by Louis Begley
Ben held sleeping with the wives of close friends to be a riskless and potentially beneficial activity from the point of view of all concerned. His own discretion was total—he never revealed a single name even to me, only the process. As for the straying wife, he thought one could normally count on her distaste for scandal, especially if she had small children and if one explained in advance, as he never failed to, that one’s affection for good old Greg or Sam and determination not to marry again were equally unshakable. Ben insisted to me that in fact there was never any difficulty: he had simply gotten to understand and like better a number of our mutual friends and their families; the drain on his finances was negligible—frequent outings to chic restaurants, weekends in London or Acapulco, and presents of jewelry all being obviously ruled out. Since ignorance is bliss, it was not necessary to take the husband’s perspective on these doings into account. But, when he did, Ben concluded that the husband came out ahead. In the worst of hypotheses, Ben’s sexual performance made the hitherto undervalued husband look better. If, on the contrary, the lady was satisfied, she returned to the nuptial couch relaxed, possibly with more positive ideas about what might be attained there. But the existence of office or professional links changed all that; in the particular case of the Decazes, the lack of a shared history of friendship that would dispose the lady to collaborate in the preservation of general good order made for a volatility, for unpredictable potential disruptions of family and business relations. Worse, it would make demands on Ben’s time and involve him in systematic lying.
Whether Ben believed in these lunchtime theories, and to what extent they reflected his experience, I wasn’t sure. But each time he expounded them, I was grateful he did not feel it necessary to assure me that Prudence and I were not included in their ambit. As I noted at the outset, Ben liked paradoxes in conversation. He had a similar (albeit more superficial) propensity to contradictions in his daily behavior. Among them were the way in which he shied from attachments, although he suffered from loneliness, and how he lied with gusto if asked where he had dined the previous evening or whether he liked Tchaikovsky and yet strenuously avoided situations requiring sustained falsehood.
There was another wholly different reason for him to vacillate. Dolores had just written suggesting that he spend that same Pentecostal weekend in Athens. The work on her new house in Kifisiá was finished; the husband had business in New York; Ben could stay at the Grande Bretagne and go to the museum in the morning. “We will have lunch in Piraeus with broiled fish. All afternoon you will love me,” she concluded. Ben was tempted. So it happened that a note of thanks to Véronique for the evening in Arpajon came close to marking, for the time being, the end of his contact with my cousin. True, there was no necessity to go to Athens on that particular weekend in order to enjoy such uncomplicated pleasures. Dolores’s husband was often away: Ben thought he could tell her that he too was going to New York (lest she come to Paris or offer to meet him in whatever other city he named as his destination). On the other hand, right then Dolores might help him keep black thoughts at bay, while later in the summer he might be over his depression and, in any case, Athens would be too hot.
Yet Véronique’s offer had a peremptory quality. It had to be taken up right then or not at all. And what would Véronique think if he ignored it? That he had not understood her or was timorous—or, possibly, that he had found her unattractive? Each of these suppositions and others like them, in addition to being untrue, implied an undeserved insult to her or a loss of face for him. His memory was vivid of how she had looked at the cocktail party at the rue du Cherche-Midi and then in the Fortuny dress in her own house, and of the peculiar old-fashioned perfume that progressively combined with the nascent delicate odor of her sweat. It had been warm in the conservatory; she had perspired; probably she used no powder or deodorants, just little dots of that perfume. Desire for Véronique, brutal and urgent, made itself felt. He should invite her, he thought, to a restaurant where the food and wine were good and the decor refined enough to go naturally with an elegant woman—at the same time, although Paris in principle would have been emptied for Pentecost of everyone but tourists—it was better, so that she need not feel nervous, to avoid places where people she knew were likely to dine. Was this his punishment? he wondered. Was he condemned to pore over restaurant guides and wine lists like Sisyphus rolling his rock uphill?
He put down the papers he had been studying, dialed the number himself, and arranged to see her on Friday evening of the weekend she had named; he wanted the entire time Paul was absent to be open before them. He asked that she meet him at Ledoyen, in one of the gardens of the Champs-Élysées. Her voice was tiny and colorless. She said yes.
ON THE FRIDAY he was finally to see her, he went home after the office—Paris was indeed deserted, the taxi ride took less than ten minutes—bathed, washed his hair for the second time that day, clipped his fingernails and toenails, and dressed with extreme care. His newest black shoes seemed dull. He buffed them himself, telling Gianni to rush to the florist’s before she closed, to make sure that the flowers in the house were fresh, and to change his sheets and the towels in his bathroom. He decided he would leave his car with the doorman of the Crillon. From there he walked to the restaurant, hardly conscious of the red and yellow flower beds, then at the height of their glory, carefully staying on the pavement so that the dust of the garden allée would not whiten his gleaming shoes.
He was precisely on time. The red-plush foyer was empty; some people were in the bar. He decided to wait for her at the table—it would be at least five minutes—to avoid the awkwardness of greeting her at the door and then crossing the dining room at the side of a young woman who was still a stranger. Was she not a little taller than he? He supposed she would wear very high heels. Also, he wanted to make sure of the table. It was a table at the window and it was all right; they could turn their backs on the other diners and face the mass of green outside. The garden lights had just been turned on; the green was changing to a Magritte navy blue.
This time her hair was down, not quite to her shoulders, gathered loosely by a ribbon that ended in an enamel clasp above her forehead. Ben found it less becoming than the chignon she had worn on the two previous occasions: her features, typical of a blond, floating just a little, changeable, needed a touch of severity or concentration; he regretted that her ears were covered. She was a little out of breath, as though she had been running, and her chest moved heavily under a dress of red crepe de chine with a pattern of smug, cream-colored Buddhas. Ben told her she was very beautiful. She laughed, asked if he was surprised that she had kept the engagement, and when he replied—truthfully—that he had never doubted it, laughed again and said he was odiously sure of himself. The reason she was late and had not had time to put up her hair, she informed him, was that she had decided only twenty minutes before to meet him. Until then, she had planned to call the restaurant and say her car had broken down. That would not have worked, Ben said; he would have sent his own car for her. She then told him, in possible contradiction, that she had arranged to stay in town: her mother-in-law agreed to invite Laurent (that was her son’s name) and the au pair for the weekend.
She ate and drank fast, almost rapaciously; in contrast to the impression given at the party by the pallor of her arms, she seemed to him admirably wholesome. He said it was time for the life story she had promised. She asked him to wait until after dessert; she couldn’t both talk and pay attention to food.
After she had finished her sherbet, she told the story, at first almost as woodenly, Ben thought, as he had told his own in Arpajon. The anecdotal part that concerned my great-uncle and my family, of course, he knew; she had loved horses, still did, thought she could handle any steeplechase course; she jumped with her legs open, it was all in the balance, it had been awful to leave for Vassar and give up racing and now they couldn’t afford to keep a good horse and, anyway, Paul wanted her to be in Paris during the week. There was a pause
during which she peered into the mirror of her compact. Then she continued: I changed my mind about Vassar very soon. All those friends of Jack’s on weekends—I kept on falling in love. I even wanted to marry Jack, but he paid no attention. He said I was his little sister. Would that have stopped you? All those gods and pharaohs liked it, and I would have met you so much sooner!
For the second time, the recklessness of my cousin’s conversation disconcerted Ben. Was she acceding to his wishes before they had taken form? Why had she named me? This was a door he preferred not to open. Like a man steering into a long skid, he mumbled in English that yes, vice is nice but incest is best. She smiled. Her compact occupied her again.
Knowing from me that the father was dead, Ben asked about Véronique’s mother. This was the way to steer the conversation onto a road that was circuitous but left him in control. Where he wanted that road to lead he hadn’t yet decided.
The flat truthfulness of her answer surprised me when I read his notes. She said she drove on occasional weekends to her mother’s place because she wanted Laurent to know the house where she had grown up, but it was difficult for her to be with her mother alone: her mother had beat her and continued to do so even when she was in college and came home on vacations. She hit her with a riding whip—they were always around—or a clothes hanger or an umbrella, whatever was near. Véronique would have great welts and black-and-blue marks on her back and legs.
Horrified, Ben asked why she had put up with it, especially once she was no longer a child. Véronique answered that she was not sure she any longer knew the answer. At the time, it had seemed to her that the beatings calmed her mother and made things go better in the house for a while—her mother was extremely nervous, perhaps hysterical—besides, she had gotten used to it. She didn’t mind the hurt, just that it showed, because she always had to remember when she shouldn’t be seen undressed.
That’s probably why I married Paul, she added carelessly. When I graduated from Vassar, I was looking for a job in Paris, but I would go home to the country on Saturdays, and my mother was still beating me. I met Paul in Paris, at Lavinia’s birthday party. He took me out afterward, and we went to the room I had in a friend’s apartment on the rue Jacob. We made love with all our clothes on, even my underpants. Fortunately he wanted it that way; I could not have let him see my body. And then? Then he asked to marry me and I told my mother and she said I was lucky, he is so solid, and she stopped hitting me. We had Laurent, and my mother gave me the money to buy an apartment and a house in the country, and now he usually takes me undressed.
Her eyes were empty—Ben wondered whether the earlier impression of health and freshness was misleading, perhaps she was, in fact, a little mad, or whether there were other things she was thinking of, had been on the verge of saying, and then had decided she would not speak about. She was playing with a lump of sugar on the table. Without thinking, Ben covered her hand with his. It was a warm, quiet hand; he realized that his own was cold as ice and that he was trembling. It doesn’t matter, she said, it has all turned out pretty well. My mother also liked to ride. She taught me herself, when I was little. If I had a horse now, I would still be good; I could ride in any terrain. They drank a brandy, and then another. Véronique smiled. Now it was she who took his hand. She said she was curious whether Ben was really tenderhearted, tender like a woman, or afraid of his own thoughts.
He said he was afraid. In the town where he lived at the beginning of the war, when the Germans first came, there was a friend of his parents’—a large, blond woman, with permanent lazy cheerfulness. He remembered her wearing shiny silk blouses that stretched tight over a bosom which like everything else about her—arms, lips, even her back—was surprisingly ample. When she bent down to kiss him, he would try to peek at her breasts. The valley between them was also oversized and smelled sweet of powder. One day, the Germans took her to the Gestapo or SS house. She was kept there one night, perhaps two. He no longer remembered why they took her or whether he ever knew the reason. Then they released her; she was led to her home by two regular policemen, one on each side, supporting her at the elbows. The point was that she couldn’t see. They had beaten her on the face, on the breasts—everywhere. So it was beatings, that and the word “lead.” He could not hear of beatings or of people being led even in absurdly unconnected contexts, as when his own mother would speak of the bridegroom’s mother’s being led to the canopy at a Jewish wedding, without thinking of that woman and being deathly afraid. What made it odd was that he had not witnessed the scene; his mother had described it.
Véronique asked what had happened later.
He replied, I don’t know, or perhaps I have forgotten that, too.
The air outside was warm when they left the restaurant. She had with her a heavy green leather raincoat, ugly and unsuited to her dress. He asked to carry it for her; folded, it weighed uncomfortably on his left arm. She took his other arm. They walked through the gloom of the garden toward the Concorde, shining, brilliant, and noisy in the distance. It was still early; the floodlights illuminating the obelisk and the horses of Marly had not been turned off. In a moment they would reach the great square. Her pace was slower. She leaned against Ben so insistently that he felt the outline and warmth of her breast. The vision in the story he had just told, mixing with Agnès at Desfossé’s flickered in his mind—was this a universal signal? He let the leather coat fall on a bench and turned toward her. Before his arms could close around her she was already clinging to his body, her lips opening his. He had not misunderstood her.
BEN TOLD ME of his affair with Véronique only after it became known to Paul. These circumstances will be related in their time. What neither Véronique nor I ever told Ben—and I believe he stuck to his decision not to suspect it—was that I too had been her lover during her first college vacation, when I stayed at her mother’s house in Quevrin, and during the following school year; that I had seen and followed with my lips and tongue the stigmata left by those extraordinary, secret beatings; that I beat her myself, with the palms of my hands and then also with my belt, in winter afternoon daylight, in the glacial silence of my parents’ apartment—they were spending that Christmas in Eleuthera—because, after we had made love, and I had caressed her back, which was again clear as alabaster, she begged me to do it with a vehemence that shocked me and eventually separated us, for I had never done such a thing before or since. It was, therefore, not difficult, as I read the notes in which their first night together was alluded to so often, described by Ben in frenzied fragments, to be present, to remember, and to imagine.
They drove in silence to the rue du Cherche-Midi. Her mouth was glued to him, her hands were inside his shirt, unbuttoning his trousers, tugging at his necktie. At red lights he would in turn reach for her. By the time he had stopped the car before his house, their clothes were in such disarray that he was going to abandon the car on the sidewalk, but she laughed, rebuttoned him, opened the gate, shut it behind them, and said, Let’s race inside. On an idiotic impulse, he carried her over the threshold; though so tall, she weighed nothing. When they were in his room—he had picked up their clothes from the floor as they made their way to it; he did not want to leave, like Hansel, a trail for poor Gianni—and at last he saw her naked, he was astonished at how heart-wrenchingly thin she was, her white body, with no remains of suntan at all, a blond isosceles triangle in the middle, ending in large slightly pink feet. Her breasts, which had felt so heavy when they embraced, were in fact only long. She bent over him. In the spasm of pleasure that ensued he thought for a terrified moment that there were scars at the ends of her breasts—what operation could she have had?—but it was only her nipples, somewhere at the end of his field of vision, pendent, astonishingly dark for someone of her color, and large.
And the rest, those actions that Ben had used to think so repetitious? They enchanted him; he had stumbled into the vast bliss of being loved. She told him how she had longed to be entered by him, that she wou
ld not stop masturbating except when he was in her. She would cover him with her juice and forbid him to wash, steal his clothes and wear them, find one million ways to be always with him.
So there we will leave them, in my cousin Olivia’s bed, the French windows open on the little garden and pensive Pomona. They will sleep until the sun is quite high. Then Gianni will bring their breakfast; Véronique will sing in the bath; they will speed across Paris to get rid of the awful raincoat and pack a tiny suitcase of her clothes—just enough for the long weekend she will spend with Ben in his house.
I envied them, especially Ben, when I read about those days in Ben’s documents. Véronique was so amiable—he was not accustomed to that—and Paul, or someone before or since Paul had met her, had taught her, as Ben put it, using Valmont’s phrase, to do of her own will and enthusiastically the things men hesitate to ask of the most hardened whores. Or perhaps it was just the product of wide reading, the new availability of certain kinds of films, and that good nature I have just alluded to.
