by Louis Begley
I want it to be here waiting for us, she says.
Faith, hope, and availability.
Notaben 402:
My German has improved steadily during this week. It’s encouraging how such things return.
It’s our last night. They serve a surprisingly good churrasco with fried manioc flour. We drink very cold beer. She clings to me at the table, her hand always at my crotch. Our fellow diners, a branch manager of Banco do Brasil in Belo Horizonte, his brother-in-law whose profession I haven’t figured out, and their families have stopped paying attention to us or smile benevolently. As we occupy the only two places at the head of the table, I help her discreetly open my fly. Can pleasure be endless?
Later, under the netting, moonlight on our faces, I ask her how I will find her when I return to Rio. Will it be soon? she wants to know. I say next year, probably before the summer, as early as I can arrange it. In that case, she tells me, she will perhaps still be in Rio. The Doctor likes to change the girls, so they seldom stay long. He likes them to be fresh. There are so many who want to come! This makes my eyes fill with tears, and I inquire where she will go upon being “changed.” She doesn’t know, probably a club in Sâo Paulo.
Is it a question of money? Can I buy her back from the Doctor or his partners? She doesn’t want that. A part of what she earns is set aside in any case, and in a few years she will be able to retire. Then she will send me postcards from Montenegro, near Novo Hamburgo. That’s where she would like to live. Perhaps she will even be able to get married, she adds shyly.
Undated draft of letter from Ben to Véronique (translated from the French by me):
Merry Christmas, my love, I am still in Rio, back from a vacation on a desert island set in the greenest water I have ever seen. I was as helpless there as Robinson before the Lord sent him Friday, totally neglecting suntan oils, etc. Result: Very red and very painful back, yes all the way down, and a marked distaste for sitting down.
Are you skiing well? Is Laurent having fun?
It turns out I will have to be in New York for a while (undetermined in its extent) at the beginning of the new year. Office politics. My faithful troops tell me, Father look to your right, look to your left! I will not bore you with the dreary details or names of homoid sharks you do not know. We will be in touch by telephone. Contact with nature has given me new courage: I will dare to call you in the morning, when I think you have returned from Laurent’s school. And you can reach me at home or in the office. Don’t forget my New York secretary’s name—Carl—or that, all spiteful rumors notwithstanding, he is a man!
You may, with your usual tenderness, wonder where I will spend the holidays. I don’t know. Surely away from New York. The bustling cheer of one’s friends is too hard to bear. Most probably, I will stay here. There are some people from the rural south of this country who have treated me with unexpected kindness. They have no religion, and, in my case, that’s just right for this season.
Your
Ben
VIII
HE INVITED ME to lunch at the Veau d’Or. During visits to New York from college, almost twenty years before, I had gone there with my parents, usually for Saturday lunch, before their afternoon subscription concert. It seemed always filled with people just like them: good-looking and hearty, dressed in bold tweeds, greeting friends, making an agreeably boisterous noise. The owner, Gerard, himself voluble, rubicund, and beautifully turned out in lounge suits of refined grays and blues, reigned over the customers and the harassed, dyspeptic Breton waiters with artful ease; his partner, whom I never heard utter a word, perched behind the cash register at the end of the bar. How one was seated, and the length of the prefatory sojourn in the crowded space between the bar and the coatroom, was determined by criteria that assigned little weight to reservations. My parents would spend less time in that purgatory than my father required to down his first martini; with a mocking flourish, Gerard would take his glass and, carrying it himself, lead them to one of the rare tables where the width of the banquette was sufficient for my father’s comfort. Less-favored clients were left to marinate in gin for what seemed the length of a three-course meal, only to be seated ultimately face-to-face on hard wooden chairs at tables one-third the size of those Gerard considered appropriate for my parents. I was sorry he did not appear to know me when I asked for Ben; himself, he had not changed much, and I had hoped that this master physiognomist would see through the film with which years of absence had doubtless covered my face. It seemed awkward to mention my name—clearly he was busy—and also futile: the pleasure I had hoped for was to be recognized spontaneously. Instead, I followed him to Ben’s table, the one facing the window, where Gerard himself normally took his meals. So, in this place, too, Ben was now a valued habitué.
You are almost fifteen minutes late, he greeted me. Are you in training for my existential role?
He had lost so completely the sunburned look Prudence and I had admired when he arrived from Brazil and told us about virgin Angra that his face was like the flannel of the gray suit he was wearing, only paler in tone, and untidy, which was never true of his clothes. His eyes were bloodshot. I explained that my editor had kept me longer than I had anticipated going over an article and asked Ben if he had a cold.
No, he replied, I haven’t been sleeping well, and it’s starting to show. Perhaps I’ll go back to Rio and put my body in the sun. A good tan covers everything, wipes away all sins.
The waiter arrived with cold mussels, which the Veau d’Or has always offered as soon as one sits down and I can’t eat because I am allergic to the mustard in the sauce. Then, for some minutes, we were busy with Gerard, ordering lunch. When Ben introduced me, Gerard said he was glad to see me again and asked about my parents and why they never came to the restaurant anymore. I told him they rarely were in the city but that, sometime soon, I would bring my own daughters to lunch. The idea that I might resume this family habit suddenly pleased me very much. I thought it would also please my parents; it was the sort of thing around which Prudence might organize one of her letters to my mother.
Actually, repentance and absolution, if you can obtain it, would be more suitable than a suntan, although less chic, I said to Ben. You have wrought havoc in my family. Why aren’t you in Paris? You told Véronique you were going. On New Year’s Eve, you told Prudence and me the same thing. I have just had a letter from Véronique. She says you haven’t even written or telephoned to explain what you mean to do.
I hadn’t intended to say any of this. I had thought to speak to Ben about Véronique, but later and more delicately. Now I was accusing him, putting forward a view of his actions—Prudence’s, actually, and probably shared by the small number of right-thinking persons to whose attention the affair had come—that I knew did not take into account all the circumstances.
That’s not fair, he replied. I didn’t telephone while she was in Switzerland because I might have gotten Paul. But the day after the one when she told me she’d be back in Paris I called to ask what she had decided and what she wanted me to do: she said she couldn’t speak with me. I called again the next day and she only cried. The same thing happened two or three times more, and the last time she asked me never to call again. I wrote asking for an explanation. The answer I got was one of those letters only your cousin Paul knows how to compose in this decadent era. He told me he was writing on Véronique’s behalf as her natural protector and was ordering me to respect his honor, her honor, the honor of Laurent, and the tranquillity of his domicile, and above all to stay out of Paris unless I want my rear end filled with bird shot. Jack, he may have even mentioned your honor! I took this to mean that she had weighed what I told her about myself and the disadvantages of living with someone like me and had decided in favor of Paul.
He emptied his wineglass and continued: Probably, it’s a wise choice. I might have advised it myself. One might say I almost did. Of course, I am sorry about the havoc.
By the way, he added after another
pause, I have refrained from going to Paris not because I am afraid of Paul and his shotgun. I really haven’t wanted to be there; besides, it isn’t necessary so far as the office is concerned. We have just made my second-in-command, young van Damm, a partner. You will recall I tried to bring that about. Some people in the bank think it would be just as well in that case if I made my return to New York permanent and official.
Véronique had chosen not to mention in her correspondence either those telephone calls or—assuming that it had not been somehow intercepted by Paul and she had been able to read it—Ben’s letter asking for an explanation, though she had copied for me parts of the long letter Ben wrote from Rio de Janeiro. If his declarations of love and readiness to live with her were genuine, she wanted to know, how could he choose to wait quietly in New York for a confirming answer? Hadn’t she given him all the answers, all the assurances he needed, during the months they were together, and then, when she compromised herself before Paul’s entire family, hadn’t she declared her love publicly? His place was at her side.
I realized that Véronique’s questions were in large measure rhetorical. I knew her enough to be certain she understood Ben’s hesitations and the way he transformed them into scruples. She should have been able to handle these ambiguities. But I could not help believing that Ben had intended her to react just as she did. Unless I was horribly wrong on that score, the selectivity of Véronique’s account to me of Ben’s actions was unimportant, and her uneven behavior explicable by nervous strain and fatigue. Of the two, she was the more vulnerable. I was suddenly appalled by Ben’s lack of imagination and his apathy, which verged on callousness, and I told him so with considerable feeling.
He looked at me queerly and said, I am surprised to hear that from you of all people. Have you forgotten the early Sunday morning fireside conversation in Paris? Do you remember my twins, the not-so-little Sarah and Rebecca? I told you then how hard it was to do what had to be done. I told her the same thing, over and over. It was just as hard, perhaps harder, to let a roll of the dice settle the matter—a huge effort, really; and that’s what I did when I wrote to Véronique from Rio and asked her to decide how we were to live. If she wanted to bet on me, why didn’t she take me at my word? Of course, I took care to point out the risks, the thorns on the rose; there are so many! But that was nothing new.
Ben, I said, examine your conscience. She thinks that first you led her on (these were words I immediately regretted because I knew they were unjust) and then—instead of jilting her outright—you wrote a careful, mystifying letter. You retired behind a smoke screen. She doesn’t know how to act or what to think and she is very unhappy. You don’t look happy either. If there is a misunderstanding, don’t let it become permanent.
He asked me how much I knew about the letter from Rio I was talking about. I answered that Véronique had quoted long paragraphs from it—I could not know what was missing.
There was a silence during which I ate my food rather unhappily. What right have I to go on badgering him? I thought. Am I giving advice to the lovelorn? What if he takes my advice, undoes the work of the last month, and then their lives and Laurent’s turn out badly?
How are Prudence and the children? he asked abruptly.
Fine, I said, fine. I described a plan to send my older daughter the next year to a school in Wales, which was recommended as combining a good academic program with first-rate training in equitation. Jane had become a fine rider during the summer, and Prudence wanted her to be able to reach a higher level in a setting more austere than the usual schools in Virginia and Maryland that stress horsemanship. I was secretly happy of the opportunity to relieve the tension developing between Prudence and Jane, and Jane and her younger sister.
Ben had listened to me with a gloomy face, turning his glass back and forth between his thumb and index finger. He interrupted me: So there has been no family crisis, no tonsils, no wisdom teeth to be removed, no painters in the dining room or the pantry to prevent inviting your lonely and freshly uprooted friend to dinner or a Sunday lunch?
It’s a fact that you are not very popular right now with Prudence or my parents, I admitted. Prudence doesn’t know what to think. You know you are her pet. She would rather not believe that you have taken advantage of Véronique.
Should Prudence consider the possibility that I am the party of whom some slight advantage has been taken? I have been romantic with the lady, generous with the husband, and discreet as an English butler. I don’t know for a fact that English butlers are discreet, but that is their reputation. Naturally, nobody bothers to be discreet about me. Then I fail as a stereotype: I don’t explicitly jilt the lady, but it is asserted that the nuptial noises I make are not unambiguous. In retribution, my best friend’s wife treats me as though I had stolen the family silver.
What choice had I but to tell him that he was exaggerating the significance of Prue’s reaction? I even took it upon myself to invite him to dinner the following Sunday or any other night that week he was free. He shook his head and said he would have to seek absolution from my wife some other time; by Sunday he would be again in Tokyo. He launched into the explanation of the financing of a steel mill and a dispute between some Japanese steel companies and the Belgian consortium he had just advised in Brazil, which had stagnated for a number of years but was now before arbitrators. Huge sums of money were at stake. I was too upset to pay close attention. I suppose he was upset too, and that is why he went on with a deadeningly boring tale, to which I listened just enough to understand that, for reasons unrelated to the origins of the quarrel, Ben’s Belgian clients, having taken note of the ease of his dealings with the Japanese in Brazil, had recently asked him to try to negotiate a settlement with their adversaries in Japan.
I will call you at your magazine when I return, he concluded. Meanwhile, tell Prudence and your parents that I am not all black inside—closer to gray, like my flannels.
As we were getting our coats, I saw that he had in the pocket of his coat a folded copy of the Daily News and commented on the new direction his reading had taken. He laughed, patted the paper, and handed it to me.
Take it, he said, the story is told better than in the Times and in many ways it’s quite relevant.
I read the immense headline. Charles Manson and his two disciples had been found guilty of the Sharon Tate murder.
Undated draft of letter from Ben to Véronique (translated from the French by me):
My adorable Véronique,
I lunched with Jack today. He surprised me by talking about you and me. Being apparently in close contact with you, he was in a position to do so in some detail. I had not realized your cousin was so intimate a friend. Is there anyone in your family whose business we have not become? Would it not be wiser to write to me instead? Yet I have not heard from you once, not once since the day, almost a week after I arrived in New York, when I found your letter waiting at my office. In it, two sentences: You have broken me. Your soul is impure.
Why? Because in the letter I wrote to you from Rio I urged you to be prudent? Because I repeated one more time—tediously, I am sure—the fears that have tormented me? That must be it, unless my instincts and Jack’s meddling have misled me. Yet I had never concealed that those anxieties lodged in my “soul” right alongside my desire for you, alongside my love.
Tomorrow I leave New York for Tokyo. I am not sure of the length of my stay. If you consent to see me, I will return by way of Paris. The shortest of messages—Come!—entrusted to my secretary in Paris or New York will suffice to bring me to you.
Your
Ben
There was no such message. Indeed, I believe that Véronique left Ben’s letter—if he sent it—entirely without reply. However, she wrote to me again, several times within about ten days, and it occurred to me that perhaps that was the method she had settled on for remaining in contact with Ben. She said that Paul and she were moving to the rue de Varenne. That was a concession to her taste for the
Left Bank and the Faubourg Saint-Germain. But she too was making a concession: the house near Arpajon was on the market. They were looking for a place in the Sologne, as murky and melancholy as they could find, where marsh birds would be plentiful and near enough at hand to satisfy Paul. He had offered her a small-gauge shotgun with a beautiful stock and lessons at the celebrated gunsmith’s, Gastine Renette. She had accepted.
AS SOON AS he returned from Tokyo and Brussels, for that is where he had gone next, Ben and I had lunch again. It was only a few weeks after the meal at the Veau d’Or; I had called him, having ascertained from his secretary when he was expected, convinced that he would not make the first move and eager to make up what had almost turned into a quarrel. I also had a practical reason, which was to ask him for names of people I might look up in Brazil. My journalistic assignment there was imminent. Over the telephone, he sounded distracted and impersonal; I could not help remembering that he had told me he often read the newspaper while taking unwanted calls. Although at the end of the conversation he apologized for his tone, saying I had caught him in the midst of preparing for a meeting, I was not without apprehension as I waited in the reading room of my club. He appeared, exactly on time, as always, we proceeded to our table, and I saw that I need not have worried: either Ben had not kept a grudge or he had decided to file it away in a remote drawer of his mind. When I proposed dinner with Prudence at home, he accepted at once and said he had presents for the girls—curious Meiji restoration prints of French young ladies of fashion he had found in Tokyo’s biggest department store, of all places—and was glad of an early opportunity to deliver them.
