As Max Saw It by Louis Begley Read Free Book Online Page B

distracted from architectural history, which one of my incantations has summoned you here, with such mischievously delayed effect? All my invitations declined, offers to visit ignored, and yet here you are, in the one place where I would havethought Toby and I could be tête-à-tête! Or is it tit for tat, since we find you in a pleasantly delicate situation with this young lady?
    He laughed generously at his own joke.
    Genuine pedagogic pleasure, Charlie, nothing more. I was congratulating Miss Wang on the road map we have just worked out for her future legal studies! She is a student in the seminar I am leading, the best interpreter in China, and my true friend.
    I did not think that Charlie measured the consequences of joking, even in this empty corner of the Imperial Palace, about a “delicate situation” between this poor child and a guest of the Chinese government’s to whom she had been assigned as a guide; the disparity between the risk to her and my achieving an unexpectedly clearer understanding of the nature of his feelings for Toby was enormous. I now think that my habitual caution led me to exaggerate, but at the time I truly believed that nothing in China concerning foreign “friends” went unobserved. I resolved to remind Charlie not to joke about Miss Wang and me if we met again, and not to mention the incident, even if he kept back her name, in anecdotes with which he might wish to titillate his Chinese contacts.
    The object of my worry seemed unconcerned by the conversation and, in fact, glad to meet these two men, one of whom was near to her in age. Glancing at me as though to see whether I would object, she proposed that we continue the visit together.
    Splendid! decreed Charlie, let’s go to the eunuchs’ quarters. They are a great curiosity. Toby will be amused.
    I interjected mildly that they were, on a diagonal, at the opposite end of the Forbidden City, and that by the time we had gotten there, looked around, and returned to the East Gate, where Miss Wang had told the driver to meet us, the poor man would be in a state of anxiety and the hotel kitchen closed. I could think of no other place we might have lunch. Charlie brushed these worries aside, saying that his car was waiting at Coal Hill, only a few minutes from where he proposed to go. We would then have plenty of time, both to rescue my driver and to have lunch. It turned out that he and Toby were also at the Beijing Hotel. And so we set off, passing the great ceremonial reception halls and the very small palace where the emperors actually lived, and then turned toward the quarters of the empress, the concubines, and the eunuchs. Charlie was well informed about the palace and had the sort of eye one would expect in an architect for tricks of perspective, vistas that suddenly appeared in the moonlike opening in a wall, and the effects of occasional asymmetry in these marvelously repetitious groupings of buildings and open spaces. He resumed with brio the lecture to Toby the encounter with us had interrupted—the chance to address a larger audience may have acted as a stimulus—sometimes pulling on the boy’s sleeve when he thought his attention flagged or taking hold of his ear to make sure his head was turned in the direction of the medallion or other detail of decoration he wanted him to notice.
    We reached the melancholy dwelling place of the eunuchs: a square space of marble, formed by four low buildings containing cells with vaulted ceilings. Their doors opened on the courtyard. Standing at the balustrade of theadjacent terrace, one looked down on the dull roofs. The place could have served as a stable. Ghostly presences—this was where memories of a lost world seemed to me most present, almost physically, as though some acrid scent had lingered undisturbed in the still air.
    Society was turned upside down here, announced Charlie. The perversity of its structure will entertain and instruct you. No comradeship of men. The emperor