Authors: Louis Begley
But then he realizes that, even if effective, neither solution is acceptable. Carrie might find out what he has done: he can’t take that risk. It is better not to have a plan.
When he woke up—in the end he did take a nap—it was dark. He dressed rapidly, feeling the need to get away from the house to a place where there were other people. Inside his house, wherever he turned, he felt mocked: Charlotte’s presence and Charlotte’s absence, like twin masks of Comedy and Tragedy in some allegory he was unable to decipher. On any other night, he would have driven straight to O’Henry’s. That was out of the question.
Right after law school, before he had met Mary, he went out with a receptionist at W & K who was a cousin of the debutante from Boston brought so vividly before his eyes
through the magic of involuntary memory as soon as he heard Gil Blackman’s fickle assistant on the telephone. The receptionist was nice to him, but not so nice as he had wished. He suspected that a senior associate, whom, as it turned out, she eventually married, was allowed to take certain liberties. During a short but shameful period, on evenings when he was working late, or she had refused to see him, he would telephone her. If she didn’t pick up, Schmidt would immediately conclude that she was with his rival, and gave his imagination free rein. The thought that she might have activities outside of work that weren’t connected with dating, for instance going to a concert or the movies with another woman, never crossed his mind. The age of the answering machine had not yet arrived: he could not keep calling just to savor one more time the sound of the promise that she would call back. If she did answer, he would cover the receiver with a guilty hand, listen, and hang up after a minute or two. But to hear Charlotte! It occurred to him that unless Riker was already back from the office he would be certain to hear her voice—at least a recording of it. He dialed the number and let it ring until the answering machine took over.
Eight-thirty. There had to be a nine o’clock show in Southampton, in one of the odd shoe-box rooms into which the old movie theater that smelled of mold had been divided. Any film would do.
He parked his car around the corner. Fifteen minutes to show time. There was no line. He bought a ticket and went to look at the vans and convertibles through the window of the General Motors showroom next door. What should he do with Mary’s car? Give it to Carrie. It was absurd to let her
drive an old jalopy while the Toyota was just sitting in the garage. Or he could trade the Toyota in for another car and give Carrie that one. He would lose money, and it was foolish to get rid of a car that had maybe twenty thousand miles on it, but that would be the more elegant thing to do. There was also Charlotte’s car, which she had left on her last visit. She hadn’t mentioned it in her letter. Perhaps now that she was being advised by both attorney Riker and Dr. Renata she had come to think that the car, registered in Schmidt’s name, wasn’t really hers. They must have counseled in their tactical discussions: Don’t ask for the VW at the same time you make a grab for your old man’s silver! He’ll flip out!
He looked at his watch. There was time for a quick drink across the street. He started in that direction. But in the entrance to the alley next to the bar, as if carved in stone, staring at Schmidt and registering no surprise, stood the man. He held a brown paper bag at chest level. In anticipation of the season, he wore a beige duster. On his head perched a stained gray fedora.
Get over here, you bastard, you old goat, he cried to Schmidt. I’ve been waiting for you. You and I have business to settle!
Schmidt turned tail. Once inside the movie theater, he found a seat toward the front, in the middle of the row, with people on both sides. He felt calmer when the movie ended. The man’s unspeakable filth and stench—it was that, not his physical strength, that terrified him. Like fear of rats feeding on garbage. He would overcome it.
Mary took long baths. Carrie prefers showers. There is a white wicker armchair in the bathroom. Schmidt sits in
it, watching Carrie take a shower. She has returned from Sag Harbor—not long after his return from the movies. Seeing her like this is overpoweringly exciting: her body is so young, so free of imperfections. The contrast between the heft of her breasts and the elongated body that seems always at the edge of fatigue is not a defect; Schmidt finds in it an ineffable charm. It reminds him of the sadness of certain Degas dancers—that girl, for instance, with a questioning upturned face, one foot on a chair, tying her slippers. When Carrie makes love she grows so serious that in the beginning Schmidt wondered whether he was hurting her, whether she needed to be consoled. But it’s never that: she is serious because the gift she makes of herself is total, and the force of the climax overwhelms her. He has come to think that her violent, prolonged orgasms are a reward for her seriousness and generosity.
She has been washing with extreme care. Schmidt laughs at the attention she has given to her belly button. She has told him, pointing to a tiny pinprick, That’s where I wore a ring. It was crazy! Schmidt would like to know which one of her boyfriends had this wish to mark her. He hasn’t asked; he is afraid it was Mr. Wilson, although that seems so preposterous. When she finishes, Schmidt stands up and holds a towel for her, wraps her in it, and pats her down until she is dry. She has already brushed her teeth. He takes her in his arms and, turning out the lights on his way, carries her to bed. Too bad for the little guy, she whispers this in his ear, and, a moment later, I love you, darling, I can’t tonight. He dicked me for an hour. It was brutal. That asshole was so freaked out he couldn’t come. Her fingers continue. Do you still love me? You like it like this, Schmidtie?
Later, when her head is already in its nest on his chest, Schmidt tells her that he has seen the man and asks whether she knows that he has come back. She does; he has waited at the restaurant.
Carrie, does the man dick you?
You sound funny! Can’t you say Mr. Wilson? That’s his name.
Does he?
When he first came here, he tried. He got cleaned up at my place and tried and tried. No way! He couldn’t. He got so pissed he hit me. No, it wasn’t bad, just knocked me around.
What will you do if he tries it again?
He won’t. He just won’t. Not while I’m with you.
Why? How do you know?
He told me. Like you’ve got the things he used to have. He doesn’t want me to compare.
Then he will want to kill me.
Q
UOGUE HAD FOUGHT VALIANTLY
and with considerable success to stop Jews from invading the bay properties that made it such a desirable beach community in the eyes of many of Schmidt’s partners and clients. Nevertheless, Schmidt had a deep-seated, generalized prejudice against Quogue and its entire population—locals and summer and weekend residents.
To start with, Schmidt’s canon held that all townies living in the western part of Long Island’s Suffolk County were avid, mercenary riffraff: the more enterprising among them built on speculation the houses that were defacing Schmidt’s landscape, while the rest busied themselves selling cars and insurance. So far as he was concerned, regardless of geographical considerations, Quogue belonged in that part of the county. The East End locals were more likely to be found cutting lawns, servicing septic tanks, and growing vegetables (activities of which Schmidt approved and that, in his opinion, lifted them to a higher sphere of existence), unless they were fishermen, an ornery but noble and endangered order. But Schmidt’s loathing for Bryan was not at all related to
Quogue’s being his birthplace. He detested Bryan for being devious and exacting access to Carrie’s body. Whether and to what degree these demands were unwelcome, Schmidt had not yet chosen to investigate.
And Schmidt’s view of Quogue was not enhanced by the presence of those very partners and clients who had houses there. They were the sort of people whose links with Schmidt Jon Riker had used to illustrate for Charlotte her father’s anti-Semitism, but Schmidt did not feel at ease with them. As a species, they were too genial and too gregarious for his taste, given to planning jolly activities at which they were sure they would have great fun together, and to relating later, in detail that suggested the gift of total recall, how swell everything had in fact turned out to be, even though Jimbo had broken his kneecap falling down the Spanish Steps and Mary Jane’s doctors were unable to cure the dysentery she caught in Cancún. It will be plain by now that bonhomie was not one of Schmidt’s characteristics. Besides, the men had used to irritate Mary by not understanding what she did, while their wives, with existences defined by raising children and good works, had bored her, made her impatient.
His first inclination, therefore, when he opened the Walkers’ lengthy, many-times-folded-over invitation to their thirtieth wedding anniversary celebration to be held at their house in Quogue on the second Saturday in May, was to decline. The invitation had been addressed to his office; he didn’t recall receiving a letter of condolence from them; the past was the past; they weren’t intimate anymore. There would be other people at the party in the same embarrassing category of former friends: couples who made up Schmidt’s
circle when he was at law school or with whom he and Mary had dined regularly in the years that followed, and the flotsam and jetsam of divorces. As for the latter category, it was hard to predict whether the wife or the husband was more likely to have been salvaged. Looks and charm were often dispositive, the more attractive partner sailing on to other waters.
These were friendships that had bloomed long ago, when most of them lived on the Upper West Side or between Washington Square and Gramercy Park. At that time the grand firms for which the men worked paid young lawyers pitifully low salaries but the old partners fully expected the associates and their wives to dress up like Mommy and Daddy and live like miniatures of Mommy and Daddy, on the assumption that everyone had a small trust fund that made that sort of thing possible. Therefore, they coped; knowing how to cope was a tribal skill, like knowing how to rig a sailboat. Sometimes two couples—inseparable, good looking, and exuberant, with their perfect, picture-pretty, towheaded, and exuberant children—would jointly rent a large house near the beach in Amagansett or on the north side of the highway in Water Mill. The husbands had all been law school classmates, give or take a year. They would ask strays like Schmidt to come out on the train with them for a weekend of corn on the cob, gin, and watching the children play at the edge of the surf. It was during such a weekend at the Walkers’, to which Ted Walker had invited him, that Schmidt was able to dazzle Mimi, Walker’s willowy Philadelphian wife, by poaching for her a whole salmon, and then decorating it with rich-looking, yellow mayonnaise he had made from scratch in a
bowl, just stirring peanut oil into egg yolks with a little whisk. Anyone other than Schmidtie would have simply reached for a jar of Hellmann’s, became the universal many-times-repeated comment.
Still, why should he go to that party? Did he any longer care about them or they about him? One couldn’t begin to explain over a drink or a plate of cold roast veal the games life had played with the Walkers or with him since they had drifted apart, soon after his marriage to Mary. And the rest of that group! He expected it would be a challenge even to recognize half of them, requiring instant restoration of hair color, if not of hair itself, airbrushing potholes left in the skin by removal of little cancers, whittling down bellies and rear ends. Nevertheless, after breakfast, as he read the text of the invitation—it was really an illustrated family history, punctuated at every turn by exclamation points, with pictures of the Walkers and their children at various ages—he was overcome by curiosity. Ted and Mimi’s story seemed so happy and their lives so wonderfully simple. What was that like? How did they manage it? He should find out: it would be a sociological expedition of a sort he would not be easily able to undertake if Carrie should accept his various imprudent suggestions that they live together and she quit her job. It was a buffet dinner: he could leave when he wanted. No one would miss him.
Once he had driven the thirty miles from Bridgehampton and found himself in Ted and Mimi’s house, he remembered his tergiversations and curiosity, and might have burst out laughing, because it was all so simple, if it had not been for the envy that stabbed him. The house was much like his, a
brown clapboard affair with screened porches and sky-blue window shutters, surrounded by old trees. On the neat lawn in the back a band was playing New Orleans jazz. Pleasant-looking locals were handing drinks and canapés and other finger food to older types, many of whom he could identify without captions, and to young people cut from the same selection of cloths as the more presentable latter-day associates at W & K, and just as wholesome. Those would be the friends of the Walkers’ lawyer and banker kids. There was no tent; he supposed the house was big enough to feed this crowd, and anyway the night air would be too cold for a tent unless it was heated. For Charlotte’s wedding, he had planned to have a big tent close to the back porch, so that people could drift in and out. That was one difference. The other was his rotten luck; it was nothing but that: first Mary and then the dreadful business with Charlotte. Without that unseemly row, he could have managed. Ted didn’t have any more money than he. He could have given a great party—Mary and he could have done it with both hands tied behind their backs. All he needed was something to celebrate. But hold it: Why not throw a bash to introduce Carrie to society? With Bryan parking cars and the man in blackface behind the bar—if he could be found and cleaned up! Decidedly, there was no riddle to be answered here. This was just another catered party, given by a nice couple whose lives had not yet been broken. Their time would come.
Despite his own indifference to the fortunes of the Walkers and his other former friends scattered among the guests, Schmidt took it hard that people he had once known well, and had not seen for an age, should not feel curious about
him. For instance Ted: he had been perfectly polite and cordial, but then ditched Schmidt with the “Stay right here, I’ll be right back” of a busy host, not bothering to make sure he had someone to talk to. Abandoned, Schmidt crisscrossed the lawn, drifting in and out of groups, putting forward views and asking questions he knew were of no interest to himself or whomever he had happened to buttonhole. Resenting the intrusions of others into conversations he had begun only to feel excluded from them, drinking more and faster than usual in the hope that the repeated trips to the bar made his meanderings less conspicuous. A voice he knew well hailed him. It belonged to his former partner, Lew Brenner. What a surprise: Had the walls of Jericho fallen down?