Man Who Was Late by Louis Begley Read Free Book Online Page A

disappears.
Pipi
room? Into the stairway, to be felt up by an enterprising guest? Or can’t I see her through the cigarette smoke? Gilbert approaches, puts his arm through mine. Acrid smell fills my delicate nose. He knows the Cockney. Says her
con
is in a state of constant (no pun intended by me) itch. Were he to telephone her from a café and say, Hike up your skirt, take off your underpants, and don’t move, I’ll be right over, she would do as he told and wait as long as it took, getting wetter and wetter.
    Gilbert is surely right; no doubt speaks from experience. I leave him, go over to talk to Marianne, member now fully aroused. Like the
libraire
, she has no breasts, but vast like Venus in the hips. Asks me why I go to Amsterdam all the time. I begin to tell her—shouldn’t a legal secretary be curious about Dutch holding companies and money that grows in the shade? By way of a strange non sequitur, perhaps because the vanity of all my pursuits suddenly chills me (“a man may sit at meat and feel the chill in his groin”), I change the subject. Speak to her confidingly about Rachel and the twins, and how a man who haslost his arm will sometimes feel twinges of pain where his fingers had once been. She cannot hear me over the music; goes off to pass more runny cheese.
    Hours later, when we have finished our business in bed, the Cockney tells me how Marianne said I am the most sinister man in the world. My Dracula qualities not being usually manifest, knowing that they “converse” in French, I ask how Marianne phrased this in her native tongue.
L’homme le plus sinistre du monde
is the giggled reply. That’s all right, lovey, say I comfortingly, she only means I am the
dreariest
of men.
    We were lucky. During the entire five days we were on the road the weather remained perfect, the sky of a gentle blue, the sort one often sees in Impressionist paintings but never in America, where the light is so much harsher. It was warmer than when we had arrived; Prudence said how like an Indian summer, and Ben told her the French-Christian expression for that strange season, which is so like the gift of a pagan god. We wanted to see all that we possibly could—Prudence had studied the green Michelin and pored over the detail maps—we hoped Ben wouldn’t want to sacrifice tourism to country inns with stars before their names. As it turned out, he had a low opinion of all restaurants between Orléans and Tours and did not object to picnics, provided they could be held in a meadow on the side of a hill, preferably above a vineyard, with a flat stone or two at hand to put the food upon. There was no lack of such meadows. Ben would shop early, to be sure we had our provisions beforethe shops closed for the sleepy lunch hour, composing meals of sausage, sardines, and cheese, bread to be eaten on the side, against the judgment of Prudence who would have preferred to make sandwiches; we drank local red wine—Chinon, Champigny, and Bourgueil—fragrant and, according to Ben, no more apt to turn our heads than Evian. He would drink the wine like water, he announced; after all, he wasn’t the chauffeur. That was because, immediately at the start of the trip, he turned the wheel over to me, explaining that some sort of nervousness or distraction, he wasn’t sure of its nature, made him drive badly, to the point where he thought he was all the time on the verge of running into things.
    While we stretched on the grass in the sun, and over dinners, Prudence talked about French Renaissance architecture. She had studied art history at Radcliffe, her memory was good, and Ben seemed unable to tire of asking her questions. They were wonderful questions, so well organized to lead up the evolutionary chain from Blois to Chambord that I wondered if Ben was absorbing new information or exquisitely keeping up his end of a leisurely cultural baseline volley to let his best friend’s wife show off. I didn’t much care where the truth lay: