Schmidt Steps Back

by Louis Begley

  I don’t know, he replied. I’ve heard it said that it’s less damaging to be left by a partner who discovers he’s homosexual or she’s a lesbian, because you’re not in competition with the person they left you for. It’s more like a mutual mistake. But really I don’t know. Perhaps it’s different from case to case.

  I don’t either, but it was awful. Do you read Balzac?

  He shook his head and, correcting himself, added that he had read Eugénie Grandet in his last year of high school French.

  It must have been a good school. I’m not sure that happens today. I think Cousine Bette is probably his best novel. The story revolves around Baron Hulot, an incorrigible trousseur des jupons; someone who’s always getting into women’s underpants. His wife is very beautiful and très sage—a model of virtue and goodness. When Hulot becomes completely besotted by a horrible little woman, the wife of a glorified clerk in Hulot’s ministry, and the expense of keeping her is ruining the family, Madame Hulot, who’s still in love with her husband and desperate to save her family, really at wit’s end, cries out, What is it that they do for men, those filles? I guess you’d say: “those whores.” Why can’t I learn it, whatever it is. I’ll do it for him if only I can make him happy, if only I can keep him! She doesn’t succeed, any more than I did. What should I have done for Tim? Anal sex? I did it, though I hate doing it. But now I’m convinced that what he was looking for was different, not just sticking it up some anus, and that what he needed neither I nor any other woman could give to him. He wanted a man. It’s somehow different, even though the mechanics seem the same. My father, who is very worldly and wise, and never let me down during that awful time, said something that opened my eyes. He told me to stop blaming myself. He said that men who think their wife is frigid or don’t like the sex they have with her for whatever other reason don’t go to other men for better sex. Not unless they’re homosexual. Straight men, if they’re dissatisfied, go with other women, call girls if necessary.

  Tim a queer! Schmidt thought. How totally unlikely. He had nothing of the pansy about him, nothing that connected with the stereotype. Were there other queers at the firm at that time? That “boy” she had mentioned, whom Tim took to gay baths, was he literally an office boy, or was he another lawyer? An associate, because at the time he surely wasn’t speaking of a partner! To be astonished and shocked that such things were true twenty-five years ago, he thought, had nothing to do with W & K today: he knew of one homosexual partner (but did everyone else in the firm know?) and two or three associates. But it could be that there were many more. He had been out of touch ever since he retired. The only gossip he knew was what he picked up at the occasional firm function he attended out of a misplaced sense of duty and what he heard once in a while from Lew Brenner and, yes, also from his own son-in-law, Jon Riker, before that ornament of the bar had been forced to withdraw from the firm and deploy his legal talent elsewhere. But back then when Tim was an associate? At college, Schmidt had been dimly aware that a small group, really a handful of his classmates and other contemporaries, were the subject of jokes about being effete, limp wristed. There were a couple of tutors around whom they orbited. He hadn’t precisely disliked them, but they used to make him feel awkward and uncouth. Some of them, whom he had continued to see here and there, were out of the closet, as were the homosexual writers whose books Mary had edited, the two known gays among her colleagues at the publishing house, and the shifting, ever renewed contingent of queers in occasional attendance at Mike Mansour’s lunches, dinners, and parties, many of them the acolytes of a musician of genius over whom Mike happened at the time to spread his protective wing. But Tim! Old Dexter Wood must be turning over in his grave.

  The waiter brought the order. Schmidt found a hundred-franc bill in his wallet and gave it to him, apologizing for driving him crazy.

  They drank their coffee in silence, until it was broken by Alice. My father thought I should see a psychiatrist to have someone to talk to, and so did one of the few friends I still had in Paris. We had been at the lycée together, and she had also lost a child. To leukemia. She recommended a very nice woman who had her office on boulevard St. Germain. In good weather, it’s a nice walk from where we live, across the Tuileries. She gave me a prescription for a tranquilizer and sleeping pills, and being able to talk to her probably helped, but nothing she said and no effort I made to be reasonable got me over the feeling that he had defiled me by doing to me the things he had either just done or was about to do with other men, with Bruno. I would lie awake in my bedroom, knowing that Tim was awake or asleep in what had been our guest room—I couldn’t bring myself to tell him to move into Sophie’s bedroom—and think about it. He and Bruno continued to use my house at Chantilly for weekends and they tried to have Tommy come out with them. They meant well, but it was a prospect I hated. I needed his presence. Besides, although I was certain that Tim and Bruno would be totally discreet and look after him as well as I or better, I worried about other men who I supposed joined them in the evenings. What kind of men? Fortunately, Tommy had so much homework on most weekends that he couldn’t, or anyway didn’t want to, go to Chantilly. When he did go, I usually went too. Can you imagine those weekends? Tim, Bruno, Tommy, and I, each of us in his or her room. Tim and I didn’t share a bedroom at rue St. Honoré, but at least Bruno wasn’t in the apartment; they weren’t sneaking from one bedroom into the other. During school breaks and at Christmas and Easter I made it a rule, and got Tim to agree, that Tommy and I would go skiing alone or to Antibes to stay with my father. All the precautions in fact turned out to be pointless. There isn’t much you can hide from a thirteen-year-old. Tommy figured out what was going on before his father got sick. How he articulated it for himself, I don’t know, and we never discussed it. He made no move to do so. Probably I should have started a discussion, but I didn’t know how, and for all sorts of reasons I had stopped seeing the psychiatrist and had no one to advise me. My father had been a great help at first, but after my mother’s death, when he became fully aware of the loss, grief overwhelmed him. Later he became too absorbed by the relationship he was forming to be able to concentrate on Tommy and me and set me straight. Apropos of figuring things out, I finally understood why my friends had been so closemouthed from the outset when we kept on taking Bruno to their parties and inviting him to our house every time we gave a dinner. Paris is a small town, and they either knew him or knew about him. He was deep in the closet, but people less stupid than I understood what was going on in my ménage. If my parents had been living in Paris when we moved there, they would have been able to warn me.

  She had finished her cognac and asked if she could have what was left in his glass.

  Alice, Schmidt said, why did you stay in the ménage à trois? Why didn’t you divorce?

  She answered, speaking as clearly as before but more slowly. That was the subject of a great debate involving me, my father, and the psychiatrist while I was still seeing her, and of course Tim and Bruno. I thought from the first that we couldn’t go on together and shouldn’t try and that Tim and I should divorce. Tim was against it. It was always the same refrain. The loss of Sophie was about as much as Tommy could bear. The two children had been so very close. We shouldn’t make him lose his father and his home on top of that. That was also Bruno’s opinion. I know they were absolutely sincere. They both loved him. What made it easier for them to take that position was that, as I’ve told you, neither of them intended to come out. Bruno said it was private and cozy in the closet. He was ready to lead a march of one hundred thousand gays straight back into it. So maintaining the status quo didn’t interfere with any plan of theirs. The psychiatrist told me that was all wrong, that inwardly Tommy knew the marriage was broken, even if he didn’t quite know or couldn’t name the reason, and that this explained some aspects of his behavior. She thought he would adjust rapidly to his father’s departure. Of course, I should have listened to her. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I would have
decided to do if my father had not come out strongly on the side of our staying together for the time being. It was too hard for me to go against his advice. Then I too began to prefer to maintain the façade of our marriage.

  She paused and said, That’s a whole other story that I’m not even going to try to tell. Tim’s story becomes even more painful, but if I have enough strength to go on with it you’ll get the answer to your questions. All I knew about AIDS, she continued, was what I was reading in the newspaper, and that wasn’t much. I certainly noticed when Tim, who in all our years together had never been sick, not even with the flu or a cold, began to complain of sore throats, sleeplessness, headaches, and diarrhea, and that this seemed to be an unending series of ailments. I said I noticed those illnesses, which sounds cold, but I can’t say honestly that they upset me. I had quit as a wife. I no longer loved him. Instead, I felt indifferent and annoyed. Slightly hostile. It’s possible that, ignorant as I was, I would have read the figure in the carpet if I had still loved him and had been concerned about his well-being. I’m not sure. For one thing, I think I was fooled by Bruno, who was then and has remained perfectly healthy. It’s a primitive sort of reasoning: why one and not the other? On some level, I probably suppressed such knowledge as I had or was acquiring because I didn’t want to get involved or to be forced to feel sorry for Tim. So let’s say that for a long time I knew nothing and suspected nothing. Then at the beginning of 1989, when Tommy and I got back to Paris from skiing during the Christmas vacation—we had gone to St. Moritz—the housekeeper, Madame Laure, whom you’ve met, told me that Tim was at the American Hospital with a nasty case of pneumonia. Bruno had put him there and had been looking after him. A week or so later, Tim was discharged, and Bruno brought him home. He recovered from the pneumonia, but he had no energy, he was losing weight, and he claimed that he had almost constant diarrhea. He looked like hell, but that August he went to Bar Harbor with Bruno anyway. I had refused to go; that was the second summer I had done so, and Tommy and I once again spent almost the entire summer in Antibes, this time with my father and my mother’s friend, who had moved in by then. She is a wonderful woman, and all four of us got along very well. Father was able to get Tommy into a sailing club in Cap d’Antibes, and Tommy loved it. He felt like a real native.

  When we got back to Paris we found that Tim was already there, having cut short his stay at Bar Harbor, and a couple of days later he and Bruno very formally asked to speak to me together and told me, for the first time, that a couple of years earlier he had tested HIV positive. The doctors put him on drugs that they said would keep the illness at bay, but as we could all see, they hadn’t. He had to face the facts: the time had come for him to withdraw from the firm. He wasn’t up to running the Paris office. In fact, he didn’t think he was up to doing any sort of work as a lawyer. Now you know why he retired from the firm so early. Of course, I became desperately worried that he had infected me—there was no reason why he wouldn’t have. I had one test for the virus, which was negative, and then two more just to make sure, and then finally the doctor convinced me that since the last time I had sex with Tim was just before Sophie died, in July 1985, there was no chance that the virus was inside me, hiding. I didn’t tell Tommy about my worries. But he was extremely bright, and he saw for himself his father’s condition. He too read the papers. One day after school he asked me if I thought that I too was going to come down with AIDS. Can you imagine his anguish? That’s when I am afraid we made the second big mistake about Tommy. He was scheduled to start at St. Paul’s that fall, but we kept him at the lycée in Paris. I thought—I suppose Tim did too—that it would be better for him to stay here than to throw him into that very competitive and unfamiliar environment. I was afraid it would be more than he could take.

  Where is he now? asked Schmidt.

  At Yale, she told him, majoring in mathematics. He did brilliantly at the lycée, passing his baccalaureate exam with an honorable mention and getting a gold medal in mathematics in the national contest. Now he’s doing just as brilliantly at Yale. Unfortunately, he had distanced himself totally from us even before he left. A wall went up. Who can blame him? Tim, my father, and I, none of us had measured how corrosive life with Tim and me would be. In his sophomore year he came back from Yale during his winter vacation to see Tim when he was dying and stayed until the end, but that was the first time he had come to Paris since he had left for New Haven. He has spent his vacations with the Verplanck grandparents, at their place in Cold Spring, their apartment in New York, or the house in Bar Harbor. My father has tried to get him to Antibes. He turned him down cold. He prefers the monster Verplancks! They ignored Tim during his illness and didn’t come to the funeral, although it was practically next door. Lew Brenner had been in touch with them, and he told me later that they rejected all suggestions that Tim was gay and had died of AIDS. So far as they’re concerned, he died of a runaway metastasizing cancer, and I refused to take care of him. The sad thing is that Tommy too has adopted the line that I refused to take care of his father. But I don’t know how I could have cared for him, even if I had still loved him. There was no room for me. Bruno and Tim decided he would live in Chantilly with a staff—all men, every one of them homosexual—assembled by Bruno. Bruno even offered to buy the house from me! The most I could do was to go to see Tim, which I did. It dragged on so horribly, Schmidtie, with stuff like lesions or small cancers on his skin, pneumonias, then cancer of the lungs that spread to the liver and the brain. In that house full of firearms, why neither Tim nor Bruno took a shotgun out of the gun closet and ended it I will never understand. The way he finally went was such a cheat. He had wanted badly to read and write during the time left to him after he retired, and he couldn’t do either. There weren’t many days when he was able to concentrate.

  So Lew knew, Schmidt mused.

  Yes. Nobody else at the firm. Tim asked him to tell no one.

  She had been calm during that last part of her story and, it seemed to Schmidt, supernaturally lucid. Now her self-control left her. She curled up on the sofa and cried softly, like a child. Schmidt sat down beside her and stroked her hair. He didn’t know what to say to comfort her. At last she stopped sobbing and asked for the bathroom. When she returned she said, You will have to forgive me, I used your toothbrush. But I washed it carefully afterward. You don’t mind, do you?

  He looked at her and wondered whether he had ever seen anyone so beautiful. Her pallor and eyes swollen from crying gave her face an aspect of tenderness and tragic nobility. Alice, he said, you will perhaps think I am raving, but I know I’m not: I’m falling in love with you, I want you to know it, and I don’t care what happens next provided I can be with you. Always. Honest Injun, he added, feeling increasingly stupid.

  Oh, Schmidtie, she said, holding out her arms, you don’t really want to have me with you always. You hardly know me! But you can kiss me if you brush your teeth first. When he returned, she held her arms out again. I’m drunk, she told him, I’ve drunk all that remained of the cognac. I taste of cognac. Will you mind that?

  He sank on the sofa beside her. She kissed imperiously, her tongue sweeping his, her arms strong and clinging with the force of wisteria. A sacred terror took hold of him, such as, it is said, possesses a novice at the doorstep of a temple where mysteries known only to the high priestess of the place are revealed. The gestures were ones he had accomplished and repeated countless times, but their meaning, he sensed, would be new and fraught with unknown dangers. She was ripe and irresistible, like a golden pear. By what right would he thrust into her? Thrust and ejaculate. Did this beautiful and tormented woman know what she was doing? His own part seemed ordained. With his arm around her waist, he led her into the bedroom.

  V

  HE MUST HAVE BEEN inside her when sleep descended. Was it possible that they had slept through the night? He looked at his alarm clock. Seven-fifteen. Morning or evening? It wouldn’t matter to him, but what about Alice, if it were the next day
? Would Madame Laure have sounded the alarm when she found that Alice hadn’t slept in her bed? But no, there was nothing to worry about. The sliver of sky that showed through the bedroom window was pigeon gray and pink. An evening sky. He lay on his back, every muscle relaxed, Alice’s head on his shoulder, her arm draped over his chest. Her legs held his legs prisoner. Her moist nether lips pressed against his thigh. There was no reason to wake her. From time to time she mumbled and sighed, and her embrace tightened. Once she giggled softly. Smiling, he stroked her hair and her arm and drifted off into sleep.

  That was so nice, darling, I feel good all over, thank you, she whispered. Did the whispered words waken him or the feather with which she tickled his nose? Where could she have gotten the feather? Of course: occasionally they protruded from the coverlet; she had pulled one of them out.

  She was sitting up, having thrown off the covers, and turned on the lamp on her side of the bed, and for the first time—he did not think that frenzy in which he had undressed her counted—he saw her entirely naked. Lustrously white skin, creamy and soft to touch, breasts so small that neither nursing nor time had deformed them, long and perfectly formed legs ending in feet direly in need of a pedicure. The triangle of hair: that was the one part of her he felt he had explored. Its aroma clung to his hands and face. He sat up too, facing her, ran his hands over her torso and back and returned to her breasts. Silently, she put her arms around him and offered her mouth, her right hand busy at his crotch, ascertaining his response. Unexpected good fortune! Afterward, while they lay side by side, exhausted and holding hands, she told him she thought she was hungry.

  Are you going to take me to dinner in the nice restaurant downstairs. Or do you think I’m not dressed up enough.