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

Prudence was in seventh heaven. We were even less abstemious at dinner. One evening, Ben announced that while he and I would split the bill for the food as usual, the wine would be on him. We ate crayfish as a first course—the specialty of the hotel’s brightly lit restaurant with little table lamps made out of gnarled vine roots—and with them drank a local wine and then, when it came to pheasant stewed with cabbage, two bottles of a Beaune-Enfant Jésus ’59 of aprice so prodigious that Ben suggested we pretend for the rest of the meal that we were his bank’s valued clients, with taste and strength to match. He was celebrating an anniversary of sorts, he told us, a trip to Burgundy with Rachel in the year of that wine, precisely when the grapes were being brought in. They had left the twins at home. One evening in Beaune Rachel and he drank that very wine (selected, he assured us, without sacrilegious intent on his part), from the same producer, Monsieur Bouchard, but of the ’47 vintage, and that was the year in which his father chose Jersey City for their family home in the New World, a coincidence that seemed to him at the time full of tragicomic meaning he now could not remember, perhaps because this ’59—so far as he was concerned a better year in all respects than ’47—had addled his brains. Rachel and he had finished one bottle that evening and made a good dent in the second, sending what was left to the chef with their compliments, and made their way, arms around each other’s waist, to their room in the Hôtel de la Poste, so justly famous for huge, hard beds, made expressly, or so it seemed, so that those Chevaliers du Tastevin who managed to survive the twenty-kilometer automobile return trip from the banquet in Vougeot could snore in sodden bliss until the onset of morning hangover. Only Rachel and he did not snore—not right away in any case—they made love in those sheets that were like some snow country.
    The chocolate soufflé came: Ben detected unsuitable lumps, consequence of haste and careless stirring, allowed Prudence to talk him out of sending it back to the kitchen,which he claimed he would have done only to prove to the chef that we paid attention to what we ate. Instead, he asked for ’59 champagne to console us for life’s imperfections. We drank to our next trip—we would go to Avallon, Vézelay, and Beaune next spring, if Prudence’s parents would take the children during Easter vacation—and then to the twins: he wished them and associated delusions bon voyage. At the table next to us were four men who looked like garage owners. They left after much embracing of the
patron
and the
patronne
. We were now the only guests in the dining room. Whether to mark his contentment with what we had consumed or to speed us to our room, the
patron
offered us old brandy. We clinked glasses, and when I stood up I was grateful that our room was only one flight of stairs away. Ben too was tipsy, tipsy enough to say he hoped that what we had eaten and drunk at table would not detract from pleasures that should follow, and how, in his own case, he was not sure he would even manage to sacrifice to absent loves before sleep overcame him.
    Excerpt from letter, dated September 1975, from Rachel to me:
    I’ve forgotten the name of the wine in Beaune. Isn’t it like Ben to have such a thing up his sleeve, unless he had forgotten it also and only said you were drinking the same wine to give his story higher color. That too would be like him. Why did this sort of thing stick in
your
memory? Were you taking notes on Ben even then?
    Whatever its name, the wine was very good. I chose it and I paid for it. He didn’t tell you that, I suppose. Or did you both take it for granted?
    The rest of the evening I remember more vividly. Before I undressed, he asked to do something we had never done before, right away, in haste. He hurt me, and when I told him, he said he didn’t care, it was a part of the