by Louis Begley
I understood at once it was unlikely that he would come to meet my friends in his own drawing room, even though they included the Paris-based New York Times political reporter he most admired. A flush of annoyance passed over me; there was an unpleasant mixture of boorishness, pride, and envy under the surface of Ben’s carefully polite reaction to my proposal, which set my teeth on edge. I was at the point of telling him that for his own sake he should cut it out but stopped myself—for how was this bit of self-improving ablation to be performed?
To anticipate events, I was, of course, right about the party: Ben first called to say he was delayed; our friends in due course suggested we all go out to dinner; his secretary rang to say we must not wait, he would try to catch up with us at the restaurant. We stayed late, not exactly waiting for Ben but drinking too much new wine; he never came. When we got home that night—Ben was still out—I said to Prudence that perhaps he had acted wisely. He might not have wanted to risk being put forward by me as his interesting banker host only to find that the guests, after volubly admiring his establishment, drinking his liquor, and eating his foie gras canapés, had departed with no likely sequel to his hospitality.
For the moment, though, having decided not to launch an attack across the lunch table, I said I was grateful for his generosity and asked if his life was indeed as celibate as it seemed. Or was he being discreet out of respect for Prudence?
Ben laughed—he had seen how put out I was. Having carefully cut and lit a cigar, he said, No, I don’t practice celibacy, I practice sexual hygiene—rigorously! Do you want to hear about it?
I nodded my head. A set piece, as though an actor playing the part of Ben had stepped toward the footlights, followed.
My sessions with Dolores are at lunchtime, he intoned, on Mondays and Fridays and usually at teatime on Wednesdays, subject to holidays, the will of God and my clients, and, most particularly, the reliability of the lady’s husband—in principle, he doesn’t lunch at home. Never on weekends, that’s when he is around and does eat lunch. She comes to my house, but it seemed awkward to keep to our routine and not upset yours; besides, Dolores’s pad is nice—just under the roof of the Palais Royal. It’s a shame not to use it. Off her bedroom she has a little balcony with geraniums, sunlight always on the verge of flooding it. We might well do our exercises there regularly, but Gianni serves just the sort of light cocotte’s meal I approve of, and his point of view doesn’t matter—in fact it is altogether benign—whereas Dolores’s maid is devoted to the husband and has to be got out of the way, which is a nuisance. But you don’t really want me to go on about how I keep in form, or do you?
I assured Ben of the intensity of my interest and, more precisely, my curiosity.
He said, Now you have asked for it, I don’t have an appointment until after three, I will tell as much as modesty permits. There isn’t just Dolores. Don’t forget Paris has been my port of call for a long time, but let’s start with Dolores—I actually call her Do, because she will do anything and I can’t bear her name. Can you remember my dentist in New York? I once gave you his name, when Rachel and I were still together. He was our family dentist, and I told you that Rachel claimed he would rub his erection against her arm while he was drilling. Well, he never did that to me, and he was actually my first guest in Paris, though not at rue du Cherche-Midi—he stayed in the spare bedroom of my suite at the Ritz. Before I sailed, I went to have my teeth cleaned. As usual, when his assistant had finished, he came in to tug at my tongue, and like an idiot—except that God looks after idiots—I told him I was moving to Paris. I had not even opened wide or bitten down or what have you, and already he was asking if he could spend a few days with me; he just happened to be going to Paris, too, though fortunately not on the same boat. The few days turned into a week. That was all right; I wasn’t around much and neither was he.
Anyway, the first Sunday morning after I moved into my present digs the telephone rings. Barely awake (pun intended) I answer; a female voice speaking Iberian French wants to speak to the doctor. I explain ever so politely that he left Paris while I was still living in a hotel. Oh, she says, you must be that très gentil Monsieur Ben; I say, At your service; and, believe it or not, the voice expresses a keen desire to come at once to see me. I plead for two hours’ delay; it is granted. At the appointed minute, the doorbell rings—Gianni being off, I open the door. Henna-red hair, raincoat, white poodle. Ever affable, I ask the lady and the dog to come in. When Dolores, hand kissed, poodle let loose, allows me to take her coat I see she is wearing black shiny leather from neck to boot tops: a sort of birthday suit, because my keen eye detects no bump or line bespeaking such nonessentials as underpants or bra. I offer champagne; she accepts; we sit down on the causeuse and begin to chat. Here is the story: Dr. Banks the dentist filled her and her husband’s teeth in New York and by and by was filling her other cavities as well. The husband is in the shipping business—why that called for his moving from New York to Paris I haven’t found out—here she mainly studies yoga. That the old drill wizard wanted to resume his ministrations between visits to the Louvre is not surprising, but imagine my astonishment when she told me he recommended me to her, saying I would begin where he left off. Of course, he was right to count on me and I have been very grateful—I have even sent him a case of wine. I call my activities with Do hygiene, in part because of the association with oral hygiene but mostly because it’s all so neatly executed and repetitious: regular position, followed by top-to-toe, followed by her on me, and then, once a week, on Wednesdays, unsolicited she opens her back door to me. Why on Wednesdays—it’s a good question, but you know me, I only ask questions at work or when I am trying to find my way to the post office, so I really don’t know. If you think there is a strange, faint odor in my bedroom I will tell you its reason. Do’s poodle is always around to watch us and the beast is incontinent!
I told Ben I felt he should round out, if that was the right expression, our tour of Paris by letting Prudence and me meet the lady, but he categorically refused.
It would be like having you to lunch with the squash pro, an excess of zeal. Besides, if you want a tour of Ben by Night, it would have to be more extensive, and it’s subject to changes and cancellations without previous notice and without refund. Right now there is also a bookstore owner with radical political views, flat chest, and capacity for instant orgasm; a cousin of Guy’s who smells of Gitanes, swears, and has one gold front tooth; and an oversexed Cockney bank employee—I assure you not of my bank!—who loves to eat and has such awful table manners that when I take her out to dinner I wish I could hide behind a newspaper just not to see what she is doing with her fingers. All of this is good hygiene and moderately good fun, even though the loss of my “precious bodily juices” is huge. I just don’t want to mix my gymnastics with you and Prudence and what one might call my more permanent life.
Those were days when Dr. Strangelove and General Jack D. Ripper never failed to amuse us; I rose from the table in the best mood. Ben had told me that rue du Cherche-Midi was a street of monasteries and convents. I was happy to be able to think that Ben did not, after all, return from work to the la Chapelle elegance only to live there like a monk. On Saturday morning, as arranged, we left for the Loire.
Notaben (undated and unnumbered):
Yesterday, I took the Cockney to a party given by her friend Marianne. It seemed wise to skip the fiesta Jack and Prudence were organizing at rue du C-M for the fashion and Vietnam War gurus of the Trib. I know the type without having the honor of knowing the individuals—stick French words indiscriminately into their English, accent like breaking stones, voices loud (competitive decibel production), breath sour (effect of whiskey? cigarettes? too much shouting?), passion for undiscovered bistros known only to other Americans.
Marianne lives au diable—obscure cold street, wrong side of the Champ de Mars. Two maids’ rooms (partition knocked down) in one of those bourgeois buildings that teach revolution to servants and just
ify their body odor. Elevator for the masters; brutally steep, metal stairs for the servants lead to the seventh floor, where are all the chambres de bonnes. No individual WCs; one Turkish toilet for the whole floor, crosshatched outlined feet where you place your feet and squat and strain. In the middle of the corridor on which these rooms (cubicles?) give, a cold-water faucet. That’s all. Marianne has a hose she attaches to it, which leads to her room. There it can be in turn connected to a bottled-gas heater. From the heater another hose leads to the ceiling and ends in a shower head. A curtain encircles the entire installation. On the floor, directly under the shower, is a tub to collect the water from Marianne’s ablutions. Reason for my mastery of these details: before the last guests (including Cockney and me) leave, Marianne demonstrates its use and, extensively, her own charms. Someday must ask why she shaves all her body hair except under the arms. Based on investigations to date, this is not the fashion here.
But I am getting ahead of my story—if there is one to be told.
Marianne’s room dimly lit—that is the fashion—and filled with French and English receptionists and “hostesses;” the latter are young women who show one around “salons,” i.e. exhibitions of anything one might think of—books, washing machines, crockery from Limoges, cheeses of France…. Two plaster copies of 18th c. heads, one real Louis XVI chair. No American girls; they don’t fit in; too ambitious? Aggressive?
Sociological note. Solid French-Catholic families don’t believe in education for their nubile and lascivious daughters. Once these adorable young things with first-class manners and unfurnished heads leave the convent school, they crowd into precisely such futile and underpaid occupations; they are so pleased to find a job and “studio” (meaning this sort of hovel) to live in. So established, they have infinite leisure, the Lord be praised, for lubricity!
Marianne assembled an almost equal number of male predators. Among them, young American lawyer with big ears that stick out like mine—works for a firm I give some business to. Also, Gilbert de Caille, always on the prowl, like a cat. Strange, considering his name. We are enveloped in the odor of sausage, Camembert, and red wine, deafened by a French Chuck Berry. Apropos of sticking out, nothing here sticks out more than my presence. I am older (though Do tells me I look too young for her to be seen with), I am un monsieur important, I am too well dressed, I am—they think!—rich. The young lawyer, I can tell, is torn: Should he keep on fondling the blond girl’s knee or talk to me—one never knows, what if I became “his” client?
The Cockney disappears. Pipi room? Into the stairway, to be felt up by an enterprising guest? Or can’t I see her through the cigarette smoke? Gilbert approaches, puts his arm through mine. Acrid smell fills my delicate nose. He knows the Cockney. Says her con is in a state of constant (no pun intended by me) itch. Were he to telephone her from a café and say, Hike up your skirt, take off your underpants, and don’t move, I’ll be right over, she would do as he told and wait as long as it took, getting wetter and wetter.
Gilbert is surely right; no doubt speaks from experience. I leave him, go over to talk to Marianne, member now fully aroused. Like the libraire, she has no breasts, but vast like Venus in the hips. Asks me why I go to Amsterdam all the time. I begin to tell her—shouldn’t a legal secretary be curious about Dutch holding companies and money that grows in the shade? By way of a strange non sequitur, perhaps because the vanity of all my pursuits suddenly chills me (“a man may sit at meat and feel the chill in his groin”), I change the subject. Speak to her confidingly about Rachel and the twins, and how a man who has lost his arm will sometimes feel twinges of pain where his fingers had once been. She cannot hear me over the music; goes off to pass more runny cheese.
Hours later, when we have finished our business in bed, the Cockney tells me how Marianne said I am the most sinister man in the world. My Dracula qualities not being usually manifest, knowing that they “converse” in French, I ask how Marianne phrased this in her native tongue. L’homme le plus sinistre du monde is the giggled reply. That’s all right, lovey, say I comfortingly, she only means I am the dreariest of men.
We were lucky. During the entire five days we were on the road the weather remained perfect, the sky of a gentle blue, the sort one often sees in Impressionist paintings but never in America, where the light is so much harsher. It was warmer than when we had arrived; Prudence said how like an Indian summer, and Ben told her the French-Christian expression for that strange season, which is so like the gift of a pagan god. We wanted to see all that we possibly could—Prudence had studied the green Michelin and pored over the detail maps—we hoped Ben wouldn’t want to sacrifice tourism to country inns with stars before their names. As it turned out, he had a low opinion of all restaurants between Orléans and Tours and did not object to picnics, provided they could be held in a meadow on the side of a hill, preferably above a vineyard, with a flat stone or two at hand to put the food upon. There was no lack of such meadows. Ben would shop early, to be sure we had our provisions before the shops closed for the sleepy lunch hour, composing meals of sausage, sardines, and cheese, bread to be eaten on the side, against the judgment of Prudence who would have preferred to make sandwiches; we drank local red wine—Chinon, Champigny, and Bourgueil—fragrant and, according to Ben, no more apt to turn our heads than Evian. He would drink the wine like water, he announced; after all, he wasn’t the chauffeur. That was because, immediately at the start of the trip, he turned the wheel over to me, explaining that some sort of nervousness or distraction, he wasn’t sure of its nature, made him drive badly, to the point where he thought he was all the time on the verge of running into things.
While we stretched on the grass in the sun, and over dinners, Prudence talked about French Renaissance architecture. She had studied art history at Radcliffe, her memory was good, and Ben seemed unable to tire of asking her questions. They were wonderful questions, so well organized to lead up the evolutionary chain from Blois to Chambord that I wondered if Ben was absorbing new information or exquisitely keeping up his end of a leisurely cultural baseline volley to let his best friend’s wife show off. I didn’t much care where the truth lay: Prudence was in seventh heaven. We were even less abstemious at dinner. One evening, Ben announced that while he and I would split the bill for the food as usual, the wine would be on him. We ate crayfish as a first course—the specialty of the hotel’s brightly lit restaurant with little table lamps made out of gnarled vine roots—and with them drank a local wine and then, when it came to pheasant stewed with cabbage, two bottles of a Beaune-Enfant Jésus ’59 of a price so prodigious that Ben suggested we pretend for the rest of the meal that we were his bank’s valued clients, with taste and strength to match. He was celebrating an anniversary of sorts, he told us, a trip to Burgundy with Rachel in the year of that wine, precisely when the grapes were being brought in. They had left the twins at home. One evening in Beaune Rachel and he drank that very wine (selected, he assured us, without sacrilegious intent on his part), from the same producer, Monsieur Bouchard, but of the ’47 vintage, and that was the year in which his father chose Jersey City for their family home in the New World, a coincidence that seemed to him at the time full of tragicomic meaning he now could not remember, perhaps because this ’59—so far as he was concerned a better year in all respects than ’47—had addled his brains. Rachel and he had finished one bottle that evening and made a good dent in the second, sending what was left to the chef with their compliments, and made their way, arms around each other’s waist, to their room in the Hôtel de la Poste, so justly famous for huge, hard beds, made expressly, or so it seemed, so that those Chevaliers du Tastevin who managed to survive the twenty-kilometer automobile return trip from the banquet in Vougeot could snore in sodden bliss until the onset of morning hangover. Only Rachel and he did not snore—not right away in any case—they made love in those sheets that were like some snow country.
The chocolate soufflé came: Ben detected unsuitable lumps, consequence of has
te and careless stirring, allowed Prudence to talk him out of sending it back to the kitchen, which he claimed he would have done only to prove to the chef that we paid attention to what we ate. Instead, he asked for ’59 champagne to console us for life’s imperfections. We drank to our next trip—we would go to Avallon, Vézelay, and Beaune next spring, if Prudence’s parents would take the children during Easter vacation—and then to the twins: he wished them and associated delusions bon voyage. At the table next to us were four men who looked like garage owners. They left after much embracing of the patron and the patronne. We were now the only guests in the dining room. Whether to mark his contentment with what we had consumed or to speed us to our room, the patron offered us old brandy. We clinked glasses, and when I stood up I was grateful that our room was only one flight of stairs away. Ben too was tipsy, tipsy enough to say he hoped that what we had eaten and drunk at table would not detract from pleasures that should follow, and how, in his own case, he was not sure he would even manage to sacrifice to absent loves before sleep overcame him.
Excerpt from letter, dated September 1975, from Rachel to me:
I’ve forgotten the name of the wine in Beaune. Isn’t it like Ben to have such a thing up his sleeve, unless he had forgotten it also and only said you were drinking the same wine to give his story higher color. That too would be like him. Why did this sort of thing stick in your memory? Were you taking notes on Ben even then?
Whatever its name, the wine was very good. I chose it and I paid for it. He didn’t tell you that, I suppose. Or did you both take it for granted?
