As Max Saw It by Louis Begley

at least a part of Max’s lovely, long vacations. Of course, the Fogg remains open, but something can be worked out.
    They have bought a Jaguar two-seater. With the top down, they explore the towns on the North Shore and also, with less confidence, the South Shore around Cohasset. It’s dreadfully suburban; Dover would do, if it weren’t so full of stuffy types who work for insurance companies or on State Street. Charlie Swan comes up with a solution: they must head farther west, to the Berkshires, where he owns a house in Billington. The way Camilla drives, they can be there in under two hours. He knows of just the property for them, on a hillside, across a narrow valley from his place, with a viewstraight into the sunset. The garden is a succession of terraces held up by old brick walls. They have, of course, seen a good deal of Charlie and Toby. Max never really lost contact with them after the meeting in Beijing; Camilla knows Charlie from Oxford and London. He and Toby come to Camilla and Max’s wedding dinner, which is given by the Kahns.
    Max buys the house Charlie has found. It’s a ruin inside, but that’s just as well because Camilla wants to change everything, and Charlie, who hasn’t accepted a job of this sort in the last twenty years, offers to do the design work. It will be superb, a hymn to their friendship. Fortunately, a farmer’s cottage comes with the house; it’s in good condition, so that Camilla and Max can start their weekend existence immediately. Charlie is spending less time in Europe; he comes to Billington regularly. Both he and Toby are expert cooks. When they are only up for weekends, on Saturday nights, and more often when they are in residence, there is a big dinner at Charlie’s. Naturally, they count on Camilla and Max. Max admires everything about Charlie’s house: a brick Shaker structure, very spare but so graceful that it wears a smiling air of welcome. The collection of American furniture and bric-a-brac delights by its fantasy; a fitting extension, Max thinks, of the eccentric who coexists in Charlie with the rigorous bully. And Max likes Charlie’s guests. They are a mixture of local patricians—stooped, bony men in tired tweeds or gabardine, depending on the season, whose wives have handshakes like lumberjacks—and collectible New Yorkers qualified by money, acknowledged talent, or extreme good looks. Max’s new crowd. Charlie invites “my kind of queer” only: architects or artists and an occasionalbeauty, like Toby. Except for a few old friends, sometimes referred to as “that adorable creature,” about whose relation to Charlie one might speculate this way or that, Max believes sexual orientation is not a factor that determines Charlie’s favor. None of these men are special friends of Toby’s. Who are Toby’s friends? When and where does he see them?
    Toby joins Max and Camilla on their walks through the woods at the other end of the valley. Sometimes Max and Toby go rock climbing alone. Max thinks that Toby was right when he worried about disappointing him. That is because Max does feel that Toby has let him down. He is not making progress along any road one can recognize. At work, he is Charlie’s man Friday, that’s all. Charlie’s nose is always in some book; his library makes Max envious. Toby reads only magazines. He is sweetness incarnate, but his conversation has not been refurbished; one finds it dull. In a way, it is like his looks—the beautiful face of an adolescent paired with the body of a young man menaced by incipient thickness—at the midriff, perceptible ever so slightly about the cheeks—which is more dangerous than baby fat.
    M AX KNOWS that many years have passed since a treatise examining the intellectual foundations of contract law has been published by a common law scholar. He thinks he can write such a book—a short work, openly speculative in nature, free of academic jargon and the apparatus of footnotes. The reconstruction of