by Louis Begley
Decaze is lucky, that cousin of yours is a good business partner, remarked Ben as we returned to the drawing room. With a word or two spoken in French, he had prevented Guy from leaving with the others, and now, throwing open the French windows that gave on the garden, and raising his arms to welcome the cold air, announced that dinner was about to be served at home: Gianni had made gnocchi; we would drink a great deal of good wine and then, when the mood was right, go to the bar in the rue Chauchat to hear the only real balalaika left in Paris.
III
THE FOLLOWING FEBRUARY Ben came to New York for a visit; there was a partners’ meeting of his bank he wanted to attend—a matter of speaking up at the right time for Scott van Damm, who might be considered in the partnership election later in the year, or perhaps of seeing that no cracks developed in his own position in Paris. He stayed long enough for us to have lunch twice, and of course he came to dinner at home with Prudence and the children. I had recently joined a club of considerable distinction—some would say the most desirable of such institutions in the city. The thrill of leading a guest into those precincts was still fresh, and that is where I invited Ben for our farewell meal. We had already talked about my book and its slow progress. There was very little useful information about the daily life of American Indians in the precolonial and early colonial periods; almost none to reveal how they perceived their existence. I wanted a firmer grip on their truth. Ben laughed. He said (and with increasing frustration I had been coming to the same point of view) that thoughts which had not been written down could never be recaptured—except, if one has sufficient confidence, by a leap of intuition. For that, I was not ready. Ben said he knew I had not used his apartment. It was a pity, inspiration being the sister of regular working habits. In reply, I told him of Prudence’s plan to take the children skiing in Idaho during Easter vacation, provided her parents made us the gift of cash they had suggested we might expect. Our next visit to Ben would have to wait until the fall.
Battle was raging in the Plain of Jars, but we did not mention Vietnam. I had come during those years to find it grating and, in the end, useless to debate the American involvement in the war with certain members of my family and close friends. Such discussions, one quickly saw, were an unpleasant waste of time; they raised questions about the values on which relationships reposed that I preferred to leave unanswered. With Ben, my disagreement was not about the conduct of the war—he had no wish to see American B-52S bomb Laos and Cambodia—or even about its merit: in fact, ever since Diem and Nhu were first fixed in our collective consciousness by the New York Times, he had maintained that we were backing the wrong horse in Indochina. Rather, I could not help feeling that Ben was not sufficiently American to understand a purely native aspect of the dispute about the war: the necessary, cleansing function that antiwar protest performed in the political life of the Republic. His vision of the movement—confined to pretorn blue jeans, grimy headbands, unwashed hair and feet, swaying pendulous breasts, and, indoors or out, a propensity to sit on the ground, legs outstretched, even when a chair or bench was available—usually expressed in sardonic sorties, angered me. I took it as another symptom of his irreducible Central European cultural hypocrisy: good appearance passed off for the good life, secret yearning for a brutal, punishing father translated into tolerance for the likes of Kissinger and Nixon. I wondered whether Ben’s choice of service in the marines, nominally a high-spirited, aesthetic reaction against the prospect of spending, like myself and most of our friends, the two egalitarian years demanded of a peacetime draftee in the army among overweight typists and inventory clerks, had not proceeded from the same troubled source. So it seemed wiser—besides, we had only talked about me and my family—to turn the conversation to him. As usual, that meant talking in the first place about the twins.
Of Sarah, Ben said that she had done well in college. Now she was out, but instead of going for a graduate degree or getting a real job (the latter not being strictly required from a financial point of view) or having a whopping adventure—for instance, trading in coffee beans in Quito—she lived tranquilly out of wedlock with a Harvard professor of Hebrew studies at least five years Ben’s senior, blessed like Abraham with children from his first wife and not in the least divorced. The wife was to blame—she refused to accept the necessary rabbinical writ from the professor. All this was taking place in Waltham, in the professor’s run-down tenement, within shouting distance of Rachel’s ancestral Brookline. Presumably for part-time distraction, Sarah took the morning shift at the cash register of the corner laundromat. Ben admitted that he was not above enjoying the joke on Rachel—the accusation that he was the old satyr of Porquerolles still burned in his foot like a sea-urchin spine. Less amusing to him was Sarah’s view—perhaps inspired by the professor, perhaps achieved through independent analysis—that Ben was a bad Jew, unwilling to assume his Judaic identity, and therefore unworthy of her affection.
I asked about Rebecca.
She has come to believe that I loved only her mother and Sarah, and at best tolerated her. She has no use for me, except as a high-class employment agency. All is as though I had a duty, perhaps in lieu of reparations, to get her the jobs she wants. She has her eye on some curatorial position with the Victoria and Albert in the glass department, and, believe it or not, I think I’ll be able to do it! I’ve struck up an acquaintance with Sir Sigmund Warburg and he has been astonishingly kind about helping Rebecca. There is one small hitch: Rebecca will not come to the telephone when I call, and she doesn’t answer my letters. We communicate exclusively through Rachel, which slows things down. My opinion as a banker is that I must write off Sarah and Rebecca. They are bad loans.
I am wrong to talk about this, he continued, I know my attachment to the girls has been absurdly excessive, but I find it very hard to come to terms with the obvious, fatal truth. The girls can have real or imagined complaints about Rachel—some more awful than anything I have been accused of—and Rachel will tell you and anybody else who is willing to listen that the twins are monsters. Still, in the end, something—genes? glue of family money? Rachel’s being a woman?—makes their relations permanent. They have to work things out and they do. When it comes to me, after years of faithful service in the zoo, at the Museum of Natural History, and at the beach, they retired me without as much as a souvenir silver whistle. All I have left is a bad case of womb envy, babysitting skills, and a collection of fading snapshots I no longer keep in frames because they have become embarrassing to explain. You probably noticed that there are no photographs in my office in Paris or in the rue du Cherche-Midi. I am more divorced from the twins than from Rachel.
My own memory of him as a mother hen was vivid; we had held occasional joint picnics on the rocks above Central Park’s East Meadow. Nevertheless, I didn’t undertake to comfort Ben by suggesting that the twins were going through a rough period as young adults and that later their relationship would revive. I too thought that his expectations and the intensity of his feelings were excessive. Those girls were not his children; the circumstance of their natural father’s being dead could not change that. And then, there were too many obstacles: Rachel’s influence—she held Ben responsible for her own disappointments, and this disappointment of Ben’s was a pleasant revenge; the feminist sentiments, which encouraged matrilinear groupings; Ben’s hurt feelings and colossal pride. Besides, he was changing. For all his gentleness with Prudence and me—renewed evidence of which I had seen during our visit—I felt that he had, in general, become harder in manner, possibly because his self-assurance had kept pace with his success, and more set in the ways he thought befitted an elegant old bachelor. I decided to ask him instead about his sexual hygiene in Paris. The expression had stuck in my mind.
He told me there had been notable developments. Dolores’s husband was moving the conjugal residence to Athens, the French tax collectors under Pompidou having become too active for his taste. Fortunately, poor Dolores had not rebelled, and Ben di
d not have to face the task of explaining that he was not a pillar she could lean on. The tricky problem would be to enforce the rule Ben had immediately imposed, that when she came to Paris for a visit—the husband agreed she should do that at will—she must stay at the Plaza-Athénée, like all other shipowners’ wives, and not with Ben. He would receive her with joy in all his members, but only on bed-but-no-breakfast terms. Guy’s cousin was opening an art gallery in Marseille and was also moving away—that didn’t matter much since her services could not be compared with Do’s for excitement or dependability. The Cockney was oscillating between possessiveness (she had recently asked Ben to drop her off at work after a night at the rue du Cherche-Midi; he refused, pointing out the availability of the métro at the corner of the rue de Sèvres) and tasteless, sluttish talk, possibly even behavior. For instance, it appeared that there were men among the “bosses” in her office—she had insisted on naming them—who made her “itch.” New therapies, new animals for his zoo were needed, lest he be reduced to waiting for Scandinavian au pairs on the boulevard Raspail at the hour when their courses at the Alliance Française ended and they were ready for a drink with a venturesome stranger.
Viewed from my monogamous Upper East Side perspective, this last aspect of Ben’s situation did not seem too depressing. But I promised to direct to him any appetizing friends who might be traveling to Paris and then asked if there weren’t suitable replacements to be found among the circle of the Decazes’ friends and nieces. Véronique had written to me about the favor I had done Paul by introducing them to Ben. That is how I knew that the Oklahoma clients had, in fact, retained Paul, that Paul had invited Ben to lunch, and that Ben’s bank was becoming an important source of business for Paul. Ben replied that he had been glad to help Paul—especially as the work was done right. He would keep my advice in mind, but he had not yet been able to accept any of their invitations (very cordial, very tempting) in Paris or in their place in the country.
We rose from the table. His next visit would be a short one, in early April, to attend a meeting of a board of directors. We made a date for Thursday the ninth to lunch again at my club.
Notaben 273 (written on Air France stationery and dated February 1970):
On the difference between a mujtahed and a shithead.
A mujtahed is an ulama (Islamic scholar) recognized officially by other scholars as qualified to engage in independent reasoning on legal (therefore religious) issues. The process of such independent reasoning is ijtihad—one supposes the highest possible form of intellectual activity. Sometime in the XIIIth c. of our era most—perhaps all—Sunni scholars decided that the gates of ijtihad had been closed forever, that everything capable of being grasped by the effort of human understanding had been so perfectly set down for the generations to follow that all that remained was to apply precedents. That process is taqlid, the opposite of ijtihad. Since there was no possibility—in fact, no need for—further independent thought, no mujtahed would again come into being.
Possibly because they are awaiting the coming of the lost Imam and therefore must bet on the future, Shiites have never believed in such closing of the gates; for them, in every generation there has to be at least one mujtahed, so that among them the delicious process of ijtihad has continued unabated. On this issue, the best ulama among the Sunni have now rallied to the Shiite position.
This information comes from Dr. Bensalem. He swears it is accurate, his uncle having been a great shari’a scholar.
A shithead, on the other hand, is someone whose head is full of shit. I have that on the authority of the Cockney, whom I interrogated exhaustively before giving up my initial understanding of the word. Pre-Cockney, I understood it to denote a more superficial condition, that of one’s pate or possibly hair having been smeared with excrement.
Why go into this? Disgust at what I have become, fear that my head is just so packed with ignoble desires, envy, thoughts rooted in nothing and leading nowhere. When I traded in my chance for a life of something like ijtihad, I should have picked taqlid. Why not? Isn’t that what they practiced so joyously in every heder in Lithuania and Poland? Only I could have done it at a fancy law firm. As it is, I read Business Week instead and claim that if I am paid enough I can also interpret the Mene, Tekel, Upharsin on the wall.
Before Christmas, I was in Venice with the Cockney. One walks down the frozen nave of the Frari, through the arch of the choir, and suddenly perceives the Virgin ascending, her young peasant girl’s feet hidden in a small, playful cloud, just out of the reach of the uplifted arms of the Apostles, who, until a moment ago, thought she was among them. Surrounding her is a crescent of cherubim, some standing or sitting on the same playful cloud, others supporting it. Above, like a flying saucer, soars the Father, propelled by two more grown-up angels; His dark-hued face is bearded and virile, resembling the vaporetto captain whose vessel I seem to board so often.
I told the Cockney I felt so “exalted and humbled” that while we were there I managed to forget about being a shithead. She paid no attention whatsoever. Perhaps she thinks I’m talking to myself. The day before, when we visited Santa Maria Formosa, I showed her the tombstone inscription near the altar that bears Hermann Wilhelm’s name and mentioned that it is believed Rilke had been inspired by it. Then I launched into a discourse about Rilke’s preference for Angels, lovers, animals, and trees that, as an analogy, might serve to explain my fondness for her.
Resolved: I will spend more time on sex and think less about food, clothes, and money.
Notaben 274, dated 15/3/70:
I have prepared the following notice that might, when I have had it suitably engraved, be presented by Gianni (when that invaluable man returns) on a little silver tray (naturally in a closed envelope) to all lady visitors:
How to Get the Most out of Monsieur Ben
While you are here, Monsieur will be as ardent as circumstances permit. Please respect his illusions and refrain from being more ardent than he!
Montherlant says somewhere that more marriages have been spoiled by bad breath than by infidelity. I live in terror of sour-smelling mouths, my own and those of others. Children of both sexes, young girls, and young cats can be approached without guile: no need to offer them mint candy, cigars, or garlic to mask the fetor of tired gums.
The whole of Montherlant’s oeuvre validates, with Old Testament sternness, my forthcoming notice to lovelorn visitors. The only question is: Have I made my meaning plain? In a later, improved edition I may try a formula. Sexual interest of B in X (which we shall call I) is reduced in proportion to the amount by which the sexual interest of X in B exceeds the value of I. In my case it is not only sexual interest (and performance) that are so affected—the blight spreads over all of my affection for X. I cannot bear to receive more than I am able to give. Is this just my own starved and stingy heart, or are all males so constructed? (Montherlant is no help here; in his pages there is no love.)
WE MET AS AGREED on the second Thursday in April. I was jubilant about Carswell’s defeat the day before and told Ben about how people we both knew had gone to Washington to lobby senators, for the first time in their lives, to bring about that result.
Carswell is so much worse than Haynsworth that we are lucky Nixon for once didn’t get his revenge. Perhaps I should ask to be replaced in Paris and become a political agitator in New York like all my old friends. Do you think I’ve become respectable enough to fit in? It might suit me to get away from Pompidou and the agitators in France. I am tired of protesting shopkeepers!
Ben’s suggesting, even in jest, that he might wish to return to New York was unexpected. I asked what was wrong. Had he failed to renew his sexual zoo?
Yes and no, he answered, I don’t really know. I haven’t paid very much attention.
He went on to explain that this was a dreary time for him. He had finished the work for the Oklahomans and now missed his bargaining sessions in Rabat with the president of the Moroccan company and the brillian
t little Dr. Bensalem—exchanges at once intricate, tense, and suffused with friendship. For instance, he said, take the black bean soup and chefs salad they serve at your club. They’re all right. But one look is enough to make me long for boiled mutton, chickpeas, couscous, and harissa, followed by a glass of mint tea. And for Moroccan waiters who start grinning as soon as you appear, shake your hand, and call you Chef. What I am working on in Paris is dull stuff: the sale of a family-owned French perfume manufacturer to the owners of an American cosmetics firm who are even richer. Their money is new. The deal is limping along in a setting worthy of a Buñuel. Our meetings are at the house of the matriarch of the tribe on avenue Foch. It has small sitting rooms that are perfect cubes, each with its own Impressionist masterpieces, where one can caucus between rounds of negotiations. Her butler passes stuffed eggs and whiskey and soda. Then we go in to lunch. The other week, I managed to extract from the old lady a piece of new information: Yes, now that I had reminded her, she thinks the family in fact owns—through “formalities”—those Swiss companies one has never heard of before that have recently turned up receiving most of the proceeds from the sale of their perfumes. Naturally, it’s they and not the French company that have the rights to license the perfumes. No, the Swiss companies’ books of account can’t be revealed, let alone audited; a banker surely understands how important discretion and trust are in a family business. No, the family will not guarantee what those accounts might turn out to be; there are too many cousins to be consulted, the tax consequences might be unpleasant, she is no longer a young woman, one has to think of the worst.
