by Louis Begley
I led Léa to the nearby French restaurant where I sometimes have lunch with a friend or dinner with Lydia when we don’t want to go to one of those three bistros in our neighborhood that have a lock on my wallet. We’ve been going there for many years. It didn’t occur to me to choose another place where I might be less likely to find people I knew and the staff was not accustomed to seeing me with Lydia. Had I given the matter thought, I might have gone to the French restaurant anyway for a simple and solid practical reason: I am such an old client that I don’t really need a reservation. I propelled Léa through the door and then to the table the owner indicated. This was not a simple matter because he kept apologizing for not being able to give me my usual table, and I had to shake the hands of the maître d’hôtel and assorted waiters. Finally, we sat down. A glance to my left told me that I had been recognized by one of the editors at my American publisher’s, though not my editor. He was having lunch with a man so oddly dressed that I decided it must be one of his authors. A friendly gesture with my hand in his direction was quite sufficient. A lady with a head of curly red hair sitting with a group of four overdressed biddies in the center of the room presented a more serious problem. It was the wife of Lydia’s brother, Ralph. She had not seen me, but I would have to speak to her on my way out, unless she noticed me sooner and we made eye contact. Even before I spotted her, it had been my intention to order for Léa so she wouldn’t dawdle over the menu, to eat fast, and to leave as soon as possible. But I hadn’t reckoned with the owner and the waiters whom I had already greeted. They returned, seemingly for one purpose only, to ask whether Madame—that is to say Lydia—would be joining us, and if another setting should be added to the table. No, she is at the hospital, working. One by one, they expressed the wish to see me come back with Madame soon. We might as well have gone to your wife’s hospital cafeteria, observed Léa, and she was right. Midway through the meal, she said, Let’s skip dessert and go back to the hotel. I replied that I couldn’t. She didn’t argue, and we chewed on in silence. But a few minutes later she said, All right, you have hurt my feelings. I am coming instead to see your office and my painting. Don’t try to say no.
Having looked over my installation, which she said I had described well, not a surprise given my profession, she said I should consider getting a little spot to light the painting. I told her she was right; perhaps the electrician who does the work at my apartment building could do it. Then she pointed to the daybed and asked whether I took naps on it. Often, I told her. When I run out of words, you know, run out of steam. Let’s take a nap together, she answered, what are you waiting for, fuck me.
There is no bathroom attached to the office. I had to guide her afterward to the toilet at the end of the corridor. When she returned she said I seemed to be a different man in New York; she wasn’t sure she liked this new personage. He was more brutal when he made love, and not as pleasant to be with as the man she had known in Paris even when we weren’t making love. I said she was right. There wasn’t a moment I wasn’t thinking of my wife, and that changed me. The conclusion I had reached, I said, was that we shouldn’t see each other in New York. It made me too nervous. She thought for a moment and said that was a problem. She had to see me, so what were we going to do about it? Robineau was coming back to the United States in early September, she told me, for the International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington, but they would be in New York before the meeting and after it. Maybe she wouldn’t go to Washington at all, just stay in New York. She didn’t want to be here without seeing me. Anyway, she was thinking of looking for a gallery to represent her in New York and wanted to get French Vogueto send her to the States on an assignment. Her editor had asked her to come up with a suitable subject. Being near me was the principal reason for all this, she concluded.
I made the sort of speech you would expect, reminding her of what I had always said: Anything we did—however much I liked it and wanted it—couldn’t interfere with Lydia; seeing her in New York, as we had just discovered, radically changed the nature of our relations; anyway, soon I would be in Paris a lot, and perhaps we could meet in other places as well. But not in New York, where so many people knew me and I would be forced sooner or later to lie to Lydia. Because I didn’t want to insult her, I didn’t admit that I had no wish to see her in a place where I would be obliged to go from her bed—or her and Robineau’s bed—to Lydia’s. I also told her a lie. I said I would be away from the city in the first part of September, with Lydia, on Martha’s Vineyard. In fact, I was going up alone to sail, but I feared that if she knew that she would arrange to find herself there too.
That evening I said to Lydia that the Voguejournalist who had written the article about me in Paris had called out of the blue to say she was in New York and I had lunch with her. Lydia told me she knew that; at any rate she knew that I had lunch with a beautiful European-looking girl. Corinne—my sister-in-law—called and told her she had seen me. Then Lydia said that perhaps I should have invited the journalist to dinner. I replied that if she thought so, I would invite her next time, when we had someone to serve at table, particularly since the painting that I bought in Paris and hung in my office had been painted by that girl—Léa Morini. It had become clear to me that excluding Léa’s existence entirely from our conversations would be difficult. At the same time I was discovering characteristics of persistence, immodesty, and, I am obliged to say, off-putting insensitivity in Léa. Did the realization come to me during our lovemaking in Robineau’s hotel room, over lunch, when she suggested going back there, or at my office, when she laid out her program for being near me? I am not certain. I also made another discovery: Léa’s chatter, so often incomprehensible, which had charmed me in Paris, did not have that effect in New York. To the contrary, I was on the verge of finding it irritating and, even worse from my point of view, boring. Like certain other fine products of France, her charm didn’t travel well. You may have already guessed as much, but just to give you a balanced view of the matter, I will admit that I am bored by most people with whom I am obliged to converse. On the other hand, I tolerate very nicely those with whom I need exchange no more than a few words on a given occasion. Sometimes I even look forward to seeing them. The only exception to the rule of Don’t Talk to Me is Lydia. I hang on her every word. Therefore, as you might infer, my finding that Léa bored me was in no small part the result of the dissipation of the absolute need to have her in my bed, as well as of the persistence of my feelings of guilt and fear about Lydia and our marriage. It all made me wish to avoid Léa.
I was able to duck Léa and Robineau’s visit in September. But long before then, her telephone calls to my office had turned into a flood of messages. I returned them as promptly as I could, which was not always easy when Lydia and I began to spend long weekends in East Hampton, but I made a big effort because of my growing sense that I must meet at least in part her demands for attention—and even for my presence— lest she begin to think I was dropping her. Why did that possibility trouble me? I wasn’t sure. My provisional answer was that I didn’t want her to go off the deep end. What that might signify remained unformulated. So it happened that when she returned to New York almost immediately to visit a male friend, a former great love, and suggested that, since this great love was away from his apartment all day, we could meet there, I said I would prefer to spend a day and a night with her in Boston. That was what we did. I told Lydia that I needed to visit one of my former college professors in Cambridge, David Leach, to ask what he thought about certain recurring themes in George Eliot that seemed to intersect with my new novel. This was, by the way, perfectly true, and so in fact I saw David and wasn’t obliged to tell Lydia a direct lie. She is so discreet, of course, that she didn’t ask why the visit required me to spend the night. The sex with Léa in Boston was as good as ever. The conversation wasn’t. I wondered how it would go in Paris. My work there was to begin in October, on a date that was not yet set.
North paused at this poin
t and asked, Are you awake? I assured him I was, and on tenterhooks. That’s most flattering, he replied, a moment’s pause then and I will continue.
You will recall, North said, that I had lied to Léa. I told her that I was going to Martha’s Vineyard at the beginning of September with Lydia. In fact, my plan was to go there alone and sail. What do you think really happened? Listen carefully. To my considerable bewilderment—and yes, satisfaction, because for once I was genuinely glad to give up time alone on my boat and the absolute silence in the house when I worked—my brother-in-law Ralph’s two children asked to come with me. It was just possible to fit this in before the start of the school year at Andover, because I was going up to the Vineyard on Friday of Labor Day weekend. There were, of course, no seats to be had on any of the direct flights from New York, so we took the shuttle to Boston, and from there a twin-engine Cessna I was able to charter. A skeptic like you would probably assume that it all ended unpleasantly, as such well-meant enterprises usually do. But no: they are good kids, and quite possibly I had changed a little, because I had been obliged to look at myself so closely in the course of writing Loss.Perhaps there were other reasons as well. I did not do my Captain Queeg act onboard Cassandra,or my Diary of a Mad Housewifeact onshore. All three of us read good books: Rob, The Brothers Karamazov, I suppose to gain a better understanding of his old man; Jenny, Notes from Underground,for reasons unknown, perhaps to gain a better understanding of me; and I selected passages from Saint Augustine’s Confessionsto see more clearly where I stood in relation to Manichaeanism. After these terrific ten days, we flew to Boston and from there I drove the kids to Andover believing that we had done well and might have an even better time repeating the adventure in the future.
Nice, don’t you think? Unfortunately, I have just told you a little fairy tale. Here is the truth. Thinking that I ought to end the stalemate in my relations with the Frank family, and believing that my reputation as a child-hating ogre was unjustified, I invited the two kids to join me on my little sailing vacation. The initiative, as you can imagine, required courage and determination on my part. They turned me down. Can you guess why? Well, I assure you it wasn’t because they wished to spend the little time remaining before the start of school at work for the Anti-Defamation League, or a birth-control clinic, or on any other high-minded endeavor deemed worthy of support by their near forebear, Bunny Frank. The invitation having been extended as soon as they returned to East Hampton from their white-water rafting and bird-watching camps, respectively, they told me they would think about it. Then they said no. How could I blame them? They saw me, I said to myself, as the rather strange man who is married to their aunt Lydia. I was willing to bet any amount that neither they nor any of their cousins had ever referred to me, or thought of me, as their uncle. There was more to it though. When I told my little niece Jenny how sorry I was, she blurted out that she was sorry too. Grandma had told them not to go with me. She said she didn’t trust me. And did I blow my top or deliver myself of coolly acidic remarks to Lydia in the privacy of our ménage? No, I did not. Indeed, I kept Jenny’s confidence, without having been asked to. So I went off to the Vineyard by myself, and I am happy to report that I had a pretty good time in my wonderful house, not shaving, pissing only outdoors except the one day when it poured, once or twice going to see my fuddy-duddy friends over a drink, and sailing alone on my wonderful boat.
I have mentioned my escapade with Léa in Boston. We returned from Boston to New York on the same plane. I saw her once more during her stay in the city. She knocked at the door of my office one afternoon, waking me from a nap I was taking, having finished a difficult page of Loss. She said she had been to Brooks Bros. to buy for monsieurthe physicist his preferred blue oxford-cloth button-down shirts and boxer shorts of the same material. Strange sort of purchase, you might think, with which to charge a young mistress, but I have known other perfectly rational Frenchmen with a passion for the very same items of apparel. Being in the neighborhood, she had thought of me and realized that it was teatime. Therefore, she bought an English fruitcake. Could I make tea? she asked. It so happened that I could. We drank it peacefully, and each ate one slice of the cake. She wrapped the rest to take home to her old great love. Just when I thought she was going to leave, she said that she would like to stay quietly on the daybed while I worked. I told her the truth: it was impossible, the only person in whose presence I could write being Lydia. In that case I will go, she told me, but you should know that you have hurt my feelings. I thought you would like to have me here, after such a pleasant time together. It occurred to me later that I had made a mistake; it would have been better to humor her, even if that meant that I had to pretend I was revising some text. But at the moment I thought that if she stayed we would make love, which I didn’t want, and that I would be encouraging her to undertake further initiatives of the same sort. You might say that I didn’t want to spoil her.
Except for the regular postcards she decorated with grotesque and often obscene little figures and snatches of doggerel, I didn’t hear from her again for a week or perhaps longer, until one morning she telephoned, leaving a message. She had something urgent to tell me. My heart sank. She didn’t use a diaphragm, in fact claimed not to own one, and insisted I didn’t need to use rubbers because she was on the pill. I was glad to comply, though I didn’t completely believe her. The news had to be that she was pregnant. It wasn’t. She told me an involved story about a dinner at which most of the guests were journalists or worked in publishing. She mentioned some of the names, none of which I recognized. Over coffee, the conversation turned to American writers, and a journalist working for L’Express, who had been researching an article about creative-writing courses at American universities, said it was common knowledge in New York’s literary circles that I was suffering from acute leukemia. Léa claimed she had not slept all night, she was so upset, and yet she couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t have told her that I was gravely sick. Besides, I looked so well the last time she saw me, as she told the others right away, to prove that the report had to be false. But the journalist replied that people with cancer often didn’t want it known, and indeed went to great lengths to conceal their illness. I assured her that I was, in fact, perfectly well. A few days later, she left another urgent message. When I reached her, she said that she had been at a small dinner at Robineau’s apartment—just as a guest, because his great love, Françoise, was back from an assignment in Moscow. Again there was a discussion of American writers. She mentioned how she had enjoyed interviewing me. Thereupon, one of Robineau’s friends, an editor who once worked for my French publisher, which is why I knew his name, said it was common knowledge in New York that I told people that I had leukemia so as to explain my frequent disappearances. The awful fact was that my spells of manic depression had become so severe that Lydia, with increasing frequency, had to oblige me to sign myself into an asylum. For weeks at a time! She couldn’t remember the name of the hospital but thought it was something like the famous department store. Bloomingdale, I suggested, in Westchester. Yes, that was it, the name the editor had mentioned. She contradicted him, of course, saying that she was in touch with me and I was perfectly normal. Thereupon, another guest chimed in. He maintained that when North doesn’t need to be locked up it is because the medication is working. His case is exactly like Robert Lowell’s, he concluded. In addition to the psychosis, North is drinking himself to death and has advanced cirrhosis of the liver. He tries to be tanned all the time to hide the jaundice. Is any of this true? she asked me. I told her to relax, I was feeling fine and had no known history of mental illness. As for my alcoholism, surely she had observed that I drank less than most of her Parisian friends. I must have been convincing, because she laughed and said I was un amour.
I don’t ordinarily pay attention to gossip about me. You might say I expect it, as does every writer who has had one or two successful books. As for “New York literary circles,” I am ready to lead an anthropo
logical expedition to search for them—anywhere outside the minds of society columnists and correspondents of foreign media doing pieces on the state of American culture. But Léa’s chatter did trouble me, because it revealed that she was going around Paris talking about me. On one level, it didn’t matter. She had done an interview with me that had received a good bit of attention. Why shouldn’t she, therefore, use whatever she knew about me to shine at table? On another level, it did, because she had by now a good deal of information that couldn’t have been acquired talking over coffee at the Flore. Sooner or later, people in that gossipy Paris world, which likes to visit New York, would put two and two together and begin to speak of la petiteMorini who is so intimate with John North. My mood was turning black with self-reproach. And at the time I was once again assailed—no, the word isn’t too strong—by anxiety about The Anthill,which prompted further misgivings about Loss,and of course, one thing always leading to another, about all my earlier work as well. The proposition was brutally simple and dreadful to consider: if the books are no good, if they are unnecessary books, then my life, of which I had given up so much in order to write them, had been wasted.
What set me off was nothing directly concerning Loss;its progress had been slow, but I was moving along and, from time to time, when I reread and corrected the text I was even amused and surprised. I couldn’t imagine where I had gotten some of the stuff I had written down, but I was glad to see it was there. The screen adaptation of The Anthillwas the immediate cause. I received from the producer a text he described as the almost final version of the screenplay. According to the contract, I had the right to review it and send in my suggestions, revisions, and so on for his and his colleagues’ consideration. Nothing more than that. As drama, the screenplay struck me as pretty good. Certainly, it wouldn’t put audiences to sleep. I was distressed, though, by the sentimentality of the story and the main characters. That was certainly not what I had intended, what I remembered writing, and that is not, I made quite sure of it, a defect of the novel, which I very conscientiously reread. But was it not possible that the screenwriter—I knew him and knew he was no fool—had seen through some flaw at the core of my book? Something I had not been conscious of that he had brought to the surface? And there was a touch of vulgarity to the screenplay. Had my book invited it? Or, equally sad, was there such a huge and unsuspected gulf that separated me from most of my readers? I asked Lydia her opinion. She reassured me: there was no such flaw and no such gulf. In that case, was she the only reader who understood me? Assuming that she was answering honestly, I pushed these questions away as best I could, and labored on the screenplay to bring it back to where I thought it belonged, but with little speed and little satisfaction. A freak accident relieved the pressure: an example, I suppose, of how Providence looks after writers on a tough deadline. The female lead of Anthillthe movie, having completed a film shot in western Australia, had decided to treat herself to a weekend of water-skiing. Somehow or other, she got banged up seriously enough to postpone our shooting schedule by a couple of weeks. But I went to Paris as planned. So much of the book’s action is set there, either directly or in flashbacks, that the director thought he should start in Paris and said that was where I could be most helpful.
