Schmidt Steps Back (12 page)

I would love it, she replied, but I can’t. Tomorrow I’m having lunch with my colleague who looks after contemporary American and English literature. He’s more than a colleague: he got me hired! They would never have taken me if he hadn’t made them. I had no work experience in publishing; in fact I had never had a real job! But he had faith in me. By the way, he went to Harvard, and he thinks he knows you. I mentioned your name today. He is Serge Popov, she said smiling.

Serge Popov! The name surfaced from the depths of time like the monster rising from Loch Ness. Yes, he remembered Popov, and remembered disliking him. Oh really, he answered.

A cloud must have passed over his face because she smiled again, this time at him, and said, Don’t be like that, Schmidtie, I can’t change my lunch date. Serge and I aren’t having lunch alone, we’re having lunch with our boss. It’s important. Now stop pouting, and come here—she patted a place beside her on the sofa—and seduce me.

He limped back to the hotel through deserted streets, at the corner of rue Cambon refusing the services of a professional with spiky hair dyed green who offered them at half
price in view of the lateness of the hour. Seduction indeed! But who had been the seducer? The awkward and rough-hewn stranger with the beginnings of white stubble on his cheeks or she, who had taken him into her bed and lavished on him such tenderness? From what well did she draw it? Were there words and gestures she had withheld, ones that she would bestow only on a man she loved, treasures that perhaps—no, surely—only Tim had known? In their writhing and caresses, had it been Tim she had sought, Tim such as he had seemed to be when he first introduced her to Schmidt? He did not think he would ever learn the answers to his questions even if they existed. She had accompanied him to the door and, in their last embrace, her bare arms around his neck, her naked body burning through his clothes, had murmured, Yes, that would be very nice, when he told her he would return soon. I will, I promise, he whispered. He would keep the promise. He was certain that, however extraordinary it might seem, he really loved her—the childish phrase pressed itself on him—for keeps.

T
HE
O
KLAHOMA
C
ITY
Federal Building had been bombed earlier in the morning. According to CBS, there were at least thirty-one dead, twelve of them children in the second-story child care center; scores were missing, possibly buried in the rubble. In the pandemonium, no one dared speculate how many of the missing might be dead or alive. But the world turns, and board meetings held in buildings left standing and unharmed must go on, so that no one was surprised when at twelve sharp Mr. Mansour called the meeting of his foundation’s directors to order. At his suggestion, however, the proceedings were suspended for thirty minutes after the sandwich lunch, and before Mr. Albert Schmidt’s report, during which pause the group watched the one o’clock news on CNN, wordless and transfixed by the horror of the images. No sooner had the TV been turned off, however, than a red-faced man Schmidt didn’t know piped up, saying that he could see the hand of Muslim terrorists in the attack, and brought upon himself Mr. Mansour’s reproof. The great financier, having been born in Egypt, and having spent his childhood and first years of adolescence in that country and in Morocco, naturally considered himself an expert on all matters touching the
Middle East. The question is, he told the unfortunate speaker, producing in his right hand, as though by magic, ivory worry beads that immediately began a
clickety-clack
staccato, the question is what you would say if
El-Ahram
tomorrow prints a story saying it sees the hand of Jews in this attack, you know, Jews trying to pin the attack on Arabs. You’ll say it’s nonsense. The same nonsense as what you said just now. You should be ashamed of jumping to such conclusions and speaking when you don’t know what you’re talking about. Having stood up to make his presentation, Schmidt sat down, expecting the chastised director to leave the room or perhaps even resign. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, he heard Mr. Mansour calling on him to proceed with the report that they had all been waiting for.

It seemed to Schmidt after he had finished that he had been droning on far longer than was appropriate and had lost his audience. Evidently, it wasn’t so. The best thing that ever happened to you, Mr. Mansour told him when the meeting broke up, the very best thing that ever happened to you was getting a chance to hang out with me. You’ve gotten smart. Almost like a Jew.

Thanks for the compliment, Mike, Schmidt replied. What have I done to deserve it?

That’s a stupid question, Schmidtie! Are you trying to prove I’m wrong? You want to know what you’ve done? Let me tell you. You put on a real class act for those directors.
Pas de problème
. They were wowed. The question is: does it matter what those guys think? They’re just WASPs in suits I put on the board to make the foundation look good. Holbein is something else. He’s smart, and let me tell you he was impressed.

Holbein was the secretary of the foundation and so far as
Schmidt could tell the secretary or vice president of everything Mike Mansour owned, a factotum so entrenched and so Machiavellian that Schmidt occasionally permitted himself to wonder whether Mike himself was not under his employee’s occult control.

How did you deserve the compliment? Mr. Mansour continued. You gave a lecture on the political and economic situation in eight countries you’ve never been to before and the condition of my Life Center in each. You never once looked at your notes, and you didn’t make a fool of yourself. Or of me, because I hired you. They all believe you know what you’re talking about. Even Holbein!

Schmidt repressed the urge to ask whether Mr. Mansour was among the believers. He had learned that the answer would be the truth as Mike saw it, unmitigated by any trace of tact or desire to spare his interlocutor’s feelings, and once you had heard it you had better be ready to live with it. Yes, it was true that he had spoken without notes, but he had written an outline of what he wanted to say on a yellow legal pad during the flight from Paris and afterward had silently rehearsed the presentation he was going to make. That was no more and no less than what he had done in preparation for countless client meetings at which he had led his clients, executives of the insurance companies and their in-house lawyers, through the structure of an investment and the risks it entailed. But there was a difference: during this presentation, and afterward, when he answered the directors’ questions, he had been on autopilot. His mind had been elsewhere. That had never happened when he was in practice, however urgently personal problems had pressed on him or how badly he was suffering from lack of sleep or, in the sixties and early seventies, from
a hangover, the effect of those dinners Mary and he and his married contemporaries took turns giving, at which nightcaps of scotch or snifters of cognac were de rigueur and followed the ingestion of a large quantity of red wine, Chinon or Côte du Rhône, greater than he was likely to drink in a week these days. He had luxuriated, allowing his thoughts to dwell on Alice and the plan he was hatching. It was to make in May, probably mid-May, a follow-up visit to the Centers in Warsaw and in Prague. The reason? On his way home he would stop in Paris and see Alice! The secret knowledge had made his heart pound. He had already, before the meeting, obtained Mr. Mansour’s approval for the project. Did he need it? Certainly not, he was perfectly able to pay his own round-trip airfare to Paris, in whatever class he chose, and his other expenses including a hotel room perhaps not quite so grand as the suite Mike put at his disposal. But a lifelong habit of traveling at clients’ expense played its role—even Mary, he remembered, had liked to time their occasional trips to Europe so that they coincided with the Frankfurt Book Fair that she attended as a matter of course as one of her publishing house’s representatives or some other, similar event that called for business travel. Yet another reason made Mike Mansour’s blessing desirable. A quirk of Schmidt’s psyche? To go to Paris on business lent structure and dignity to the Parisian escapade. He would arrive not as an old goat improbably courting his young partner’s widow but as an executive—indeed the president—of an important nonprofit on his way home, having completed a valuable mission. The thought that it would be more romantic to arrive in Paris for no other reason than wanting to be with Alice had traversed his mind as well. On balance, he preferred the mission sanctioned by his friend and chairman.

Are you spending the night in the city? Mr. Mansour inquired as they were leaving the foundation’s office. Schmidt looked at his watch. It was a quarter past three. By the time he had rented a car and gotten going, the traffic out to the Island would be murderous. He wasn’t up to it. Yes, he answered, I’ll stay at the apartment the foundation has so thoughtfully provided and head for Bridgehampton tomorrow morning.

He was truly grateful for the pied-à-terre on Park Avenue, which had not been called for by his contract with the foundation and was, instead, one more example of Mike Mansour’s quirky munificence. But Schmidt had more to be grateful for that day. Speechless joy had overcome him the previous evening when he arrived from the airport at close to eleven, exhausted and feeling strangely dehydrated, although he had drunk bottle after bottle of water. A huge bunch of white and purple lilacs stood in a vase on the living room coffee table, and next to the vase was a note scribbled on a smiley Post-it. It read
These are from your garden
. It was signed
Guess Who! Carrie
. Even without the signature he wouldn’t have doubted that it was she, with her unalloyed affection and natural grace, who had been responsible for that welcome. He hoped only that it had been one of Mike Mansour’s security men who had driven the offering from the country, and not she. Pregnant as she was, she shouldn’t be hopping into her little BMW to make the round-trip from Bridgehampton.

Another smart idea, said Mr. Mansour. You are becoming a real Jew. Is your car here?

Schmidt shook his head. I got here from Paris late yesterday evening.

Pas de problème
. If you had your car here, Manuel—that was Mike’s manservant—would drive it back to the beach. But
this is simpler. You’ll come with me in the helicopter. Manuel will pick you up. Take off at twelve, early lunch at my house, and after lunch I send you home. You know the Cannings? Joe and Caroline?

Yes, Schmidt knew them. He had been at the dinner party Elaine and Gil Blackman had given before Christmas, an event distinguished by that little prick Canning’s baiting of Mike Mansour, whom he was meeting for the first time, and Mike’s manifest appreciation of Caroline’s looks and chic.

We’re having dinner together tonight, Mr. Mansour continued. At Fabien’s. You want to come as my guest? I wouldn’t have asked Canning if I could have invited the wife alone, but for the time being the price of admission is having him around. For the time being—Mr. Mansour hummed an air Schmidt did not identify—for the time being.

Fabien’s was a French restaurant on the Upper East Side that had risen to prominence, indeed, if one were to believe the
Times
’s inane reigning food critic, to the pinnacle of world gastronomy. Schmidt disliked it, having been obliged with some frequency to have dinner there with Mary and her star authors. Decorated in what he called Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel style, it managed to combine exorbitant prices with cheeky and inept service and offered a menu so complicated that Schmidt had trouble finding anything on it he wanted to eat. As for the clientele, a majority consisted of beefy men, hardly in need of a meal rich in animal fat and cream, and their bimbos, whose high-pitched voices reduced Schmidt to sulking silence. No, he was full of truly warm feelings for Mike, but the prospect of having dinner with him and the Cannings
à quatre
at that place made him want to go on a hunger strike. It was in fact astonishing that Mike’s plan had
been to dine with those two alone. Could he intend to slip Joe a Mickey Finn, and spirit Caroline to his penthouse? Or would someone like Holbein and wife—Holbein surely had a wife—be on hand to complete the table? No, that would not be an improvement, not from Schmidt’s point of view.

I wish I felt up to it, he replied, but the old jet lag is going to hit me hard. I had better get some rest this evening. We’ll catch up tomorrow.

Suit yourself.

That was Mike Mansour’s favorite response when an offer of his had been turned down, and almost always it was the harbinger of a stinging reprisal. And so it was this time.

Though it’s too bad. I have Enzo Errera and his girlfriend joining us; I thought you’d like them. It would have been a good occasion for you and Enzo to bond. Afterward you could see him when you liked, on your own, without waiting for an invitation from me.

How annoyingly right he was! Schmidt would have liked to have that opportunity, not only because he admired the great pianist but also because he was beginning to think that if his incredible luck held, and Alice came to live with him, or even only spent long periods of time in Bridgehampton and New York, he had better have a circle of friends and potential houseguests who might amuse her and make up for whatever she would be missing in Paris. Gil Blackman and Elaine were great, but who else was there? No one. Why did fate condemn him to look into the mouth of every horse that Mike offered, to underestimate and reject him and his gifts? The vestige of something he would have called his good manners held him back from saying, Oh, in that case, Mike, I’ll take a short nap as soon as I get home and join you at the restaurant. Instead
he said, I hope you’ll give me a rain check, watched Mr. Mansour get into his vast black Rolls, waved good-bye to him, and walked home. Eight blocks translated into ten minutes: early enough to catch Alice before she went to bed. But there was no answer. He let the phone ring until the answering machine switched on, and left a message. Please call me at my New York number. He had written it out for her, together with his number in the country, his cell phone, and his e-mail address. To be on the safe side, he gave her the number again slowly and repeated it digit by digit. Then he undressed and got under the covers.