Man Who Was Late

by Louis Begley

  But that’s precisely the problem.…

  I was finally able to prevail on V to avoid precipitous actions. For one thing, she must first talk to a lawyer. I really don’t want her to lose Laurent.

  The rest of Ben’s note is about Paul’s rage upon his return from London—he did hit Véronique, but there was no apparent erotic intention in the punch that left her with a black eye, wearing dark glasses for two weeks, and broke a Louis XVI chair from his family—his refusal to accept the cocka-mamy explanation for Véronique’s absence, the growth of his suspicion that she and Ben were lovers, and threats by Paul to “punish” Ben if it turned out that he was right.

  A UNESCO conference on advances in hybrids resistant to drought and pests, which held out hope for parts of Africa, was scheduled to take place in Paris in mid-October. This was a subject that interested me and that I knew something about, because of research I had done on my Maine precolonial Indians. The magazine agreed to my attendance and commissioned an article. The expense allowance was not generous; in any event I preferred to be with Ben. When I called to propose a one-week visit, I detected a note of initial hesitation in his voice, which he quickly blamed on uncertainty about his own travel plans and then drowned in the generous enthusiasm of his usual response to each request I made of him. I arrived on a Saturday evening, wishing to have a day free for wandering through Paris—with Ben if possible—and for relaxation before the conference opened. In my experience, such gatherings, however high their intrinsic value, induce sleep unless one is thoroughly rested or suffering from a toothache. To my surprise, Ben met me at the airport. As we sped toward the city I made a comment about his driving; it did not seem to make him nervous, as in the past.

  Oh, he replied jauntily, that has stopped being a problem. I have been driving a lot, and quite happily. I have things to tell you about it.

  When we got to the rue du Cherche-Midi, I noticed a corresponding greater gaiety in the surroundings; it seemed that Ben had really settled in. There was a profusion of cut flowers, and plants of various sizes and shapes had been added to the stiff—desolate, Prudence had said—ficus and rubber trees Olivia had left to stand lonely guard before the French windows of the drawing room. With champagne, Gianni served canapés he must have prepared himself, instead of the salted nuts and Dutch cheese crackers of the previous year. Fires were blazing in both fireplaces. I regretted that Prudence had not been able to come with me. She would have liked the change in the atmosphere and the change in Ben’s own mood. As though he had read my thoughts, he said he was very sorry she wasn’t there and asked me to do whatever I needed to get ready to go out. We would have oysters and more champagne; he couldn’t see how I would have a night’s sleep otherwise.

  By this time, it was quite late. Ben set a fast pace. Until we got to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the streets were dark and empty. Our heels made a resonating noise against the sidewalk of the sort I associate with black-and-white films about France under occupation. I could see that Ben’s standing in the world of night owls was high: at the Lipp, it was the owner himself, and not one of the nephews, who gravely shook his hand and then mine and showed us to the table without even a pro forma delay. There was Ben’s usual fuss about categories and quantities of oysters.

  When it subsided, and our glasses had been filled, Ben told me he was glad to be able to talk to me in person, instead of writing or telephoning. A row was in the making about Véronique; it was just as well that I hear about it from him; he wanted to tell me about her anyway now that it was no longer a secret he was obliged to keep, and, as I was staying with him, I would probably run into her and figure out the situation even if no one in her French family chose to mention it to me or to my mother. In the hours that followed—we were the last clients to leave the restaurant and then used all the logs Gianni had left, keeping the fire going until, dead with fatigue, we decided we had to call it a night—Ben told me much of the story I have related. The rest he confided only to his notes.

  The new aspect of the situation, he said, is that Paul has become sure that it’s me, and not his nerves or imagination or some unknown dark stranger. Véronique and I have been quite careless and open on the telephone, first, because I call her only when by all rights he should be at his office, and, second, because in France you can’t listen on another extension to what is being said unless you get special equipment—and maybe even an authorization for it from the post office. If the telephone rings and someone picks it up, the other extensions essentially go dead. What we had not supposed was possible, but that pork did it, was that he would put a bug on his own line and make a tape that, although it is not particularly rich in intimate detail, nonetheless leaves no doubt that we see each other behind his back. Véronique has heard the tape. He likes to play it to her. I have not yet had the pleasure. But that’s not the end of your cousin Paul’s telephone activities. He has taken to calling me at home in the middle of the night to inform me that he has just “screwed” or is about to “screw” Véronique—the verb is his as he now speaks to me in English, probably a form of ostracism so far as he is concerned—and he also calls at the office. The calls at the office are usually threats. For instance, he has suggested that he might send the tape to the head partner of my bank—as though poor old Dwight would care who is “screwing” Madame Decaze—and has even offered to shoot me if he catches us together.

  To lighten the mood, Ben continued, I once asked him why he needs to catch me with her if all he wants to do is kill me, but I don’t completely dismiss this idea of his, having seen him bang away with his gun at clay pigeons, and he is so unbalanced that when I last let him into my office he was literally frothing at the mouth, making it difficult for him to speak. He also plans to notify your mother, because he holds you personally responsible for having introduced a “leper” into his domicile. Strangest of all, he hasn’t made any move to stop working for me as a lawyer. In fact, some of his calls are about how we are not giving enough business to his firm. He says no real man would make the personal situation between us a pretext for injuring him financially. I have not, as it happens, given instructions to use him less. On the contrary, I continue to like sending him out of town!

  I asked whether he and Véronique were still seeing each other.

  Of course, Ben replied, in the afternoons, at my house. I would say every afternoon, unless something happens that makes it quite impossible for me to leave the office. In those cases, she comes in the morning, right after Joos has taken Laurent to nursery school, and I simply get to the office on the late side. This week, Paul will have to spend two nights in Brussels. That means the three of us can dine together, unless you utterly disapprove. In any case, she will come home with me after dinner. And she is coming to lunch tomorrow. She has told Paul she has to see her mother about money.

  I said that it could be that I was tired, but I couldn’t understand. If they loved each other and she was willing to leave Paul, why was she still living with Paul? Couldn’t their lawyer—I assumed they had one—arrange some sort of separation so that she could move in with Ben or into an apartment of her own? It seemed to me that was the way these things were arranged in New York.

  He doesn’t want her to leave, Ben replied, he wants to keep her at any price, he wants her to love him again as in the past, and he says she will never get Laurent if she walks out. But that’s only a part of the story; it’s really because of me. She does love me, and I love her, and she does make me happy. Still, I have not said pack your bags or leave your clothes there, as you prefer, and come to live with me. And the reason I don’t do it is Laurent. I don’t want to be responsible for her losing him or having to accept some unworkable arrangement, like not being able to take him out of the country. That is the understandable and respectable reason for the situation. I keep warning Véronique that if she doesn’t keep Laurent things will eventually sour between us. I am convinced that is so. It should be possible, though, for her to get Laurent on some reason
able basis if we are careful and persistent. But the secret, guilty reason is that I am afraid to have Véronique come to me with Laurent. I am out of the stepfather business; the twins put me out of it. Even if some love were left over inside me from the twins that I could give to Laurent, I would always be checking on him out of the corner of my eye, wondering whether he was throwing it away, as Sarah and Rebecca had.

  There was nothing I could think of to say. We sat for a while, looking at each other, until Ben got up and opened one set of the French windows. Cold, mildewy air poured in.

  I sound terrible, he told me. Like some sort of machine for grinding out words.

  For some time I had felt an enormous ache encircling my skull, pressing against my eyes. It was not just Ben’s revelations, however much they depressed me. I had drunk too much, and although I had taken a bath and poured into it violet crystals from an expensive-looking bottle, my skin smelled of the airplane.

  Let’s see what’s in the icebox, I suggested.

  We found sausage and Gruyère. There was bread on the counter, wrapped in a dish towel. Ben opened a bottle of red wine. We sat down and ate, hacking away at the sausage with an old, dented carving knife. I saw that Ben was weeping. The kitchen window gave on the front courtyard, toward the east. A sort of sallow morning had begun. Ben turned off the lights in the kitchen and the drawing room and we went to bed.

  I fell asleep almost at once. When I awoke, Ben was knocking on my door. He asked if I wanted breakfast before lunch, which would be served as soon as Véronique arrived. If I did, Gianni would bring it immediately. I got ready, somehow holding my headache under control with orange juice, aspirin, and Ben’s bath crystals. When I went into the drawing room, Ben was still alone, standing before an open window. He was quite dressed up, considering it was Sunday and he was expecting only his mistress and his old best friend, who was the woman’s cousin. I admired his tweed suit of an undefinable soft color, the beautifully matching shirt and necktie, the polish of his shoes. Cousin Olivia’s ceilings were very high; perhaps because of that, or because of that sort of distance from people and objects that a hangover induces, I also found Ben very small and lonely looking. He heard my steps and turned around with a smile.

  The last part of our conversation was very morbid, he said. I have those feelings of denial and despair, but they are not all that important. Just a way of conjuring bad luck: never admit you are happy! Someday, I will get around to patenting this method.

  The doorbell didn’t ring. Véronique must have had a key. She came into the room with her coat still on, an enormous bunch of red chrysanthemums in her arms.

  Look how beautiful they are, she said. They smell like a well-kept cemetery. And I have a new street guide for Jack, Ben’s is in tatters, and a necktie for Jack so he can dress up, and a sweater for Ben, so he can take his necktie off.

  It was a cashmere turtleneck the color of her flowers. Ben said he would put it on at once. I saw that he was very moved. Then, at the table, while she served the food Gianni had set out, she exclaimed over how well Ben looked in his sweater, admired the wine, talked about my mother and Vassar and Ben’s important work—there was a huge project, which I too had heard about from Ben, that he was looking after in Brazil—I saw that she was leaving very little to chance. She was like a maddeningly pretty nurse whose light, quick hands bandage a large wound so tenderly that the sick man thinks only how fresh looking she is and how kind and does not even notice that she has taken away the hurt. Ben did seem happier than I had ever seen him. They offered to come with me on my walk, but I vigorously refused, knowing why she was there. As I headed toward the Seine, I prayed that this was one train Ben would manage not to miss.

  V

  Letter from Véronique to Ben (translated from the French by me):

  Paris, 10/xi

  My lovely Ben,

  You should have let me come to Brazil with you. It would not have been nearly so bad as the mess I have made here, trying to be prudent. And you should not have urged me to go with Paul to his uncle Rémi’s for the All Hallows’ Eve weekend. But I listened to you, my darling, and anyway Paul was making such a fuss about Rémi and his party, saying how I was the legend of the family, how everybody was talking about me, buzz buzz, and how the only way to fix it was for us to make an appearance and be correct. So we went, and Laurent was angelic all three days, but that is not what Paul had in mind when he lectured me about good behavior.

  Rémi’s château is really quite nice. By some miracle, it was not restored in the 19th century. It has an ornamental moat Rémi is especially proud of. Inside, it’s dull: dark wallpaper turned brown, Second Empire furniture, some of which may be valuable, and wherever you look—antlers! He has them in every size and in every location: over doors and fireplaces, in double rows on the dining room walls, even in the bathrooms. Each one has a little copper plate that gives the date of the meet and the place where the kill occurred.

  The whole horrible family was gathered—all of them monsters except for Rémi, whom I like even though he organized this witches’ Sabbath, and my wonderful Lavinia. But, of course, Lavinia wasn’t there. Intelligent as ever, she got away to Deauville. How could I ever have married Paul? Why didn’t I break our engagement after I had met them?

  On Saturday, like every week in the season, there was the meet. Uncle Rémi’s hunt mostly goes after roe deer, which is a splendid thing, my adored Ben, because those animals are beautiful and clever like you and equally difficult to catch. Since he is the master of hounds, we started from his house, within the moat, right in front of the perron. The sun came out and it all looked very grand: shiny horns; hounds; members of the hunt in bottle-green coats, everybody else in black; many children, one or two as little as Laurent, on their ponies. Rémi remembered that I ride, and he had a nice gray mare for me, with good gaits and very eager.

  Paul is ridiculous on horseback, but he decided he wanted to follow the hunt; in fact he had made a big point of it the day before, so Rémi’s régisseur got a horse for him out of a rental stable, a huge bay animal that wheezed terribly. It must have a heart condition. This made Paul feel slighted—a very stupid reaction: a better horse might have thrown him (and my troubles would be over!). But he was unhappy anyway from the start, because he was wearing a tweed jacket while all the other men were in hunting coats or in black.

  Finally, after a lot of blowing of horns and consultations among Rémi and the huntsmen (they are the employees of the hunt who look after the dogs, and they are the only people who really know where the scent of the deer can be picked up and what the deer will do once he is started), we set off. I don’t suppose you have seen one of these provincial hunts. It’s not at all grand and exciting like an English print. No great open fields; no jumping over stone fences or down muddy cliffs into rushing streams. Just hard riding and trying to outsmart the animal. All the villagers turn out to watch, in cars, on bicycles, and sometimes it is they who tell the huntsmen which way the deer has gone.

  Rémi tried to match Paul up with one of the young cousins, but he refused and told me that he expected me to stay with him, and so I did for almost one hour, although the wheezing of his horse was driving me mad and got steadily worse. Also Paul was pulling at the poor beast’s mouth, which is something one doesn’t do. Then there was a moment of great confusion. The deer must have lain down in a hollow under a pile of leaves, they are perfect camouflage, and Rémi and the huntsmen and the rest of us just ran over him. This happens only rarely and proves one is chasing a superior animal. In any case, the dogs lost the scent completely.

  At last they got it straightened out, the deer broke, and I went after him fast, catching up to Rémi, although I saw that Paul had made his horse so furious that the poor animal was just standing athwart the road, throwing his head, blocking other people, and refusing to move. Rémi and I had a lovely run through the forest and a big clearing and again in the forest, and I forgot about everything except you, my angel, until th
e curée was over (Rémi made them give me a hoof because I had done well and was a guest), and we were drinking in a village restaurant nearby. At once, everybody was asking where Paul was and I had absolutely no idea. He finally showed up, just as people were going home. He had gotten lost. You can imagine his mood, especially as the night air was turning cold and he was so charley-horsed he could hardly walk.

  In Rémi’s car on the way home, Paul didn’t say a word to either of us. His teeth were chattering so I put a blanket over him. Then when we were in our room—I just had time to make sure Laurent and Joos were all right—he told me to pull off his boots and then he let down his britches and showed me his rear end. It had great bloody sores on it from the saddle, and the underpants were sticking to it! One would have thought my maman had worked him over. I burst out laughing; I couldn’t help it, although I was sorry he had hurt himself, and then he hit me twice, on the face. It’s becoming a habit.

  I got away somehow and waited until he had left to dress for dinner. The whole gang was there when I came down, glaring because I was late, a roomful of Decazes with just two or three of Rémi’s Poitou neighbors who fit right in with the family. They were short one man, so Rémi put me, I can’t imagine why, next to Paul’s mother. I detest that woman. She didn’t smile when I sat down and did not open her mouth to greet me. Across from her was her cousin, Maître Dutruc, whom I also detest. You can’t have forgotten the black warts on his nose. I introduced you to him at our dinner in June. He is a racist. During the war in Algeria his platoon tortured prisoners and he likes to brag about it. On my right was some local cousin who ate sauce with his knife and did not speak to anybody, so that I could see he had nothing against me personally. At the other end of the table was Paul, making eyes at Dutruc’s daughter—the younger one, not the one he used to sleep with before we were married. Apropos of people who don’t speak, Paul did not say a word to me either, not a single word of apology while we were standing around drinking whiskey—I shouldn’t say “we” as the Decaze females weren’t doing any such thing. If they drink anything at all, it’s port.