About Schmidt

by Louis Begley

  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.

  Schmidt felt his heart pound. Gil was going to offer him work: ask that he negotiate the financing for his production company’s next movie deal. Or some sort of consultancy—if only it wasn’t a purely legal job. Then he could take it without running afoul of the no-practice rules of the W & K retirement plan!

  No dice. All Gil had to offer was advice to be endured patiently. Isn’t that man DeForrest who runs Wood & King your friend? Can’t you work something out with him? If they don’t want to redistribute partnership percentages, why shouldn’t you go back as a partner on salary? A sort of senior adviser?

  Schmidt laughed.

  It’s too late for that. Too many irreversible steps have been taken. I have bargained for a pretty decent deal by W & K standards, I have no clients left—they too have been redistributed and seem quite happy. Where would I live in the city? Let’s talk about something cheerful: like the Blackman children!

  We’ll do the children in due course. You have a problem. Quite seriously, Schmidtie, isn’t there anything you want to do? How about a foundation? Even better, go on some boards. What’s the name of that lawyer with bad skin who raised money for Reagan? That’s what he has done.

  You’ve put your finger on my problem! All I’ve done is work for W & K. I am a product nobody needs. That’s why you can’t get me back on the shelf. I have thought about foundations. And even if there were some harmless small outfit that would hire me, I am not sure I’d go for it! In the first place, there is the practical angle: it would cost me more to move back to the city and take such a job than it would pay. More important, I’ve always disliked charities and the sort of people who run them. It’s my vision of hell. You raise money and set aside a fat slice for salaries and overhead. The next thing you know, you have to invent programs so that what’s left can be spent on them. Then da capo! Jaw-breaking boredom!

  Seeing Gil’s blond face darken, Schmidt added with alacrity: I don’t mean all not-for-profits, for instance not the home for actors with Alzheimer’s you support, that’s quite useful, and I don’t dislike all foundation presidents, just most of them. The simple truth is just as I said—nobody wants me. Not my firm and neither foundations nor boards. I haven’t had the right extracurricular activities, so I don’t have the right profile!

  Schmidtie, what you don’t have is the right attitude!

  Believe me. I am like some guy on a bus who got up to pee and comes back to find that his seat has been taken, along with every other one. What can he do? Get off? You know what that means in the case of the one and only bus ride. It’s better to look stupid and hang on to a strap. What do I care if I look stupid!

  You certainly shouldn’t have gone to pee while your pal DeForrest was getting himself elected presiding partner of your firm. I’ve never understood it. You as much as told me the job could have been yours; all you had to do was to say you wanted it. Then you would be running the firm and asking your partners whether their clients or anybody else needs them!

  Schmidt salted his French fries. He had been picking at them daintily, with his fingers, as though he really meant to leave them on his plate. They weren’t bad. To hell with abstinence. He decided he would eat them, down to the last one. What would he get in return for denying himself a little fat? Sometimes Gil’s memory was more irritating than charming. One could go for months without seeing him, and he would take the conversation up just where it had ended, remembering tidbits one wished had been forgotten or never mentioned.

  That’s precisely it. DeForrest wanted the job. He wanted it more than I. In fact, I’m not sure I had a reason for wanting it. I might have only wanted to be sure I could get it. That’s not enough.

  And DeForrest?

  He had this ambition to be presiding partner for years; at times he seemed quite childish about it. Also, he had gotten rather tired of practicing law. It’s something that happens to lots of lawyers, but it hadn’t happened to me. So it was natural he should get the job. Besides, he had all sorts of ideas about what should be done—quite a manifesto. I had no program—I guess I would have just tried to keep things as they were.

  What would have been wrong with that? You always liked that firm, and you seemed to make enough money. Do you wish now you had been less accommodating?

  Not really. DeForrest might have put up a fight and won. That would have been very tough on me and bad for the firm. Anyway, I would have left just the same, at the same time, and I would be in the same spot now.

  Schmidt was stuck with this answer. What was the use of admitting that he had stood aside because Jack DeForrest had told him over and over they would each have what they wanted most? Schmidtie, you want to shape the practice and that’s what you should do, leave the administrative headaches to me, you don’t like that stuff. An unofficial, happy duumvirate. It hadn’t worked out that way, though; there was no sharing with Jack. Overnight he had been diminished, and it escaped no one that something had gone wrong: Schmidt remained just as he had been, with his own clients and his own shrinking practice—for the likes of Riker to carp at.

  He smiled at Gil and helped himself to half of what remained in the bottle.

  Let’s sound that cheerful note. How are the sublime Blackman girls?

  Still working hard at their dead-end magazine jobs. Refusing to be grown-ups. Lisa is without a boyfriend and becoming frantic about it. Nina has found a new one who doesn’t earn a living and never will. To be precise, he is having his voice repositioned—from baritone to tenor, because he thinks he looks more like a tenor. By an Albanian coach! And his father is an Orthodox priest in Scranton! I wonder what the paternal voice is like. Lisa and Nina haven’t stopped playing with dolls. Perhaps they had too many dolls’ tea sets.

  And Elaine’s kid?

  Schmidt had forgotten her name, something that never happened to Gil.

  Lilly. Lovely Lilly. No change. She’s a harmless, dull child. I wish she spent more time with her father. It would make it easier for Elaine and me to travel. His girlfriends are practically her age! I tell Elaine that’s built-in company for Lilly and should make it easier for him to take care of his daughter. She doesn’t see it that way. Why do you and I always carry on about our children like a couple of barnyard hens?

  Because we love them.

  No, it’s guilt. I have a reason—I abandoned mine and their mom and have lived with silly Lilly and her mom, so I can’t grow up and act like the father of grown-up women. But you? You and poor Mary were always perfect, and at least there you have got what you deserved—the beautiful, intelligent, and completely successful Charlotte! Any news?

  She told me last weekend that she is getting married. No surprise there: to Jon Riker.

  Ah, Schmidtie, how right and how wonderful! Your family has been reconstituted! I shouldn’t have had to drag this out of you.

  I was going to tell you but we got bogged down in my sorrows.

  What a relief! Both of them have real, grown-up jobs, and they are getting married instead of playing house! I was wrong—you don’t need a job, you have one! You will be the indispensable baby-sitter! I assume that Mary knew. That must have made her very happy. Elaine will call you. She will be thrilled. And a little envious!

  In fact, I d
on’t know whether Mary knew. I rather think they made up their minds afterward. And the truth is that I haven’t taken the news well. We’ve had a sort of quiet but deadly tiff, and I don’t know how to end it.

  Tell me about it—everything.

  Pride and a shared preference for dryness in discourse: Schmidt could not have brought himself to tell Gil that what had happened to their friendship made him suffer, or that for a moment he had hoped to work for him somehow. Everything else was fair game; one accomplice confessing to the other. In consequence, they were often indiscreet. Thus Schmidt had told Gil about Corinne. And Gil, newly famous and newly rich, had come to Schmidt, although Schmidt had been the best man at his wedding and it wasn’t Schmidt’s sort of work, to say, I deserve to be happy and instead I am wretched, I must divorce Ann, handle it for me. Schmidt negotiated the arrangements with more zeal than if his own money and rights to children had been on the line, obtaining a perfect success, and wasn’t surprised that Ann never spoke to him or to Mary again.