by Louis Begley
And so Schmidt attempted to explain. Since all he could say about his last night with Alice was that he had treated her badly, without any tenderness, even though she had as much as apologized and said she loved him, the explanation seemed absurd even to him. The look of incredulity on Gil’s face knocked out what little wind remained in his sails.
Good grief, Mr. Blackman said at last, the lady explains to you that she has an old thing going with Popov, something that the way you tell it sounds as though it were more about friendship and sympathy with his situation than sex, and you get up on your high horse and gallop away! If you don’t want a time-share, as you put it, why not take her away from Serge? Give her a better time in bed and out than he can. How can you be jealous of her past with him? Or did you think she was a virgin?
No, he didn’t. Yes, he was a fool. And no, there was nothing he could do about it. There was no prying her from Popov, and he couldn’t share with Popov of all people, couldn’t be a party to cheating him. That was the gist of Schmidt’s answer.
Mr. Blackman nodded and ordered another gin martini. You want one? he asked.
Schmidt shook his head. Not if he was going to get any work done in the afternoon.
Bizarrely, it occurred to him that if his poor late Mary had heard him she would have rolled her eyes, a gift that not even Mr. Blackman possessed.
You’ll live to regret it, Mr. Blackman continued, not the martini but once again cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s really a habit, isn’t it, beginning with letting that brute DeForrest stiff you into not making a run to lead your firm, your early retirement, the prima donna act that almost cost you your job with Mike’s foundation. The idea that when he offered you the job you had the gall—no plain stupidity—to tell him that you were hesitating, that working for him might interfere with your friendship! What a self-defeating asshole you can be. Then I pulled you back off the window ledge. Probably I should have gone to London with you. You’re too dumb to be allowed to run around unattended.
Stop, said Schmidt, please stop. I’m wretched enough as it is. I haven’t even told you about Charlotte.
Mr. Blackman listened intently and remained silent for a while after Schmidt had finished. Holy Moses, he said finally. I have an idea. Do you know Elaine’s cousin Jerry?
Schmidt shook his head.
He’s like the pope of New York psychoanalysts. Most of them he’s trained personally. Suppose I asked him to have a shrink-to-shrink talk with this fellow Townsend and find out what’s really going on from his perspective? Whether that works or not, making it clear to Townsend that he should pay close attention to this case can’t hurt.
Schmidt nodded. Please do.
All right. Now I’ll tell you some cheerful news. Believe it or not, Canning has bought into the sex change. We now have a female lead. Your screen credit is secure.
That’s great, said Schmidt. Are you getting Julia Roberts?
She’s too pretty. We need someone with more edge. I think we’ll get Sigourney Weaver.
As they said good-bye—their partings, Schmidt noted, were becoming increasingly emotional—Mr. Blackman said: Schmidtie, you’re as stubborn as a mule. I know that. But please do yourself a favor and climb out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself. Hop on the plane. Go to Canossa—I mean Paris. Woo her, get her back in bed, let time take care of the rest.
Schmidt nodded, shook Gil’s hand once more, and went his way uptown on Park Avenue. It seemed to him he was staggering, although in fact his gait was perfectly steady. The sun was blindingly bright. He crossed over to the west side of the avenue in search of patches of shade and continued north. Gil was right: being an idiot about DT, Katerina, and their predecessors had not impaired his judgment in the affairs of others. Why not take the advice of his best friend, an artist who had shown in film after film how well he understood women? Why? Because he didn’t trust Alice. That’s what was at the heart of his preposterous stubbornness. She had lied, tricked him into sharing her with Popov, made a fool of him. He had attempted an apology—flowers ordered by telephone, the message dictated to a salesclerk—the sort of thing that would have sufficed if he had forgotten her birthday. Too bad. Begging her pardon in sackcloth, on his knees, was beyond his power.
Whether owing to cousin Jerry’s intervention, a discreet nudge from Myron, or the passage of time, proving once again that ripeness is all, Schmidt received at his office a telephone call from Dr. Townsend’s medical assistant. Repressing the urge to ask medical what, he listened attentively and respectfully. The young woman, of Russian extraction he was willing to bet, told him that the doctor was aware of the letters he had written to his daughter, Charlotte, and of the fact that she had not answered. If Mr. Schmidt was interested in having a consultation with Dr. Townsend about Mrs. Riker’s condition, the doctor would clear it with her and schedule an appointment. Mr. Schmidt should understand that the fee for the consultation would be one hundred fifty percent of the doctor’s usual fee for a treatment session and would not be reimbursed in whole or in part by insurance. Mr. Schmidt acquiesced. Two days later, the same young woman called again. The consultation could take place the following day. I’m in luck, thought Schmidt, remembering that in the past New York psychoanalysts disappeared from the city on the first of August and didn’t reappear until after Labor Day. He must have managed to get through to Charlotte’s shrink just as he was going out the door.
It was a singularly impersonal office: not a diploma or a photograph of wife, children, horses, or sailboats to be seen. In their place, lithographs of old New York, before the heart of the city moved uptown, and, above the indispensable brown leather couch, an ecumenical group of photographer’s studio portraits. Schmidt identified Freud and Jung. The others, Dr. Townsend told him, were New York greats: Abraham Brill and Lawrence Kubie and, in a category of his own, Wilhelm Reich, a much misunderstood and underappreciated man. Having been disposed to distrust him, Schmidt found this young man—he supposed that he was in his early forties—attractive and direct as soon as he began to speak. Even without the diplomas, he had no doubt that Townsend was the product of one of three or four boarding schools and then Harvard, Yale, or Princeton and that he had spent his boyhood summers in Maine or on Long Island. It didn’t hurt to have interviewed dozens upon dozens of bright young fellows applying for jobs at W & K. The thought of those years of practicing law, of the company of young people he had admired, of all those loyalties, abruptly filled Schmidt with nostalgia.
Look, Mr. Schmidt, said Dr. Townsend, I don’t do family therapy, and I’m not going to try to improve your rapport with Charlotte. My purpose is to get some information from you that may help me treat her and to respond to your perfectly natural and legitimate desire to have a better understanding of her situation. Is that all right with you? Please bear in mind that I may or may not tell Charlotte what you say to me and that I may or may not believe what you say. All right?
Schmidt nodded.
First, can you tell me what you think have been the principal traumas in Charlotte’s life? No need to go into the accident, I mean before the miscarriage and the hysterectomy.
Schmidt nodded again. Really, he said, there was little, or rather I can’t identify much. There was a frightful row when she was eleven or twelve, and I put my foot down and said we couldn’t afford to board her horse in New York. So frightful that the memory is still very vivid. It must have been the first time I refused to give her something important she really wanted. By the way, my wife, Mary, and I presented a united front on the subject of that horse. Then there was my own misbehavior. During a very difficult summer—difficult because Mary, who was suffering from what was diagnosed as a depression, treated me with considerable hostility—I allowed myself to sleep with Charlotte’s babysitter. It came out much later, only about three years ago, that Charlotte had understood, however imprecisely, what was going on. How she realized it I don’t know, the girl and I were extraordinarily careful, and neither o
f us detected any sign of snooping or any lessening of Charlotte’s affection for her or for me. It was Mary who caught us, because of a stain on the sheets, and she fired the girl. But then Mary improved and resumed tranquil relations with me, including sexual intercourse. Perhaps the mere fact of the girl’s being fired, perhaps something that she blurted out, had allowed Charlotte to figure out what had happened either then or in hindsight. I can’t tell. Is that enough? Do you need more detail?
Townsend shook his head. Not for the moment.
All right. His gorge rising, Schmidt plunged into an account of his complicated—for he insisted that it was such—aversion to Charlotte’s marriage to Jon Riker; his decision to give his life estate in the Bridgehampton house to Charlotte as a wedding present and to move out of the house, a decision he duly acknowledged as being motivated by his distaste for living with Charlotte and Jon in a house of which he was not the master, a decision that for rock solid tax reasons turned into his buying Charlotte’s remainder interest; his dismay at Charlotte’s decision to be married by a rabbi in a Soho restaurant instead of his house.
He stopped for breath and said, I have realized something. I am giving you a version that has benefited from Renata Riker’s raking me over the coals about what she claimed to recognize as my deep-seated anti-Semitism. I have come to realize that there was in fact a thread of anti-Semitism running through my relations with Jon Riker and his family. I am indebted for this insight to Dr. Riker and also to my best friend, who happens to be a Jew. That’s a fact and I’m not going to deny it, but I want you to know that I have done my best to purge myself of my anti-Semitism, and I think I have succeeded. And I would like you to accept my assurance that my animus against Jews, such as it was, never involved my harming a Jew in any way whatsoever. For example, Jon Riker owed his partnership in my old law firm almost entirely to my advocacy. Not that his work wasn’t excellent. He just needed a little push to get him over the top on time, without what might have been a humiliating delay. You might say that I’ve been an anti-Semite only on aesthetic grounds! He laughed nervously, conscious of Townsend’s blank stare.
I see, said Dr. Townsend.
Yes, said Schmidt, you too find my fig leaf too small. All right. Let’s go on to subsequent traumas Charlotte may have suffered. I suppose I have to include my liaison with a very young—twenty years old—and very beautiful half–Puerto Rican waitress that started after the blowup with Charlotte over the house or just around that time and lasted more than two years. I know Charlotte resented it. Whether it was a trauma I can’t tell. I mention it for the sake of completeness. Other traumas: Jon Riker’s affair with some sort of paralegal at the law firm and a huge unrelated indiscretion or perhaps something worse that led to his being booted out of the firm. Charlotte’s own affair with a colleague at the public relations firm she worked for—that too ended badly. She was going to start a new business with him, using my money, because he hadn’t any, when all of a sudden he dropped her and went back to the wife he had divorced or was divorcing. I can’t remember which. Charlotte and Jon got back together, but I would imagine the bloom was off the rose for them. The firm with which he is now can’t hold a candle to Wood & King, my old firm, where he would have been set for life. And the Riker parents—I may be telling tales out of school—seem much less prosperous than they once were, and all of this has precipitated what I can only call a raid on Charlotte’s money. Then, curiously enough, in April of this year, Charlotte extended an olive branch to me. A truce that ended with another attempted money grab by Jon. He had the chutzpah—perhaps I shouldn’t use that word—to try to get me to set up some sort of trust for the unborn child who would have been my grandson. As though anything in my history with Charlotte justified their not trusting me to be generous!
He paused before continuing. And that brings us to the miscarriage. I do want, though, to say one word more. Renata Riker’s role in all this has been nefarious; her conduct has been inexcusable.
Mr. Schmidt, Dr. Townsend said mildly, I don’t mind your blowing off steam about Renata Riker or anyone else, but it’s Charlotte’s traumas I asked you to describe. Thank you for the information you have given me. I have to say that you have a remarkably well-organized mind. Now I will tell you what I can about your daughter.
Reading from notes, he told Schmidt that Charlotte’s depression was a notch or two below severe. Like Myron Riker, he disliked the taxonomy. She was beginning to respond to medication but resented the inevitable side effects: fatigue, listlessness (themselves akin to symptoms of depression), and, of course, some weight gain. Not significant, but still there; in due course she will shed those pounds. There was initially marked hostility toward what she called his ur-WASP side. That had dissipated, and he was observing in its place positive transference. Charlotte’s ego, her sense of herself, appears to be surprisingly fragile. Staggers under a weight of guilt and insecurities—that is, Dr. Townsend said, what he had written down, verbatim. In all cases of significant depression, suicide is the greatest danger, and a reason for concern. In Charlotte’s case, however, his worry was mitigated by the institutional setting, and he believed that by the time she left Sunset Hill that risk would have been very substantially diminished. Prognosis: on the whole good. In a while—he couldn’t quantify what that meant—he would gradually reduce the doses of medication with a goal of eventually, after she had been discharged, weaning her entirely. He expected that he would be prepared to recommend sending her home before Christmas. But that was no more than a guess; getting to that point might take significantly longer. From that point on the regime he would recommend was therapy and monitoring—specifically two sessions a week—with him or another psychiatrist qualified to administer medication as well as therapy. Return to work, something that is on Charlotte’s mind, was very much recommended but shouldn’t be rushed.
Listening to this nice, rational, attractive man, Schmidt wondered about his parents. There must be parents somewhere; he didn’t look or sound like a foundling or someone who had from the start been in foster care. Parents or the equivalent are always lurking somewhere, like cockroaches. Had this nice even-tempered man been inoculated at birth against parent poison? Or was he on meds himself, carefully monitored by a Townsend look-alike sent by central casting, lest this nice Townsend erupt in his nice Carnegie Hill duplex, assault his nice can-do wife, batter his nice kiddies as they get home from Chapin and Buckley, and then hang himself with his own suspenders—Schmidt was ready to swear the embroidered braces were from Turnbull & Asser and were guaranteed to support the one hundred seventy pounds of bone and muscle Dr. Townsend seemed to be carrying. Yes, that is how he would do it: tie the end of the suspenders that’s not looped around his neck to the banister, ease himself over the side, and poof. All the air has gone out of Dr. Townsend!
I am truly grateful to you, he told the doctor, for this explanation and for everything you are doing for my daughter. An obvious question: could I see Charlotte?
I’ll ask her when I see her this afternoon. If she is receptive to the suggestion, I’ll make the arrangements at Sunset Hill. Are you generally available?
Yes, Schmidt said. I can be there any day, at any time.
Good. My medical assistant or I will call you. I have to warn you, though, a visit may turn out not to be as pleasant for you or Charlotte as you and she—in her normal condition—would like. If you would like to let me know how it went, here is my summer telephone number. I’m about to leave on a short vacation.
The appointment at Sunset Hill was at one on Saturday. Schmidt foresaw summer beach traffic in every direction: a trip that should take two or two and a half hours could easily take four. Having slept badly the night before, he ate his breakfast in a hurry and while shaving noticed an uncontrollable twitch in his left cheek. Was this some sort of little stroke? His mouth was so dry his tongue stuck to his palate. Just to see whether he could, he tried to say miserere mihi and found the words escaping his lips as feeble s
queaks. Fear death by water, but ferries it would be: the first one from Sag Harbor to Shelter Island, the second from the other side of that island to Greenport on the North Fork, and the third from Orient Point at the tip of the North Fork to New London. New London! The roost of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine. Count on an anti-Semitic aesthete to find the Jewish angle! There was a mob at the ferry canteen, but Schmidt elbowed his way to the counter. Two hot dogs with mustard and relish: a delicacy he could swear he hadn’t tasted since the Red Sox game to which he took Charlotte, along with a clutch of underbred classmates, in the spring term of her senior year. The home team actually won! They had beer too, the boys and girls having all turned twenty-one, but even if they hadn’t no one was going to card them. Schmidt would have liked a beer to go with the ferry dogs, but prudence counseled against that and even coffee with milk and sugar—where would he go to pee once back on land? By the side of the road? The last time he tried that, on the Long Island Expressway, a cruiser pulled up behind him, and the pimply Irish cop who got out said he’d write him up for indecent exposure. Come on, you’re kidding, retorted Albert Schmidt, Esq. That went over big: You think I’m kidding? I’ll run you in. There are women and children driving by, and you stand here waving your dick in the air. There was nothing like the prospect of being run in to calm Mr. Schmidt, and once calmed he was such a model of sweetness and reason that the cop couldn’t resist calling him sir. Have a nice day, sir, and get home safe!
He was at the reception desk of Sunset Hill at a quarter of one, having fully recovered the power of speech, the voice that had held spellbound a thousand cops and a thousand insurance company lawyers. Mr. Schmidt, he heard it say, Mr. Schmidt to see Mrs. Riker. Dr. Townsend’s patient, the doctor set up the appointment.
The receptionist scrolled down a column on her computer screen and greeted him: Hi, Albert, take a seat in the waiting room back there. The doors to the toilets are marked. I’ll send someone to get her and to take you to the interview parlor.