Shipwreck

by Louis Begley

  It really doesn’t matter, I said to her. You need to get married to a man you love, and live with him. Have children, if you can. I don’t need to get married to have children, she corrected me. Perhaps the first child could be from you? Think about it.

  Her studio looked out on the street, a northern exposure. The bedroom was in the back and had a small terrace. We made love right away, at first standing up, Léa with her back to me, leaning against a chest of drawers. Afterward, she asked whether I wanted to look at some of her work. When I said I did, and started to pull on my trousers, she whispered, No, stay just as you are, so that we went into the studio naked. She wanted to show me only her new work, oils on stretched canvas. The paintings were in a storage bin. She went through the familiar routine of studio visits: the canvases out of the bin, set on easels so they can be seen at the proper height, other paintings lined up against the wall, and so forth. I think that the combination of the very bright light in the studio and our nudity—especially hers, as she performed tasks one associates with stocky men in work smocks, the naked girl crouching and lifting, and thus showing off the strength of her arms, back, buttocks, and thighs—added to the unease her work caused me. I suppose I might have had a similar feeling if I had found myself unexpectedly on the set of a blue movie. Her paintings were quite large, all of them two meters by one fifty, mostly horizontal, and, to my surprise, because I supposed, for no special reason, that she was an abstract painter, figurative and realistic. They were landscapes—various views of what I was quite sure was the same garden—with male and female figures whose stiffness of bearing made me think of the Amish, scantily dressed in old-fashioned clothes. Some of them displayed their sexual organs. Not ostentatiously or aggressively. The organs were simply there, rendered with great precision. No contact among the figures. Their eyes were directed neither at the viewer nor at their companions. If they weren’t blind, they were looking at something away from me and away from the painted scene. The vegetation was tame: the sort of plants and flowers you would find in any suburban garden near Paris and for that matter New York. Among the plants, however, there were large insects of species unknown to me, very meticulously portrayed. The insects gave the impression that they were staring at you.

  You will doubtless conclude that my pal Léa had been studying Balthus, and you will be right. I thought though that her paintings were less flat and, somehow, in spite of the isolation and rigidity of the human figures, more exuberant. Had she not told me that they were her work, I might have guessed that they were paintings not only from a different time but also from a different continent. Although the vegetation seemed to be, as I said, European and quite banal, and the figures were pale skinned, the overall impression was of tropical excess. Something I might have found less disturbing in the work of a Latin American painter. I knew that I should say something, and that she expected me to speak, but I was troubled. You should never allow yourself to sound like an art critic when an artist invites you to his studio and shows you his work, and obviously, I had to be especially careful with Léa. So I remained silent until she asked what I thought.

  Your work is very strong, I told her, overpowering. You are gifted—and skillful. It’s all a wonderful surprise. Especially your technique.

  She made a face and said that I must have been surprised because I thought she was only good at screwing—and maybe writing flattering magazine pieces about me. Then, abruptly, she turned out the lights and pulled me to the bedroom.

  We had breakfast on the terrace the following morning and afterward returned to the studio. I looked at the paintings again, in part to please her but also in order to understand them better. You should buy one, she said. I’ll charge you half the gallery price and throw in a special discount. Do you know why you should have one of my paintings? So that you will have a reason to invite me to dinner at your apartment when I come to New York. You will tell Lydia I want to see how you have hung it. And she gave her cry: Youpi! Obviously, when she offered to sell me one of her paintings, the only answer I could give was that I would be happy to own one, particularly a work that she chose for me. She pointed to a painting of three female figures. I thought that one of them perhaps had something of Léa about her face. Certainly the pubis, visible through a slit in that figure’s long skirt, was shaved like Léa’s, the razor having spared on the delta a narrow vertical strip of hair, like the brush one sometimes sees in a Western School painting on the head of an Indian brave. The other two figures were not exposing themselves.

  That’s perfect, I said, exactly the one I would have picked myself. Then I said I would pay in cash. I realize now that I was already unconsciously acting in accordance with the rule I was to adopt somewhat later, that I must never let Léa have anything from me in writing, unless it was a professional communication, such as a note thanking her for the article in Vogue.A check, constituting nothing more than the means of payment in a business transaction, should have also qualified as an exception to the rule. I didn’t think of that and, in the end, it was probably just as well that I gave her cash. A check on an American bank takes forever to clear in France. And cash was certainly more convenient than a check if she didn’t intend to declare the income to the tax inspector, which is the normal French modus operandi.

  The sale of the painting having been successfully concluded, Léa said that she had to go to the opening of a sculptor friend that evening. She wasn’t asking me to come with her because both her physicist monsieur and Jacques Robineau would be there, in addition to le tout Paris, in other terms altogether too many people she fucked gathered in a rather small space. Let’s have dinner late, she said, in your room. I would invite you to dinner here, but I have to be in the office in the afternoon, and then there is that vernissage,so I won’t have time to cook. Please order something good. I will be starved.

  It was another beautiful day. I walked from her studio to the hotel, and worked on my book until noon. Then I had lunch at the counter of the café on the Maxim’s side of rue Royale that is always full of tourists—these days more of them Japanese than American. It serves superior ham and Gruyère sandwiches on buttered baguettes. I had coffee afterward and then went shopping for Lydia and Léa. To buy a present for Lydia was easy, in theory. I know her taste and size so well that I rarely need to ask a saleswoman of the same build as she to try on the dress or jacket or top that has caught my eye. But like all questing knights in moral trouble, I dawdled and took a great deal of time shuttling back and forth among the three shops I like best on the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré until I found what I wanted for her. It was a crêpe de chine blouse, cut exactly like the one that Léa wore on our first evening, but in ivory rather than white. I thought it would go better with Lydia’s skin, which is as white as rice powder. An image came to mind: when she put it on—which she would want to do as soon as she opened the package—I would plunge my hand into her cleavage. We would make love at once, without waiting until I had unpacked or shaved or even bathed. She would be grateful for my impetuosity—far more than for the present. I was certain of our shared, triumphant climax. Thinking about Lydia that way aroused me powerfully, although had I been questioned before I bought that garment I would have surely said that the night with Léa had left me sated. Now, on the contrary, I felt tormented by desire. I wanted to fuck. I looked at the saleswomen with the eyes and instincts of a male on the prowl, appraising their breasts and mouths, their legs and their buttocks, asking myself how this one or the other among them would respond if I propositioned her. For instance: Yes, I will take this chemisier and also the other one, which is more in your colors than the one I am buying for my wife. They should be wrapped as separate gifts. You see, the second one is for you. Here is my card. The Ritz—room 307. From six o’clock. That’s where I will give you your present. Please don’t keep me waiting.

  The chances of success? Better than fifty-fifty, I would say. I am reasonably attractive; I have known women to fall for just such a mixture of s
urprise and disrespect. And what could be more exciting than to get one of those high-style salesladies to come to my room, laughing to cover her confusion, accepting the glass of champagne I handed her and the invitation to try on the garment that I would have taken out of its wrapping and draped over the back of an armchair?

  People are most often wrong about sex. As you have probably guessed, I opened this parenthesis, which I will soon close, to demonstrate that, contrary to ignorant middle-class prejudice, which holds that men become “fucked out,” intense and inventive lovemaking with any woman who is a great lay—to borrow Robineau’s mot justefor the girl we both happened to be humping—redounds to the sexual benefit of the wife. The husband’s interest in women, and in the unbeatable pleasure to be found in fornication, rises sky-high. When he thinks of what he did with that woman during an illicit encounter in the afternoon, he wants to improve on it, or at least match it, in the evening with the woman to whom he is married. On condition, of course, that he loves his wife or, at the very least, is well disposed toward her. I loved Lydia. No, the injury to the wife is deep, but of quite a different nature.

  I shook myself out of the erotic daydream and, with Lydia’s package under my arm, concentrated on what I would get for Léa. My heart wasn’t in the business of finding her something to wear. Really, the crêpe de chine blouse was her one garment the elegance of which I completely understood—and knew where to find. Her other clothes, which I liked on her, seemed to derive their chic from the way she put together the elements of her costume. For instance, her jeans, belt, and boots. They were not individually what I would choose. This was true of her pocketbook, for instance, which resembled an overnight bag and often served as one. Her style was, I thought, particular to young women of her precise generation and milieu, so that even at the best and most expensive shop, an accessory that I thought corresponded essentially to something I had seen her wear would, if I bought it, most likely turn out to be a gaffe, because, in fact, the one she actually owned and others truly like it could only be found by the initiated, after hours of research, in a little shop off the boulevard Richard Lenoir that I would have never noticed for many reasons, including my rarely venturing into that part of Paris. Pushing forward with my own search, I saw, in the window of an antique dealer in the rue St. Honoré, a pin in the shape of a lily made of gold and enamel that I recognized to be a good turn-of-the-century piece just right for Lydia. As for giving it to Léa, I understood her well enough to realize that she would thank me for it with a big kiss, because she would have understood that it was valuable and in very good taste, stick it in a drawer, and never wear it—unless the fashion she followed changed radically. On the other hand, the sort of hard-edged silver ornaments I saw her wear, most of which I thought could be acquired from Hermès, or wherever counterfeit Hermès products were distributed, were so clearly not to my taste as to be, coming from me, an absurd present. Besides, how was I to choose the one that was right among the clunky wristwatches, chain bracelets, and rings that looked like brass knuckles? The same antique dealer sold picture frames. I found one that was Viennese, made of silver like the Hermès ornaments. Encrusted in it was a sphinxlike feminine face carved in ivory that Art Nouveau favored. Léa’s paintings led me to think that she might like it. The price was more than what I had intended to spend, but I was celebrating the sale of my film rights—as well as the prize. I told the dealer I was taking it. A murmur of protest somewhere deep in my psyche made me understand that Lydia was entitled to compensation, by way of an equal or greater extravagance. I bought the lily pin for her.

  It was understood that I would stop by Pierre’s gallery for a cup of coffee. But a thought that had been germinating since I finished work and put away my manuscript that morning seemed to be putting out new shoots. I was at that early phase of the composition of the novel I eventually called Losswhen the closest and most tender attention must be paid to each such growth. Unless you examine it promptly, turn it into words, and actually put them down on paper, the danger is great that by the next day it will have disappeared or become unrecognizable and useless. I called Pierre from the shop and asked whether we might have a drink instead that evening, and hurried back to the hotel. It was already too late. I reread what I had written in the morning—two double-spaced pages, a decent output at the early stage of a novel—made the necessary corrections, and was unable to move forward. There was, alas, no reason to alter the judgment I had reached about my work. I was describing a love scene between a couple in their early middle age: a wife and the husband whom she is leaving. Why? She thinks that he has not gone far enough in his career or his personal development, disappointing her legitimate expectations, that he doesn’t have a strong sense of who he is and what is due him, that he demeans and denatures her by yielding to her whims. To a degree I intended this to sound plainly crazy. One might also look at their case and reasonably conclude that while in the past she found him moderately amusing, now he bores her. People change. She has met a man who seems to have more élan and is just enough of a son of a bitch. So, for old times’ sake, she lets her husband do one more time the things they used to do in the past, and she throws in for good measure the new stuff she has learned from the s.o.b. Her orgasms are rare, so the fact that she doesn’t come this time is not a big deal; the proceedings are pleasant enough and, anyway, they satisfy her need to feel generous. But, paradoxically, the husband, who had begged to sleep with her, is devastated. The gestures, the mounting excitement, the ejaculation, all utterly meaningless. Because he hadn’t accomplished what he knew most probably couldn’t be accomplished. As I corrected those pages, I couldn’t deny that I had gotten it exactly right. You can find much worse stuff in almost any book by one of my colleagues or—I suppose, if such a thing exists—in an anthology of great American prose. Yet my pages left me cold. Was there any value in them if such was their effect on me? Quite honestly, I didn’t know. At the same time, having just been engaged in a round of scribbling, I had to admit that this activity gives me more pleasure than any other. Except for fornication, in certain cases.

  So what do you make of that? North asked point-blank, and fixed me with a menacing glare.

  I shrugged.

  A dreadful and vulgar form of reply, said North. I am surprised to see you resort to it. It means, I take it, that you have no point of view you care to express. What a pity! Allow me to inform you that, when the scene I have described was formed in my mind, and when I wrote it, I was thinking of the farewell visit—in fact the only visit—Madame Arnoux pays to Frédéric in Flaubert’s L’Éducation Sentimentale, the greatest novel ever written, according to Franz Kafka and me. The two scenes have nothing in common. Frédéric had never slept with Madame Arnoux, whom he loved to the limit of his powers, and he doesn’t sleep with her now, although she as much as offers herself. The reason, apart from the fact that he has the temperament of a wilted lettuce leaf, is that he fears the disappointment. She has aged, and so has he. What will he find when she disrobes? Isn’t it better to live with old disappointments than with a new ones? So they part, she foolishly deluding herself into thinking that he did not take her because of his generosity and refinement of soul, he full of bitterness that engulfs his entire wasted life. Why was I thinking of Frédéric and Madame Arnoux when I described my hapless married couple? There are various parallels: the corrosive sadness of irretrievable opportunities, the failure of the senses. You expect a rush of pleasure that takes hold of you like a huge roller in a heavy surf—but nothing happens. The most important link, though, is me. I realized that the events I was describing moved me in the same way as my memory of that last meeting between Frédéric and Marthe—Marthe is Madame Arnoux’s given name, by which she authorizes him much too late to call her. You might say that I was dedicating those pages to Flaubert, an homage he would have scorned. But we were talking about pleasure. As you may have guessed, I did not carry out my brilliant scheme and invite one of those ladies from rue du Faubourg
St. Honoré to call on me at the hotel. I was tired after my shopping and even more tired after rewriting my pages. It’s exhausting work. It was hours before I would see Léa and I did not need to hurry because I was meeting Pierre at the bar of the Ritz. I undressed, got into bed, and masturbated thinking of Léa and Lydia. Masturbating while on the television screen some hairless ape sodomizes a floozy with bad skin, and then whacks his phallus over her face until at last he gets his shot off and wets her with semen, has never been my road to heavenly peace. I am left feeling exploited. The flicks I can see with my eyes closed are higher class and more effective, and they cost nothing. I have a lifetime supply. So it was this time. I would have been hard put to say which of my two leading ladies had more power over me.