Schmidt Delivered

by Louis Begley

  But Bryan refused, shaking his head. I’ve got money, he said. Fuck it, man, I thought you were my friend.

  So that was that. Bryan had certainly put things in perspective. There weren’t all that many dishes to wash after the ghastly, silent lunch. Sooner or later, she would come down, and she wouldn’t use the back stairs or fly out the window. Of course, nothing stopped him from getting into his car and driving off—to the beach, to Montauk, to the airport. Men disappear all the time, for no reason at all. Instead, he dried the two crystal wineglasses, put them away, and went back to the library to work on the bills.

  She always moved soundlessly, even when she wasn’t barefoot, and it was not because he heard her steps that he became aware of her presence. She stood in the door, wearing the white terry-cloth bathrobe she liked. Her wet hair glistened. Darling, she said, you’re real mad at me. I’ve never seen you like this. Why?

  You left me—without any warning.

  Schmidtie, I went to see my parents. I called from school, between classes, and my mom wasn’t feeling good. Then I called Mike Mansour’s house and told Manuel to give the message. There wasn’t anyplace I could reach you. Why is that bad?

  You didn’t call me from the city.

  I did. I left a message on the machine.

  Yes, a message that you had gone out on the town with Michael Mansour. Was that part of taking care of your mom?

  I drove her to the hospital for her leg and then drove her back home. There was nothing she needed. Yeah, I called Michael. So what’s wrong with that?

  Nothing, if you’re going on dates with other men. I didn’t know you were.

  I’m not. Whoa, Schmidtie, we see him all the time. He’s your friend. I wanted to see his apartment. I’ve never been to a fancy place like that. Then he asked if I like to eat Japanese. So we went to that restaurant. I told you that in the message.

  And later?

  What do you mean later?

  I mean what did you do later, after dinner.

  We went to a club in Tribeca and danced.

  Mansour danced?

  Yeah, he danced. He dances pretty good. Hey, he showed me how to belly dance! I danced with Jason too. Jeez, that guy really knows how to move.

  I see. Security all the way, even on the dance floor. That’s nice. And what else? I mean what happened after that.

  Michael asked if he should drive me home or if I wanted to stay at his place.

  And what did you decide?

  Boy, Schmidtie, you’re a real lawyer. I said I’d stay in his apartment. Here are the reasons: I left my car in his garage, so I would have to get it and drive all the way to Canarsie at three in the morning, which I didn’t feel like doing.

  Aha! Mr. and Mrs. Gorchuck lived in Canarsie. That was an interesting, and someday possibly useful, fact, heretofore unknown to Schmidt. The precise situation of Canarsie in relation to Brooklyn, likewise unknown to him, merited investigation.

  Second, I didn’t want to wake my dad up. When mom’s sick like this he sleeps in the living room.

  Then where did Carrie sleep? Also in the living room? On the floor or on a second couch? Was there not a second bedroom, however small, or did she sleep in the kitchen on a folding bed? Sharp pain in Schmidt’s heart: Why didn’t this poor child trust him enough to have let him see how the parents lived, why didn’t she let him lift them above such sordidness?

  I see, he said. But you didn’t think they would be unable to get back to sleep if one of them woke up in the middle of the night and saw that you hadn’t returned? I might have thought that was worse.

  You’ve got to be kidding. They think I’m a grown-up.

  True enough. And what happened once you got to the Mansour residence?

  What do you mean?

  I think it’s clear what I mean. Did he make a pass at you? Did you sleep with him?

  You really want to know?

  He didn’t, but he nodded his head.

  Guess what! He raped me. Yeah, and Jason held me down. You happy now?

  Carrie, Bryan was here this morning.

  No shit.

  Right. Back from Florida. I got his message, right after I got yours. He screwed it up there. It’s the old Bryan, only different. He talked a lot. About you.

  Like what?

  Like you slept with every waiter at O’Henry’s. The owner too. A full-service waitress, that’s what.

  And what’s that to you? You thought you were the first, Schmidtie?

  No, you told me the man—excuse me, Mr. Wilson—was the first. But I didn’t know that, to take Bridgehampton alone, you had serviced every waiter and busboy at your place of work, in addition to the owner, Bryan, and Mr. Wilson.

  You mean like if you had known you wouldn’t have fucked me? Is that it? Up yours, Schmidtie. Mr. Wilson sure had your number. You’re a shithead, that’s what he said, a hoity-toity shithead. I should’ve believed him.

  She cried, the way she always did when the subject of the man came up.

  I am sorry, Schmidt said. You want my handkerchief?

  Wipe yourself, you bastard. What’s your problem? When you’re in my pussy, it doesn’t feel right? Not clean enough for you? You don’t like what you get when you eat it because you’re not the first? How about me? Do I ask you where you’ve stuck your dick? Remember, I asked you if you wanted me to be faithful. You blew me off. And now you’re jealous!

  I am. I love you, Carrie. I’ve asked you to marry me, over and over. We’ve been together. I don’t know how I would live without you. When you asked me that question, at the very beginning, it was different.

  Shit.

  No, it’s the truth. Please come over here.

  He couldn’t believe it, but he had somehow managed: he had, perhaps for the first time in his life, actually broken out of the box he had put himself into, had made a gesture of peace. She took a step toward him, then two. Trembling, he drew her onto his lap and caressed her hair. It was still wet, like a young dog’s just in from the rain.

  Please, Carrie.

  Don’t.

  He had put his hand on her knee, where she allowed it to rest, and then tried to move it higher, toward the center, where he imagined she was wet too.

  Carrie, this isn’t about the waiters or the busboys. That was Bryan talking, wanting to humiliate me. By the way, he did a good job. This is about now, about you and Michael Mansour. I can’t just let it go, I have to know. It’s not just some guy who thinks he is my friend. He’s someone we see all the time, together. What happened?

  You really want to know? she repeated.

  He nodded his head and took his hand off her knee, finding a neutral ground on the terry cloth.

  OK. He’s got this triplex. His bedroom and a kind of living room with a big fireplace are on the second floor, and also a room with mats and machines—treadmill, bicycles, and a cage for weights. All kinds of stuff. He has a trainer come in every morning. You won’t believe it. At six. The guest rooms are on the third floor. He showed me into my room, and where the lights were and everything, and the bathroom, and I thought he was like going to kiss me and say goodnight. Instead, all of a sudden, he drops his arms and says, I want to see your breasts. I look at him surprised, and this time he says, Please show me your tits. I was like let me out, man! I had on this black blouse you gave me, you know, short, with little shoulder straps, that doesn’t button, so I just lift it up and tell him, Here they are. Say hello. I think he’s going to grab me or lick them, but no, he asks me, What’s Schmidtie going to say? I couldn’t believe it, so I say he’s going to try to break your stupid face. I’ll tell you, it was like he threw cold water over me. I closed up. So he says it’s all right, Schmidtie doesn’t need to know and other kinds of shit, and I tell him forget it, I’m going to sleep.

  And then?

  In the morning, he comes into my room again and says he’s sorry, he couldn’t sleep all night, he was jerking off thinking about me, and he’ll give me a million dollars if I
fuck him. I ask, Right now? So he says, No, not now, I can’t get it up, I’m too worn out, but please soon. Don’t make me wait too long.

  Oh, Carrie.

  Some friend you’ve got there. You want to hear the best? On my way out of there, I was saying good-bye to Jason, and Mike rushes out from somewhere, I don’t know where he was, and says, Don’t forget the dinner on Sunday. Hillel’s going to play. I expect you and Schmidtie. It’ll be a fabulous party.

  Carrie, I’ll give you a million dollars if you don’t let that man get near you.

  She looked at him very carefully and replied, It’s no good, Schmidtie. If I take your money, I’ll never sleep with you again. Then she took his hand, put it back on the inside of her knee, guided it upward, and whispered: Hey, you haven’t written that check for one million dollars yet, have you? Come on, dopey, we’re wasting time. Let’s go upstairs.

  VIII

  BEFORE Carrie left for school the next morning, he gave her a gold pin in the form of a scarab. It had been his present to Mary to mark the date old Dexter King told him that the firm had taken him into the partnership. It was a beautiful piece, although perhaps a bit strong—some might say too elaborate—in the manner of jewelry made in Boston at the turn of the century. To his surprise, Mary never wore it. That wasn’t the sort of thing that Schmidt would mention, let alone inquire about, but it occurred to him subsequently that she might have seen the bill, which he had put on top of his chest of drawers, together with other papers, to take to the office and send to the insurance broker. The price was high, well beyond Schmidt’s means. Not wanting to sell any of the few stocks he owned, he had borrowed to pay for it. She disliked—as in fact did he—his anomalous outbursts of extravagance, and, since they could bring themselves to talk about money only with the greatest difficulty, and then always stiffly, as though the subject made their flesh crawl, putting this object away would have been her way of annulling an action she reproved. She could count on him to understand and to keep silent. This circumstance was probably the reason he had not offered the pin to Charlotte along with the rest of Mary’s trinkets, the bittersweet chronicle of his devotion and sense of circumstance reposing in leather boxes of various shapes and sizes as though in miniature tombs. Mary’s mother had died very young, her father, cut down by machine-gun fire while he waded toward a Normandy beach, even earlier; there was nothing she had inherited from them except their wedding bands and an engagement ring, all of which Schmidt had also withheld: the former because they made him uneasy, the latter because it was such a pitiful thing that he thought it best not to expose it to view and comment. The good jewelry in Mary’s family had belonged to Aunt Martha, and that Mary put in a safety box for Charlotte directly after the old lady died. Most of what Schmidt offered to Charlotte she accepted. The rest he sold for more money than he would have thought likely to a merchant he had dealt with over the years. But not the Boston scarab; he liked him far too much. He had made the right decision, to keep him and to give him the second time: when Carrie saw it—he had held out his fist enclosing the jewel and said, Quick, go knock, knock to see what’s inside—she asked him in her little voice, Darling, is this for me, and, when he nodded, she kissed his hand, called him darling once more, and then Bebop, and, after she had attached the pin to her shirt, offered to skip school and spend the day with him, because he had made her so happy. But he said, Go on, be sure that you’re not late and that you drive carefully, held open the door of the little car for her, and remained in the driveway a long time after it disappeared. Bebop. The diminutive of his godfather’s name, and the only pet name Schmidt’s mother ever used. She had a way of saying, when one of his friends telephoned and he was sitting in the same room as she, and she happened not to be in one of her crankier moods, You want Bebop no doubt, I’ll get him for you, he must be somewhere in the house. It made him cringe. Spoken by Carrie, the color of the word changed. It was as gay as the rainbow.

  She wouldn’t be back until late in the afternoon. There was nothing, literally nothing, he needed to do. It was pointless to make the bed or clear the dishes because the Polish women would arrive later that morning. Carrie had said she would pick up sausages and fruit and vegetables for their dinner on her way home. There were enough cans of tuna and sardines in the pantry to withstand a siege, and he had bought bread and cheese when he got the breakfast croissants. Lunch, therefore, was taken care of. The soft but steady rain that began to fall almost as soon as Carrie left—he was glad she had put up the roof of her car—did not rule out doing laps in the pool but made the prospect unattractive. Gil Blackman had left for the West Coast. Schmidt wasn’t sure he would have risked telephoning and being told by Gil that he couldn’t take time off from work to have lunch, even if Gil had been in Bridgehampton, or that he was ready to see him if that implied resuming their last conversation, and probably it did. He could always invite Elaine to lunch in his place. This was, however, something he had never done before or even contemplated. Did Elaine go out to lunch when it was not a social obligation involving Gil? Schmidt doubted it; she had told him she was in the thick of research for her book on colonial orphanages. She had not mentioned how that was accomplished, given the limited resources of the Bridgehampton library. Presumably, she had books sent to her from the Society Library in New York or got them on some interlibrary loan, and, now that Gil was a Harvard overseer, perhaps even from the Widener. At any rate, why would he ask her to lunch? Whatever turn the conversation took, it would only lead to trouble. Carrie was not a safe subject, and neither was Charlotte or, for that matter, Gil, of whose secret sentimental life Elaine was convinced Schmidt knew the ins and outs. Was it worth the collateral risk that Elaine might see in his initiative some sort of absurd romantic overture? It wasn’t, and there was nobody else he considered even remotely possible.

  That left Trollope—he had embarked recently on the project of rereading his favorites—paying bills, and waiting for Charlotte to telephone. It seemed to him that she really should let him know whether she was coming for the weekend. If for any reason she couldn’t or didn’t want to, he would go to the city to see her. But he had decided he must above all avoid making her feel she was being ushered back into the nursery, that he was somehow “taking over.” It was best to wait. Eventually, she would call. The thought of sitting down with a book first thing in the morning was not appealing. To that extent, it was clear that he had given Gil Blackman a touched-up version of his hours of solitary leisure. The bills—there weren’t all that many of them—had to be paid. But first he was going to shave. Of late, especially on days when Carrie had classes, he found himself putting off his toilette until later and later, and that was surely the slippery slope on the way to becoming a neglected—yes, why not say it—a dirty old man. He had seen it happen. A literary agent, one of the few whose taste and principles Mary had respected, in fact she had thought he should have been an editor with his own imprint in a major house, whom they used to see regularly, retired. Soon afterward, his much younger wife divorced him for no apparent reason; certainly they knew of no other man in the picture. Perhaps the reason was that he insisted on spending most of his time at their house in Georgica, while her work as a partner in another agency required her to be in New York during the week. In any event, she had made no pretense of liking the country or her husband’s retirement. Soon after she left, one began to see Jake doing his errands at the local markets with two days’ growth of beard, shuffling about in sneakers from which he had removed the laces he apparently found superfluous, and preternaturally stooped. At some point, he lost two of his lower front teeth. There was no reason to suppose that he had been in a brawl; more likely he had bitten down too hungrily on the bone of a lamb chop. The teeth went unreplaced, and, within months, Jake was dead, of a stroke, leaving a complicated estate, with not enough liquid assets to pay taxes on it, to be divided among hard-up nephews, nieces, and stepchildren. That was not the sort of end Schmidt wished for himself. Not shaving, he
recognized, does not inevitably bring on apoplexy, but it might be a harbinger!

  Upstairs then, to the bathroom. He could not recall how often he had used the blade clamped to his razor. There were two alternatives: try the blade again, with the possibility of switching to a new one in midstream if the shave wasn’t smooth, or insert a new one. Halfheartedly, because the not-inconsiderable price of top-of-the-line razor blades had become something to reckon with, he settled on the latter course, applied the shaving cream, and started to scrape. Hello! Through the open window Schmidt heard a car on the driveway going faster and breaking harder than he thought appropriate. It was not yet the hour of the Polish cleaning brigade. He looked out and saw Mr. Mansour’s little Rolls-Royce. The door opened on the driver’s side and that gentleman got out. Another figure—Jason, Schmidt supposed—remained in the passenger’s seat. Mike Mansour strode toward the front door, mounted the steps, and rang the bell. Aha, he was on his best behavior. His usual form, and, for that matter, the form of most people Schmidt knew, was to walk in and shout, Anybody home?

  This time Schmidt faced three possibilities. He could go down and open the door; he could shout, Come in, I’ll be right down! through the open window; or he could pretend he wasn’t at home. He’d be damned if he was going to depart from his normal habits because of that lout. Therefore, he emitted the normal yell and heard Mike Mansour’s even louder reply, Take your time, I’ll wait on the back porch. Well said: Schmidt wasn’t about to rush. He took his time, twenty minutes by his watch, before joining his guest, who stood up solemnly and held out his hand. Schmidt walked past him and leaned against the arm of the chintz sofa. He did not ask Mansour to sit down.

  Carrie has told you?

  About her evening—I should say night—with you in New York?