Authors: Louis Begley
What exactly do you teach?
Contracts, and some legal history. You see, I am curious about obligations.
Then I added, perhaps because I feared he was losing interest: Not having a respectful attitude toward making money was a help throughout. If you wish to call it help! Anyway, that’s how I slipped into my marginal form of existence.
You can’t call being friends with Arthur marginal! He raves about you. What’s the connection there? He has nothing to do with Harvard.
I explained: In fact he is in Cambridge a good deal, because of a company on Route 128 he has put money into. It has a Business School affiliation. I met him at a colleague’s, at dinner, and we fell to talking. Later, he came to dinner with me and a woman I was then living with. I introduced him to some of the more interesting types among the reigning Brahmins, the ones he especially wanted to know. He was a hit and we became friends. Now I depend on him for my vacations.
You could do worse!
I agreed, and kept on talking.
T
HAT NIGHT
, in my room, listening to the radio, I heard Nixon resign. It was difficult to make out his words through RAI’s voice-over translation. I had been waiting for this moment, but the satisfaction I had expected from the ogre’s disgrace somehow eluded me. Did he feel shame, I wondered, uttering all these words that explained nothing? I was not satisfied with myself either. Why had I been so assiduous in
my replies to Rodney, almost fawning? What business of his was it after how many years of a neatly shared existence Kate had chosen to leave me for her newly appointed colleague in the Slavic studies department? Presumably, at that point, Rodney was no longer paying attention, so that my elegy on afternoons in the Widener and evenings at Cronin’s did not run a serious risk of being repeated for the amusement of Edna. Besides, would I not recite it for her as well, at the drop of a hint of curiosity, throwing in even the more sordid details? For instance, my bitterness at the loss of the use of Kate’s house in the meadow above White River Junction, which had turned me into a summer nomad without hearth or home; the small victory she obtained when I signed over my white VW with a brand-new sunroof, after she confronted me with the irrebuttable argument that she would need it to go back and forth between Cambridge and Vermont, whereas I wouldn’t; my own larger victory, won when I kept the apartment on Sparks Street. Nixon and Max—some team! If pressed, I would even have told her that ultimately it was the faint indignity of being the abandoned party, and the inconvenience, I minded the most. Kate’s skin had begun to coarsen; she was smoking too much; and she had become shrill. In time, I might do better.
T
HE
J
OYCES
were conscientious hosts. The next morning there was an organized departure for Como, to visit the Duomo and also Sant’Abbondio, which they considered possibly more important. When I came down to the drive, jittery from sleeplessness, the first observations on the cataclysm that had just taken place must have already been
exchanged. Arthur, who professed to admire Nixon and Kissinger for being such shits, was already in Edna’s two-seater. He would find in her a suitable midwestern audience. I waved to Charlie; he waved back as he got into the last available seat in a car apparently belonging to a woman with red hair in a khaki jumpsuit, whom I took to be Italian. Rodney may have gone ahead; in any case he wasn’t there to help the dwindling group of guests sort themselves out. Should I get the Fiat Arthur and I had rented at the Milan airport? I could see that some cars were not full, but how was I to know whether their empty seats weren’t spoken for? I felt the onset of a familiar mixture of awkwardness and irritation—it was like standing with a plate and glass in one’s hands at a buffet in a room where everyone else seems to have a place by prearrangement, so that one’s choice is between sitting down alone, perhaps next to the telephone, or dragging a chair over to a table surrounded by animated diners—all quite fond of one another—in the hope that they will open a space for the embarrassed stranger. I thought I would just miss this trip. Exaggerating the gesture, I slapped my forehead with my hand, as though I had, all of a sudden, remembered something important, and ran back into the house.
The swimming pool, I had been told, was on the other side of the maze. I made my way there through thick smells of colorful borders and bushes in full bloom. The pool turned out to be oval, lined with white marble—no other material had currency at the Rumorosa—and surrounded at a distance by a circle of slender cypresses. At its edge, legs in the water, face concentrated over a backgammon board, sat
a figure of such startlingly perfect beauty that I thought it was a girl—not seen at dinner the night before because she was too young or because she was only an employee at the villa—now taking advantage of the quiet that had fallen upon the surroundings to sun herself without her bikini top. When I came closer, close enough for the figure to sense my presence and turn to look in my direction, I saw that I was wrong: it was Eros himself, longhaired and dimpled, his skin the color of pale amber, for it had pleased the boy god to wash off the matte finish of white powder under which, day after day, he allowed himself to be admired, disguised as a statue, on the pedestal at the end of the villa’s central alley.
He smiled, put on his dark glasses, and spoke to me in English: I guess the bus for Como has left. My name is Toby. Why did you stay behind?
I told him my name and that I had no real excuse; possibly I hadn’t wanted to get into a car in which there was no one I knew and hear stuff about Nixon I might not agree with.
I understand that.
Why weren’t you at dinner last night?
Reasons something like yours for not going to Como, and that’s why I didn’t go to Como either. Do you want a game?
He added, Nixon was once my dad’s lawyer, but I don’t know about American politics.
I told him I had never played backgammon.
He smiled again and said, It’s not hard, I’ll teach you.
He must have given such lessons many times. My inability to count spaces at a glance provoked in him tolerant amusement. He did not need to count at all. The small rapacious
hand skimmed over the board moving his own men and, when I made mistakes, mine as well, stacking them up in neat piles and, without a pause, setting up a new game each time he won.
We should play for money, he ventured. Small stakes and a handicap for you. It will force you to pay attention.
I assured him my problem was not with concentration but arithmetic, and the will to win.
That amused him.
Charlie said you’re a law professor. Don’t they all know how to count?
Almost all.
We played a few more times, enough to let him conclude I had grasped the principles but would never be an interesting adversary. Then he put away the set, ran to the diving board, rose from it like a tawny bird, descended, and swam so fast and so beautifully that out of respect I remained at the pool’s edge, although, after so much sun, I too wanted to jump in. He understood, and stopping at the near end of the pool, called out, Come on, Professor Max, don’t worry about keeping up! You can’t. I’ve been in competitions since I was a kid.
I obeyed, and as I swam back and forth in my plodding fashion, keeping well to the side, my curiosity about this strange, beautiful boy—he could hardly be more than sixteen—kept growing. He had the grace and easy kindness of a young prince. Was he one? The English he spoke was perfect, but it wasn’t necessarily American or British. No American boy I had ever met possessed such a manner.
When we had dried off and sat down in the shade of a
Roman umbrella, he explained, just as naturally as he had imparted to me the basic rules of backgammon, that he was on vacation from a boarding school near Lausanne, where his father had dropped him off—these were the words he used—three years earlier, after he and his mother divorced. He was the only child. The father went back to Beirut and his trading business with Saudi Arabia; the mother was in America, in a hospital.
She’s crazy, you see. It began a couple of years before I went to Lausanne. She wouldn’t leave her room. Then one night she jumped out of the window. She hit the roof of the greenhouse and got pretty badly cut.
I said that was horrible. He agreed. Then he smiled, making me wonder whether some of his cheerfulness wasn’t a series of nervous tics, like dance steps someone might execute for no reason.
What about now? I asked him. Why are you here?
He smiled again.
Charlie brought me. I work for him, at his firm’s Geneva office. My dad got me the job. Dad knows Rodney Joyce too. They were spooks together after the war. It’s my summer training.
L
ATER THAT DAY
, during the long melancholy interval between the real and official end of an August afternoon, when at dusk
la mosca cede a la zanzara
and drinks are served, I wandered out to the front of the villa with a book, thinking I would read in the last of the sun. There was no sound except for the back and forth ping of a tennis ball. I guessed it was Rodney playing singles with some carefully chosen
guest, perhaps Arthur, since Arthur had not opened when I knocked on the door of his room. One imagined siestas in shuttered bedrooms, then somewhat later tubs redolent of the expensive bath oils supplied by Edna, and women beginning to wonder how they would dress for dinner. I had expected to be alone, but there, like a beached whale on a wicker settee, a glass of white wine in hand, a bottle in a bucket of ice beside him, was Charlie. I saw him before he noticed me. He had no book or magazine; his eyes were fixed on the lake below us, perhaps on a boat making its way toward Dongo or Gravedona. When I said his name, he rose to greet me with a sort of abbreviated bear hug, then pressed me down into the other corner of the settee. Encased in white linen, his bulk struck me as prodigious. It wasn’t a former athlete’s fat; during the momentary embrace, I felt that his body was as hard as it seemed heavy. Perhaps my memory of him was faulty, perhaps time had playfully doubled his size. He poured a glass of wine, handed it to me, and attacked.
I am surprised to see that you and Arthur travel around together. What a way to come to this place! Don’t you realize he is known everywhere as a snob and a rotter? You used to be an intellectual, someone really serious. What’s happened to you?
I haven’t changed in that respect; that may be why I wouldn’t be here at all if Arthur hadn’t brought me. Why pick on him? Isn’t everybody here a snob? You and the Joyces, for instance? And what do you mean by calling him a rotter?
Just that. You are out of your depth with him. He is spoiled to the core. His business deals are sharp, he squeezes
his partners, all he cares about is being invited to places like this, and getting his name into gossip columns.
Have you done business with him?
Certainly not! My work is making sublime buildings, and they don’t come cheap, and they are not for common speculators. Your new pal has no use for anything that’s of good quality, never mind great art. It’s instinctive. He thinks quality is for suckers who subscribe to that magazine he publishes, which I use for toilet paper!
He added sadly, You shouldn’t allow yourself to be seen with him.
There are people one knows for long periods of time without any element of choice having entered into the matter. They pop up regularly in a defined context; when at some point they disappear, one doesn’t miss them. So far as I was concerned, Charlie belonged in that category. That he should take upon himself to be intrusive, and so harsh about Arthur, was outrageous. Whatever my own views about my traveling companion might be, and the foundations on which our relations reposed, I could think of no reason why Charlie should doubt that Arthur and I were friends. I had no doubt whatsoever that at the Rumorosa he was my real host. I told Charlie I found the prospect of continuing our conversation unpleasant and stood up to leave.
Charlie seized my hand. He had tiny feet but his hands were huge, as if made to grasp oars, in scale with the rest of him.
Don’t take offense. I have spoken with too much feeling, but there is a reason. Let’s walk toward the lake. I will explain. There may not be another opportunity.
I found it difficult to refuse, and, to a degree, I wanted to know what he would say. We followed a path through a cypress grove to yet another terrace that ended at the edge of the water in a balustrade. On it, facing the lake, stood a row of Olympians, among them Hermes and Hercules and, next to the latter, perhaps by chance and perhaps because the patron who had commissioned this display enjoyed small ironies of the gods’ family relations, Ganymede. Meanwhile Charlie talked.
You didn’t attend my wedding even though I invited that hairy-legged graduate student you were so inappropriately associated with. Perhaps you still are! That was a painful surprise for me, and for Diane too. You paid little attention, you have probably forgotten the effort I made to make sure that you met Diane immediately after our engagement. As soon as I learned that you would be in New York, I prevailed on her cousin Anson to include you in the party he gave for Diane; you and she hit it off at once; I had counted on that and asked you to dinner with us afterward at Giovanni’s. You declined, without a reason. That was a sign I failed to read, because as I said your brutality in not coming to the wedding, which was really very small, very intimate, considering how large Diane’s and my families are, took us by surprise. You hurt me very deeply.
For God’s sake, Charlie, that was more than ten years ago! I meant no harm. Didn’t I write that I was sorry? What’s the connection between these imagined slights and poor Arthur?
I did receive a sort of form letter—typed!—about a problem with your car. Perfect nonsense, you could have taken
the train. And you sealed that expression of contempt by your wedding present—a majolica cachepot! Could one send such a thing to me! I smashed it at once.
Had Charlie become insane? He advanced upon me with such ferocity that I found myself cornered, my back against the balustrade, on my right a monumental flowerpot planted with white geraniums. In the meantime, I had managed to recollect why I had so “brutally” skipped Charlie and Diane’s wedding. Kate and I had in fact come to New York, a friend of Kate’s being providentially absent so that we could spend the weekend in her apartment, with the firm intention of driving on Saturday after lunch to Short Hills, where the reception was to be held on the estate belonging to Diane’s grandparents. We had been told that the place resembled a game reserve, and we wanted to see it. At the time, though, my sexual obsession with Kate was at its height. We didn’t go out to lunch, made love instead on the friend’s Murphy bed, and fell sound asleep. By the time we awakened, it was possible, but not certain, that we could reach on time that—for us—obscure part of New Jersey. Rather than taking the chance, I made tuna-fish sandwiches, which we ate in bed, and, thus strengthened, we resumed our activities. I may have suggested to Kate that we dedicate them as an epithalamium to the happy couple.