Schmidt Steps Back

by Louis Begley

  After the main course had been cleared, Mr. Mansour proposed a toast to the success of the new project: Gil had moved beyond thinking about a film based on Joe’s new novel to a full commitment. He was going to make the film! Right, Gil?

  Gil nodded. Subject to the usual outs. I look forward to it, if it can be done.

  If I back a project, there is no way it can’t be done, announced Mr. Mansour, wagging the right index at Mr. Blackman. Or am I wrong?

  Gil smiled and said nothing.

  Canning, who until then had uttered only his usual monosyllables, suddenly piped up: Speak for yourselves! I haven’t moved beyond thinking. I wouldn’t know how.

  Touché! Mr. Mansour laughed. Of course, I’ll be deeply involved, I’ve already shared insights with Gil, and I’m going to share them with you, Joe. I see the screenplay as a collaboration between a great novelist and a great filmmaker—with my input. I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that they will be essential. You have Chocolate Kisses and its huge success as an example. It’s Gil’s and my joint effort.

  That was one of Mr. Mansour’s claims that Gil rejected vehemently, though not in his presence.

  The worry beads had been inactive. Now they went clickety-clack at their accustomed speed.

  Joe and Gil, Mr. Mansour continued, listen up slowly. One issue we have to visit is how we lighten the mood of Joe’s book. You know, so that it will play in Peoria! The question is, Joe, the question is, why are people in your books so disagreeable?

  Could it be because that’s how people are, Canning replied, or because that’s how I see them? Perhaps both.

  Touché again, conceded Mr. Mansour.

  Caroline, what do you think?

  That Joe is the best!

  Thank you, chère amie! Caroline and I got to be great friends in Paris, but that doesn’t mean she has to agree with me every time. I’ll call the next witness. Schmidtie, what do you think?

  Whatever it was that ailed Mr. Canning must have been contagious. Schmidt answered: Think about what?

  The book, cried Elaine, the book, The Serpent!

  I found it gripping, said Schmidt. Gil gave it to me, and I read it straight through.

  That’s no kind of testimony, Elaine broke in. I’m an investor in this film, and I’m with Mike! Something has got to be done to the plot! Listen slowly, like Mike said: A widowed father—a distinguished lawyer like you, Schmidtie, but living in North Dakota—tells his son who has just graduated from law school that he can live rent free with his great-aunt in her brownstone in Brooklyn while he is clerking for a judge in New York. What Joe could possibly know about North Dakota is another question. Who even cares about North Dakota anyway? I’d move the father to the Hamptons. Anyway, the kid agrees; the great-aunt is thrilled. He lives with her for five years, until she dies. The father is the executor of her estate. Practically everything is to go to the American Red Cross. But the father does the executor thing and discovers there is no money, practically nothing left at all. His son had been robbing the old woman blind ever since he moved in. It gets worse. He had terrorized her! I think she was on to him but didn’t dare to protest or seek help. I got lost in the legal stuff about whether the father was absolutely required to turn the kid in to the police. I don’t know if it matters. The point is that the father makes it clear to the kid that he has figured it all out, and no sooner has he done so than he realizes his own son will try to kill him. Do I have it right so far, Joe?

  Silence.

  All right, it’s your book, but it’s going to be our movie, continued Elaine, and I have to tell you the plot made my flesh crawl. Besides, how can you have a major film without some major romantic interest?

  But, Elaine, Schmidt interrupted, there is a major romantic interest, though maybe not a role for Julia Roberts. The romantic interest is Vincent the anthropologist, the expert on cannibals!

  Well, well, said Canning, we’ve quite a team here. Elaine has got the plot right, and Schmidt has figured out the romantic interest. What do we do now, Mike and Gil? Do we ask them to rewrite my novel, Mike, or are you going to do it yourself?

  Back at home after Mr. Mansour’s dinner, Schmidt wondered why Canning bothered to write those novels. It couldn’t be for money: Schmidt had a pretty good idea that a midlist novelist’s royalties, even combined with what Caroline earned, couldn’t pay for the way they lived. They lived off his insurance company pension and savings. It must be that he wrote in order to people a small corner of the earth with characters as repulsive as himself. Then a more interesting question entered Schmidt’s mind: Could Mr. Mansour have designs on Elaine too, and, if he got Gil out of the way, if he sent him to L.A. or North Dakota, would she be his for the asking? Pas de problème! Look at Caroline! There she was, cool as a cucumber, on best terms with the Egyptian fiend and all the while listening indulgently to her schmuck of a husband.

  Under the influence of these thoughts, which had awakened his sexual hunger, Schmidt found his resolve had weakened. It no longer seemed possible to wait placidly for Alice to call. He had to take action. It took the form of a short fax he sent to her home: June seems difficult for you, but July is almost upon us. Can we see each other then? Weekdays, weekends, anytime at all and anyplace will do. What astonishment and joy the next morning when he found on the fax machine in his kitchen Alice’s reply: Darling Schmidtie, July 14, Bastille Day, is on a Friday. Take me away from the frenzied French! Let’s meet in London on the thirteenth and remain through the following Monday. I’ll bring a little black dress, in case you decide to take me to the theater. Yours in every way, Alice. Facsimile suddenly became his medium of choice. He wrote back: I’m already in seventh heaven. Rendezvous on the thirteenth at the Connaught.

  Why was he so sure of finding an accommodation in that sought-after hotel? He had come to have faith in Mr. Mansour’s secretary. There would be room at the inn for Alice and him even if all the world came to London to be taxed.

  XVI

  THREE AND A HALF WEEKS until the rendezvous in London! Schmidt had never been so lonely, so starved for affection, not even in the weeks following Mary’s death. Then he had been numbed by the long vigil at her sickbed and stupidly busy with the myriad tasks required for the settlement of even a straightforward estate like hers. Trivia took time, time that would otherwise have been spent wallowing in booze and despair. Besides, Charlotte and Jon were at the house every weekend. Together with Charlotte, Schmidt had slogged through the most painful task of all: clearing out Mary’s closets. Except for the few things that either Charlotte wanted or could be given to the brigade of Polish ladies who cleaned the house, all her poor forlorn clothes—dresses, coats, shoes, the inventory of intimate possessions went on and on—were carted off to the East Hampton thrift shop. They burned Mary’s underpants, having been told by the thrift shop that it wouldn’t take them. Then there was Mary’s Toyota. First Charlotte wanted it, and then she didn’t. After what seemed like days of waiting at the Motor Vehicle Department office in Riverhead, Schmidt managed to transfer it into his own name. Then he put it in the garage, never to be used. The real solitude began when all those tasks had been accomplished, when Charlotte returned to her weekend routine of running on the beach and spending what remained of the day with Jon, behind closed doors. They were never at home for meals other than breakfast. Otherwise, they ate out, alone or with friends from the city. Invitations to join them were rare and ungracious. Then came the first quarrels: over the boorish manner in which Riker announced to Schmidt their engagement, Schmidt’s failure to accept the Riker parents’ invitation to Thanksgiving with sufficient alacrity, Charlotte’s rejection of the gift he proposed to make to her of his life estate in the house, and, worst of all, her refusal to wear Mary’s bridal dress or to have her wedding reception at the house in Bridgehampton. Quarrels begat quarrels: he could expect from Charlotte heartache; never company or solace.

  Meanwhile it was becoming clearer than ever to Schmidt that there was no pl
ace for him in the world in which Mary and he had lived so pleasantly during their weekends and vacations. It was a world of powerful editors and literary agents and writers successful enough to own or rent a house in the Hamptons. Large parties, given in honor of publication of books and visits by authors deserving to be so fêted, alternated with intimate dinners nicely calibrated to ensure that peers of the realm dined in the company of peers. Of that realm, Mary had been a natural denizen, a duchess by virtue of her charm, talent, and power. Schmidt had been tolerated as her consort. With her gone, invitations to the little dinners had stopped abruptly. Those to lawn parties, at which marginal agents, junior editors, and midlist writers hoped to rub elbows with their betters, turned into a slow trickle, and then they too stopped. Schmidt knew that in part he was to blame. His prickliness, his professed dislike of small talk, his inability to move graciously from one group of guests to another, were fatal flaws that were not counterbalanced by wealth or success in the law sufficiently well publicized to impress even laymen. He was a retired lawyer and nothing more, a husk. A former partner, to be sure, in a great firm whose name these sophisticated agents, editors, and writers recognized as a center of power, but what kind of a lawyer had he been? Private financings! No hostile takeovers or defenses against the same to his credit? Absent from great First Amendment battles? Nothing could be more boring. He had thought that Lew Brenner, for instance, thrown into this pitiless milieu, would do just fine. He could talk about Arab sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, and barbaric Texans, deals in which billions of dollars and the policies of sovereign states were balanced on the edge of a knife. What could Schmidt talk about? The newest fashions in leveraged leases, the insurance company lawyers he had known, the vast ethical problems raised when he had been called on to opine whether a sale was a true sale or a disguised loan? He reeked of ennui and knew it. On top of that, he would accept invitations, then fail to show or show without having accepted, both venial sins when committed by a peer of the realm, mortal in his already marginal case.

  The apparition of Carrie in his life had moved him into another sphere of existence, the sphere of bliss. Bliss that he had known would vanish like a mirage, even when awkwardly, clumsily he ventured to propose marriage, showed himself ready to be nothing more than a doormat under her feet, or perhaps a stepping-stone to some subsequent more appropriate marriage and higher station. Bliss came to an end as it must, leaving in its wake the mystery of little Albert. And, inevitably, his short-lived happiness had been added to the monstrous inventory of Charlotte’s resentments. There was no doubt: the ever-deeper—he was beginning to fear permanent—estrangement from his daughter was his life’s principal liability. On the asset side of his balance sheet he put seeing Carrie and little Albert daily and babysitting with Albert whenever he wasn’t in Jason’s and Bryan’s way, but that was a rapidly depreciating asset. They would be leaving his pool house in the early fall. Without a word having been spoken, he had reached an understanding with Carrie. Its gist: keep it low-key. Let Jason stop by Schmidt’s kitchen to talk about how the marina was doing—better than Jason had expected—and progress in refurbishing the house, into which all too soon the young family would be moving. But Schmidt needn’t reciprocate and make his way to the pool-house kitchen to drink a Coors with Jason. The implications of that understanding for the future saddened Schmidt. But the future was still only around the corner. He need not try to deal with it now. And apart from that? He could claim Gil and Elaine Blackman’s friendship and, of course, Mike Mansour’s. How often could he let it be known to the Blackmans that he was available for a meal? And were there limits even to Mr. Mansour’s patience and hospitality? Of late it seemed to Schmidt that there were none. He marveled at his good fortune.

  The major new asset on his balance sheet was the work he was doing for the foundation in New York, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. He thought that in the fall he would add Monday afternoon, although with Shirley’s help he was already carrying a full week’s workload. You’ve got the moxie of a young W & K partner, Mike Mansour had told him, not a broken-down retiree. Had he been Sy, Schmidt would have purred to hear this compliment. He had not forgotten Carrie’s report of what Mr. Mansour had said after Schmidt had accepted the foundation job: Schmidtie can do it, but maybe he’s gotten used to not working. He might quit or something. That piece of gossip had come to her, of course, from Jason and had made Schmidt wonder whether he had not set himself up for yet another failure by taking the job Mike had offered apparently in spite of those doubts. While he was at his foundation office, talking on the phone to the heads of the Life Centers and translating their eccentric English into his own, attending to correspondence, even being grilled by Mike’s vizier Holbein, he would naturally forget his loneliness. For lunch, he would have a sandwich in the foundation’s cafeteria or at his desk or, more often, walk over to the club and sit at the members’ table. The chitchat there almost invariably concerned things and people he knew nothing about. He would have liked, he told himself, to get to know the swarm of young people employed by Mansour Industries in the building where the foundation had its office, but he had concluded it was a lost cause. When in contact with them, for instance standing in line for his sandwich or venturing to share their table in the cafeteria, he couldn’t help being conscious of their lack of interest in him, and the unspoken question: Who is this relic? It was equally true that, having looked at them closely, he was just as glad to leave things as they were. To keep his distance. These traders and accountants, Mike Mansour’s bean counters—managers and engineers employed by companies in the Mansour Industries group were tucked away in the provinces of the empire and seldom made an appearance at headquarters—were young men (their female colleagues apparently ate at their desks) uniformly coatless, ballpoint pens protruding from the pockets of their white shirts, excessively wide neckties fastened at midpoint to those shirts by gold pins, their cell phones holstered at the belt and sometimes connected to the ear by a variety of gizmos, with loud voices and accents of neither Syosset nor Oyster Bay but boroughs and towns less frequented by Schmidt. Aha! triumphed Schmidt’s conscience. Why don’t you come out and say it, say they’re Jews! Immediately Schmidt rose for the defense: Objection! Schmidtie is no anti-Semite. They’re unattractive wonks, there is no reason that Schmidtie should like them! And so perhaps they were, but Schmidt doubted whether, with Mr. Blackman sitting in judgment, the accused would be acquitted or let off with a warning.

  City evenings were lonely as well. The only W & K partner with whom he was still on easy terms was Lew Brenner, to whom paradoxically he had not been close before. The guests Mary and he had entertained at home in the city—it seemed to him they had been legion—were not much use either. For they too had been Mary’s professional friends. The others, college and law school classmates, executives of client companies, he felt no urge to call them, to listen to surprised greetings, to announce, Hey, it’s me, Schmidtie, I’m back, back from the dead! Instead, he went to the movies across the street from Lincoln Center or to the ballet and afterward ate a hamburger at O’Neal’s. A production of Lohengrin closed the season at the opera. He had felt lucky to have caught it and, in obeisance to his and Mary’s former habits, had dinner during the intermission at the opera’s fancy restaurant.

  He was therefore astonished and initially pleased, too pleased for his taste, when, upon returning to Bridgehampton late one Thursday evening, he saw in the neatly sorted and stacked mail on the kitchen table an invitation to the Fourth of July party to be given on July 3, the fourth itself being a Tuesday, and so logically the evening when the multitudes would be rushing back to the city. Bill Gibson, a literary superagent famous for wresting seven-figure advances from publishers in the U.S., and smaller but still eye-popping ones in Europe, for books that didn’t always earn them out, was the host. Schmidt remembered that he had once had a sort of personal connection with Gibson. In those days when they were still likely to meet regularly at literary
gatherings, the agent, instead of looking through him or avoiding his eye, would spontaneously engage him in conversation. The reason? High finance and financial combinations interested Gibson; he was under the impression that Schmidt was the designer of devilishly complex schemes, not merely an artisan skilled in giving them contractual expression, which was closer to the truth. But at least two years had passed since he had seen Gibson, certainly since they had talked, and he couldn’t remember having been invited to his Fourth of July party since the summer after Mary died. This invitation had obviously been sent by mistake; a secretary had used an old list, compiled before Schmidt had been dropped. An envelope addressed to Mr. and Mrs. would be the dead giveaway. He fished it out of the waste-basket and was puzzled to find it addressed to him alone. Too bad, he would send his regrets. That was what he told Mr. Blackman the next day when they met for lunch at O’Henry’s, putting what he thought was a humorous spin on it: the automatism of secretaries in this day of computer-generated lists and so forth.