Schmidt Delivered

by Louis Begley

  Ask your conscience about the money, the dean told him, or your heart. I don’t know. You’ve got to give Jacobs another check.

  What if it gets cashed and my first check gets cashed too? Then I’ll be out fifty dollars.

  You discuss that with Mr. Jacobs.

  He did as he was told. Jacobs was at the cash register, she behind a back counter, pretending not to see him.

  He’d brought his checkbook with him and showed Mr. Jacobs how he had entered the transaction on the stub. He was willing to write another check, but what would happen if the check the store had lost resurfaced?

  Nothing. Tell the bank not to pay the check you claim we lost, Mr. Schmidt, said Mr. Jacobs. It’ll cost you a quarter. Here it is, take it, be my guest, and don’t show your face here again.

  He threw the coin at him and continued, That’s a dumb trick, Schmidt. You stole the cash from that girl.

  Yes, but they couldn’t prove it. The owner’s voice carried. Some students, none of whom Schmidt knew, were staring at them. Presumably, they had heard it all. On his way out, Schmidt tried to slam the door behind him. It fooled him and swung instead feebly back and forth. There was no telling what might happen next, such as some follow-up by the university police or that man Jacobs. In that case, it would look bad if he dropped the business about the check after having made a fuss. His bank, the Harvard Trust Company, was only a couple of blocks away. He went there and, after an officious explanation to a teller and then a manager sitting behind a desk on the bank floor, put in the stop order.

  No question. The prospect of having the extra cash, when he understood that all he had to do was take it, had made him literally dizzy. It was like finding a fifty-dollar bill on the sidewalk. He certainly wouldn’t have carried it to the police station and said, Gee, officer, look at what somebody dropped in the street. By the time he had gotten to his room, though, he understood that the disappearance of the money would be discovered, that the girl would be held responsible even though no one would believe she stole it, that she would remember the transaction between them and know he had taken the missing cash, and that taking the check was a crazy move, like redoubling at poker when all you’ve got in your hand is a pair of deuces. At the same time, there was an advantage in having done something so outrageous, so stupidly crazy. If he was going to get caught, it could make the whole thing seem just that: a crazy, absentminded stunt, for which he should be dressed down, perhaps slapped on the wrist, but nothing worse. He knew he should go right back to the store, give back the money, give back the check, say he didn’t know what he was thinking about—get down on his knees to the girl and the owner. But he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep the fifty dollars, or maybe one hundred if somehow he didn’t have to write another check. In the end it would be his word against the girl’s, and her word couldn’t be as good. She was just a salesgirl with big tits and a big mouth who had let herself be picked up at the pinball machine at Elsie’s and had played with his cock on their first date. Before the haberdashery, she had worked at Snow White, doing the university’s laundry. That was why she knew all about the stains Harvard boys made on their sheets, and how the pads of those chubby, hot fingers got to be so weirdly smooth. Scalding hot water and lye had made the lines on them disappear till she had no fingerprints left. She was not someone he wanted to be seen with; the one time he had shown her to Gil had made that clear.

  Well, he had kept the money, and, when he remembered the miserly allowance his mother sent him, less than half of what Gil got from his parents who weren’t rich, didn’t live in a fancy house like his mother and father, his anger at having been made to feel such scruffy need would surge up, sometimes blocking out the shame. Even so, it hadn’t really been about money. After all, he had never picked Gil’s pockets or stolen the books he needed for classes instead of buying them at the Coop and Schoenhof’s or plain stolen books for resale to a dealer near to Central Square, which was something people did. He had acted on an impulse. Resentment had entered into it more than greed—that the best he could do was this little townie slut who wouldn’t go all the way. But once he understood the mess he had made and its likely consequences, the more powerful sensation that made him go on took over, one of fatality, of being carried he didn’t know where by a force he couldn’t and didn’t want to control. The cards were what they were; they had to be played out.

  That in this incident, and certain others apparently unconnected with it, he might have been in fact pushing his luck, lunging headlong toward catastrophe like a test driver at a cement wall, occurred to him when, as a very young partner, he was flying back to New York from a recruiting session on the campus of a southern university where Wood & King had never tried to hire associates before. Unless what linked the incidents was nothing else but malice, the unique quality that turns a man against himself, his neighbors, and, of course, God. What a sense of relief! Legs stretched out, a second double bourbon before him on the pullout table, he was luxuriating in the comfort of his first-class seat. The hangover of the early morning, on account of which he had called American and put himself on a later plane to New York, was present only as a vague, not entirely unpleasant, feeling of increased sensitivity and alertness. He had been able to spread his papers on the seat next to him and was going over résumés of the students he had interviewed and his notes. Laverna Daly! Entitled “A Short Biography,” her c.v. had been professionally printed and had clipped to its upper-right corner a color snapshot. It didn’t do her justice. She had worked in summer stock and small repertory companies as a set designer until she was over thirty and then decided to study law. The rest was as you might have expected: A’s and “Excellent” in soft courses taught by phonies—human rights, international legal order, legal problems of women, and a seminar on prison conditions—passing grades in the tough subjects that counted to Schmidt and at W & K: contracts, tax, civil procedure, corporations, securities law. On the other hand, she had to her credit an undergraduate degree granted with highest distinction in Renaissance studies at Berkeley, a year at the university in Grenoble, and what was said to be complete fluency in French and Italian. This was his last thirty-minute session of a two-day interviewing stint that ran from eight in the morning until six in the evening, in a windowless cubicle in the administration building. The demand to see the W & K recruiter had been so strong that he agreed to tuck in additional interviews over breakfast and lunch in the law school cafeteria.

  He had read the Daly résumé along with the others the night before. She had no chance: the grades were wrong; that students who start law school late, after they’ve abandoned some earlier muddleheaded career, don’t work out as lawyers was an axiom at W & K; he was put off by the “Personal Interests” listed in italics at the bottom of the second page—cooking, modern dance, and poetics. It was a waste of time for which the university’s lottery system of assigning students to oversubscribed interviews was to blame. That girl might as well be applying for the space program. The thing was, though, that she surprised him. He had had trouble keeping his eyes open during the preceding interview and the one before. But as soon as she began to talk—stating, as he had asked her to, the facts and the holding of the most recent case she had read that caught her interest—he perked up, recognizing a remarkable sense for the structure of legal reasoning combined with unoffensive self-assurance. She continued to do so well that he didn’t cut her off at the end of the allotted time and, in fact, was busy figuring out whether her cause would be better served by his inviting her right away, on his own responsibility, to a full set of interviews at the office in New York or getting the hiring committee to issue the invitation. In theory, only the strongest candidates were to be invited on the spot by the interviewer. She certainly didn’t qualify on paper, and he might not be able to convince the committee, which would read her record with the same biases as he; whereas if he got her in the door, she might do exceedingly well.

  Look, he said, I’m going to take a calc
ulated risk. If I just looked at your grades and that sort of stuff, I should be telling you that this has been a very good meeting, that I’ll report favorably to my partners, and that I hope we will be able to invite you to visit us, although the competition at your school is very stiff, and so forth. Instead, I am sticking my neck out and inviting you to New York right now because I want to give you a chance to overcome your record by talking to other partners the way you have talked to me. Don’t get your hopes up too high, and don’t disappoint me.

  It wasn’t a blush. She turned red and began to tell him about the fulfillment of her dreams, and how this was the first invitation from a top firm, when he stopped her.

  Just call this lady. Here—he wrote out the name and telephone number and handed the paper to her—sooner rather than later. She schedules interviews. There is some advantage to being in the first wave to be considered.

  She got up and shook his hand and then asked, Do you know this town? Have you been here before?

  He told her it was his first time.

  Then would you let me ask you to dinner with me? You’re probably staying at the University Arms. I’ll pick you up in an hour.

  He looked at her in a new way now that she was standing up. It was all right; the clothes women students felt obliged to wear to interviews looked all right on her; she wore normal high-heel shoes. He had had his fill of footgear designed by mad podiatrists. In fact, he had no plans, and having dinner with a student you considered promising enough to interview in New York was quite within the rules. Since this was a woman, he supposed it would be better if he didn’t have the meal with her alone, even though it was her idea. Therefore, he answered, I would love it, but I’m inviting you. By the way, if there are any other students you’d like to ask along—or anyone on the faculty—let’s by all means have them too.

  She made a little noise that sounded like ooh ooh, and said, No, there isn’t anyone. I think we’ll have a better time alone. Don’t you?

  The dinner, he discovered, was to be in her apartment. Just cheese, fruit, and wine. He didn’t mind? She was tired of the dolled-up restaurants near the campus and the fake southern fare; if they were going out it would have had to be a road-house, way out of town, and she wasn’t sure that was his style. Or maybe it was. The police were hell if they caught a student driving after a few drinks, and anyway she would rather have him at home. At home there were to be found, somewhat as he had expected, candles and Moroccan cushions and rugs and oversize heavy wineglasses. She excused herself to change into blue jeans and a top that tied in the back and left her midriff bare. The music was Vivaldi. After the cheese, she asked him whether he smoked. He replied he did, cigars, preferably, not cigarettes.

  This made her laugh. I mean real stuff, she said. You know. Let me roll one for you.

  That was just about as much marijuana as she had, enough for one joint. It was Schmidt’s first. They smoked it half lying side by side on the rug, their backs against a pouf. She nestled her head on his shoulder. Quickly, his arm was around her, and he was playing with that bare midriff, teasing her navel. The smoke, if he could tell, wasn’t affecting him, but the need to take her was unbearable. He worried about ejaculating.

  Hey, I can’t do it until I’m high, she told him suddenly, I just can’t. It hurts. You got any in the hotel?

  No, he answered, can’t we get some? Can’t you call someone? Is there somewhere we can go to buy it?

  There was a whole list of numbers with occult marks beside them in her address book. She put on her glasses and started telephoning. Meanwhile, newly sober, member no longer tumid, he took stock. There he was, in a room that reeked of pot, with one hand in the shirt and the other on the crotch of a half-naked law student looking for a job in his firm, rubbing her up while she called every pusher in town for a delivery. The very portrait of a W & K partner on a recruiting trip. He had to be insane. Besides, the numbers rang busy or didn’t answer. There was one thing they mustn’t do, he decided: that was to start cruising bars, looking for a dealer.

  Laverna, he murmured while she was dialing, this is a waste of time. Why don’t we have a real drink instead?

  That was all right with her, rum with Coke for her, neat for him, while they waited for a guy for whom she had left a message. She had taken off her jeans and gotten him to undress but kept on her underpants. No way he was going to screw her until she’d had her high. With each gulp of rum, that mattered less to him. The worrisome erection was somewhere far away, having its own good time. He heard himself, as though he were some ventriloquist’s dummy, carry on about the taste and smell of her sweat. Hey, I want you to sweat more, he croaked, which was like carrying coals to Newcastle the way both of them were streaming. At last, when the bottle was empty, and they were each falling, at ever shorter intervals, into fits of snoring sleep, during a contortion that had her on top of him, sliding her torso up and down between his legs, he felt the wet, the release, and the gluey cold.

  He timed a two-day business trip to Boston to coincide with her visit to Wood & King in New York, having asked Jack DeForrest, then his best friend at the firm, to shepherd her from partner to partner, which would have been his own normal responsibility. It was a safe choice: Jack was wonderfully obtuse about everything that wasn’t a legal problem or a matter of firm politics. He left in his hands a note for Laverna that was carefully affectionate and impersonal, the sort of thing that couldn’t compromise him and yet should serve to pacify her if that was needed. He didn’t want to get her on the warpath. To his horror, a week later a job offer went out to her. A month or so passed, during which time he contemplated the monstrous inconvenience of her presence at the firm even if she acted as though nothing had happened. Then he received first a copy of a letter she had sent to the hiring coordinator in which she declined the offer and then a letter to him, about as bland as the one he had written to her, saying that in the end she thought she would be happier working for the government and was taking a job with the Justice Department. She’d be glad to get together if he ever came to D.C. The thought of her being available—not in New York but nearby, and out of the W & K context—powered for him erotic daydreams. In the end they were sufficient. He replied wishing her luck but made no move to see her.

  And his much praised crushing rectitude? Schmidt thought that was a matter of emphasis if not definition. That he had beat his colleagues and clients over the head with demands his righteous zeal made of the practice of law was beyond doubt. Whether he had the right to cast the first stone seemed to him another matter. If there was a day to come when all sins would be revealed, there was one he knew would make him wish his tomb had remained sealed until the end of eternity. The financing of petrochemical facilities spread out along the coast of the Gulf of Texas turned on a series of contracts that bound to the supply of product a huge oil company with sufficient credit to back a borrowing of several billion dollars. How much product had to be bought and paid for in any given period, and the level of payments that were due even if the product became unavailable, were determined by contract provisions that alone came to a hundred pages. Within them, like the pit inside a plump fruit, was a series of algebraic formulae expressing what had been decided in words during the negotiations, and definitions of exquisite complexity. Of exquisite beauty, claimed Schmidt, who was their principal maker, in his role as counsel to the syndicate of long-term lenders. When the time came for putting the documents into final form, he took a benevolent attitude toward the oil company’s last-minute requests for changes, most of them in his opinion unnecessary, on the theory that it was good policy to give its lawyers the opportunity to show that they were not always capitulating to the lenders and to Schmidt.

  One such request, for a change in a formula, put forward solemnly by the senior partner of the law firm that was the lead counsel to the oil giant, threw Schmidt into a state of astonished amusement. He heard it prefaced with a personal appeal to himself, recalling the many hard cases that disting
uished lawyer and Schmidt had worked on together as colleagues to such good effect. There was one small problem: the effect of the change, if a court let the contract stand as modified, would be unfairly adverse to the oil company. His friend, the oil company’s lawyer, was making a grotesque mistake: he had turned himself one hundred eighty degrees around, pointing in the wrong direction. To be sure, it would not have been polite for Schmidt to point that out on the spot, in front of the very large group that included oil company businessmen gathered around the conference table, but he could have said something about taking the request under consideration and then explained first to his clients and then to his friend in private why the change should not be made. Instead, Schmidt passed his hand over his eyes, as though to chase away an incipient headache, and whispered to the associate who was keeping track of the changes to make it without a fuss. Thereupon, he excused himself and left the conference room for some minutes to take a turn in the corridor while his heart pounded. Fatally, the change was made, and the final agreements, signed the next day amid great pomp, incorporated it. Schmidt waited until he was quite sure that only he knew that they were flawed. It was then that he wrote, having told the lead lender that was what he would do, a letter to the oil company’s lawyer, informing him that he had authorized the change in question as a matter of courtesy, although, immediately, he doubted its wisdom. Having taken the time to study it thoroughly, he was certain it was not something that his colleague or the oil company could have intended. He explained why, and how he had already recommended to his clients that an amendment to the agreements be signed correcting the error and restoring the originally intended text. Such an amendment was signed. The eminent opposing counsel spoke and wrote eloquently about Schmidt’s remarkable, indeed exemplary, powers of analysis combined with rectitude rarely encountered these days in the profession. Several members of the lending consortium seized the occasion to write as well, with copies of their letter to old Dexter King, who was still the presiding partner, to go on record as being proud to have Schmidt as their lawyer.