Authors: Louis Begley
No, he must not quarrel with Riker. His deepest need was to be at peace with his daughter, to maintain a state of wordless complicity with her, like those rare moments of surrender when the surf that rakes the Atlantic beach is transformed into tiny, glittering ripples, and one can float on one’s back, eyes open to the late-September sky. Instead he had been churlish with the boy, Charlotte surely thought he had, and on the day she had told him they would be married! It didn’t matter that the vulgar boy had provoked him. Coming from himself, ill temper was unforgettable, if not unforgivable.
If he didn’t manage, for reasons that couldn’t be stated without aggravating the case, to return to treating Riker as he used to in the office, indeed at the breakfast and dinner table under his own roof during all those years when, after all, he was sleeping with Charlotte, if he behaved as though Mary and he hadn’t imagined and accepted the conventionally desirable result, he would force her to take Riker’s side against him, to behave, quite properly, as though the insult had been directed at her. This was the kind of misery that Mary could have cured, even as she could unravel desperately tangled kite strings and make things all right between him and Charlotte, now talking to one and now to the other, keeping their confidences, until at last, hours or many days later, one of them was coaxed into saying the obvious, necessary words that meant nothing but brought them back into sunlight.
And a quarrel with DeForrest and the management committee over the pension plan? He could imagine how Riker might explain the two sides of the argument to Charlotte. Charlotte didn’t doubt that he had more than enough money. How could it be otherwise? Money had not been a subject Mary and he discussed in Charlotte’s presence—they hardly ever talked about it even when they were alone. His mother’s squalid nagging about money had been the constant background noise while he lived with his parents; he didn’t want to be reminded of it in the life he had made for himself. To be sure, he had occasionally informed Charlotte that he wasn’t rich, in a tone, he realized, about as convincing as that of his ritual injunctions not to speed on the eastern end of the Long Island Expressway because she was bound to be caught, but
considering how Mary and he had lived, in such material ease and without going into how that ease was financed, as though bills didn’t exist, could she have resisted the conclusion that in fact he was rich, and his disclaimers of wealth or anything like it only a part of his perpetual scoffing and self-deprecation? What would she think of her father when she heard he was digging in his heels to resist—uselessly, in all likelihood—prudent measures the partnership wanted, ones that had been designed, with expert help, to make sure that retirees weren’t a millstone tied to the young partners’ collective neck?
He looked at the kitchen clock. Charlotte would have left her office, and probably gone to her dance class, would now be at home waiting for the hardworking Riker’s late meeting to end, microwave oven at the ready. What did they put in it? Surely not little steaks; it would have to be grilled tuna—of course, cooked sushi! Instant tortellini! A lot of good it had done, poor Mary’s ban on TV dinners, frozen veal parmigiana with potato croquettes, takeout or delivered pizzas, and those little carton rhomboids of chicken with water chestnuts from the Chinaman on Third Avenue. Linen napkins, the table set as if for a picky grown-up, even if Charlotte was having her dinner alone, as she often did because he, Schmidt, had worked late for many years and Mary had book parties she had to attend—all that effort rewarded by her blooming into an iron-pumping yuppie! Their daughter in Lycra leotards, waiting for her bankruptcy maven to come home! And he—probably accustomed to eating in his shirtsleeves, ballpoint pens and pencils sticking out of his pocket, unbathed and unshaved!
Quiet, Schmidtie. That’s not the way to domestic tranquillity.
Almost surely he could catch her at Jon Riker’s apartment, before he came home; perhaps it was better than talking to her at the office. There, she might put him on hold and attend to more pressing business! On the other hand, he was coming to realize that what he had to say, that he would be delighted to accept the senior Rikers’ invitation to eat their turkey—subtext, meet them and their relatives—could be said anytime, the sooner the better, and quite usefully in fact when Riker was at home, provided he could resist adding a crack or two to the acceptance. Yes, even if he was speaking to Charlotte when she was alone, he’d have to be careful to hold the irony. Then the evident, symmetrical solution presented itself: He could leave the message with Jon’s secretary without speaking to either of them!
He dialed the secretary’s number, got instead her voice mail, and, overcoming an urge to giggle, said. Please tell Mr. Riker that Mr. Schmidt accepts with pleasure the invitation to Thanksgiving lunch so kindly extended by Mr. Riker’s parents.
Now that was done; he could see there was no other way out of the Thanksgiving mess, short of a well-staged last-minute sore throat or bronchitis. A lugubrious solution, but one that needn’t be rejected out of hand. In the meantime, he would call Charlotte at the office and invite her to lunch the first day she was free. It was impossible to face Jon Riker, the Riker parents, and the Riker relatives and friends before he had talked to her. About what? There was time to figure that out, and why not have lunch with his daughter, even if
he had nothing new or urgent to say? He might let her talk about her life; she ought to have a great deal to tell him. It seemed to Schmidt that he was behaving intelligently, as though he had sought Mary’s advice and followed it.
Schmidt detested leftovers and cluttered refrigerators. He shopped separately for each meal and bought staples every two weeks at the grocers’ cooperative in the village. Held back by the weather and the weight of his sadness, he hadn’t left the house all day. The only place where he might still get food was the delicatessen with a misleading Russian name that sold cold cuts and shamelessly marked-up groceries. Cold cuts didn’t tempt him. He could dine on the sardines, hard-boiled eggs, and bread he already owned and had paid for, and wash them down with bourbon or the Côtes du Rhône he hadn’t finished the night before, when he had cooked hamburgers. Schmidt’s feelings about leftovers didn’t extend to unfinished bottles of wine, provided the wine hadn’t waited more than two days and, during warm weather, was kept in the refrigerator. He had eaten sardines, hard-boiled eggs, and bread for lunch, but lack of variety was no objection; after all, he ate the same thing for breakfast every day, and sardines and eggs were food he liked. The alternative was to go out to dinner, not to a friend’s house, since no friend had suggested it, but to a restaurant. He got the ice, the bottle of whiskey, and a glass, and carried them to the living room. The fire was laid. He had done that after clearing the breakfast dishes and making his bed in the morning. It took with the first match. He poured a drink and sat down on the sofa that faced the fireplace.
To go out, actually to speak to someone, even if it was only
the waitress, to hear the sound of his own words, struck him as desirable. It might make him sleep better. It wasn’t a question of having a hot meal; he could take care of that by making scrambled eggs, instead of having them hard-boiled. The cost of the meal shouldn’t deter him, although the local restaurant prices were absurdly high in relation to the quality of the food and the service. He had done more arithmetic since the meditation in the cellar: he wouldn’t need to apply for food stamps or live like a hermit, provided he bought an inexpensive, simple house. The yearly saving on upkeep alone would pay for many outings. But if he were to have dinner at O’Henry’s, which was surely where he would go since he liked his conversations with Carrie, the waitress whose name he had recently learned, chances were strong he would, on the way to his table, be inspected by the Weird Sisters. These were the three writers’ widows who lunched and dined there most days—every day, he was willing to bet, unless one of them or one of the larger circle of similarly situated hags was entertaining at home. He knew them, had known them for years, and had always greeted them with a smile and a wave of the hand and passed on. Mary occasionally paused for a few words—they were of her world—while he waited at a respectful distance. He had understood that he was in fact invisible to them, as a lawyer, a married man, and the husband of an editor who had not had the honor of publishing the works of their husbands. His new person seemed to be acquiring an alarming opacity; after a few more smiles, a hoarse summons to join them might issue. Could he refuse without giving offense? He might get away with it the first time, but politeness would require that he ask to join them himself the
next time he arrived, if it wasn’t obvious that they were at the point of finishing their meal. Unless his having been a lawyer was a fatal social bar, his presence would not be without precedent. At lunch, there were occasionally men at their table. Two of them were also known to Schmidt. They were both local writers, gaunt, tall, and trembly, of whom one must believe that their work was done in the early morning or late at night, before the prandial intake of martinis or long after it had been slept off.
Schmidt wasn’t sure he would thrive in this particular seraglio. He feared that, except when free legal advice was needed—how to recover the deposit on the tour of Sri Lanka, booked just as the Tamils had gone on their most recent rampage and canceled only two days before flight time, or in which court a libel action might be started to restrain the publication in Ukraine of a biography of the late husband that alluded to his taste for little boys—the treatment reserved for him by those hags, and even more so by their men friends, would be patronizing, of a sort to make him regret his presumed wealth, flat stomach, and as yet unredeemed failure to tend the thankless Muse. There were other disadvantages. For instance, did he want the overly familiar owner who seated guests when he wasn’t too busy downing a shot at the bar or watching a momentous pass on the television screen to direct him automatically to the widows’ table? Was he ready to do the arithmetic when the time came to split the check and measly tip among the revelers, to keep track of who had drunk how much of what? It was a case that called for the application of Groucho Marx’s rule: If that club would have him as a member, he didn’t want to join. “People”
might think he had become a hopeless case, ready for AA and the social worker. But were there people likely to turn up at O’Henry’s—other than Carrie, the waitress, and Mr. Whittemore, at whose store across the street he bought liquor in transactions marked by mutual respect—about whose opinion he gave a hoot?
He couldn’t think of anyone. Martha’s friends, who had taken up Mary and him with old-lady graciousness, were dead or resided in nursing homes or distant retirement communities. It was true that, in principle, anyone with a house nearby, or even a chance visitor capable of identifying the Weird Sisters and their entourage, might go to O’Henry’s, for hamburgers with chili, which were good, or, in the case of resident squares and summer people, for the regular sightings of local litterateurs. But Schmidt no longer had contacts with squares of his own class who owned property nearby. They had ceased when the tennis club refused to admit as a member the Jewish laryngologist who had bought, overpaying considerably, a large house across the street from the club entrance, especially in order to be near the courts on which he had hoped to play. Mary was on the admissions committee and, upon the fatal blackballs being cast, resigned in the name of the whole family. Schmidt hadn’t complained—not even about not having been consulted. Later tennis stopped being an issue because Mary had to give it up, they had thought only temporarily, after the false alarm of her angina that was exacerbated by the anguish over her family history of heart disease. Schmidt hadn’t wanted to play, if it meant leaving her alone; she loved the game with such a passion. In the meantime, Schmidt and Mary’s social life continued
among Mary’s friends: other editors, writers of all stripes, and literary agents, and their hangers-on, so many of whom lived nearby. They were by and large more interesting than the squares, and often played good tennis. Some were rich as well as glamorous and could organize games on their own courts. Frankly speaking, Schmidt was not displeased when the subject came up, because a gossip column had mentioned some lunch on a terrace overlooking the beach, to note that his partners envied his fancy connections. Obedient to unwritten rules that govern such matters, none of them dwelled in the surrounding woodland, their habitat being nearer the city, chiefly in Westhampton. It had occurred to Schmidt recently that his social situation had changed: he might rejoin the tennis club. But Charlotte’s marriage plans were going to throw a monkey wrench into that project; he had no intention of becoming Riker’s Trojan horse.
It was Schmidt’s belief that he had no friends of his own in the agreeable circle that had been his and Mary’s. He had entertained most of Mary’s pals and colleagues as her husband, and it was in that capacity that he had been entertained by them. They had been popular hosts: the fact that their parties were held at an old house of considerable distinction, and the food and drink they served were more than a cut above usual book party fare, didn’t hurt. But he realized that their guests came, and invited them back, because of Mary: she was a powerful editor and she was genuinely liked. Her own authors, of course, were assiduous; so were many others who aspired to be published by her. The invitations to large parties continued during the summer that followed Mary’s death. Mostly Schmidt declined or, having accepted, at the
last minute decided to remain at home. He didn’t like to find himself standing on those broad lawns or under well-pruned trees, glass in hand, on the edge of the crowd as though its roar were a centrifugal force that had expelled him, too sad or too timid to push his way to the hostess or to break into conversations—groups didn’t open to include Schmidt; journalists didn’t race to greet him—that had no relation to his grief. Besides, he was certain that any effort he made would leave him fearing he did not have sufficient respect for Mary. He might have wanted to go to some of the small weekday or Sunday-night dinners Mary and he used to attend; but, with a few exceptions, which he was able to relate afterward to the presence at table of an unaccompanied female houseguest, his telephone didn’t ring. He wasn’t invited. Possibly it was because he hadn’t been seen at the larger gatherings; people could well think he had decided to travel. The continuing flow of invitations to such events didn’t contradict his theory. He was simply on the list for the Xs’ or the Ys’ standard summer parties, invitations to which were typically addressed and mailed by the secretary of one of the members of the household. There was no more to it than that. At one of the book parties he did attend, the hostess, a literary agent who represented several of Mary’s authors, directly after offering Schmidt condolences and the usual odious apology for not having expressed them in writing, made a remark that offended him, and stuck in his mind.