Man Who Was Late

by Louis Begley

  Europe’s canicular August 15 weekend, which empties cities, sending to the mountains and beaches all but the bedridden, cantankerous doctors, and pharmacists sufficiently unlucky or unimportant to be designated for emergency duty, was upon him. He had made no plans to leave Geneva, any more than to stay for a particular length of time. As he had explained to his clients, this was a part of his usual tactics in a negotiation: instead of presenting the adversary with a deadline, which (because it might reflect real obligations) would be used, as hours ticked away, to extract concessions in return for helping respect it, he preferred to have no schedule at all, so that the other side was face-to-face with the dull prospect of his insisting on every point however long it took to resolve it, at the cost to his adversary, unless he compromised his position, of fatigue or hunger, if a mere workday was involved, or larger disruptions in work or family plans. But this time the impending holiday weekend had made everyone eager for a prompt resolution, and he, for once, really had no program. Nothing required his presence in New York. He had shrunk from planning a vacation—in part because any vacation would have entailed either including Marie-France, who had declared herself willing to abandon her share of a Westhampton beach house so that she might join him, or explaining why she was rejected, and in part because the paralyzing nervousness that had overcome him earlier in his room was now recurring whenever he was not occupied with work. He wondered whether he had enough stamina to endure idleness. The more immediate question, however, was what to do that very evening.

  At the restaurant table, on the back of yet another piece of promotional cardboard, recommending regional dishes and wines to be tasted that week, he made one of his lists. An eminent Geneva lawyer, Professor Pictet, had been brought by Phil Norris into the last two days of meetings, seemingly as an afterthought, to advise on Swiss procedural law that might apply to the settlement. To everyone’s relief, its application could be avoided. The great expert—a man of confident physical vitality, as befitted his rank of colonel in the Swiss army, and of distinguished manners—had taken the opportunity to be especially courteous to Ben, whether out of genuine sympathy, or because he recognized in Ben a source of future retainers, was not clear. Hearing that Ben, unlike the others, was not leaving Geneva, Pictet at once invited him to dinner. On the instant fearful of being cornered, not certain of his mood, Ben had temporized. It would be necessary to telephone with an answer before the nap. He put Pictet at the head of the list; was it a welcome or an unwelcome coincidence that, like the pastor who was Jacques de Todi’s father, Professor Pictet resided on the route de Cologny? Would his property also stretch to the highway, stop to permit the rush of traffic to and from Lausanne, and then, on the other side, meander down to the lake, to a private landing marked with a lantern? In Jouve’s book there was no description that Ben could remember of the mother. Madame Pictet, in the picture the professor had in his office, was small, plump, and shy, surrounded by three daughters wearing glasses; surprising looks for a Swiss grande bourgeoise, different from the towering, blond figure one would have imagined as the consort of a lawyer bearing the name of a venerable Geneva bank or the wife of a great Calvinist divine.

  Perhaps because Banque Pictet brought them to mind, next on the list appear the names of two Geneva bankers whom Ben had seen frequently in Paris, bracketed, with the words “I WILL NOT SERVE” next to them. In the context I take this to be Ben’s rejection of the passing thought that he might, having just brought to completion a project, immediately, on his own initiative, sustain the boredom of a business dinner. It shows how Ben’s irritating habit of expressing himself through pointless allusions persisted. I suppose (but one is at the mercy of the limits of one’s own memory and gift for free association) that he had in mind both Leporello and Stephen Dedalus. After the second name there is an asterisk. The related footnote reads: “This man is to be avoided in his domestic setting. Countess [the banker is an Austrian count] is all teeth and knees.” Ben concluded the list with the name of a Swissair stewardess, her telephone number, the words “red hair, lips like peeled shrimp, rest unknown, promised to call,” and three asterisks. Indeed, it is to her that he attempted to telephone before resting, but he reached instead her roommate, Swiss German, he thought, unable to inform him when Sophie might be at home. Something both eager and falsely girlish in her voice warned Ben that she would flirt with the headwaiter, complain about the asparagus, and expect him to order crepes suzette and coax her into eating them. He decided not to venture the suggestion that she take Sophie’s place that evening.

  It grew dark. He tried Sophie’s number once again, thinking that, after all, he would ask the roommate to have dinner. What business of his were her manners? If she was the tart he imagined, that was just fine as well; copulating until exhaustion with a slut might drain him of the trembling disquiet investing his arms, legs, and sides—all of him, it seemed—until, like Make’s dropsical chamberlain, he could find no rest. This time there was no answer. He composed the number once more, fearing that he had misdialed, and let the ring go on so long that even if she were under the shower washing her hair she must answer. Nothing.

  He poured a large brandy, drank it, and called me in Vermont. It had occurred to him that he could ask to stay with us a week or even slightly longer and not call it a vacation; the question of what to do about Marie-France would not arise. He got Prudence’s cousin Sean. Sean was staying in our house with his wife and children, while Prudence, the girls, and I, having picked up his boat in Camden, were beating our way south to Nantucket. We intended to sail lazily in those sunny and protected waters, stopping for a hot shower and a shore meal with friends on Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Naushon, until it was time to deliver the boat in New Bedford to a lawyer from Boston who had chartered her for the first two weeks of September.

  Ben and Sean knew each other. They had been in the same class in college, had taken some of the same courses. Sean had seemed to Ben, until his senior year, by which time Rachel’s efforts had fitted him with new glasses through which to observe such matters, the epitome of what one would have wished to be—a golden-haired undergraduate with a smooth, smiling face, and clothes, perhaps handed down by a father, evocative of ineffably easy manners, who would greet Ben on Mount Auburn or Dunster Street without slowing his graceful, loping stride and disappear behind the brightly painted door of a final club. At night, when no one would see him, Ben examined those doors with their burnished brass doorknobs and plaques and reflected on the decisiveness with which he had been relegated to a sphere so different from Sean’s. The rarefied area of being that lay beyond was impenetrable; he would never apprehend the nature of the mysteries from which he had been excluded, let alone experience them. Indeed, it seemed honorable to refrain from pronouncing the names of those august retreats reserved by Sean and his likes themselves—to feign momentary distraction if another pronounced them, as a Hindu of the shopkeeper caste would take care not to step on the shadow of a Brahman.

  Thus Ben’s marvel at the transformation Time and Fortune conjoined had wrought in him and Sean was considerable. That the golden, smiling youth should have grown heavy and assumed the comically serious costume and demeanor appropriate to the successful Boston insurance executive he had become was not surprising, but Ben claimed to be astonished that Sean now looked up to him and tried to puzzle out the secrets of his, Ben’s, existence. It did not astonish me. Believing without reserve in the world of finance he inhabited, Sean valued like a true connoisseur the extent of Ben’s success, and it was now he who wished to penetrate the mysteries of Ben’s sphere, whereas for Ben the charm of Sean’s secrets had dissipated utterly, like perfume from a bottle left without a stopper. Still, when Sean with his instinctive hospitality, having listened to the reason for Ben’s telephone call, urged him to come at once to Vermont and stay as long as he wished, assuring him that he would be as welcome as with Prudence and me, and join in the family’s activities or organize his life otherwise
in any way he preferred, Ben declined wistfully, explaining with great politeness that the idea of rushing to Vermont from Switzerland on the most crowded weekend of the summer had come as a mad impulse best to be disregarded.

  More telephone calls followed. Rebecca was hiking in the Dolomites without an itinerary and would not have an address until the following week; he learned this from Sarah who talked to him more freely than usual. He guessed correctly that she was alone in the house, the professor and his children having driven to Atlantic City, where his parents had retired. He was blue and at loose ends, Ben told Sarah: fit punishment for too much professional success. As soon as the concert was over, while some people in the audience were still applauding, most of the others had shuffled out of the hall to catch the first wave of cruising taxis; the musicians all had wives waiting for them in the suburbs; only the maestro was left quite alone, no one had given a thought to where he might have his dinner. Was the professor going to be away long enough for her to contemplate meeting Ben, for instance in London? They would see some plays, go to the National Gallery, and drink Pimm’s cups at the Connaught. It would be a well-deserved vacation for her and a tremendous boost for his morale. He put it all nicely, she has told me, without making her feel any pressure or the sting of his usual sarcasm, so that almost right away she was sorry when she replied that his offer was kind but came too late, the life she had chosen didn’t happen to include weekend trips abroad or his grand restaurants and fancy hotels or any of the sort of amusements he was so good at organizing.

  But that, after all, is the reality, she said. It’s too bad you can’t accept it or get out of your jet-set rut. Try Mom, she added. Horace Jones has just walked out on her; she’ll probably jump at the chance to have a free trip to London with you.

  Curiously, Ben made no mention of this suggestion when he dictated late that night into the portable recorder he had borrowed from Phil Norris. He simply recounted having found Rachel at home, on the North Shore of Boston. She came to the telephone after a long delay, out of breath; the cook, impressed by Ben’s calling from Europe and apparently of the view that it was more economical for him to wait than to call again later, had insisted on getting Rachel from the strip of beach at the end of the lawn. It was long enough after lunch, and besides she had been swimming, Ben observed, for the gin and tonics to have worn off. Nonetheless, she was pleasant from the start and seemed appropriately impressed when he explained what he had been doing in Geneva. My, my, my—repeated many times over, for that was how she was in the habit of expressing approval—accompanied his account. That Phil Norris had actually been working for Ben increased her enjoyment; she had memories of him as a dashing veteran at Harvard. Ben told her that having no dinner companion lined up had made him consider eating in his room: possibly a chicken sandwich accompanied by a very large, very cold scotch and soda. He asked if she remembered the wide-ranging comparative study they had made of the quality of such sandwiches—focused on the absolute absence of gristle from the meat and the firmness of the white bread—and how the Boston Ritz had hung on to a narrow lead. She replied in kind. Had they not also zealously studied the speed with which chasseurs in an establishment of the palace category removed cigarette ashes and butts from the cylinders guarding elevator doors and restored their sand to pristine whiteness, the vocabulary the concierge used responding to questions about the hotel’s hairdresser, and the relative stiffness of its linen sheets? Ben’s heart beat. Suppose he did ask and she consented? He would show her the progress he had made in all areas of instruction, demonstrate the man he had become. But what would happen after the weekend or the week spent together? “Nothing can be whole or sole that has not been rent.” It occurred to him that Yeats had written nonsense. The reality was drearily different. He thanked Rachel for talking to a distraught man.

  He had been on the telephone so long that the air had turned cold. He closed the windows and drank another brandy to quiet the tingling in his skin—or was his skin actually quivering, although the hand in which he held his glass was steady? He looked at the Rhône, now black and shiny. Beyond lay Calvin’s city: in the day green with the lushness of trees, an atmosphere clear and profound, Jouve had written, the most austere in Europe. Was this, too, lyrical nonsense? Had the desperate souls plotting redemption and destruction migrated to other havens? Secret and tortured vices, so Ben had been told, thrived here on the compost of puritanism. He felt again the urgent need of a woman—a woman of low life, degraded, skillful, and unquestioning. These should abound in Geneva; the trick was to find one. Why had there not been a Carvalho among all the Belgians and Japanese to reward the good work he had done? On his own, during walks in the old town, he had already identified certain promising bars: they opened late; some seemed to be above street level. He dressed rapidly, counted the cash in his wallet, and left the hotel, the door key in his pocket. It was better to be able to walk rapidly past the concierge.

  The river was very noisy. He walked toward the Grand’Rue, then in the direction of Calvin’s church. Each woman out at this hour might be for sale. He had no experience of Geneva’s streetwalkers. Did they wait at street corners on heels like stilts, their skirts a mere loincloth, or was the password given by signs of a subtlety worthy of this city, so that the demeanor and garb of a young mother signaled for the connoisseur the nature of her corruption as surely as a colored tag stuck into Camembert told a good housewife that it was ripe to serve that evening? He stopped before café windows, peering attentively inside, looking for women sitting at tables alone, scrutinizing them brazenly. There was no response. Like the old couples beside them, they masticated peaceably and heedlessly or sipped white wine out of little glasses. The bars he had fixed in his memory were dark and very crowded with men. He felt tired. The hotel restaurant would be closed; at the corner of the place du Bourg-du-Four he found a brasserie that was still serving and ate his dinner at a tiny table alongside two tables of Americans on a bus tour. In the roar of voices he made out the conversation of two women, perhaps his age, perhaps just past it; they had cheerful, ruddy faces and the sort of blouses with little forget-me-nots or plum flowers one would find in the Lord & Taylor’s in a wealthy suburb. They were wondering if he spoke English and, if he did, how to go about asking him to join the group for the rest of the evening. He smiled at them. Immediately, they smiled back. As they both were at the edge of the table, facing each other, he found it easy to examine their legs. He saw calves, prickly if he judged correctly and covered by large freckles, flat sandals of brown leather, possibly acquired on a Greek island, toes with unkempt, unlacquered nails. Nostalgia and aversion. He smiled again warmly and walked out of the restaurant.

  As he reentered the hall of his hotel, he thought of having recourse to the normal solution for evenings of such wretched loneliness: he could press into the hand of the concierge a folded bank note of large denomination and ask distractedly, perhaps looking away, to have a nice young person directed to his room as soon as that could be arranged. But speaking with the concierge was the female clerk whose task it was to admit clients to their safe-deposit boxes; no guest needing her services, who might cause her to return to her desk, was in sight. Besides, the concierge’s face lacked ruse and servility. Would he decline the service, Ben asked himself, and, if so, how was Ben going to avoid him for the balance of his stay and when someday he returned to the hotel? How long was he going to remain in Geneva? Would he ever come back? These questions couldn’t be answered. He stopped at the entrance of the bar. No single women, only couples and men drinking together.

  Pages dated “Night of 11/8/71”:

  Took 2 Seconals and drank brandy. Got the waiter to bring a bottle so I needn’t keep ringing—besides, room service must stop at some hour, even here. Nothing doing; can’t sleep. Masturbated carefully, so as not to stain bathrobe, and then ate a chocolate bar. Niente sleep. Three in the morning. I communed with Norris’s machine again until the tape ran out. Must buy some tomorrow if such
a thing exists in Geneva. Poor Jack. What’s the point of these outpourings or of scribbling away as I do now except I am so frighteningly awake and reading makes me even more nervous? Twitch twitch.

  Preposterous, vehement urge to call Véronique in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Disguise my voice, say I raise funds for Vassar or want to confirm her bank balance. This gets her to the telephone. Better yet, keep calling until finally it is she who answers. Will she go to some place where we can speak: the post office, the Miramar? In the dark of the booth, hearing me plead, she relents. Then, I go to Biarritz. Enact the dream of last August. Hôtel du Palais, white room, arms and limbs entwined, cooled by the ocean breeze. We efface the images of this year.

  It will not be. I was unable to seize what she once offered with such keen ardor and now there is nothing to retract, nothing to forgive, nothing to take.