by Louis Begley
I don’t suppose she will invite me, Schmidt ventured. You know, after the divorce she never said one word to Mary or to me. The last time we saw her, at the ballet, she didn’t even pretend not to recognize us. A cut, pure and simple.
You may be right. She’ll have to have me, I suppose, since I’ll pay for the wedding, but my lawyer! The snake who handled my divorce! Unforgiven and unforgivable. You’re paying for loyalty, Schmidtie. Wait. I’ll tell her no Schmidtie, no champagne. As an opening move. We’ll see where it gets us.
Nowhere. I’ll look at the wedding pictures. And the beautiful and much maligned Lilly?
Gil chuckled. That’s right, you are my stepdaughter’s fan. Getting fitted for a bridesmaid’s dress. Her father’s getting married to a chick who’s actually a full ten years older than Lilly. That’s progress. Her predecessor was Carrie’s age, for Chrissake. I can tell you Elaine is relieved. I think she’s going to give them a wedding present!
Ah, yes.
Speaking of which, how is Carrie?
This was not a subject Schmidt wished to take up. To tell Gil what he thought was to burn her bridges. Gil would not keep the secret, he would talk to Elaine, then Carrie would never again be on the same footing with the Blackmans. And Charlotte, he realized, was in the same situation. He would not betray Carrie, and he would not betray his daughter, not to Gil. Gil would recognize a betrayal. In self-defense, he pointed to his empty glass and kept silent while Mr. Blackman concentrated on the preparation of a second round of martinis.
Splendid!
Not too bad.
This was said frowning, after a pause, possibly a sign that Gil’s thoughts were running in a different direction.
I am concerned about you, he said when they sat down to eat the beef stew of a provenance entirely familiar to Schmidt, which was actually preferable to the promised duck. I have been concerned for some time. You are leading the most bizarre life. Really, you see no one except Carrie. Brother Mansour, of course, and that’s something I want to talk to you about too. The girl goes to her classes, that’s all well and good, and then she comes home to do her homework. I bet half the time you help her!
No, no.
It doesn’t matter. You haven’t lost your marbles—not yet—but your horizon is shrinking. Every day. Just when you should be making every effort to widen it.
I do read, you know.
That’s lovely. The newspaper, every morning, I suppose, and you watch the news and the Yankees. Oh yes, and the Giants when the season starts. But what do you and Carrie talk about? What can you talk about?
She’s very intelligent, you know.
Please, Schmidtie. She’s also gorgeous and you’re an old goat. And you know I like her a lot—sometimes maybe too much for your comfort? Right? That’s not the point. How long were you and Mary married? Just short of thirty years, by my count. Don’t you feel the difference, don’t you understand it?
Schmidt blew his nose.
Really, Gil. My life with Mary was just that. Life with her. It ended when she died. It can’t be reproduced. I am happy with Carrie. It so happens that we don’t miss seeing people. Anyway, what do you suggest we do about it? Join the seniors’ bridge club at the community house? Or should I take up Rollerblading? I think there’s a group that Rollerblades in some parking lot in Southampton. Perhaps they even do field trips.
Schmidtie, you’re full of shit. Instead of facing where you’re at, you fence with me. That’s all right—for the time being—but sooner or later it will all come to a head. Let’s talk about Mike Mansour. You do realize that I have known him for years. He’s backed all of my movies—since The Raven—mostly making good money. How many years is that? At least twenty. That’s how long I’ve known Judith too—the alimony queen. I’ve never met the first Mrs. Mansour, but she belongs to prehistory, before the triumph of the House of Mansour. A nice Sephardic girl from Brooklyn he just pushed aside. Repudiated by Mansour Pasha. She got married again pretty fast—a skin doctor in Israel! That was a smart move. As Mike will tell anyone who’ll listen, the alimony he was paying her was like the minimum wage.
Really!
Oh, yes. Judith is a different story. For one thing, she was rich and she let Mike invest her money. That’s something he doesn’t talk about, although he did very well with her money and in the end gave it back, with a nice slice of the profits. The guy is not a crook. He’s something else!
For instance, what?
I’m about to explain. I introduced you, and I take responsibility for it, and I don’t mind your having fun and games in Water Mill. But you should know more about him than I think you do. Carrie, too.
It was a windless night without a moon. They went out on the back lawn sloping down to Georgica Pond and, following an old, shared habit, urinated ponderously, aiming at the mulch under the rhododendron, away from the grass.
One of the great underrated pleasures available to man, observed Mr. Blackman.
Schmidt did not disagree. Although the hour of mosquitoes might well have passed, he proposed they sit on the screened porch. To hell with taking chances. He had always been sensitive to bites; of late they turned into small infected sores. The golden, sunset years, and the underrated humiliations they hold in store. There was clearly more to be learned about them.
I’ve gotten greater insight into Mike Mansour, said Mr. Blackman, since he developed artistic ambitions. That goes with recreating the family’s Egyptian past. This cotton-merchant stuff is bullshit. They were poor. Besides, ever since that guy read The Alexandria Quartet, you know, he resents it being known that he’s from Cairo. Can you imagine the past he could have invented in Alexandria? Holy Moses! Anyway, it used to be, when he backed a film, he’d put up x hundred thousand toward development costs and, say, y million more when we went into production. The lawyers worked out his take—I should say that this guy Holbein who does numbers for him would regularly butt in with new ideas about the split and how we should realign the backers’ interests—and the deals were tough but fair. I had no complaints, and Mike didn’t give me any grief when we struck out. Take Beauty of the Hemlocks. That was one huge mistake. I was just getting over Katerina—my version of Carrie, n’est-ce pas, Schmidtie—and her having dumped me, otherwise I wouldn’t have filmed that monstrosity for all the tea in China. From the start, it creaked like a cheap bed, and dealing with Martin Quine was a disaster. All right, he wrote the book, but let me tell you every time he touched the script I could have murdered him. I wasn’t myself—that’s the only reason I agreed to let him consult on the movie. By the way, can you believe it, Katerina and that imbecile Papachristou have divorced. She called me about it last week. Only one kid. A boy.
This could be your big chance, observed Schmidt.
Never, replied Gil. I will never be unfaithful to Elaine again. We’ve always had a good marriage, but now when I’m with her I feel actively happy. There is no other way to put it. My heart ached though when I heard Kat on the telephone. The woman won or the woman lost—nothing changes in that department. Let’s get back to your new best friend.
Please, he isn’t.
We will see. Anyway, when we did my last movie, he asked to be named as coproducer. That was a bombshell. I must admit Eric Holbein was a big help because all he cares about is money so that he can be objective about this kind of nonsense. He also saw the risk for Mike—for his Life Centers. Hey, you know about that foundation shit? Actually he does a good job with it. Also the threat to his vanity, and so forth, because the film was bound to be controversial. Of course, Eric was proved right. For a while, we thought the ACLU, Anti-Defamation League, and Jerry Falwell were all going to come out against us. So Eric and I found a formula that I thought made everybody happy.
You know, I hardly read movie credits.
That’s all right, nobody expects you to. The film I’m about to make—he doesn’t only want to have a production credit. He wants to be an executive producer! My first instinct was to tell
him on the spot to take his money and stick it up you know what. I restrained myself, naturally, because it’s really quite a lot of money and we can use it, and besides we’ve done business together for such a long time. So I asked what this was all about. He had the nerve to say he feels he is ready to give me real creative input. To move my work to a higher plane! The first thing I was supposed to do was to hire Omar Sharif as a consultant. I was eating a chef’s salad and almost choked. Really, I asked. He replied, Really, really. To make a long story short, he laid out for me how he had never failed at anything he really wanted to do and had already accomplished everything that could be accomplished in business—by the way I stopped myself from asking whether he had measured himself against Microsoft—but he still doesn’t feel he’s reached his potential. He wants to fulfill himself through art. Cinematography! At that point I could no longer hold back and asked whether he had ever considered the need for talent in making art. What makes you think you have any, I added, just in case he hadn’t gotten it. In all honesty, I thought he would slug me—you’ve probably noticed there is muscle under that envelope of fat—or anyway get up from the table and leave. Not at all. Pas de problème. He said he had always felt he could have been an artist, it was only the need to rescue the family business when his parents got into that accident that put a crimp in his style, and he had already proved himself by backing me and giving me advice. And he went on to recite, in detail, all the suggestions he had made over the years that I had followed. Nine times out of ten: utter rubbish.
Extraordinary! Where do you stand?
I’m talking to Holbein—he’s my new best friend. That’s also where you come in. You have to realize that Mansour is one of the real world-class—ugh! why did I use that expression?—manipulators of people, not only money. I wouldn’t put it past him to think that if he lures you in with his entertainments and flattery (the subtext being you’re a WASP idiot, but he sees in you something special he loves)—I know he’s feeding you that stuff—you may just possibly agree to lobby me. Because he knows what you mean to me, he probably thinks it’s not impossible that I’d give in. You have to understand that he wants me to do this for him very badly. He knows he can’t make me do it by threatening to withhold the money if I say no, because he knows I can get financing elsewhere. Anytime. The thing is he believes there is no other place he can go. Got it? I have an alternative, and he doesn’t! He’s determined to be an executive producer for me, and not for just any schmuck he can buy in Hollywood. He wants class. In this money is secondary to him, though not to Holbein.
No, it wasn’t a dream. Gil had actually said, quite naturally, as though the words had simply slipped out, and perhaps they had, that he, Schmidt, was important to him, had a meaning, therefore, a value in those regions where Gil’s real life was played out, regions from which Schmidt had always thought he had been excluded, dwelling but in the suburbs of affection that Gil visited when the desire to gossip with an old roommate about the times gone by, children, and sex overcame him. Like a sudden yearning for a pastrami sandwich.
I would never do such a thing, Gil. To tell you the truth, I can’t imagine his asking. It’s inconsistent with the way he has behaved—quite recently.
Aha, he’s made a pass at Carrie!
No, not quite.
You don’t have to tell me. Let me tell you something. I don’t know what went on between him and Judith—in these matters I am always in agreement with the last speaker. The husband tells me A: fine, it’s A. The wife tells me B: all right, it’s B. But I’ve seen enough of Mike in New York and in L.A. to have a pretty clear idea that he’s a one-night-stand mechanic—though of a rather unusual sort. He zeros in on some woman, and bingo she thinks she’s Cleopatra. He will give her a kingdom, make her wonky kid a satrap. What goes with the goodies, I’ve often wondered. Something, I suppose. Maybe nothing much. It seems to end no sooner than it has begun, and yet it doesn’t end. There are these curious reappearances of women you think have dropped into a black hole. They show up in the restaurant where you’re meeting him for a meal; he calls you up to get their sister a walk-on part in some sitcom series; you get on his plane because he’s offered to take you to Paris or London, and there is one of them playing gin rummy with the security man. It happened to me once when I brought Elaine along. You should have seen her face. She was good friends with Judith, you know. The point is that there’s nothing simple or wholesome about the way this guy operates with women. A kid like Carrie is vulnerable. I’ve got to say though that usually he goes for married women—some of whose husbands hang around his place! Come to think of it, that almost fits your situation. Shit, Schmidtie, I hope I didn’t go too far.
Don’t worry about it. Carrie’s strong. Stronger than you think.
Perhaps.
Schmidt listened to his messages the moment he got home, too impatient to go to the bathroom first. Hey, I’ve eaten with Mike. In a Japanese restaurant. They give you twenty little dishes and you have to guess what you’re eating. The way they treat him he’s got to own that place. Surely, thought Schmidt, in a private room, no shoes, tatami mat, feet and legs meeting under the table. My folks are real glad to see me. I’ll call you tomorrow. Fuck it, Schmidtie, I love you and I’m thinking about you. You know what I mean? She laughed. The other voice on the answering machine was Bryan’s, whining, promising to visit tomorrow, as early as he could make it.
VI
EARLY in the morning, between sleep and waking, he understood how it would have to be. Unbearably familiar, Bryan puts his backpack and the tube in which he transported his paintings on the square table in the pool-house kitchen—in Florida he had taken again, with wild hunger, to covering four-by-six sheets of wrapping paper with poison green, magenta, purple, and pink acrylic paint, the colors he had liked the most back when he painted at his buddy’s place in Springs, yes, he has decided to work on paper, canvas and stretchers being a real hassle—and also a tool kit made of shiny metal, the contents of which, although unknown, fill Schmidt with dread. The boy has changed. A yellow goatee complements the long yellow ponytail, and he is fatter and dirtier, particularly the hands, and those horrid fingers that end in nails he has chewed off. In fact, they end in suppurating scabs. But, under the fat, the same marine boot camp muscles, only he has never been a Marine; he’s the kind of guy who can twist your arm out of the socket while puffing on a joint, without giving it a thought. Stronger than Michael Mansour. You bet he is, this is the real McCoy. Sure, he says, he’s staying. He’s come home. Home is where if you have to go there they have to take you in, isn’t that right, Albert? Holy cow, thinks Schmidt, let me out of here, the son of a bitch is quoting poetry, I’ve got to call someone. But it’s difficult for Schmidt to get to the telephone, because Bryan sticks very close to him, first in the house and then in the garden, and probably the only way to shake him loose is to say he’s calling to order pizza. Then when the pizza truck is already in the driveway he’ll go out to pay with his credit card and plead with the driver to get him out of here, straight to the Southampton police station, that is if Bryan hasn’t followed him to the truck, which he will certainly do if he isn’t in the john. Definitely, Schmidt should have called the police the moment he heard Bryan was on his way, but how would that work, since he doesn’t know the date and number of the warrant that is out for him in Florida, so it’s all the hospital director’s fault unless it’s Schmidt’s fault because he hadn’t asked him. Only nothing’s been lost, it isn’t too late because Bryan will never take a taxi from the bus stop; he will call to ask Schmidt for a ride, and that will give Schmidt his big chance.
Then Schmidt remembers that he is in his bed and Bryan for the moment is God knows where, although, as sure as eggs is eggs, he’ll be turning up here, but later in the day, it being only six in the morning according to the alarm clock on the night table. So it isn’t too late to call the Florida state troopers, find out whether there is a warrant out for him, and, if the news is good, if t
he little prick has jumped bail, put the Florida cops in touch with the Southampton cops and have him picked up before he knows what hit him. So long, it’s been nice to know you! Except it’s Bryan who’s got to be moving along. Mr. Schmidt will stay right here, in his comfortable house, everything going tick-tock like a Swiss cuckoo clock. Such are the rewards of virtue when it combines with wealth and impeccable standing in the community. He gives his name and address. The police dispatcher connects him to a Sergeant Smith or Sergeant Jones. Thank you, sir, for bringing this annoying matter to our attention. We will have a cruiser on standby, just give us a call. Yes, sir, no reason at all for you to worry. That’s what we are here for!
As always, there is a catch. Short-term, everything depended on there being a drug offense, jumped bail, an outstanding warrant, and so forth. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any Southampton or Suffolk County officers cuffing Bryan and handing him over to their Florida colleagues who have arrived here on the big fat airplane to return their fugitive to southern justice. What if Bryan has been fired simply because he was lazy or rude or because a telephone operator complained that he had felt her up. But long-term, even if Bryan is indeed carted off to Palm Beach, how long will he stay in jail? Not very long. He will cop a plea and be back here, on a plane or bus to Bridgehampton, within the year—all right, within eighteen months. For one purpose only: to kill Schmidt or hurt him so bad he would wish he had never been born. That is what the aluminum toolbox was for. The man who has made a specialty of detailing cars would know ways to detail his old pal Albert, with some of those pliers, cutters, and gouges he always carries with him just in case. The present visit isn’t for that. All he wants now is money. Then give it to him, give it to him in installments payable somewhere far away. Or maybe he wants something kinky that has to do with Carrie. No problem! She’ll know how to deal with that, unless she wants it. Like with Mansour. How base! Once he had taken its measure, disgust with the ignominous thought, with its origin in his brain, drove Schmidt out of bed. He went to the bathroom, urinated, blew out the wind that had turned his stomach into a soccer ball, brushed his teeth, and went down to the kitchen. It was too early for the newspaper, hours before a croissant could be bought, so he had better make himself tea.