Shipwreck

by Louis Begley

  This was said somewhat sternly.

  What are you doing here? she continued. I thought you’d given up on New York.

  Not in the least, I told her. I’ve been away a good deal, but I’ve never stopped being a New Yorker. This time I’ve come home to stay.

  That’s good news, she said, we will reconnect.

  In rapid order she went on to inform me that she was living in the city but since she still had her place in Little Compton was able to keep one foot in Rhode Island; that both her parents were dead, as was her sister-in-law Edie; that her brother John hadn’t remarried, was living in the big house in Bristol, and took even more seriously than their parents its significance in the history of the state; and that there were many things to catch up about. Thereupon we heard the gong summoning us to our seats. As we separated—she was in the mezzanine and I in the orchestra—she announced she’d look for me at the next intermission.

  I made a sincere effort to pay attention to the goings-on onstage—a Balanchine ballet that was not one of my favorites—but it was no use. I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering. Good heavens, Lucy! I wasn’t sure that I had seen her more than once or twice after her and Thomas’s divorce, and that would have been in the late seventies. Possibly in the early eighties. In fact, it seemed likely that the only times I had given her any thought must have been when I saw Thomas, alone or with his new wife, which I had done with some frequency, and inevitably when I read Thomas’s obituary. Other than the obituary, it all seemed desperately long ago. Lucy could have been one of those Radcliffe, Smith, or Vassar girls of good family who came to New York in the 1950s after college in search of a husband or the dream job. You met them at a cocktail party given by somebody’s aunt or godmother. They were mostly attractive—Lucy had been, depending on the angle from which you saw her, a great beauty or a jolie laide—and if conjugal bliss and raising the perfect family in Bronxville, Scarsdale, or Morristown was not their principal immediate object, they wanted to write. In the meantime, they were looking for a job in book publishing or at Time, LIFE, or the Saturday Evening Post. Unfortunately, the men who dispensed such jobs thought that girls of their sort were best suited to answering the phone and bringing coffee. A good way to break out of the stereotype and escape was to go to work instead for a fashion magazine. That’s what Lucy did. A couple of years after Sylvia Plath’s stint there, she competed successfully for a summer job as guest editor at Mademoiselle, went back to Radcliffe for her senior year, and after graduation proved once again clever or lucky. She wangled a year’s internship at the Paris Vogue, a posting that must have made the aspiring writers and journalists among her classmates break out in hives from envy.

  Lucy was apparently special in other ways as well—at least in the context of the early 1950s. A man I played squash with twice a week, at the Harvard Club when I invited and at his grand Park Avenue club when it was his turn, had remained a regular on the debutante party circuit. He had been at the ball the De Bourghs gave for Lucy at their mansion the summer before she started at Radcliffe and had kept up with her during the New York season that followed, at the Junior Assemblies and every other conceivable venue, apparently including some he didn’t care to specify. She was ravishing, a knockout, he told me, she electrified every stag line and would have easily been the debutante of the year if it hadn’t been for rumors about the unfortunate business at Miss Porter’s just as she was due to graduate. She’d gone AWOL—according to the account he’d heard she’d shimmied down a rope from her dormitory window—and was discovered sleeping off a bender at a Howard Johnson’s outside Farmington. Her swain had already departed, and she refused to reveal his name to the police or the headmistress or even her parents. Mr. De Bourgh pulled strings and wrote a big check so that she was allowed to graduate, and he and Mrs. De Bourgh went ahead with the party. Whether they held their noses was an open question, since the invitations had been sent out and it would have been a bigger embarrassment to cancel. My squash partner made these revelations as we rested in his club’s locker room after an arduous match. In keeping with the atmosphere of the place, he added a personal testimonial: She fucks like a maenad. A snooty maenad!

  Paris was where I got to know her well. At first we’d only run into each other at American embassy functions. Ambassador Dillon and his successor, Amory Houghton, had been at school with her father; they made a point of looking after her. Later she began to invite me to the elegant little dinner parties she gave at her apartment on rue Casimir-Perier, a short walk from place du Palais Bourbon, where Vogue had its office at the time. Then one thing led to another. There were many young American students and expats in Paris at the time. The strong dollar made luxuries affordable. Lunch for two at Lapérouse, with a decent bottle of wine, set one back, after a generous tip, perhaps twelve dollars. The war in Algeria had not yet heated up, and the lure of the intellectual and literary life in Paris was at a zenith, stoked by the reputations and powerful personalities of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Camus, as well as the vogue for existentialism and French cinema. Lucy stood out among the Americans of her age. As is well known, the very rich are different from the rest of us: they possess and enjoy early and are convinced that they are better than we. Lucy wasn’t very rich herself, but the aura of historical importance and wealth that surrounded her was unmistakable. Her forebears, the eighteenth-century De Bourghs, had been well-to-do ship owners in Bristol, Rhode Island. The one who was her direct ancestor, James De Bourgh, had commanded a ship before he was twenty; during the War of 1812 he was a dreaded privateer on the American side; after a career in Rhode Island state politics he became a U.S. senator. His huge fortune, consolidated through cotton manufacturing, had been earned in the slave trade; when he died in the late 1830s he was said to be the richest man in Rhode Island and possibly the second-richest man in the country. I suppose it was John Jacob Astor who beat him out for the first place, but I’ve never taken the trouble to confirm my hunch. Although by the time I met Lucy, the De Bourgh saga was hardly known to anyone who wasn’t an American history buff, and even I, who qualified as such, had initially had only a sketchy recollection that there had once existed an important De Bourgh, I had perforce become familiar with it. One simply couldn’t spend much time with Lucy and not hear about James De Bourgh and his Rhode Island contemporaries and rivals, the far-better-known brothers John and Moses Brown. She inveighed against the gradual frittering away of the De Bourgh fortune under the stewardship of James’s descendants, among the more feckless of whom she counted her own father, and American trade policies she blamed for the collapse of New England textile mills in the 1920s, which her grandfather and his brothers had failed to anticipate, but so far as she was concerned her family’s glow had not been diminished. Besides, as she used to say, losing your shirt is a relative concept. Everything depends on how many shirts you have left. We’ve still got many to go.

  She astonished me by turning down the junior editor’s job in New York that the magazine offered her at the end of the internship. Living in New York, she said, wasn’t for her. Instead, she went home for the summer in order to get in some good tennis, she said, and in the fall returned to Paris, her apartment, and her dinner parties. After one of them, while we were having a nightcap, I asked what she planned to do now that she was back.

  To live! she answered breezily. To dare to live!

  She expatiated on that concept in the course of subsequent conversations. Wasn’t she an heiress of all the ages, duty bound to take full advantage of her education—she had a comically high opinion of her Radcliffe degree in Romance languages and literature—and above all her freedom? Family trusts, though hardly as ample as they might once have been, allowed her to carry on the way she did. Why take a job she didn’t need or particularly want and, coincidentally, deprive someone to whom it might make a real difference?

  I had no ready answer other than “of course,” although I wondered how well she had pondered the fate of nineteenth-centur
y expatriated ladies on whom consciously or not she might be modeling herself. Besides, it wasn’t any of my business. Lucy and I got along well, and having her in Paris organizing her dinners and occasionally more ambitious entertainments was pleasant. A case in point was an expedition to Chartres with her and a married couple from Providence on their honeymoon in France. Talking nonstop about the architecture of the cathedral and Henry Adams’s take on it, she barreled down the three-lane route nationale, which the shadows cast by plane trees lining it on both sides had turned into the semblance of a shimmering stream, her four-door Mercedes convertible leaving in the dust the deux chevaux carrying the humbler French and the big sleek Citroëns beloved of French bourgeoisie and government officials, until the gendarmes stopped us at a speed trap about thirty kilometers from our destination. They were polite, and so was she, but, as she said when we resumed our journey, some of the squeak had gone out of her. But only for that morning. By the afternoon we had her in fighting trim again, and the trip back to Paris was even more hair-raising. Her theory was that cops never stop you twice on the same road. Besides, she had a dinner date, and she didn’t want to be late.

  As the intermission approached, it occurred to me that I had enough stored-up memories and enough living ghosts—former persons, I called them—encircling me, school and college classmates, people I had worked with at one journal or another, and my literary agent to whom I had remained faithful, and had no need to add Lucy to the crowd. The thing to do might be to stay in my seat during the intermission. Alternatively, I could skip the third piece on the program, a Balanchine ballet I had seen too often to care about missing it, leave the theater, and go directly to dinner. The conscience of a balletomane prevailed. There was no good reason to avoid Lucy, and certainly none to let her drive me away.

  Lucy must have turned to see which way I was going when we parted after the first intermission. She was waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

  Well, she said, that was fine dancing. Did you enjoy it?

  I nodded.

  There may be better dancers in Europe, she continued, I wouldn’t know. I don’t go to Europe anymore. But to my mind this company is still wonderful.

  I assured her that I agreed, whereupon she asked, Aren’t you going to offer me a glass of champagne?

  It turned out she wanted mixed nuts as well. I paid and followed her out to the balcony. There she told me with scarcely a pause between sentences that she had been sorry to read about Bella and should have written, but she hadn’t known her very well, and that she supposed losing her had made me very lonely.

  Shocked by the callousness of her remarks, I turned toward the fountain and remained silent.

  After a pause she said she remembered that I, on the other hand, had written after Thomas died, which she thought then and continued to think had been a gesture of misguided politeness. Not expecting condolences, she hadn’t answered.

  I may have shrugged before replying that I had liked Thomas and had regretted their divorce when I heard about it, as well as, of course, the ghastly accident.

  She turned on me.

  What do you mean! I couldn’t have gone on living with that monster. You went on seeing him, of course, just like all the rest of my friends. Yup, everything he wanted fell into his lap, including that celebrity second wife, and he never acknowledged that he owed it all to me. Perhaps he didn’t remember. Perhaps he never got it.

  I didn’t bother to reply.

  My son, Jamie, is a failure, she added inconsequentially. He tries to write screenplays but doesn’t know how. No wonder he can’t sell them. His wife is a Chicana. Naturally they live in a creepy suburb of L.A. When I go out there, he doesn’t even let me stay in his house. I have to go to a motel!

  That’s hard, I said.

  This time she agreed. Their story is that Thomas never asked to stay with them. Naturally! Why would he have? He stayed in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel and had himself driven out and back! You know that he had absolutely no sense of direction.

  I couldn’t help laughing. He may have well chosen the better solution, I told her.

  Certainly, she replied, he could afford it.

  She must have realized that I was about to say goodbye and changed the subject: I suppose you’re meeting people for dinner. You can tell the truth. I’ve already eaten, so you don’t have to worry about whether I’ll fit in. I eat early these days. Some other evening, though, I’d like to have you over for dinner. What’s your telephone number?

  I gave it to her, together with my e-mail address.

  She wrote both down in a dog-eared address book and said, I’ll be in touch.

  Also by Louis Begley

  SCHMIDT DELIVERED

  MISTLER’S EXIT

  ABOUT SCHMIDT

  AS MAX SAW IT

  THE MAN WHO WAS LATE

  WARTIME LIES

  LOUIS BEGLEY lives in New York City. His previous novels are Schmidt Delivered, Wartime Lies, The Man Who Was Late, As Max Saw It, About Schmidt, and Mistler’s Exit. His website is www.louisbegley.com.

  A CONVERSATION WITH LOUIS BEGLEY

  Donald Hall has published twenty books of poetry. His short stories are collected inWillow Temple (2003). Forthcoming is a memoir,The Best Day the Worst Day, about his late wife, Jane Kenyon, and a selection of his poetry from 1950 to the present.

  Donald Hall:The first thing to notice, the first thing to astonish, is the form of the novel—John North’s monologue over three days to a nameless listener. “I made no comment,” the listener tells us. “It seemed best to say nothing.” In one of his few references to himself, he speaks of John North as “this man so like me in appearance, in demeanor.” Maybe he notes class and education only, but it raises the thought that North is in effect talking to himself. Did you have any such notions?

  Louis Begley:It is possible that North is talking to himself. Small pieces of stage business, however, point in the other direction. Occasionally, the mostly silent ostensible narrator says something and bestirs himself to do certain things. He drinks, he eats, he accompanies North to the toilet. More important, he observes North and reports on him. None of this, I agree in advance, is conclusive. It could be that North and I are enjoying a private joke.

  A reason to think that North is not alone that I find persuasive is the tension of the narrative. I think it comes from North’s always addressing someone who is in fact right across the table from him, rather than speaking to the abstraction called a Reader.

  DH:Did the monologue form occasion special difficulties in the writing?

  LB:It didn’t. I had no hesitation about the form. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was very much in my mind; it could not be dislodged. I wanted the tale to be told by a compulsive talker, one of those obnoxious people whom at first you can’t get to shut up, and later would gladly pay if only they kept going.

  DH: In the Paris Review interview, done while you were writing Shipwreck, you talk about beginning a novel with a “clear image of the protagonist and of the protagonist’s predicament,” and of knowing “how the predicament will resolve itself.” Did you know how Shipwreckwould end?

  LB:Yes. As I may have said in the Paris Reviewconversation, I had the ending so clearly in mind that I wrote it out before I started on the beginning. Such changes as I made later in the ending had to do with the geography of Martha’s Vineyard, the exact place where North’s ship would be wrecked, and, of course, the use of words.

  There must have been eight or ten printed drafts with nothing but word changes. And between those printed versions I was constantly changing words on the screen of my laptop. But nothing of substance was altered.

  DH: While being interviewed by Léa at the beginning of the novel, John North talks about how a novelist uses “tales and anecdotes told to him by others. When he is dining out, for instance, like Henry James.” Was there such a seed for Shipwreck? Do you remember how the novel began and how it grew?

  With Loss,Joh
n North “had a pretty good draft” of the last scene in his book “before I started the first chapter.” Did you ever do such a thing?

  LB: I am sorry to report that I did not get the idea of Shipwreckdining out.

  Its germ was a thought that came to me in Venice, I believe shortly after I had finished Schmidt Deliveredand before I started Mistler’s Exit. I wanted to try to write a thriller about a married young man with children who decides he must get rid of an intrusive mistress who is threatening the tranquility of his family. Of course, he wants to commit a perfect crime so that he can live happily ever after. That aspect of the transaction is not, in his opinion, difficult to work out. The real problem is that he genuinely likes his mistress, and therefore, he wants to make sure that he doesn’t frighten her or cause her pain.

  I had a solution to that problem as well, but I didn’t get around to testing it because I turned instead to Mistler’s Exit. But, when Mistler’s Exitwas done, the old thriller idea rose up in a new shape, that of a crime that may not be a crime at all, at the root of which is the very complicated relationship between North and his mistress, Léa.

  So it is true that, like North when he was writing Loss,I had the last scene in hand when I got to work.

  DH: North’s monologue takes place at a bar called L’Entre Deux Mondes. The name of the establishment seizes me. I found myself giving Shipwreck an alternative title: Between Two Worlds. I seem to take the name of the establishment as being descriptive of the novel. Do you see any such possibility?

  LB:You are exactly right. Where the narration takes place is a mystery, and I intended it to be such. At one point it occurred to me that L’Entre Deux Mondes could be a quiet corner of an insane asylum.

  DH:I do not confuse Louis Begley with John North, but I wonder if your feelings as a novelist jibe with his. He does not want to pick one of his novels as best because “one can’t say that sort of thing about a book any more than about children.” You say something similar about your own work in a Paris Review interview. When John North writes a novel that makes use of memories, he tells us, writing the novel exorcises these memories. Has such a phenomenon happened to you?