Man Who Was Late (23 page)

As the genre requires, between the two friends stands a woman, Baladine, Russian of course, beautiful and large breasted. To Jacques she is mother, sister, and wife. Luc desires and then loves her. She will yield to his desire, but he does not possess her until it is no longer a seduction; he waits for her to accept the act entirely. Jacques has a presentiment that the irreparable is about to happen: treason, the gravest sin God is called upon to punish.

So Luc and Jacques are defiled by Luc’s treason and his jubilation in it. Now comes Jacques’s turn to defile Baladine. Although for him women are nothing but a repugnant sack, he takes her. He uses her money; he buys refined, provocative clothes—to attract boys—and after the boys he returns to her.

You do know Geneva? he asked me. I had been listening in silence and replied that I did.

Then you will remember the cliffs between the place where the Rhône pours itself into the lake and the junction with the Arve. Imagine a night in November. Turbulent, black water, the bise blowing very hard. Jacques is running toward the great bridge. Jouve has him make a funny noise: Tsic-Tsic.
Djag-Rag. Perhaps Jacques only hears it. He halts just beyond the bridge; measures the height of the parapet. It’s a good place. He will attain Unity with God. A few days later, his bloated body is found on the herse that guards the river turbines.

Although the book is a small masterpiece, I find what comes after the death mannered and not very interesting. No wonder; what was there left to say? Even Tolstoy doesn’t have an easy time sustaining the story after Anna has jumped under the train.

I will read Jouve’s book, perhaps this summer, I told him.

Do, he said, if I have time I will send it to you so that you will have it in Vermont.

The rest of the conversation was about my wife and daughters and the small incidents of their summer in the country. That was the last time I saw Ben. A few days later, he left for Geneva.

Note on Swissair stationery, dated August 1, 1971:

Phil Norris’s law firm had always served Ben’s bank. He was the partner who joined Ben in Geneva; they had often worked together in the past. I have known Phil since Exeter; during my last year in school he used to come up from Cambridge together with other alumni who had gone into the war directly after graduation and then in ’45 or ’46 were freshmen in college. Within limits imposed by his professional discretion, it was easy for me to ask what he remembered about Ben in Geneva. I have also had long talks with Scott van Damm about those meetings and related subjects. They agreed that Ben’s was a virtuoso performance.

That he should have a complete grasp of the structure of the settlement and the new undertakings the parties were embarking upon was not surprising; he was their principal architect. They were both struck, however, by his mastery of technical details buried in the hundreds of pages of legal writing that gave effect to the agreements and by the penetration with which he assessed the consequences of changes developed in the course of laborious drafting sessions. The work went on late into the night, each day, without stop, including the weekend. It was normal—indeed necessary, given his high personal standing and role as the originator
of the settlement—for Ben to break off for some hours in the evening. Depending on where he was needed more, he would either dine alone with his Belgian clients to review the day’s progress and prepare the positions to be taken on open issues, or bring the leaders of the two groups together over a meal in an effort to find solutions, in relative privacy, for problems too delicate for discussion in general meetings. There translation into Japanese interrupted the flow of ideas and the presence of a larger audience incited negotiators on both sides to advance rigid and unrealistic proposals. After dinner, however, he invariably returned to join the working group and did not leave until he was satisfied that the day’s decisions had been accurately reflected in the papers and that all difficulties and inconsistencies encountered during the process of drafting, which did not require additional substantive negotiation, had been resolved. Ben had a reputation—on the whole deserved, according to both Phil and van Damm—for a sort of fastidious remoteness and impatience, which, again according to them, did not endear him to younger colleagues and lawyers obliged to work on his transactions, however much they might respect his talent. During this period he showed the other side of his nature, so well known to me: he was, as Phil put it, gentle and affectionate with the working group, quick with praise, tolerant even when, with an uncanny instinct, he went straight to errors in drafting or calculations, displaying a hitherto unknown irreverent gaiety that lifted their spirits. Upon the closing of the settlement, the sense of relief, mixed with wonder at what had been accomplished, was general. After congratulatory speeches, as champagne corks were beginning to pop, a long round of
applause for Ben came spontaneously. He had become everyone’s hero.

This was on the morning of August 11. It was therefore possible for the Belgians, for van Damm, and for his assistant, to get away to join their families for the crowning weekend of the summer. The Japanese group was bound for Tokyo, Phil for Wyoming, to resume an interrupted vacation. By lunchtime, like guests at a party that had gone on too long past midnight, seeing the waiters finally move bottles and glasses off the bar, they scattered.

Ben lingered in the hall of the Hôtel des Bergues. After the last handshake, when he had seen all of them off, it occurred to him that willy-nilly he would have lunch alone. As there was no hurry, he went upstairs first, to his room in the corner of the second floor, and looked out at the trees and the river glistening blue and white in the sun. Even his room was warm; he supposed that outside, in the city, the heat was intense. On the table and on the chest of drawers lay drafts he had worked on the night before and first thing that morning. They were
no
longer needed; their arid presence in the room suddenly irritated Ben. He rang for the chambermaid and asked her to take the documents away and to see to it that they were thrown into the trash at once—he remembered that they were confidential and that, in theory, he should have given them to one of the young lawyers charged with retrieving every scrap of paper. Faced by the newly unencumbered surfaces, the woman began to arrange on them the customary publicity display: visitor’s guides to Geneva, advice about the opening hours of the two hotel restaurants, and an invitation to deposit valuables in the safe.
He stopped her brusquely with a reminder that it was his habit to throw such things daily into the wastebasket. The room was becoming intolerable. The chairs and side tables crouched on the pale pink rug in a circle—beasts ready to leap as soon as he turned his back, the odiously small colored engravings of the Alps hung too high and crooked. He felt his skin tingle with nervousness, tension, and fatigue. It was like the torment of long insomnia. He called the chambermaid again, gave her a tip, and told her to put flowers in place of the papers she had removed.

A German couple was seated at one of the tables in the windowless bar, where he stopped on his way to lunch; he chose a bar stool from which he could watch them. They were married. Both had new, expensive clothes and leather accessories that were somehow similar; had they been bought at the same store? He studied the woman’s maroon pocketbook, odd for August, and matching pumps, never walked in, like Dr. Durer’s. The man smoked. His cigarette holder, case, and lighter were gold; he wore a suit of pistachio gabardine. From time to time, he stroked the woman’s calf. They were drinking brandy. Obviously, they had eaten an early lunch. Ben supposed this was the prelude to a siesta. The way they spoke about Geneva, they could not have known each other very long. Most probably a second marriage: comfortable people, with money in their pockets, glad to be in this very comfortable hotel. There was no use drinking a second martini in order to outwait them. What would he find out? Follow them upstairs, discover which room they were in? Childish games for lonely travelers, he thought, played too many times. Having lunch in the more formal of the two
restaurants, which adjoined the bar, similarly windowless and serving resolutely French food, repelled him. He decided to eat in the hotel café, which opens on the quai des Bergues, and to drink a bottle of Valais red with the meal. Later, although alone, perhaps he too could sleep.

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.