Schmidt Steps Back (27 page)

Meanwhile it was becoming clearer than ever to Schmidt that there was no place for him in the world in which Mary and he had lived so pleasantly during their weekends and vacations. It was a world of powerful editors and literary agents and writers successful enough to own or rent a house in the Hamptons. Large parties, given in honor of publication of books and visits by authors deserving to be so fêted, alternated with intimate dinners nicely calibrated to ensure that peers of the realm dined in the company of peers. Of that realm, Mary had been a natural denizen, a duchess by virtue of her charm, talent, and power. Schmidt had been tolerated as her consort. With her gone, invitations to the little dinners had stopped abruptly. Those to lawn parties, at which marginal agents, junior editors, and midlist writers hoped to rub elbows with their betters, turned into a slow trickle, and then they too stopped. Schmidt knew that in part he was to blame.
His prickliness, his professed dislike of small talk, his inability to move graciously from one group of guests to another, were fatal flaws that were not counterbalanced by wealth or success in the law sufficiently well publicized to impress even laymen. He was a retired lawyer and nothing more, a husk. A former partner, to be sure, in a great firm whose name these sophisticated agents, editors, and writers recognized as a center of power, but what kind of a lawyer had he been? Private financings! No hostile takeovers or defenses against the same to his credit? Absent from great First Amendment battles? Nothing could be more boring. He had thought that Lew Brenner, for instance, thrown into this pitiless milieu, would do just fine. He could talk about Arab sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, and barbaric Texans, deals in which billions of dollars and the policies of sovereign states were balanced on the edge of a knife. What could Schmidt talk about? The newest fashions in leveraged leases, the insurance company lawyers he had known, the vast ethical problems raised when he had been called on to opine whether a sale was a true sale or a disguised loan? He reeked of ennui and knew it. On top of that, he would accept invitations, then fail to show or show without having accepted, both venial sins when committed by a peer of the realm, mortal in his already marginal case.

The apparition of Carrie in his life had moved him into another sphere of existence, the sphere of bliss. Bliss that he had known would vanish like a mirage, even when awkwardly, clumsily he ventured to propose marriage, showed himself ready to be nothing more than a doormat under her feet, or perhaps a stepping-stone to some subsequent more appropriate marriage and higher station. Bliss came to an end as it must, leaving in its wake the mystery of little Albert.
And, inevitably, his short-lived happiness had been added to the monstrous inventory of Charlotte’s resentments. There was no doubt: the ever-deeper—he was beginning to fear permanent—estrangement from his daughter was his life’s principal liability. On the asset side of his balance sheet he put seeing Carrie and little Albert daily and babysitting with Albert whenever he wasn’t in Jason’s and Bryan’s way, but that was a rapidly depreciating asset. They would be leaving his pool house in the early fall. Without a word having been spoken, he had reached an understanding with Carrie. Its gist: keep it low-key. Let Jason stop by Schmidt’s kitchen to talk about how the marina was doing—better than Jason had expected—and progress in refurbishing the house, into which all too soon the young family would be moving. But Schmidt needn’t reciprocate and make his way to the pool-house kitchen to drink a Coors with Jason. The implications of that understanding for the future saddened Schmidt. But the future was still only around the corner. He need not try to deal with it now. And apart from that? He could claim Gil and Elaine Blackman’s friendship and, of course, Mike Mansour’s. How often could he let it be known to the Blackmans that he was available for a meal? And were there limits even to Mr. Mansour’s patience and hospitality? Of late it seemed to Schmidt that there were none. He marveled at his good fortune.

The major new asset on his balance sheet was the work he was doing for the foundation in New York, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. He thought that in the fall he would add Monday afternoon, although with Shirley’s help he was already carrying a full week’s workload. You’ve got the moxie of a young W & K partner, Mike Mansour had told him,
not a broken-down retiree. Had he been Sy, Schmidt would have purred to hear this compliment. He had not forgotten Carrie’s report of what Mr. Mansour had said after Schmidt had accepted the foundation job: Schmidtie can do it, but maybe he’s gotten used to not working. He might quit or something. That piece of gossip had come to her, of course, from Jason and had made Schmidt wonder whether he had not set himself up for yet another failure by taking the job Mike had offered apparently in spite of those doubts. While he was at his foundation office, talking on the phone to the heads of the Life Centers and translating their eccentric English into his own, attending to correspondence, even being grilled by Mike’s vizier Holbein, he would naturally forget his loneliness. For lunch, he would have a sandwich in the foundation’s cafeteria or at his desk or, more often, walk over to the club and sit at the members’ table. The chitchat there almost invariably concerned things and people he knew nothing about. He would have liked, he told himself, to get to know the swarm of young people employed by Mansour Industries in the building where the foundation had its office, but he had concluded it was a lost cause. When in contact with them, for instance standing in line for his sandwich or venturing to share their table in the cafeteria, he couldn’t help being conscious of their lack of interest in him, and the unspoken question: Who is this relic? It was equally true that, having looked at them closely, he was just as glad to leave things as they were. To keep his distance. These traders and accountants, Mike Mansour’s bean counters—managers and engineers employed by companies in the Mansour Industries group were tucked away in the provinces of the empire and seldom made an appearance at headquarters—were young men (their female
colleagues apparently ate at their desks) uniformly coatless, ballpoint pens protruding from the pockets of their white shirts, excessively wide neckties fastened at midpoint to those shirts by gold pins, their cell phones holstered at the belt and sometimes connected to the ear by a variety of gizmos, with loud voices and accents of neither Syosset nor Oyster Bay but boroughs and towns less frequented by Schmidt. Aha! triumphed Schmidt’s conscience. Why don’t you come out and say it, say they’re Jews! Immediately Schmidt rose for the defense: Objection! Schmidtie is no anti-Semite. They’re unattractive wonks, there is no reason that Schmidtie should like them! And so perhaps they were, but Schmidt doubted whether, with Mr. Blackman sitting in judgment, the accused would be acquitted or let off with a warning.

City evenings were lonely as well. The only W & K partner with whom he was still on easy terms was Lew Brenner, to whom paradoxically he had not been close before. The guests Mary and he had entertained at home in the city—it seemed to him they had been legion—were not much use either. For they too had been Mary’s professional friends. The others, college and law school classmates, executives of client companies, he felt no urge to call them, to listen to surprised greetings, to announce, Hey, it’s me, Schmidtie, I’m back, back from the dead! Instead, he went to the movies across the street from Lincoln Center or to the ballet and afterward ate a hamburger at O’Neal’s. A production of
Lohengrin
closed the season at the opera. He had felt lucky to have caught it and, in obeisance to his and Mary’s former habits, had dinner during the intermission at the opera’s fancy restaurant.

He was therefore astonished and initially pleased, too pleased for his taste, when, upon returning to Bridgehampton
late one Thursday evening, he saw in the neatly sorted and stacked mail on the kitchen table an invitation to the Fourth of July party to be given on July 3, the fourth itself being a Tuesday, and so logically the evening when the multitudes would be rushing back to the city. Bill Gibson, a literary superagent famous for wresting seven-figure advances from publishers in the U.S., and smaller but still eye-popping ones in Europe, for books that didn’t always earn them out, was the host. Schmidt remembered that he had once had a sort of personal connection with Gibson. In those days when they were still likely to meet regularly at literary gatherings, the agent, instead of looking through him or avoiding his eye, would spontaneously engage him in conversation. The reason? High finance and financial combinations interested Gibson; he was under the impression that Schmidt was the designer of devilishly complex schemes, not merely an artisan skilled in giving them contractual expression, which was closer to the truth. But at least two years had passed since he had seen Gibson, certainly since they had talked, and he couldn’t remember having been invited to his Fourth of July party since the summer after Mary died. This invitation had obviously been sent by mistake; a secretary had used an old list, compiled before Schmidt had been dropped. An envelope addressed to
Mr. and Mrs
. would be the dead giveaway. He fished it out of the waste-basket and was puzzled to find it addressed to him alone. Too bad, he would send his regrets. That was what he told Mr. Blackman the next day when they met for lunch at O’Henry’s, putting what he thought was a humorous spin on it: the automatism of secretaries in this day of computer-generated lists and so forth.

You’re nuts, replied Mr. Blackman, a case of incipient paranoia.
Nowadays it can be treated with low doses of medication. I saw Bill the other day, and he told me spontaneously and specifically that he hopes you will come! He realizes you haven’t been in touch and wants to catch up. Elaine and I are going. Do you want us to take you?

That suggestion was unprecedented in the long history of their friendship, a sign of solicitude that made Schmidt wonder whether Gil really thought he wasn’t well. But no, that was nonsense. He accepted the offer, managing to sound almost as grateful as he really was.

Good, said Gil. You’re on our way to his place. We’ll pick you up. Let’s say at six.

It was pleasant to arrive at the party with Gil and Elaine. If the number or the average price of the cars parked along the road on both sides of the stone gateposts flanking the driveway, or the black-clad security guards, with wires sticking out of their ears, who checked names of arrivals against a list, or the presence of not one but three village cops directing traffic was a guide, Mr. Gibson’s fête could already be pronounced, at least for the literati of the Hamptons, the social climax of the long holiday weekend. Schmidt knew from experience that, had he come alone, he would have trudged, a solitary figure, along the road from his car to the gate and up the long driveway to the house, too shy and too ill at ease to tag along with any of the couples ahead of or behind him, even those he knew and greeted. What was he to say to them? Through too long a silence he had lost the power of speech. But the Blackmans’ protection had worked a magic change. It had transformed a sad figure, easily mistaken for an intruder, for a minor houseguest of one of Bill Gibson’s friends, a transient
doomed to disappear the next day and never to be seen again, into someone possibly worth meeting or at least greeting with more than a semblance of warmth.

Postadolescent boys and girls in black trousers, white shirts, and black bow ties were circulating with trays of white wine, red wine, and sparkling water; canapés of foie gras or broiled tuna; miniature spring rolls; tiny frankfurters; and assortments of crudités. Elaine took a glass of white wine, and Gil expertly parked her with a group that had formed around a perorating novelist.

Let’s go to the bar and get a grown-up drink, he said to Schmidt. I have something to tell you, he added when he judged the distance from Elaine to be sufficient. I’ve got a studio for DT on East Sixty-Sixth Street, just a hop, skip, and jump from my office. Of course I’m giving her a job too. That’s why I’m going ahead with Canning’s book, even though he’s an asshole and Mike will be on my back to make the movie more salable. I’m all for that, of course, especially as I am thinking I might put some of my own money in it. Make that Elaine’s money. God knows she’s loaded!

Here’s an idea, said Schmidt. Perhaps it’s crazy, and perhaps Canning would tear your head off if you proposed it. How about a sex change? Why not make Vincent the cannibal anthropologist into a girl, and get Julia Roberts to play her? Canning isn’t gay. I think he made Vincent a queer only to be chic. It has no bearing on the story.

They had reached the bar and ordered double bourbons on the rocks.

Schmidtie, you rascal, that is inspired! the great filmmaker replied very slowly. Why didn’t I think of it? I spend too much time thinking about DT. I don’t believe Mike is here—by the
way we should introduce him to Gibson. If he comes onboard with it, which I’m sure he will, I’ll give Canning a call and say this is how it’s going to be. You know what? I think he’ll say yes if I sweeten ever so slightly the price I’m paying for the rights. It’s going to be a whole new ballgame. I think you’ve just improved our gross by fifty to eighty million in the U.S. alone.
Cin cin!
To
The Serpent
! I’ll list you in the credits as literary adviser to the producer. Wait till Elaine hears this!

Apropos of what Elaine hears, Schmidt said, don’t you think you should be more careful about DT? I don’t think you’ve ever before set up a mistress in an apartment. It sounds to me like two households, a double life. You didn’t do that even with Katerina. You’re playing with fire.

I am, old friend, but I don’t know how to stop. All she wants to do when we’re together is fuck, and she fucks like a whirling dervish. She’s taken it to a new level. I can’t let go.

Schmidt patted him on the back. Be careful.

I’m trying, replied Mr. Blackman, believe me. Let’s find Elaine and rescue her.

With that they turned to find themselves face-to-face with Alice and Popov. Her arm was under his left arm; he held her hand; her breasts pressed against him.