Man Who Was Late by Louis Begley Page B

that she shave, like her friend Marianne, he risked adding flame to her already excessive fervor. Was he an udder attached to a garrulous milking machine?
    At home, he watched over his supply of Black Label scotch,ordering it from the Nicolas at the rue de Sèvres by the half case. He believed he shouldn’t go to the Coupole too often. What would the waiters imagine? Would the way he dressed, his neatly barbered appearance, the generous tips he left, and his choice of good wine save him from demotion, or would he become one of the regulars—men and women found at the Coupole and the Lipp evening after evening, behind the same little table, glasses automatically set before them and refilled, reading
Le Monde
or staring blankly, dining off Baltic herring? It was the charcuterie dilemma posed in slightly different terms.
    Guy Renard had a new girl, with whom he had not yet slept; he was either not going to parties or not offering to take Ben along. Once those parties had been Ben’s chief amusement. Ben still waited daily for Guy’s telephone call; sometimes it reached him at the office, frequently a good bit later, at home, when he had already had a couple of whiskeys, taken a bath, and half decided on the evening’s dreary course. Guy would propose dinner, just the three of them, but first a scotch at Ben’s. Guy talked and Ben poured. The girl stood with her back to the fire, submissive long legs within reach of Guy’s hand; he caressed her like a horse. The bistro was usually somewhere on the other side of Paris. Guy would drive, careening around corners, taking shortcuts up wrong way streets. They left the car on the sidewalk, carelessly; parking tickets were still cheap in Paris and could be fixed by practically anyone. They drank at table, afterward at Paprika, where there were gypsies, and again at Ben’s. Ben knew that Guy needed an audience and that the audience bored the girl; he was tired of being that audience; he didn’t want thefriendship to wear out; his own boredom was hard to repress—at times he would offer Guy and the girl a drink when they arrived and in a short while ask them to leave. He would invent a subsequent engagement of his own, with which one of the beautiful Americans he knew so well? Ben would not say. This was, Ben thought, as good a way to maintain his independence and social authority as any other. Before departing for Marseille, Gianni had prepared a vast store of Dutch cheese crackers and macadamia nuts. When finally alone, Ben raided that store, replenished the ice in the bucket, and drank and read until he fell asleep over his book.
    He was rereading
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
. Years ago, in the course of a boisterous meal, he had recommended that text, located so strangely between dream and Rilke’s recollections, as a cure for my nostalgia for Paris and certain other places I had known in Europe; he said I was suffering from unseemly illusions about what might have been, typical in a henpecked husband. It is true that I had been jealous of his constantly popping over to Paris or London or, for that matter, to Sydney and Tokyo, lingering there, amassing impressions and anecdotes, while I trudged up Madison Avenue to take the children to school, down Madison Avenue to the magazine, and then back up the same route for our early family dinner.
    Read the
Notebooks
, he said, you will see what Paris is really like when you are alone, your work, like some acrobat’s performance finally over, and you have let down your guard—perhaps because you are tired, perhaps because you are sad. Uncertainty and fear ooze out of walls of buildings, out of the walls of your elegant hotel room, even if thehousekeeper has remembered to put the standard bouquet of roses and carnations with the director’s compliments on the desk next to the room-service menu and laundry lists. You drift past houses, along boulevards, like a blank piece of paper.
    Of course, he added, in