by Louis Begley
For some time now, listening to North had been making me feel apprehensive. He had reached a point in his story at which it seemed some new development was to be anticipated. It would not be pleasant, or easy to shrug off, even here, at L’Entre Deux Mondes, even in my unsettled state of mind oscillating between extreme sympathy for North and a numbness for which I blamed the effort I had been making to follow the meandering course of his story, the lateness of the hour, and, to tell the truth, the alcohol. I thought that I detected in his bloodshot eyes something like sadness in place of the habitual mockery and defiance. Perhaps a similar anxiety had taken hold of him and accounted for his silence. I did not dare to interrupt it.
Look, said North, things are rarely as simple as one tells them. For instance, it’s quite true that I had finished my novel, had reread it, and, after due allowance for its uncorrected condition, found it no worse than its predecessors at that stage of their existence. Or let me put it differently: What I read didn’t bore me. No, don’t protest, there is nothing abnormal about being bored by what you’ve written. Far from it: I have found myself falling asleep over my own typewriter while I slogged through some description of a girls’ school in Salonika or the New York subway or other foolishness of the sort that for some reason I found valid at the time and I thought I absolutely needed to stick into my story. And my eyes have closed when I was rereading the stuff. Can you imagine the horror of finding that an entire work you have labored over is like that? You shake your head. Let me tell you that I can, although thus far I have been spared that particular humiliation. So I revised and revised, less curious or anyway less concerned about what Lydia might say, and in the meantime my own position evolved again. I realized that the last scene in the book, which I had mapped out in considerable detail before beginning to write— in fact, I had a pretty good draft of it before I started the first chapter, and it would not be an overstatement to say that I wrote Lossso that I could get to that scene—needed a significant fix. Not one that required many deletions or a lot of new text. It was a matter of a few sentences to correct the version I had given of the cuckolded and abandoned husband’s feelings, without which the end of the novel, such as I had written it, was inconsistent with what had become my real intention and, besides, too cruel for me to bear. I performed the operation and found it successful. It was a Wednesday morning in August. Both my club and my favorite restaurant—yes, the same one to which I had so stupidly taken Léa—were closed. I knew that Lydia was at an all-day staff meeting. Nevertheless, I shaved, bathed, got dressed to the nines, and treated myself to a celebratory lunch at another restaurant that I like but usually avoid because, unless you eat there every week, which I don’t, or reserve ten days in advance, which I never would, they tell you, with a little smirk in their voice, that they’re fully booked. In August, it’s a different story. They were actually glad to see me, and the quality of the service, the meal, and the half bottle of wine for once justified their outrageous price.
Do you know why I have just told you this? North asked.
I shook my head.
The reason is not apparent, but it is this: while by a little bit of writing, by changing a few words, I could affect profoundly the climax of my novel, I cannot change the course of the story I am telling you. You see, no price, not even my own life, would be too high, he continued without pretending to give me an opportunity to answer, if I could make that story end now, or if I could rewrite its outcome. There are no such miracles. Words once said cannot be unsaid, and I tremble at what I must tell you.
You see, North continued, I have described to you a moment of triumph. Don’t think that I exaggerate: writing is a solitary business and its great joys—the rare moments of elation—come when you are convinced, even for a short while, that you have solved a big problem and your book is going well. If you remember that, you won’t be surprised if I tell you that during this period when I was finishing my novel, and then launched into revisions that seemed to me successful, Léa vanished from my mind. It was as simple as that. I wrote every day and was totally absorbed in my work; I was happy when I was with Lydia; there was no room or need for Léa or anyone else. There had been times in the past year, in fact quite a few, when I missed, almost physically, the intensity of the sex with Léa, something that, as you now realize, I had never attained with Lydia. Nothing of the sort intruded during that August. Léa shattered my tranquillity by her own acts.
I was again receiving messages from her at my office. They seemed to grow in length. I did not always listen to them in their entirety, in part because she was repeating herself and in part because it would have taken so much time. Because of the heat wave, I went to my office irregularly, mostly to check my mail, both the walk and the ride downtown in an overheated taxi being so disagreeable that they hindered getting down to work. In fact, if I hadn’t from time to time erased messages on my machine when I was there, it would have filled up. I don’t know exactly what she would have done if she had realized that her messages were not being recorded, but given her subsequent behavior, I don’t think that she would have given up trying to reach me. What I did hear in these messages was a hodgepodge of her usual exclamations, assurances that she loved and missed me in certain specific ways that she sometimes described, imprecations that I join her in Ramatuelle, where she was for some of this time, and complaints of being badly treated by a new love—a man whose name I thought I recognized from previous accounts of the comings and goings in the circle of her journalist and art dealer friends. When I called her back and she wasn’t there I didn’t leave a message myself, true to the principle of not leaving incriminating evidence in her possession. Once, she was at home. I told her I would be traveling in the West with Lydia and couldn’t talk. Nonetheless, messages accumulated almost daily. None of this, I should tell you, interested me greatly. Unofficially—in the sense that I hadn’t consciously formulated the decision, and as you can see was far from having communicated it to Léa—I felt that my relationship with her, our love affair, call it what you will, was over. For me it ended when we left Spetsai, for no reason other than that I hated being unfaithful to my wife and found that Léa’s company no longer gave me pleasure. Except during sex, which I thought I could do without. These were the excellent reasons I was willing to give to myself when I directed my conscious thoughts to Léa, which I did rarely and very reluctantly. Léa had become a hugely unpleasant problem, one I didn’t want to deal with. In the meantime, I was planning a stay in Martha’s Vineyard for the Labor Day weekend, and perhaps two weeks more. I hoped Lydia would come with me, that I could pry her away from the hospital and holiday weekend festivities in East Hampton. I thought I would go to the Vineyard even if she didn’t, but in that case only after the weekend, which I would spend with her. A year had passed since I last visited my house and, more important to me, my boat.
During the week before Labor Day—, North said, and then he paused, looked puzzled, and corrected himself, no, it must have been over a longer period, perhaps ten days, perhaps two weeks—the content of Léa’s phone messages changed. They were alarming, and I had to admit that I didn’t believe it was all pure fabulation. A series of them were from Ile de Ré, where a new love and she were staying with his married friends. Like all her great loves, the new one was supremely brilliant. She gave me the highlights of his career at the two grandes écoles he had attended—but she was discovering in him a streak of mean brutality. There were unreasonable demands and anger when she didn’t comply. She didn’t describe the nature of these demands, but I couldn’t help supposing that they must be quite unusual, perhaps extreme, since she was not a novice in such matters. When he invited her to Ile de Ré, she had agreed to stay until the end of the month, but now she thought she had better leave. But how? Tell him and her hosts she had to get back to Paris? But what would she do if he said that he was leaving with her? Or if he turned on her violently? The married friends were so very polite that she wasn’t sure they would p
rotect her. They might think it was indiscreet to get involved. She was also afraid that if she left he would follow her to Paris, where she would be completely alone. All her friends were away on vacation. Then came a message from a pay phone on a railroad platform, on the mainland. She had taken advantage of being alone—while her love and the host were out sailing and the host’s wife had gone to shop for groceries—and run. The ferry was on the point of leaving, but she made it, and she was about to board a train to Paris, where she would take another, from the Gare St. Lazare to her parents’ house in Normandy. Once she was there, she would call again; she had to speak with me; she needed my advice.
I didn’t want to counsel Léa; in fact, I didn’t want to talk to her. Although nothing had been said between us, she was far too sensitive and intelligent not to have understood where we stood, and I told myself that was sufficient. Almost all the women with whom I had love affairs before I married Lydia are still my friends. We may not meet for lunch as often as we should or exchange letters, or do any of the things that in theory friends are always doing, but I do not discern any bad feelings or hostility. I saw that this case was different: there would be no continuing friendship. To the contrary, I would want, quite passionately, to have nothing more to do with her. It may or may not be clear to you but, as I looked coldly on our relationship, all I could see was its sordidness. I was ashamed of what I had been doing. This was a fact, not a judgment subject to appeal. I don’t think that Léa ever came to any general judgment about our activities. She attached no moral significance to them. You wonder whether being ashamed justified heartless behavior toward a young woman I had been delighted to screw whenever the occasion presented itself and I felt like it. The answer is no, it didn’t, but I had become angry as well as ashamed. In any event, for the time being I was let off the hook, and glad of it because it seemed to me there was nothing I could do for her, and no words of wisdom to impart that she wouldn’t find insulting. If I were to give her my honest advice, I would have had to say that she should stop being a little slut and give up sleeping with men who didn’t meet some modest threshold level of kindness and decency. I had no doubt that this would make her laugh, and I could imagine her riposte: You mean I should let myself be laid only by true gentlemen like you! The answer to that question was: Of course, you should have stayed away from me, and very little effort was required to stop my advances. But that is not what she would want to hear.
North paused as though to give me an opportunity to speak. I said nothing, and after a moment he continued.
I am giving you here, said North, an example of my sour propensity to renounce and reject parts of my past. My growing determination to shun further contact with Léa is really of a piece with how I often behave in much more trivial matters, when I have been disappointed or when I think I have been in the wrong. Take restaurants where I have been a regular guest. If I am served a surprisingly bad meal, or if I think I have been treated disloyally—for instance, I am kept waiting, despite having made a very precise reservation—two outcomes are possible. The first, which is happy, and consistent with my general predilection for untroubled dealings and loyalty when it comes to places where I eat and drink, get my teeth cleaned, fill the car with gas, and so forth, is that the restaurant owner or head-waiter will apologize at once in a manner that I find sincere. In that case, all is forgiven, and I never give the offense another thought. But if no rescue operation is performed, and I allow myself to get worked up—as I got worked up after that comical epiphany about the true nature of my affair with Léa—all hell breaks loose and there is literally no going back. To the restaurant, or to the person. My annoyance or worse at whatever it was that set me off—it sometimes happens that I forget the precise nature of the wrong I have suffered—is from then on compounded by feelings of guilt about my own role in the breach of faith. It’s all childish and absurd, I know it is. Nevertheless, there are streets in more than one city that I avoid because they happen to be where this or that establishment I have broken with is located, so that walking along them might expose me, for example, to the risk of an encounter with the barber who cut my hair for years and surely felt hurt when I abandoned him. It would be kinder, I say to myself, to let him think I had moved away from the city, or never returned to it, or, best of all, had died. There are addresses that I have had to expunge from my address book and would, if I knew how, expunge from my memory, so that if a friend asks me, Do you still go to Igor? referring to the barber who offended me, I could lift my eyebrows in bewilderment and reply that I have never known anyone by that name. The truth is, of course, that no rescue operation was possible in Leá’s case, but that fact, including my not-so-dim awareness of it, had no influence on the outcome.
Thereupon, North rose and told me he was going to the men’s room. Did I need to make a visit? he asked. I accepted the offer gratefully. When we were back at table, North said that it was possible that the oddities of his character he had been discussing did not interest me. If that is so, he told me, I was underestimating their significance. After I had assured him that there was no danger of it, he refilled my glass and continued.
I must get back to the events that were unfolding, he told me. You see, up to that point Léa had made avoiding contact with her wonderfully easy for me. She had never mentioned in any of those messages where or how I could reach her, which isn’t surprising because naturally she wouldn’t have wanted me to dial the number of that house in Ile de Ré. On the other hand, I could have broken my rule and left some words of comfort on her Paris answering machine. I knew that she checked it compulsively. But with the unity and coherence of my feelings toward Lydia, and my conviction that I had finished with Léa, these appeals of hers were particularly unwelcome and ill timed.
She called again, from her parents’ place, just as she had said she would. The town in Normandy turned out to be Trouville, a dreary resort a short distance from Deauville. The mention of Trouville made me recall a cold and clammy weekend I once spent there with a wilted American couple who had rented a villa for the summer. The memory intensified my disgust. They had quarreled incessantly during my stay, which for them was probably the equivalent of treating me like a member of the family. I must have felt obliged to accept their invitation because the husband had been a protégé of father’s. Why else would I have gone there? I don’t think that I had any illusions about Trouville or my hosts. Had someone asked me to describe them, I believe I would have given a prophetic answer: The sort of people who ask, when they see you, if you are going to the beach, whether you have brought your own beach towel, and, if you haven’t, which was my case, produce a worn-out white washcloth and say you can’t have one of the landlady’s good towels because you’ll ruin it. So much for my novelist’s foresight. It can provide you with accurate information, but you don’t always act upon it. Superimposed on the memory was an incongruous and humoristic vision of Léa, an almost blind Aphrodite, her tan perfect and her breasts insouciant, who is discovered, having lost her way, walking up and down that gravelly strand among a population of pale petit bourgeois covered with goose pimples and shivering in the cold. The most recent message included a telephone number. I was to be sure to call that same day, after eleven in the evening, when her parents would be asleep. The telephone rang in her room and we would be able to speak privately. To this she added, in English: You had better call me. I didn’t like the words or the tone. Still, shortly after five in the afternoon, which corresponded in France to the hour she had named, I telephoned from my office. I too wanted privacy. She answered at once, but it wasn’t to talk about Ile de Ré or her disquieting new love, or to seek my advice. It was to announce that Voguehad offered her a reporter’s position in New York and she thought she might accept it. Therefore, she was coming to the city the following week to see the woman who would be her new boss, and also us, both me and Lydia. If she was going to live in New York, she wanted to make our situation transparent. That was the way she put it, and
she added, again in English, a variant of the unlovely locution she had used in her last phone call: You had better be there. Perhaps she was practicing how to cope with her tough environment-to-be. My astonishment was so great that then and there I made a fatal, unforgivable mistake. I should have said, Terribly sorry, ma petite chatte,Lydia and I are leaving for Australia and Tasmania and won’t be back until the new year. I told her the truth. I said I would be on Martha’s Vineyard. Really, she asked, alone? Again I told the truth, that I wasn’t sure. And then, because I could no longer contain my rage, I shouted, I will kill you if you come near Lydia. I regretted instantly what I had said, but it induced in her a fit of laughter. When she was once again able to speak, she said this: You have no sense of humor. I remember our pact. But, even so, I am going to see Lydia. If not this month, then the next. It doesn’t have to be on your island. I want to get her to move my painting to your apartment. It doesn’t look right in your office and, anyway, I want it to be where it can be seen by the important people who come to your house. I hung up without saying goodbye.
