Authors: Louis Begley
He heard car doors slam. Wednesday—it must be the Polish cleaning brigade. He was too nervous to shave, too nervous to remain in the house with them. The forward observers, Mrs. Zielnik and Mrs. Nowak, poured into the
kitchen and caught him by the arms. Kissed, he fled upstairs, wiping his cheeks on his sleeve. The bed in Charlotte’s room was unmade. That was good; they would know it was time to change the nuptial sheets. In the corner, he saw Riker’s running shoes, on top of them thick socks—unwashed, he supposed. At arm’s length, holding them with the tips of his fingers, he carried these articles to the bathroom, dropped them on the floor, lowered the toilet seat and cover, and without looking, flushed, just in case. A contraption for cleaning gums, familiar to Schmidt from drugstore window displays, but new in this place, stood on the shelf. Fearful of electrical fires, he unplugged it. Beside it, in a glass, two plastic attachments for use in the mouth, one with a blue and the other with a pink base. Conjugal hygiene! No doubt one sat straining on the crapper while the other performed advanced oral ablutions. Back in the bedroom, he stripped the blankets and threw them on the floor. There they were, the weekend stains—like a kid’s wet dreams in camp.
By the time he had put on his heavy sweater and descended the front stairs, the vacuum cleaners were in action. Waving with one hand, pointing to his ears with the other, to make sure they understood there was too much noise for conversation, he passed through the front hall. He had avoided the weekly update on Mrs. Zielnik’s eczema and the pesky bladder of Mrs. Nowak’s husband. That was something to be grateful for.
He heard the sea from the road, before he got to the residents’ parking lot. Mauled to the bone by the storm, the beach had become a narrow, abrupt strip. Neat clumps of seaweed, like little brown nosegays laid out in parallel arches,
marked the successive limits of the ocean’s heaving advance. Schmidt left his loafers in the dune and walked east, along the edge of the surf, where the sand was hardest. There was no pause between the breakers, no rest from the sucking that followed every crash. He could not imagine making it through that water, heavy with sand, rushing in confused circles while it gathered its force for the next strike. Why hadn’t he done it, right after Mary died, the way he had imagined it? The scene was out of the Woody Allen movie that looked like Bergman, only the figure on the screen would be he: A thin, fairly tall man, to judge by his posture no longer young, in cotton trousers and a large parka, stares from this beach at just such a sea, but the light is less strong. One senses that it’s daybreak. He stands at the edge of the water. A disorderly wave far ahead of the others swamps his Top-Siders, wets him to the knees. The man doesn’t retreat; with his sleeve, he wipes the mist of tears from his face. Then he does take a few steps back, looks to the left and to the right and at the sky, runs heavily, but that’s the best he can do on the wet sand in shoes that are already like weights, and plunges into the surf. Even in these ridiculous clothes, one can tell he is an experienced swimmer. He makes it over the top of the first wave, and then the second, as though he were romping with grandchildren; the third is too high, so he dives through it, recovering in time to take on each newcomer until he is free, at last able to start swimming. He does an improbable sort of crawl, arms in those baggy sleeves lifting in a laborious wobble, the head bobbing up irregularly, quite out of control. At a certain point—the strangeness of the scene subverts the absent spectator’s and perhaps the man’s own sense of time—he
seems to have had enough. He goes for the shore, and he is intelligent about it. On his back, keeping an eye on those breakers, he does a tired swimmer’s float. A huge one comes. The man repeats his diving act until he catches a wave badly: a frantic arm is out of line. Still, he comes up, for a moment that’s brief like a shriek, in great disarray, no longer swimming. Then there is absolutely nothing.
Why hadn’t he?
Some seagulls flew overhead, in full cry. Such a very clear day! Already, he could see the house at the edge of Georgica. Too bad only he was taking advantage of the sunshine to walk on the beach, but what could one expect? The locals were busy unplugging toilets or filling oil tanks and sending bills for the same, writers were writing or getting a cup of coffee at the candy store, the Weird Sisters were on the telephone, retirees with apartments in New York or Paris were in those apartments getting dressed for lunch, and the other old farts had lost the ability to move or the habit. They might be playing canasta at the Seagull Motel! Mary had liked walking on this endless beach even more than he. A place of no abiding footprints: Why hadn’t the ocean saved him from trudging here alone, his thoughts dispersed and black? Had he lost his nerve? That might be the truth, disguised as pity for his own body, still undamaged, still eager, like a dog that won’t come to heel, eager to gallop about, a soggy tennis ball in his teeth, so unprepared for the rolling and scraping against the ocean floor, for the swelling and the evisceration.
Pace
Woody Allen, it was possible to be less brutal. There were pills: all those leftover pills in paper cups. It turned out that Mary didn’t need everything the surgeon had provided. He had
told himself he should bury her, that it was wrong—cruel, really—to leave it to Charlotte to clean up after both mother and father, to muck out their private, unspeakable debris. But it hadn’t taken long before he recognized the true shape of his disgrace: curiosity, and longing for solitude, both obscene as an itch. For so many years, in effect, his entire adult life, he had lived at Mary’s side. Could he not sail alone beyond the pillars of Hercules and taste the apples of the western garden before the waves closed over his head?
He had never promised Mary he would do it, although the temptation had been great. Solicitude—she was so tired—had held him back, and his own dislike of pathos. Such little courage as she still had shouldn’t be used up in vacuous remonstrances: No, you mustn’t, you are still a young man, think of Charlotte! Yes, I must, I won’t live without you! Yet, until the end, he had intended to do it, at the right time, without making it harder for her.
Hee! The ocean is still wet, the painkillers are nice and dry!
The Polacks would be at his house for one hour more. That was the message Schmidt read on the face of his watch. A meal in their presence was unthinkable. Comments on his nutrition. Or Mrs. Subicki, her rear end cascading off the seat of the kitchen chair drawn up companionably beside him, legs in elastic kneesocks stretched out, monstrous feet unshod for comfort, would reach into the Gap shopping bag for a bologna and mayonnaise on white, already half consumed on the previous job, and finish it pensively. The hard-boiled eggs and sardines could wait—for his supper or the next day’s lunch.
It wasn’t the Sisters who harpooned Schmidt. He hadn’t even noticed whether they were at their usual place at O’Henry’s. Sure of himself and nimble, Schmidt had evaded the owner’s greeting and was moseying toward a table in the land of charity, near the one at which he had sat the previous evening—itself occupied by two males of the minor insurance agent genus—it being equally out of the question, Schmidt thought, to sit elsewhere, and let the sweet child fear she had been wrong to be so friendly with him or that she hadn’t been friendly enough when she said thank you for that tip, and to say point-blank to the busybody owner that he wanted to be served by Carrie. Instead, he heard the familiar, droll voice of his college roommate. A pleasantly stocky man with a face like Michael Caine’s and layers of beige cashmere on his body rose to embrace him. A lucky roll of dice in the housing office had joined them in their freshman year; untroubled affection kept them together until they graduated.
At last! My faith was about to be shaken! Half past two and no Schmidtie! Mrs. Cooney would not have allowed such a thing to happen.
You are right! I don’t know what to say. I’ll just say that I am terribly sorry.
Cooney II
or
The Return of Cooney!
Which title do you like better? Can we install that saintly woman and her telephone in your pool house? I yearn for her calls: May we confirm lunch today at twelve-thirty? Or my favorite: We are on a conference call with a client. Will you forgive us if we are fifteen minutes late?
There was a bottle on the table Gil had been working on. Too bad about Carrie; how could Schmidt get Gil to move to
another table when he had already ordered? Perhaps it was just as well. She would be watching from the door leading to the kitchen and perhaps she knew—if not, she would find out!—who Gil was. Schmidt’s prestige was about to skyrocket.
A drink of cheap red wine? All the decent bottles are outrageously overpriced.
He poured Schmidt a glass.
Thanks, I have stopped drinking at lunch. No, I do want it. Gil, I am not just late. The truth is that I had forgotten we were having lunch. The only reason I’m here and haven’t stood you up altogether is that I had to get out of my house. The Sikorski squadron is in it, moving the dirt from one place to another. I have so few appointments these days I don’t bother to look at the calendar.
Yet another reason to make Cooney come back. If you have nothing to do, why haven’t you called us? You know Elaine and I would love to have you come for a meal. We want you at every meal!
I don’t know any such thing. You and Elaine are always working. I don’t want to interfere with the birth of a new masterpiece.
We eat—just like everybody else!
This was disingenuous of Gil, but Schmidt had no desire to say so. In his opinion, the only reason it was possible to maintain that they were still intimate friends was that he had taught himself to observe certain conventions carefully. One of them, which under present conditions clearly needed updating, was to believe that deep down in her heart Elaine liked Mary and him more than the glamorous people, her real
friends, she and Gil lived with day in and day out, and that she regretted—oh how bitterly!—the mysterious, irresistible forces that interfered, absolutely prevented, Gil and her from “playing” with the Schmidts. In her language that meant doing together the sort of things one might expect of couples bound by a special, secret predilection: casual dinners after an off-Broadway show, vacation trips to the Andes, and what have you, not merely seeing Schmidt and Mary at large gatherings—principally screenings of Gil’s films and the receptions that followed. Another convention regulated Schmidt’s lunches with Gil. Soon after Gil’s
Rigoletto
had made it to Cannes and won, Schmidt sensed from remarks Gil let drop about certain friends that it was on the whole better not to call Gil first but to wait until the suggestion to have lunch came from him. And yet, experience with disturbingly long periods when Gil gave no sign of life whatsoever, even when there was no reason to think he had taken offense or was out on the Coast, suggested that if Schmidt wanted to avoid a de facto rupture he himself would have to make a move at some point. That this was the correct line of conduct Schmidt had no doubt: Mrs. Cooney, who understood a lot more than she let on, had tacitly validated it. She would mention casually, but probably in accordance with one of the schedules she kept in her desk drawer, that she had noticed several openings in Schmidt’s calendar and ask whether he mightn’t like her to call Mr. Blackman’s assistant—since they hadn’t heard from him recently—and set up the usual. That would be lunch at twelve-thirty, eaten, depending on whose turn it was to invite, at Schmidt’s club or at a restaurant in the Seagram Building that was treated like a club by Gil and
a number of other sleek men and women with idiosyncratic eating habits the headwaiter had memorized or entered in a computer.
Why Gil should consider Schmidt’s calculated reserve natural in so old a friend, why he should go off the air abruptly and without any explanation, were questions to which Schmidt thought he had the answer, one that made him sad. It had to be the slow onset of a combination of absentmindedness and indifference so profound that, unless Gil’s assistant told Gil, in accordance with her own schedule, that it was Schmidt time once again, or, increasingly rarely, Gil himself suddenly wanted to exchange a certain kind of gossip, the way Schmidt might feel a craving for knockwurst and potato salad, he wouldn’t think of Schmidt at all. Schmidt supposed it was no different from the way he sometimes forgot to send his annual contribution to Harvard College, Planned Parenthood, the Armenian Jazz Festival, the Girl Scouts, etc., a failure that the Mrs. Cooneys who worked for those institutions were paid large salaries to prevent, even as they took care not to irritate him by overly frequent appeals. The value of his link to Gil was such that Schmidt accepted the humiliation like bad weather. It had not, for instance, prevented him, at a time when he was more ignorant about death, from being pleased to imagine that, when the time came, it was Gil whom Mary would unhesitatingly summon to his bedside. That nice prospect no longer mattered. If Charlotte and Jon did any summoning after packing him off to the hospital, it would be that clown Murphy or some other lawyer of his ilk.
Is there a new film in the works?
Yes and no. I have a proposal and a script I should take seriously, but there is something about it I dislike. Elaine has a proposal too—for a show she might organize at the Whitney. We are holed up here, fiddling around and drinking. I write things down and cross them out. What about you?
There is nothing left to fiddle with! I am discovering that it’s difficult to wean myself away from being a lawyer. I wonder about clients, the firm, whether Mrs. Cooney likes living in Santa Fe, and on and on. I could take the jitney into town, go to firm lunch, and find out, but I hate going to the office and I hate calling up my former colleagues. It makes me feel like an unwanted ghost! I remember what my father used to say after he quit: everything keeps going around and around.
I told you to take a leave for as long as necessary to look after Mary, and not even think of retiring. There is a race of men—all federal and state and bank employees, and most dentists—who are born to retire. They aspire to retirement from the moment they are born. Youth, sex, work, are only the necessary intermediary states: the subject progresses from larva to pupa to nymph until, at last, the miracle of metamorphosis is complete and gives the world the retired butterfly. Golf clubs, funny shoes, and designer sunglasses for the dentist, campers and gas-fired barbecue sets for the employees at the low end of the pay scale! You and I belong to a grander race. We need to be kneaded by misfortune and modern medicine before we are ready. Praised be the Lord, I am happy to announce that you strike me as unripe for a living death. What you need is a job. I’m going to think one up for you.