Shipwreck

by Louis Begley

  Look, I said to the girl, I’m sorry if I was brusque. Each time I am asked this particular question or one like it I begin to feel that I am suffering from metal fatigue. As though some important structural support inside me were going to crack. Or my arms were going to fall off. Because there isn’t an interviewer who hasn’t asked it. You’d think it mattered, but believe me, it doesn’t; it’s a dead end. So I have perfected a standard answer I am quite resigned to giving. I didn’t give it to you because I thought you deserved better, but I am not sure I have anything better to say. So, if you want the standard speech, go right ahead and turn on your tape recorder.

  That won’t be necessary, was her answer. She opened her notebook, found a clean page, switched to a high-tech ballpoint pen, and waited.

  All right, I said. But first I’ll have another whiskey. It’s outrageous how little liquor they put in a drink in these St. Germain des Prés cafés.

  The waiter brought my drink and, after a large sip, I began: It is a given that a novelist of my sort finds his material principally in his own life. The memory of places he has lived in or has visited and the events in which he has been caught up, even if he was completely passive. He uses his nightmares, fears and sorrows, ambitions and disappointments. Of course, he draws on his joys too. I don’t mean to suggest that only unhappy memories go into the work, although that often seems to be the case. Oh, yes, he also uses everything he has read and has not forgotten, and tales and anecdotes told to him by others. When he is dining out, for instance, like Henry James.

  The look on the girl’s face made clear that we had failed to connect; James was not to be found in the French lycée curriculum. I didn’t let that detail slow me down.

  All sorts of stuff gets stored inside a novelist, I said, including stuff he doesn’t know is there until he begins to write. Was it the effect of the drink or of listening to my own words? I found myself wanting to impress the girl and pushed on with more brio.

  Once the novelist has found, I said—stumbled upon, would be more accurate in most cases—once he has found a subject that attracts him, and makes him want to start a book, he shapes these odds and ends until they become useful material and can be hung like laundry on the line of his story. Garments of words, fashioned word by word and sentence by sentence. This is hard work, and most would give anything to avoid it if only there were some other way a novel could be written. But there isn’t. Not sure that I hadn’t lost the girl again, I tapped my fingers on the table. Forgive the digression, I said. What I hope you will accept as true is that my new novel, just like its brothers and sisters, is autobiographical in only one sense: it’s made out of stuff that life has deposited inside me. But my novels aren’t about me, and none of them is the story of my life.

  The girl wrote busily, put away her pen, and said, This is just what I needed. Thank you again!

  She smiled joyously, displaying regular, strong, and very white teeth. I have always liked women with good teeth. I have to admit that altogether I like the new kind of French. I like their healthy looks. So different from the sallow kids I knew when I was a kid myself, with their passion for politics and their yellow teeth that melted in plain sight as they drank their scotch. Better pediatricians and dentists, a good diet, and vacations given over to strenuous sports, that’s what made the difference. I am constantly astonished to see how the young French get to do everything. Ski the high Alps, sail off the coast of Australia, walk across China—the wonder is they can afford it. Perhaps forgetting about politics has helped too. When I think of what the war in Algeria and May ’68 meant for the French of our generation, I feel like a goddamn museum piece. If there is any great political or social cause like that that could quicken the pulse of this girl or her friends, I assure you that I have not found it. Not even after I got to know her very well.

  But to go back to the interview, North said, I certainly wanted to be fair. You can sympathize with that. So I told the girl: I’ve warned you. When you get ready to put these pronouncements into your article, please remember that this is not the first time I have made them. But, however often repeated, they are what I think. Honest to God.

  Another joyous smile was my recompense.

  It doesn’t matter, she said. I’m not worried about your interviews with other magazines. This one is for our readers.

  I was tempted to ask the girl why she assumed that her readers read only Vogue,but I forbore. We had already talked enough. For that same reason I didn’t tell her there was a follow-up question she should ask: Why is the one story I hadn’t told, and seemed to have no desire to tell, in place of the bits and pieces of it mixed with other bric-a-brac, the story of my life? Had she asked, I might have told her what, at the time, I believed quite strongly: that such need as I had to confess was more than satisfied by the bits and pieces—the occasional allusions tucked into my novels to that unconfessed life. Do these occult messages, to the confection of which I think I have devoted far too much time, have addressees? Lydia is the principal one, of course. There is always the possibility of some other ideal and preternaturally sympathetic reader, too shy to have made himself known or not yet born. It doesn’t matter. Do my messages have a purpose? I used to think of them as minor acts of defiance, like clues that a murderer convinced of having committed the perfect crime feels compelled to leave behind him. In truth, however, I believe that I make up these messages mainly to have fun, which may also hold for the murderer.

  North paused here, his composure perhaps not so complete as it had been. The unexpected silence gave me an opening. I took advantage of it and asked why he hadn’t had the desire to tell it all, to write a memoir. He looked at me queerly and asked, in turn, Don’t you think that the chat we’re having is quite enough? Seeing that I had no ready answer, he extracted a case from the inside pocket of his blazer, opened it, and offered me a cigar. I declined. He took one himself, clipped the end with a penknife, and, once it was drawing satisfactorily, continued his tale.

  At last the photographer was ready. Now I sat on the banquette, across the table from him. As he clicked his way through a series of frames that had me turning away from the lens, I stared at the girl, at first because you have to look at something, but soon with growing interest. She was taller, I realized, than she had seemed when I first saw her rise from a table on the terrace of the Flore, a copy of The Anthillheld aloft so I could identify her. I noted the expensive-looking jeans, the lipstick that gave her a Marilyn Monroe mouth, and the shock of dark blond wavy hair through which she kept running her fingers. She had told me her name: Léa Morini. Jewish, perhaps, though I knew that in France it wasn’t only Jews who might choose that name for a daughter, and there was nothing particularly Jewish about the girl’s features, or her bold, almost rambunctious manner. But, as you know, among the French it is difficult to draw any conclusions from physical type except in extreme cases. The family name, Morini, told me nothing: it could just as easily have been of Corsican as of Sephardic origin. So I pursued thoughts of a different order. Were her parents the sort who would knowingly burden an innocent infant with a biblical tag that might not suit her, or were they tout bêtementignorant of how Laban’s tender-eyed daughter was never the sister Jacob preferred, no matter how hard she tried? Either hypothesis was plausible. After all, little girls are called Gilda, Cordelia, and Judith all the time, as if those names told no story, and also Felicity, perhaps to give the child a push in the direction of happiness, without taking into account the possibility that the child might have to pay for the parental presumption.

  We’re losing you, Monsieur North, said the photographer. You’re somewhere in the clouds.

  Sorry, I replied. Let’s try it again.

  I collected myself, and even offered to put on my reading glasses or to hold them in any one of the gestures I have practiced in the course of hamming it up for many shoots. You know the secret? Always channel energy into your eyes. Otherwise, the camera betrays you. It captures your flaccid face an
d empty stare.

  We finished. I shook hands all around and offered my thanks. Then I remembered my usual injunction to journalists who interview me. There is just one thing, I told the girl, I will have to check any direct quotes you want to use. Not to censor the article; I only want to make sure that I don’t seem incoherent. You know where to find me.

  You’ll have the quotes tomorrow, she replied and gave me her card.

  I read the home address. Rue de l’Abbaye de St. Germain.

  How nice, I said, just around the corner, nestled against the church.

  It is wonderful. My studio is on the top floor. There is no reason you should know it, but I have two careers. I’m also a painter.

  Although it was drizzling, I decided to walk up the boulevard St. Germain to the hotel in the rue du Bac, where Xavier had as usual arranged for me to stay. There was no message from Lydia. My old friend Pierre Lalonde, my best friend in France, had telephoned again. I had not had the chance to return his first call. This time he left a message. He and Marianne were expecting me for dinner at eight-thirty. Would I please confirm? Why Pierre should think that I might have forgotten or changed my mind was puzzling. I have always been meticulous about keeping appointments and arriving on time—something that one could not have said about him. The girl had left a message too. Just to say that she was very grateful. No need to call her back. I have always liked the sort of good manners you can still take for granted in France even if, as in this case, they seem utterly perfunctory, the result of being on automatic pilot in these matters. Obviously, there was no other reason to thank me again by telephone after having thanked me in person less than half an hour earlier. Long ago someone had taught her that this sort of coup de filwas the polite thing to do, and therefore she went ahead and left her telephoned thank-you note without considering whether the act made sense. And perhaps in some way it did, because the gesture turned out to be quite welcome. I received it like a cup of steaming hot tea offered at the end of that dreary afternoon. It also moved me to call Pierre and assure him there was no misunderstanding. Calme-toi.I won’t stand you up.

  I knew that, with the rain, traffic was going to be bad at the dinner hour when all of Paris is on the move. Even so, there was no reason to deprive myself of a drink or a bath. The drink, I thought, must come first. I decided to have it in the hotel bar. Do you know that bar?

  I shook my head.

  Really? It’s in the basement, a long space furnished to replicate some Frenchman’s idea of an English club. Left Bank editors and publishers have made it their headquarters since the beginning of time. That’s where they meet their writers, and, I bet even more important, their partners in adultery. Discretion is supposed to be guaranteed by the dimness of the light. That is, of course, pure nonsense, a blague.As one look around this place will teach you, eyes adjust to darkness rather quickly. For my taste, it was carried too far, like all farces. I am thinking of a dashing editor I know with a remarkable stable of Latin American writers. Hot properties in France, and in Germany as well. He used to have lunch there, every day, weekends excepted, always at the same table, with his mistress, who was not in publishing. She happened to be married to a man who had been two years behind me at college. Three lovely children, house near Fontainebleau, and so forth. At the other end of the room, but not more than forty-five feet away, was the table at which this dashing editor’s wife lunched, also every workday of the week, with one of her husband’s colleagues, a specialist in Central European literature at the very same publishing house. The wife of the Central European expert worked in publishing as well, in publicity, but at another house. Tact, sadism, or plain carelessness? You tell me. In theory, face was saved, because the first couple arrived invariably at one o’clock, and the other, just as methodically, after one-fifteen. I remember being shocked not merely by the fact of adultery but by the casual acceptance of it by each of the four. Whether my college friend and the publicist wife were au courantis another matter. I hope they were blind and naive. How much heartache and bitterness lay behind these arrangements, I have no idea. The fact is that they clashed violently with my own sense of acceptable behavior.

  Anyway, at the end of that afternoon in May there was no one in the bar whom I recognized, which was just as well. The interview with the girl at the Flore had worn me out, and I knew that there would be more than enough conversation later. I found a table away from the crowd, settled down in one of those club chairs with which the place was furnished, and ordered a drink—scotch, out of caution, in preference to gin— and a smoked-salmon sandwich to line my stomach: father’s prescription for getting through a round of diplomatic parties with flying colors. There would be plenty of drinking at Pierre’s as well. You may be surprised, seeing me guzzle here, to hear that I had given any thought to how much I would drink that evening. I hope it won’t disappoint you to learn that my consumption of alcohol is ordinarily quite unremarkable— hardly above the level that my doctor, a very reasonable fellow to be sure, finds acceptable. No, I wasn’t hitting the bottle at the time when these events took place. The dinner was certain to begin and to end late. There was nothing to be done about that. With luck, if there were no other guests, I would get away before midnight, right after coffee. In that case I might catch Lydia at home, after the hospital and before she went out to dinner. I supposed that she would be going out to her sister’s or her brother’s, in which case, if I missed her, I could call at home, first thing in the morning her time. Trying to get through at the hospital was a time-consuming and irritating nuisance to be avoided whenever possible. Or, indeed, I could ask to use the telephone at Pierre’s. Leaving his party early, before the last guest had kissed Marianne’s hand, before that old reprobate and I had had a last whiskey or, if he happened to be in touch with a good, small producer, a calvados, invariably struck Pierre as preposterous. As did my confessing that I felt tired. We had always loved our private tours d’horizonat the end of the evening, which covered everything from his business through the wonders being accomplished by his two daughters—the elder was studying composition at the Paris Conservatoire; the younger, my goddaughter Mélanie, was a star at her lycée—all the way to the book I had most recently finished or was writing. But Pierre’s gallery on avenue de Matignon did not open before eleven. The deals that made him rich were rarely consummated there anyway; and his presence in the office upstairs, where he did the serious dealing, connected to the gallery by a spiral staircase, was not regulated by any schedule. The gallery served to impress clients by its serious chic and to show the work of artists Pierre was trying to move to a higher commercial plateau by means of the exquisitely mounted and researched exhibitions for which he had become famous. No wonder he was still able to carry on exactly as in the days when he and I could never find a cabaret that stayed open late enough, until the sky had turned into a gray smudge, and Paris, a city that sleeps late, was beginning to stir. By that hour, the women with us, whether we had started the evening with them or found them along our way, were generally ready to give up on us as lovers. All they wanted was a lift home and a chance to go to bed—alone! But not much later in life, I discovered that my writing was best done in the morning—after at least five and a half hours of sleep. That means going to bed before midnight. An unpleasant thought interrupted these lazy, pointless ruminations. Wouldn’t my new perception of my work soon require me to decide whether those hours of work were still necessary? Would I ever want to write again? And at the cost of what sort of sacrifice? I wondered whether it all depended on Lydia, on what she would say or, more important, on how she felt after I had told her how deeply I feared that all I had accomplished was empty and devoid of significance. For the moment, I thought, there could be no answer. I had to stay on course.

  Will you have something to eat? North asked all of a sudden. Shall we tell that man with sideburns to bring us some canapés?

  I confessed to the stirrings of hunger.

  Good! The memory of the sandw
ich I had just begun to eat at the bar of the old Pont Royal when the bellhop brought me my faxes has made me ravenous. There were three of them: I laid them out on the table. One was from Lydia. It may strike you as odd, but I have before my eyes even now, quite distinctly, her angular, beautifully disciplined script, and the words I read:

  The parents have struck again! Mom telephoned to say they couldn’t understand why we haven’t told them our plans for the Memorial Day weekend. That’s this coming weekend, in case you’ve lost track of your native calendar. They count on us at the beach because Harriet and her gang are coming, and so are Ralph and his brood. Maud isn’t. What could be her excuse?

  Since you said you might not be back, I accepted.

  So once more you are off the hook, darling John. Stay in your lovely Paris but think of me with every wild strawberry you eat, every scrumptious melon, and certainly every bite of foie gras.

  That message was a liberation to be thankful for. My in-laws are called Frank, and the Frank family festivities—at any of the senior Mr. and Mrs. Frank’s residences, and for that matter at the residences of Lydia’s brother and sisters—have a quality of ponderous self-satisfied good cheer I used to find unbearably oppressive. Lydia claimed that exposure to the Franks at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and so forth awakened the monster in me. What kind of monster? So long as they put it down to my misanthropy, I didn’t mind being teased. I don’t mind it being known that I am not overly fond of my fellowmen. But I knew that the sour stirrings I felt inside me, like the taste of bile after you have retched your heart out, were those of the monster envy, of all my vices the one that fills me with greatest shame, the one that I wanted to conceal from Lydia. Have I succeeded? There is no telling. She sees through everything and doesn’t always say what she has seen or, I believe, admit to herself how far she has penetrated. Otherwise, I am certain she would have taken more care not to let me think then, as at certain other times, that she was arranging to exclude me, whether or not she was. I reread the fax. Almost the entire family was to be there, at that gathering in East Hampton from which I was to be absent. The monster writhed. Of course, when I called later in the evening, I could ask Lydia to tell her parents that I would be there after all; I could leave for New York in the morning. The truth was, though, that neither seeing her action as a reflection of her judgment about my character, nor the judgment of my better self that I should grow up and go to the Franks’ cheerfully and in good faith, nor even my envy of those who were to participate in these festivities that I fundamentally disliked, were sufficient to change the fact that deep down I wanted to stay in Paris. I preferred not to spend the Memorial Day weekend among my assembled in-laws. I didn’t like the figure I cut among them, and I thought it was just possible that Lydia didn’t much like it either. So why go there, against my will, and make trouble? I asked myself, feeling more comfortable. I should add that I am not sure about Lydia’s judgment of my character; and I am never sure that I interpret correctly her motives and actions when it comes to her family. Seeing that the other faxes were only from my agent, I stuffed them into my pocket. They could wait. I finished my drink and the sandwich.