Schmidt Steps Back (30 page)

He had arrived in Bridgehampton late in the evening. The next morning, before he had brushed his teeth, before his first cup of coffee, he called Mr. Mansour’s preferred florist in Paris and ordered a mauve orchid to be delivered to Alice. Judging by the price, it was an orchid tree. Just as well. He wanted
something that would shout “contrition.” What would the card say? He understood the question the salesclerk asked in French and tried to dictate the reply in English:
I behaved like a lout. Please forgive me. Signed, Schmidtie
. The florist’s employee got stuck on the word “lout,” stubbornly, insisting it should be “louse.” That was perhaps an improvement, but not one he was ready to adopt. There was also trouble over “Schmidtie.” She insisted on “Schmidt.” Merde, he said in English, and settled for a message in baby French he knew for sure was grammatically correct:
S demande pardon
. Hard cheese on Schmidtie. Some hours later, while he was eating his lunch of sardines and Gruyère, the florist called. The same young woman. Madame Verplanck had refused to accept the delivery. His credit card would be credited with the price of the plant, minus the cost of delivery. Shame, burning shame, overwhelmed him. What was he apologizing for? The harsh, unloving sex and the lecture on the quality of her cunt? Definitely. Was it a vaster apology, encompassing a withdrawal of his preposterous claim to her fidelity? He had made no such claim. What he had demanded from her was honesty. She should have told him about Popov. Had she done so, the question of fidelity would have never arisen. He would not have accepted a time-share. The refusal sprang from something buried deep inside him that could not be reached or altered.

Such was his frame of mind when he met Gil Blackman for lunch in the city at the Four Seasons Grill in the Seagram Building, a restaurant that sleek New Yorkers like Mr. Blackman treated as their club, the headwaiters and the owners having memorized or entered into the computer their idiosyncrasies, whether concerning dietary preferences or the table at which they felt most self-importantly happy.

Triumph? cried Mr. Blackman.

Defeat.

I can’t believe it. You went to London and blew it. Why? How?

And so Schmidt attempted to explain. Since all he could say about his last night with Alice was that he had treated her badly, without any tenderness, even though she had as much as apologized and said she loved him, the explanation seemed absurd even to him. The look of incredulity on Gil’s face knocked out what little wind remained in his sails.

Good grief, Mr. Blackman said at last, the lady explains to you that she has an old thing going with Popov, something that the way you tell it sounds as though it were more about friendship and sympathy with his situation than sex, and you get up on your high horse and gallop away! If you don’t want a time-share, as you put it, why not take her away from Serge? Give her a better time in bed and out than he can. How can you be jealous of her past with him? Or did you think she was a virgin?

No, he didn’t. Yes, he was a fool. And no, there was nothing he could do about it. There was no prying her from Popov, and he couldn’t share with Popov of all people, couldn’t be a party to cheating him. That was the gist of Schmidt’s answer.

Mr. Blackman nodded and ordered another gin martini. You want one? he asked.

Schmidt shook his head. Not if he was going to get any work done in the afternoon.

Bizarrely, it occurred to him that if his poor late Mary had heard him she would have rolled her eyes, a gift that not even Mr. Blackman possessed.

You’ll live to regret it, Mr. Blackman continued, not the
martini but once again cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s really a habit, isn’t it, beginning with letting that brute DeForrest stiff you into not making a run to lead your firm, your early retirement, the prima donna act that almost cost you your job with Mike’s foundation. The idea that when he offered you the job you had the gall—no plain stupidity—to tell him that you were hesitating, that working for him might interfere with your friendship! What a self-defeating asshole you can be. Then I pulled you back off the window ledge. Probably I should have gone to London with you. You’re too dumb to be allowed to run around unattended.

Stop, said Schmidt, please stop. I’m wretched enough as it is. I haven’t even told you about Charlotte.

Mr. Blackman listened intently and remained silent for a while after Schmidt had finished. Holy Moses, he said finally. I have an idea. Do you know Elaine’s cousin Jerry?

Schmidt shook his head.

He’s like the pope of New York psychoanalysts. Most of them he’s trained personally. Suppose I asked him to have a shrink-to-shrink talk with this fellow Townsend and find out what’s really going on from his perspective? Whether that works or not, making it clear to Townsend that he should pay close attention to this case can’t hurt.

Schmidt nodded. Please do.

All right. Now I’ll tell you some cheerful news. Believe it or not, Canning has bought into the sex change. We now have a female lead. Your screen credit is secure.

That’s great, said Schmidt. Are you getting Julia Roberts?

She’s too pretty. We need someone with more edge. I think we’ll get Sigourney Weaver.

As they said good-bye—their partings, Schmidt noted,
were becoming increasingly emotional—Mr. Blackman said: Schmidtie, you’re as stubborn as a mule. I know that. But please do yourself a favor and climb out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself. Hop on the plane. Go to Canossa—I mean Paris. Woo her, get her back in bed, let time take care of the rest.

Schmidt nodded, shook Gil’s hand once more, and went his way uptown on Park Avenue. It seemed to him he was staggering, although in fact his gait was perfectly steady. The sun was blindingly bright. He crossed over to the west side of the avenue in search of patches of shade and continued north. Gil was right: being an idiot about DT, Katerina, and their predecessors had not impaired his judgment in the affairs of others. Why not take the advice of his best friend, an artist who had shown in film after film how well he understood women? Why? Because he didn’t trust Alice. That’s what was at the heart of his preposterous stubbornness. She had lied, tricked him into sharing her with Popov, made a fool of him. He had attempted an apology—flowers ordered by telephone, the message dictated to a salesclerk—the sort of thing that would have sufficed if he had forgotten her birthday. Too bad. Begging her pardon in sackcloth, on his knees, was beyond his power.

Whether owing to cousin Jerry’s intervention, a discreet nudge from Myron, or the passage of time, proving once again that ripeness is all, Schmidt received at his office a telephone call from Dr. Townsend’s medical assistant. Repressing the urge to ask medical what, he listened attentively and respectfully. The young woman, of Russian extraction he was willing to bet, told him that the doctor was aware of the letters he had written to his daughter, Charlotte, and of the fact that she had not answered. If Mr. Schmidt was interested in
having a consultation with Dr. Townsend about Mrs. Riker’s condition, the doctor would clear it with her and schedule an appointment. Mr. Schmidt should understand that the fee for the consultation would be one hundred fifty percent of the doctor’s usual fee for a treatment session and would not be reimbursed in whole or in part by insurance. Mr. Schmidt acquiesced. Two days later, the same young woman called again. The consultation could take place the following day. I’m in luck, thought Schmidt, remembering that in the past New York psychoanalysts disappeared from the city on the first of August and didn’t reappear until after Labor Day. He must have managed to get through to Charlotte’s shrink just as he was going out the door.

It was a singularly impersonal office: not a diploma or a photograph of wife, children, horses, or sailboats to be seen. In their place, lithographs of old New York, before the heart of the city moved uptown, and, above the indispensable brown leather couch, an ecumenical group of photographer’s studio portraits. Schmidt identified Freud and Jung. The others, Dr. Townsend told him, were New York greats: Abraham Brill and Lawrence Kubie and, in a category of his own, Wilhelm Reich, a much misunderstood and underappreciated man. Having been disposed to distrust him, Schmidt found this young man—he supposed that he was in his early forties—attractive and direct as soon as he began to speak. Even without the diplomas, he had no doubt that Townsend was the product of one of three or four boarding schools and then Harvard, Yale, or Princeton and that he had spent his boyhood summers in Maine or on Long Island. It didn’t hurt to have interviewed dozens upon dozens of bright young fellows applying for jobs at W & K. The thought of those years of practicing law, of the
company of young people he had admired, of all those loyalties, abruptly filled Schmidt with nostalgia.

Look, Mr. Schmidt, said Dr. Townsend, I don’t do family therapy, and I’m not going to try to improve your rapport with Charlotte. My purpose is to get some information from you that may help me treat her and to respond to your perfectly natural and legitimate desire to have a better understanding of her situation. Is that all right with you? Please bear in mind that I may or may not tell Charlotte what you say to me and that I may or may not believe what you say. All right?

Schmidt nodded.

First, can you tell me what you think have been the principal traumas in Charlotte’s life? No need to go into the accident, I mean before the miscarriage and the hysterectomy.

Schmidt nodded again. Really, he said, there was little, or rather I can’t identify much. There was a frightful row when she was eleven or twelve, and I put my foot down and said we couldn’t afford to board her horse in New York. So frightful that the memory is still very vivid. It must have been the first time I refused to give her something important she really wanted. By the way, my wife, Mary, and I presented a united front on the subject of that horse. Then there was my own misbehavior. During a very difficult summer—difficult because Mary, who was suffering from what was diagnosed as a depression, treated me with considerable hostility—I allowed myself to sleep with Charlotte’s babysitter. It came out much later, only about three years ago, that Charlotte had understood, however imprecisely, what was going on. How she realized it I don’t know, the girl and I were extraordinarily careful, and neither of us detected any sign of snooping or any lessening
of Charlotte’s affection for her or for me. It was Mary who caught us, because of a stain on the sheets, and she fired the girl. But then Mary improved and resumed tranquil relations with me, including sexual intercourse. Perhaps the mere fact of the girl’s being fired, perhaps something that she blurted out, had allowed Charlotte to figure out what had happened either then or in hindsight. I can’t tell. Is that enough? Do you need more detail?

Townsend shook his head. Not for the moment.

All right. His gorge rising, Schmidt plunged into an account of his complicated—for he insisted that it was such—aversion to Charlotte’s marriage to Jon Riker; his decision to give his life estate in the Bridgehampton house to Charlotte as a wedding present and to move out of the house, a decision he duly acknowledged as being motivated by his distaste for living with Charlotte and Jon in a house of which he was not the master, a decision that for rock solid tax reasons turned into his buying Charlotte’s remainder interest; his dismay at Charlotte’s decision to be married by a rabbi in a Soho restaurant instead of his house.

He stopped for breath and said, I have realized something. I am giving you a version that has benefited from Renata Riker’s raking me over the coals about what she claimed to recognize as my deep-seated anti-Semitism. I have come to realize that there was in fact a thread of anti-Semitism running through my relations with Jon Riker and his family. I am indebted for this insight to Dr. Riker and also to my best friend, who happens to be a Jew. That’s a fact and I’m not going to deny it, but I want you to know that I have done my best to purge myself of my anti-Semitism, and I think I have succeeded. And I would like you to accept my assurance that my animus against
Jews, such as it was, never involved my harming a Jew in any way whatsoever. For example, Jon Riker owed his partnership in my old law firm almost entirely to my advocacy. Not that his work wasn’t excellent. He just needed a little push to get him over the top on time, without what might have been a humiliating delay. You might say that I’ve been an anti-Semite only on aesthetic grounds! He laughed nervously, conscious of Townsend’s blank stare.

I see, said Dr. Townsend.

Yes, said Schmidt, you too find my fig leaf too small. All right. Let’s go on to subsequent traumas Charlotte may have suffered. I suppose I have to include my liaison with a very young—twenty years old—and very beautiful half–Puerto Rican waitress that started after the blowup with Charlotte over the house or just around that time and lasted more than two years. I know Charlotte resented it. Whether it was a trauma I can’t tell. I mention it for the sake of completeness. Other traumas: Jon Riker’s affair with some sort of paralegal at the law firm and a huge unrelated indiscretion or perhaps something worse that led to his being booted out of the firm. Charlotte’s own affair with a colleague at the public relations firm she worked for—that too ended badly. She was going to start a new business with him, using my money, because he hadn’t any, when all of a sudden he dropped her and went back to the wife he had divorced or was divorcing. I can’t remember which. Charlotte and Jon got back together, but I would imagine the bloom was off the rose for them. The firm with which he is now can’t hold a candle to Wood & King, my old firm, where he would have been set for life. And the Riker parents—I may be telling tales out of school—seem much less prosperous than they once were, and all of this has precipitated what I can only
call a raid on Charlotte’s money. Then, curiously enough, in April of this year, Charlotte extended an olive branch to me. A truce that ended with another attempted money grab by Jon. He had the chutzpah—perhaps I shouldn’t use that word—to try to get me to set up some sort of trust for the unborn child who would have been my grandson. As though anything in my history with Charlotte justified their not trusting me to be generous!