Free Man Who Was Late by Louis Begley Page A

me—renewed evidence of which I had seen during our visit—I felt that he had, in general, become harder in manner, possibly because his self-assurance had kept pace with his success, and more set in the ways he thought befitted an elegant old bachelor. I decided to ask him instead about his sexual hygiene in Paris. The expression had stuck in my mind.
    He told me there had been notable developments. Dolores’s husband was moving the conjugal residence to Athens, the French tax collectors under Pompidou having becometoo active for his taste. Fortunately, poor Dolores had not rebelled, and Ben did not have to face the task of explaining that he was not a pillar she could lean on. The tricky problem would be to enforce the rule Ben had immediately imposed, that when she came to Paris for a visit—the husband agreed she should do that at will—she must stay at the Plaza-Athénée, like all other shipowners’ wives, and not with Ben. He would receive her with joy in all his members, but only on bed-but-no-breakfast terms. Guy’s cousin was opening an art gallery in Marseille and was also moving away—that didn’t matter much since her services could not be compared with Do’s for excitement or dependability. The Cockney was oscillating between possessiveness (she had recently asked Ben to drop her off at work after a night at the rue du Cherche-Midi; he refused, pointing out the availability of the métro at the corner of the rue de Sèvres) and tasteless, sluttish talk, possibly even behavior. For instance, it appeared that there were men among the “bosses” in her office—she had insisted on naming them—who made her “itch.” New therapies, new animals for his zoo were needed, lest he be reduced to waiting for Scandinavian au pairs on the boulevard Raspail at the hour when their courses at the Alliance Française ended and they were ready for a drink with a venturesome stranger.
    Viewed from my monogamous Upper East Side perspective, this last aspect of Ben’s situation did not seem too depressing. But I promised to direct to him any appetizing friends who might be traveling to Paris and then asked if there weren’t suitable replacements to be found among the circle of the Decazes’ friends and nieces. Véronique had writtento me about the favor I had done Paul by introducing them to Ben. That is how I knew that the Oklahoma clients had, in fact, retained Paul, that Paul had invited Ben to lunch, and that Ben’s bank was becoming an important source of business for Paul. Ben replied that he had been glad to help Paul—especially as the work was done right. He would keep my advice in mind, but he had not yet been able to accept any of their invitations (very cordial, very tempting) in Paris or in their place in the country.
    We rose from the table. His next visit would be a short one, in early April, to attend a meeting of a board of directors. We made a date for Thursday the ninth to lunch again at my club.
    Notaben 273 (written on Air France stationery and dated February 1970):
    On the difference between a
mujtahed
and a shithead.
    A
mujtahed
is an
ulama
(Islamic scholar) recognized officially by other scholars as qualified to engage in independent reasoning on legal (therefore religious) issues. The process of such independent reasoning is
ijtihad
—one supposes the highest possible form of intellectual activity. Sometime in the XIIIth c. of our era most—perhaps all—Sunni scholars decided that the gates of
ijtihad
had been closed forever, that everything capable of being grasped by the effort of human understanding had been so perfectly set downfor the generations to follow that all that remained was to apply precedents. That process is
taqlid
, the opposite of
ijtihad
. Since there was no possibility—in fact, no need for—further independent thought, no
mujtahed
would again come into being.
    Possibly because they are awaiting the coming of the lost Imam and therefore must bet on the future,