Authors: Louis Begley
He put the last plate in the dishwasher and went out to check on the garden and the pool. Something was probably wrong with the water filter. Schmidt didn’t like the fan of tiny bubbles issuing from the return lines. It would be best to have the pool-maintenance service make sure air wasn’t getting into the system. Another annoying and time-consuming phone call that someone other than he could be making, possibly the combination houseman-and-yardman husband. The difficulty, if indeed there be one, wasn’t that a full-time housekeeper would look down her nose on the Polish brigade and ask to get those ladies fired, a disloyal act Schmidt had no intention of performing. He knew he could be stern enough to impose Mrs. Nowak and her colleagues on whomever else he engaged. They would be like a covenant that runs with the land, a part of the social contract. Only Carrie’s feelings stood in the way. Class consciousness of Colony Club ladies? Schmidt thought it was rudimentary in comparison with Carrie’s. He read as a clear signal, for instance, her refusal to set foot in O’Henry’s or to shop in Bridgehampton: the poor child didn’t think that she was any kind of success in the eyes of her former coworkers and the army of locals who filled the tanks of her and Schmidt’s cars, mowed the lawn, vacuumed
the pool, fixed the plumbing, painted the shutters, or did any of the other vastly overpriced chores required for Schmidt’s general enjoyment of life. Far from it, she thought, not inaccurately, that she was considered by them a traitor to her class. The expression was his and not one, Schmidt realized, that either she or they would use, having recourse instead to some up-to-date synonym for “floozy.” Naturally: a Puerto Rican waitress from Brooklyn comes out to the Hamptons to pocket big tips and after a year gets tired of plates covered with scraps of red meat and uneaten fries and even of shacking up with Bryan or some other local stud. So she gets herself a better job—laying a rich old guy, someone it’s all right for the locals and the migrant lumpen proletariat to rob blind but not to fraternize with. That had surely been the initial analysis made by the Polish brigade. But the ladies got used to Carrie during Schmidt’s convalescence, and she got used to them. Whatever might be their a priori moral or social judgment of Carrie, he felt certain they couldn’t help seeing that she was a good egg and was treating him right. But so long as they lived in this place, with the folk memory of their history so fresh, how was he to get her to think of herself as the lady of the house and make her comfortable with any other staff he might hire?
As soon as he had recovered from his accident, he had a five-foot wall of delicately colored weathered old bricks built to surround the pool. The flagstone deck was replaced by more old bricks, and red and pink climbing roses and rosebushes were planted inside the wall. A get-well present to himself. The roses prospered and were in full bloom. Bogard,
the gardener, kept an eye out for hornet nests. So far they had been lucky: neither hornets nor bees had come to visit. Schmidt tested the temperature of the water with his hand. Perfect for him but on the cold side for Carrie. It was a beautiful but cool July. Reluctantly—in part because he had never been able to get out of his head the remark of a publisher friend of Mary’s that a morning of heating the pool costs as much as the best seat at the opera, in part because he liked the cold for himself and wouldn’t have cared if others, Carrie alone excepted, stayed out of the water, and also because he disliked the noise—Schmidt turned on the heater, took off his clothes in the changing cabin at the side of the pool house, dove in, and began doing laps. He had given up counting long ago. The effort to keep track distracted him from thoughts about anything else. Instead, he regulated himself according to the clock suspended on the brick wall. His intention was to swim fast every day for thirty minutes, unless it rained so hard that getting into the water seemed too absurd or he heard thunder nearby.
It really was too bad he had only Gil and Elaine Blackman to turn to for company, and Gil sometimes seemed too chummy with Carrie for his comfort. In the old days, he had liked, had in fact been proud of, Mary’s milieu of publishers and writers. He certainly preferred it to the equally closed world of Wall Street lawyers, and he hardly knew anyone else in or near Bridgehampton other than the eternal Blackmans. Well before Carrie, Mary’s friends made him feel that, deprived of her prestige, on which account he was forgiven his mostly silent presence at their lunches and dinners, he
was of no use to them. Most of the lawyers among his acquaintance were practicing partners in first-class New York law firms just like his old firm, a handful taught at Columbia or New York University, and an even smaller number, a couple of classmates and one former partner, had become federal judges. He hadn’t kept up with them. And their wives, their dreary wives! If you put aside the few aging beauties among them, who had kept the self-assurance and good humor that having first-rate looks when you are young can give you for life, about the only good thing you could say for them was that they were women. Schmidt resolutely preferred women to men.
Were there former colleagues, active and retired partners of Wood & King, who liked him, with whom he could reestablish some sort of ties? He thought that, on the whole, their feelings toward him were pleasantly benevolent. The exception, of course, would be Charlotte’s husband, Jon Riker. If by some miracle that fellow could push a button and electrocute his father-in-law in his own swimming pool, there wasn’t a force great enough, Schmidt thought, not even Wood & King’s presiding partner, that could keep his big fat finger off the button. As a practical matter, none of this mattered. His old legal pals didn’t happen to pass their summers or weekends anywhere nearby, and, to Schmidt’s surprise, until he divined that she didn’t especially care to live nearer to Brooklyn and her parents, Carrie showed no interest in the suggestion he had floated that they get an apartment in New York. And suppose they did, how would he go about launching them as a couple? Would he arrange a round of
cocktails, little dinners, and theater outings? He had been used to seeing his partners mostly over lunch. The wives he saw twice a year, at firm dinners for partners and their spouses—since they had begun to take women into the partnership, spouses were no longer necessarily wives—and the firm outings for all lawyers and concubines of any sexual orientation designed to promote good fellowship through a day of tennis, golf, and drinking. It had suited Mary to keep her distance from his firm, and Schmidt wasn’t sure that left to himself he would have preferred to be more gregarious. Even if Carrie were not in the picture, it would have been awkward, and perhaps not possible, to live down his past aloofness, to become one of the boys. But imagine Jack and Dorothy DeForrest—or even the W & K man-of-the-world Lew Brenner and his wife, Tina—invited to a small dinner at Schmidtie’s brand-new penthouse to meet Miss Carrie Gorchuck. They would get through the meal and the coffee and brandy all right, though the men might be too unsettled to cluster as usual in the corner of the living room to talk about the firm’s finances, but afterward, what a fuss! Schmidt with a girl younger than his own daughter, yes, younger than Jon Riker’s wife! No, she’s not a lawyer. I asked what she did and she came right out with it; she was a waitress until that old goat came along and made it worth her while to give up working. Beautiful as the day is long, absolutely—and then, depending on the speaker, a further graphic detail might follow—but, you know, with just a touch of the tarbrush. Some sort of Hispanic. Yes, Puerto Rican. It was just as well that the issue didn’t need to be faced. The very young partners—and
certainly the associates—would think the new Mrs. Schmidt was a ten. But what was Schmidt to them or they to him?
He executed a very correct turn and looked up at the clock. Twenty-five minutes. To keep going for another five was intolerable, not because it was hard but because it was too boring. Another daily defeat. Cut short the swim, skip the exercises intended to tighten the stomach, fall asleep over
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
He climbed out, dried himself, and, with the towel wrapped around his midriff, out of habit, although there was no risk of an unannounced visitor who might surprise him in his nakedness, lay down in the sun. Really, it couldn’t be simpler: just like Carrie, he was déclassé. Since deep down the last thing he wanted was to rejoin his class—even if giving up Carrie weren’t the price—he must look for a social life elsewhere. Alas, not among the waitresses and busboys at O’Henry’s or the chattering Ecuadoreans and Dominicans who trimmed his hedges and picked up broken tree branches. He was too old for the former; the latter didn’t speak English. Not among the funny men and women with oversize smiles who sold local real estate, placed insurance, or fixed your teeth in an emergency, if you couldn’t go into town. They were too unattractive. He needed to find people who belonged to no class and, indifferent to his loss of status or simply too ignorant to understand, might be drawn in by his availability and style. That was supposed to be the one advantage of a comfortable retirement. You want Schmidt at lunch? You’ve got him. Someone’s asked you to fill a table at the gala benefit for the opera at fifteen
hundred dollars a seat? Schmidtie’s check is in the mail. Couldn’t Carrie’s looks do it for them? In his youth, they might have been adopted by members of café society, like the Greek shipowners who had been his father’s clients. Was there still a café society, even though El Morocco and the Copacabana had vanished, and the “21” Club kept changing hands like a used car? Exposure to articles on “lifestyles,” which had spread inside the
New York Times
like a malignant growth, and the occasional furtive dips into a weekly New York publication that had made a specialty of studying the vulgar rich, with reporting by young persons some of whose parents he had known, led Schmidt to believe that there did exist a similar subclass, completely outside society as he had once understood it, composed of parvenus—not especially beautiful or idle—sitting on mountains of vastly appreciated shares in companies they had started or bought on the cheap. With his billions and Levantine aroma, Michael Mansour was surely in it. Perhaps other friends of the Blackmans qualified. One would have to see.
The telephone rang in the house. Let it go. Until recently, when Carrie’s mercilessly teasing compelled the acquisition, Schmidt had had no answering machine, on the theory that if anyone really needed to reach him it was easy enough to call again. Now that he was the owner of such a contraption, he compensated by listening to messages only rarely—when he thought Carrie might have left one. The ringing continued. It was someone persistent, who took into account the possibility that he was in the garden. He might answer in time if he ran, and then he might not. He remained on his deck
chair. Carrie wouldn’t be calling; she was in class and, anyway, didn’t have the telephone habit. What if it was Charlotte? He had planned to call her himself, a little later. Nobody else mattered; it wasn’t as if there were still the chance of his getting a new assignment or, that miracle of miracles, a brand-new client. He would have liked to wipe the slate clean of the last years of his practice, before Mary’s illness brought him to retire early: a shrinking workload, feelings of helplessness (although he had not done anything to lose clients; how could he have prevented the consequences of his specialty’s having gone the way of the telex machine?), guilt, and shame about not having enough brains or energy or force of personality to drum up business of some other sort. A number of fellow financing lawyers he knew and respected had done just that. In the jargon of the profession, they “retooled.” Loneliness and not knowing what to do with his time were a cheap price to pay for early retirement, for having been set free. Besides, a couple more years, and he would have had to leave the firm anyway. Without the miracle of Carrie to console him. It wasn’t as though anyone at Wood & King might have suggested that he stay on past the mandatory retirement age. Had anyone thought of calling it the Drop Dead date? In fact, it was likely that the younger partners might have agitated to have him pushed out if he hadn’t made everybody’s life easy and negotiated his own departure. People’s lack of imagination was wonderfully surprising: these partners in their forties or early fifties, didn’t they foresee that what they did to their elders would be done to them in not so many years? More brutally, in
all likelihood. Schmidt and his contemporaries had been brought up in a tradition of almost filial respect for their elders. If they had neglected to transmit a halfway effective simulacrum of those feelings to the next generation of partners, at least they hadn’t offered them the sordid spectacle of parricide. But the very bright youngsters in the firm today, the superstars said to be beating down the doors of the partnership, claiming admission as their birthright, would have received ample instruction in that blood sport, and from front-row seats. If he lived long enough, he would have fun watching them cut off the balls of the self-satisfied bastards who had been after his. Perhaps even Jon Riker’s—he didn’t care that it would be unseemly to sit there and laugh while one’s son-in-law was neutered.
Enough sun. One more dive into the pool, five minutes of laps. Down, anger. He should learn to laugh and get rid of the scowl that etched the bitter lines framing his mouth. How lucky he was, in the end. He had plenty of money. Not for him one of those mail-order second marriages with a classmate’s widow or some divorcée with a surgically renewed face—certainly not the sourness of celibacy. “Black, but comely” his wild girl, his lily of the valley; each night he lies betwixt her perfumed breasts. But how long would it be before that wild girl told him she had had it with her old and limp lover?
The telephone again. He was at the door of the screened porch. For Pete’s sake, Schmidtie, stop the doddering crackpot routine; cross the porch, go into the living room, and answer. Ah, it’s Charlotte. So rare that she called. Calling was
his job. Stilted conversations; Schmidt timed them so that there was something he could do immediately afterward—take a stiff drink at the very least—to deaden the sense of desolation.