by Louis Begley
Perhaps you think about the girl when you do it.
You’re wrong. That breaks your concentration and stops you dead in your tracks! I believe it’s something very healthy: the girl has made me more interested in the activity. I feel better about my old carcass. That must be the reason.
Then what’s wrong? It sounds quite ideal. Or does she want you to divorce Elaine?
She says she knows I’m too old for her. Of course, I’ve told her that I will never leave Elaine. I don’t just love Elaine—I like our life together. The girl is certainly smart enough to understand that.
She may not believe you. Anyway, there seems to be a category of women who don’t mind living with men who are old enough to be their fathers. Particularly when they are glamorous and rich, like you. There are lots of examples.
Sure, but usually they’re older than my girl or a little crazy.
Is she the latter?
I don’t think so. I think she is just a nice, oversexed kid.
Then I ask again, what’s wrong?
The duplicity. I don’t have an unmixed reputation as far as fidelity is concerned, but I don’t deserve it. You might say that I’ve only been unfaithful to Elaine in moments of distraction. Never in a way that made me shut her off from what I do and think about every day. If only I could bring the girl to the house to be the number-two wife!
Elaine might like that.
She’d hate it. So would Lilly—and Nina and Lisa. You know that those two are crazy about Elaine. There would be a solid front against me!
Like the Maginot Line, right? Then maybe the only solution is to stop. If the girl is so intelligent, and you have explained everything to her, she should understand. You could even introduce her to somebody more suitable—for instance, a younger me!
But I don’t want to stop! That’s like saying I should tear up a flower bed. If I put the problem of duplicity aside, which I can’t, I’ve got something happening to me that’s quite marvelous. I’ve been transformed into a brand-new man, admired and desired for some qualities I can’t even see, and this by a girl who is like a daydream, except that she is absolutely real! You know the normal me: important and self-important, days cut up in thirty-minute segments of appointments with other men like me, weekends here or on the Coast, and vacations planned by Elaine months in advance, like that Christmas trip we’re making with the usual idiots, intermittent orgies of spending money and paying bills, and every eighteen months or so the ritual fit of nerves about a film I know is going to turn out pretty much all right. Do you think it’s easy to give up this new thing that’s grown up in my life? Could such a thing—so unpolluted by my permanent self—happen again?
Ah, the mirage of fugitive youth!
That’s another problem. How long can I keep it up, this sort of stuff—I mean physically? And what happens when I slow down?
That will take a while, especially if you’re not in New York all the time. By the way, are you jealous? I mean, do you care whether you are the only one?
I don’t dare to be. She has asked me a slightly different question, whether I wanted her to be faithful. I said that would be an unfair request, since I am not faithful to her. She was so genuinely shocked that I had to explain it was only with Elaine!
Schmidt found it difficult to comment on this revelation. A moment of thoughtful silence followed, interrupted by Gil.
Look, what about this guy? Are you going to call the police?
Perhaps tomorrow. I feel too tired. There is no rush; by now he might be anywhere, including, of course, my backyard. There isn’t much I can tell you. I met him, if that’s what you want to call it, on the bus. He sat down next to me and stank. I don’t think I could bear to touch him. I believe he sensed my revulsion and used it to terrorize me. This is an abstract way of putting it, but it’s as good as any other. I saw him a second time, through the window of O’Henry’s, and had the same feeling of panic. What was the meaning of tonight? A coincidence? Was he looking for a house with a front door that was unlocked, happened to check mine out, and took a shit on my doormat out of frustration? Is he following me around because he knows he can scare me? Whatever it is, I don’t like it.
I don’t either. Let me know what you decide to do.
After Gil left, Schmidt had another, indecently large, drink of brandy. It was not the first time that having listened to one of his friend’s tales of woe he wished he had the same sort of problems to contend with. The visit from the man, on the other hand, was right up his own alley Shame and paralysis! Was he expected to call the police and ask Sergeant Smith to rescue him from a bum defecating on his doorstep? Wouldn’t it be more decorous to get a crowbar, like Gil, or the ax handle he already owned, and brain the fellow when he pulled his next stunt? But his nerve would fail; he was unmanned by that strange hobo; it was the effect, which he had never seen, of a snake on a bird. Two birds with one stone: there was something wrong with that pun that brandy prevented him from identifying, but it was all the same. The Amazon island would put plenty of distance between him, the man, and all pretense of Christmas cheer.
VIII
TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS the next day.
Although it’s past ten, Schmidt is in bed, perhaps asleep, covers wound around him tightly, like a shroud, to keep the warmth in, to shut out the need to get on with the day. Summoned, he reaches for the receiver, the phone kept somewhere on the floor beside the bed: that is how Schmidt guards against knocking over the glass of water on his night table, spilling the contents on his book, losing his reading glasses, and making the battery pop out from his alarm clock, which it does at the slightest shock. It’s Gil, not Charlotte.
You were great. There’s no one else I can talk to about her.
Ah, the girl.
I don’t think I got across how wonderful she is. I could be doing anything at all—shaving, crossing the street—and suddenly I think of her. It’s as though I had a second heart. One for everything in my life that’s known, that’s as it should be, and one for her.
You did get it across. I understood that.
I have a letter from her—the first one! She timed it so I would get it this morning. There’s no risk; she knows I always get the newspaper and the mail myself. It’s terrific—short and funny. I feel like jumping up and down. She wrote it to make me feel good! Why shouldn’t I let her?
No reason. I envy you. Just be careful about Elaine.
I am, even about how I use the telephone. She’s out shopping, for party favors. What about the island?
I’ll call you later.
And that man?
I’ll call about that too.
Do. This afternoon. I told Elaine about him. She said I should have brought you back home with me, and made you sleep here.
Please thank her, she’s a love. Of course, so is the girl!
Complacencies of a meaningless Sunday. Schmidt drives to town. On the main street, in the sharp light, a dark crowd enters the Catholic church. Their cars have filled the parking spaces along the sidewalk, but there is room in the lot behind the hardware store. The candy store owner saves The New York Times for Schmidt. Although, contrary to his custom, Schmidt is unwashed and unshaved, like the numerous Jewish and somewhat less numerous Gentile males who also get their paper and drink coffee at the counter of that establishment, he decides to take breakfast in a booth. Pancakes, bacon, and syrup, in place of the week-old English muffin waiting in his fridge. At once, he feels he has eaten too much. Analysis of the Willy Smith trial in the “Week in Review”: Will the jury acquit him? Gil probably knows the oaf; surely he knows the senatorial uncle. Another aging satyr in search of young love.
After breakfast, Schmidt visits each of the town’s three parking lots, leans against the fender of a car that strikes his fancy, and, thus exposed, waits.
Nothing.
Perhaps on Sunday the man too sleeps late. Perhaps he is at mass.
When Blue Felt Slippers answers the telephone at Gil’s house,
the party is in full swing. Schmidt insists, and spells his name; eventually, Mr. Blackman comes to the telephone. Yes, he wants very much to go to the island, the sooner the better. No, he hasn’t called the police. He has thrown down his gauntlet to the man and has felt no fear. Gil and Elaine mustn’t worry.
IX
IT’S VERY HOT, but the air is so clear that Schmidt can see the trees on the distant bank of the river as clearly as if he were looking through binoculars. In fact, he has forgotten to bring them, which is stupid, because the birds are as amazing and varied as Gil—or was it Elaine?—had told him. Instead, from time to time, he borrows the guide’s, feels squeamish about putting them against his eyes, but doesn’t want to offend that observant and sensitive man by wiping them first. He has told the guide and the Indian boy to take the morning off; he will move a chair to the landing and read in the sun. It might be nice to get some color in his face before he goes home. They spend so much time on jungle paths, and, when they go out in the boat, drifting near the riverbank, in the shade of the trees, that he is almost as pale as when he first arrived.
In fact, the book—Nostromo, since he decided that if he were going to South America he might as well test his theory that Conrad had fixed in it completely and forever the essence of that continent—lies in his lap open to the page where he began almost an hour ago. The reason is that Schmidt has been overcome by intense, rather stupid happiness. It permeates his body. He feels good all over; were someone to ask his blessing, he would like to give it. He could also sing, perform uncommon acts of charity, tell a small child stories of creation. Nature is beautiful and good—even though under the surface of the opaque, tobacco-colored water, fish are devouring each other, alligators asleep in the mud among the reeds will awaken to pangs of great hunger and spring on their prey, and the barefoot, brown boys and girls tirelessly playing soccer in the village perhaps half a mile away with a bundle of rags tied with a string will never get to kick a leather ball or learn to read. Schmidt is in harmony with nature. For the moment, all that matters is that and his gratitude. It is so very splendid to be alive!
When the evening falls, he writes to Charlotte. His stay is almost over. Probably, there is no sensible way to mail a letter from the island at this point. He might as well do it at the Manaus airport, on his way home, if he is going to mail it at all.
There is a confession he owes her: The way those years when she was a child and then a big girl sped by, he has trouble constructing a narrative of what happened between him and her. Nothing very bad, of that he is sure. When she was little, and then at Brearley and at Harvard, she was always a model daughter, a source of such pride, and he cannot think of a time when he withheld his approval, any mean act of which he was guilty, or anything even halfway sensible she wanted that he did not try to make sure she would have. But what did they do together that had more substance than the time he put in watching over her at the beach, driving her to all those lessons, or sitting beside her at the movies? The rare visits to a museum in the city? A couple of performances of The Nutcracker? Taking her and her roommates out to dinner in Boston, when he visited her at college with Mary, or during the few trips he had made alone, as a lark, when Mary was away at a sales conference? Had he and Charlotte ever had a real talk, either when she was little or as grown-ups? Was there something he had taught her about life that was worth mentioning? Incorrigible, he adds he isn’t sure he knows such things. Perhaps that is why he has so little to say to her now, except how much he loves her and, of course, when they fight. Had Mary done better, and if so, how had she managed it? If she did, it was some quality she possessed and he, Schmidt, lacks. Would Mary have felt she had more in common with her daughter?
There is a violent downpour in the afternoon. No nature trip. He hasn’t uttered a word all day, except obrigado, to thank the servants. Having reread what he wrote, he tears it up and says, out loud, Even if this stuff is true it’s no excuse for the way she behaves. Good manners are the one thing she might have learned from me.
X
HE HAD SENT under the cover of envelopes, because the only address where he knew he could reach her was O’Henry’s, postcards of the restored opera house in Manaus, Indians spearfishing from canoes and lounging in their hammocks, and birds of the Amazon. Before leaving, he had deposited her Christmas present with the bartender: bright red leather gloves lined with wool. Therefore, her being so utterly business-like the evening of his return, Schmidt having rushed to the restaurant for dinner, really just in order to see her, as he acknowledged to himself—she greeted him and took his order without a word about the four-week absence, the gloves, or his having written—surprised Schmidt. He had expected connivance, a sign that would distinguish him, but there was nothing, not even one of her languid smiles. It would have been easy, so it seemed to him, to make a teasing remark about his strange tan; his one serious session in the sun made him turn the color of copper, with just a touch of verdigris. But as he chewed his way through the dinner, it seemed to him that she was paying less attention to him than ever, less than was due an habitué, who also happened to be a local notable. He was reminded of the times when Mary, Charlotte, and he would return to the city after the Christmas vacation and discover that out of the entire staff of their building—as numerous as the progeny the Lord had promised to Abraham, had been his invariable joke—only the cross-eyed and wizened Ukrainian handyman would thank them for the substantial gift of cash that had been distributed, before their departure, by the super, his colleagues apparently considering manifestations of gratitude to be acts beneath their dignity.
Immediately, he was furious at himself: What right had he to put Carrie in that context? She had always thanked him nicely for her tip. Those silly extraneous attentions must have been quite simply unwelcome, perceived by her as the hesitant, almost leering advances of an old bore sick with loneliness. He skipped the second and third espresso and the after-dinner drink. When she brought the check, he found that in his wallet he had the twenties and tens he needed to pay and leave a gratuity, correct as the figures worked out, although somewhat less generous than usual, without asking for change. He waved goodbye and stalked out.
The overnight flight from Rio de Janeiro to New York had left him tired—he had rejected, as too complicated, the solution of avoiding it by using the Salvador—Miami connection—and he had intended to go directly to bed. But he felt dissatisfied and agitated. His skin itched. The accumulated mail was on the kitchen table. He hesitated between brandy and whiskey, poured a large whiskey and soda because he was thirsty, brought over a wastebasket for the junk mail, and sat down to sort it.
Mostly it was junk. He put aside the New Yorkers and the New York Review of Books and the bills—electricity, gas and heating oil, his two credit cards, the club, and the yardman; really, it was nothing, when compared to the time when he had a real household. Was he spending less money than he had expected? Mrs. Cooney could have told him right away; she had liked reconciling his bank statements, a task that required the use of felt-tip pens of various colors for doodling and underlining and offered her the opportunity to volunteer acerbic comments about Mary’s and his expenses. Actually, the balance that appeared in his checkbook was substantial; he hoped it was correct. He had not continued Mrs. Cooney’s labors of verification after leaving Wood & King and her providential care. This was no time to begin, especially as he would have to go back to where she had left off. There were also several communications from W & K. All but two went directly the way of the junk mail; Schmidt was not interested in the firm’s monthly news bulletin, the memoranda to all lawyers in the office and selected clients on the more striking developments affecting executive compensation, or the questionnaire about partners’ preferences as to the date on which the dinner for most recently retired partners (Schmidt among them) might be held at the Metropolitan Museum. His current intention was not to attend. He put on top of the reports from his investment adviser a notification from the accoun
ting department that his retirement benefit for January 1992 had been duly deposited. The other letter, signed by Jack DeForrest, he read over twice: It told him that the firm had amended, by a unanimous vote of active partners (so Riker had voted yes), the pension plan to continue his pay-merits at the current level, but, in the interest of fairness to younger partners and taking into account the welfare of the firm, only until the January 1 nearest his sixty-seventh, rather than seventieth, birthday He would, of course, appreciate the favorable contrast with the normal payment period of only five years following retirement.
Nice, thought Schmidt. That’s when they think I can stop eating. It’s OK with me; perhaps I won’t even be around to notice.
This news called for another large drink. Schmidt had bought in Manaus some moist, dark, and rather sweet tasting cigars. He cut the end off one of them with the carving knife and lit it with great care. A neat circle of ash began to form. It lengthened faultlessly. Schmidt poured more whiskey into his glass. It struck him as strange that so many of his contemporaries had decided to give up smoking, alcohol, and coffee—and, of course, cheese, eggs, and red meat as well. Had they information about the advantages, perhaps even pleasures, of longevity, of which he had remained ignorant? He must inquire of DeForrest. At least he answered his telephone; Schmidt wouldn’t have to leave the question with his secretary, to be answered by some assistant. Unless there was such a secret, it seemed reasonable to stick to his agreeable, life-shortening habits, perhaps even to acquire new ones. He wondered what they might be and to whom he might put that question. Perhaps Gil, if he wasn’t away. He might do it at the same time he reported to Gil on the Amazon island and, no doubt, received a report on the idyll with the girl.
Abruptly, money and the need to avoid the calamity of a too-long life made him think of Charlotte. He had not called her upon arrival. He could still do it; they never went to bed before eleven. On the other hand, she hadn’t telephoned either, although when he saw her and Jon in New York he had told her the date of his return and had mentioned it again in the postcard he wrote to her from Brazil. It was possible, of course, that she made a mistake entering it in her calendar, or that she hadn’t put it down and had forgotten, or that his card had gone astray or was taking more than three weeks to reach her. Sooner or later he would have to call, there was no rule that said she had to be the first to call when he came back from vacation, he didn’t want to create an unnecessary awkwardness, and it would be nice to know what plans they had for weekends. From the contents of the refrigerator it was clear that they had been around, in all likelihood with friends, as neither of them, to his knowledge, ate margarine, drank prune juice, or saved half-finished bottles of Coors. But he hadn’t found any note from them on the pad of paper on the kitchen counter or in any of the other likely places where he had looked. More whiskey, heartache, and the beginning of another cigar: the telephone call would wait until the morning. It had gotten late; that, and not his feelings, prevented him from dialing their number. In the morning, he would leave a message on the answering machine.
