Free As Max Saw It by Louis Begley

whose ma and pa had the pretention to call him Maximilian! I am obsessed by it. You see, my parents, God rest their souls, were avid readers of Proust. And yet they called me Charles! Private joke or imprudent respect for family tradition? Because I am in fact Charles III. Both my paternal grandfather and great-grandfather hadthat name, but that was AP,
avant
Marcel. You see, just like Odette, Toby is a pissing tart, and the little bugger isn’t even my type.
    H E’S GOT A HEADACHE , but I don’t think he’s hung over; that almost never happens, said Toby the next morning. He said we should go ahead without him.
    Miss Wang had asked if she could take that Sunday off, to do laundry and visit her friend at Beijing University. The latter project involved many miles of pedaling. The Chinese I knew used the word “friend” asexually; there was no indication whether this one was a man or a woman, a question that gnawed at me, as this was not the first such expedition. Her wishing to see a girlfriend, in preference to traipsing around Beijing with me and sharing a couple of meals, I found quite natural. If it was a man, her choice did not merely annoy me; a bizarre failure of logic made me consider it foolish, almost unreasonable. What could an afternoon with some deadly serious, bespectacled law student or teaching assistant offer that could compete with me? Even taking account of the total lack of privacy that prevailed at Beida (that’s how the university was commonly referred to), I was able to imagine, of course, a certain activity there other than conversation, one from which I had refrained—I assumed that the decision had been mine exclusively—but didn’t the delicious tension between us, the fruit of that denial, offer an adequate reward? It occurred to me that if Miss Wang had told me the previous morning about seeing her friend at Beijing University, I might have been less enthusiastically optimistic about her chances at Harvard.
    I suggested to Toby that we return to the Forbidden City by what I called the back way: the lively street parallel to Chang An, north of the hotel. We walked past the bicycle repair shop, the establishment where mechanics hammered on mysterious large motors—was this an attempt at repair or the process of turning them into scrap? Elderly men and women, bent almost in half from rheumatism or a lifetime of bearing loads of merchandise, shuffled along, winter vegetables in bags made of netting on their backs. Some looked out of windows or stood in doorways, puffing on long clay pipes. When we got to the canal, other old men were at their t’ai chi exercises, eyes unseeing, as though they were acting out a dream.
    The morning was warm and sunny. In one of the courtyards of the palace, there were stone tables with chairs on both sides at which old men who had surely retired long ago played chess. We sat down to watch a game.
    Charlie said he talked to you last evening.
    That’s right. He explained a lot of things I hadn’t understood.
    He’s a good egg. I am very lucky.
    I asked Toby whether he liked chess.
    No, I just play backgammon and checkers. But it’s fun to look at them play.
    Then he asked, Are you very disappointed?
    By what? I replied cautiously.
    Not the gay stuff, that’s just how it is. For guys my age, it’s not such a big deal. I mean my not going to college and all that. You’re a professor, so you must think I’m kind of goingdown the tubes. You had that hurt expression when I told you yesterday.
    My official role as a pedagogue was not something I thought about much in civilian life, outside Langdell Hall, but suddenly I realized that for this poor child—it would be necessary to accustom myself to the fact that he had turned into a young man—I represented constituted authority: a censor who keeps the gates of education and normal life as an adult.
    So I said to him, It was a very unexpected meeting. It took me a while to get used to the two of you showing up