Free As Max Saw It by Louis Begley Page A

here all of a sudden, when in my mind you were still on the shore of Lake Como. Don’t pay attention to the effect of surprise. I don’t think you’re finished: there are many ways outside the university to prepare yourself for life, and you have a good start with your languages and travel. If you use your head and read as much as you can, you will do just fine. You must be learning all sorts of things at Charlie’s office and from being with Charlie. Who knows? If you feel the need of it, there will always be time for college or a professional school later.
    I was pretty badly screwed up, but it’s true, Charlie is teaching me a lot, if I can stick to it.
    He gave me a big open smile, which seemed genuine, like when he told me it was all right to paddle along at his side in the swimming pool at the Rumorosa.

IV
    R UN SLOWLY , horses of the night! How often would I whisper those words to myself during the first decade of my prosperity? That wish was not granted to me. Instead, events, experiences, time itself accelerated, like grains of sand when the beach is whipped by a storm. Perhaps it was the effect of the contrast with my previous mode of existence. I had been used to living like a superannuated graduate student: in small spaces, taking measured steps. Perhaps it was my age. So little had changed inside me, and yet, in a couple of years, I would, with so much of my past unperceived, really not felt, turn fifty.
    Slides of jumbled vacations—uncherished, neglected, almost embarrassing—one has resolved to set in order someday. Let me stand aside and display them. Look at Max as I see him now, such as I was then in the distant whirlwind.
    V ESPASIAN WAS NUTS to say money has no smell. It’s like the mating stuff that skunks spray, except it draws the rich, the not so rich, and the famous of both sexes; gays too. Now that Max is wealthy, they’re all over him. Such easy manners: colleagues who have never spoken to him outside of facultymeetings, those Brattle Street and Beacon Hill intellectuals he doesn’t know even by sight, invite him for meals and drinks, or to watch sports on television—the latter invitations he never accepts—as though he had always been there, an intimate friend of the household. Max has finally discovered the secret password of the Western world; Arthur and he are still friends, but, in his new circumstances, what is to stop Max from getting into Ali Baba’s cave on his own?
    Max is respected, possibly liked, at the Law School; that’s because he doesn’t ask for favors or belong to either of the cliques that wish to transform the place. Teaches conscientiously. His letters to the graduate studies committee and the financial aid office, followed by casual visits to assistant deans who manipulate decisions of this sort, have the desired effect. Miss Wang is admitted, with a full scholarship. The housing office assigns her to a regular dormitory: he insists on it, in preference to a room in one of those communal apartments in Somerville or Waltham; he knows that Chinese graduate students stick together like steamed rice. That would be a waste of the Harvard experience, he tells her. The point is to be with Americans, working through the same problems as they; there is more to a legal education than reading casebooks.
    That’s also the argument he eventually uses to get her out of his own place. When he sleeps with her, the night of her arrival, it’s as though some terrible thirst were at last slaked. He thinks he is filling to the brink the lithe, violent tube that passes for her body. It’s also keeping a wordless pact made in the Forbidden City. It seems that neither of them had doubts about its terms.
    But he isn’t ready for a Chinese concubine, just as he doesn’t keep a dog or a cat. It makes him nervous that she washes his shirts and scours the bathroom, although the cleaning woman has just done it, that she likes to sit in his lap. She thinks they should eat at home: the