Man Who Was Late by Louis Begley

stingy heart, or are all males so constructed? (Montherlant is no help here; in his pages there is no love.)
    W E MET AS AGREED on the second Thursday in April. I was jubilant about Carswell’s defeat the day before and told Ben about how people we both knew had gone to Washington to lobby senators, for the first time in their lives, to bring about that result.
    Carswell is so much worse than Haynsworth that we are lucky Nixon for once didn’t get his revenge. Perhaps I should ask to be replaced in Paris and become a political agitator in New York like all my old friends. Do you think I’ve become respectable enough to fit in? It might suit me to get away from Pompidou and the agitators in France. I am tired of protesting shopkeepers!
    Ben’s suggesting, even in jest, that he might wish to return to New York was unexpected. I asked what was wrong. Had he failed to renew his sexual zoo?
    Yes and no, he answered, I don’t really know. I haven’t paid very much attention.
    He went on to explain that this was a dreary time for him. He had finished the work for the Oklahomans and now missed his bargaining sessions in Rabat with the president of the Moroccan company and the brilliant little Dr. Bensalem—exchanges at once intricate, tense, and suffused with friendship. For instance, he said, take the black bean soup andchefs salad they serve at your club. They’re all right. But one look is enough to make me long for boiled mutton, chickpeas, couscous, and
harissa
, followed by a glass of mint tea. And for Moroccan waiters who start grinning as soon as you appear, shake your hand, and call you Chef. What I am working on in Paris is dull stuff: the sale of a family-owned French perfume manufacturer to the owners of an American cosmetics firm who are even richer. Their money is new. The deal is limping along in a setting worthy of a Buñuel. Our meetings are at the house of the matriarch of the tribe on avenue Foch. It has small sitting rooms that are perfect cubes, each with its own Impressionist masterpieces, where one can caucus between rounds of negotiations. Her butler passes stuffed eggs and whiskey and soda. Then we go in to lunch. The other week, I managed to extract from the old lady a piece of new information: Yes, now that I had reminded her, she thinks the family in fact owns—through “formalities”—those Swiss companies one has never heard of before that have recently turned up receiving most of the proceeds from the sale of their perfumes. Naturally, it’s they and not the French company that have the rights to license the perfumes. No, the Swiss companies’ books of account can’t be revealed, let alone audited; a banker surely understands how important discretion and trust are in a family business. No, the family will not guarantee what those accounts might turn out to be; there are too many cousins to be consulted, the tax consequences might be unpleasant, she is no longer a young woman, one has to think of the worst.
    How did this end? I asked him.
    It hasn’t. It can’t. I have advised my clients to wait. Assoon as Madame Mère has her next attack of angina, which can’t fail to come, the whole gang, including the family
notaire
, will be in such a funk over the French tax audit of the estate that they will agree to anything we ask, provided they receive ready funds that can end up in their numbered Swiss accounts.
    In fact since early March, well before that visit, domestic arrangements no longer gave him comfort. Gianni’s mother in Marseille was sick, probably dying. Ben told him to go there at once and look after her as long as was necessary; Madame Hamelin, the concierge, could bring the morning croissants and oranges and newspapers, make his bed, and do the laundry; he didn’t want a temporary replacement, even if it was Gianni’s best friend who had once worked for the Count de Vogüé. In the evenings, when he didn’t have a dinner to go to—it seemed to him he was invited less than