Read Online Man Who Was Late by Louis Begley - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Louis Begley
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open theFrench windows that gave on the garden, and raising his arms to welcome the cold air, announced that dinner was about to be served at home: Gianni had made
gnocchi;
we would drink a great deal of good wine and then, when the mood was right, go to the bar in the rue Chauchat to hear the only real balalaika left in Paris.
III
T HE FOLLOWING F EBRUARY Ben came to New York for a visit; there was a partners’ meeting of his bank he wanted to attend—a matter of speaking up at the right time for Scott van Damm, who might be considered in the partnership election later in the year, or perhaps of seeing that no cracks developed in his own position in Paris. He stayed long enough for us to have lunch twice, and of course he came to dinner at home with Prudence and the children. I had recently joined a club of considerable distinction—some would say the most desirable of such institutions in the city. The thrill of leading a guest into those precincts was still fresh, and that is where I invited Ben for our farewell meal. We had already talked about my book and its slow progress. There was very little useful information about the daily life of American Indians in the precolonial and early colonial periods; almost none to reveal how they perceived their existence. I wanted a firmer grip on their truth. Ben laughed. He said (and with increasing frustration I had been coming to the same point of view) that thoughts which had not been written down could never be recaptured—except, if one has sufficient confidence, by a leap of intuition. For that, I was not ready. Ben said he knew I had not used his apartment. It was a pity, inspiration being the sister of regular working habits. Inreply, I told him of Prudence’s plan to take the children skiing in Idaho during Easter vacation, provided her parents made us the gift of cash they had suggested we might expect. Our next visit to Ben would have to wait until the fall.
Battle was raging in the Plain of Jars, but we did not mention Vietnam. I had come during those years to find it grating and, in the end, useless to debate the American involvement in the war with certain members of my family and close friends. Such discussions, one quickly saw, were an unpleasant waste of time; they raised questions about the values on which relationships reposed that I preferred to leave unanswered. With Ben, my disagreement was not about the conduct of the war—he had no wish to see American B-52S bomb Laos and Cambodia—or even about its merit: in fact, ever since Diem and Nhu were first fixed in our collective consciousness by the
New York Times
, he had maintained that we were backing the wrong horse in Indochina. Rather, I could not help feeling that Ben was not sufficiently American to understand a purely native aspect of the dispute about the war: the necessary, cleansing function that antiwar protest performed in the political life of the Republic. His vision of the movement—confined to pretorn blue jeans, grimy headbands, unwashed hair and feet, swaying pendulous breasts, and, indoors or out, a propensity to sit on the ground, legs outstretched, even when a chair or bench was available—usually expressed in sardonic sorties, angered me. I took it as another symptom of his irreducible Central European cultural hypocrisy: good appearance passed off for the good life, secret yearning for a brutal, punishing father translatedinto tolerance for the likes of Kissinger and Nixon. I wondered whether Ben’s choice of service in the marines, nominally a high-spirited, aesthetic reaction against the prospect of spending, like myself and most of our friends, the two egalitarian years demanded of a peacetime draftee in the army among overweight typists and inventory clerks, had not proceeded from the same troubled source. So it seemed wiser—besides, we had only talked about me and my family—to turn the conversation to him. As usual, that meant talking in the first place about the
gnocchi;
we would drink a great deal of good wine and then, when the mood was right, go to the bar in the rue Chauchat to hear the only real balalaika left in Paris.
III
T HE FOLLOWING F EBRUARY Ben came to New York for a visit; there was a partners’ meeting of his bank he wanted to attend—a matter of speaking up at the right time for Scott van Damm, who might be considered in the partnership election later in the year, or perhaps of seeing that no cracks developed in his own position in Paris. He stayed long enough for us to have lunch twice, and of course he came to dinner at home with Prudence and the children. I had recently joined a club of considerable distinction—some would say the most desirable of such institutions in the city. The thrill of leading a guest into those precincts was still fresh, and that is where I invited Ben for our farewell meal. We had already talked about my book and its slow progress. There was very little useful information about the daily life of American Indians in the precolonial and early colonial periods; almost none to reveal how they perceived their existence. I wanted a firmer grip on their truth. Ben laughed. He said (and with increasing frustration I had been coming to the same point of view) that thoughts which had not been written down could never be recaptured—except, if one has sufficient confidence, by a leap of intuition. For that, I was not ready. Ben said he knew I had not used his apartment. It was a pity, inspiration being the sister of regular working habits. Inreply, I told him of Prudence’s plan to take the children skiing in Idaho during Easter vacation, provided her parents made us the gift of cash they had suggested we might expect. Our next visit to Ben would have to wait until the fall.
Battle was raging in the Plain of Jars, but we did not mention Vietnam. I had come during those years to find it grating and, in the end, useless to debate the American involvement in the war with certain members of my family and close friends. Such discussions, one quickly saw, were an unpleasant waste of time; they raised questions about the values on which relationships reposed that I preferred to leave unanswered. With Ben, my disagreement was not about the conduct of the war—he had no wish to see American B-52S bomb Laos and Cambodia—or even about its merit: in fact, ever since Diem and Nhu were first fixed in our collective consciousness by the
New York Times
, he had maintained that we were backing the wrong horse in Indochina. Rather, I could not help feeling that Ben was not sufficiently American to understand a purely native aspect of the dispute about the war: the necessary, cleansing function that antiwar protest performed in the political life of the Republic. His vision of the movement—confined to pretorn blue jeans, grimy headbands, unwashed hair and feet, swaying pendulous breasts, and, indoors or out, a propensity to sit on the ground, legs outstretched, even when a chair or bench was available—usually expressed in sardonic sorties, angered me. I took it as another symptom of his irreducible Central European cultural hypocrisy: good appearance passed off for the good life, secret yearning for a brutal, punishing father translatedinto tolerance for the likes of Kissinger and Nixon. I wondered whether Ben’s choice of service in the marines, nominally a high-spirited, aesthetic reaction against the prospect of spending, like myself and most of our friends, the two egalitarian years demanded of a peacetime draftee in the army among overweight typists and inventory clerks, had not proceeded from the same troubled source. So it seemed wiser—besides, we had only talked about me and my family—to turn the conversation to him. As usual, that meant talking in the first place about the
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