Man Who Was Late (11 page)

He returned to Paris through Corbeil, as he had come—why look for Rambouillet at this hour? The road seemed miraculously short. When he arrived at the corner of Montparnasse and the rue de Vaugirard, where he decided he would leave the car instead of struggling with the gate, Ben saw that the metal curtain of the
epicene
had been cranked halfway up; the owner was on the sidewalk outside, prying apart with a hammer the slats of a crate of bananas. Ben bought two and ate them at once, voraciously. They would stave off his hangover. He threw the peels into a basket filled with discarded lettuce leaves and onions.

T
WO DAYS LATER
, on the Monday after that weekend of exultation, I telephoned Ben to tell him that my daughters and I had marched in Washington—Prudence was sick with a bad throat—linking arms with strangers, singing at the top of our voices, and also to ask whether he could get away from Paris over the Memorial Day holiday and join us in Vermont. I said he didn’t need to fear landing in the midst of one of our family reunions. It would be just the five of us, lots of bad tennis, and no organized activities. For once, in a matter of this kind, Ben did not chill me with his “European” point of view. He understood what was happening in America. The French television had played clips of the march; he had watched them on Sunday. As for the visit I proposed, he said he would try to come but couldn’t make any plans. The office was busier than ever. Then he told me he had been to the Decazes’ party.

You see the effect of living in different time zones, he said. Events never coincide. While you were still marching I might have been on the dance floor. Instead I talked to Véronique. That was a momentous occasion in its own way. It’s possible that thanks to you I am now in a more cheerful landscape.

In fact, when Ben looked back on it during the days that followed, Véronique’s flirtatious manner and what he took
to be a proposal that he invite her in her husband’s absence troubled him. They seemed too bold and provocative for the circumstances, but he wasn’t sure his assessment was correct. Possibly it was nothing more than a high-spirited way of ending a long and too personal conversation that had begun to bore her. Something akin to the way she laughed. That her husband’s half sister had been present supported this interpretation. But, on the other hand, wasn’t Lavinia’s presence a cover of which Véronique skillfully took advantage rather than a constraint? The latter interpretation was reinforced by Ben’s conviction that a current of sorts had surged between them when he described his paltry wartime miseries—could it be that “She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d”?—as it had earlier when, unexpectedly, she had touched his arm. But if she was attracted to him and tempted by the prospect of an adventure, should he not avoid involvement with this temperamental married woman?

Ben’s dislike of entanglements, and a closely allied consideration—his reluctance to have disorders of his personal life seep into the neat, protected space in which he conducted official business, the bank’s and his own—were deeply rooted. The Cockney, Dolores, and her shipowner husband did not count—he considered them commedia dell’arte figures and dealt with them accordingly—but although he hardly knew Véronique or Paul, she was my cousin and a “nice” woman, mother of a five-year-old boy and wife of an equally “nice” man. Why should Ben let his shadow pass over their happiness? In addition, according to all reports, the legal work Paul was doing for Ben’s firm was valuable. He had in a sense become a part of the office, and Ben despised
office romances as threatening to discipline, objectivity, and concentration on servicing the interests of the bank. During the period immediately following his separation from Rachel, when friends’ wives like so many curious social workers rushed to care for this elusive, strangely correct, and wounded man, he had scrupulously declined offers of solace from spouses of partners and junior colleagues—those offers so often communicated by the lady’s surprising substitution of a moist kiss on the lips for the previous handshake or chaste peck on the cheek.

Ben held sleeping with the wives of close friends to be a riskless and potentially beneficial activity from the point of view of all concerned. His own discretion was total—he never revealed a single name even to me, only the process. As for the straying wife, he thought one could normally count on her distaste for scandal, especially if she had small children and if one explained in advance, as he never failed to, that one’s affection for good old Greg or Sam and determination not to marry again were equally unshakable. Ben insisted to me that in fact there was never any difficulty: he had simply gotten to understand and like better a number of our mutual friends and their families; the drain on his finances was negligible—frequent outings to chic restaurants, weekends in London or Acapulco, and presents of jewelry all being obviously ruled out. Since ignorance is bliss, it was not necessary to take the husband’s perspective on these doings into account. But, when he did, Ben concluded that the husband came out ahead. In the worst of hypotheses, Ben’s sexual performance made the hitherto undervalued husband look better. If, on the contrary, the lady was satisfied, she returned
to the nuptial couch relaxed, possibly with more positive ideas about what might be attained there. But the existence of office or professional links changed all that; in the particular case of the Decazes, the lack of a shared history of friendship that would dispose the lady to collaborate in the preservation of general good order made for a volatility, for unpredictable potential disruptions of family and business relations. Worse, it would make demands on Ben’s time and involve him in systematic lying.

Whether Ben believed in these lunchtime theories, and to what extent they reflected his experience, I wasn’t sure. But each time he expounded them, I was grateful he did not feel it necessary to assure me that Prudence and I were not included in their ambit. As I noted at the outset, Ben liked paradoxes in conversation. He had a similar (albeit more superficial) propensity to contradictions in his daily behavior. Among them were the way in which he shied from attachments, although he suffered from loneliness, and how he lied with gusto if asked where he had dined the previous evening or whether he liked Tchaikovsky and yet strenuously avoided situations requiring sustained falsehood.

There was another wholly different reason for him to vacillate. Dolores had just written suggesting that he spend that same Pentecostal weekend in Athens. The work on her new house in Kifisiá was finished; the husband had business in New York; Ben could stay at the Grande Bretagne and go to the museum in the morning. “We will have lunch in Piraeus with broiled fish. All afternoon you will love me,” she concluded. Ben was tempted. So it happened that a note of thanks to Véronique for the evening in Arpajon came close to
marking, for the time being, the end of his contact with my cousin. True, there was no necessity to go to Athens on that particular weekend in order to enjoy such uncomplicated pleasures. Dolores’s husband was often away: Ben thought he could tell her that he too was going to New York (lest she come to Paris or offer to meet him in whatever other city he named as his destination). On the other hand, right then Dolores might help him keep black thoughts at bay, while later in the summer he might be over his depression and, in any case, Athens would be too hot.

Yet Véronique’s offer had a peremptory quality. It had to be taken up right then or not at all. And what would Véronique think if he ignored it? That he had not understood her or was timorous—or, possibly, that he had found her unattractive? Each of these suppositions and others like them, in addition to being untrue, implied an undeserved insult to her or a loss of face for him. His memory was vivid of how she had looked at the cocktail party at the rue du Cherche-Midi and then in the Fortuny dress in her own house, and of the peculiar old-fashioned perfume that progressively combined with the nascent delicate odor of her sweat. It had been warm in the conservatory; she had perspired; probably she used no powder or deodorants, just little dots of that perfume. Desire for Véronique, brutal and urgent, made itself felt. He should invite her, he thought, to a restaurant where the food and wine were good and the decor refined enough to go naturally with an elegant woman—at the same time, although Paris in principle would have been emptied for Pentecost of everyone but tourists—it was better, so that she need not feel nervous, to avoid places where people she knew
were likely to dine. Was this his punishment? he wondered. Was he condemned to pore over restaurant guides and wine lists like Sisyphus rolling his rock uphill?

He put down the papers he had been studying, dialed the number himself, and arranged to see her on Friday evening of the weekend she had named; he wanted the entire time Paul was absent to be open before them. He asked that she meet him at Ledoyen, in one of the gardens of the Champs-Élysées. Her voice was tiny and colorless. She said yes.

O
N THE
F
RIDAY
he was finally to see her, he went home after the office—Paris was indeed deserted, the taxi ride took less than ten minutes—bathed, washed his hair for the second time that day, clipped his fingernails and toenails, and dressed with extreme care. His newest black shoes seemed dull. He buffed them himself, telling Gianni to rush to the florist’s before she closed, to make sure that the flowers in the house were fresh, and to change his sheets and the towels in his bathroom. He decided he would leave his car with the doorman of the Crillon. From there he walked to the restaurant, hardly conscious of the red and yellow flower beds, then at the height of their glory, carefully staying on the pavement so that the dust of the garden
allée
would not whiten his gleaming shoes.

He was precisely on time. The red-plush foyer was empty; some people were in the bar. He decided to wait for her at the table—it would be at least five minutes—to avoid the awkwardness of greeting her at the door and then crossing the dining room at the side of a young woman who was still a stranger. Was she not a little taller than he? He supposed
she would wear very high heels. Also, he wanted to make sure of the table. It was a table at the window and it was all right; they could turn their backs on the other diners and face the mass of green outside. The garden lights had just been turned on; the green was changing to a Magritte navy blue.

This time her hair was down, not quite to her shoulders, gathered loosely by a ribbon that ended in an enamel clasp above her forehead. Ben found it less becoming than the chignon she had worn on the two previous occasions: her features, typical of a blond, floating just a little, changeable, needed a touch of severity or concentration; he regretted that her ears were covered. She was a little out of breath, as though she had been running, and her chest moved heavily under a dress of red crepe de chine with a pattern of smug, cream-colored Buddhas. Ben told her she was very beautiful. She laughed, asked if he was surprised that she had kept the engagement, and when he replied—truthfully—that he had never doubted it, laughed again and said he was odiously sure of himself. The reason she was late and had not had time to put up her hair, she informed him, was that she had decided only twenty minutes before to meet him. Until then, she had planned to call the restaurant and say her car had broken down. That would not have worked, Ben said; he would have sent his own car for her. She then told him, in possible contradiction, that she had arranged to stay in town: her mother-in-law agreed to invite Laurent (that was her son’s name) and the au pair for the weekend.

She ate and drank fast, almost rapaciously; in contrast to the impression given at the party by the pallor of her arms, she seemed to him admirably wholesome. He said it was time
for the life story she had promised. She asked him to wait until after dessert; she couldn’t both talk and pay attention to food.

After she had finished her sherbet, she told the story, at first almost as woodenly, Ben thought, as he had told his own in Arpajon. The anecdotal part that concerned my great-uncle and my family, of course, he knew; she had loved horses, still did, thought she could handle any steeplechase course; she jumped with her legs open, it was all in the balance, it had been awful to leave for Vassar and give up racing and now they couldn’t afford to keep a good horse and, anyway, Paul wanted her to be in Paris during the week. There was a pause during which she peered into the mirror of her compact. Then she continued: I changed my mind about Vassar very soon. All those friends of Jack’s on weekends—I kept on falling in love. I even wanted to marry Jack, but he paid no attention. He said I was his little sister. Would that have stopped you? All those gods and pharaohs liked it, and I would have met you so much sooner!

For the second time, the recklessness of my cousin’s conversation disconcerted Ben. Was she acceding to his wishes before they had taken form? Why had she named me? This was a door he preferred not to open. Like a man steering into a long skid, he mumbled in English that yes, vice is nice but incest is best. She smiled. Her compact occupied her again.

Knowing from me that the father was dead, Ben asked about Véronique’s mother. This was the way to steer the conversation onto a road that was circuitous but left him in
control. Where he wanted that road to lead he hadn’t yet decided.

The flat truthfulness of her answer surprised me when I read his notes. She said she drove on occasional weekends to her mother’s place because she wanted Laurent to know the house where she had grown up, but it was difficult for her to be with her mother alone: her mother had beat her and continued to do so even when she was in college and came home on vacations. She hit her with a riding whip—they were always around—or a clothes hanger or an umbrella, whatever was near. Véronique would have great welts and black-and-blue marks on her back and legs.

Horrified, Ben asked why she had put up with it, especially once she was no longer a child. Véronique answered that she was not sure she any longer knew the answer. At the time, it had seemed to her that the beatings calmed her mother and made things go better in the house for a while—her mother was extremely nervous, perhaps hysterical—besides, she had gotten used to it. She didn’t mind the hurt, just that it showed, because she always had to remember when she shouldn’t be seen undressed.