by Louis Begley
Meanwhile, Lydia returned. My attention was wholly engaged. I watched for a sign. Had the breach between us healed? Where did I stand? I wasn’t sure. She was serene and chatted cheerfully about the dreadful journey, almost twenty hours door to door, that took her from Taipei to Narita and from Narita to New York. She brought me as a present a jade netsuke of great beauty. But was she so loving because this was simply her way, or was it because she had forgiven me? I felt a great unease. When I compared this reunion with so many others when I had returned from abroad, and she greeted me at home, I could not identify any difference in her behavior. But we had never before, during our long and harmonious marriage, parted other than in good cheer, clinging to each other. There had never been need of a reconciliation. If one was needed now, I didn’t know how to go about it. A question to her—on the order of You aren’t angry at me anymore?—I feared might reveal to her more about my offense than she already realized. In fact, at the moment I was no longer sure what my offense had been. That I didn’t want to go to Japan? But that was surely because I was nervous, needlessly, perhaps, but quite genuinely, about my work. What kind of crime was that? That I had made asinine remarks about the Japanese? I am so self-centered, you see, my work being included in the “self,” that it is not unusual for me to forget what I have said quite recently to this or that person—even to Lydia. I don’t consider my outbursts important. Others tend to remember them, alas all too well. Unless the trouble was not connected at all with the Kyoto Congress, and came because Lydia had sensed that I was having an affair with Léa. I turned away from the thought; it had made my hands turn ice cold. You must find truly remarkable the faculty I was displaying for the disregard of inconvenient truths about myself and my situation, no matter how well they were known to me. I would have to agree with you about that. Time passed slowly, but it was past lunchtime, Lydia’s plane having landed at about ten-thirty. I was watching her unpack. In a moment, she would disappear to take a bath. I put my arms around her and said we could have scrambled eggs at home or go out for a bite. I had thought she would prefer to go out. She nodded and told me she wouldn’t be long. Her good manners were impenetrable. There was nothing I was going to learn over our hamburgers. If I was to understand whether anything important had come between us, it would be when we made love.
After lunch I waited in bed for her while she spoke to her parents, brothers, and sister. I noticed that she called them in the order of seniority. They were lovely conversations, not only about monks sweeping the gravel smooth in a Zen temple, or the painted faces of Kabuki actors. She had stories that were interesting and droll, whereas I, a professional story-teller, as a rule have nothing to relate. When I call my sister, which I do more or less every week, I am unable to say much more than that my work is going well before I switch to our only real subject, the parents and their keepers. But Lydia’s conversation was full of giggles and shared confidences, those I could hear, because I was at her side, and those that I could read on her lovely and expressive face. Did I envy her? Certainly, the monster was at my side, even as I was at hers, but for the moment it was overcome, neutralized by happiness, by the wonder of saying to myself that this is my wife, the woman whose mouth I will kiss, who will wrap me in her arms, whose body will yield to mine.
Do you remember Wyatt’s lines: “They fle from me, that sometyme did me seke / With naked fote stalking in my chambre”? Rest assured, Lydia did not flee. She came to bed, naked and trusting. And having been chaste during the weeks of our separation, I was a battering ram while I waited—oh, on a reduced scale, I’ll agree, this being no time to boast—but as soon as I drew her to me, so that, lying on our sides we faced each other, well, I became nothing, and no amount of her tenderness could change it. We talked for a while—about the museum in Taipei, of all things! Then we fell asleep: she because she was so tired, I because there is no safer place to hide. She was first to awake and, in her usual way, very careful not to disturb me, reached for her book and began to read. Our bedroom faces south and west over the roofs of adjoining buildings; she did not need the light of the lamp. But she moved, and that was enough to break my sleep. I struggled back into consciousness and for a while lay very still. Her nearness soothed me; it calmed my fears. I dared to begin to touch her. She smiled, a familiar sign that told me she knew and liked what I was doing. Soon she put down the book. Relieved beyond measure, joyous, I was all right. And what did I learn? That she gave herself without reserve, and that the act, as almost always, brought us great pleasure. It did not, I realized, prove anything except that she loved me, which I knew, and that it didn’t matter how much she had guessed—if at that time she had guessed anything at all. Jehovah did not need to call out to me to ask about my sin: I knew I was the author of my own expulsion from the garden where I had been so blessed.
Lydia is a conscientious physician. She was appalled by my cough, which I seemed unable to shake, my loss of weight, and my insistence on keeping to my regular work schedule, in fact, to my usual schedule in all aspects. Perhaps because I had been yielding so recently to my body’s maleficent demands, I now refused it any concessions. I had finished the second round of revisions to the screenplay and it didn’t seem likely that I would need to do more until the project advanced to a further stage. You must take a vacation, Lydia had been telling me, someplace where it’s warm and you are separated from your novel and George Eliot. At the same time, it was clear that she would not come with me. In retrospect, she considered that she had already taken too much time off going to Japan. I had no desire to go away alone—I felt weak and unadventurous— and I didn’t want to go south to a resort, whether it was Florida, Mexico, or the Caribbean. I will rest here, I said, I like our apartment. I will make a point of getting to bed early. In reality, I was tired. When I sat down to write, my eyes would begin to close after a mere hour, sometimes less. I tried my system of quick naps on the couch in my study, removing only my shoes and lying on my back, my hands crossed behind my head. Ordinarily, half an hour of sleep in that position, without other preparations—like pulling down the shades or disconnecting the telephone—is enough to let me go on with work until I produce two or three pages and prepare a jump-off platform for the next day: a sentence pointing in the direction I want to take. But not this time. I slept much longer and awakened feeling broken. Or I awakened in a half hour as I had planned, but the moment I was back at my table the same lassitude as before would overcome me.
Of course, I asked myself whether these were not symptoms of a failure of imagination, signals that I was writing the wrong book, punishment for my sins, the definitive proof that I was a writer without talent whose shame was being revealed—all the maladies typically lumped together under the label of writer’s block that feed a writer’s hypochondria. I knew, though, that something unconnected with my writing was acting upon me, perhaps in addition to all the foregoing ills, because I tired unnaturally when I attempted to walk to my office, the forty blocks I have always covered at my habitual trot being so clearly too much that, after a perfectly serious attempt, I would hail a taxi. I found myself forced to stop midway through the first match of squash that I scheduled with the pro to get back in shape. I was too weak and couldn’t stop coughing. Did I consult my doctor? Yes, because Lydia insisted on it and, although I protested in my usual fashion, I quite saw that it was not unreasonable to speak to him. I have little faith in medicine, except when it comes to extreme maladies, such as the ones that Lydia tries to combat or that manifestly call for surgery. The rest of it, the care of normally sturdy men like me, I consider high-priced tinkering, at best less harmful to the patient than the bleedings and purges administered by the leading lights of the medical faculty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That sort of medicine killed the Sun King, and he and any other man capable of thinking straight would have rejected it indignantly had he not been weakened already, as much by such treatments as by the disease, and browbeaten by the physicians. My doctor, who
is actually a perfectly fine fellow, appropriately skeptical about his own science, confirmed that my travails as a writer were not alone to blame. I was suffering from a variety of deficiencies and insufficiencies that had their source in the pneumonia or trailed behind it. He said, Give yourself two months off—or, if that seems impossible to you, one month. And get away from here to a place where you do not wake up each morning thinking that you should work. You can’t work productively just now; the botched attempts leave you frustrated and add to your fatigue and depression. Could I have come to the same conclusion myself, without the office visit, the blood tests, and the bill that followed? Certainly, but I suppose that since this sort of rest meant not working, I needed the validation of a medical authority to relieve my guilt.
Two places tempted me as possible retreats. One was, naturally, my house on the Vineyard. The other was Spetsai, an island off the Peloponnesus, to which I was drawn by numberless memories, not all of which I had used in my first novel and, therefore, not all of them dead. For me—I don’t know to what extent this is true for other novelists—memories strong enough to power a novel are themselves displaced once the book drawing on them has been written. Only pale ghosts remain in the nether land outside the book, so feeble and distant that they can no longer command the offering of the smallest dish of blood. But of my Spetsai past I had put into the book only the violence and danger of a first love and, in a laboriously transformed form, a political intrigue in which my father had involved himself, and the treachery—so it seemed then, but perhaps it was only a mixture of necessity and foolishness—of his best friend, a French diplomat who, like my father, had behind him une belle guerre,but had developed unfortunate connections with the extreme right. So I had left to me a good deal to revisit: the gentle landscape of that rarity which is a green Greek island; its friendly coastline, with stretches of deserted rocky shore interrupted here and there by unexpected sandy beaches and sheltering coves; the perfection of its size. Spetsai is large enough to afford a sense of physical freedom, and yet so compact that one can traverse it from one end to the other in a four-hour purposeful walk across dry, aromatic brush, and a strong swimmer has no difficulty swimming around it in a day.
People my parents saw every day during the season for lunch, drinks, or dinner, or at picnics organized aboard a caïque, lived in the area bounded on one side by the old harbor, where yachts stood anchored amid the boat building and repair activities centered there, and on the other by a spur of the island that looks on Hydra. Just behind the old harbor a row of tall white houses built two centuries ago by Venetian shipowners looks grimly over the seawall. A handful of other old houses climbs the hillside, less strict in appearance and surrounded by stands of lemon and fig trees and laurel and bougainvillea. At the extremity you will find modern villas built at the very edge of the sea. Smooth rocks at a distance of not more than a hundred steps from their terraces constitute the owner’s private beach. Among my parents’ friends were the sort of Greeks who populate the Pierre in New York and the Plaza Athénée in Paris, French people neither very rich nor very aristocratic nor very glamorous, but more than sufficiently pleased with themselves in these regards, and other foreigners who just happened to live there. Father and Mother were unofficial permanent local representatives of the United States and hosts to a line of American and British friends long enough, Ellen and I thought, to circle the globe—all loosely bound by government service or the war. There were also the special cases, certain luminaries defined by no fixed criteria. Among these were two Swiss men from Zurich, painters who had lived together since art school, both enjoying a fair degree of success, especially in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and both remarkable cooks. Apart from domestic chores, which somehow Max had made Johann understand from the start were Johann’s responsibility exclusively, they did everything together, inseparable to the point that everyone in their circle referred to them simply as the Painters. It was easier than using their names. They adopted me when we first went to Spetsai and didn’t become less affectionate after the appalling mess my father went through, which caused my parents to sell the house in disgust and abandon the island. I never lost contact with them; indeed, I stopped off to see them in Zurich at every opportunity. Their first trip to America was to attend Lydia’s and my wedding. The Painters had been writing to me—actually it was Max who wrote, that activity being his alone—and occasionally telephoning, with rare persistence, to urge me to visit them in Spetsai. They wanted me to come before the island changed under the waves of tourists, and while they were still living as they had in the old days. That they were at most five or six years younger than my parents was very much in my mind, as was the state to which my parents had been reduced. They would not last forever. Springtime is enchanting on Spetsai. I was seized by an urgent desire to take them up on their invitation, and telephoned to accept it.
I told Lydia that evening over dinner that, since I had agreed—reluctantly, I made that clear—to my prescribed rest, I very much hoped she might find a way to be with me, at least for ten days, especially since the place was to be the island that meant so much to me, which she had never seen. I had decided I would stay for three weeks, perhaps four, according to the compromise I had reached with my doctor. To my surprise, she did not even seem to consider the question seriously; otherwise, wouldn’t she have said, Let me think about it and speak to my staff, we’ll talk about it tomorrow when I come home? Instead, she laughed and said she would feel lucky if she managed to get away on weekends, to East Hampton. Then she added, gratuitously, it seemed to me, that Spetsai—for better and for worse—was “North country,” perhaps it was just as well if she didn’t go there and introduce an alien element into my family myth. That closed the subject: I was too proud to mention it again. I remembered, of course, how when we first met she had talked with special intensity about my Spetsai novel, although it was the only one of my books that she never mentioned after we became lovers. That silence had struck me as strange and made me wonder whether in relation to that special period in my family’s life and mine there might be a chink in her otherwise imperial, almost triumphant self-assurance, which seemed to exclude feelings even remotely like jealousy. Was it the love story that I described? I doubted that; other liaisons of longer and shorter duration and varying levels of intensity—most of them I am constrained to confess imaginary!—live in my other books. It may have been her thinking that in that novel I had written about a magic circle of my own, from which she and, who knows, perhaps the Frank tribe as a unit would have been excluded. That would be perfect nonsense, of course, but people—even of the highest intelligence— sometimes apply what goes on in a novel to themselves. The consequence is that you can probably find some poor fellow in New York, with a literary culture and a taste for Tolstoy, perfectly accustomed to dining with Royal Highnesses, employed by this or that auction house, asking himself: Suppose I had run into Oblonsky and Levin dining on oysters, halibut, and rib roast at Stiva’s favorite hotel, could I have greeted them? Would they have asked me to join them at their table? And so forth.
No hypothesis could be excluded. The fear that our relationship was indeed damaged tormented me, as did questions for which I had no answer that brought peace. What explanation was there for dismissing out of hand, without apparent regret, the chance to be together in this unusual circumstance? Since she had insisted as strongly as my doctor that I get away for a rest, could she not find a way for her colleagues and assistants to carry on while she was absent for such a short while? Suppose it was she who had fallen sick: Wouldn’t an arrangement be worked out to cover? I know about the maxim that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and I didn’t for a moment forget that I had refused to accompany Lydia to her congress in Kyoto because of my work, but there was, it seemed to me then, a difference between our situations, and I think so even today. No one could write my book or screenplay for me, or even, if I may say so, keep it warm and prevent a rupture f
rom developing between me and the text. As though to forestall any doubt that I had been genuinely sick, I took pleasure in recalling that I have never babied myself—on the contrary, as Lydia knew well, I had always put a high value on my considerable indifference to fatigue and aches and pains. All this hodgepodge served as the basis for a dubious and unfortunate conclusion: that Lydia’s refusal to come to Spetsai for my convalescence was unjustified. Moreover, I felt myself authorized to regard it as an action more significant than my refusal to attend her congress. In my thoughts I took to referring to that event as a tax dodge, designed to let one hundred and fifty nephrologists and their consorts whoop it up in a place that had no more connection with childhood diseases of the kidney than—why not!—Ulan Bator.
We parted, therefore, a week or so later, rather the way we had said goodbye when she left for Japan. We had dinner the night before at the French restaurant to which I had taken Léa. I ordered a very good wine without a murmur inside me about its preposterous price, my serenity reinforced by the two payments I had just received from Hollywood. We made love nicely when we got home. But I knew that in my heart all was not well and was almost sure that that was also true of Lydia. So there, said North, as though he were abruptly snapping shut a book. It’s late and I am tired. If you wish to hear more, meet me here tomorrow. I bid him goodnight.
The next morning, North was waiting for me at the door of L’Entre Deux Mondes. His eyes were red, showing ugly enlarged blood vessels. The eyelids twitched. He cried, Welcome, most welcome! And led me to the table. Our half-empty bottle of scotch and a bottle of soda were already there. He made me a drink, refreshed his own, and said the place looked dingy. Never worse. I followed his gaze and nodded, although honestly I could not discern any change from the day before or any other day I remembered. His own appearance was another matter. The middle button of his tweed jacket was missing—I was certain it had been there when we parted—and his necktie had congealed egg yolk on it. Remains of his breakfast? He hadn’t shaved. Perhaps, having slept late, he had decided to skip his morning toilette.
