As Max Saw It (8 page)

The morning was warm and sunny. In one of the courtyards of the palace, there were stone tables with chairs on both sides at which old men who had surely retired long ago played chess. We sat down to watch a game.

Charlie said he talked to you last evening.

That’s right. He explained a lot of things I hadn’t understood.

He’s a good egg. I am very lucky.

I asked Toby whether he liked chess.

No, I just play backgammon and checkers. But it’s fun to look at them play.

Then he asked, Are you very disappointed?

By what? I replied cautiously.

Not the gay stuff, that’s just how it is. For guys my age, it’s not such a big deal. I mean my not going to college and all that. You’re a professor, so you must think I’m kind of going
down the tubes. You had that hurt expression when I told you yesterday.

My official role as a pedagogue was not something I thought about much in civilian life, outside Langdell Hall, but suddenly I realized that for this poor child—it would be necessary to accustom myself to the fact that he had turned into a young man—I represented constituted authority: a censor who keeps the gates of education and normal life as an adult.

So I said to him, It was a very unexpected meeting. It took me a while to get used to the two of you showing up here all of a sudden, when in my mind you were still on the shore of Lake Como. Don’t pay attention to the effect of surprise. I don’t think you’re finished: there are many ways outside the university to prepare yourself for life, and you have a good start with your languages and travel. If you use your head and read as much as you can, you will do just fine. You must be learning all sorts of things at Charlie’s office and from being with Charlie. Who knows? If you feel the need of it, there will always be time for college or a professional school later.

I was pretty badly screwed up, but it’s true, Charlie is teaching me a lot, if I can stick to it.

He gave me a big open smile, which seemed genuine, like when he told me it was all right to paddle along at his side in the swimming pool at the Rumorosa.

R
UN SLOWLY
, horses of the night! How often would I whisper those words to myself during the first decade of my prosperity? That wish was not granted to me. Instead, events, experiences, time itself accelerated, like grains of sand when the beach is whipped by a storm. Perhaps it was the effect of the contrast with my previous mode of existence. I had been used to living like a superannuated graduate student: in small spaces, taking measured steps. Perhaps it was my age. So little had changed inside me, and yet, in a couple of years, I would, with so much of my past unperceived, really not felt, turn fifty.

Slides of jumbled vacations—uncherished, neglected, almost embarrassing—one has resolved to set in order someday. Let me stand aside and display them. Look at Max as I see him now, such as I was then in the distant whirlwind.

V
ESPASIAN WAS NUTS
to say money has no smell. It’s like the mating stuff that skunks spray, except it draws the rich, the not so rich, and the famous of both sexes; gays too. Now that Max is wealthy, they’re all over him. Such easy manners: colleagues who have never spoken to him outside of faculty
meetings, those Brattle Street and Beacon Hill intellectuals he doesn’t know even by sight, invite him for meals and drinks, or to watch sports on television—the latter invitations he never accepts—as though he had always been there, an intimate friend of the household. Max has finally discovered the secret password of the Western world; Arthur and he are still friends, but, in his new circumstances, what is to stop Max from getting into Ali Baba’s cave on his own?

Max is respected, possibly liked, at the Law School; that’s because he doesn’t ask for favors or belong to either of the cliques that wish to transform the place. Teaches conscientiously. His letters to the graduate studies committee and the financial aid office, followed by casual visits to assistant deans who manipulate decisions of this sort, have the desired effect. Miss Wang is admitted, with a full scholarship. The housing office assigns her to a regular dormitory: he insists on it, in preference to a room in one of those communal apartments in Somerville or Waltham; he knows that Chinese graduate students stick together like steamed rice. That would be a waste of the Harvard experience, he tells her. The point is to be with Americans, working through the same problems as they; there is more to a legal education than reading casebooks.

That’s also the argument he eventually uses to get her out of his own place. When he sleeps with her, the night of her arrival, it’s as though some terrible thirst were at last slaked. He thinks he is filling to the brink the lithe, violent tube that passes for her body. It’s also keeping a wordless pact made in the Forbidden City. It seems that neither of them had doubts about its terms.

But he isn’t ready for a Chinese concubine, just as he doesn’t keep a dog or a cat. It makes him nervous that she washes his shirts and scours the bathroom, although the cleaning woman has just done it, that she likes to sit in his lap. She thinks they should eat at home: the smell of the vegetables she stirs in the frying pan for dinner clings to her skin. There is a way she has of bringing him cups of tea when he works at his desk that makes him unable to concentrate. When he packs her off to the Harkness he gives her a key and tells her she must call before she comes over.

In no time at all, she asks if she may introduce a new friend. He is a Chinese scholar, that’s what he calls himself, at the Business School; same model, Max thinks, as the friend he imagined she might have at Beida. They have dinner à trois in the Chinese restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue across the street from Wigglesworth. The scholar insists on paying. Miss Wang continues to sleep with Max, but it’s all much lighter now; they have a good time when they talk, like in Beijing; her first examinations are approaching, and he helps her get prepared. One day, he receives a letter from Miss Wang. It covers two large sheets of pink paper with flowers in the upper-right-hand corner. The handwriting is beautiful; there are really no mistakes in her English. She thanks him for her new life and apologizes. The scholar and she are in love. She is returning the key to Sparks Street. It’s just as well, considering how much time Camilla is spending there.

S
HE HAS BLOND HAIR
, green eyes, and long legs. Doesn’t use deodorant; or perfume, either. First woman he has
known whose armpits aren’t shaved. An English girl, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Backed by a first-class degree from a women’s college at Oxford, she does something or other at the Fogg. It turns out to be conservation of prints and drawings. The father is a fashionable don at Oxford. He teaches philosophy and publishes catchy articles in the
New York Review of Books
. Mother, a psychoanalyst. They know everybody; that’s made clear when Max meets Camilla at the Kahns’ Sunday lunch.

Camilla and Max go to his apartment directly from lunch. He still lives on Sparks Street, looking for something larger. Would she like a brandy? He puts a recording of
Dido and Aeneas
on the turntable, makes sure that she sits down on the sofa, where he can be beside her, and not on an armchair. His visits to England have been very brief. The way she talks is amusing. Is it the Oxford accent, or an abbreviated form of speech that’s even more refined? At times, during lunch, he didn’t understand what she was saying. He fiddles with the snifters, which are too large, and the bottle.

She says, Aren’t you taking me to bed?

He has never made love like this before. There are no preliminaries. The borders that are crossed he would have thought were lifetimes away.

It’s six o’clock. She picks up her clothes, urinates loudly leaving the bathroom door open, uses his toothbrush, and tells him she may be found in the telephone book.

He calls—the next day.

T
HE MARRIAGE
to Camilla is contracted carelessly.

She loves gardens. The apartment on Highland Terrace
they move into, really the wing of a large house, belongs to the aged widow of a Medical School professor, a cousin of the Storrows. It has a brick-lined patio. Around it, beds where the widow’s gardener has planted perennials. The widow agrees to give them a right of first refusal; as she has no intention of selling the house, it will be of use only when she dies. Camilla is very cheerful. She whistles when she is in the house, wears jeans and Max’s worn-out shirts, and bicycles to the Fogg. She has replanted the handkerchief-sized garden. The gardener—initially skeptical—approves of the result, and weeds and waters when they are away. She is keeping the apartment very bare; Max has so many books one doesn’t need anything except a bed. A bed they have. Other furniture arrives later. Max has never been so happy.

Camilla longs for the country. Her parents live in an ancient stone house, a half hour outside Oxford; that’s how she was brought up. If they only had a place to get away to on weekends, and for at least a part of Max’s lovely, long vacations. Of course, the Fogg remains open, but something can be worked out.

They have bought a Jaguar two-seater. With the top down, they explore the towns on the North Shore and also, with less confidence, the South Shore around Cohasset. It’s dreadfully suburban; Dover would do, if it weren’t so full of stuffy types who work for insurance companies or on State Street. Charlie Swan comes up with a solution: they must head farther west, to the Berkshires, where he owns a house in Billington. The way Camilla drives, they can be there in under two hours. He knows of just the property for them, on a hillside, across a narrow valley from his place, with a view
straight into the sunset. The garden is a succession of terraces held up by old brick walls. They have, of course, seen a good deal of Charlie and Toby. Max never really lost contact with them after the meeting in Beijing; Camilla knows Charlie from Oxford and London. He and Toby come to Camilla and Max’s wedding dinner, which is given by the Kahns.

Max buys the house Charlie has found. It’s a ruin inside, but that’s just as well because Camilla wants to change everything, and Charlie, who hasn’t accepted a job of this sort in the last twenty years, offers to do the design work. It will be superb, a hymn to their friendship. Fortunately, a farmer’s cottage comes with the house; it’s in good condition, so that Camilla and Max can start their weekend existence immediately. Charlie is spending less time in Europe; he comes to Billington regularly. Both he and Toby are expert cooks. When they are only up for weekends, on Saturday nights, and more often when they are in residence, there is a big dinner at Charlie’s. Naturally, they count on Camilla and Max. Max admires everything about Charlie’s house: a brick Shaker structure, very spare but so graceful that it wears a smiling air of welcome. The collection of American furniture and bric-a-brac delights by its fantasy; a fitting extension, Max thinks, of the eccentric who coexists in Charlie with the rigorous bully. And Max likes Charlie’s guests. They are a mixture of local patricians—stooped, bony men in tired tweeds or gabardine, depending on the season, whose wives have handshakes like lumberjacks—and collectible New Yorkers qualified by money, acknowledged talent, or extreme good looks. Max’s new crowd. Charlie invites “my kind of queer” only: architects or artists and an occasional
beauty, like Toby. Except for a few old friends, sometimes referred to as “that adorable creature,” about whose relation to Charlie one might speculate this way or that, Max believes sexual orientation is not a factor that determines Charlie’s favor. None of these men are special friends of Toby’s. Who are Toby’s friends? When and where does he see them?

Toby joins Max and Camilla on their walks through the woods at the other end of the valley. Sometimes Max and Toby go rock climbing alone. Max thinks that Toby was right when he worried about disappointing him. That is because Max does feel that Toby has let him down. He is not making progress along any road one can recognize. At work, he is Charlie’s man Friday, that’s all. Charlie’s nose is always in some book; his library makes Max envious. Toby reads only magazines. He is sweetness incarnate, but his conversation has not been refurbished; one finds it dull. In a way, it is like his looks—the beautiful face of an adolescent paired with the body of a young man menaced by incipient thickness—at the midriff, perceptible ever so slightly about the cheeks—which is more dangerous than baby fat.

M
AX KNOWS
that many years have passed since a treatise examining the intellectual foundations of contract law has been published by a common law scholar. He thinks he can write such a book—a short work, openly speculative in nature, free of academic jargon and the apparatus of footnotes. The reconstruction of the house in Billington has reached a stage at which it is quite possible to think of spending a sabbatical year there in comfort. He can imagine no place where he would prefer to write—lifting his eyes from the
text to stare at the empty sky. Reference materials can be shipped to him by the Law School library as needed, or he will make quick expeditions to Cambridge. Camilla agrees; she has been urging Max to spread his wings. The Fogg is good about rearranging her schedule. She will need to spend only two nights each week at Highland Terrace. With the purchase of a Volvo station wagon, chosen despite Charlie’s protest that its name and plum-red color make him think of a vulva, they become a two-car family. The book advances slowly, but Max grows fond of following his thoughts where they lead. The sentences he sets down on paper to express them seem becoming; he rejoices at each small success. When he rereads the text in the spring, he concludes that what he has done is worthy of being continued. He negotiates an indefinite extension of his leave. It occurs to him that he might dedicate his book to the memory of Cousin Emma as well as to Camilla. The former gave him the freedom to write in perfect conditions, the latter his new self-confidence.

W
ITH THE RETURN
of good weather, the tempo of social activities quickens in Billington and the two adjoining towns where people who count are apt to have their houses. A short distance down the road from Max and Camilla’s stands a bleak structure surrounded by yews. The Rookery, for that is the name on the owners’ notepaper under an embossed crown, is the dwelling of the elderly Lord and Lady Howe. The baron—the third to have the title—descends from a man who grew rich grinding wheat into flour. He is an ornithologist married to an American. Her family made uniforms
for the army in a nearby town where rich people no longer live. From late June until early September, the Rookery is the scene of festivities equal to Charlie’s in their standing and power of attraction. The food comes out of a can or the freezer, but it is served by the English butler, one dresses for dinner, and the women withdraw to have coffee in the pink drawing room that has the same view as Max’s study. Through their mothers, Camilla and Lord Howe are cousins. The Rookery becomes the other pole of Camilla and Max’s evening and weekend life. No disloyalty to Charlie is involved: he is constantly at the Howes’, and the titled couple is in the place of honor when Charlie and Toby entertain. By now Max finds it only natural that the friendship between Charlie and Ricky Howe predates by many years Charlie’s decision to buy a house in the Billington valley. He shares the general regret that exigencies of their schedule prevent the Howes from staying in the valley until the foliage hits its reddest peak in October.