Authors: Louis Begley
The advantage of this handyman-artist is that most of the time, unless something sets him off, he doesn’t talk, and doesn’t seem to mind if Schmidt is silent as well. When a question is put to him, he answers politely in a soft voice, his words gentle around the edges, like a little boy’s. Before she left for Florida, his mother must have taught him not to use bad words and to speak carefully. You’d think he was sixteen, and yet he must be close to thirty! There is nothing childlike about his body: it is short but powerful. One can imagine him on the chin-up bar, putting in his five minutes every morning. The impression comes rather from the perfect oval face and cheeks that blush so easily under blond fuzz. There is another aspect, a little out of place: the tiny earring, the long, thin blond hair gathered in a ponytail, the fake elephant-hair bracelet, the fingers with nails that have been chewed raw, and something disagreeable about the eyes. At first the eyes seem “who? me?” Li’l Abner candid, but a careful observer cannot fail to notice that the whites are in fact yellow, and that Bryan doesn’t look you in the eyes. He looks away, furtively. Is it better when he has on his aviator glasses? Hard to tell. It turns out that Bryan considers carpentry as only a means to get enough bread. In reality, he is an artist. He has brought over his paintings for Schmidt to look at. They provoke a similar unease in spite of their banality: huge canvases covered by tantric patterns. The boy has a weakness for poison green, magenta, purple, and pink. What of it? You
wouldn’t expect Carrie to have a beau from Skull and Bones!
Perhaps it’s time for conversation? Schmidt asks him: Is this your day off, Bryan, or is business slow? The slump must hurt even on the South Fork.
It really does, Albert. Something awful.
Another redeeming grace. Although nine times out of ten, Bryan’s kind of person proceeds immediately to a first-name basis, for instance on the telephone, calling you from the garage to say he’s finished the lube job on your car, Bryan did not. It was Mr. Schmidt this and Mr. Schmidt that, although Schmidtie, seeking to ingratiate himself, told him early on to skip the Mr. and use the cozy, softened version of his name. Bryan replied with a pretty lisp: Gee, I just can’t, it sounds so disrespectful! Would you mind if I call you Albert instead?
My buddy who lives in Springs is real worried. He’s making payments on his truck. I’m lucky. I’ve got these other jobs.
Oh yes? Things you can do when the carpentry is slow?
That’s right. I watch houses, like if you go on vacation to Florida or Europe, and for people who only come out on weekends. And I’m beginning to detail cars.
What’s that?
You know, if you want your car to be superclean, cleaner than new! I get all the dirt and grease off, right down to the original surface, and then vacuum and wax. In this one garage where I work, there are customers that get brand-new cars detailed before they will drive them. I’m getting pretty good at it—it’s artistic work.
He snickers, rolls a joint, and licks it until the paper is soaked through. Yes sir, a detail man! A particularly heavy fragrance spreads with the smoke.
You want to try it, Albert? Just once? It’s the good stuff. Not the usual small-time goods.
No thanks. I’m about to light a cigar.
Hey, pass it to me, says Carrie.
Her eyes are open. Puff puff, lick lick. Back to Bryan. For Christ’s sake, Schmidtie, will you relax! This is nothing: they regularly exchange body fluids.
Shit! You weren’t kidding.
You know, Albert, if any of your friends would like some, I could get it for them. Other kinds of stuff too. Out here, rich people sometimes don’t know the ropes. They want to make a purchase, and they want the best quality, but they don’t know who to ask. I only go for the quality stuff.
Fuck off! You leave Schmidtie alone. He isn’t interested.
Carrie’s growl—it is the first time Schmidt hears it. A tigress! She would fight to defend him. Still, the tension is unpleasant.
It’s a nonissue. I don’t have many rich friends. Besides, I hardly ever see anybody.
But you know them, Albert, that’s what counts. If any of them are interested, all I need is an introduction.
Will you fuck off, you shithead? I gave you your package last night. What’re you doing here anyway?
Hey, Carrie, remember? You and I are going to show Albert that house that’s come on the market. Don’t hassle me. It was your idea.
I’m going to fix some lunch. Soup OK with you, Schmidtie?
Of course.
Now he remembers. Carrie has told him Bryan and his partner work for a builder whose client didn’t have enough money to close on a house. He said he would look at it.
Nice girl, that Carrie, and crazy over you, Albert. She’s never felt that way about me.
I’m just an old guy. I guess she enjoys having someone to look after.
Sure, like last night. I’m with her, and, right away, the party’s over. She has to go to see if you’re all right. How do you think that makes me feel?
Schmidt shrugs his shoulders. I thought I just heard her say she gave you a package last night.
Bryan rolls another joint and pats down the pouch.
She delivered it all right, he says. This stuff. That’s where it came from. One hundred percent pure Moroccan hashish. Nothing but the best! You don’t want to fool with that. Carrie’s OK. She knows when I need her. But with you it’s something else.
Schmidtie, I want to drive. Can you get the top down?
She really can’t keep her hands off the Saab. They cross the highway and head for the stretch of scrub oak beyond the railroad track. Scruffy, badly marked road: the center line is hardly visible, the edges of the asphalt have been chipped away by frost, winter after winter. The borders along it are half sand and half weeds. They are littered with debris tossed from trucks like Bryan’s and the cars of slobs who own or rent in this part of the world: paper plates, beer cans, Kleenexes smeared with lipstick, broken glass, cigarette packs, and take-out cartons from Burger King. Here and there, a busted white plastic bag surrounded by its load of rotten vegetables, empty Evian bottles, and chicken bones. It’s one way to avoid that trip to the town dump, and who wants to cart garbage to New York in the back of the station wagon and hand it to the doorman? They pass a grim old fellow
walking toward them on the other side of the road. He carries one of those white garbage bags and is actually picking up the stuff! A bum scavenging for food? No, he wears clean garden gloves, therefore, a deranged householder. Carrie toots the horn at him, but he doesn’t look up.
What a yoyo, she cries out.
Hey, slow down, it’s here on the right.
Bryan is in the backseat, behind Carrie. His hands reach over the driver’s seat to her shoulders. Then one of them moves farther down, finds her breast, and squeezes.
Cut it out, will you? You want me to go off the road?
Schmidt negligently throws out his cigar. It’s just tobacco, but immediately he regrets the gesture. Bryan will think he’s OK, behaving just like Mr. Schmidt, when he next heaves a broken muffler pipe over to the side of the road.
They turn into a driveway, really a curving swath cut by a bulldozer. At its end the site, also raw—the contractor hasn’t returned to haul away his litter, never mind finish the grading—an odd-looking one-story house, shaped like the letter
X
. The dumpster placed near what should be the front door overflows with sheetboard, scraps of timber, and corrugated wrapping.
Shangri-la, says Schmidt.
Bryan whines: Don’t look at the plot, Albert. It can be landscaped any way you want.
Of course.
I swear to you. McManus didn’t clean up the land because the guy broke the contract. I have the key. You want to go in?
One entire segment of the
X
is a long room with two fireplaces and a kitchen that’s all counters and no walls placed toward the farther end, the other two half segments that cut
across it are like separate wings and contain sequences of bedrooms and bathrooms. Oak floors with a chic finish and white walls. Even though the sky has clouded over, the house is very light.
Schmidt has never been the first occupant of a house or an apartment. It must be a strange experience. Every nick in the paint, every scuff mark on the woodwork, would be one’s own. He walks around, opens closet doors, looks at the plumbing and kitchen fixtures as though he knows what he is doing, asks about the cellar.
It’s great, Albert. Come on, take a look.
In fact, it is a nice, clean cellar, with two crawl spaces.
Basta
. In another minute Bryan will whip out the contract for him to sign. He must be working on a commission.
Thanks, Bryan. Nice house. Shall we go now?
Carrie has been doing some looking of her own.
You could put me in this room, she announces, and leads Schmidt to the bedroom at the end of one of the wings. It has a door that opens on what will be the garden.
That’s a deal.
If Albert buys the house you can look after him without sleeping here. It’s real close to Sag Harbor. Right?
Bryan puts his arm around her waist.
At the Sag Harbor hotel, Carrie has a rum and Coke, Bryan has two beers, and Schmidt a brandy. During the short ride over, Bryan has smoked another reefer, sharing it with Carrie. Schmidt feels dreadfully put-upon. He asks for the check, pays with cash because it’s quicker, and gets up, saying, See you soon, Bryan. I’ll think about the house.
It doesn’t work. Bryan has left his truck sitting in
Schmidt’s driveway. Carrie races along the turnpike. If the police stop her, they will find Schmidt in a car blue with hashish smoke, driven by a local waitress, with a pusher in the back. That’s front-page news for the local press. But they make it back safely.
Bryan doesn’t roar away in his truck. He follows them into the house. Carrie has gone upstairs without a word, perhaps meaning to shake him off. What is Schmidt to do? He fusses with his mail while Bryan sits in the corner of the library, working on his nails. Some time passes before Schmidt finds the solution. He walks over to Bryan, holds out his hand, and says, I had better take a nap now. We’ll see each other soon.
Bryan rises to shake his hand and sits down again.
I’m waiting for Carrie, he informs Schmidt.
In Schmidt’s room, the bed is turned down. Carrie holds out her arms to him. What took you so long?
Bryan. How to make him leave. In the end, I told him I needed a nap. But he’s still here. He said he is waiting for you.
Yeah. He wants me to go back to Sag with him.
Do you have to?
He gets crazy when he’s like this. Come on, Schmidtie.
She is already naked. Squatting on the bed, she unbuckles his belt, opens his trousers.
Later she renews her question: You still love me?
More and more.
And Bryan. You’re not mad at me?
I wish he’d drop dead.
I belong to you, Schmidtie. Please love me. I’ll be early. You’ll wait for me?
The truck is pulling out, going too fast on the gravel. He
had been so deep inside her, and now she is going to get under this guy and open her legs, her buttocks. Whatever time she returns, she’ll nuzzle his neck and whisper, Let’s go to sleep, darling. Fatigue? Satiety? Perhaps it’s also a sort of modesty: wanting to be fresher when he takes her.
The photographs of Mary and Charlotte, alone and with him, that cluttered up the top of the double chest of drawers to the left of the bed are gone. They are on a shelf in the closet, easy to reach when he wants to look at them. That’s his form of modesty. The pain Mary suffered in this bed during the last weeks: Was it a form of retribution? Schmidt can’t think what grave sins she had committed to deserve it. The past is both distant and recent, and yet they all seem venial: small lies, short-lived fits of anger, perhaps pride. But it was a Miss Porter’s and Smith College alumna kind of pride, a quality girls used to be praised for. They were to have self-respect and remember who they were and how much they had to be grateful for. Mary certainly did. As for his own case, the scourge of Charlotte’s unnatural dislike, icy loneliness, the trap of Bryan and of the man, which condemns him to live in desire and without hope? If it is retribution meted out ahead of time, it must be for Corinne, confirming that there is symmetry in the Almighty’s arrangements. Of course, it was unthinkable that someone was actually bothering to balance separately billions of individual accounts. The job had become too big for the just gods who “of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us.” The final solution was global: endless torment, distributed randomly, but with no one left out. It was enough to remember that all lives end badly.
One simplifies these things, especially for children. He remembers how, when Charlotte was eight, Mary and he played their LPs of
Don Giovanni
for her over and over and explained the plot before taking her to see it performed at the Metropolitan Opera. When they got home from the matinee, he asked her what she had liked the best. It’s when the statue comes to dinner and walks like this: ta ta ta ta, she told him, and kept on repeating, ta ta ta ta. He was delighted with her answer, and told her she had gotten it exactly right. First, Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore. Then he taunts the dead man by inviting his marble statue to dinner. Then, on top of it, he has the bad manners to forget the invitation he has issued, sits down to dinner, without waiting for his guest, and starts gorging himself. Here Schmidt gave his off-key rendition of
Ah, che piatto saporito
and
Ah, che barbaro appetito!
No wonder the man of stone walks into the banquet room angry ta ta ta ta and pulls the Seducer down into hell!
When retribution is so neatly personalized, Schmidt thinks he can understand it, perhaps even,
à la rigueur
, for a moment believe in the system. According to the librettist, and Tirso de Molina before him, Don Giovanni could have escaped. If he had not mocked Elvira, if he had obeyed the ghost of the Commendatore, if only he had repented! How is he, Schmidt, going to be saved? By letting go of Carrie?
Sei pazzo! Not
for all the tea in China! It should be possible, for a sum of money that he could afford, to buy off Bryan. And if the man reappears, he can have him arrested and put away for a good long time in a booby hatch, enough time so that, if he is let out again, it won’t matter. For instance, in Wingdale, if
that place is still in business: he would call his old friend, the governor’s secretary, and ask him to speak to the right people. That fellow is obviously a dangerous public nuisance. But Bryan might not stay “bought.” He might pocket the money and laugh at him. When in the past he counseled clients against paying bribes and thought that arguments derived from moral principles or the likelihood of getting caught weren’t working, he usually concentrated on the ghastly inefficiency of such methods. You couldn’t be sure whether it was necessary to pay—the government official might do what the client wanted anyway, without the money—and if he took the money and did nothing, you had no recourse. He might now for once listen to the voice of his own wisdom. On the other hand, Wingdale has a chance of working.