by Louis Begley
All right, we were thinking of going to this tennis camp in Aspen. But Harry doesn’t know if he can get away. It depends on the children.
Oh.
He’s divorced and he’s got these two boys, seven and five. If his wife can get some time off later this month, he’ll stay with the kids in this place they share in the Berkshires. They’re cute little guys. That’s another reason Harry hasn’t got much money. He’s paying both child support and alimony.
And he’s sure it makes sense for him to leave a job with a steady income for a start-up business?
Dad, this is a big chance. We know we can make it. Harry will never get out of the hole unless he makes real money and owns something.
I see.
He sure did. A divorced man with two children, obligations to his wife, and no money to speak of in the bank account, who wants the use of Charlotte’s money for his new business. In the meantime, why not take a vacation together at a tennis camp! That seemed unambiguous enough, no need to probe. Who knows, she might even choose to tell him more. But she gave no sign of being about to speak.
Therefore he continued: Right, I do want to meet him. The sooner, the better. Look, Charlotte, could we talk about Jon now? I’ve told you that I’ve spoken with Jack DeForrest. I really don’t know where to begin.
All right, Jon’s an asshole. But he didn’t give that bitch the brief, she stole it out of his briefcase, and he’s too fucked up to tell on her. That’s the problem in a nutshell, and it’s his problem. I’m going to leave him. What would you suggest instead? Is there anything else you want to know? You must sure be glad you were right about him.
No he wasn’t, thank God he wasn’t. He hadn’t become the bad, vengeful witch. He had cast no evil spells, hadn’t hoped for vindication of this sort. That part of Renata the shrink’s warning, delivered during the presumptuous, inexcusably familiar lecture she gave him upon their first meeting, directly after the Riker family Thanksgiving lunch his daughter and the imbecile fiancé had blackmailed him into attending, he had taken seriously. Yes, he had grown to loathe Jon Riker. Furthermore, Renata may have been right, and Jon too, if she was repeating faithfully what Jon had told her, to claim that deep inside he had always disliked that boy—even when he worked with him so closely at Wood & King and pushed hard to have him made a partner. Their decision to be married in an odious restaurant in SoHo rather than in the family house, Charlotte’s refusal to wear her mother’s wedding dress, the way she had taunted him—how else could one describe telling him that only a rabbi would officiate at the wedding and she planned to convert to Judaism?—Jon’s calumny, which she had dared to throw in her father’s face, that he was known throughout his firm as an anti-Semite, all this and more rankled. But none of it could make him rejoice to hear Charlotte, cool as a cucumber, make light of her marriage and dismiss her husband with a vulgar epithet. Nothing had prepared him for such disgrace. He must have been blind.
I am so terribly sorry. Poor Charlotte. Have you told Jon what you plan to do?
You’re sorry? You couldn’t stand him. You should be saying good riddance. No, I didn’t have to tell him. He’s an asshole, but he’s not dumb. The thing is that he won’t move out of the apartment. And I have to sleep in the guest room, because he won’t get out of my bedroom either. Harry says I need to get a lawyer real soon. Do you think W & K would take the case, since they’re throwing him out of the firm anyhow? He’s already got a lawyer, a guy with an Italian name—Cacciatore or something.
Schmidt sighed. I should think it would be very awkward for any of the lawyers at the firm to represent you against him, he told her. From the way you’ve just talked, and the way you own the apartment and the house in Claverack jointly, I don’t believe this is going to be a friendly separation, in which all you need is a lawyer to advise on taxes and write up what the parties agreed on. If you like, I’ll call Murphy and ask him for a recommendation. You must remember him, he’s the partner at the firm who has done Mom’s and my wills. He knows a lot of divorce lawyers.
I remember Mr. Murphy. He’s not what I want anyway. I want a real tough Jew, so Jon and Cacciatore don’t run circles around him. I’d use Harry’s lawyer, but Harry doesn’t think he did such a hot job for him. You think I can move in with Harry? I’m sick and tired of having Jon around, but I don’t want him to be able to say it’s my fault if I leave the apartment and live with Harry.
These days I don’t think it matters. You had better check though. Murphy will know. I’ll ask him when I talk to him about a lawyer for you. Charlotte, I began to wonder when you mentioned the tennis camp, but now it seems crystal clear. I take it you’re having an affair with Mr. Polk. Did it begin before Jon started seeing this woman?
You mean Debbie Vogel?
The lady lawyer. The one who’s at the center of the trouble about the brief.
It started before, but who cares? Jon was screwing one of the paralegals after hours, in his own office, on the floor or on the desk. Dennis’s wife told me. Everybody knew about it.
He heard Carrie’s footsteps in the front hall. Honey, he called out. Charlotte and I have almost finished. Do you want to make some coffee? We could have coffee out here.
Not for me, said Charlotte.
My poor baby. You’ve been married for such a short time, you and Jon knew each other so well, you’d been together for years, why marry only to go with other people?
You’ve got to be kidding. Don’t you admit to yourself that people have sex? You of all people, living with this girl! Let me ask you some questions. Why did you cheat on Mom? You think I didn’t know you were laying my Vietnamese babysitter, right in this house, under Mom’s nose? Please explain that one to me. Jesus, you even made a pass at Renata. Couldn’t resist it, could you? If you ask me, men are shits. Oh great, you look like your eyes are going to pop. I get it. I guess I just blew my chances of getting that money. Stupid me.
Her voice was reaching him from a great distance. Another voice, much smaller and closer to him, whispered, Don’t worry, stop counting your money, it will all be hers pretty soon anyway. It was extraordinary how tired she made him. He shook his head, as though to get water out of his ear, and reassured her: The money’s at your disposal. Charlotte, just tell me into what account I should have it transferred.
And seeing that she had brightened and was going to speak, presumably thank him, he raised his hand and added, Please no more speeches.
A man is stuck with his bad nose, eyes, hair, teeth, and texture of skin—curses of heredity, always there to remind him where he began. Schmidt was not far from believing that he had taken from his parents their worst traits of character as well. He watched for them in his own behavior, wondering when he was about to do this or that, whether, for once, he might shake free of the recurring nightmare. Usually, he failed. Just as in his teens he had been on the alert for pimples around his mouth, ready to squeeze them between the nails of his two index fingers until the pus had been extruded ahead of a drop of fresh blood. The “look what you have done to me” treatment had been his mother’s specialty, directed as easily against Schmidt’s father as against himself. Grave, pale, and trembling, since she was always recovering from one illness or another, hands ice cold and red at the joints, she glided from room to room sighing and shaking her head in unexpressed wonder. People get used to continuous background noise—the dripping of a faucet, a neighbor listening to the ball game—and soon stop hearing it. Therefore, at irregular intervals, the mother’s sighs became louder, more like stifled sobbing. Oh, she would get out of bed and dress as usual in one of the housecoats she wore to spare her better clothes, and in this garb she came to meals, but it wasn’t to eat or speak. The wound—one or the other culprit sitting at the table with her, Schmidt or his father, knew all too well which wound it was and how it had been opened—was too deep. And this could go on for days, until Schmidt’s father, deliberate and implacable, would commit a larger offense, for instance crushing a crystal wi
neglass in his hand, red wine all over the white linen tablecloth—an admirable trick, since he never cut himself—or coming to the table with a legal brief or a ship mortgage he corrected all the while he ate, pausing only when he was served. As though out of the blue, the trance she was under was dispelled. They would return to speech as gray and mean as the silence that had preceded it.
To have his own offenses forgiven, Schmidt had to grovel. With his haughty and normally impassive father, it was the onsets of rage that stung: absurd in their unpredictability, the violence of the insults he hurled, and the way he had of forgetting almost immediately what he had said and done. Whereas his mother never forgot and never forgave. Every hurt was planted and nursed tenderly like a seedling until it bore its venomous fruit. And what could he say for himself? Had he dealt in good faith with Charlotte about money, had he not mistreated her? The stuff about the funds he had given her when he bought out her remainder interest in this house, the money she spent on the house in Claverack and the apartment in the city, the payment to her that stuck with such stubbornness in his craw, after all, it was entirely his own invention, born out of anger and a grudge quite worthy of his parents. It was never a necessary transaction: he entered into it because he disliked his son-in-law-to-be. If that Jew lawyer and he were going to spend weekends and holidays under the same roof, he wanted at least to be able to lord it over him—an ambition difficult to fulfill completely so long as the Jew’s wife, his daughter, was a part owner of this house. The wasteful, needless strategem had turned against its inventor. Who knows? If he had kept his mouth shut, had not pushed for a change, Charlotte and Jon might have used this place as their weekend house. Then perhaps he could have helped them be more prudent. After all, he knew W & K so well. But there too he had allowed resentment over all-too-real slights get in the way of friendships, however tepid, old tics that might have moved a Lew Brenner or Mike Woolsey, or even DeForrest himself, to phone or take him aside after a firm lunch—in fact he hadn’t taken the trouble to attend a single one since he left, slamming the door behind him—and say, Schmidtie, I know it’s none of my business, it’s bad to meddle, but Jon should be more careful, people are whispering, you might just want to look into it. A word to the wise. Had he seen the handwriting on the wall, he would have surely read it. Anyway, it hardly mattered what he read or what he knew: the skill and patience needed to help weren’t his. He had thrown his daughter to the dogs.
IV
NO, there hadn’t been many changes in the Crussels’ house Schmidt could point to after the visits to Mr. Mansour that for over a month had been recurring with such regularity, and yet the impression was one of difference. For all the effort the old couple’s decorator had expended to restrain them, somehow Jean and Olga had always gotten their way, so that their arrangements held a mysterious potential for recalling both the five-and-tencent store of years gone by and the most up-to-date mail-order catalogues. No such hobgoblins’ ears peeked out under Mr. Mansour’s regime. The deck Schmidt stood on was in itself the same vast rectangle of pure burning white, with not a grain of sand, not a scratch to mar its surface, perching above a dune overgrown by rugosa roses and green and silvery grasses. The trick, the distinction, may have been simply in the way the swarm of chairs of every size and description, settees, tables, and parasols were disposed: at first, these masterworks of steel, aluminum, canvas, and linen gave an impression of randomness, as though they had been set down carelessly by movers who might return in a moment to carry them off to another location. After a longer look, they revealed self-assured, calculated refinement. And so it was throughout the house and its whimsical dependencies.
The beach, of course, endures and yet changes every day, showing itself at this lunch hour as brutally gnawed by the week’s storm and tides. Schmidt removed his sunglasses and peered at the ocean again, wanting to see its true colors. A man dressed in baggy black clothes, his naked feet sometimes licked by the water, was still standing there, his attitude unvaried since Schmidt had arrived a good while before. Perhaps he too was intent on the struggle of the faraway sailboat, hardly more than a nervous white brush stroke at the edge of the horizon, almost immobile, beating its way against a west wind. What could be its destination? The marina at nearby humble Shinnecock, where Indians, before white men came, had already dug a passage to link the ocean to the bay? New Jersey? The Pillars of Hercules? All of a sudden, as though having decided to abandon the distant craft to its fate, perhaps wanting to make up for the time he had lost, the man shrugged his shoulders and started to walk very briskly eastward. A longing, perhaps related to the man’s abrupt action, came over Schmidt: for absence, for a life that wasn’t seeded with mistakes of his own making. He recognized it as childish and drank what was left of his gin and tonic. According to Manuel, the houseman with a Mediterranean accent, Mr. Mansour was on a conference call with London, had been for hours. And Carrie had stood him up. They had agreed that she would come directly to this house after her last class. Instead she left a message for Schmidt with one of Mr. Mansour’s ubiquitous security men. She was on her way to Brooklyn to see her parents and wasn’t sure when she’d be back. But it wasn’t an emergency and he shouldn’t worry. She would telephone him at home at the end of the afternoon. Schmidt understood that to mean that she was probably spending the night. There had been no discussion of anything of the sort. Why hadn’t it been possible to tell him in advance if this wasn’t an emergency, why hadn’t she caught him before he left home, during a break between classes?
He wasn’t sure he was up to lunching alone with Mr. Mansour. In any case, he had been kept waiting longer than was decent. That this might also be Manuel’s opinion occurred to Schmidt when the former brought him a second drink and said he would hand to Mr. Mansour another note about lunch. The concern of this nice servant was almost embarrassing, and Schmidt wondered whether he hadn’t better refuse the gin and tonic and depart—perhaps leaving his own note to the effect that they should try to get together another day, when Mr. Mansour was less busy. He didn’t doubt that it was awkward to interrupt a telephone conference with London, where it was already close to seven in the evening, and, by the time Mr. Mansour had finished lunch, people would want to be at table eating their own dinner, but Schmidt had seen enough of his host’s dealings with his colleagues to be sure that no such considerations would stand in the way if Schmidt were an important guest he was keeping waiting, or if Mr. Mansour wanted from him something that required the sort of wheedling he called “making charm.” In the end, Schmidt took the drink Manuel had offered. There was no other place where he particularly wished to go to just then. Nor was he willing to put at risk the entertainment that frequenting Mr. Mansour provided, in itself and as a subject for conversation with Carrie.
They had fallen into a camaraderie that Michael Mansour had been quick to call friendship. In fact, Schmidt thought he hadn’t seen friends around that gentleman, not in the sense that Schmidt understood that word, and apparently there wasn’t, after all, a café society of which Michael was a member. He belonged instead, Schmidt had concluded, to a less amusing but infinitely more exclusive spiritual brotherhood, the insignia and privileges of which included being on firstname basis with other billionaires in North and South America and Europe (and even those parts of the Middle East where having been born a Jew in Egypt was not a serious black mark for someone like Mr. Mansour who was as rich as a Gulf Arab sheik), possession of their unlisted and zealously guarded private telephone numbers, and eligibility for invitations—otherwise inexplicable—to the islands they owned in the Caribbean and chalets in Vail and Gstaad, as well as, of course, to their weddings and funerals. It was mid-August. Michael’s helicopter took him into the city only for brief visits. The demeanor of the guests at the lunches and dinners that Schmidt and Carrie were solicited to attend almost daily—it seemed to Schmidt that a new invitation was offered following each meal they had with him by the insistent host or by the secretary who made early
morning telephone calls—evoked for Schmidt more nearly clients of a colossally rich Roman, probably a freed slave such as Trimalchio, gathered in expectation of the inevitable moment when favors would be granted. Money was in the air, like the heady scent of the honeysuckle hedge that lined Mr. Mansour’s driveway.
I am sorry about Carrie, he told Mr. Mansour when they finally sat down at the small table of the dining room that gave on the deck, the wind having stiffened so considerably that Manuel counseled against eating outside.
The lobster salad was served to the host with extra dollops of mayonnaise. Mr. Mansour took a second helping, reconsidered the matter, and helped himself to mayonnaise again.
Forget it. She’s one great kid. Between you and me, she must be going crazy, she’s so bored. That too is something I want to talk to you about. The immediate piece, he continued between bites, is what are you doing about your son-in-law? I had my people do some checking on him. I think I should meet him and your daughter and sort this thing out for you. I am probably the only person who can pull it off. You may want to be there too, so I can bring all three of you back together, but not at the first meeting.
This was not the first time that Michael had referred to Jon Riker, let alone his disgrace. Hovering over the food, Michael’s perfectly oval face, perhaps a bit too large for such a compact man, was all smiles, as though he had just told or heard a first-rate joke. His bald pate gleamed. He wore white linen trousers and a white cotton shirt with long sleeves. Rolled back for comfort from the wrists and open over the chest to the fourth button, it showed off serious muscles. The resemblance to Manuel the houseman was marred only by Manuel’s handlebar mustache. Perhaps Mr. Mansour had required him to grow it, just as he might have asked him to change his name from Michael to Manuel.
