Schmidt Steps Back (32 page)

Over coffee, he told Jason about Charlotte’s accident and how she would never be able to have children. Most of what he had to say Carrie had already heard. Then, smiling at the baby, pleased to see how contentedly he kicked and gurgled, he made his speech.

Perhaps one day, after Charlotte has gotten completely well, she and Jon will want to adopt, he told them. It’s possible, but I’m not sure that it’s likely. If they do adopt one child, they may want to adopt another one, or perhaps more, so as to have a larger family. I mention these possibilities only because I want you to know that I’ve thought about them and have taken them fully into account. Whatever Charlotte and Jon do in this respect will have no effect on what I’d like to do for little Albert here. Or other children who for one reason or another come into my life and become dear to me. If you’ll permit it, if you agree, I will pay for the education of Albert and any brothers and sisters of his—tuition, tutoring, living expenses away from home, and so forth—from preschool through graduate work. Summer camps are included. The works. Will that be all right with you? Obviously, if the marina makes you so rich that you want to bear those expenses yourselves, you won’t be obliged to accept my money. I’ll set it aside instead as a nest egg for the kids.

Carrie let out a whoop and ran around the table to hug him. What kind of dopey question was that? Hey, Albert, send Schmidtie a kiss! You just got yourself a pretty good deal. Schmidtie, this is so generous I can’t believe it.

Jason too had stood up and with great seriousness shook Schmidt’s hand.

Sit down, sit down, Schmidt said, and raised his hand as a signal to cease further effusions.

Well, that’s good, he said. But I want you to understand that my question wasn’t all that dopey. What I’m going to do will lead me from time to time—for instance, when you’re choosing a school or a camp or when decisions have to be made about going to a boarding school or staying at home or about college—to stick my big nose into your affairs.

He couldn’t help it. He winked at Albert.

If that’s really all right with you, he continued, you’ve made me very happy. I’m a lonely old man. I need to think I can make myself useful.

That was as brave and as sincere a speech as Schmidt was capable of making. But a little green-hatted devil whose proboscis resembled Schmidt’s, perching on his left shoulder, took a cynical view. Congratulations, chum! he whispered in Schmidt’s ear. Including the siblings in your largesse was one smart move. You hadn’t told me that part. It will sure spare young Albert some grief. But watch your step anyway. Don’t forget: we never forgive our benefactors, and no good deed goes unpunished. Leave lots of air between that little family and you. Don’t crowd them.

Shopping for sufficiently fine and clever wooden toys for young Albert took up a good deal of Schmidt’s free time when he traveled and obliged him to carry an empty suitcase, which was filled gradually as he visited one capital after another. Central and Eastern Europeans were still carving, and putting carts and wagons together without nails or glue. The search continued when he was at home in Bridgehampton or New York. He had become an avid reader of FAO Schwarz catalogs, which disappointed him more and more, and as time he spent staring at the screen of his computer increased, he
became an habitué of online outlets, as well as eBay, where he hunted for antique toys in mint condition. The kid, as he referred to little Albert in his thoughts, seemed to like him, the way, Schmidt supposed, he would have liked Mr. and Mrs. Gorchuck, Carrie’s elusive parents resident in Canarsie—Schmidt still had not encountered them, and for all he knew they had not yet set foot in Carrie and Jason’s house in East Hampton, in which case perhaps Carrie took Albert to visit them at their home. Schmidt hadn’t undertaken to inquire, remembering from the time when he and Carrie lived together that Carrie strongly preferred to keep distinct parts of her life in separate compartments. Or the way Albert would have liked Jason’s parents, had they lived somewhere closer to Long Island than Nova Scotia. It all went to show, he thought, how good it is to have money: if your children want to see you, you can hop into your car or on a train or plane and go to where they are. Or vice versa. You send the tickets or a check. And how shitty it is to have none or too little. No, being treated like a sort of grandfather, or anyway allowing himself to believe that was how he was treated, suited Schmidt just fine. Wasn’t that all he had hoped for when he could still take for granted that one day Charlotte would have children? Nor was he only attentive, as a virtual grandfather, to keeping Albert supplied with trucks, puzzles, and games. Schmidt had taken on as well the responsibility for the kid’s religious and spiritual education. It was Jason’s elder married sister, living in Nova Scotia like the rest of the family, who stood up with him at the font, and not, as he had feared, one of O’Henry’s waitresses, Carrie’s former colleagues. Let there be, however, no mistake: Schmidt’s democratic principles were intact. He liked those very young women, their welcoming bosoms, and the occasional
whiffs of barely suppressed body odor, knew their first names, and left generous, sometimes extravagantly generous, tips. But ever since the nature of his connection with Carrie had moved on to a Sunday-best bourgeois respectability, he preferred to see them only in their professional setting.

Schmidt had taken to heart the advice of the little fellow with the big nose and the green hat: he was doing enough for young Albert—and therefore Carrie—to vent a tiny part of the affection dammed up within him to the point of overflowing. He hoped he was not doing too much, that he was not in the way. Experience proves that being a good grandfather—whether de facto or de jure—is not a full-time job, unless you live in the seclusion of the Alps and are lucky enough to take into your house and your rough heart Heidi, your little granddaughter. Or to find yourself in some analogous case. Therefore, although Schmidt thought of Albert often, always feeling a happy warmth in his heart, and when in Bridgehampton saw the boy and his parents as often as he thought was prudent, being Albert’s Albo—a sobriquet suggested by Schmidt fearful that the kid would mispronounce Schmidtie—was not even a part-time job. It did little to fill the void of his days and nights.

Running the foundation was the more effective remedy. Old habits persist. Schmidt had always worked hard as a lawyer and had been capable of an eerie concentration that sheltered him from noise, interruptions, discomfort, and, he well knew, thoughts unconnected with his work. That detachment, that absolute fixation on tasks at hand, had it not been the subtext of Charlotte’s reproaches in the first quarrels she picked with him after her engagement to Jon? She had berated him
for having had his old trusted secretary transmit messages to her, make travel reservations, arrange for the time during the workday when they could speak on the telephone. That same concentration was now saving his sanity.

To his surprise, and subsequent amusement, Schmidt discovered that his foundation job opened the door to a social life in a milieu where he would be lionized. It consisted of so-called fine arts or cultural trustees or cultural affairs executives—the inventiveness of the nomenclature used to tart up fundraisers and public relations operatives was stunning—who had recently joined his club. Dazzled by Mike Mansour’s fortune, they saw in Schmidt the vade mecum to the Mansour billions. The fact that the foundation operated only overseas and didn’t make grants to U.S. institutions didn’t discourage them, a separate deal or a new charitable initiative being always imaginable. Some of them probably, on a smaller and personal scale, salivated at the thought of the lectures they could deliver, and seminars they could lead, in Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, and even in other less romantic destinations, all compensated by honoraria and reimbursement of every travel expense, including first-class airfares. Schmidt had no moral objection to such calculations, understanding all too well that those nicely turned out ladies and gentlemen had apartments and houses to maintain and their own and perhaps other mouths to feed. Only, as the perennial aesthete, he found offensive, like a stain on a carpet, both the nomenclature and the hunt at the club for business and personal advancement. These were sins against the established order and civility.

Ever since
The New York Review of Books
began publication, he had been a faithful reader of its personal announcements,
not because he was looking for a restored fifteenth-century farm in Umbria or a studio with exposed bricks and ceiling beams on Île St. Louis or wanted to enter into a progressively intimate relationship with a Boston divorcée or female Jewish academic ready to travel, but because they amused him as stylistically perfected communications, shot like an arrow into the air with the hope of lodging it in the heart of a kindred soul on the Upper West Side.

His circumstances had changed. He found himself sending terse, though he hoped well-turned, replies to divorced and single females—he avoided widows—with their love of music, travel, Italian and French food, and interest in financially independent gentlemen between sixty-two and seventy-two. That bracket, he found, was the most sought after among the aforementioned females. He enclosed a photograph taken of him for the foundation’s annual report: the least stuffy and off-putting he possessed. Three of these shafts hit a target. The images he received in return, however, did not incite him to proceed. Somewhat discouraged, he kept on reading, and one day came upon an announcement, in a genre he had seen before and distrusted, the scent of which now drew him. Its author claimed she was a married woman of fifty, residing in Bedford Hills—the
ne plus ultra
of Westchester respectability—seeking afternoon meetings in Manhattan with an equivalent gent. Discretion guaranteed. How should he parse “equivalent gent”? Schmidt took the approach that had been taught to him by Paul Freund when the Harvard Law School was still worthy of its name: It’s a constitution, gentlemen, we are interpreting, we must look at the problem being addressed and find reasonable solutions. Soon enough he came to an interpretation that was not unfavorable. The lady
couldn’t be thought to insist on a married man, unless she was seeking the spice of double adultery or had determined to avoid anyone who might seek permanency. Even if those desiderata were in her mind, he could probably allay her concerns by delicate advocacy. That left the question of age, but he doubted that she was unwilling to consider candidates who did not claim they were her own age or younger. Biology being what it is, fifty-year-old male seekers of adventure were likely to prefer ladies who were significantly younger. In the end, he decided not to push his luck by confessing that he was a widower. He wrote to her, enclosing the photo he had used in previous correspondence with fellow readers of the
NYRB
, avowing his age and also his continuing vigor. As an aside, he told her that in Manhattan he lived alone and unencumbered.

The color photo he received by return mail showed the lady in a see-through blouse, her breasts small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, the nipples rouged. She had large black eyes, a large and slightly hooked nose, a wide mouth, and black hair. He concluded she was of Italian extraction. She wasted no time, proposing to meet him the following week on whatever day and in whichever bar near his place he would specify, though not too late in the afternoon. She wanted to be able to catch the 9:22 to Katonah. All things weighed, he proposed the Carlyle at 5:00—why be rushed by the train schedule?—on Tuesday. She was better than he expected: not just fine breasts but a good figure and decent legs, and she struck him right away as clean. That had been a worry. He had planned to get her to bathe or shower with him before getting down to business, but it was better to have her be clean to start with. Judging by the size of her pocketbook, she had with her all she needed to repair her makeup, mascara and all.
Vera was her name, and once more she wasted no time. Her scotch on the rocks drunk, she said, You don’t look like Mr. Goodbar, let’s go.

She was also in favor of washing and had brought a toothbrush and toothpaste, and in the tub, which she preferred and in which she asked him to join her, she washed his T & T (tool and testicles, she explained) and invited him to reciprocate. There was no foreplay. She lay down, raised her knees, and said clearly but nicely, Eat me, in the process coming with a good deal of noise. He had thought that she would return the favor, but she shook her head. Let’s screw first. You won’t last sixty seconds if I go down on you. Later I’ll give you head to raise you from the dead! She was right. When he proposed dinner afterward, in a trattoria on Third Avenue, she looked at the alarm clock—it was past eight—and asked if he had anything in the fridge. Just some cheese and scotch. That’s fine, she’d have a snack and be ready to hop on her train. You want to meet again? she asked. You’re OK. Just kinky enough. If I see you again, and if you’re still nice, we’ll do anal.

Over the years—she would say good-bye to him on her sixtieth birthday, allowing that she and her husband were moving the following week to Fort Lauderdale—he learned very little about her. The husband was a podiatrist with a practice in the rich suburbs successful enough to pay for the house in Bedford Hills and the second one on a Floridian canal, as well as putting a son through Cornell’s hotel management school and a daughter through Iona College—she’s a dope, Vera explained, she takes after him. Schmidt assumed that “him” was the husband. She never volunteered, and he never asked, why she wanted him to service her weekly, complaining when he was out of the country but assuring him that she hadn’t
replaced him during his absences. It was an arrangement that he would have understood better if she had asked for money or expected presents, but no, when after two unsolicited “anals” he tried to show his appreciation in the form of an Hermès silk square decorated with a Greek motif, with good humor she pushed away the shopping bag containing the scarf in its box and said, Hey, your wife will like that. Save it for her. Come on, let’s fuck! We’re wasting time.