the manse she had inherited in Little Compton or the De Bourgh family seat in Bristol? Would she have wanted to live within his means during the period of however many years when he was still a student or when his salary was a pittance? That would have meant residing in Waltham or Somerville rather than on Beacon Street while he was still at the business school and later when she was continuing with her treatment and he had the business-school research and teaching assignment, and in Brooklyn or in the wilds of the West Side, or, horror of horrors, Hoboken, once they had moved to New York. Would that have suited her? If my memory of my first visit to them on Park Avenue was correct, the answer was no. She would have had to do without nannies, full-time cleaning ladies, and housekeepers; one cannot imagine how she would have coped with Jamie. The other side of the coin is that if she had been a long-term investor or even a gambler with steady nerves, if she had been careful to hang on to Thomas instead of goading him into a divorce by a stunt that was truly beyond the pale, in material terms she would have done quite well. He would have most likely stuck with her, and she would have inevitably had her turn at the racetrack betting window, collecting the rich payout. She would have ended up “using” Thomas, his position and his money. Could a couple stay together if one partner begrudged the other what had been given or received unequally? I didn’t think so, and if I was right, the real question might be whether, in a couple that wasn’t in approximate equilibrium, “climbing” had been the purpose of the partner who was poorer or socially inferior at the outset. It was a bet I couldn’t win or lose, but I would have wagered any amount that Thomas had married Lucy because he had fallen for her and hadn’t wanted to lose her, which he feared he would if he didn’t take the plunge. That is not to deny, however, that tucked inside him was a strong instinct for self-preservation, that he would not have risked marrying a woman with her lifestyle, to use an odious expression that was not yet in use at the time, her assumptions about what life owed her, and her psychological fragility, if she had not had enough money. And because Thomas wasn’t quite the straight arrow he sometimes seemed, who could say whether Lucy’s lifestyle and fragility had not been the catnip he couldn’t resist, a fragrance as powerful as the sex?
Having reread my words, I had to laugh at the notion of catnip. If the sweet smell of Lucy’s money and Social Register connections had determined Thomas, or had given him an ever so slight push over the line, he’d been a fool. Certainly, Lucy’s money had made life in Boston and in New York much more comfortable in the early years. Certainly, he had been able to savor guiltily and mostly in secret the sweetness of the De Bourghs’ historical importance and social position, condiments that had also heightened the pleasure of screwing Miss Lucy. But the leg up she had given him, the footstool she’d been? Pure bunk! In its place I saw the contempt in which she’d held him, and how it and the discord between her and Thomas had sapped his energy and, had he been less resilient, would not have failed to clip his wings. There was no getting around it. It wasn’t just Lucy: they had both made a hash of it.
Inexorably, I was led back to Alex’s diagnosis, that the marriage had been doomed because, when you came right down to it, Lucy didn’t like Thomas. Alex was probably right. If she had liked him, she would have been more generous, and Hubert would not have been allowed to come back into her life. But why hadn’t she liked him? He was good-looking, pleasant, and manifestly destined to succeed. She had picked him. Where had she gone wrong?
In the morning, I set out for Zabar’s with the intention of stocking up on smoked fish I would take with me to Sharon the next day, when I moved there for the summer. On Broadway, when I was no more than a hundred yards away from the store, a young woman a few steps ahead of me, talking with great animation into her cell phone, veered toward the curb in order to claim the cab that was discharging a passenger. Unaware, perhaps because my eyes were fixed on her huge head of curly red hair, of the small suitcase she was pulling behind her, I kept walking without changing direction myself until I tripped on something that turned out to be the leash attached to the suitcase. My hands had been clasped behind my back—a habit that is half affectation and half an attempt to alleviate the permanent pain in my lower back. I did not bring them forward fast enough to cushion the fall, and I heard an impressive thud when my forehead hit the sidewalk. The young woman said, Gee, I’m sorry, and got into the cab. Two or three people stopped to observe me. Anxious not to require their assistance or sympathy, I got up smartly, dusted off my trousers and canvas-duck jacket, and was ready to continue to Zabar’s, when one of the bystanders raised her hand and told me I had better do something about the bleeding. I touched my forehead and brought back fingers covered with blood. Next I looked at myself in a store window and saw that the bigger source of the bleeding was a gash in my right eyebrow. There was also a less-alarming abrasion directly above it.
Sewing up my cuts at the St. Luke’s—Roosevelt Hospital emergency room, just beyond Lincoln Center, took less time than I had feared, and I was relieved to learn that the doctor in Sharon would be able to remove the stitches. No change in my schedule was required. I had a sandwich and a big latte at Le Pain Quotidien on West Sixty-Fifth Street and, pleased with my newly displayed stoicism, got my errands done at Zabar’s, packed as soon as I got home, wrote notes to people who I thought might be interested, however tepidly, in my departure, and, after another dinner of scrambled eggs, cheese, peaches, and wine, went to bed. The painkiller the emergency room doctors had given me had the desired hypnotic effect. The dreams I was convinced it had also procured were so swinish that I was able to disregard them. I got up in the morning refreshed, admired my patched-up face in the bathroom mirror, got the car out of the garage, loaded my meager possessions, and drove to Sharon, procul negotiis, as far from the affairs of men as I could manage.
In the third week of August I received a telephone call from Bill Taylor. He was at his house in Lenox; the Tanglewood festival crowds had driven him bats. Was I working too hard to contemplate having a guest, even one who was not only s
elf-sufficient but asked for nothing better than to be allowed to scribble all day, and did I have room? Having finished a complete first draft of my new novel, I was giving myself a breather before starting the serious rereading of the text and the revisions that would follow. But even if I had been in the midst of composition, even if I had been on deadline—a condition I had now managed to avoid for many years—I would have told Bill the same truth: that I was jumping up and down for joy at the prospect of seeing him and that he must come as soon as possible and stay until he was good and tired of Sharon. There is always a little selfish idea in the back of a writer’s head. Mine was that I might get my text printed out in the village, a practice that cost money but avoided putting too much strain on my aged printer, and get Bill to read it. He was a few years older than I; like Alex he had been in the war, and I believe had been in Alex’s class at college. Unlike him, however, Bill had had nothing to do with the Lampoon, final clubs, or even the Signet. His father refused to give him a dime, and he had had no money beyond his scholarship, the GI Bill, and however much of his army pay he had been able to save. Archie MacLeish had admitted him to his writing class in the fall of his freshman year, an unusual if not unprecedented distinction. A collection of Bill’s short stories was published some months after his graduation. I had recognized the quality of his talent as soon as I read them, and my admiration for his work kept growing with the appearance of each new book, of which there were now many.
We didn’t meet until I went to live in Paris, probably because he hadn’t participated in the sillier aspects of undergraduate life. By then he had become close to a number of people involved with the Paris Review, one or two of whom I knew well. But the introduction was made by my friend Guy Seurat, who had become his French publisher—as well as Bella’s and mine. Bill was from New Orleans, where for generations his family had run a livery business that eventually evolved into a carting and moving company. The South was a world I knew only from the southern school of writers, which was then in great vogue. Bill’s works were markedly different from theirs. Mordant and cerebral, shunning flights of rhetoric, his tales of siblings’ internecine struggles over property were closer in mood and outlook to Mauriac’s depictions of cannibalism as practiced by the bourgeoisie of the Bordeaux region than to the treatment of not dissimilar themes by Faulkner and, later, Flannery O’Connor. Like many American writers and artists, he drifted away from Paris in the sixties—I had remained because of Bella—found he didn’t like the way oil and gas money was transforming New Orleans, came back to Paris frequently, staying in a pied-à-terre in the Marais, but in the seventies and the eighties had lived principally in a fourth-floor railroad walk-up on upper Lexington Avenue that he shared with Dick Berger, a conceptual artist slowly becoming fashionable. Toward the end of that period, after Dick had dumped him unceremoniously, Bill bought an old house on a quiet side street in Lenox. We had hit it off in Paris, becoming good professional colleagues. But it was Bella whom Bill had loved, who knew the ins and outs of his affairs, including the disastrous entanglement with Dick, and who dispensed advice and consolation. Once we had fixed up the house in Sharon, Bill started a tradition of visiting us there each summer, usually around Labor Day. He drew closer to me after she died, as though I had been left to him in her will. He too was alone now; one younger man after another left him for reasons Bill couldn’t fathom or didn’t care to discuss.
