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

in my board. Because now we will come to the interesting part, what Scotty Reston would call the watershed event.
    There was nothing one could get to drink in the lobby at that hour. I suggested going up to my room, where I had some cognac. We sat down in the two armchairs. It was a strangely chilly evening. Fatigue or excitement, I found I was shivering. I turned on the electric heater.
    My condition hadn’t escaped Charlie’s attention. Are we afraid to be alone with the satyr? Ah, that’s better, nothing like a glass of brandy before an open fire! Ha! Ha!
    The watershed turned out to be the Vienna woods. I went to Vienna in June, right after the divorce, to look at the Sparkasse and some other Otto Wagner work.
    There were ideas of design passing through my head. I was prescient, or I had simply looked at the photographs very well: whichever it was, this work, once I had actually seen it—stared at it as if in a trance—became the grain of sand around which gradually formed the pearl of my artistic invention. Absolute truth, although expressed bombastically. Do you know my Union Bank building in New York? Itrises over Madison Avenue exalted and yet humble; every element in its design is a call to order and an echo; I have conceived it so that the surrounding motley structures all take comfort in its presence.
    I said truthfully that I found the bank building exceptionally beautiful.
    Well, that was what I did downtown. The Vienna woods was where I went to drink wine with an architecture student who had been recommended to me as a combination assistant and guide. Bronzino portrait of a young man, but dressed in a green corduroy suit and reincarnated as a specialist in sex disorders! The diagnosis that had eluded Diane’s New York Hospital guru he made the moment we met. One evening, when all the stars were out and the cuckoo sang in the lilac trees, he began the therapy. I have not swerved from the road he traced.
    Is this—I mean your having become a homosexual—generally known?
    Having become? I prefer being. It’s known among the upper set in Sodom, and if one queer is onto a secret, in the next five minutes the rest of the world is informed. If you mean have I come out of the closet, the answer is no! I would like to lead a mass movement back into the closet; it’s so cozy.
    And you’re all right in sex now, the impotence was just with women?
    I have told you to read Krafft-Ebing for details, cutie pie. I don’t mind talking about girls; that’s good clean locker-room fun. The homo stuff is strictly personal!
    He leaned over and massaged my knee, as if I had remindedhim that it had been neglected since before dinner.
    His glass was empty. Apropos of closets, he inquired, is that where you keep that venerable brandy? You seem to be saving it for a rainy day!
    I got up and poured him an enormous shot.
    He scratched extensively and continued: I will explain to you the presence of Toby, so that he will be spared your hysterics when you meet again. Rest easy, I didn’t seduce him that summer when we met at the Joyce caravanserai. It’s not my form. He went back to school in Switzerland, but at the end of the year, he ran away. Disappeared for six months or more! His father had the Interpol and every other kind of police looking for him. Not a trace. Then, one day, out of the blue—that’s not a pun—he rang my office in New York. Fortunately, I picked up the telephone myself; my secretary might not have put him through. He said he was at a pay phone in the city—he refused to say where—and that he would come to see me if I had clean clothes put in a hotel room where he could first wash and rest. I had some things delivered to the Waldorf, down the street from me, and the next day I saw him. He was a mess. I have kept him with me ever since. Do you believe in the fatal irony of names?
    I am not sure I know what you mean.
    How odd! I should have thought its incidence would be painfully familiar to a manikin