Schmidt Delivered (22 page)

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 distinguished 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.

It might well be that Dr. Renata hadn’t the gift or training needed to break down a witness, force him to tell all until the last misdeed, the one that was to have remained buried forever, had been laid bare. But Schmidt had to hand it to her: she was no slouch when it came to getting him to examine his own conscience. All right, he was an abyss. Perhaps deeper and darker than Jon Riker. It seemed to him that it didn’t matter. For one thing, he had never been caught. He strove to avoid doing evil. His own sins were no reason he shouldn’t hold Riker to being honest with Charlotte. At most, they might temper his scorn.

T
HEY WERE
in bed, Carrie watching the Knicks game, Schmidt reading. He had abandoned
Phineas Redux
, for the first time unable to share Trollope’s enthusiasm for Phineas or Lady Glen or Mr. Plantagenet Palliser, to feel that, across time and space, true English ladies and gentlemen were his spiritual comrades-at-arms. In the place of
Phineas
, he had taken up James’s
The Awkward Age
, which he pored over sentence by sentence, if not word by word, struggling to make sure that he understood correctly the diabolical chatter over teacups: the virus of corruption spreading from Mrs. Brook’s drawing room had really spared no one, not bewitching Nanda or even Mr. Longdon, with whom he would have liked to compare notes on more than one subject. He was also playing footsie under the covers with Carrie. For some time now, she had taken to wearing pajamas to bed and would resist taking them off when they made love. Love-making followed a different course too. She was always affectionate and attentive, but almost without exception she forced him to come before he made a move to take her. I want it this way,
honey, she would murmur. Hey, I like it this way, don’t spoil it. What’s the matter? Your little guy sure likes it. Or she just kept her legs closed. No way to pry them apart.

Indeed, what was the matter? It wasn’t a question he was eager to ask. Snuggling close, he put his free right hand inside her pants. That she didn’t resist; in fact she moved her pelvis to help him and fell into the same rhythm with him. Very quickly, he felt her come. It was the break for commercials. She turned on her side; said Keep reading, stupid; covered his mouth with hers; and returned the favor. Did you like it? Come on, tell me, did you like it? When he groaned yes, she told him, You see how nice that is. Now go back to your reading. I want to watch.

Carrie, he said, maybe we should get away from here for Christmas and your school break. I thought we’d go to Paris, stay there until the end of the year, and then do something adventurous. Like Egypt. They seem to have stopped shooting tourists. We might as well take advantage of the pause. Mike Mansour could set things up for us.

He had been thinking about his spending habits and Mike Mansour’s low opinion of his standard of living. Mike wasn’t altogether wrong. With the money he had set aside for Charlotte’s trust, of which he made himself the individual trustee having the power to decide on distributions, naming Gil Blackman as his successor—but really he must find a younger successor instead of leaving the choice to W & K if Gil died or went soft in the head—and the money he was leaving outright to Carrie, there was no reason he shouldn’t spend more and give Carrie, and himself, a good time. He knew he would
never do anything too wild. Even if the markets were bad, he had enough in treasuries to live out his life in great comfort. The unresolved question was whether the successor to Gil should be Mr. Mansour. There wasn’t enough money in the trust to make him want to steal it—which the bank trustee, one could hope, wouldn’t let him do in any case—and he might in fact be sensible about investment policy and when principal should be invaded. This was something to talk to Mike about. Yes, he was in a position to begin a life of irresponsible pleasures.

Jeez, replied Carrie, Christmas is just when they’re going to be on this estate in the Dominican Republic that Mike’s trying to buy. We’ll be invited.

Oh, how do you know?

Jason told me. Don’t you want to go? It’ll be fun. They’ll have a big boat to visit other islands and there’ll be scuba diving. I’d really like to learn to scuba dive. Jason says it’s really great.

I suppose Mike will have a whole lot of people.

That’s OK. The house is big.