Man Who Was Late (7 page)

Writing today, I find it difficult to avoid letting an anachronistic note of irony or foreboding intrude into a description of the genial, straightforward first encounter between my cousin, her husband, and my host. Ben left the short thin man—the president of the Oklahoma company, I later learned—and greeted the Decazes before I had managed to come to their side. The talk was brisk—in fact a cross-examination of Paul conducted by Ben with hardly any preliminaries and no waste of time. As he inquired into the work Paul did, his law firm, and his experience with American businessmen, I realized that Ben had been quite serious: since I had a cousin in Paris I was fond of, he would help her husband. I supposed, in his mind, it was an elegant going-away present for Prudence and me, consistent with the tendency he had developed to regard my family as being a little on the needy side. And I could see that Ben liked Paul Decaze: he was the sort of Frenchman we then referred to as milk-fed. Born just before the war began or in its early years, brought up on a diet that made them grow to an American size, and athletic, these Frenchmen had clean teeth and a cheerful willingness to speak reasonable English. Ben said, Véronique and you must excuse us; I will throw Paul into the fish tank.

I was alone with Véronique for a moment I was hoping to prolong. She had kept the distinct sort of breathlessness I remembered from many years before, and she was even more
unquestionably beautiful. I liked the way she wore her ash-blond hair in a bun that exposed to view her tightly formed, perfect ears; I admired, with a twinge of envy for Paul’s or her revenues—or the way they managed them—the absolutely straight black skirt ending just at the knee, over very pale stockings, and the black knitted jacket worn over a man’s shirt of dull white silk, dangerously open but revealing only a strand of pearls. Her hands ended in long, cared-for fingers. She put her arm through mine as we talked. There was nothing between Véronique and that entrancing shirt.

Mais c’est la petite Madame Decade, comment vas-tu?
I saw before us the elongated form of Ben’s friend Guy Renard and, more specifically, his keen face, all profile and modeled to do justice to his name, bent over Véronique’s hand where he deposited a ceremonious and satisfied kiss. Naturally, it’s you, he continued in English, thus confirming the opinion I had formed of my conversational ability in his language. Where but at Ben’s house, he went on, could I risk finding the only young woman in Paris who has ever resisted me, flirting with an American?

But I am practically American myself, Véronique laughed, and this man is my long-lost cousin and Ben’s best friend! Paul is here too, and he really is flirting—with Ben and Ben’s rich clients!

It turned out that they knew each other very well, although I like to think quite innocently, due to family ties between a certain Odile, who had been appropriately receptive to Guy’s attentions, and Véronique’s nearest neighbors in the village near Arpajon, where she and Paul had their country place, so that they were almost certain to see each other—on most
weekends, I gathered—when the Count and Countess de Montorgueil entertained.

And it suddenly seemed utterly absurd to Guy that, having introduced Ben to all the elegant women and great houses in his acquaintance, he had never taken him to that particular château, which had no equal in the Île-de-France among properties still in private hands, and that he had never presumed to present Ben to his adorable compatriot. He took out one of those Hermès pocket diaries bound in wine-colored leather without which the French appear so lost and was ready to make concrete plans, when Ben rejoined us, saying, Monsieur Decaze is a fast worker! Before we know it he will be in Rabat, helping my friends from Oklahoma to work their way out of a French construction contract, and you will end up being very angry at me, he added for the benefit of Véronique, because while these Moroccan expeditions in themselves are profitable and perhaps even amusing, eventually they turn one’s social life into a Sahara. You will never know whether you can count on your husband’s being in Paris.

Guy and Ben now kissed each other. I could not help noting how quickly expressions of joyous surprise at finding Véronique at Ben’s and of resolve to have Ben become a regular visitor in the countryside surrounding Arpajon and its noble dwellings entered Guy’s permanent repertory. Kissing men on both cheeks instead of shaking hands and kissing women on their hands were newly acquired habits I had already begged Ben to abjure; I found them unattractive in an American, even if he was one only by adoption. An ill-timed
and unfair irritation was overcoming me; it was as though my plans had already worked too well. Fortunately, Prudence reappeared at the head of the Oklahoma contingent. We drank more champagne; Ben made a toast to phosphates and their miraculous uses; Gianni presented a succession of those truly miraculous round breads, hollowed out and refilled with paper-thin sandwiches of smoked salmon, prosciutto, and Roquefort that are the underpinnings of a Parisian cocktail party. It was the first time the Oklahomans had encountered them. These are
pains surprise
, surprising breads, Véronique informed the short thin man. If you tell me what hotel you are staying at, I will have a couple of them delivered to you to take to Rabat. An airplane ride won’t hurt them at all!

Scott van Damm had reserved a large table at Chez Joséphine, just down the street. The hour for the clients’ early dinner had come—they were suffering from jet lag, upset stomachs and other perhaps even worse discomforts. Ben asked to be excused from keeping them company; the pretext, that in a few minutes he would have to return to the office to speak to New York, was one that Prudence and I had confidently expected. Quite unexpected was Paul’s offer, enthusiastically supported by Véronique, to go along to the restaurant and take Ben’s place and make sure they had a true Parisian meal.

Decaze is lucky, that cousin of yours is a good business partner, remarked Ben as we returned to the drawing room. With a word or two spoken in French, he had prevented Guy from leaving with the others, and now, throwing open the
French windows that gave on the garden, and raising his arms to welcome the cold air, announced that dinner was about to be served at home: Gianni had made
gnocchi;
we would drink a great deal of good wine and then, when the mood was right, go to the bar in the rue Chauchat to hear the only real balalaika left in Paris.

T
HE FOLLOWING
F
EBRUARY
Ben came to New York for a visit; there was a partners’ meeting of his bank he wanted to attend—a matter of speaking up at the right time for Scott van Damm, who might be considered in the partnership election later in the year, or perhaps of seeing that no cracks developed in his own position in Paris. He stayed long enough for us to have lunch twice, and of course he came to dinner at home with Prudence and the children. I had recently joined a club of considerable distinction—some would say the most desirable of such institutions in the city. The thrill of leading a guest into those precincts was still fresh, and that is where I invited Ben for our farewell meal. We had already talked about my book and its slow progress. There was very little useful information about the daily life of American Indians in the precolonial and early colonial periods; almost none to reveal how they perceived their existence. I wanted a firmer grip on their truth. Ben laughed. He said (and with increasing frustration I had been coming to the same point of view) that thoughts which had not been written down could never be recaptured—except, if one has sufficient confidence, by a leap of intuition. For that, I was not ready. Ben said he knew I had not used his apartment. It was a pity, inspiration being the sister of regular working habits. In
reply, I told him of Prudence’s plan to take the children skiing in Idaho during Easter vacation, provided her parents made us the gift of cash they had suggested we might expect. Our next visit to Ben would have to wait until the fall.

Battle was raging in the Plain of Jars, but we did not mention Vietnam. I had come during those years to find it grating and, in the end, useless to debate the American involvement in the war with certain members of my family and close friends. Such discussions, one quickly saw, were an unpleasant waste of time; they raised questions about the values on which relationships reposed that I preferred to leave unanswered. With Ben, my disagreement was not about the conduct of the war—he had no wish to see American
B-52S
bomb Laos and Cambodia—or even about its merit: in fact, ever since Diem and Nhu were first fixed in our collective consciousness by the
New York Times
, he had maintained that we were backing the wrong horse in Indochina. Rather, I could not help feeling that Ben was not sufficiently American to understand a purely native aspect of the dispute about the war: the necessary, cleansing function that antiwar protest performed in the political life of the Republic. His vision of the movement—confined to pretorn blue jeans, grimy headbands, unwashed hair and feet, swaying pendulous breasts, and, indoors or out, a propensity to sit on the ground, legs outstretched, even when a chair or bench was available—usually expressed in sardonic sorties, angered me. I took it as another symptom of his irreducible Central European cultural hypocrisy: good appearance passed off for the good life, secret yearning for a brutal, punishing father translated
into tolerance for the likes of Kissinger and Nixon. I wondered whether Ben’s choice of service in the marines, nominally a high-spirited, aesthetic reaction against the prospect of spending, like myself and most of our friends, the two egalitarian years demanded of a peacetime draftee in the army among overweight typists and inventory clerks, had not proceeded from the same troubled source. So it seemed wiser—besides, we had only talked about me and my family—to turn the conversation to him. As usual, that meant talking in the first place about the twins.

Of Sarah, Ben said that she had done well in college. Now she was out, but instead of going for a graduate degree or getting a real job (the latter not being strictly required from a financial point of view) or having a whopping adventure—for instance, trading in coffee beans in Quito—she lived tranquilly out of wedlock with a Harvard professor of Hebrew studies at least five years Ben’s senior, blessed like Abraham with children from his first wife and not in the least divorced. The wife was to blame—she refused to accept the necessary rabbinical writ from the professor. All this was taking place in Waltham, in the professor’s run-down tenement, within shouting distance of Rachel’s ancestral Brookline. Presumably for part-time distraction, Sarah took the morning shift at the cash register of the corner laundromat. Ben admitted that he was not above enjoying the joke on Rachel—the accusation that he was the old satyr of Porquerolles still burned in his foot like a sea-urchin spine. Less amusing to him was Sarah’s view—perhaps inspired by the professor, perhaps achieved through independent analysis—that
Ben was a bad Jew, unwilling to assume his Judaic identity, and therefore unworthy of her affection.

I asked about Rebecca.

She has come to believe that I loved only her mother and Sarah, and at best tolerated her. She has no use for me, except as a high-class employment agency. All is as though I had a duty, perhaps in lieu of reparations, to get her the jobs she wants. She has her eye on some curatorial position with the Victoria and Albert in the glass department, and, believe it or not, I think I’ll be able to do it! I’ve struck up an acquaintance with Sir Sigmund Warburg and he has been astonishingly kind about helping Rebecca. There is one small hitch: Rebecca will not come to the telephone when I call, and she doesn’t answer my letters. We communicate exclusively through Rachel, which slows things down. My opinion as a banker is that I must write off Sarah and Rebecca. They are bad loans.

I am wrong to talk about this, he continued, I know my attachment to the girls has been absurdly excessive, but I find it very hard to come to terms with the obvious, fatal truth. The girls can have real or imagined complaints about Rachel—some more awful than anything I have been accused of—and Rachel will tell you and anybody else who is willing to listen that the twins are monsters. Still, in the end, something—genes? glue of family money? Rachel’s being a woman?—makes their relations permanent. They have to work things out and they do. When it comes to me, after years of faithful service in the zoo, at the Museum of Natural History, and at the beach, they retired me without as much as a souvenir silver whistle. All I have left is a bad case of
womb envy, baby-sitting skills, and a collection of fading snapshots I no longer keep in frames because they have become embarrassing to explain. You probably noticed that there are no photographs in my office in Paris or in the rue du Cherche-Midi. I am more divorced from the twins than from Rachel.

My own memory of him as a mother hen was vivid; we had held occasional joint picnics on the rocks above Central Park’s East Meadow. Nevertheless, I didn’t undertake to comfort Ben by suggesting that the twins were going through a rough period as young adults and that later their relationship would revive. I too thought that his expectations and the intensity of his feelings were excessive. Those girls were not his children; the circumstance of their natural father’s being dead could not change that. And then, there were too many obstacles: Rachel’s influence—she held Ben responsible for her own disappointments, and this disappointment of Ben’s was a pleasant revenge; the feminist sentiments, which encouraged matrilinear groupings; Ben’s hurt feelings and colossal pride. Besides, he was changing. For all his gentleness with Prudence and me—renewed evidence of which I had seen during our visit—I felt that he had, in general, become harder in manner, possibly because his self-assurance had kept pace with his success, and more set in the ways he thought befitted an elegant old bachelor. I decided to ask him instead about his sexual hygiene in Paris. The expression had stuck in my mind.

He told me there had been notable developments. Dolores’s husband was moving the conjugal residence to Athens, the French tax collectors under Pompidou having become
too active for his taste. Fortunately, poor Dolores had not rebelled, and Ben did not have to face the task of explaining that he was not a pillar she could lean on. The tricky problem would be to enforce the rule Ben had immediately imposed, that when she came to Paris for a visit—the husband agreed she should do that at will—she must stay at the Plaza-Athénée, like all other shipowners’ wives, and not with Ben. He would receive her with joy in all his members, but only on bed-but-no-breakfast terms. Guy’s cousin was opening an art gallery in Marseille and was also moving away—that didn’t matter much since her services could not be compared with Do’s for excitement or dependability. The Cockney was oscillating between possessiveness (she had recently asked Ben to drop her off at work after a night at the rue du Cherche-Midi; he refused, pointing out the availability of the métro at the corner of the rue de Sèvres) and tasteless, sluttish talk, possibly even behavior. For instance, it appeared that there were men among the “bosses” in her office—she had insisted on naming them—who made her “itch.” New therapies, new animals for his zoo were needed, lest he be reduced to waiting for Scandinavian au pairs on the boulevard Raspail at the hour when their courses at the Alliance Française ended and they were ready for a drink with a venturesome stranger.