by Louis Begley
A couple of days after his arrival I invited my cousin Josiah and his wife, Molly, to dinner. Bill liked them. Our meals with them, and whichever of their daughters and granddaughters happened to be around, had also become a tradition. This time they came alone. We ate on the screened porch seated so that we could all admire the moon, which had risen early and hung over us like a yellow lantern. I had dispensed with the services of Mrs. James and served steaks I broiled on my small outdoor grill, boiled new potatoes, and a tomato salad, followed by a peach tart baked by Mrs. James’s daughter. It was the kind of dinner Bella would have chosen for a hot August night, and I couldn’t help being pleased that I had pulled it off. Except for Molly, who was going to drive, we drank more of my old Chinon than was reasonable, and I didn’t mind Josiah’s ribbing me about my conferences with Alex and general obsession with Thomas and Lucy.
Really, Bill interjected, Philip still sees her? I kicked the habit so long ago that if you asked me whether she was dead or alive I would have had to say I’m not sure. I do know that Thomas died some years ago, and she certainly wasn’t dead at the time of the accident. The Times said he’d been survived by both wives. Of course, I know Jane. She’s interviewed me. I confess that I used to know Lucy very much better; we’d see each other all the time in Paris and then in New York, when Dick Berger and I were still together. I even knew Thomas; I’d see him in New York. Then it was all over. Still, why do you suppose the thought that Lucy might not be alive has crossed my mind? Wishful thinking?
Josiah laughed. It’s because dying has become such a habit! But rest assured. Lucy’s alive and kicking. Philip can fill you in. He is currently the world’s leading expert.
I hadn’t liked the bitchy edge of Bill’s remarks about Lucy and was glad that the conversation veered to Iraq. The day before, a suicide bomber had blown up the UN headquarters in Baghdad killing the UN’s head representative in Iraq and more than a dozen other people. The cluelessness of Paul Bremer, our new proconsul, the incipient religious war in that benighted country, the looting of its art treasures that our military failed to stop, and the sneak attacks on our troops filled all of us with apprehension and gloom. At least we’ve gotten rid of Saddam, Josiah interjected, breaking the silence. Bill protested that if America was on a quest to slay dragons, there were many others waiting in line, some even more monstrous, like Kim Jong Il. He for one was convinced that if we continued on that path the end result would be the demoralization of our country and the eventual unhinging of its economy. All his money, he said, except for an amount in cash that he figured was roughly equal to one year’s expenses, was in stocks. Should he sell? If he sold, what should he buy? Josiah gave him long-winded advice about the need to diversify and the virtues of investing in equities. As for himself, he said he was buying gold for his family’s life-buoy fund. Gold coins. You could always find a buyer, even if some crisis made you unable to get your money from the ATM. In addition, unless you’re dumb, you’ll be able to finesse paying tax on the gain. And believe me, he added, if you hold gold you will have gains.
The next day I screwed up my courage and asked Bill whether he would read the draft. He said he’d be glad to. In return, he wanted to know about my new interest in Lucy.
I noticed, he added, that I shocked you by what I said about her yesterday evening. I’d had one bourbon too many before dinner and too much of your wine. The fact is I can’t forgive her for how she behaved when Dick and I broke up. Perhaps I should, but I can’t.
I told him my interest was anything but new; I too had known her in Paris, had seen her on and off in New York, and in May, right after my return to New York, I’d run into her at the ballet. The change in her had shocked and fascinated me. I didn’t mean the change in her appearance—in that respect she was doing as well as could be hoped. It was the simmering anger that could at any moment, one felt, boil over as rage, resentment, and bitterness the potential for which I had not detected in her before. She’d become humorless. The rawness of her hostility toward Thomas, perhaps hatred, even though the guy had been dead since 1998, and they’d been divorced for at least twenty-five years, shocked and surprised me. What had he done to her? What had she done to him? As I said, the guy is dead, and while he was alive he wasn’t all that bad. I had liked him.
Bill laughed and said, It’s not all that mysterious. She’s fucked up her life. Deep down she knows it, but that’s no help because she can’t and won’t admit she’s done it to herself and so must find someone else to blame. Thomas has been the logical candidate, and now the poor guy can’t even try to defend himself. I really did know her very well, both in Paris and in New York. In fact, I was her bosom friend and father confessor, though not her director of conscience, and did she ever need one! That stopped when Dick left me and she took his side—gratuitously, stupidly, and viciously. As I told you, I’ve not forgiven her; we haven’t communicated since then. Not that she has tried to apologize or make up! No, admitting that she’s in the wrong isn’t in her DNA. Anyway, to go back to the time when we were best friends, a sort of relationship that develops more often than you probably realize between a gay man and a girl who gets herself banged by practically everyone she meets, including weirdos like that Swiss guy Hubert. She must have someone to talk to. Who could be more comfy than a nice queer like me who happens to like the company of women? She could tease my cock all she wanted, without having to put out, and get sympathy from someone whose own sex life wasn’t then and isn’t now all that simple. I used to tell her my troubles too! Did you know the dreaded Hubert? Come to think of it, you must. He was friends with Guy Seurat.
I shook my head and added that I’d heard about him—from Lucy.
Just as well you didn’t have the pleasure, said Bill, he was a nasty piece of work. The key to Lucy is that she’s a goddamn romantic. She’s probably told you that Hubert fucked like a god, or something like that, and that he was at the time an important journalist. I think, though, what clinched the deal was his status as a fearless and very competent mountain climber. That’s on top of the skiing. Do you know about that?
Again, I shook my head.
Well, he’s climbed the north face of the Matterhorn alone, with just one guide, and also the north face of the Eiger, which is said to be a real killer. If he hadn’t existed, she’d have had to invent him: a sadist with a big death wish! What more could Lucy have wanted? Or take the fling she had with Aly Khan! Do you know about that? He tucked her in between Rita Hayworth and Bettina. They’d go on those wild nighttime dashes to Deauville because one of his horses was doing something or other and he had to be there. She told me afterward that she’s never been so scared in her life as with him in one of his cars. The sex, as described by her, was life threatening too.
I didn’t know about Aly, I said. I guess I didn’t read the right papers.
They managed to keep it very quiet, Bill replied. I don’t know how they did it, but it worked, the only squib in the press was in Paris-presse: Prince Aly adds American aristocrat to his haras, his stud farm. No other paper picked it up.
The recollection made Bill laugh so hard tears came into his eyes. He wiped them and continued. I’ll propound a theory worthy of Havelock Ellis. For neurotic romantics like Lucy, real sexual attraction, and what you might call love, exist at two antipodes. One is inhabited by generic romantic lovers, preferably artists or writers. These are the good guys, but they’re not allowed to be weak, which when you think of most of our colleagues is a big problem. Domineering bastards and sadists are on the prowl at the other antipode. That’s Hubert’s domain. The question is how did Miss Lucy with her De Bourgh pride and so forth—someone in Paris who knew the parents well, perhaps the ambassador with whom I was quite chummy, once told me De Bourghs didn’t believe they piss and shit like other people—justify to herself letting him use her the way he did once the heavy stuff began? That’s where I believe and I’d bet anything the aura of adventure—his skiing, Matterhorn and Eiger—were usefu
l credentials. They validated what she was doing—and even more important what he was doing to her. That leaves the space between the antipodes, where only casual sex can and does take place. It is there, in that empty lot, I am convinced, that she met Thomas, and that is where the affair with him should have remained. We don’t know whether Lucy in fact has ever had the ideal romantic lover, or who he might have been, but he sure wasn’t Thomas. And Thomas, unfortunately for him, wasn’t Hubert lite either. If only! Then she would have loved him madly and forgiven him everything unless, like Hubert, he really crossed a bright red line. But as it was, poor Thomas was fated to have a raw deal.
I should tell you, he continued, that I had many occasions to observe the Snow ménage in action. Dick and I got the place on Lexington Avenue soon after they settled in the city. She and I had been in touch, so we got together right away. It was pathetic how she was gasping for breath, desperate not to be smothered by the boredom of the existence those two had staggered into: those office colleagues with whom Thomas wanted her to socialize, other bankers, Josiah included, lawyers with whom he worked on deals. What a distance from the sort of people to whom she’d gotten accustomed in Paris! Actually, many of the Paris crowd were here, but she had lost track of them, and they hadn’t been exactly looking for her. Between you, me, and the doorpost, so far as most were concerned she’d been nothing more than a hanger-on who gave little cocktail parties and dinners with good food. That had been useful to them in Paris, but even if she’d tried to lure them in New York, it cut no ice. You know how such things go. Old friends drop into a black hole or become too successful. So I did my best. For instance, I got her together with Penny Stone, you probably remember her, a southern girl who’d been studying painting, did some modeling, and turned to photography and was doing shoots for Vogue. She took Lucy to gallery openings and introduced her to some of her friends. There was Mac Howell, a pretty good poet. Through him she met Gianfranco Rossi and a whole gang of painters. Of course none of them was respectable from Thomas’s point of view, some of them, especially Mac, drank a lot, and they smoked pot—or hash if they could get it—and some dropped LSD. Hell, we all did, and Lucy quite liked the pot and the hash! She didn’t have the nerve to try any of the really good stuff. Anyway, in Thomas’s opinion they weren’t people who could be invited to dinner or whatever with his friends. Then Dick and I began to have an open house party on Thursday evenings. Let me tell you, everyone came. It would get so jam-packed that people were queuing in the staircase. Of course, I issued a standing invitation to Lucy and Thomas. She came regularly, and for a while Thomas came too because he’d recognized that these were happenings, social events that were mentioned in gossip columns and so forth. Lucy did just fine in that setting, just as she had in Paris, but Thomas had a way of creating a void around himself. He wasn’t rude—just icy and covertly hostile. You didn’t have to have a particularly thin skin to sense that he was uncomfortable, that he wished he were somewhere else, that he certainly would have preferred to be talking to someone else, and, above all, that he disapproved. They must have had it out about how he antagonized people at our parties, because after a while she always came alone. He plain stopped showing up. So Lucy went on meeting Penny and Mac and some of the others in bars or at Penny’s, and they drank and got stoned together, but the idea of her creating the kind of salon she more or less had in Paris was out of the question. Not with the aptly named boreal Thomas Snow! There is a whole other chapter to be written, by the way. At a time when we all, Lucy included, locked elbows and demonstrated against the war, Thomas was for LBJ. He thought he was a great president! He thought we were in Vietnam to protect our vital interests. Of course, he recanted long before the Pentagon Papers came out, but all the same he remained in deep disgrace.
You really disliked him, I ventured. Lucy married Charles Bovary! Is that what you’re telling me? Why not come out and say it?
Not at all, Bill answered, although one learns a great deal more from novels than from life. I liked him all right, and of all the Paris hands he met in New York during that time I was the only one he seemed to take to and approve of. Not exclusively because of my charm, I believe. My modest celebrity played a role. His friends would have read reviews, some even knew my books, so I was a quasi bohemian who could be invited with them. No, there was nothing wrong with Thomas if you took him on his terms, as a very bright, very ambitious, bound-to-succeed, nice-looking investment banker, with very good manners that had been learned. I do not think they came from the heart. Charles Bovary? Certainly not. Thomas wasn’t a stupid oaf; he was self-aware, and I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that nothing I have told you about the effect he’d had on Lucy’s friends would have come to him as a surprise. He most certainly didn’t botch any operations on anyone’s clubfoot. Metaphorically speaking, of course. In fact, to my knowledge the only really stupid thing he ever did was to marry Miss De Bourgh.
Had Bill deepened my understanding of Lucy? I thought he probably had, making me visualize an aspect of her life with Thomas I knew nothing about. He was right not to see Thomas as a sort of Charles Bovary—of that I was sure—and Lucy, with her intelligence, haughty sense of caste, and, let’s face it, money, was worlds away from the beautiful provincial fool who had read too many novels. But I had not made much progress in my effort to see Thomas more clearly. Except for one thought that was taking form in my mind: that there was no mystery; he was quite simply what he appeared to be, a fine example of the American dream come true. Work hard and succeed! And he had had all the necessary equipment: high intelligence and good looks. There was also the fact that he had managed to make a beautiful and devilishly bright girl like Jane happy. Not a bad reference, Jane’s having apparently been happy with her lawyer husband Horace until he had crossed her red line, and being by her own admission happy with her current banker husband, Ned, didn’t lessen its relevance or weight. Putting Horace’s peccadilloes aside, all three corresponded to a type she found acceptable. Jane was no romantic; she was a modern American woman perfectly clear about what she wanted.
XI
A FEW DAYS AFTER Bill left for Lenox, a FedEx envelope addressed to me arrived at my house in Sharon, an unusual event unless I am working on a manuscript with the rare editor who isn’t too cheap to use that service. Inside the envelope I found, to my considerable surprise, a long letter from Jamie. He wrote that he had intended to visit me in New York and then, after he had learned from Jane that I had moved to the country for the balance of the summer, had decided to ask to see me in Sharon, that his plans for travel to the East Coast had been frustrated by Stella’s—that was his wife’s name—pregnancy. Having had two successive miscarriages late in term, she was understandably nervous about his being away. The baby wasn’t due until November; doubtless it would be difficult to leave right after it had been born, and he didn’t want to postpone getting in touch with me until the New Year. There followed a development, which I found very touching, about old memories: the occasional weekend foray with his father and me to P.J. Clarke’s and the cheeseburgers that still made his mouth water, the Tintin and Astérix comic books I used to bring him from Paris, the time his father and he spent a week with Aunt Bella—an appellation that invariably brings tears to my eyes—and me at the house we owned at the time on Île de Ré, and the fun it had been to go out in my sailboat. He hoped I would allow him to show me some of his recent work, including the adaptation he had completed of a Jack London novel, which actually seemed likely to go into production.
Then he came to the point. He’d heard from Jane that I’d been talking to her and Lucy about his father and, just like everybody connected with Lucy and his father’s “case,” he wanted his testimony to be entered on the record. Some of what he wrote I had already heard. The firsthand account of the effect of the breakup on Jamie was new and saddened me deeply:
Dad stormed out and Mom went absolutely bonkers. She made herself a drink, put on her favorite 45 rpm with this Piaf song “R
ien de rien, non je ne regrette rien de rien” and played it over and over and over. She danced to it, drink in hand. Then it was suddenly summer, and it was surely the worst summer of my life. Mom and Dad hadn’t worked out anything before he left, such things as when I could see him, what would happen during vacations, and other stuff of that sort, and they were really furious at each other, totally unable to communicate. Right after graduation, Mr. Cowles, the St. Bernard’s master who tutored me, and I went up to Little Compton. Mrs. Smith, the cook, went with us to keep house. Mom said she had to stay in the city until her doctor went on vacation, but she drove up on weekends, green about the gills and as cross as two sticks. Those weekends weren’t great. Mr. Cowles would take off, as did the cook, and I had to tiptoe around the house because Mom mostly slept. Or she’d go out and leave Mrs. Ticknor, an old biddy with bad breath, in charge because she thought it was wrong not to have an adult in the house. Not that I needed her, at the age of fourteen, in a very safe community. Anyway, although Mom didn’t know it, Mrs. Ticknor would start hitting the liquor closet pretty hard as soon as Mom was out of the driveway. She’d been Mom’s social science teacher or something; Mom explained to Mr. Cowles and me that the Ticknors were a very good Rhode Island or Connecticut family that had lost all its money. Mr. Cowles—I was actually calling him Hugh by that time—was really into that sort of thing. Finally, I turned Mrs. T. in to Mom. You can imagine the row. Afterward, Mrs. Ticknor came by the house when Mom had gone back to the city and cursed me and said she was giving me the evil eye! During the week it was actually all right, because Hugh and I would go to the club to play tennis in the morning, and in the afternoon we’d sail the Mercury Dad had given me for graduation. Then came the real big row, when Dad arrived on a Tuesday and took me to Newport because it was my grandfather Snow’s seventieth birthday. We came back pretty early in the evening, but in the meantime Mom had called and asked to speak to me, and Hugh had no choice: he told her where I was. Mom went wild and yelled at him, then yelled at me when we got back, and when Dad took the telephone she yelled at him until he hung up on her. We’d called her back when we returned because she’d told Hugh she’d get the police if we didn’t. Even without the cops, the legal stuff began right away. Mom tried to get an order to prevent Dad from showing up. That got nowhere. Then Dad was advised to get some sort of order that would regularize his being able to see me, but that dragged on, and before it was resolved I was at Exeter and away from this mess.
