Man Who Was Late (21 page)

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):

The singer crooned, reaching the intractable mass of Ben’s resentments and longings in their sullen hiding place; his voice—old-fashioned, bewitching—gave them attractive expression, one that Ben thought was, by the sleight of metaphor, weirdly accurate. Alas, he had never managed to do so well himself during those exhausting moments of sincerity when he strove to explain to Rachel, in the old days, and then to me or Dr. Durer his sense of loss and dislocation. Implacably intrusive, the voice continued:

Yes, that was the desperate and, in his own case, apparently vain longing for the other, into whom one could melt, the other who was the healer.

The scratchy portable “pickup” in Guy Renard’s living room was working its way through a record of Léo Ferré singing poems by Aragon. Ben had asked Guy to play it, perhaps because of that song. They were drinking too much scotch. The day had seemed endlessly bright; if the sun ever set, if dusk came, they would go to the Bois for dinner. Navy-blue shade of the huge trees, lamps like fireflies on the gleaming white of round tables, a pink sky smudged with smoke: it was worth waiting for. The record had been a favorite of Guy’s and of his band of friends’ the summer that Ben first met them in Porquerolles. The funny record player, really like a red, imitation-leather valise, was their inseparable companion. Shocking Ben by their indifference to silence, they took it to coves that could not be reached by land, where one swam off the anchored
pointu;
at his house, when they came in the evening, they would set it on the balustrade that separated the terrace from the rocks and the sea. They sang along with the record—such strong, melodious voices they had, and perfect memory for the words. Slowly, two of the girls would dance together. No light was allowed in the windows of the pink villa—they were serious about stargazing. In a circle around the table cigarettes burned like eyes of cats.

Ben had arrived in Paris that very morning. Right away, he called Véronique. She was in Paris; she had not left for the country; the maid, whose voice he did not recognize, was
willing to find out whether she was at home. A long wait, then Véronique came to the telephone. They spoke quickly, out of breath. No, she could not see him today, not at any time. And tomorrow? Yes, tomorrow, she would have lunch with him; yes, at his hotel if he wished it.

Against all probability then, he was to see her, and it was to be on his terms! There had been no recriminations; he had not had to plead his case. His heart beat very hard, and he sat for a while on the bed, near the night table where he had hung up the receiver, with his eyes closed, pressing his hand to his chest as though to calm the organ within it. Afterward, having changed rooms and unpacked—he now dared to acknowledge to himself that this suite with a pretty but totally unostentatious living room, on the courtyard side, away from street noise, would serve him better than the standard room, filled by its twin beds, into which one entered directly from the corridor the hotel had first offered—he got hold of Guy. Another miracle, albeit minor: Guy was free that evening and did not object when Ben declined his offer to find a girl who might join them at dinner to make the table more festive.

So, exalted, just a tiny bit light-headed from whiskey and fatigue, Ben waited for the sky to change to the appropriate color and for the question that would eventually be put, while Guy discoursed, in beautifully orotund sentences, on the patterns into which relationships among their mutual friends (and indeed friends of Guy’s whom Ben knew only by name) were currently organized, and thought how much like the Hayden Planetarium this was—a well-trained voice, a velvet sky, the Constellation of the Fox displayed upon it.

And how go the affairs of our little Madame Decaze? Guy asked. Odile tells me you have returned her to the owner.

An unkind interpretation, Ben replied. Her affairs, so far as I am concerned, are in suspense, by her own design.

It would have been better for her if she herself had managed to convey that impression. For reasons one cannot understand, she has chosen the role of the victim. Is it a specially refined taste for public humiliation or natural naïveté? Impossible to say—perhaps it’s her American education. On the other hand, most members of the Decaze family are naturally malevolent. They must like having her in the role of the mistress you rejected; it puts her under their thumb.

I am seeing her tomorrow, said Ben. Tomorrow, we may change roles.

Notes on the back of the menu for lunch on July 7, 1971, from the grill of the Crillon in Paris:

She wore a summer dress that was new to him: a stiff, navy-blue cotton affair, with a white pinstripe and a shirt collar. Like a shirt, unbelted, it buttoned down the middle. Instinctively, he disliked it: it was not the sort of thing one would have expected a woman like Véronique to choose for a lunch such as this. Did she think she was stopping at the Crillon for a quick bite with him between a morning of shopping and an afternoon appointment at the dentist? It had to be the dentist, not the hairdresser, her hair was cut very short—freshly mowed, he would have been tempted to blurt out—and clung to the skull like a gold-and-silver casque. This too irritated him, as though he should have been consulted before this step had been taken, or at least given warning of its consequences. And she carried some sort of awkward parcel, from Aux Trois Quartiers, and now was resolutely resisting the headwaiter’s efforts to remove it from her grasp. There was no need for more proof! Since she was to be in the place de la Concorde at one, she had decided to
run a convenient errand beforehand. Monstrously, slowly, the thought began to form in his head that he might have misread the script from the start—it could be that this had always been a one-man passion play, with no female lead role in it at all—or more likely, that feelings and events having organized themselves for Véronique on an accelerated schedule far in advance of his own, the script he thought he knew had been definitively discarded and replaced.

Ben, what are you doing in this hotel? Has Olivia thrown you out? Has the Ritz closed its doors? She held out her hand.

Olivia continues to think I am a perfect tenant, and to reinforce that opinion I have given her back her house until the end of the month. She wants to enjoy the Paris season. The reason I am in this place is that my senior partner, his wife, and countless children and cousins are at the Ritz to cleanse their shirts and bodies after pony trekking in Iceland. Dwight told me that if I happened to be in town at the same time as they, he would like us to have a meal or two together. I decided I would stay out of sight. So here I am, with half of the American press and all the State Department types for whom there was no room at the embassy. The peace talks must be at a delicate point or else, like Olivia, they all wanted to enjoy the Paris season.

She said, Ben you are unchanged. You talk to prevent silence and you listen to yourself. What happened to us hasn’t marked you.

Just what has happened, he asked, will you please explain it to me? If you liked me as I was, why aren’t you glad I am still the same? That’s what I came to Paris to find out. Of
course, Pve noticed changes in you: you don’t answer my letters and you have cut your hair like a boy’s. Are the two related?

Ben, stop playing with words. It’s childish and unfair and I am famished. Please order lunch.

He consulted the menu and the waiter. She did not speak except to tell him she did not want wine. That’s another change and also a bad sign, he observed. Are there many more I should expect?

She said, When you were in Brazil, you abandoned me. I had written to tell you what I had done. You knew I had done it so there would be no way out: we would have to be together. And still you turned me down.

A tear began a long descent down the side of her nose, followed by another. Then she was crying very hard. Ben disliked public display of emotion. He watched in silence. She stopped eating, sniffed into a handkerchief, dried her eyes and cheeks, and said, I am not sure what difference it can make, but I have come to receive your explanation.

He undertook to give it. His mouth was dry, although he drank glass after glass of water and then of wine. Against the pleasant obligato of the busy dining room, he heard his own voice rise and fall interminably—mechanical, off-key, absurdly distinct, and unlistened to—as though he had been moved mistakenly to make an unwelcome, ambiguous, and overly long toast at a banquet where his presence was in itself a mistake. His French was out of control; for the first time since they met, he began to address her in English, to exclude any error in nuance or connotation.

He knew he was telling her things she had listened to
many times before, he said: his failure with Rachel and the twins; how the loneliness that always dogged him turned into shame in the sexual act, because sterility rendered the act futile and as sinful as Onan’s; that she had brought to him a vision of such new possibilities of sunny happiness that he felt he must hold his breath and remain very still lest the vision fade. These were the reasons, he told her, for the vacillation, the constant hanging back—mistrust, sometimes loathing of himself, never lack of love.