by Louis Begley
Thereupon Hubert says he and Jacques need to talk, and they withdraw into his small conference room. I stay in my armchair and pick up an issue of The New Yorker on his coffee table. After about twenty minutes Hubert returns alone and tells me that he’s disappointed. All things considered he doesn’t think that our relationship can continue on the same basis as before. I ask him to explain in simple French what that means. He said he isn’t completely sure, but he no longer has complete confidence in my advice, so certainly I can’t be his personal adviser. At the same time, he doesn’t think I could work well with Jacques Blondet, who’s moving to Brussels anyway to run the former foreign business of l’Occident for Sainte-Terre from there. That leaves him at a loss, and, in any case, he wants to tell me once again that he’s deeply hurt. How could I have abandoned him in the Occident transaction? My place was at his side. I asked whether he truly believed the logic of his statements. I don’t know, he tells me. I am a very emotional man. That’s when I finally take the hint and say, I have just figured out what you’ve been telling me. Our relationship, professional and personal, is over. He doesn’t say anything so I stand up, say goodbye, and ask him to say goodbye to Jacques for me. As I’m going out the door, he calls out, Henry, there’s one more thing. Shut the door. I didn’t want to tell you this in front of Jacques, he says, but there has been one other unpleasant development. The French ambassador in Brussels called me this morning and said that, unfortunately, in view of what has happened, I won’t be promoted to the grade of commander in the Legion of Honor. When I heard that, Henry said, I couldn’t restrain myself anymore and I burst out laughing. You can’t imagine Hubert’s face. It was as though I had thrown a pie at him.
That was the end of any serious talk that evening at Lucas Carton. Henry was dead tired. Besides, the wine may have gone to his head. He did say he’d have more to tell me in the next couple of days and promised to call me. Before that happened, however, George telephoned.
It’s a mess, said George, and Henry’s taking it very hard. People here are worried. It’s understood that his relationship with Sainte-Terre is over, which is pretty ironic given that Henry has just pulled off the coup of the century for him. Unfortunately there is no one either in Paris or in New York who can step in and hold on to Hubert as a client until he comes to his senses. Anyway, Henry is making rather theatrical statements about the future. I don’t want to get into just what he is saying because it may all blow over. But I wanted to alert you to the fact that Henry is in trouble.
I asked whether Henry had any work other than that for Sainte-Terre. From the outside, I said, it seemed as though he had been spending all his time on that one client.
That’s the problem, replied George, people are asking whether he can be effective in Paris without that work, and it’s not clear how he would manage a transition to New York. The management thinks it will work out, if he is patient and doesn’t fly off the handle. It’s some of the younger guys who are worked up. Call me if you find out anything you think I should know.
There was an article I was doing for a U.S. weekly on the debut year of French socialism. But what I hoped would be a distraction only reminded me of Henry and his troubles. I once again called Margot. There was no answer, and no answering machine, although I tried a number of times. I asked my editor whether he knew where Margot and Jean might be. He expressed surprise at my ignorance and said that he didn’t think he would betray any confidence by telling me what was quite generally talked about in literary circles: Margot had gone off with an American moviemaker—he mentioned a name with which I was unfamiliar—the boy was in Switzerland, and Jean was traveling. Some sort of program of readings and lectures in Quebec. He had no more specific notion of Margot’s whereabouts.
Four days later, I did hear from Henry.
Look, he said. You’re my oldest friend. I can’t be evasive with you. The truth is that I have decided to make a drastic change in my life—to be more precise, I am inches away from it—I need to think, and a lot of day-to-day stuff, most of it office stuff, is interfering with my coming to a conclusion. Don’t take it amiss if I go off the air for a bit; I may need as much as three weeks. As soon as “the intellect grows sure that all’s arranged in one clear view,” you and I will meet.
I didn’t know whether this was good news or bad; in any case it was important. And yet so imprecise that I didn’t think I would violate Henry’s confidence if I reported it at once to George.
He said, That’s pretty much what he told our new presiding partner, Jake Weir. It’s a good thing that Henry has a real fan in Jake.
My agent telephoned me the same day to inform me that a well-known director wanted to do a film based on a trilogy I had written in the late sixties and early seventies. He wanted to meet me before committing, and the feeling was mutual. I left a message with Henry’s secretary telling him that I was going to the West Coast, that he could reach me by telephone, and that, in any event, I would be back in a week’s time. I left a note to the same effect at his apartment. As an additional precaution, I called my French publisher and asked him to tell Margot how I could be reached, if she reappeared.
Meetings dragged on, and I extended my stay on the West Coast by another week. However, my anxiety about Henry was growing, and I called his apartment every evening Paris time and his office during the day. Either he was still away thinking or he had asked his admirably collected and polite secretary to lie. Obviously it would have been sensible to break up my trip by spending a couple of days in New York, but I decided against it and arrived in Paris on the Day of the Dead. The city was empty and slick with rain.
XXXIII
I SUPPOSE there is very little that you don’t know about yourself, Henry said when we next saw each other. You started writing so early—and you’ve been seeing a shrink forever. Between the analysis and your novels, I can’t imagine that you have left one square millimeter of your self unexplored.
It’s not that simple, I told him. We change. We practice to deceive. The moment you get past one ingenious disguise you discover another one behind it. I’m not even sure that there ever was a true self for me to unmask—unless it’s the sum of my private lies and appropriations.
Perhaps one day I’ll come to some such conclusion, Henry said; I’m only getting started. This shameful business with Hubert de Sainte-Terre and l’Occident has left me disgusted and exhausted, but it’s had one welcome consequence: I’ve had no work to do, so for once I’ve thought about myself rather than my clients and the wondrous results I can achieve for them. I don’t want to mislead you. As you know, for a long time now to me “clients” has meant Hubert and his businesses. I’ve given you blow-by-blow descriptions of his behavior over l’Occident. Over the years we’ve talked about the kind of work I was doing for him and the friendship that had developed between us. George has probably filled in many gaps; he’s always loved office gossip. All the same, I don’t see why you’d realize what I’ll immodestly call the scope of my achievement. I’ll give you an idea of it—even at the risk of seeming to boast. Until a couple of weeks?—a month?—ago not even one of Hubert’s sycophants would have even thought of denying that I’ve given the boss impeccable advice. Indeed I had. I’ve saved him millions upon millions by making sense of how his companies are owned. I’ve put the kibosh on any number of harebrained schemes in which he would have been rolled if not defrauded. I’ve gotten him out of unpleasant and sticky messes that threatened his reputation. In this l’Occident gambit alone he will double his stake within two years, and that’s a lot of money. I realize that since I refused to do the Occident deal my taking credit for it can be disputed, but without me there wouldn’t have been a deal. So perhaps I’m entitled to fifty percent of the credit. I could add other examples, but that’s enough to put the ingratitude in context. On the minus side, there’s an incalculable loss. I don’t know what money value to put on Hubert’s having to wait until the next government change before he gets to be command
er in the Legion of Honor. The initial cost in wounded pride must have been considerable. I would have hated to see the tantrum he threw after that telephone call with the French ambassador. On the other hand, he can blame the Socialists for the insult and that should take some of the sting out. Well, I too am capable of throwing a fit. Do you remember Hubert’s gift at the Grand Véfour of Les illusions perdues? I told you about it.
I nodded.
It showed his intelligence, which is powerful and eerily subtle. He understands me. You see, I’m giving him his due. He knew that for all my own intelligence, experience as a lawyer, and personal history—my less-than-happy childhood and the accelerated Americanization I have undergone, about both of which he has grilled me—I was in secret a starry-eyed romantic! Full of illusions, including illusions about where I stood in relation to him! I’ve done some growing up in this and some other departments, but for the moment I am just reporting where I was and where I am now in this particular regard. I no longer have any illusions about Hubert. Actually I began losing them before he kicked me in the teeth, but obviously I wasn’t ready to put a name on what I was seeing. So there were incidents that sent a chill through me that I duly noted but did nothing about. I’ll give you two examples, one serious and one comical. Jacques Blondet is another ungrateful SOB whose neck I’ve saved countless times, mainly by renegotiating deals in which he left too much of the boss’s money on the table, which in Hubert’s eyes is a capital offense. Usually I’d manage to get some of the cash back so that the deal looked better. To my surprise, I learned that in connection with those very deals Jacques was spreading the word that I’m a Shylock, always looking to take my pound of flesh, while he’s the guardian of Hubert’s elegant style of fair dealing.
I nodded, remembering Blondet’s remarks to me in Brussels.
That’s the sort of twaddle to which ordinarily I wouldn’t have paid any mind, and certainly it wouldn’t have had any bearing on feelings toward Hubert. But I learned from another one of Hubert’s flunkies that Hubert was perfectly au courant of Blondet’s game and in fact got a big kick out of it. One thing led to another, and I discovered that setting people who work for him against each other like fighting cocks is one of the count’s preferred pastimes—right up there with skiing. It is perfectly possible that he arranged for me to be told that he was watching. There are other such sadistic pastimes. I’ll return to one in particular. But here is the funny story: Remember the Latin correspondence Hubert conducted with me? It turns out that, like the pope, he has a Latin secretary, who ghostwrites his Latin letters and verse. Of course, Hubert reads Latin well, in fact, better than many people who have at some point been serious about Latin, and has memorized snatches of poems, but that isn’t enough to enable you to write. That’s a different skill. So he fakes it. Incidentally, after I told him about my dictionary his Latin letters stopped. He knew that his letters were no longer a torment. By the way, I suppose you know that he cheats on Gilberte.
I said that years ago George had told me something along those lines that he had heard from Derek de Rham.
Ah, yes, said Henry. I know Derek’s stories. There are dozens and dozens like them, most of them true. Hubert used to regale me with them—especially about ongoing messes—with emphasis on the more sordid details. At first I thought that this was the high-class Belgian equivalent of guys in the barracks telling tall stories about the pussy they’d got themselves in Pigalle on a Saturday evening pass, but no, this was the real stuff, about women who weren’t professionals. In fact, I know some of them. All right, I guess that if a man wants to lay women about whom he says such things that’s his affair, and if he wants to tell them to his lawyer it’s up to the lawyer to stop him if he feels disgusted. I didn’t; it seemed part of our intimacy. But Hubert’s indiscretion is such that I found Gilberte occasionally revealing, by a phrase she’d drop in what had to be moments of distraction, and by certain silences, that she too was au courant. Poor woman! Hubert impressed me so much, I was so stagestruck, so flattered by the attention he paid to me, so wrapped up in my work for him, that I was inexcusably slow to wake up. I had too much at stake, both professionally and in my personal life, to say to myself in so many words that Hubert is a shit and can’t be my friend even if he can be a client. But when I did awaken—paradoxically, since my own relations with women haven’t always been what they should be—it was this instance of Hubert’s misconduct, his disloyalty and appalling treatment of Gilberte, that put the ugly Hubert in focus: the sadist and overbearing bully preying on whoever can’t stand up to him. So much for my admired rapace!
He caught his breath and continued. So, while final ingratitude and the kick in the teeth hurt, there was no way that I could, without loss of honor, continue to serve him as a lawyer. A lawyer has to be in his client’s corner and defend his interests zealously, and I was, alas, at the point of not being sure whether I still respected Hubert or wished him well. Not that I am at all convinced that I could have gone on serving him as a client if what has passed for friendship were withdrawn by him or by me: that’s not the way he works.
He asked the sommelier for another bottle of burgundy and was silent until the wine had been brought to the table, decanted, and poured into glasses.
I’ve spoken with a good deal of warmth, he said, about this ghastly disappointment, and I want to be sure that you don’t draw the wrong conclusion. Losing Hubert’s business hasn’t rattled me, however much it may have upset my firm. If I want to, I can replace Hubert by other clients who will bring the firm as large a stream of revenues or greater. The specialty I have is putting together jigsaw puzzles made of bits and pieces of legal systems that were never meant to fit together. There isn’t anyone in Europe or New York who can do it as well as I can; that’s a simple and unchallengeable fact. I gather that some young Turks in New York think that I have thoughtlessly killed the golden goose. Fortunately Jake Weir, who is now the head of the firm, doesn’t buy it. We both know they’re wrong. We’re in agreement that after the few months I might need to regroup, I’d have new work fully as challenging and profitable as Hubert’s. For better or worse it’s an open secret that I am the author of the Occident transaction, and many heads of large financial institutions wouldn’t mind having someone who can invent such strategies advise them. Nor is my falling-out with Hubert a stain on my reputation; clients I’d be interested in and their advisers realize that Hubert has behaved like a horse’s ass.
I said, I’m so happy and so relieved. Let’s drink to bigger and better puzzles!
Not so fast, said Henry. I told you that I’ve been thinking. That has included asking myself about the satisfactions I derive from the exercise of my profession. They’ve been numerous and very intense. In fact, I’ve been very much happier at Wiggins & O’Reilly than I would have imagined possible, given the special—or shall we call them tenebrous—circumstances that led to my being hired. I was truly proud to become a partner. But satisfactions one gets from a job well done don’t increase with each completed assignment no matter how much fuss clients and colleagues make over you. On the other hand, the price you pay for success day in and day out, which is to put other people’s concerns ahead of your own, turns out to be very high. You might even say exorbitant. I’ve read somewhere that survival of the species—at least of the higher orders—reposes on a single anomaly: until senescence, neither the male nor the female tires of orgasms. But I can assure you that nothing I have done as a lawyer has ever come close to giving me a hard-on, never mind the rest.
Was it possible that Henry was aware of Jim Hershey’s intervention on his behalf, or that he wanted to reveal to me Margot’s role in that defining event of his life? When and by what means had he gained this knowledge? And why did he seem to assume that I too possessed it? These were questions I could not put to him. If, as was quite possible, he had blurted out those words, without intending me to understand, just as Margot’s indiscretion, from which I had drawn an unproved inference, wa
s probably involuntary, or if indeed I had misunderstood Margot, there was a risk that, by replying to what I thought he had said, I would humiliate him at the worst possible time, at a moment of great vulnerability. Instead, I raised my hand hoping to slow him down. I wanted to absorb what I had heard.
Henry paid no attention to my gesture or what was surely my pained expression. Hear me out, he said. I am still on the subject of my exercise of free will. I mean to do everything I can to make sure that you understand that I’m not under any obligation to give up my profession or the life I lead. But that’s exactly what I am about to do, as a matter of my own choice, and not because these circumstances have forced the decision on me.
Sam, he continued, with poor Archie dead, with my parents dead, you are the person who has known me the longest and the best. Not even Margot has ever known me so well, because for many years I was putting on an act for her. I’ve never done that with you. You’ve seen me for what I am from the day we met, that first day in the dorm, and you’ve accepted me just as I am. Please accept what I am going to do and promise that you’ll think of me as fondly in the future as you do now.
What are you talking about, I cried out, what are you thinking of doing?
Shh, shh, he said. Let me catch my breath and I will tell you.
When he spoke again, he asked: Have I said in the course of this tirade that I loathe my life?
