Authors: Louis Begley
I did not think this ampler explanation would appease Charlie; besides, whatever might be the cause of his bizarre upset and resentment, I was not sure I wanted to make him feel better. The remark about Kate’s legs was a further outrage, even if I had also deplored her refusal—temporary as it
turned out—to work against nature’s design with a safety razor or a hair remover.
It has everything to do with Arthur, and your being here under his dishonoring auspices, he resumed. I rejoiced when Edna told me I would see you. Of course, she had the good taste and savoir faire not to reveal with whom! I might have vomited. In that past, which to you seems so dim, I elected you in petto, because I alone could see inside you something strong and hard that someday would be revealed in great glory, just as what I had hidden inside me has been revealed. For others—particularly Janie and Edna—you were just another pretentious little poseur wrapped around some tutor sipping tea at the Signet! Yes, I elected you in secret to be my secret friend. That was a gift of myself. Now perhaps you can understand my disappointment, no, bitter humiliation to see that you are still the sycophant!
Had he not been so large and manifestly powerful, I would surely have hit him with one of Edna’s green metal chairs, which were conveniently placed nearby. Instead, unaccountably, with my right hand I clawed the soil inside the flowerpot. It was very wet; the gardener must have watered it that same afternoon. I took a fistful of the stuff and threw it at Charlie, aiming at his face. It landed at the level of his breast pocket, making a large, dripping stain. I continued to bombard him while he stared with his mouth wide open. Then, just as unaccountably, we both began to laugh, unable to stop, until tears ran down our cheeks. Quite exhausted, I undertook, as a token of reconciliation, to pat him on the shoulder, and left a long streak of dirt on his sleeve.
All right, he said, that’s enough. You haven’t turned out badly after all.
He sat down on one of the chairs I had contemplated braining him with, took out his pocket handkerchief, and thoughtfully brushed his suit.
This will dry quite nicely, but I will get into something else when we go back to the house, he announced. Look, he pointed to the lake, we are at the confines of the ancient world. The villa of Pliny the Younger stands on the other shore. To your right, the murderous Alps. Greek gods guarding against Hannibal’s elephants. Here, vineyards, apiaries, sheep peacefully grazing in the meadows. Paradise for the learned and sensitive of heart. In me, everything has changed since those days when you took so little trouble to know me. I have been very lonely.
I began to mumble something about having heard that he had divorced Diane. Immediately, he interrupted me.
Preordained passion and resurrection. My true work as an artist and a man began at that moment. Someday, you will see the best of what I have done. I will explain the unifying, directing thought, and you will grasp it, because you are sensitive and intelligent. Henceforth, you are one of my intimates—they are very few! Stay with me when you wish. If you like France, I have a house in Vézelay almost as ancient as the basilica. I am building a nest in the trees above Rio. My apartment in New York is in the River House. I will send you a key and give instructions that you are to be admitted whenever you choose. This morning you met my young employee. Children and small animals are the best
judges of character. He spoke well of you. Do not betray me again!
Before I could reply, he offered me a cigar, clipped its end, helped me light it, lit one himself, put his arm through mine, and pulled me at a rapid pace toward the villa.
A
FTER MY BATH
, I looked for Arthur again in his room. Once more, he wasn’t there. I found him downstairs, on the eastern terrace where our visit to the Rumorosa had begun. The villa was narrow and long—the living room and the gallery on the ground floor occupied its entire width—so that one seemed always to be going from one side of the house to the other. Rodney and Edna and the woman with red hair were there too. I sat down with them. The setting sun had filled the villa and made its windows glimmer like the lake’s water in the gentle ocher and yellow facade. Here the light was gray and cold.
Rodney told me to make myself a whiskey. Arthur and he were still in tennis clothes. He had beaten Arthur in the last set and continued the analysis of tennis such as it had been taught to him: strong service and reliable, accurate baseline play.
You fellows are getting to be as old as me, catching up, he told Arthur. Every time you rushed to the net I got you.
I am off my game. I should only stay in houses where I can play. Please talk Laura into building a court or cutting down on her hospitality. She has invited me to Belluno for a week. I can’t resist the best wine and peasant food in Italy, but there won’t be any tennis. By the way, Max, you are coming too!
So the red hair was called Laura. She addressed me. In a tenor voice, speaking rapid accented English, she assured me she absolutely counted on me; otherwise Arthur might not come, and she wanted Arthur to see some graphics that were just right for his office in Milan—in fact for any office. Did I have an office, she inquired. She would have things in Belluno, of course, but if I was still in Italy in September I might want to visit the gallery. To prevent my evident confusions getting the better of me, Edna informed me lazily from her couch that Laura’s gallery was in Milan; she sold fabulous new work.
I was finding Laura attractive. Matter-of-fact, lively, and pleasant, without a hint of coiled-up aggressions that might be released at any moment, and so elegantly cared for—women like her did not turn up at the Cambridge dinner parties to which I was invited. I observed her varnished toenails. Wondering whether there was a link between Arthur and her, I said that my room in Langdell, at the Law School, could use something bright, and that if the invitation was for a date before I had to start teaching I would like to accept.
There is no problem, we will go to Laura’s straight from here, declared Arthur. It’s a pleasant day’s drive. You can go in Laura’s car and I’ll follow. We’ll stop for lunch at Giancarlo and Bettina’s.
Thus the next
étape
of my journey in Italy was settled. I experienced a strange mixture of well-being and lightheadedness, assisted, I supposed, by the large dose of whiskey I had poured into my glass. Somehow, from the world of those little hotels Kate culled in her library of Fodor’s guides and magazine clippings, to which we would rush in fear of
losing our reservation, establishments where the room with beams and provincial furniture would turn out to have squashed mosquito stains on the wallpaper and a bed that squeaked, I had penetrated into a magical realm of cashless bounty and comfort. It was odd to think that neither Laura nor the Joyces seemed to find my presence within it a jarring surprise; if that impression was correct, why had I been kept out until this moment? Arthur must have said Open Sesame on my behalf. Could someone else have done it, or was it necessary that the revolution of Fortune’s wheel bring about a unique confluence of persons and time? And who had opened the gates for him, or the red-haired Laura? It was possible, it occurred to me, that I was naively mistaking cheerful good manners for gold, and would need to hurry to catch the train from Belluno to Milan and to my plane back to Boston before my visit became an embarrassment. I decided to repress that small-town New England suspicion. Edna slapped at a mosquito and announced that we should go in until the wind from the lake rose—which it would, conveniently, just before dinner.
As Arthur was about to follow the others, who were going up to change, I asked if he would stay a moment longer and talk with me.
Gladly, he replied. Let’s sit down in the living room. We’ll have it to ourselves.
I told him first that it had occurred to me I would be wrong to go to Belluno. Wouldn’t he rather be alone with Laura—what was the point of having an extra man in that sort of situation?
Arthur laughed.
It’s not even a situation. Besides, between now and the time we arrive there, Laura will have invited ten other people. It’s a big house: beautiful but run-down and informal, not like here. Real Italy—you will love it! She’ll be disappointed if you refuse. In Italy, law professors teach maybe once a week. They’re more like important lawyers; they give legal advice. Laura has little businesses in many places, a bit of money here and a bit there. Since you are a professor, she figures that if you come to her house as a guest she can ask you for free advice—probably about taxes! Anyway, where is the harm? She seems to like you.
So there was no attachment between them. I felt a flash of desire and hope and thought that they too had better be repressed before I made a fool of myself.
What about Charlie, I asked. How well do you know him? I hadn’t realized you knew him at all.
Why? Has he been talking to you about me? I bet he tried to blacken my name.
He certainly has some strong feelings.
He’s got them about everything—especially winning prizes! You know our company has an investment in
Città
. Each year the magazine gives prizes for the five best new buildings. They are reviewed in the fall issue, with expensive photographs, essays by well-known critics—the works!—and then
Città
sponsors a scholarly exhibition at the MoMA and in Stuttgart. The thing started as a nice little routine, but now it’s considered a big deal. The editors propose the buildings, but the winners are picked by an outside jury. Two years ago I sat on the jury—I have been writing pieces for
Città
on industrial projects, so in Italy I am a critic. Of
course, that isn’t really why I was picked. The editor-in-chief wanted to make a friendly gesture. Then it turned out that we didn’t give Charlie’s piece of dreck in Hamburg a prize, not even an honorable mention. Of course, later he got the Schnitzler Prize for it, which is what he really wanted, but in the meantime he made a huge fuss, wrote a five-page protest to the editors—we published highlights from it and our reply—and he even got the deans at Columbia and Yale to issue statements about how the whole thing was an anti-American outrage and so on. He sent a letter to me too saying I was personally to blame because I pull all the strings, so I wrote back saying I don’t answer crank mail! Since then he is polite when we meet, in this elaborate manner he has developed to go with being a great maestro, and behind my back he says the nonsense that gets repeated to me. When he arrived here, he told Edna that I have been seen picking up male prostitutes in Rome!
Have you?
I was titillated by the turn the conversation had taken, but not totally surprised. He was single, and yet, in the three years I had known him, I had never met a woman he was connected with or seemed to be pursuing. In Kate’s opinion, that showed he was a capon, interested only in money and gossip. I tended to accept the proposition, first put to me by my gym teacher at prep school, that there are no sexless lives. As Arthur was rich and extroverted, I found it difficult to believe that masturbation was his principal outlet. Therefore, I had constructed three theories to explain my friend’s lack of a known female companion: he was faithful to a married mistress, probably living in Geneva where he officially
resided and spent a good deal of time; he disliked wasting time on courtships and resorted to call girls and similar sordid solutions; or he was a very quiet fairy. I knew that there was no lack of those at Harvard, some so discreet that their secret was only known through the compulsive indiscretions of their best friends; why shouldn’t they flourish in international business?
Arthur raised his eyebrows. Unfortunately for Charlie, no! I think Charlie has put me at the head of the plot against him because, although he and I have known each other for years—socially—we have never given him any business. Why should we? He is too expensive. There are good architects in Europe, with good names, who work for one-half of what he asks and manage to finish their buildings on time. What we couldn’t tell him under
Città
rules is that the jury never even considered his building because the editors didn’t propose it! And that is because the editor-in-chief, a very artistic queen, thinks Charlie isn’t very nice.
Here he made a disparaging gesture, intended to signify a limp wrist.
I’ll see you at dinner, he concluded. You should ask Edna to put you next to Laura. Be nice to her.
C’est une affaire—
still young, organs in good working order, chic apartment in Milan, house in the country, and the
poverina
is all alone.
I had no previous experience with Jews like Arthur. Clearly, he was invited by people—indeed was on terms of complete intimacy with them—who didn’t ordinarily have Jewish friends. He just as readily told jokes about Jews that would have been considered unacceptably offensive by Jews I knew on the Law School faculty and Borscht Circuit jokes
in which the goy is an idiot. It seemed to me that, in an aloof way, he usually ended up calling a spade a spade, an expression I was learning not to use. I decided to do as he suggested.
M
ORE PEOPLE
than had turned out the evening before were gathered in the dining room, where chiaroscuro villagers, holding each other by the hand or the arm, circled Pulcinella and flashed longing grins at the guests. Instead of the long table there were round tables for six on the terrace. I found my place card; although I had said nothing to Edna, it was between Laura’s and Toby’s. So this evening he would be at dinner. Rodney was next to the boy, then Charlie and a California woman with false eyelashes and jewelry in the shape of giant teeth. On the other side of Laura was the director of the Rockefeller establishment. He seemed to be on a mission to the California woman; I saw him preaching at her even before we sat down. The lecture, about social trend indicators and their use in the study of Chicano elites, continued while we ate the pasta. I introduced Toby to Laura and told her that he had been teaching me backgammon while everyone else was absorbing culture. She enveloped me in a smile directed at Toby and began to question him about school, the work he was doing at Charlie’s office, and his plans for university studies. It turned out she had a niece his age in Florence who intended to go to college in the States. She offered to have them meet. He said yes at once, eagerly, with the easy grace I had earlier liked so much, explaining he was worried about the academic level of his boarding school in anything other than mathematics, not
good at all in English composition or in history, while he hoped to become a journalist. Perhaps he couldn’t get into any university and should find a job on a paper through his father, the way his father had got him a job with Charlie. Laura was given to alternating abruptly between English and Italian; the admirable child followed her lead, speaking as distinctly and, I thought, as elegantly as she. I began to think that a candidate like him, out of left field, might in due time be helped to gain admission to Harvard—if I made sure the right person, capable of seeing past the standing of the Swiss school and even Toby’s standard examination scores, should they turn out to be spotty, studied his case. Illogically, my benevolent intentions gained strength as I observed Laura. She had turned in the boy’s direction and was leaning forward; her arm rested against my sleeve, it was naked, and she made no move to take it away. I decided that the red of her jersey dress went perfectly with her hair; earlier, I would have thought the combination was impossible. The light at the center of the table was strong; it turned Laura’s suntan into an ashen pallor. She was probably a little older than I had first supposed. What did Arthur mean about her organs, and how had that information come to him? It occurred to me that I might experimentally touch her knee with mine; she returned the pressure, and I perceived a smile directed at the boy that could have been intended for me.