Shipwreck

by Louis Begley

  Apropos, North said, pointing to my empty glass. Don’t you think we should have another?

  I gave my assent. Nodding approval, he resumed the narrative.

  In the taxi I read the faxes from my agent. In one he asked me to be on the alert for a message I was likely to receive after midnight Paris time announcing that I had been awarded the biggest of American literary prizes for my new novel. He gave me the names of the other two finalists. In his judgment, there was no way I could lose against them. In the second fax, he submitted an offer from a major studio to buy the film rights to The Anthill.The price made me gasp. There are bound to be issues we would normally raise when we see the contract, he warned me, but the price is so generous that we won’t break the deal over them. Celebrate, and feel proud of yourself, was his conclusion.

  No doubt I would celebrate, especially the sale and the prospect of a large inflow of cash. But the immediate question was whether I should tell Lydia right away or wait until the fatal fax, when I would know one way or the other about the prize. I decided to wait. If I did really win, that would be splendid news to give her, and if I didn’t, news of the movie contract would be like having a ready antidote. If I lost without mentioning it, she would see what had happened in the Times, when it published the winner and short list, without having been prepared. That was a disadvantage, but it couldn’t be helped. As you might imagine, all the while, prize or no prize, the judgment I had reached about my work had to remain unchanged, and that was bitter. But I have to admit that I felt less depressed than I had following the interview with the girl at the Flore. The prize was new evidence of sorts, perhaps sufficient to justify a new trial. I liked the thought that, at least while news of the prize was still fresh in their minds, the Franks would have to hold both my work and me in somewhat higher esteem. You see, I had pretty much decided that the jury would vote for me.

  The ride was interminable. I fell asleep and woke with a start when we stopped at Pierre’s address, in the rue de la Faisanderie. Perhaps you know that street in Passy. If it were wider, and not so aggressively residential, you might mistake Pierre’s apartment house for a bank, a smaller version of the Crédit Lyonnais building on the boulevard des Italiens. It certainly would have been convenient for Pierre to live directly above a bank: each time he and Marianne were to be away from Paris, they could have taken the paintings off the walls of their foyer, living room, dining room, and library and carried them to a vault a couple of floors down. But the building is, in fact, only a discreet redoubt of haute bourgeoisie, and I suppose that Pierre had to resort to all the ingenious devices that Parisians use to fortify their apartments and town houses against the burglaries one hears about every time one goes out to dinner. To my knowledge, the Lalondes had no live-in staff, which made the problem acute. At most, some lady who cleaned and cooked, and at night tucked herself away in the servants’ quarters under the roof. I began to think though that there might have been a change. The manservant who greeted me at the door and led me to the salon did not seem to have been sent by a caterer, nor did the canapés he was passing. I quickly catalogued other novelties since my last visit. Gone was the strangely prescient Cézanne of a clearing in the forest of Chantilly, as well as Picasso’s portrait of Olga and both Renoirs. A full-length Klimt of an Oriental dancer and other works of Austrian and German expressionists had taken their place. The comings and goings of those and other masterpieces seemed to be the subject of brisk conversation among Pierre and Marianne and an American couple in their late fifties.

  Jim and Edith Cleary, from Oregon, said Marianne.

  Pierre embraced me and added the significant missing information. You have before you two very eminent collectors, he said. Extraordinary knowledge and taste! So far they have concentrated on contemporary works by American artists. The quality of what they own is astonishing: not a single painting that isn’t first class. Now they feel ready to expand into modern and impressionist masters. Jim and Edith already know you, John, through your novels. A famous novelist never needs an introduction, he added with the sort of grating joviality that usually accompanies such remarks.

  Once the word “collectors” had been uttered, I realized that I knew about this couple. More than once, my father-in-law had spoken of them and their collection with respect. Their being from Oregon should have been sufficient to identify them. So these were the Clearys of Portland and of the vast forest products fortune founded by the Cleary grandfather. The son had increased it enormously and, so far, the grandson had kept it intact and entirely private. Pierre’s theory, I also realized, must be that they were fans and would like to meet me. That was why he had wanted to make one hundred percent sure that I made it to this dinner and was more or less on time. In fact, I was ten minutes late, but that’s good form in France. It gives the hosts a chance to stop bickering. But did Pierre know that they had heard about the novelist John North? Or had he taken my celebrity for granted? Without false modesty, I can say that I have never made such a leap of faith. I was even more curious to know whether Pierre had announced in advance that I was coming or only when the Clearys had arrived, the way in a smart restaurant the maître d’hôtel announces a surprise side dish offered by the chef only when it is served. He seldom left important matters to chance; I would have bet that he had used me to lure them here. The answer to my question was given immediately. Pierre did know that the Clearys professed to admire my books. I was the bait. They weren’t at all sure that they should go out to dinner, Edith announced, they were so jet-lagged, but once they heard the author of Green Island would be there, they decided that having dinner in their suite was out of the question. It would have been like being in Paris and not visiting Malmaison! Did I think, she asked, that Green Islandwas my best? By the way, Green Island is my first novel, not that it matters very much. Without thinking, I fired back my standard rejoinder: I don’t talk about that. Then, because I wanted to be polite, I added that one can’t say that sort of thing about a book any more than about children. A good father, I continued, isn’t supposed to say which child he loves most. Immediately she allowed that I was so right, they would never rank their three boys and two girls, all of whom they adored, and, anyway, weren’t comparisons odious? Could I imagine how much fun they had with their brood? She hoped our children gave my wife and me as much joy.

  Yes, I could imagine it. It did not seem necessary to tell Edith that Lydia and I had no children. Lydia had wanted them, and the subject came up as soon as we seriously discussed marriage. We returned to it over and over. I was quite direct and open about my reluctance, and eventually she said she understood my conviction that children have little place in a writer’s life. You see, said North, I had been telling her that my books were my real children, and my first duty was to them. All the time and energy I had were to go into writing and trying to be a good husband. If we had children, I maintained, those human children would find in me at best a sort of benevolent uncle or godfather. I would be happy to see them, provided they didn’t interfere with my work, I would be ready to advise them, and would give them money so long as I had it. Beyond that, I droned on, she would be pretty much on her own as a parent. I also talked, even more fatuously, about a writer’s need for freedom to travel, to seek new experiences, and to avoid commitments. I kept this up with even greater vigor after we got married. Always, she would grow very serious. That is how I liked to characterize the effect of my speeches, although I knew that her “seriousness” in reality was nothing more than a mask for bottomless regret and sadness that overcame her when she heard those pronouncements. As for me, mouthing them put me in high spirits. I must have thought I was clever. At first, she used to reply that we could have children on my terms; she would manage. When she said that, I believed her. My respect for her strength and capability continued to grow. I thought she could manage anything. And since, thanks to her grandparents and parents, we had plenty of money, I took the view that there was no reason that we shouldn’t get prop
erly organized for the job. You know, hire the right nannies, a good cook or housekeeper, and so forth and later make sure the children go to the right schools. But she was thinking more deeply, the way she always does, and one day—I think we must have been married for three years by then, and I believe she hadn’t been on the pill—she said that in the end she agreed with my view of things. We wouldn’t have children. The only way to do it right on my terms would be for her to give up patients altogether. She couldn’t, as a single parent, do clinical work and research and still be a good mother. Not alone. And she wasn’t able, she said, to give up an indispensable part of her work. The subject was closed, so far as she was concerned, although I knew she was saying these things only as a sacrifice to me, to our marriage. She had talked herself into believing that the children would come between us—her and my monumental selfishness. Except that she wouldn’t have even thought it selfishness; she would have scrupulously thought of John, John the artist, John the man she loved. In fact, we didn’t return to the subject for many years. I had no interest in reopening it. But Lydia is older than I. Almost exactly five years before the dinner at Pierre’s, when she was thirty-nine, she told me in bed, after we had finished making love and were lying very quietly, with our arms around each other, that she had been thinking again about having a child and how this was her last chance; she would make whatever adjustments in her work were required. It’s difficult to make a child on command when you are her age, after years and years of contraception. Our first years of marriage gave little reason to hope for instant success. But we beat the odds. Lydia was pregnant within two months, quite naturally, without any treatments. Her happiness was so complete and so candid that I began to feel a participatory joy. Then, in the sixth month, she miscarried. The child—a little girl, to be precise—was stillborn. Do not even think of trying again, was the advice of the doctors. As though in a Greek tragedy, we were left on a bare stage, with our regret and self-reproach as the chorus.

  I had wandered into this minefield, North said, by talking too much without thinking, it was my fault and nobody else’s, so I kept up the literary act with the Clearys, repeating large chunks of what I had said to the girl that afternoon. That seemed fair enough, the questions being almost identical. I know of no rules against self-plagiarism. I saw Marianne watching me, as though I were a man on a high wire. She understood. At last, I was able to direct the conversation back to collecting, whereupon the art historical and art market twaddle began to flow with no interruption except Marianne’s increasingly anguished musings about the lateness of her other two guests, and whether she should just give up on them and ask that dinner be served. Meanwhile, as the manservant, with pleasant assiduity, continued to refill my glass, my thoughts turned to the Franks. How was it that I felt so diminished by the Franks and envious of them? The question and answers were old, but that did not stop their gnawing at me. They belonged, no doubt, to those matters that Dr. Czarny, the analyst on whose couch I had many years ago explored my underworld, identified as deserving treatment someday. That day never came. Instead, I reformed my life and married Lydia. My parents were still flying high then. When they had time to speak to me about my marriage, which was not very often, they invariably said Lydia was a gift from heaven to me and them. But I knew they could not repress a certain polite amusement, never revealed to Lydia, at my having married “one of those Franks.” Oh, they respected the way that the Franks’ real estate fortune had financed good works at every school and college any member of the family had ever attended, and at various museums and hospitals in New York that they had showered with money, and the decency, industry, and unity with which members of the clan conducted their lives and business. But why, sighed my parents, must the Franks be so self-satisfied, as if they were really the first to have given generously to charity X, Y, or Z, or to have bought old and new masters to hang on their walls, or, the most central but unspoken question, to have so much money and no debt? Clearly the Franks were far richer than my parents and, more to the point, had more money than any of our long-nosed and watery-blue-eyed distinguished ancestors had ever dreamed of accumulating, back when in my family one made money instead of just spending it. That did not put my parents off their pace. Not really. Money meant less to them than to many other people. And it is true that if you talked to the senior Franks—to the adorable Bernard, known to his family, myself included, as Bunny, or to Judy—you were bound to hear, whether you appeared interested or not, all about the academic degrees and successes of all their children and grandchildren and nephews and nieces of school age. Did that make my parents feel envious, considering my sister Ellen’s and my modest attainments? I don’t believe that it did. They were too sure of themselves and, alas, too stylish. For them, as for so many of their class and age, the school and university you had attended, the teams you had played on, and the clubs you had joined were more important than scholarly prowess. So my parents simply kept smiling at the wonderfully fit Franks, so tanned and so well preserved—give or take a few hip or knee replacements. Then suddenly everything went dark for this elegant and ironic pair. They declined more or less in tandem, as though they had made some pact and the agreed signal had been given: both had moments of increasing frequency and length at first of confusion and then quite obvious lack of awareness of where they were or to whom they were speaking. Within a bewilderingly short time, my sister Ellen and I found ourselves the guardians of an equally demented mother and father, both still lodged at their gorgeous Federal house in Georgetown but now cared for by relays of nurses and other specialized helpers. As soon as we understood how it would be, we sold the apartment in Paris and, after a tussle between Ellen and me, the house in Aspen as well, which she and her husband had wanted to keep, being passionate skiers. I insisted on putting it on the market because it was clear to me how that luxury nursing home for two we had organized would devour our family money. So you see, it did not require too much intelligence or an unusual habit of introspection for me to figure out that the Franks saw me as barely acceptable. They hadn’t expected their beautiful daughter, who was a star, to marry a scribbler of the sort of good family that has seen its best days, a perfectly decent fellow but not to be taken seriously compared, for instance, with the husbands of the other two sisters. One of those husbands was a partner in his father’s private investment bank on Wall Street, and the other issued from a rival real estate dynasty. As it happened, the relations between the two clans were exceptionally amicable, by reasons of intermarriage and a shared struggle to climb to the top. Otherwise, that son-in-law might have been as welcome to the Franks as a Montague to the Capulets. That leaves Ralph, the son. Well, he was the heir, and that would have sufficed even without his rough good sense, hard work at the family office, and superior ability as sailor, golfer, and fund-raiser for the United Jewish Appeal and allied causes. In fact, my well-bred modesty aside, I thought the Franks’ picture of me wasn’t entirely fair. It undervalued my work—not for its aesthetic merit, because entre nousthe Franks valued that aspect of it more highly than I did, but, especially as of late, for its public standing. Then there was that more mysterious asset, my personal standing in a world that both counted and didn’t count for them. It was as if they couldn’t understand the abiding distinction of my family, or accept in me the heir to an American tradition tested on battlefields, in both chambers of Congress, and in finance when the foundations of our country’s industrial strength were laid. Forgive me, I know I am pompous just now, but these feelings are quite strong in me. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it was, they had their picture of me before their eyes, and so I was weighed on the family scales.

  At last the door leading from the foyer into the living room opened to admit the tardy couple, a man unknown to me, evidently French, and roughly my age, and, of all people, the girl—Léa Morini. She favored me with one of her smiles and said to Marianne that we had already met, that very afternoon. The man and I were introduced: Jacques Robineau, the sec
ond-in-command of a state-owned bank. That told me that he had been one of those students who flash like a comet through the French system of grandes écolesand competitive examinations, become by the time they are thirty high civil servants, move upward through a series of ministers’ cabinets, and by the time they reach forty are placed by their elders, who preceded them at the same schools, near the top of just such a bank or state-owned industrial establishment. So he would have just arrived, on time, at his scheduled career stop. I thought his friendship with our hosts must be recent; otherwise I would have met him before. Since the Clearys spoke no French, his fluent English was likely the reason he had been invited—and told to bring a friend, if he had one who spoke English well. But perhaps Pierre and Marianne knew the girl, and knew she was the friend he would bring. I supposed that the nature of the friendship between her and Robineau was obvious, but somehow I preferred to treat it for the moment as a subject for eventual investigation.