Man Who Was Late (12 page)

That’s probably why I married Paul, she added carelessly. When I graduated from Vassar, I was looking for a job in Paris, but I would go home to the country on Saturdays, and my mother was still beating me. I met Paul in Paris, at Lavinia’s birthday party. He took me out afterward, and we went to the room I had in a friend’s apartment on the rue Jacob. We made love with all our clothes on, even my underpants. Fortunately he wanted it that way; I could not have
let him see my body. And then? Then he asked to marry me and I told my mother and she said I was lucky, he is so solid, and she stopped hitting me. We had Laurent, and my mother gave me the money to buy an apartment and a house in the country, and now he usually takes me undressed.

Her eyes were empty—Ben wondered whether the earlier impression of health and freshness was misleading, perhaps she was, in fact, a little mad, or whether there were other things she was thinking of, had been on the verge of saying, and then had decided she would not speak about. She was playing with a lump of sugar on the table. Without thinking, Ben covered her hand with his. It was a warm, quiet hand; he realized that his own was cold as ice and that he was trembling. It doesn’t matter, she said, it has all turned out pretty well. My mother also liked to ride. She taught me herself, when I was little. If I had a horse now, I would still be good; I could ride in any terrain. They drank a brandy, and then another. Véronique smiled. Now it was she who took his hand. She said she was curious whether Ben was really tenderhearted, tender like a woman, or afraid of his own thoughts.

He said he was afraid. In the town where he lived at the beginning of the war, when the Germans first came, there was a friend of his parents’—a large, blond woman, with permanent lazy cheerfulness. He remembered her wearing shiny silk blouses that stretched tight over a bosom which like everything else about her—arms, lips, even her back—was surprisingly ample. When she bent down to kiss him, he would try to peek at her breasts. The valley between them was also oversized and smelled sweet of powder. One day,
the Germans took her to the Gestapo or SS house. She was kept there one night, perhaps two. He no longer remembered why they took her or whether he ever knew the reason. Then they released her; she was led to her home by two regular policemen, one on each side, supporting her at the elbows. The point was that she couldn’t see. They had beaten her on the face, on the breasts—everywhere. So it was beatings, that and the word “lead.” He could not hear of beatings or of people being led even in absurdly unconnected contexts, as when his own mother would speak of the bridegroom’s mother’s being led to the canopy at a Jewish wedding, without thinking of that woman and being deathly afraid. What made it odd was that he had not witnessed the scene; his mother had described it.

Véronique asked what had happened later.

He replied, I don’t know, or perhaps I have forgotten that, too.

The air outside was warm when they left the restaurant. She had with her a heavy green leather raincoat, ugly and unsuited to her dress. He asked to carry it for her; folded, it weighed uncomfortably on his left arm. She took his other arm. They walked through the gloom of the garden toward the Concorde, shining, brilliant, and noisy in the distance. It was still early; the floodlights illuminating the obelisk and the horses of Marly had not been turned off. In a moment they would reach the great square. Her pace was slower. She leaned against Ben so insistently that he felt the outline and warmth of her breast. The vision in the story he had just told, mixing with Agnès at Desfossé’s flickered in his mind—was this a universal signal? He let the leather coat fall on a bench
and turned toward her. Before his arms could close around her she was already clinging to his body, her lips opening his. He had not misunderstood her.

B
EN TOLD ME
of his affair with Véronique only after it became known to Paul. These circumstances will be related in their time. What neither Véronique nor I ever told Ben—and I believe he stuck to his decision not to suspect it—was that I too had been her lover during her first college vacation, when I stayed at her mother’s house in Quevrin, and during the following school year; that I had seen and followed with my lips and tongue the stigmata left by those extraordinary, secret beatings; that I beat her myself, with the palms of my hands and then also with my belt, in winter afternoon daylight, in the glacial silence of my parents’ apartment—they were spending that Christmas in Eleuthera—because, after we had made love, and I had caressed her back, which was again clear as alabaster, she begged me to do it with a vehemence that shocked me and eventually separated us, for I had never done such a thing before or since. It was, therefore, not difficult, as I read the notes in which their first night together was alluded to so often, described by Ben in frenzied fragments, to be present, to remember, and to imagine.

They drove in silence to the rue du Cherche-Midi. Her mouth was glued to him, her hands were inside his shirt, unbuttoning his trousers, tugging at his necktie. At red lights he would in turn reach for her. By the time he had stopped the car before his house, their clothes were in such disarray that he was going to abandon the car on the sidewalk, but she laughed, rebuttoned him, opened the gate, shut it behind
them, and said, Let’s race inside. On an idiotic impulse, he carried her over the threshold; though so tall, she weighed nothing. When they were in his room—he had picked up their clothes from the floor as they made their way to it; he did not want to leave, like Hansel, a trail for poor Gianni—and at last he saw her naked, he was astonished at how heart-wrenchingly thin she was, her white body, with no remains of suntan at all, a blond isosceles triangle in the middle, ending in large slightly pink feet. Her breasts, which had felt so heavy when they embraced, were in fact only long. She bent over him. In the spasm of pleasure that ensued he thought for a terrified moment that there were scars at the ends of her breasts—what operation could she have had?—but it was only her nipples, somewhere at the end of his field of vision, pendent, astonishingly dark for someone of her color, and large.

And the rest, those actions that Ben had used to think so repetitious? They enchanted him; he had stumbled into the vast bliss of being loved. She told him how she had longed to be entered by him, that she would not stop masturbating except when he was in her. She would cover him with her juice and forbid him to wash, steal his clothes and wear them, find one million ways to be always with him.

So there we will leave them, in my cousin Olivia’s bed, the French windows open on the little garden and pensive Pomona. They will sleep until the sun is quite high. Then Gianni will bring their breakfast; Véronique will sing in the bath; they will speed across Paris to get rid of the awful raincoat and pack a tiny suitcase of her clothes—just enough for the long weekend she will spend with Ben in his house.

I envied them, especially Ben, when I read about those days in Ben’s documents. Véronique was so amiable—he was not accustomed to that—and Paul, or someone before or since Paul had met her, had taught her, as Ben put it, using Valmont’s phrase, to do of her own will and enthusiastically the things men hesitate to ask of the most hardened whores. Or perhaps it was just the product of wide reading, the new availability of certain kinds of films, and that good nature I have just alluded to.

Notaben (unnumbered and undated):

In July, Véronique and Laurent moved to Arpajon while Paul remained in Paris, but unless he worked really late or had early morning appointments, one could not be sure that he would not jump into his car and rush to the country to spend the night with his wife and son. It was such a short drive: hardly forty-five minutes if one left Paris after the rush hour. It was essential that Paul find it highly inconvenient—impossible—to return to Arpajon unexpectedly. Ben saw to it. New work for Ben’s bank rained on Paul’s law office; each assignment required Paul’s personal attention. The early 1970s were a fairly civilized period for lawyers and bankers: summers were generally quiet; one could afford to slow down. Important men who had the ultimate power over deals were away on long vacation at their Côte d’Azur villas or on their yachts, but Ben thought up deals that he was sure those men could not resist. Each such deal had a structure of exquisite legal complexity. He explained to Paul and his own New York partners (lest they shudder at the size of legal fees paid in Paris) that the solution of such problems could not be left for the last minute; he wanted to be ahead of the competition. Therefore, he needed an inventory of financial products perfected and ready to be offered at the first available opportunity. He knew that the deadlines he set imposed a personal hardship on Paul, he would assure him, but the result would make him indispensable to the bank and establish his reputation in international financial circles in Europe and the United States. In fact, for certain of these projects he asked Paul to go quickly to New York, to lay out for the bank’s American lawyers and tax advisers on the spot how obstacles previously thought insurmountable could, in fact,
be overcome by Paul’s and Ben’s combined wiles and imagination.

Now that Ben knew the road to the Decazes’ house by heart, he found that the forty-five minutes ordinarily needed to reach Véronique could be cut down to thirty. He felt light: he was in love, and he exulted in the certainty that Véronique loved him. How could he doubt it? She telephoned him the moment she had spoken with Paul and confirmed that once more he was spending the night in Paris; she was putting Laurent to bed. Ben would dine hastily and early—Gianni radiating grave approval of his employer’s new habits—shed his office clothes, bathe, and, with the roof of his car open, the France Musique concert turned up to full volume, concentrate his attention on beating his most recent record for speed. So that the dog wouldn’t bark, she waited outside the gate of the property—once, on a very warm night, she appeared from behind a stand of flowering laurel entirely naked, her hair loose, arms opened to welcome him. The house was dark, except for her window and sometimes the window of the cook, Madame Julie, on the far side of the kitchen. Joos, the Dutch au pair, went to sleep almost as early as Laurent. Ben waited until Véronique reappeared at the window, got the ladder she hid for his use behind the roses, climbed as far as it reached, and pulled himself up the rest of the way into her room. She liked to prepare refined collations: cold chicken, cherries, and strawberries and, later in the summer, figs, champagne. They slept very little; in the first uneven light of dawn he would be driving back toward Paris, this time slowly, letting the huge trucks carrying produce to the market at Rungis roar by him as he replayed in his mind the
wonders of the night. His hands, his whole body, he thought, had the smell of Véronique. He lingered over his coffee and newspapers, putting off the moment of the bath as long as possible, when that smell would yield to Guerlain’s geranium.