Authors: Louis Begley
I had landed in Boston the previous day, and had slept at Highland Terrace before setting out for the Berkshires, so I was fully rested. Nevertheless, I was experiencing, as always when I return home from a distant place, a sense of not having fully arrived, a sort of momentary estrangement for everything that should be most familiar. It’s a sensation that sharpens the power of observation; when Charlie appeared, it made me take note of the change in him. A change, but since when? The beginning of the summer? That other, earlier summer when Camilla left me? I would have been unable to say with confidence. And what did it consist of? Fatigue, an appearance of distraction, certainly entered into it. After we had embraced—Charlie had taken to kissing me even in public—and I had wished him happy birthday, we
went to drink wine in the arbor around which, at Toby’s suggestion, there had been laid a low wall of old brick acquired from a Connecticut supplier specializing in scavenged materials. The missing element, I realized when we sat down, had to be Charlie’s perennial air of imperiousness and triumph. He was more like everybody else, except of course for his size and strength which was ever more astonishing.
I have come to talk to you about Toby. Thanks to your confidence in him, your generosity, and, I suppose, the medication, he had a good summer. Now the honeymoon is over. He feels diminished. What a dreadful expression! Never mind, I’ve used it. Naturally, he doesn’t want his weakness to show; he is very sensitive about it. So much pride, his and mine! Offense taken at trifles. That’s why I am allowing this evening’s preposterous celebration to take place. He didn’t want people to say it had been canceled on his account. As though I cared! I thought you should know this before you meet.
Is it bad?
Yes—probably. Of course, his doctor is doing all the right things.
I am very sorry.
As I imagined the void that had opened before him, the embarrassment that overcame me was at least as strong as my feeling of pity. Together, they prevented me from finding a more adequate expression for sympathy or desire to help, and yet made silence intolerable. Instinctive garrulousness prevailed, so that hastily I told him of the importance to the Chinese, and others, like the Japanese and Koreans, whose cultures derived from China, of the sixtieth birthday, the figure
sixty being the product of multiplying twelve (the number of animals each of which characterizes a year in the Chinese calendar) by five (the number of variable qualities of man). Thus sixty signifies the completion of a life cycle and the birthday marks the beginning of the period of “luck and age.” I told him that, according to tradition, rich men have a duty to make presents of gold pieces and finest fabrics, silk or cashmere, to members of their households.
Toby was right to insist that you give the party, I concluded, it’s a grand birthday.
I was launching into a disquisition on Chinese views about properties of numbers that made them lucky or unlucky when he interrupted me.
Perhaps in China; not here and not for me. For me, it’s the first of the Stations of the Cross.
He looked at his watch, stared at me for a moment, and said, Come upstairs to that cocotte’s bathroom you had Toby build for you. I want to show you something.
Not without apprehension, I followed. The new bathroom was, in fact, striking. We had enlarged it so that, for the first time in my life, I was the master of a dressing room. Toby had had the insides of the closets lined with sandalwood, the doors were full-length mirrors, and a daybed covered with chintz portraying birds of the Amazon jungle stood at an oblique angle to the window. I was to rest upon it, wrapped in towels, after my bath.
Charlie was never without a jacket in the country, inside his house or out. For the evening, these were apt to be voluminous, double-breasted blazers of heavy, smooth wool. During the day, he gave preference to tweed creations, the
weight and roughness of which suited the season and the activity he had undertaken (thornproof, for instance, when he walked in the Billington woods) or, as now, at the height of the summer’s heat, unlined silk. He railed against my habit of going about in shirtsleeves, wallet sticking out of the back pocket of my trousers, according to him like a sailor on leave who has been invited to spend the weekend with somebody’s aunt. I watched him kick off his loafers and, more deliberately, remove his jacket, shirt, and trousers, until arms akimbo, majestic and naked, he stood in front of one of my mirrors. I noted that he wore no underpants.
Draw near, he said. Do not be afraid, you little devil. This isn’t a pass. It will be a demonstration of the physiology of aging.
First, my face. You will have observed that I have turned gray—in that respect it helps to have once been blond. The color change is less unpleasant. Of course, my hair has remained thick. A tonsure will not needlessly inform the laity of my tastes. That is because my hair, like my mother’s, is so surprisingly wiry. We used to wonder about the purity of the race, down there in Virginia. Speaking of what’s wiry, behold my eyebrows. They have been invaded by pubic hair. Therefore, I pluck them. Each morning, I remove the more indecent hairs, those that curl, push in previously unaccustomed directions, or show split ends. It’s a losing battle; their successors are even more
voyants
. Other pubic hairs protrude from inside my nose, itself thickened and bulbous—perhaps because, in defiance of my sainted mother’s injunctions, I have always picked it. Soon its tip will be indistinguishable in form and jocund color from the gland that
finishes my dick. Eyes injected with blood, the right one unpleasantly rheumy. Under these eyes, the windows of my soul, puckered brown bags, with striations and folds like a scrotum, studded with little warts. Brow permanently furrowed. Thus Priapus has usurped the place of Mars. Two years ago, before we knew of his sorrows—you realize now that he has become the man of sorrows—Toby wanted me to have these bags surgically reduced. Stretched and then sewed up from inside the lids, I suppose. Why? Was he ashamed of my aspect? A rare movement toward sadism and mutilation? Of course, I refused. Now it must be too late for the knife, and even if it weren’t, and I should,
contra naturam
, consent to such a procedure, what would Toby think? That my new, gay eyes are a get-well gift to him, or the lure I was preparing for another young fellow?
Give me your hand.
I held it out. He opened my palm and passed it over his breasts, under his armpits, and down toward his belly.
That’s right, he said, relax and avoid excitement. I have always thought there was a fruit inside you, but this is not your day. Don’t think of sex, feel my skin and all these frigging bumps. More warts, growing ecstatically like weeds. Fear death by cancer. That is my opinion, as yet unconfirmed by my doctor. Can’t say I would care about his opinion were he to have one. For now, I scratch at the little bastards until they bleed. Like this! I also examine myself for the big ones with oddly shaped edges, black harbingers of disaster.
Using a thick yellow fingernail he scooped bits of flesh from his stomach and made a stain of blood on the mirror, as though he were preparing a laboratory smear.
Do I disgust you? Bear with me, I don’t think we will need a stool sample today.
He cradled his penis in one hand and testicles in the other.
Nothing much to report here. Slowness, occasional dysfunction, inevitable retreat of libido. Only remedy is promiscuity—the old call: change partners and do-si-do! My skin, especially on the legs, deserves your attention. It’s thin like rice paper. Inside my trousers and socks, when I wear them, it peels, leaving a fine white snow like dandruff! These are, my dear Max, extravagant disorders, not autumn’s rich increase. I have gone to seed, like you, like that superannuated rhubarb plant under your window. The ghoulish shame of it is that I am as strong as that rhubarb, indestructible. How many times have you tried to kill it and failed?
The truth is I haven’t. I rather like it. It’s practically the only thing that was planted by me.
Quite in character. One who has power to hurt and will do none. If I have revealed to you more than to any human being, it is because you have not used my words against me or in your own cause.
While he put on his clothes I wiped the stain off the mirror. We went downstairs. He refused my offer of another glass of wine.
Toby is waiting with lunch. I want him to eat his meals, he said.
He had come on his racing bicycle and refused also my offer to put it in the trunk of my car and drive him to the other side of the valley. I walked alongside him to the end of the gravel driveway. There he fastened his trouser legs with
rubber bands, mounted the bicycle, and pedaled off at great speed.
M
Y FATHER WAS
almost twenty years older than my mother. She had been his student. He died when I was in my last year of boarding school. His retirement coincided with an illness from which he never recovered. It absorbed most of his and my mother’s attention. Our kitchen shelves were filled with special foods, all of them repellent, corresponding to his ever-changing diet. Leftovers cooked with margarine, in dishes covered with saucers and later in plastic containers, unfinished bottles of strange oils, and watery cottage cheese littered the refrigerator. I recoiled at their sight. On the windowsills in the kitchen, as well as in the bathroom that I shared with them, were his pills and, in larger bottles, the potions he ingested before and after meals, while he ate, upon arising, and at bedtime. The apparatus my mother used to give him enemas hung from a hook on the bathroom door, under his pajamas. As the number of household chores he felt unable to perform grew, he took to preparing, in anticipation of my visits on school holidays, a list of tasks he had saved up for me. The list would be presented sometimes before I had even crossed the threshold, at the bus stop where he met me in his Nash. Washing that car and simonizing it were among them. He ended in a Providence hospital, permanently catheterized, other tubes conducting yellowish liquids to his body connected to machines that surrounded his bed like unknown relatives. In comparison, my mother’s exit, four years later, seemed triumphant. She fell down the
cellar stairs, headfirst, arms and legs splayed. I like to think she never recovered her consciousness.
As I dressed for Charlie’s party, and then drove to his house in the last of the sunset, I thought about that hospital room, the sore at the corner of my father’s mouth where the tube leading to his esophagus had rubbed against the lip, and the mixture of patience and eagerness with which he greeted each new procedure. He was lucid and wrote orders, imprecations, and answers to the occasional question on a pad of paper within reach of his right hand. There was no doubt that he wanted the cure to continue. Why? I would ask his doctor. I had always known my father as a valetudinarian, he was certainly very cautious, but I had never had reason before to think that he was a coward. Why had he this insane reluctance to die?
It’s the fear of final impotence, total and irreversible, the end to all knowledge, he told me. Only people who die suddenly avoid it.
Ricky and Edwina Howe, the van Lenneps, the gay cellist performing at Tanglewood, and I represented the Berkshires. Most of the guests were from the world of Charlie’s other affections, perhaps more permanent, and in the years since I had become a part of his retinue I had come to know them sufficiently well for exclamations that served as greetings, embraces, and kisses. Among them were several architects of a renown that at least they considered equal to Charlie’s and a family of real estate developers with a well-publicized devotion to culture; the most worldly among critics of architecture and art, and a giant of a man who had recently acquired the magazines they wrote for; the head of
an investment bank for whom Charlie had constructed a mansion of celebrated opulence on many acres of East Hampton waterfront (the last such work, he claimed, he would undertake); a marquess in whose Venetian palace Charlie willingly sojourned; gorgeously colorful among the black of these figures, big-game wives or companions, and the divorcées whose souls and amatory affairs Charlie was directing, in part because he genuinely liked the company of women and in part because, in principle, he preferred his table to be balanced, even though this was a goal he seldom achieved. The invitation had specified cocktails at eight and carriages at a quarter after eleven. Their automobiles lined the road—on aesthetic grounds, Charlie did not tolerate the presence of cars near his house. Before they turned into pumpkins, these guests would be hurtling down the Taconic on their way back to New York. Charlie’s indifference to the comfort of others and his hauteur were greater than the Howes’. He would not have taken the trouble, I was willing to bet, to look for lodgings anywhere nearby for this crew of revelers. The absence of younger members of the camarilla—a designer working for Charlie, and a photographer and an actor who were a couple—surprised me; they were Toby’s age, and I had expected to see them at the party for his sake, if not for Charlie’s.
I looked for Toby and found him in the smaller living room, before the fire. He was thinner than when I saw him last and had a small Band-Aid above his upper lip. Like my father’s, I thought. There was another one on his cheek. I kissed him, although this had not been my habit, and told him I was very grateful for his work. The house was just as I
had hoped; would he come to see the finished product and witness the owner’s admiration?
Perhaps tomorrow afternoon. Are you heating your pool? I might have a swim. You wouldn’t mind?
The water will be at room temperature. Come to lunch first, with Charlie, and bring some cheese if there is any left. You can swim afterward.
We agreed on that plan. I told him about Rodney Joyce’s lawsuit against his new Saudi neighbor across the lake who had taken to waterskiing in front of the Rumorosa and the letters of insult they had exchanged.
He is a fat prince, I said, with a little beard and bodyguards who have longer beards and guns as well and follow in a bigger boat when His Highness is on skis. Edna thinks they will dynamite the dock or drive a car bomb up to the veranda.