As Max Saw It Read online

  “BRILLIANT …

  Begley disarms the reader with his elegant prose, his ample sentences and ornate syntax cushioning the keenness of his perceptions. In the end, however, the reader, like Max, is forced to confront himself in the role of bystander and onlooker: Begley takes the measure not only of his characters, but also of his audience.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Echoes of Proust abound here, as do parallels to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.… Beginning on the day of Richard Nixon’s resignation and concluding during the fall of Communism in Europe … As Max Saw It points out the brutal consequences of dishonesty and self-deception in supposedly private matters.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Richly layered.… In conjunction with Begley’s first two books, As Max Saw It completes what now seems a trilogy that traces the quest for individual grace and love amid the last 60 years.”

  —USA Today

  “The work of an elegant craftsman of the old school.… The joy of reading Begley lies in his beautiful, economical virtuosity: characters are etched in three lines; epigram and description are effortlessly paired.”

  —Time

  “A work of real grace and genuine feeling.… There is something timeless and almost dream-like about As Max Saw It.”

  —Houston Post

  “A fascinating foray into an earlier era.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  A Fawcett Columbine Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1994 by Louis Begley

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Man with the Blue Guitar” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1936 by Wallace Stevens, copyright renewed 1964 by Holly Stevens.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-90796

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77594-8

  v3.1_r1

  To strike his living hi and ho,

  To tick it, tock it, turn it true …

  —WALLACE STEVENS,

  “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  I

  LA RUMOROSA, for that was the name of the Joyce villa on the promontory just below Bellagio, where Lake Como divides to form a pair of clown’s pantaloons, blue and green, gold speckled and shimmering, was one of those places where, sooner or later, everyone stayed. My turn came in a manner I greeted with a mixture of gratitude and resignation; it was like other invitations to grand houses or elegant lunches and dinners of which I had recently been the object: the hostess had authorized a real guest, her intimate friend, to bring me along. Relationships did not stick to me. Although Edna had known me really quite well—she and her best friend, Janie, had been the most spectacular examples of a new species of Radcliffe girl that appeared, miraculously, out of the Midwest in the fall of my last year at college, all patently rich and tall, and so beautifully formed, their bosoms beckoning under angora sweaters the shades of which matched the subtle hues of their lipstick, that I had felt moved, against all dictates of good sense (I was conducting with a much plainer, but sexy and freckled, graduate student an affair that was to endure until Easter vacation of the year in which this narrative opens, and besides, quite clearly, I was not their sort), to attempt to flirt at first with her and later with Janie—she had not telephoned or written to signify that she expected my arrival. Instead, after Arthur and I, guided by an inadequately shaved man in a striped vest with brass buttons, at last found her on the eastern terrace of the villa, which was shaded against the postprandial sun by the building itself, she let out squeals so enthusiastic, calling me alternately her bébé and her old beau, that, if I had not known better, I might have believed, at least for a moment, that the idea of having me there had been her own. To the left and right stretched the formal flower gardens. Directly below, at the end of a white alley bordered by marble sculptures and benches, was the celebrated flowering-laurel maze, its symmetry mystifying even from this privileged vantage point. The group of guests displayed on armchairs, poufs, and chaise longues, drinking coffee and smoking, seemed no more penetrable. Arthur knew them all, and I was variously introduced as his or Edna’s friend to deeply bronzed figures in white cotton or silk, from whose feet dangled sandals sustained by an insouciant but perfect toe—or equally white loafers with metal decorations attesting to their provenance.

  I recognized Charlie Swan, unmistakable because of his extraordinary height and tightly curled hair cut very short, so that his head reminded one of a Roman bust—and was relieved that he too knew me instantly. Noted for his prowess in a single scull and with a martini shaker, my classmate at college although he was some four years older, it was believed, I remembered distinctly, that he had obtained Janie’s ultimate favors and enjoyed them at least until her graduation from college—although he and I both graduated at the end of her freshman year. Such long tenure had been made possible by Charlie’s having stayed on in Cambridge, to study architecture, when most of us departed for military service. He had already served, in Korea, before going to college. What happened between them later I didn’t know, but I had heard that Janie had gone from one marriage with a stockbroker to another, and then possibly to a third, and was living in Chicago. Charlie had also married, someone I met briefly at one of the parties that followed their engagement, and then possibly at a college reunion, whose image—as I had retained it—did not seem to fit any of the women on the terrace. He had also become famous; more so, I think, than any other member of our class. An entire waterfront development in Hamburg bore his name, which was nice, given the aquatic association. He was responsible for the best new skyscraper in downtown Houston. Beach houses designed by him appeared regularly in Vogue essays on the habits and habitats of Hampton millionaires.

  But I did not know Rodney Joyce, and it was time I met him. Edna led me to him: Here is Max, my lost baby.

  Her husband inspected me with apparent benevolence.

  I will be going to Torno, he announced, down the shore, a little after five when the shops reopen, to pick up a gadget for the launch.

  Then, squeezing my left elbow even as he continued to shake my hand, he added, as though to demonstrate he knew who I was: Relics from Edna’s past interest me. She is such a collector! Will you come to the village with me? There is plenty of time for you to swim first, if that’s what you like. Pool, or lake from the boathouse.

  * * *

  HE HANDLED THE LARGE CAR with a sort of skilled indolence, indifferent to horns, blinking headlights, and drivers accelerating past us on the two-lane road. There were sights he wanted me to note, like the Rockefeller establishment right nearby, which was in fact worth a visit, and bits of local history. No trouble at all; the director would be pleased to meet a fellow academic. Edna and he might get him to come over for dinner. The Rumorosa had been theirs for more than ten years; Edna bought it—with her own money, he was careful to mention, because it had been her idea—a year or so after he retired from the foreign service.

  His last post had been in Paris—a political counselor.
They decided to remain, and were still living in the same apartment, on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which was not long on charm, but extremely comfortable and, in their case, because the windows all gave onto gardens, quiet as a tomb. Obviously, living in Paris and having that position, which encouraged one to get around, had made Northern Italy their backyard. They had actually been invited to seminars in the Rockefeller establishment. On the other side of the lake stood the smaller but infinitely more beautiful villa of our mutual New York friends—he made the obligatory joke or two about them—and they had also stayed there, both as guests and as lodgers.

  During one of those sojourns they happened to go across the water in a gondola for lunch at the Rumorosa, which they found to be the best house on the lake and the most lovable house they had seen anywhere. When the Ognissanti scandal broke, Edna got on the phone to the family’s lawyers in Milan within a week. She sensed that there would be a need to raise cash quickly, and she was right. She was able to buy the villa complete with everything from table linen all the way to the boat whose motor had just conked out. And the servants remained, contentedly it would seem, as there had been no defections.

  I knew enough from Arthur’s remarks and gossip about the Joyces in the houses Arthur and I had visited on our way to the Rumorosa to add some color to that sketch. The last embassy job, as indeed all of Rodney’s employments since he first came to Paris after the war to work with the Marshall Plan people, had more to do with the agency in Virginia than with conventional diplomacy. His qualifications for whatever it was he really did were manifold: a Silver Star war record, friendships with the right fellow Yalies, a gift for European languages, and an inconspicuous but ample personal fortune that required no attention from him whatsoever. It derived from manufacturing activities centered around Akron, Ohio, and was locked up in trust. That he had married Edna was less of a chance event than most marriages even in those days. Edna was from the same suburb of Akron; her family were friends of the senior Joyces. Already as a little girl she had understood that Rodney was Prince Charming. The other side of the coin was the limitation of his perfectly serviceable intelligence. It took him only so far, not far enough to become a master puppeteer, for instance, deputy director. He could not even aspire to a job in the White House or its security annex that fit his social position. Hence the onset of a form of laziness—doubtless favored by the childless, gregarious luxury in which he and Edna lived—and his early retirement.

  The spare part for the motor was ready and waiting. Rodney examined it with evident understanding, and remembered that he also needed varnish and steel wool. We looked at a Bombard. Rodney said it was too large; the owner of the water garage undertook to check in Como on the availability and price of something more like a dinghy. Then Rodney proposed a drink in the café on the square.

  What about Charlie? I asked. Is his wife—I’m no longer sure of her name—is she also here?

  That’s old business. Charlie’s frying other fish now. You will see.

  We finished our second round of Punt e Mes and climbed into Rodney’s Citroën.

  And you? he asked. I only know that at college everybody was afraid of you because you had all the answers, and that you became a law school professor!

  He turned out to be a good interrogator. Genuine interest or professional habit? I couldn’t be sure. But as we continued our stately progress toward the Rumorosa, Rodney luxuriating in the leather comfort of his seat, I told him how, after college—where I surely had terrified no one, least of all Edna and her glamorous friends—and service in the peacetime army, I did return to the Law School in Cambridge. Then one thing led to another: good grades led to the Review, good grades sustained even after that elevation led to more concentrated benevolence on the part of two of the great men who were my teachers, their favor led to the right clerkships, and from there it was but a hop, skip, and a jump to a junior faculty appointment, which turned rather quickly into my present position.

  What exactly do you teach?

  Contracts, and some legal history. You see, I am curious about obligations.

  Then I added, perhaps because I feared he was losing interest: Not having a respectful attitude toward making money was a help throughout. If you wish to call it help! Anyway, that’s how I slipped into my marginal form of existence.

  You can’t call being friends with Arthur marginal! He raves about you. What’s the connection there? He has nothing to do with Harvard.

  I explained: In fact he is in Cambridge a good deal, because of a company on Route 128 he has put money into. It has a Business School affiliation. I met him at a colleague’s, at dinner, and we fell to talking. Later, he came to dinner with me and a woman I was then living with. I introduced him to some of the more interesting types among the reigning Brahmins, the ones he especially wanted to know. He was a hit and we became friends. Now I depend on him for my vacations.

  You could do worse!

  I agreed, and kept on talking.

  THAT NIGHT, in my room, listening to the radio, I heard Nixon resign. It was difficult to make out his words through RAI’s voice-over translation. I had been waiting for this moment, but the satisfaction I had expected from the ogre’s disgrace somehow eluded me. Did he feel shame, I wondered, uttering all these words that explained nothing? I was not satisfied with myself either. Why had I been so assiduous in my replies to Rodney, almost fawning? What business of his was it after how many years of a neatly shared existence Kate had chosen to leave me for her newly appointed colleague in the Slavic studies department? Presumably, at that point, Rodney was no longer paying attention, so that my elegy on afternoons in the Widener and evenings at Cronin’s did not run a serious risk of being repeated for the amusement of Edna. Besides, would I not recite it for her as well, at the drop of a hint of curiosity, throwing in even the more sordid details? For instance, my bitterness at the loss of the use of Kate’s house in the meadow above White River Junction, which had turned me into a summer nomad without hearth or home; the small victory she obtained when I signed over my white VW with a brand-new sunroof, after she confronted me with the irrebuttable argument that she would need it to go back and forth between Cambridge and Vermont, whereas I wouldn’t; my own larger victory, won when I kept the apartment on Sparks Street. Nixon and Max—some team! If pressed, I would even have told her that ultimately it was the faint indignity of being the abandoned party, and the inconvenience, I minded the most. Kate’s skin had begun to coarsen; she was smoking too much; and she had become shrill. In time, I might do better.

  THE JOYCES were conscientious hosts. The next morning there was an organized departure for Como, to visit the Duomo and also Sant’Abbondio, which they considered possibly more important. When I came down to the drive, jittery from sleeplessness, the first observations on the cataclysm that had just taken place must have already been exchanged. Arthur, who professed to admire Nixon and Kissinger for being such shits, was already in Edna’s two-seater. He would find in her a suitable midwestern audience. I waved to Charlie; he waved back as he got into the last available seat in a car apparently belonging to a woman with red hair in a khaki jumpsuit, whom I took to be Italian. Rodney may have gone ahead; in any case he wasn’t there to help the dwindling group of guests sort themselves out. Should I get the Fiat Arthur and I had rented at the Milan airport? I could see that some cars were not full, but how was I to know whether their empty seats weren’t spoken for? I felt the onset of a familiar mixture of awkwardness and irritation—it was like standing with a plate and glass in one’s hands at a buffet in a room where everyone else seems to have a place by prearrangement, so that one’s choice is between sitting down alone, perhaps next to the telephone, or dragging a chair over to a table surrounded by animated diners—all quite fond of one another—in the hope that they will open a space for the embarrassed stranger. I thought I would just miss this trip. Exaggerating the gesture, I slapped my forehead with my hand, as though I had, all of a sudden, remembered some
thing important, and ran back into the house.

  The swimming pool, I had been told, was on the other side of the maze. I made my way there through thick smells of colorful borders and bushes in full bloom. The pool turned out to be oval, lined with white marble—no other material had currency at the Rumorosa—and surrounded at a distance by a circle of slender cypresses. At its edge, legs in the water, face concentrated over a backgammon board, sat a figure of such startlingly perfect beauty that I thought it was a girl—not seen at dinner the night before because she was too young or because she was only an employee at the villa—now taking advantage of the quiet that had fallen upon the surroundings to sun herself without her bikini top. When I came closer, close enough for the figure to sense my presence and turn to look in my direction, I saw that I was wrong: it was Eros himself, longhaired and dimpled, his skin the color of pale amber, for it had pleased the boy god to wash off the matte finish of white powder under which, day after day, he allowed himself to be admired, disguised as a statue, on the pedestal at the end of the villa’s central alley.

  He smiled, put on his dark glasses, and spoke to me in English: I guess the bus for Como has left. My name is Toby. Why did you stay behind?

  I told him my name and that I had no real excuse; possibly I hadn’t wanted to get into a car in which there was no one I knew and hear stuff about Nixon I might not agree with.

  I understand that.

  Why weren’t you at dinner last night?

  Reasons something like yours for not going to Como, and that’s why I didn’t go to Como either. Do you want a game?

  He added, Nixon was once my dad’s lawyer, but I don’t know about American politics.

  I told him I had never played backgammon.

  He smiled again and said, It’s not hard, I’ll teach you.