As Max Saw It (16 page)

Then I lie down beside him. He has turned on his side, with his back to me. The old spoon position, well known to bring comfort and peace. Except that, suddenly, it is not comfort I want. I pierce him. Like a battering ram. Without letting down my trousers. And all the while, the kid howls from pain.

The exigencies of my toilette. He too has composed himself and goes back to being grateful. I administer a sedative and show him where there are lots more should he want them. Then I say, I will leave the lights on in your room. I need a long walk now. Nothing more can happen to you until I return.

And I rush to that frozen glen. Hours later, I approach the house like a burglar. Leave the car on the road, creep quietly, quietly on the side of the driveway, so the gravel won’t crunch. His light is still on.

He rinsed his mouth with the bourbon and winked at me. I managed to smile back. Some minutes passed. I heard what could be a muffled cry and ran upstairs. The bedroom door was open. In the wedge of light that came from the corridor I saw Laura’s face. She was sleeping peacefully. I leaned my head against the door frame and remained there until my heart stopped pounding. She had lost a quantity of blood two days earlier, when she returned from Milan, but the doctor still hoped she would be able to keep the child.

When I came back downstairs, the room was empty. Dying coals glowed in the fireplace. The only glass on the coffee table was my own. Charlie had vanished.

I never have asked Charlie why he had that woman pray over the grave at Toby’s funeral, or what was his reason for the Verdi lament. I suppose I was held back by a sort of shy respect. Much later, though, under different skies, as I turned the matter over in my mind, it occurred to me that Charlie might have laughed at my indignation had I told him about it. He had indeed come to look like an aged Mars. I could imagine him throwing back that gorgeous head and saying to me something like, My boy, I don’t look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to learn about paleontology. I haven’t stopped praying because prayers aren’t granted, any more than heterosexuals have stopped screwing because children are born to suffer and to die. I told the Wop to sing the
Requiem
because it’s so beautiful.

L
OUIS
B
EGLEY
is a lawyer as well as a novelist and lives in New York City. His first novel,
Wartime Lies
, was the winner of the 1991 PEN Hemingway Award, the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Book Prize, and the Prix Médicis Etranger, France’s most coveted prize for fiction in translation. It was also nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Mr. Begley’s second novel,
The Man Who Was Late
, received wide critical acclaim. In 1993, he was elected president of the PEN American Center.

also by
LOUIS BEGLEY

MEMORIES OF A MARRIAGE

An irresistibly entertaining novel about a man struggling to understand his friends’ seemingly charmed marriage.

In the unforgiving class system of the 1950s, Lucy de Bourgh, daughter of one of Rhode Island’s first families, marries Thomas Snow, son of a Newport garage owner. It hardly mattered that Thomas worked for a Wall Street firm—in Lucy’s eyes, he remained a “townie.” Decades later, Lucy runs into Philip, an old friend. Philip remembers Lucy as a ravishing, funny, ready-for-anything hellion. He also remembers Thomas, killed in a freak accident years after his and Lucy’s divorce, and is shocked to hear Lucy refer to Thomas as “that monster.” The enormous discrepancy between memory and reality sets Philip off on a quest to discover who Thomas and Lucy really were, and what happened in their marriage.

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