Schmidt Steps Back

by Louis Begley

  Now? she asked. Now is impossible. And we’ve just seen each other!

  That hurt, but he brushed it off.

  All the more reason to rush over, answered Schmidt, but I guess we can’t do what’s impossible.

  As he said that, he remembered from high school French that if you want to say that you’ll try very hard, you say je ferai l’impossible, I’ll do the impossible. But French class was one thing, and courting Alice another. Without missing a beat—anyway that’s how he thought it came out—he continued: I’ve another idea. I must take another look at my Eastern European charges, especially the Polish office, which I haven’t seen. How would it be if I came to Paris for the weekend of May twenty-sixth?

  May twenty-sixth, May twenty-sixth, she repeated, oh but Thursday, May twenty-fifth, is Ascension Day. Everything in France shuts down from Wednesday until Monday. We call that a pont—a bridge—an extra goody. I’ve accepted an invitation from friends, in St. Tropez. I’m also going to drop in on my father in Antibes.

  Oh, said Schmidt.

  Wait, I need to take a look at my calendar. Yes, the following Sunday, June fourth, is Pentecost Sunday. I think the publishing house will close on Monday, June fifth. If I can swing it, I’ll stay in St. Tropez through that weekend.

  That was a strong dose of Catholicism for Schmidt to absorb. She was a Protestant, just like he. Why were these holidays important? Don’t be a dope, because they gave an excuse to Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Jews alike to stay away from the office! Religion wasn’t the issue: the question was, as Mr. Mansour might say, what plans one made to take advantage of it. Clearly, none of Alice’s was sufficiently elastic to include him, not even in a supporting role. No, there was no use fighting city hall or shadowy friends with houses in St. Cloud or St. Tropez.

  I have another idea, he said. Perhaps this one will work better. What if I came to see you around May fifteenth?

  Alice’s calendar was consulted once more.

  That would be lovely, my darling Schmidtie. And it’s sooner!

  Then she asked about Oklahoma City and whether it was true it was the same Muslims who had tried to blow up the World Trade Center, and he told her that for the moment no one knew.

  They brought the pizzas that Carrie liked so much and had accustomed Schmidt to like, a bowl of spinach and arugula salad, and an apple tart she said came from Sesame. Also bottled water, the name of which was new to Schmidt. He went down to the cellar and got two bottles of a Chianti. They were going to eat in the kitchen, continuing, he realized, a tradition that started with the first dinner he had had at home with Carrie. He let her set the table. It was also their custom to use the best tablecloth, napkins, silver, china, and glasses even though it wasn’t the dining room. She remembered, of course, where everything was. It could have been her house, Schmidt thought.

  Carrie was sticking to her mineral water, which, as a concession to Schmidt that he didn’t fail to notice, she was drinking out of a glass. He poured gin and tonics for Jason and Bryan, hesitated between a gin martini and a bourbon for himself, but decided in favor of the martini, fixing it meticulously before sitting down in his rocking chair. He could not keep his eyes off Carrie. So pregnant! So beautiful! Her belly stuck out—the leotard she wore accentuating the magnificent hillock. And the other protuberances, the golden apples that were her breasts! All three men in this kitchen had made love to her, in his own case wildly, with nothing barred: her mouth, her vagina, and her anus explored with equal freedom. He had no reason to think that Bryan and Jason had been less favored. Now the three sometime tenants of Carrie’s body, one still resident and two evicted, were about to eat their pizza and drink their wine peaceably and exclaim over the fruit tart. How could that be? Was a generalized decline in conventional American mores to blame for their not being at one another’s throats? Schmidt was not inclined to think so; it was rather that Carrie, like a trainer of big cats, knew how to make them sit on their stools and hardly even growl.

  A question addressed to him ended the reverie.

  Schmidtie, Carrie was saying, wake up! Your jet lag must be something else! The doctor said yesterday that if the baby doesn’t come by June twentieth, he’ll induce it. What do you think of that? Are you going to be around? Jason and I would like you to be there. The other question is, can we stay on in the pool house when we bring the baby home from the hospital? We have an eye on this house out in Three Mile Harbor that’s near the marina and just right, but it needs work. So if we can stay here meantime, we’ll make an offer on it.

  How could you doubt even for a moment, addressing both Carrie and Jason, that I want you and baby here?

  He was going directly against the great financier’s advice. Having heard of the plan to let Carrie and Jason use the pool house, Mr. Mansour had warned Schmidt to be sure they were out before the baby was born. Otherwise, he said, they’ll never leave! Pax Mike! This was a risk he would take.

  And yes, he continued, I’ll make sure I’m here in June. I wouldn’t want to be in one of those godforsaken places where Mike has his foundation’s offices when this young man arrives.

  Jason spoke up: Thank you so much! I think you’ll like the house we want to buy, and being able to leave Carrie and the baby here while Bryan and I work on it will really help.

  Sure will, Albert! piped up Bryan. You’ve always been a great guy! The best!

  Schmidt had told the little fuckup innumerable times to call him Schmidtie—unless he preferred to call him Mr. Schmidt—and it was unclear to Schmidt whether the use of “Albert” was an expression of respect or a safe way to needle him.

  Carrie said nothing. Instead she got up, put her arms around Schmidt, and kissed him.

  There is one more thing Carrie and I would like to know, said Jason after she sat down. We would like to name the little guy Albert. Would that be all right with you?

  Yes, he said, of course, I’m happy and honored, but what will people call this poor little guy? Not Al, I hope.

  We think we can make Albert stick. If not we’ll settle for Bert—don’t you think that’s still pretty good? We can’t call him Schmidtie. No one would understand!

  IX

  HE REVISITED the foundation’s center in Bucharest and from there went to Warsaw for an introductory meeting with the staff. He had never been to Poland before. It existed for him only as a collage made up of Chopin played by Rubenstein or Horowitz, images drawn from John Hersey’s The Wall and Leon Uris’s Mila 18, the endless reverberations of Auschwitz, the destruction of Warsaw’s old town during the uprising in 1944 followed by its lovingly faithful restoration, and Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement. When the director of the Polish Life Center asked him what he would like to see in Warsaw after the second day’s morning meeting at the office had concluded, leaving the rest of the day free, he said he would leave the choices up to her but thought the old town should be included in the visit. She decided they would start by having lunch there. They were seated in the back of the restaurant she had told him was the best in the old town, a long, narrow, and somber room. He let her order lunch and listened to her life story. She was born in a small town near Kraków where her parents, refugees from the eastern part of Poland that had become part of Ukraine, had settled. Of modest background—the father did carpentry, and the mother was a nurse—they had made all the needed sacrifices to enable her to attend the ancient university in Kraków, where she got her degree in modern languages. No, she hadn’t studied in England or the U.S.; she learned her excellent English in high school and later at the university. She had also had to learn Russian as the principal modern language, but she and her friends had been on a mental strike against anything to do with the Soviets. They never learned it well and managed to forget what they had learned, which she now knew was a pity. The rest of her career Schmidt knew, having looked at her personnel file: a job in publishing in Warsaw, activity in the Solidarity movement that led to six months in jail, odd jobs, then, after the first
free elections in postwar Poland, an editorial position in the newly founded daily that would become Poland’s leading newspaper. It was from there that Mike Mansour had recruited her. That was where the file stopped, but she told him that she was married to a man she’d known since the university who taught mathematics at a high school in Warsaw and created crossword puzzles on the side. They had no children. A nice man who had long ago stopped sleeping with her. No sex! Not because he had someone else, but because he had lost interest. Can you imagine such a thing?

  Schmidt answered truthfully that he couldn’t, not if one lived with a woman as attractive as she.

  She thanked him, and they clinked glasses. He was no longer surprised to find himself drinking vodka out of a carafe nestled in an ice bucket, rather than wine or beer. Vodka had been the principal beverage at dinners a month earlier in Ukraine and also at the previous evening’s dinner. But this was lunch, and, the first carafe having been emptied, Pani Danuta summoned the waiter and ordered another. Without being prompted, she went on to say that she and her husband had considered divorce but were held back by realities of lodging: they had an apartment they liked, which she would logically be the one to keep, but how was her husband to find something affordable near enough to the high school? Such an apartment didn’t exist. And then there was the more general problem of money. At the foundation, she earned more than he. That made a better life for them both. She didn’t want to deprive him of that—after all, he was an old friend. Didn’t Schmidt agree? He said he did and raised his glass to her. They clinked. As for sex, she added, she made do.

  She proposed that after lunch they visit the Łazienki Palace and its park, which had suffered little damage during the uprising. It’s mostly eighteenth-century architecture and very beautiful, she said. Feeling light-headed from the drink and the unusually warm and humid weather, Schmidt acquiesced. After a taxi ride to the park, they began their walk, which quickly seemed endless to Schmidt, as Pani Danuta kept up a learned commentary on the various royal buildings as she leaned heavily on his arm. Schmidt wondered whether the reason was habit, fatigue, or the wish to acquaint him with the heft and contour of her breast.

  It was almost four when they reached the street. She got a cab instantly. When he suggested that he would drop her off at her apartment she said it was too far out of his way. They should instead go to his hotel, which was well air-conditioned, and have a drink at the bar. Later she would take the tram from there that connected to another one that took her right to her street corner. Once again, Schmidt acquiesced. As soon as they got to the hotel, she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. He visited the toilet as well and afterward waited for her on a banquette in the bar that indeed was an oasis of fresh cool air and quiet. When she returned, they settled down to a bout of vodka drinking even more serious than in the restaurant. She had ordered a liter bottle instead of a carafe and, having asked for his permission, which he granted, asked the waiter to bring canapés of smoked salmon and hard-boiled eggs and something she called head cheese, pieces of meat in a jelly. He wondered at her appetite, like that of a man accustomed to physical labor, and at her metabolism. Somehow she burned off all that food and the booze. He would have bet that there was little fat on her tall and big-boned frame. On the whole he liked her face. Plain, with even features, and blue-gray large eyes. Her hair was straight and blond. She sensed that he had inspected her and inquired: What do you think? I’m not bad? Do I pass the test?

  With flying colors, he answered.

  She shook her head. It’s the first time you’ve looked at me. But that’s all right. When I told you I managed to get sex, I should have told you that it’s almost always with Americans or Englishmen who come to Warsaw for a few days. They don’t have VD, and they don’t spread gossip. What do you think about that?

  I think it’s very reasonable.

  Then why don’t you invite me to go with you upstairs?

  Ensconced the next day in his seat on the afternoon airplane for Paris, Schmidt asked himself for the umpteenth time an apparently unanswerable question. What had possessed him to spend the end of the afternoon, much of the evening and the night, and Saturday morning in bed with Pani Danuta? Her take-charge attitude did not abandon her in bed, her ideas of what could be done surpassing Carrie’s in their amplitude. Over dinner, she expostulated on the wretched state of Polish television—only one private channel, hopelessly vulgar and commercial, as bad as the private Czech channel—and the president of the Polish national bank who used to be the minister of finance. Sure, he knew how to say all the right things about capitalism and free market forces, but he was a Tartuffe. Both subjects were of considerable interest to Schmidt, in his official Life Center capacity; he wished she had spoken about them as interestingly at the meetings in her office.

  He had planned to leave Warsaw on Sunday, taking a flight that got him to Paris at nine in the evening, after a series of weekend meetings with that hypocritical central banker, the mayor of Warsaw, and a gaggle of less important officials. However, on Saturday morning, when Danuta checked the messages at the foundation, she learned that the appointments had all been canceled on Friday, late in the afternoon, at a time when for obvious reasons she had turned off her cell phone. The excuses ranged from an unexpected summons by the president of the republic all the way to a violent attack of stomach flu. There was little doubt in Schmidt’s mind that most of the cancellations were in fact due to the exceptionally beautiful weather, a belief that Danuta did little to challenge. Whatever the reason, one thing was certain: since there wouldn’t be any meetings, he was leaving on the first available flight. That turned out to be one that got him to Paris that evening at seven. He had agreed with Alice that they would see each other on Monday, May 15, the date she had approved. Should he let her know that he was arriving instead on Saturday? If Danuta hadn’t been in his bed, wolfing down brioches smeared with butter and honey, he would have called Alice as soon as the concierge confirmed his reservation. But Danuta’s presence there could hardly be denied or overlooked; indeed, fortified by breakfast she was soon astride him. By the time they finished and had washed, it was time for lunch. How could he fail to invite her? And then he put his foot down: no they couldn’t go back to his room. Over her objections and assurances that there was plenty of time before he had to leave for the airport, he put her in a taxi and gave the driver money for the fare.

  Then he rushed to his room and called Alice. No answer. Wasn’t that just as well? Wasn’t there something monstrous and impudent about asking to see her that very evening? “See her”! What a paltry euphemism for what he was interested in! An interval, allowing for purification, was in order. But how long? Twenty-four or forty-eight hours? Should he call on Sunday morning, explain the change of schedule, and ask whether they could have lunch or dinner together later in the day? That was the twenty-four-hour solution. The more virtuous one required postponing the call until Monday morning. It was a conundrum. He solved it by leaving a message for Alice, saying he was arriving late that evening, and would explain the change of plans. Would she please call him at the hotel?

  There were no messages waiting for him in Paris. This time he had remembered to write down in his pocket calendar the instructions for retrieving messages left for him in Bridgehampton and in the city. There weren’t any. He unpacked, and was about to take a shower when the need to call Alice overwhelmed him. There was no answer. And she wasn’t at home when he called the next morning shortly after nine or when he tried again at noon. This time he left a message. He had arrived in Paris sooner than expected, and was at the hotel. As soon as he had hung up he realized what a stupid thing to say that was. So he called again, and said he was going out for a long walk but would call the hotel to check for messages. Could they have dinner? If not he would see her tomorrow. It was almost lunchtime, but he was too nervous and oddly impatient to sit down for a stately meal at the hotel restaurant, or order at the hotel bar. The previous time he had been i
n Paris his injured ankle had prevented him from taking long walks. Nothing prevented him now. He crossed Pont de la Concorde, and marched interminably first all the way to the place du Panthéon, and then, doubling back, to Montmartre. He took the cable car there to the tiny Square Nadar, got out, contemplated the white mass of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica looming to the right, and sat down on a bench. The view of the city was unbeatable, but his old nemesis, blisters, had formed where the back of the shoe rubs against the tendon. They hurt and, he supposed, they would bleed. He was asking himself whether to ask the hotel to send a radio car to pick him up when a taxi pulled up at the sidewalk. An Asian couple toting guidebooks and a camera got out. He bounded toward the still-open door, and, once inside, gave the driver the name of his hotel.

  There was no message from Alice waiting at the hotel, but she called at dinnertime to say she had just returned from a weekend with friends in the country. If he was free, and hadn’t eaten, they could have dinner together.

  At my hotel? he asked.

  Yes, the food is so good, and so are the memories.

  They did not make love after dinner that Sunday as he had half hoped. Not tonight, she told him, soon after they sat down at table, we do have tomorrow, don’t we, and perhaps a few more days. She had told him she was born in 1945. Therefore, she was fifty. If she had been a few years younger, he might have thought the obstacle was her period. It was too bad, but he was grateful that she had made clear right away how the evening would end. There would now be twenty-four hours of additional purification, and he did not need to spend the time they were at dinner thinking of her as a redoubt he must prepare to storm and take. She was, he was finding, as splendid as when he had discovered her one month earlier, almost to the day, when he called on her at her apartment on rue St. Honoré. Her physical beauty had never been in question, not since the day he danced with her at her wedding reception, but now he was noticing so much that had eluded his attention earlier: the enchanting grace of her every gesture, her willingness to laugh, the simplicity and ease with which she questioned the maître d’hôtel about the recipe for the cold tomato soup they were having, instantly charming that stolid functionary. He admired the way she dressed. The trousers were the ones she had worn to lunch on their first Sunday together. The top too was an old friend; she had worn it when he came to dinner at her house. But the jacket, white and summery, was new to him, perfect for the exceptionally warm day that was ending. She spent little on her clothes, that seemed clear, and he asked himself whether she had less money than one would have expected of Tim Verplanck’s widow. In that case, it would be a joy to put some wind in her sails. But it was just as likely that she knew her own talent for mixing and matching, for attaining ineffable chic with small means.