Schmidt Steps Back

by Louis Begley

  The accident had happened on the Long Island Expressway, and it was huge. Traffic was moving at sixty-five miles per hour or faster. Josh had been following an eight-wheel rig with a load of steel I beams on it. Somehow one of the beams got loose. Flying it crashed through the windshield of Josh’s station wagon, decapitated Charlotte in the passenger seat, continued on its way, and crushed the skull of Jenny, who was right behind her. Under the impact of the blow, Josh turned left sharply—or perhaps he was no longer in control of the car—and an SUV in the far left lane slammed full force into the side of the station wagon, with maximum impact at the driver’s door. He died on the way to the hospital. They found Schmidt because the directions to his house, with his name and telephone number, lay in the glove compartment, together with the car’s papers.

  Yes, Schmidt could identify the bodies, and thanks to the conversation with Josh on the beach he could tell the police lieutenant that the father and daughter’s next of kin could be found in Charlottesville. There were papers to be signed.

  Then, supported by the police officer who saw that Schmidt was unsteady, he had a cup of black coffee, went to the toilet to urinate, and, seeing himself in the mirror afterward, while he washed his hands, asked himself aloud: Why should this man be alive?

  XXIII

  THE ANSWER to that vast question seemed quite simple to Schmidt. There was no reason that he should go on living other than his imperturbably good health—if he were to die in an accident, which seemed a likelier end than illness, he hoped his death would be as instantaneous as Charlotte’s—and his lack of desire to kill himself. He had thought of suicide after Mary died and had inventoried the means: wading into heavy surf fully clothed and swimming out as far as he was able, a gambit guaranteed to drown even a strong swimmer; leftover pills that had been prescribed for Mary, including those that, as it turned out, had not been needed to put her over the top. What had stopped him then? Loss of nerve, disguised as pity for his own body, unprepared for the rolling and scraping against the ocean floor, and when the availability of pills, which involved no violence or superhuman effort, became clear, a high-minded pretext he had found, according to which he mustn’t leave it up to Charlotte to clean up after both mother and father, that it was up to him to settle Mary’s affairs. Evidently, he was still not a candidate for drowning. He knew he couldn’t do it. He thought he knew equally well that if it were really necessary in order to escape a greater evil, if the alternative were great suffering that could be alleviated only by procedures that turned his body into a bag of flesh fitted with tubes for intake and evacuation, or if he were threatened with imbecility, he would wash down those little buggers with whatever he then fancied most—vodka, bourbon, gin, or even cognac, which of late he avoided because it seemed to keep him awake. But at that point at least insomnia would no longer be one of his concerns. And he couldn’t care less who cleaned up after him, whether the job was disposing of the body by having it buried next to Mary’s dissolved bones at the Sag Harbor cemetery or emptying his closets and delivering the contents to the East Hampton charity thrift shop or liquidating his assets and, after paying some small bequests and funding the trusts for Carrie’s children and Carrie, because surely he would leave money to her, delivering the rest to the Treasury of the United States, the New York State Finance Bureau, and Harvard University. Hell, he knew who would do it: that clown Murphy, his former trusts and estates partner, who had in his safe his last will and testament and was designated therein to serve as Schmidt’s executor. No, it was no longer fear or some cockeyed notion of noblesse oblige that kept him away from those itsy-bitsy pills. It came down to this: he chose not to kill himself because, being well housed, well fed, and well clothed, he was not averse to being alive. Yes, alive in the arid plane of granite on which Charlotte alone had flowered. In other words, he was a swine.

  A swine who read the newspaper and occasionally watched television and now sounded off about current events at Mike Mansour’s table free of the accustomed Schmidtian constraint, surprising himself and those who knew him best, to wit Gil and Mike. Schmidt had observed the neat intertwining of public disasters with what he now thought had been Charlotte’s stations of the cross. He continued his catalog, noting how each new horror ricocheted off his carapace of swinish indifference. The murderous pacification of Chechnya and the atrocities in Kosovo: how far away they seemed to the head of Mike Mansour’s Life Centers! He bet against the success of peace talks in the Middle East and in Ireland, unwilling to grant that good sense could prevail over bloodlust and hatred. The slaughter in Timor, that was more like it. The stabilization of the economies in Asia disappointed him: wasn’t it about time for all those little people to be taught a lesson, to realize that better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay? Might not the Y2K calamities cut everyone down to size, the yellow dwarfs included? He read Coetzee’s Disgrace. The rape of Lurie’s daughter, her acceptance of her fate, made him cry as if he were still capable of pity or compassion. The following year, schadenfreude had him rubbing his hands as he watched the dot-com bubble burst. Heeding Mike Mansour’s advice, he had eschewed Internet technology investments. Schadenfreude likewise made him nod knowingly when he read about the intifada: the last Israeli leader he had admired had been Yitzhak Rabin, whom the Jews themselves had killed. It served them right to have as their statesman Ariel Sharon. But even the swine he had become refused to scoff at the bombing of the USS Cole; Schmidt mourned the seventeen sailors who met their end in the Gulf of Aden. Had their shrouded bodies been entrusted to the sea, he wondered, had that old custom survived? What was there to admire in the last year of the millennium? he asked himself on the climactic last day of the Democratic National Convention as he watched the incumbent president in a dark suit of Italian cut, confident and fit, his meaty nose turned up in greeting, emerge from an endlessly long white tunnel and walk toward the television cameras. The scenery suggested powerfully some as yet unrealized and triumphal segment of the Star Wars saga, the departing president’s buoyant stroll into the future, the long and treacherous journey from his mother’s trailer to the Oval Office having been accomplished. A fittingly meretricious capstone for eight years of tawdriness that had led, Schmidt thought, straight to the ascent of W and Cheney and eight years of the darkest misrule in American history. Yup, the carryings-on of a narcissistic man with a taste for sluttish women and fast food had done as much as the machinations of Karl Rove, or Anthony Kennedy’s shamefully joining the four Supreme Court Neanderthals in the decision, signed by none of them, that allowed that duo to squeak into office.

  Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Perfect blue sky, perfect late-summer temperature. If it hadn’t been for the foundation’s board meeting, Schmidt would have stayed in Bridgehampton. As it was, he had driven in the evening before, got to the office early to prepare for the meeting, which was to start at ten. His secretary, Shirley, walked into his room shortly after nine to say good morning and ask whether he wanted coffee.

  By the way, she added, one of those pesky little private planes has plowed into one of the World Trade Center towers. There’s smoke coming out the building where it hit. If you come to reception you’ll have a good view.

  Schmidt glanced at his papers. For all practical purposes he was ready. He walked down the corridor to where a large number of Mansour Industries employees already assembled in the forty-eighth-floor reception area were looking toward the southern tip of Manhattan, staring at the smoking tower, when the second plane hit. No one thought any longer that some neophyte aboard his Piper or Cessna was to blame. The traders who occupied two-thirds of the floor and had been glued to Madrid’s El Mundo on their computers, unable to reach other sites, dashed in with the news; someone brought in a television set and connected to a German station. On the screen tiny-seeming figures, some of them holding hands, could be seen jumping from the vast height of the wounded buildings. Someone shouted, Look! Look! Schmidt turned away from the screen to look south, and befor
e his eyes one tower crumbled and, not a half hour later, the second. Then came news of another plane that had hit the Pentagon and another still that had crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. And the passengers in those planes, men, women, children—their seat belts buckled—waiting for the moment of impact, knowing that they were to die in flames of burning jet fuel. Schmidt found that he could not detach his thoughts from them, as though it were his own nightmare from which he was unable to awake. Were they praying? Strangers embracing strangers next to whom they sat across armrests? Recollecting quickly all that had been good and beloved in their lives? Some of the children must have understood, but the others? The infants? Did the sound of their wailing fill the planes’ cabins? Did it soften the murderers’ hearts or was it their foretaste of paradise?

  Force of habit? Some other form of automatism? Schmidt went down to the boardroom. Mr. Mansour was there along with Holbein, who worked in the building, and three other directors who said they were stranded. They had arrived for the meeting around the time it happened—the pronoun was already becoming a shibboleth—and now? It was not clear what one was to do now. Mike left the room briefly and returned followed by a dining room employee carrying a tray with bottles of whiskey, glasses, and ice. Drinks were poured, and then Mike went around the room embracing his directors one after another. Suddenly, incongruously, they were all hugging, patting one another on the shoulders. The question is, said Mr. Mansour, what to do next. Should we have lunch here? I don’t think so. I’m letting everyone in the building go home if they can. If they can’t, I’m telling them to check into a hotel at the company’s expense or sleep here. Meals are at the company’s expense too. The chief of security has checked. You can move around Manhattan, except downtown, but you can’t get out of the city. The bridges are closed, and the subways aren’t running. You can telephone but not to all exchanges. Cell phones don’t seem to be working. Schmidtie, he said, taking him aside, let’s you and I go out to the Island together as soon we can. Probably it will be tomorrow. Make sure I can find you.

  That was good of Mike, Schmidt thought. If they found they had to jump out of some window they too could hold hands.

  He returned to an empty office. Shirley had left. He checked his telephone. It worked. But he had absolutely no one to call. Carrie? She was not the kind to worry; he did not need to reassure her. To talk to her about “it”? That was beyond his present capacity for speech. As he collected papers to put in his briefcase—but for what purpose?—a thought crossed his mind. Wasn’t Jon Riker’s firm in one of those towers? He remembered the firm’s name, and his hands trembled as he turned the pages of the telephone directory. They must have moved. The published address was that of a building at the bottom of Broadway, one of those huge old buildings; he had attended meetings there in the past. No, there was no one to call and no place to go to. He supposed his club might be open, but who would be there? Other wrecks like himself? His kind of misery doesn’t like company. He decided to go home. Home to his company flat. It had become a beautiful afternoon, except for the cloud of smoke and soot rising from the pyre to the south, the sort of afternoon that should have made one feel happy, glad to be enjoying the quiet reminiscent of a holiday, so empty of traffic were the streets, so many fathers, whose offices had closed, were walking hand in hand with children or pushing them ahead in baby carriages. Why stop when he reached his building and sit in his living room drinking himself into a stupor? He continued uptown until he reached a line stretching for two or three blocks of people waiting to give blood at the Lenox Hill Hospital.

  All ages and classes were represented, all manner of clothes and demeanor, waiting with such infinite goodwill to do their duty as citizens, as humans. Totally unshaken: some, particularly prescient, had brought folding chairs and tables, but the line moved so slowly that they rarely needed to shift their improvised quarters. Companionably, they were playing cards. Gin rummy seemed to be the favorite, but Schmidt also noted games of bridge and poker. One or two groups of yuppies, in their office-casual Friday attire now worn all week, were sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, their cards spread before them. He took his place in line. Perhaps an hour later, there was a vacant chair at one of the tables; someone had given up waiting. Whether because of his age, which betokened someone who knew how to play bridge, or some other reason, a young woman got up and asked Schmidt whether he would like to take the dummy’s hand. He thanked her and sat down. A large black man in a doorman’s uniform told him not to worry; he’d hold his place on line. How kind that was! Schmidt embraced him. At one time Mary and he had played regularly, and memories of Culbertson’s conventions still rattled in his head. He found himself pulling out trump and making his bid. Then the word was passed that the blood center was closing: no additional donations would be accepted. The reason became apparent in the following days. There had been almost no wounded in need of transfusions, and there was more than enough plasma on hand for the few burn victims who had survived.

  That evening he had dinner at Mike Mansour’s triplex with him and Caroline Canning. When Mike called, and had ascertained that Schmidt was free, he said, Dinner won’t be just you and me; Caroline will be with us. She came in yesterday evening to see The Producers with me—by the way, it’s a great show, almost impossible to get tickets, but if you want I can get them for you, pas de problème. I recommend it. She was planning to go home this morning, but she’s stuck! Just like you and me! Let me put her on. She’d like you to come.

  Indeed: without alluding to what Schmidt knew she made it clear that she trusted his discretion. They were cozy, like an old married couple, she and Mike. So these were the joys of adultery that the stubborn fool he was had high-handedly refused. One week earlier he had returned from Europe on a direct flight from Warsaw. Had he been smarter, he could have stopped off in Paris, used the little apartment on the place du Palais Bourbon that Mike Mansour had decided was a better perch for Schmidt than the hotel on the place de la Concorde, and introduced Alice to its beautifully maintained Empire furniture, including the lit bateau that was actually big enough for two.

  The country will not recover from this anytime soon, said Caroline. Muslim terrorists, a foreign plot! It’s food for Know Nothing xenophobia and racial prejudice of the worst kind. And for the persecution complex of American crazies: like Tim McVeigh, like the Branch Davidians, like the Birchers, and the militias in the Northwest. You’ll see.

  Pas de problème. The question is, added Mike Mansour, nodding, what will Bush do. His government is weak. He’ll do what all weak governments do. He’ll start a war!

  They were between courses, and Mr. Mansour’s fist was at rest on the table. Caroline put her hand over it and caressed it, in agreement.

  What do you think should be done, asked Schmidt.

  Pas de problème. Send the CIA and whoever else you need, borrow some Mossad agents, find the bastards who were behind this, cut off their balls, stuff them in their mouths, and then slit their throats. Posting photographs of the corpses on the Web would be a nice touch. Ha! Ha! Ha! But this government is too dumb and too weak to do that. Pas de problème! They’ll go for another Gulf War! Look for an easy triumph on the cheap!

  Do you agree, Caroline, asked Schmidt, as a historian, as someone who has written about the Red Scare in the twenties?

  She drew a deep breath and continued to fondle Mike’s hand.

  Mike’s right about weak governments in general, and this is a weak government. Wilson was unable to function, he was out of it, when his attorney general, Mitchell Palmer, launched his raids. Would Wilson have let him do it if his mind had remained unclouded? I doubt it. Bush, the people around him, right now they’re in shock. When they realize that this is a golden opportunity to kick some butt, they’ll have no trouble selling him on the idea.

  You’re so astute, Caroline, Schmidt blurted out, I am so glad you allowed me to join you tonight, I’m so grateful to you and to Mike.

  Hush, Schmidtie, she said,
you’ve already had a couple of rough years, and now this! We have to endure it, you have to endure it, we didn’t want you to be alone. Who can say what sorrows your daughter has been spared?

  The swine in Schmidt began a retreat, it seemed to Schmidt, the beginning of which dated from the unexpected and weird concern he had suddenly felt for the odious Jon Riker. No, it hadn’t been a moment of weakness. To have wished that Riker had been asphyxiated or burned alive in the tower where his office had once been would have meant he had gone mad. He had avoided folly. One thing leads to another. Myron Riker had appeared out of the blue at Charlotte’s funeral, standing among the handful of other mourners: the Blackmans, Mike Mansour, Caroline (without Joe), Jason and Carrie, and Bryan. Myron had read about the accident, he told Schmidt and, having murmured a few words of condolence, disappeared instead of following the others to Schmidt’s house for the baked funeral meats. And so, some days after he, Mike, and Caroline had returned to the Island, Schmidt remembered Myron’s gesture. He still had the cell phone number. He called Myron and told him about verifying Jon’s address. Yes, Myron replied, thank you, they only moved a year ago. Otherwise, with Jon’s habit of always being at the office before eight … He didn’t finish.