by Louis Begley
His response about people in Rio seemed unenthusiastic. There was, of course, his economist classmate Plinio, married to a kittenish young woman who might have worn her sexual appetite on her sleeve if all her dresses were not sleeveless. Them I must see if possible, but Plinio traveled a great deal. If I cared for a folkloristic visit to the Yacht Club and the Jockey Club, a playboy businessman called Carvalho would be happy to arrange it. His secretary would send over the addresses and telephone numbers. There was really no one else he could name. Other Brazilians he knew in Rio either were very dreary, concentrated on salting away hard currency in secret numbered accounts, or had all the Swiss accounts they needed and were too complicated and elusive. One couldn’t rely on them.
Elusive in their case, he continued, means being given over to compulsive lying—though not especially about their sentiments. If they show you affection, you need not doubt it. It’s more like a system. They lie about practical aspects of existence. For instance: X sends you a telex saying he is coming to Paris to see you next week, in part out of boundless desire to be with you and in part because he needs to get away from the daily routine of work, which is undermining his health. You wait for his arrival—possibly plan a small dinner party in his honor. After a series of telephone calls you learn, if you are lucky enough to reach him, that two days before X’s telex reached you, he had in fact returned from a month-long stay in New York and will not be able to leave Brazil during the next six months, the excellent reason being that his business partner has been in an automobile crash and is being reconstituted, bone by bone, in Hamburg—which obliges X to stay close to home and mind the shop. Alternatively, X does come to Paris but earlier than expected and together with two business associates. It turns out that the purpose of the visit, planned weeks in advance, is to bid for a particular object at the Salle Drouot, and X will not have time to see you at all, let alone come to your dinner. Or you might ask X if he will introduce you to Z. Great idea, he says, of course he will be delighted to do it right away, after all Z is married to his first cousin! Only the introduction never happens.
I was laughing, but also wanted to put an end to Ben’s tirade. Therefore I asked him whether he had identified the cultural or genetic reasons for this behavior.
A part of it, he replied, can’t be specifically Brazilian. Most likely, it’s a reflection of the acquired prudence of all very rich people: if one doesn’t let on where one is or where one will be at any particular time, one is less likely to be robbed, kidnapped, or importuned, and one begins to apply that precept generally. Also, if one does a single favor for a friend, one may later be asked for an infinite series of smaller and greater favors; one learns to discourage such would-be clients by demonstrating right away one’s unreliability. But with elegant Brazilians, these tics seem innate: they sound like birds when they talk, and they wish they could, like birds, flap their wings and fly away if one comes too near. The lies are a form of flight.
A little later, I asked him if he had heard from Véronique.
No, he replied, not a word.
I decided to tell him about their leaving avenue rue de la Pompe and Arpajon; during a moment of stupidity—which now intruded on me like a poltergeist whenever Ben and Véronique were concerned—it occurred to me that he might in the future be writing to a wrong address.
Now I am no longer surprised, said Ben, not about Véronique’s silence or the real-estate activities, but about being asked to dinner. Peace has returned to your family, and with it all its joys.
Excerpts from Notabens (all unnumbered and undated):
Banished! Well, not exactly. If I in NY correspond with Gianni about the perfect maintenance and functioning of rue du C-M, so that it will be ready to receive Monsieur as soon as it will please him to return, and then in fact do not go there, that’s my decision, or so I can pretend. Reality? Primo, I would go mad there. Now that she is in the rue de Varenne, we would meet in the morning: she, newly risen from Paul’s couch, her cheeks white and rosy, leading little Laurent by the hand to his cours two blocks away, her step bold and energetic, buoyed by the thought of the hundred things she will do later in the day, none of which now concern me; between her long, striding legs the domain I no longer inhabit. And I, what can be said of me? Dragging my carcass to the office. Secundo, it may be slightly impolitic to go back to Paris just now. Dear old Dwight keeps asking how I see my future. I do not ask, What future? for fear that I will shock the great leader of my great bank. We must at all personal cost avoid that! Lucky, credulous man, knowing a happy childhood—where was it? in Newport? Mount Desert?—he has had a study of the future of us all commissioned and carried out by some very young consulting persons; therein he reads strange matters. The whole is now greater than the sum of its parts, a proposition I used to think had long ago been disproved; but no, this is the new math of banking and management. Team play, he calls it, but I prefer a musical metaphor: I shall henceforth sound new tunes in our office orchestra. Indeed, I am to take a turn at conducting. Were I to insist, a little chamber group could surely be organized for me just as well in Paris, I could saw away at my violin within it, but what do I care about Paris now that I have lost V?
For the nonce, let’s savor from a distance the delights of Gianni’s spelling. God bless Olivia for reducing the rent. Comical, though, that she should want to spend the season there, in her own? my own? so well-frequented bed.
And this place? Am I under ban of all good men and women?
Second shameful lunch with Jack. Wanted names in Brazil. If only I had dared to send him to the Dentist! Clearly embarrassed to have called me to moral order. Is it possible he doesn’t understand what has happened to me? If so, I can’t and won’t help him. Hardly understand it myself. My letter was what it was, I humiliated V, but that’s not the point, I could have made it all right had I wanted to. Entre nous, hasn’t she liked to be whipped? Instead, I bugged out. Why?
Poor Jack: the stuff about the twins I served up for him by the dawn’s early light in Paris and then at the Veau d’Or is warmed-over twaddle. They have been terrified to come near me for years. I reek of loneliness and loss. V could have been their friend; they would have seen that I can be loved, that I am not menacing. Jasmine and lilies masking a cloaca, a rat trap baited with cheese.
Why?
The words change with my mood, like clouds pushed by wind, the answer remains the same, as given by another, however hard I try to obscure it: “I myself am hell.” Form of punishment in that place? Another has said that too: Living without hope in desire.
In desire of what?
To be like Jack—balls, I wouldn’t mind being like Paul! Self-centered, self-assured, occupying a rough, masculine place. Concomitants: Tolerance of imperfection, knowing how to seize happiness when it is there to be had, basking in life, not looking the gift horse in the mouth.
Translation, please!
Véronique foolishly, blindly, miraculously wants me, gives me her body, the balm of her tenderness; proclaims my goodness, begs to heal me. Aha, too late, says incubus Groucho Marx, mustachioed lips grotesquely moving mine, the club that will have Ben as a member he will not join!
And even that is not the whole truth. What if my heart and limbs melt when I enter her, what if she is teaching me to dwell in light, are there not pools of empty blackness in her “peerless eyes”? Does folly, capricious and devouring, have its temple in this “sovran shrine”?
Like seeks like. Beware of folly, Ben: “emprison” not her soft hand. Hightail it to Angra, copulate in the foam with a nymph; then return alone to the certain devastation you yourself have wrought.
IN THE TWINKLING of an eye, Ben had transformed his West Side apartment. It had struck a mournful, early post-Rachel note, he told me: as long as he was in New York, for the moment not living among Olivia’s ghosts, he would try for once to live as he chose, surrounded by white sofas and chairs, treading on polished black boards, enjoying the sun that in spring and summer alw
ays pours into that apartment. As we gathered at Ben’s in the prolonged dusk, the park was at its early summer peak. Lights were already twinkling in the great buildings on Fifth Avenue; the sky was clear and beguiling. There was a light breeze, and the air smelled fresh, if one disregarded the acrid perfume of pollen, dust, and horse manure. Through the open windows we heard bongo drums. The natives had reclaimed their territory.
Ben was giving this weeknight dinner to try out a new stove, he told us. We had meant to bring our daughters, as he had suggested, but at the last minute we couldn’t: they said they had too much homework, so that we were alone with him and a young woman I had seen in his company once before; she seemed French, although she spoke perfect English. The time before, at the opera, she had worn a see-through white blouse and nothing underneath it. She was wearing an equally transparent garment this evening, but less frilly, somewhere between white and yellow, like old lace, with a black skirt, perhaps chosen for contrast with Ben’s walls and furniture. I wondered if she put rouge on her nipples, for they too stood out. She had every reason to have anticipated the color scheme: it turned out she was an architect. She had, so Ben informed us, supervised his painters, electricians, and plumbers and placed orders for everything he had bought for the present installation. It seemed odd that he took care to delineate her role so ungenerously, as though it mattered that the inspiration for this apartment, which after all was just an expression of what we had liked as students, had been entirely his. We drank martinis. Marie-France’s voice was all in her throat. She kept running to the kitchen to bring more olives and little bits of pizza she was heating up. At a certain point, Ben asked her to switch on the lights—the blue-gray shade we sat in was turning sad. She leapt up from the sofa to do it, with something like a little noise of excitement. I saw that Prudence noticed it and that Ben made a face, as though to disavow any inference of familiarity or approval.
The Times was publishing huge chunks of the Pentagon Papers. Both Ben and I had known Dan Ellsberg in college; I could claim that for a brief while I had been his friend. His involvement with our war machine, his California marriage, indeed the elegant, elongated silhouette of his wife, whom I had seen here and there in New York before they were married, had been on the periphery of my consciousness. Now I was prepared to defend him; in fact I applauded his courage and, for that matter, the courage and determination of the Times to stand fast in the face of the onslaught of Nixon’s men. I may have spoken of these things at greater length than I had intended. Prudence, of course, agreed, and smiled to tell me how well I had made my point. I had the feeling that Marie-France was waiting for direction from Ben, and Ben remained silent. Prudence finally said, I can’t believe, Ben, that you have switched over to Nixon and those dumb generals.
I haven’t, he replied, certainly not to Nixon. Anyway, this stuff has more to do with Johnson’s war than with Nixon’s. I am depressed, because Dan has made the country look even more foolish than usual, while we are still stuck in the war; I’m not sure that looking foolish will help get us out.
Now Marie-France had her cue. She favored respect and good manners and national unity, and very soon we were discussing with animation the new prevalence of bongo drums and skateboards, the ravages of vandals in the park, and the litter in the streets after the Puerto Rican Day parade. Ben placed us at the dinner table. I saw that it was set with silver and crystal and that the napkins had been folded to stand up in cones like clown hats. Marie-France had been at work; this was not Ben’s style. He liked shortcuts in the kitchen and no frills in the service unless he had someone like Gianni at hand. She cleared the first course and brought a roast chicken for Ben to carve while she passed the peas and even filled our glasses. I saw that it was making Ben squirm to have a hostess, and I wished I could have pointed it out to her, because she struck me as a nice, bright girl, not unlike Véronique in her good-natured vivacity, though less beautiful and hardly at Véronique’s level of elegance; she was too infatuated to read the danger signals herself.
Prudence had told me she thought we could consider what she called Véronique’s fling with Ben a closed chapter, and I had come to believe that she was right. My feelings—never simple—about Ben and Véronique had changed with the passage of time; but I had wished them success and had tried hard to dominate a latent jealousy and curb the indecent excesses of my imagination. It could be claimed, as Prudence did, that I had encouraged them. After all, the Decaze marriage was, like all marriages these days, fair game for enterprising tomcats. My sympathy for Paul was not especially vivid. I did not act on the premise that husbands of beautiful wives must stick together; I was too sure of Prudence for that. I really believed that Ben could give Véronique an incomparably more amusing and fulfilling new life if she loved him and if he loved her. There was simply more to Ben than to Paul Decaze. But now he had failed with Véronique, and she and Paul had managed to bear it out. At least I wanted to hope that given another chance, with a girl who was younger, less complicated, and apparently unencumbered by children, Ben would do a better job. So my heart went out to little Marie-France, and, as we stood at the window of the living room with our brandy, I once again wished Ben luck and hoped that a painful and unresolved chapter in his story was over.
Notaben 556 (undated):
Death is approaching me. The certainty that it is so overcomes me at times of greatest peace; I am tempted to say at times when I am almost lyrically happy. For instance, in the bath: the sky is darkening but I have turned out the light; there is no reason to hurry. My body in the water is small, clearly defined; it resembles my father’s in odd details—some liverish spots on my hands and arms, the shape of the big toe. I discover more such details each day. At first the resemblance put me off, like the sudden presence of an intruder, but now my resentment has faded. It’s not the old man taking over. It’s me growing older. The body is finite in its fragility; the thought that these are signs pointing to a final frontier gives me intense pleasure. Warmth and stillness and, like the insistent buzzing of a giant drone, the excited anticipation that all consciousness may end at any moment—right now—with nothing more than a change of temperature in that body, and I begin a happy, drowsy wait for that ending.
Notaben 560 (undated):
Marie-France asks why I do not take her with me when I have to travel. Your work, I answer, I do not wish to interfere with your work. This does not satisfy her. She can arrange to be replaced, released, Lord knows what. Especially if I go to Paris. She would like me to meet her family and friends there, stay with me in my apartment or at the Ritz, tell everyone about us, be like other people. Never. I have demonstrated I am not like other people.
Disappointed, she reaches for me.
Will I have to hurt her so as to ensure that she will leave what’s not quite well enough alone?
In the event, she knows that I must go to Geneva for a while and that I will first spend a day or so in Paris. That time in Paris is now her immediate target, although she knows about Véronique.
I want to, I must see Véronique. Why is she with Paul? It’s madness: my madness.
TWO DAYS AFTER Ben’s dinner party, I drove Prudence and the girls to Vermont and got them settled for the summer, and the following week, on the eve of Ben’s departure for Paris and Geneva, I had dinner with him, at his request. He asked if I minded if it was again at his apartment; we would have something cold with good wine. There were to be many restaurants and hotels in his immediate future; since he had gone to the trouble of redoing his apartment he wanted to use it. This time we were alone. During the meal, we talked about my girls. I said I was beginning to see what they would most probably be like as adults. There was nothing in what I saw that I could reprove, but the disappearance of other possibilities of development was in itself depressing. One knew that neither of them was going to be a Margaret Mead or Martha Graham, with all the good and bad that being out of the ordinary implied. They would just be perfectly good young women, similar
to dozens one knew, and the best one could hope for would be that they continued along one of those uneventful trajectories.
Ben listened carefully, mostly in silence. We finished the first bottle of his Margaux and started on another over my protests.
Don’t worry, he said, either we will drink it all or you will take home what’s left. We won’t let it go bad.
That made me remember that he was leaving the next day. As he had seemed tense all evening, I asked whether someone who traveled as much as he still felt an undefined anxiety before leaving on a voyage.
I don’t know, he said. In my case, it’s not anxiety, at least not this time. More like excitement on the eve of battle. There are some difficult things I will have to get done.
Then he told me he had a favor to ask. He had just made a new will and named me his executor; he had been in a hurry and hoped I did not mind that he had not consulted me in advance. His old will was the one he had made while he was still married to Rachel. He had not bothered to change it, because it left essentially everything to the twins, which was pretty much what he still wanted, but the executor was Rachel’s lawyer, and he saw no point in continuing that arrangement. I told him that of course I was flattered by his choice, but that I doubted I had the necessary business and legal skills.
Don’t worry, Ben said. If I have any money left when I die, you will hire the law firm of one of your classmates to do the work, and the estate will pay both him and you. I want you to have the executor’s commission; it’s pretax dollars. The only thing you will get under the will is a rather whimsical bequest. I can’t tell how useful it will be to you by the time you receive it.
Notaben V12 (undated):
Dinner with Jack. He shouldn’t drink very great wine so fast. No point; can’t taste it. Tomorrow, plane for Paris. Should I wait a day before I call V? Get rid of the headache & tremor of fatigue, go to her anointed like a bridegroom?
