by Louis Begley
She looked away. One afternoon, almost two years back, soon after he had recovered from the accident, while they were out on the back porch, he had taken her hand and whispered, Please be my wife. Everything seemed right for it. Bryan, her part-time boyfriend, was out of the way, cleverly dispatched to work on the house Schmidt had inherited in Palm Beach, to restore it to its pristine condition. He had as good as put that repulsive fellow into long-term storage! Neither he, nor Bryan’s predecessor, Mr. Wilson, would handle Carrie’s body again. In the case of Mr. Wilson, who had bounced off the windshield of Schmidt’s totaled car, Schmidt liked to think that was a dead certainty.
She had stared blankly at him, then as now, but even so he had gone on to argue his case.
Look, it’s all come together. Charlotte has her Jon Riker. They’re married. He’s made an honest woman of her. He says that, not I! I’ve given her money and furniture and silver out of this house. Everything she wants—for the time being anyway! They’ll drift away from me, farther and farther. Why shouldn’t you and I be married? Come on, sometimes I even think you love me. Maybe almost as much as you loved Mr. Wilson!
As always, when he showed the poor judgment or bad taste to mention Mr. Wilson, or she brought him up herself, big tears appeared in the corners of her eyes and ran down the sides of her nose. He kissed it dry.
Man, she said, what’s with you? You know I love you. I’ve loved you since the first time. Hey, I practically had to rape you! I want to live with you. But I can’t marry you. Jesus, you’re more than forty years older! Even your daughter’s older than me. What happens when we can’t do it anymore? I’m supposed to lie in bed at night and play with myself while you read?
I hope that won’t be for quite a while, he answered. Remember how you asked me whether people could love each other and not do it all the time? I told you they could. They get used to showing their love in different ways, they give each other pleasure.
Like how? Fingerfucking me? Thanks a lot, I had that with Mr. Wilson when he couldn’t get it up no matter what I tried. Hey Schmidtie, we’re doing fine. Just leave it alone.
Sure, he’d resolve to leave it alone, if only to avoid being reminded how completely right she was and what desolation awaited him down the road if he wasn’t lucky enough to die soon. But the subject had a queer way of forcing its way in, for instance when anything concerning money came up. Soon after she moved in, and time and again afterward, he told her that she didn’t need to be a waitress; it would take forever to save enough to put herself through college. Of course, he knew he was exaggerating. More was at stake for him than the date on which she would receive her diploma. Why not quit, he pleaded, and let me pay for your education? What’s the point of refusing my help? Her invariable reply: You want to turn me into a gold digger. Thereupon, just as monotonously, he’d tell her that was nonsense; they were living in the same house and eating the same food anyway, just like a husband and wife. The least he could do was to make it possible for her to enjoy those privileges that his wife would be entitled to as a matter of course. She would shake her head and say, I’m not your wife. Charlotte and Jon will say they had me figured out all along. I’m after your money!
Inspiration came to him at the end of one of those dreary exchanges. He would hook her by the gift of a tiny BMW convertible, the car she thought was the coolest in the world. The sales manager delivered it in person to the house during lunch and, as arranged, left the keys on the seat. As soon as they had finished eating, Schmidt said, Look, there is something in the driveway I want to show you.
At first she just stood there, staring very seriously at the little car. Only after he repeated twice, Go on, it’s yours, did she look to him for permission, open the door on the driver’s side, ease her body in delicately, as though the chassis were going to break at the least false move, and run her hands over the steering wheel, the glistening dashboard, the black leather.
Why don’t you take it out for a spin, he asked. We’ll have coffee when you come back.
Instead, she got out. When she had finished kissing him, standing on tiptoe, her arms around his neck, she whispered, Oh, Schmidtie, this is so bad, I just can’t say no to this car. You come too. Let’s take this baby for a ride.
She put the top down. Somewhere on an empty stretch of Route 114, heading from Sag Harbor to East Hampton, past the road that leads to Cedar Point, looking for all the world like a child before the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, she floored the gas pedal. The car shot forward. Schmidt waited until the needle was back at sixty and put forward his proposition: Wouldn’t it be nice to drive this car to Southampton College and back? You’d make me very happy, I want a college girl in the house. That way we would go on living here. I hear the courses in psychology are pretty good. You could major in that and get the diploma you need to be a social worker. If that still interests you. They have courses in acting and creative writing too. How about it?
He held his breath while she made a face. The grimace changed slowly into a smile, and she spoke.
Hey, you’ll have a live-in college girl! I guess it beats fucking a waitress. Shit Schmidtie. You would ask me now. How can I say no to you?
A great idea, because it had worked. She liked the college, even let him help with her papers. An invitation from Mr. Mansour was hardly the most romantic of contexts in which to press his suit. Nevertheless, there he was, trying once more.
Carrie, my love, he said, swallowing the last piece of his croissant. I’ve just asked you again to marry me. Aren’t you going to say something?
Yeah, I am. Thanks a lot, Schmidtie, but please drop it. We’re OK the way we are. Nothing’s changed. You’re too old. I’m too young. We’d give Charlotte a heart attack. Your friends would flip out.
The Blackmans adore you, ventured Schmidtie. And they’re practically my only friends.
That was true. Everybody had dropped him when Mary died, or he had stopped seeing them.
No reply.
But what about the estimable Mr. Mansour? Shall I say yes?
It was a mistake to have told Carrie that Mansour was very rich. That had only made her shy, not curious. Perhaps it would be less frightening to meet this fellow on her home ground. Therefore, he added, Would you rather invite him to dinner here? Or to lunch, on a day when you don’t have classes?
Schmidtie, what’s the matter with you? You’ve got rocks in your head? I don’t know how to entertain. What’s this guy’s house like?
It’s in Water Mill. Right on the beach, very modern and, in my opinion, too big and rather silly. I knew the old couple who built it. Before they became senile, I used to go over there quite often. Now they’re dead.
OK. We’ll go. But you’ll tell me how to dress.
Schmidt dialed the number. A male voice with an identifiable Mediterranean accent informed him that he had reached Michael Mansour’s residence.
Will you please tell Mr. Mansour that Mr. Schmidt and Miss Gorchuck—he still found it difficult to repress a giggle when, as was usually necessary, he spelled her name—will be glad to come to lunch on Saturday?
Somebody, perhaps Mr. Mansour’s punctilious secretary, had been at work. Instead of giggling back or showing surprise, the voice replied, I will tell Mr. Mansour, and went off the line.
Carrie was hanging up on him too. It had taken her no time to dress, as she wore nothing under her blue jeans and shirt and combed her hair with her fingers. Ah, “That brave vibration each way free”! She ran down the stairs two steps at a time, blew a noisy kiss in Schmidt’s direction, and was out the door. Film studies. She had enrolled in a special summer program. The class she was going to was a workshop. She wouldn’t be back until midafternoon.
Each change in Schmidt’s routine was like a mountain he was at first unwilling to climb, even if the result might be an improvement, such as greater comfort and efficiency or better value for his money. This was especially true of separating himself from an employee or disappointing a t
radesman. Thus, he had not let go the Polish brigade of garrulous, familiar, and obese cleaning ladies, whose arrival on Wednesday mornings, in leisure clothes of bizarre colors surely chosen to match the paint of their gas-guzzling cars, heralded the two-hour passage through the house of a benevolent tornado that blew away dust but otherwise had little to do with cleaning and had constituted, in the period between Mary’s death and the advent of Carrie, his principal contact with the world. Likewise, Schmidt continued to buy his fruit and vegetables from the merchant who had “always” sold them to him; his flashlight batteries, nails, screws, and small household appliances at the hardware store on Main Street; and his liquor and wine from the store owned by a young man whose parents, before they retired to Florida, had supplied the best groceries and meat in town. It was of no interest to Schmidt that most longtime residents preferred the slightly fresher produce at the roadside stand where a Fra Angelico Virgin come alive, in a T-shirt with HI! stenciled on it, denim skirt, and dirty sneakers, weighed the tomatoes and new potatoes, smiling at you over neat arrangements of melons and suchlike grown in the adjoining field by her boyfriend, a fitness freak with sunken eyes and cheeks. Indeed, Schmidt would sooner attend Saturday morning services in the Sag Harbor synagogue than buy a vacuum cleaner or a bottle of bourbon at the mall outside Bridgehampton. Examples of his mulishness in small matters multiplied. As he set to washing the breakfast dishes, a task he did not in the least dislike but one that took up time, he reflected on the advantages of hiring a housekeeper or some other sort of domestic employee—the word “servant” having become proscribed with such force that even Schmidt bowed to it—who would relieve him of that and other chores, even making the bed and picking up in the bathroom, when, as this morning, Carrie bolted out of the house, as well as shopping, setting the table for meals, and, perhaps, even cooking. Or he could engage a couple. The man would get the newspaper and the mail, do yard work, polish every piece of brass and wax every unpainted wood surface in the house, and strive in general for that impression of perfect stasis Schmidt had not yet achieved in his house and surrounding property, a condition that would compel the sharpest and most discerning eye to concede that not a pebble in the driveway or a single piece of garden furniture had ever been disturbed. The space over the garage could be fitted out for just such a couple.
He put the last plate in the dishwasher and went out to check on the garden and the pool. Something was probably wrong with the water filter. Schmidt didn’t like the fan of tiny bubbles issuing from the return lines. It would be best to have the pool-maintenance service make sure air wasn’t getting into the system. Another annoying and time-consuming phone call that someone other than he could be making, possibly the combination houseman-and-yardman husband. The difficulty, if indeed there be one, wasn’t that a full-time housekeeper would look down her nose on the Polish brigade and ask to get those ladies fired, a disloyal act Schmidt had no intention of performing. He knew he could be stern enough to impose Mrs. Nowak and her colleagues on whomever else he engaged. They would be like a covenant that runs with the land, a part of the social contract. Only Carrie’s feelings stood in the way. Class consciousness of Colony Club ladies? Schmidt thought it was rudimentary in comparison with Carrie’s. He read as a clear signal, for instance, her refusal to set foot in O’Henry’s or to shop in Bridgehampton: the poor child didn’t think that she was any kind of success in the eyes of her former coworkers and the army of locals who filled the tanks of her and Schmidt’s cars, mowed the lawn, vacuumed the pool, fixed the plumbing, painted the shutters, or did any of the other vastly overpriced chores required for Schmidt’s general enjoyment of life. Far from it, she thought, not inaccurately, that she was considered by them a traitor to her class. The expression was his and not one, Schmidt realized, that either she or they would use, having recourse instead to some up-to-date synonym for “floozy.” Naturally: a Puerto Rican waitress from Brooklyn comes out to the Hamptons to pocket big tips and after a year gets tired of plates covered with scraps of red meat and uneaten fries and even of shacking up with Bryan or some other local stud. So she gets herself a better job—laying a rich old guy, someone it’s all right for the locals and the migrant lumpen proletariat to rob blind but not to fraternize with. That had surely been the initial analysis made by the Polish brigade. But the ladies got used to Carrie during Schmidt’s convalescence, and she got used to them. Whatever might be their a priori moral or social judgment of Carrie, he felt certain they couldn’t help seeing that she was a good egg and was treating him right. But so long as they lived in this place, with the folk memory of their history so fresh, how was he to get her to think of herself as the lady of the house and make her comfortable with any other staff he might hire?
As soon as he had recovered from his accident, he had a five-foot wall of delicately colored weathered old bricks built to surround the pool. The flagstone deck was replaced by more old bricks, and red and pink climbing roses and rosebushes were planted inside the wall. A get-well present to himself. The roses prospered and were in full bloom. Bogard, the gardener, kept an eye out for hornet nests. So far they had been lucky: neither hornets nor bees had come to visit. Schmidt tested the temperature of the water with his hand. Perfect for him but on the cold side for Carrie. It was a beautiful but cool July. Reluctantly—in part because he had never been able to get out of his head the remark of a publisher friend of Mary’s that a morning of heating the pool costs as much as the best seat at the opera, in part because he liked the cold for himself and wouldn’t have cared if others, Carrie alone excepted, stayed out of the water, and also because he disliked the noise—Schmidt turned on the heater, took off his clothes in the changing cabin at the side of the pool house, dove in, and began doing laps. He had given up counting long ago. The effort to keep track distracted him from thoughts about anything else. Instead, he regulated himself according to the clock suspended on the brick wall. His intention was to swim fast every day for thirty minutes, unless it rained so hard that getting into the water seemed too absurd or he heard thunder nearby.
It really was too bad he had only Gil and Elaine Blackman to turn to for company, and Gil sometimes seemed too chummy with Carrie for his comfort. In the old days, he had liked, had in fact been proud of, Mary’s milieu of publishers and writers. He certainly preferred it to the equally closed world of Wall Street lawyers, and he hardly knew anyone else in or near Bridgehampton other than the eternal Blackmans. Well before Carrie, Mary’s friends made him feel that, deprived of her prestige, on which account he was forgiven his mostly silent presence at their lunches and dinners, he was of no use to them. Most of the lawyers among his acquaintance were practicing partners in first-class New York law firms just like his old firm, a handful taught at Columbia or New York University, and an even smaller number, a couple of classmates and one former partner, had become federal judges. He hadn’t kept up with them. And their wives, their dreary wives! If you put aside the few aging beauties among them, who had kept the self-assurance and good humor that having first-rate looks when you are young can give you for life, about the only good thing you could say for them was that they were women. Schmidt resolutely preferred women to men.
Were there former colleagues, active and retired partners of Wood & King, who liked him, with whom he could reestablish some sort of ties? He thought that, on the whole, their feelings toward him were pleasantly benevolent. The exception, of course, would be Charlotte’s husband, Jon Riker. If by some miracle that fellow could push a button and electrocute his father-in-law in his own swimming pool, there wasn’t a force great enough, Schmidt thought, not even Wood & King’s presiding partner, that could keep his big fat finger off the button. As a practical matter, none of this mattered. His old legal pals didn’t happen to pass their summers or weekends anywhere nearby, and, to Schmidt’s surprise, until he divined that she didn’t especially care to live nearer to Brooklyn and her parents, Carrie showed no interest in the suggestion he had floated that the
y get an apartment in New York. And suppose they did, how would he go about launching them as a couple? Would he arrange a round of cocktails, little dinners, and theater outings? He had been used to seeing his partners mostly over lunch. The wives he saw twice a year, at firm dinners for partners and their spouses—since they had begun to take women into the partnership, spouses were no longer necessarily wives—and the firm outings for all lawyers and concubines of any sexual orientation designed to promote good fellowship through a day of tennis, golf, and drinking. It had suited Mary to keep her distance from his firm, and Schmidt wasn’t sure that left to himself he would have preferred to be more gregarious. Even if Carrie were not in the picture, it would have been awkward, and perhaps not possible, to live down his past aloofness, to become one of the boys. But imagine Jack and Dorothy DeForrest—or even the W & K man-of-the-world Lew Brenner and his wife, Tina—invited to a small dinner at Schmidtie’s brand-new penthouse to meet Miss Carrie Gorchuck. They would get through the meal and the coffee and brandy all right, though the men might be too unsettled to cluster as usual in the corner of the living room to talk about the firm’s finances, but afterward, what a fuss! Schmidt with a girl younger than his own daughter, yes, younger than Jon Riker’s wife! No, she’s not a lawyer. I asked what she did and she came right out with it; she was a waitress until that old goat came along and made it worth her while to give up working. Beautiful as the day is long, absolutely—and then, depending on the speaker, a further graphic detail might follow—but, you know, with just a touch of the tarbrush. Some sort of Hispanic. Yes, Puerto Rican. It was just as well that the issue didn’t need to be faced. The very young partners—and certainly the associates—would think the new Mrs. Schmidt was a ten. But what was Schmidt to them or they to him?
He executed a very correct turn and looked up at the clock. Twenty-five minutes. To keep going for another five was intolerable, not because it was hard but because it was too boring. Another daily defeat. Cut short the swim, skip the exercises intended to tighten the stomach, fall asleep over The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He climbed out, dried himself, and, with the towel wrapped around his midriff, out of habit, although there was no risk of an unannounced visitor who might surprise him in his nakedness, lay down in the sun. Really, it couldn’t be simpler: just like Carrie, he was déclassé. Since deep down the last thing he wanted was to rejoin his class—even if giving up Carrie weren’t the price—he must look for a social life elsewhere. Alas, not among the waitresses and busboys at O’Henry’s or the chattering Ecuadoreans and Dominicans who trimmed his hedges and picked up broken tree branches. He was too old for the former; the latter didn’t speak English. Not among the funny men and women with oversize smiles who sold local real estate, placed insurance, or fixed your teeth in an emergency, if you couldn’t go into town. They were too unattractive. He needed to find people who belonged to no class and, indifferent to his loss of status or simply too ignorant to understand, might be drawn in by his availability and style. That was supposed to be the one advantage of a comfortable retirement. You want Schmidt at lunch? You’ve got him. Someone’s asked you to fill a table at the gala benefit for the opera at fifteen hundred dollars a seat? Schmidtie’s check is in the mail. Couldn’t Carrie’s looks do it for them? In his youth, they might have been adopted by members of café society, like the Greek shipowners who had been his father’s clients. Was there still a café society, even though El Morocco and the Copacabana had vanished, and the “21” Club kept changing hands like a used car? Exposure to articles on “lifestyles,” which had spread inside the New York Times like a malignant growth, and the occasional furtive dips into a weekly New York publication that had made a specialty of studying the vulgar rich, with reporting by young persons some of whose parents he had known, led Schmidt to believe that there did exist a similar subclass, completely outside society as he had once understood it, composed of parvenus—not especially beautiful or idle—sitting on mountains of vastly appreciated shares in companies they had started or bought on the cheap. With his billions and Levantine aroma, Michael Mansour was surely in it. Perhaps other friends of the Blackmans qualified. One would have to see.