As Max Saw It by Louis Begley Page A

speeding ticket in years. To hell with it, if he is caught. The night is his time of day: black solitude, enchantment. He glances at Toby. The boy is asleep with his mouth open. A while later, Toby wakes up. He asks Max to stop the car. They both urinate by the side of the road, in the amber nimbus of the parking light. Onward. Max keeps the car stereo very low, so they can talk. Toby tells him he has seen his father; he came to Boston with his new wife, a Lebanese Muslim who has been to college in Mount Holyoke. Not much older than Toby, but a funny throwback to the fifties. Plucked eyebrows, shiny brown hair done up in curls and sprayed to stay put like a wedding cake, skin soft and creamy, perhaps because she is too plump, lots of rings, and these incredibly correct clothes. Everything on her matches the yellow blouse or the fingernails, and it all comes from Hermès. The new deal is Toby gets an allowance from a trust—so much per month, enough to live the way he lives now and pay medical insurance. Just don’t call Papa; if he wants to be in touch, he’ll call you. Boy, were they ever worried about insurance! Is there some way I can sue to get some of his real money? I’m the only child—so far.
    Not until he dies, Max tells him.
    No way. He’ll just keep eating halvah and shrivel.
    Toby dozes off again. When he wakes, he tells Max he is scared. The job with Roland is just lugging equipment around and working the projector. Maybe the kids get something out of it, like a diploma to clip to a résumé. Who willwant to hire an assistant to a guy teaching about film? He doesn’t see Roland ever making a film again; he’s gotten too weird, out of touch. He should have followed Charlie’s advice: go to Cooper Union or Pratt, learn the basics, become a designer. Charlie is the only one who thinks about his future.
    It’s not too late, Max assures him. Charlie can get anyone into the program, even this late in the year. He asks whether the allowance from the trust will cover tuition and the cost of living in New York. Toby replies that if the school will take him he supposes he can work for Charlie part-time, maybe even stay with him. The vision of Charlie’s happiness when he learns that this is what the boy wants is so intense that Max decides to say nothing more about it. The boy might think he is walking into a trap. Instead, he inquires about Toby’s mother. She too is a part of the trust. Enough to pay for her and a nurse for life.
    A FTERNOON of Commencement Day. Sky absolutely spotless, as though it had been washed down. Max heads for Highland Terrace, slightly tipsy from the rum punch served in the Harkness Quadrangle for Law School students and their parents. Shouldn’t drink the stuff on an empty stomach, but the buffet reeks of mayonnaise and tuna. Horror of horrors! One of Max’s own classmates is in the crowd on the lawn. Now that the classmate has explained it, the reason for his presence becomes clear—even plausible. He has a son, who was moreover in a class that Max taught; of course, Max failed to connect the son with the parent. Yes, the proud father explains, he had the boy in the second year of college! One wife, one child, and one house. The classmate laughs.He works in the mortgage loan section of a Hartford insurance company. Serves him right. He must have used that one-wife line one thousand times. At home, Camilla is waiting in the cool shade of the garden. She serves Max a glass of iced tea with mint. With her, there are really no preliminaries: she is leaving for London; there is a post at the National Gallery she can’t possibly turn down. He absorbs the news, and also the realization that she is not asking whether he might be willing to move to London as well, to be with her.
    Camilla observes him as he stares at the wisteria, which has begun to bloom. He is red in the face, but that’s from the heat. Already he has pushed the resentment down into his gut, where it will rot like a