Schmidt Steps Back

by Louis Begley

  She broke off and said, I can’t go on today. Would you have time to see me again?

  The next day was Sunday. Where could he invite her? Brasseries would be crowded and noisy. Except for hotel restaurants, all the good and half-decent restaurants he knew would be closed. The one in his hotel was renowned for its cuisine. She agreed to meet him there at one and, as he was leaving, offered him her cheek to kiss.

  IV

  YOU’RE SHOCKED, she said, I can see it in your face. I’m wearing trousers, and I’m not made up.

  She did look terrible, her face pale and haggard, the pallor accentuated by her dark lipstick.

  You are lovely, he replied, and why wouldn’t you wear trousers to Sunday lunch unless you had been to church?

  She smiled. We don’t go to church much in France, except for christenings, marriages, and funerals. She bit her lip and added, There was an Episcopal service for Sophie before she was buried in the family plot at Verplanck Point. Tim is buried there too. The same priest said the mass. I’m going to be cremated. My mother didn’t want it because of Auschwitz, but I don’t think that’s a good reason. Cremating the Jews they killed was the least of what the Germans did to them.

  Schmidt was going to say something signifying agreement, but noticing his hesitation she broke in. Forgive me, she said, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I can’t get yesterday’s conversation out of my mind, but I want to. And I’m not sure I can or should go on with the story. What a splendid room this is! she added inconsequentially, looking around her.

  Too much marble for my taste, but the food is good, said Schmidt. Let’s order our lunch. I have to admit, though, that I would be disappointed if you did not finish what you have begun to tell me. She nodded and said, I’ll try. I’ll see.

  She ate and drank with frank enjoyment, and, not wanting to press her, Schmidt found himself doing most of the talking. He explained that the foundation he worked for had been founded by his country neighbor and now friend Mike Mansour, the billionaire Egyptian Jew who came to the United States with his parents as a young boy. The parents prospered making and selling curtains. Mike parlayed that small prosperity into a huge fortune and, having left Ronald Perelman behind, was ascending smoothly to the highest sphere of Forbes’s list of billionaires. He created the foundation to support democracy, the humanities, and capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe and former member countries of the Soviet Union.

  So far I’ve rather liked preaching the gospel of democracy and the humanities, he continued. That of Ayn Rand and joyous market capitalism is another matter. On balance, though, I’m truly grateful to Mike. He’s gotten me out of the house, I’m working again, and I’m traveling on business to places I’d never go to on my own. You probably know that I retired early, when Mary got sick with a cancer that spread pretty much everywhere. I wanted to be with her, and it was the right decision. All the same, losing both her and my life’s work left me in a desert—without direction.

  Oh, I didn’t know that Mary was dead, she said. That’s how cut off I am from the firm. I did notice, though, that there was no mention of her in your letter, and I wondered about the reason. She was so very nice. Of all those partners’ wives she was the kindest to me and the funniest. I remember her making huge round eyes and rolling them when we sat across from each other listening to Mrs. Wood give a little speech at one of those firm functions for wives. I had trouble keeping a straight face.

  Schmidt nodded. Making round eyes had been one of Mary’s special accomplishments. She had been famous for it at Radcliffe and at the publishing house.

  After a minute or so of silence he added, Alice, please go on with your story. I am eager to hear it, even if it’s very painful.

  All right, she said, but it is painful. More than painful—devastating. Let’s see, the morning after Sophie died Tim arranged for her funeral in Verplanck Point. There was no difficulty about doing it the following day so we all drove there, behind the hearse. Five of us in a limousine, Tim, Bruno, the au pair, Tommy, and I. The drive was a nightmare, and once we arrived it was even worse. It was impossible not to stay at the big house with Tim’s parents and the sister and her husband without making a public row, so in addition to all our pain and all our regret we had to face the Verplanck wall of meanness and dislike and horrid insinuations. Mrs. Verplanck actually said Tim and I were at fault. Considering the risk of infections at summer camp we shouldn’t have sent her to Horned Owl. I didn’t reply, but Tim flew into a rage and yelled. Have you ever heard him yell? It wasn’t a nice sound. We didn’t stay for the lunch after the funeral—none of us could face it—and after having a bite to eat at a mall got back into the limousine. We spent the night in some motel, and in the morning drove to Bar Harbor nonstop, except to let Tommy and Bruno—yes, Bruno too—pee at the side of the road. We were a mess when we got home, and the next day I allowed myself to sleep late and to lie down in our bedroom after lunch. Tommy and the au pair were taking a nap. I tried to go to sleep perhaps for half an hour but couldn’t, and finally I got up and went to the window. It was a gorgeous, cruelly gorgeous, afternoon. The sea was so brilliant that after a moment I had to turn my eyes away from it. I looked instead down at the garden, and there, next to the gazebo, directly in my line of vision, were Tim and Bruno, absorbed in a conversation I couldn’t hear over the pounding of the waves. I was about to call out to them when suddenly I realized the import of what I was seeing. They were holding hands, which in itself surprised me, because it wasn’t Tim’s style. I had never seen him hold hands with a man. But then Tim put his arms around Bruno and kissed him on the mouth. I mean really kissed him. They were near enough for it to be impossible to doubt that Tim’s tongue was deep in Bruno’s mouth. After a moment came a gesture: Bruno thrust his hand into the front of Tim’s trousers and caressed him until Tim drew away and, still holding hands, they ran into the house. I thought I was going to howl, but I didn’t make a sound. I wondered whether I’d ever recover the power of speech. Gasping for breath I turned in little circles in the room, fighting against the need to fall on the floor and writhe. Suddenly, I understood what I must do. I went out into the corridor. It was covered by a heavy, dark red carpet that smothered the sound of steps. But I was taking no chances and tiptoed to the big guest room where we had put Bruno. The door was closed. I still burn with shame when I remember what I did next: I put my ear to the keyhole and heard them. Fucking and moaning. Schmidtie, I knew one of them was buggering the other. What else could it be? I wanted desperately to know who was being buggered—as though that mattered—but I didn’t put my eye to the keyhole. I didn’t dare, I just couldn’t.

  She began to cry, softly and sadly. Her pocketbook was on the little taboret beside her chair. She found her handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. I’m making a spectacle, she whispered, I’m so sorry.

  Her other hand was palm down on the table. Schmidt patted it. What was he to say? All he found was: I am terribly sorry. He added, Let’s have some coffee, and perhaps a brandy. It will do you good.

  No brandy for me, she said. I’ll have a sip of yours if you have one.

  The dining room emptied while they drank coffee until they were the last remaining guests.

  It’s a beautiful warm afternoon. If my ankle weren’t in such bad shape I would suggest walking over to the Tuileries and finding a couple of chairs somewhere in the sun. But I don’t think I can do it; my ankle is worse today than it was yesterday. I’ve got two ideas. One is that we move to the lobby or the back bar. The other, more revolutionary, is that we go up to my suite. It’s one that Mike Mansour keeps all year round. It has a terrace—you can imagine the view—and a large living room if you find the air on the terrace too cool. But I don’t think you will. The afternoon sun is so pleasant.

  She actually laughed. I don’t think it will compromise me to go to your suite. Let’s try the terrace.

  He had called room service and ordered coffee, and this time also a brandy. The thought h
ad occurred to him while the waiter was busy with the tray on the terrace that she might have mentioned her apartment as a less racy alternative to his suite. He dismissed its implications. She was distraught, he was no Mike Tyson, and if his ankle was to be spared, they would have had to take a taxi and face the complications of getting him back to the hotel. No, she had made the right choice: it would have been downright foolish to forgo soaking up the sun, with a magnificent panorama of the great square, the river, and the Left Bank stretching out before them. He raised the snifter and tasted. It’s good, he said, holding the glass out for her, I doubt I’ve drunk any that was better.

  She took a big sip and then another.

  I keep on saying to myself that what happened cannot be repaired, she told him, so I might as well be good to myself. You’re right about the cognac, and you were right to ask me to come up here. Do you wonder why I’ve told you so much, and why I’m going to tell you even more?

  He told the truth: no, he hadn’t; he had thought his questions were ones that someone who had known Tim and liked him very much would naturally ask. And he hoped that she would go on. What he had learned thus far was horrible, but it didn’t explain either Tim’s retirement at such a young age or his death so soon after.

  Oh, Schmidtie, you’re such an adorable old-fashioned square. Let me have another sip from your glass, and I’ll tell it all. I’ll also tell, even though you aren’t curious, why I’ve told you already as much as I have. I think you’re nice and kind. You must have been one of those nice and very square Harvard boys I liked when I was at Radcliffe.

  If I were fifteen years younger, I would have been there, said Schmidt. I certainly was square, and it’s even possible that I was nice. Seeing that she gave no sign of abandoning the snifter, he called room service and asked for two more. Just in case, he told Alice.

  Good planning, Alice replied. My head is turning, but I’ll try to be coherent. As you can imagine—no, you can’t; I couldn’t imagine it myself—I resisted the impulse to burst into that room and curse them and then wake Tommy from his nap and get into the car with him and the au pair and flee. Go somewhere we would be safe. To my father’s house to be with him and my dying mother. Instead, I took a long shower, got dressed normally, and put a pad outside that bedroom door with a message: I expect to see both of you in the library. Then I told the au pair to keep Tommy busy when he got up and, when it was time for his dinner, to drive over to the luncheonette and take him to the movies after they’d eaten. I had noticed that Star Wars was playing when we drove through the town. After that I went into the library and tried to read the paper and keep images of Tim and Bruno out of my head. Time dragged on. Around six, I heard a car on the driveway. That was the au pair and Tommy. Perhaps a half hour later, the cook came in and said she had prepared a cold meal so she could serve it anytime. I told her to lay it out in the kitchen and take the evening off; I would put the food on the table and clean up. That’s right, I was emptying the house of witnesses. Not to my crime, I could see that the roles were inverted, but to my shame. At last—it must have been past seven—I heard them on the stairs and then in the hall and then they came in the room. They too had taken showers. Anyway, their hair was wet. They sat down, and Tim spoke. They had been asleep; it wasn’t a case of not wanting to face me. But they were both prostrate before me. They had been so very careful, had tried so hard to be discreet and to preserve our life together. They knew it was the worst imaginable time for me to find out, but they hoped I would understand that it was grief and despair that made them lose their heads and fall into each other’s arms. At that point Bruno broke in and said the same things all over again. It was grotesque: Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Do you want to know something strange? I did believe that they had been unstrung by grief, that otherwise I might never have found out. I was so naïve, I knew so little about that side of life, but they had managed to fool even my father, who is anything but naïve! Then Tim said that although the timing was appalling it might be altogether best that I know everything. They’d been lovers almost from the first, and they really loved each other. I asked Tim whether this had always been so, whether he knew he was homosexual—I used that word because I couldn’t bring myself to say “gay”—when he was taking me out, and later when he began to sleep with me and asked me to marry him, and he said no, not at that time, it had been a part of him since senior year at high school and afterward, but he took out girls too, and by the time he got to W & K he was sure that he had changed enough to be serious about me. I interrupted him there and asked whether after we had gotten together he was still going with men. He hesitated and answered very slowly and very carefully as though he were walking on eggs that it happened occasionally, there was a boy in the office with whom he’d gone to bars and to baths, and that it began to happen more often after Tommy was born, he didn’t really know why. He wanted to and couldn’t help himself. That was really it. I had become more distant, so completely a mother. That might have been a factor.

  I felt life was draining out of me, but I couldn’t cry. Perhaps it was because of Bruno. His presence seemed to me atrocious, obscene, and I said to Tim, Does he have to be sitting here? Tell him to get out.

  They both began to talk at once, as though they had rehearsed, about how all three of us were in it together, how Bruno loved Sophie and loved Tommy, and loved me too, and how Tim and he had no secrets. I was too beaten down to protest. So I asked, knowing that I was repeating myself, and that it was a stupid question anyway because there was no doubt about the answer, Do I understand that all the while you were having sex with me you were also having sex with men? How could you? Tim replied that he liked sex, and he liked me, but he really needed the other thing. The way he needed Bruno and couldn’t live without him. Haven’t you heard of husbands who have affairs and wives who have affairs? Do you think those husbands and wives don’t have sex with each other? I nodded, which was a lie. Of course I knew they did. Yes, you do, Tim replied, just think of some of our friends. It’s all the same thing. And what about Bruno, I asked, now that you’re with Bruno, do you and he have sex with other men as well? Once again they both talked and talked. It boiled down to how they had realized right away that they were in love—that was Bruno’s expression—and how that was all-important to them, so now they were monogamous, faithful to each other. Much later, when I was less naïve, I asked them whether they were lying to me. From what I had been told, promiscuity was the rule. I was to hear a lot on that subject from both of them, all sorts of explanations of how gay love doesn’t need to be exclusive because it’s a celebration of the body, and on and on. But that did not apply to a relationship such as theirs. As I said, all that was later. For the moment I felt sick, or perhaps dead, anyway more and more as if I weren’t there, as if that conversation had been taking place elsewhere, which didn’t prevent me from seeing and hearing, but in some other place from where I was. After a long while I interrupted and asked Tim what we were going to do now that all this had happened. Were he and Bruno going to leave first and let me and Tommy and the au pair make our way to Paris or my father’s house, I hadn’t yet decided which, after they had left. Or would they let us leave first? Once again Tim and Bruno had an answer ready to go—they were already like those married couples who answer every question together, as though it had been asked of both, and always say “we” instead of “I.” The gist was that we mustn’t expose Tommy to a second loss and for his sake we must all four stay together. We really can, Tim assured me. They didn’t want it to be known that they were gay; for all sorts of reasons they weren’t coming out, they would continue to be discreet, please let’s avoid a divorce or even a separation. What about him, I asked, pointing at Bruno. Does he have anything to say about it. He agrees, Tim told me. You know he loves Tommy. But is he going to be around, I insisted. The answer was Yes, couldn’t we go on as we have before, with Bruno like a part of the family? Tommy would miss Bruno. He and Bruno love each other. At that point, in that
beautiful baritone of his, Bruno chimed in about how much Tommy meant to him, how he admired and loved me like a sister, and how we had achieved a rare equilibrium. The way he put it was so elegant that I didn’t begin to feel nauseated right then. That came later. But I did say that I wanted Tim out of my bedroom. My husband agreed with such alacrity that even then, in my beaten-down, abject state, I realized I had made myself ridiculous. I don’t know how they kept themselves from laughing. So we packed up, Bruno helping as though nothing had happened, and traveled together to Paris. In retrospect I see that the loss of Sophie was a blow that had anesthetized me. If I hadn’t been so numb, I can’t imagine I would have stayed so eerily calm after finding out, just like that, one sunny afternoon, that Tim was a goddamn queer who’d been fucking Bruno and God knows how many other men before and since—and what kind of men!—and then getting into my bed. Probably fucking them even when he was making me pregnant with Sophie and Tommy.

  She was crying and, it seemed to Schmidt, shivering from cold. Let’s go inside, he said, the temperature has dropped. You’ll be more comfortable. He led her by the hand to the sofa, closed the glass doors to the terrace, and, somewhat embarrassed to be calling room service again, ordered coffee, petits fours, and two cognacs.

  You’re getting me drunk, she said morosely. No, I’m getting me drunk, and yes, I don’t care, and no, you don’t care. I’ll just keep talking. Do you think it’s worse to find out your husband is sleeping around with your girlfriends, his secretary, the au pair—the mention of sleeping with the au pair stung Schmidt who had done just that and had been caught by both his wife and daughter—with call girls, and on and on, or to find out he’s a pansy? Banging boys in gay baths! Getting them to fuck him! What do you think?