Schmidt Delivered (30 page)
Authors: Louis Begley
He pointed to the walking stick, which was leaning against the empty chair.
I mean like all the time, she replied. That’s what the doctor told Jon’s father. Well, I see I missed your birthday. Thanks, by the way, for the check you sent for my thirtieth. I guess I never thanked you. Sorry about that.
I’m sorry too.
Hey, you haven’t asked me what kind of anniversary this is. I’ll bet anything you don’t know. Do you?
He shook his head.
That shows how much attention you’ve paid to me. Think hard.
Really, I have no idea. Please tell me.
She giggled unpleasantly. No kidding. It’s the anniversary of the party you threw for your insurance company geeks and office nerds. That’s when I met Jon! It figures you forgot. You probably wish it had never happened.
His ankle, which had been satisfactorily quiet since he sat down, began to throb. He leaned down and rubbed it for a moment between his thumb and index finger. Really, there was no point in letting her goad him.
Look, Charlotte, he told her, the food here is particularly delicious. Let’s not spoil it by squabbling. Why don’t we eat it in peace and discuss what’s the matter between you and me when we get to coffee. Since this is my day off, I might even
have a brandy. In the meantime, tell me how Jon is doing in his new job or, if you prefer, let’s talk about the weather or the stock market or the movies.
He had used the same tone of voice, the same deliberate diction, that had proved so effective during the summer when she was about to turn ten and threw regular tantrums after pony camp—weeping and wheezing so uncontrollably that Mary and he wondered whether she might be developing asthma—if a particular girl a year younger and about half her size was given a livelier pony ride or was praised more warmly than she for going over the series of little jumps they worked on. Pavlovian response to a stimulus? Involuntary memory? He didn’t care which it was. She started to extol the virtues of Jon’s new firm, telling him how funny it was, considering the years he had spent at W & K, and especially his never having had another job, except as a counselor at the soccer camp, that he had taken to it immediately, didn’t mind the dreadfully long work hours, worse than anything he had known at the old firm, or the partners yelling and screaming at one another, because it all felt like one big family—partners, associates, secretaries, everybody. Not like those gentlemen, she pronounced that last word scornfully, at W & K who couldn’t wait to condemn him, never thought to give him a chance.
Perhaps, thought Schmidt. At lunch in the city, in January, a word or two Lew Brenner, that subtle and cautious man, had let drop may have been susceptible of some such interpretation. Schmidt smiled at Charlotte and said, This is excellent. All is well that ends well. I wish him luck and great
happiness. Now let’s talk about the reserved subject. You and me. Why do you treat me so badly? I have nobody in the whole wide world except you.
You’re forgetting Carrie. She snickered.
Never mind Carrie. Please tell me.
You really want to know? Because I feel I never had a father. You were married to Mom, you didn’t always treat her right, and when briefly you weren’t at the office you hung around the house. Sure, you paid for my education, or maybe Mom paid for some of it. I don’t care. Is that all I was entitled to expect? When did you act like a father? I didn’t know what families were like, so I thought that was kind of normal—maybe only Mom was supposed to be a human being. Now I know better. I’ve seen the Rikers when they’re together. Do you realize that they actually talk to each other? Myron understands what’s going on in Jon’s head, what Jon does, what he wants. The same goes for Jon’s brother. It’s not just Renata. It’s a father they can go to. I can go to him too. Can you imagine it? With you it’s zero. All right, now I’ve told you. That’s what makes me sore. It makes me choke. It makes me want to puke.
He looked around, caught the eye of the headwaiter, ordered another coffee and a brandy—since she wanted neither—and thought about what he might tell her.
Charlotte, he ventured finally, is that really true? I remember so many talks, so many outings to this or that museum or opera or concert, so many times I’ve helped you when you thought you were stuck—even with your Latin homework.
Or the days I spent with you on the beach. That was me, not Mom. I taught you about the surf. Or playing tennis. Who drove you most often to the stable? All of that can’t have been worthless or without meaning. I don’t understand.
I can see that. I’m not saying that you didn’t go through all the motions. The trouble is they were only that. Your mind was elsewhere. On your big-shot law practice. On Mom. Or on some woman you were screwing on the side. Do you know that in all your life you’ve never, I mean never, had anything to say to me? No insight, no wisdom. Sure, you were great at all the mechanics. Which train or plane I should take. Get me to the train or plane. Get me picked up on arrival. How to make sure Miss Schmidt has the right traveler’s checks. Anyway, that wasn’t even you. It was your goddamn secretary! And you think I can forget what you did to Mom.
There was nothing he could do. Say good-bye. But to put an end to this conversation condemned him, he thought, to a nightmare worse than going through with it.
Honey, he said, I’ve never stopped regretting the incident with your baby-sitter. Now that I know that you realized what was going on I regret it even more. But Mom forgave me. We stuck together—there wasn’t a moment’s question about that, she wanted it as much as I—and we went on to have a good marriage. Until the very end. I would think that you know enough by now about men and women and sex to understand such things. They can be forgiven. Sometimes they are. After all, it seems that you and Jon have forgiven each other.
She interrupted, We don’t have any kids, remember?
I do know you have no children, and that has certainly made the last year easier. But please, let me finish. The rest, I don’t even know what to call it—my failure to teach you more, or listen to you better, really I’m at a loss—that’s something I’ve worried about more than you can imagine. Look, I am me, not someone else. All during those years you talk about, I was, in fact, working very hard. I did try to be a successful lawyer, as I suppose Jon does and will, even after you have children. And I’m not an easy, communicative person. I’m not like Mom. I’m not like the Rikers. But I’ve tried and tried to do well by you, and maybe you’ve even noticed that I love you. Sure, it’s my love, not some other person’s, not the love of some ideal father. Can’t you accept me such as I am?
If I do, I don’t know where that puts us. Nowhere you would like. That’s what I think.
He called for the check and paid it.
But you must have had some purpose in asking to see me. Tell me what it was. Right now it’s quite beyond me.
She nodded. I’m wretched too, she said. I just wanted to tell you what I think.
She was staying in Paris another few days, she told him, whereupon she and Jon would drive down to Nice, slowly, making many stops, and take the plane from there to New York. He listened carefully and asked her to meet him the next day on a park bench. He did not think he could risk asking her to another meal.
He got there early, picked a folding chair next to the
bassin
that was in full sunlight, and waited. He’d read the paper in the morning. It would have seemed grotesque to him in any case to have brought one, or even a book. Far better to draw lines and circles in the sand with his stick. He saw her from far away, walking fast, swinging a little pocketbook like a miniature doctor’s satchel. So wonderfully American: he admired her blue jeans and brown suede jacket, the dark glasses she wore like old-fashioned motorcyclist’s goggles pushed up so they rested on her hair. Probably she had not seen him, thinking he had meant literally a park bench. Before he stood up and waved to her, he saw also that her brown laced-up shoes were shined, as they used to be when she went off to her riding lessons.
Let’s sit here, he said. The sun is just right. It’s warming every one of my old bones, and they are each and every one grateful.
I’m glad.
He went on drawing his lines and circles.
Dad, she said suddenly. I’m not sure you think I’m so great either. Let’s make a deal. I will take you as you are, you take me as I am. For now. We’ll see where that puts us.
You’ve got it, he said, and held out his hand.
Almost at once she left him to meet Jon at the pyramid of the Louvre. He stayed in his chair for a good long while, because there was no hurry, and then limping carefully left the Tuileries, retracing his steps to the rue St. Florentin. There were no taxis at the stand. He continued, wincing
until the ankle warmed up and the pain turned into a dull, stupid ache, to the rue St. Honoré and turned right. A couple of blocks farther was the apartment of the widow of a younger partner of his who had run W & K’s Paris office, retired early, and died. The widow had invited him to tea. He reached the gate of the building and stood before it studying the polished brass plates, uncertain whether after all he would press the buzzer next to her name.
Schmidt Delivered
L
OUIS
B
EGLEY
A Reader’s Guide
A Conversation with Louis Begley
George Andreou
is an editor at Alfred A. Knopf.
GA: When did it first occur to you to write a sequel to
About Schmidt?
LB:
I first thought that continuing Albert Schmidt’s story was possible, and would be fun, when I was finishing
Mistler’s Exit
, the novel that followed
About Schmidt
and preceded
Schmidt Delivered.
I knew the ending of
Mistler’s Exit;
it was just a matter of getting it down on paper. So I did not feel guilty about flirting with another project.
GA: How has your hero, Albert Schmidt, evolved since the days of the first book? It was particularly amusing to observe someone so temperamentally at odds with the culture at large—has that gulf widened?
LB:
By “culture at large” you must mean popular culture. I have never thought that Schmidt was at odds with American culture, as the word used to be understood, before people began to talk about such things as the culture of a particular big accounting firm or investment bank specializing in junk bond financings.
If you are referring to
popular
culture, the gap has narrowed. Carrie, his half–Puerto Rican waitress
friend, who is approximately forty years younger than Schmidt, has taught him quite a lot about how the rest of the world lives. Loving and admiring her has made Schmidt far more tolerant.
Yes, I do think my friend Schmidtie has matured—a word I prefer to “evolved”—like plums that you buy at a fruit stand when they are hard and leave to ripen in the sun on the ledge of your kitchen window. That, too, is the effect of love, as well as time.
GA: Do you think this book clarifies, or further complicates, the much commented-upon question of Schmidt’s anti-Semitism? Were you surprised or influenced by the reception he received with the appearance of the first installment?
LB:
In
About Schmidt
, I presented a portrait of a man of Schmidt’s age and milieu at the time the action of that novel takes place, which is the beginning of the 1990s, with a great many flashbacks to the preceding decades. It would not have been unusual for such a man, the product of a New York Anglo-German middle-class family with some plumage—the parents lived in a house on Grove Street, the father was the senior partner in an admiralty law firm with a Greek ship owner clientele and some money—and of an education in a Jesuit high-school and Harvard College and Law
School, to have the sort of mild anti-Semitic feelings I have ascribed to Schmidtie. Bear in mind that his is not an active sort of anti-Semitism. He does not practice it in his law firm; on the contrary, I have him be particularly decent to Jewish associates. He does not trumpet his feelings, and he is not proud of them. He knows that they get him in trouble with his wife, Mary. But, they are part of the prism through which he looks at the world. Please bear in mind also that my portrait is not of the sort you hang on the wall of the bar association library: it does not flatter. Instead, here and there it caricatures the subject’s traits. I thought that this particular trait was worth mentioning, for the sake of realism, for the sake of seeing Schmidt’s anti-Semitism dissolve as he becomes deeply involved with Carrie (who is the object of similar prejudice), and quite simply for the sake of poking fun at people I have known.
I duly noted, when
About Schmidt
first appeared, that many reviewers seemed to concentrate their attention on my protagonist’s anti-Semitism—although anti-Semitism is not, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect of his personality—but I am not sure whether I was surprised.
In order to be surprised, I think I would have had to think in advance to what the reviews of my book might be. But I didn’t and I never have. When reviews do come out, with exceptions, for instance
when I know the reviewer or have special admiration for the reviewer’s work, I only scan them.
I should add that, in my opinion, an author who thinks how his book will be treated by reviewers while he is writing, and, worse yet, tries to “correct” his work to anticipate criticism, is in bad trouble. I think I am responsible to only one critic, and that is myself.
GA: Did you ever consider letting Schmidtie live out the rest of his days with Carrie? (He wouldn’t be the first man his age to accomplish such a feat!) Or did you regard it as inevitable or meaningful that he “set her free,” and if so, why?
LB:
Of course, I could have done just that. But I didn’t really consider such a solution because both Schmidt and Carrie are too lucid to have accepted it. Carrie recognizes the powerful sexual content of her relationship with Schmidtie and refuses to have a future in which caresses are not followed by intercourse. Of course, couples can have a happy and fulfilled relationship after the man’s ability to perform has waned, but these are couples in which the age difference is not so great. Couples united by interests more profound and more nourishing than those that Carrie and Schmidtie seem to share. Schmidtie certainly knows that.
Yes, I think that Schmidt’s generosity and elegance when he lets her go with Jason are very important. They let the reader see his intrinsic decency.
GA: Schmidt seems to be your only protagonist whose story does not involve some fundamental deception. Your other heroes seem either to be living a lie, passing for someone they are not (I think of Maciek in
Wartime Lies
, Ben in
The Man Who Was Late
, even, to a degree, Max in
As Max Saw It)
, or otherwise concealing a more discrete but terrible truth (as with Mistler in
Mistler’s Exit).
Does Schmidt’s authenticity, so to speak, set him apart in your mind? In what ways, if any, does this make it a different type of story to tell?
LB:
You are right, and you have asked a very difficult question. Schmidt is different from my other protagonists. I would say that he is more ordinary. I know a number of men like him. His story is not tragic—except in the way all lives are tragic. Most of us lose to illness people whom we have loved; we all age and must face the decline of our powers and our own illness and death; we make bad decisions the consequences of which cannot be undone; and we have heartbreak relations with our parents and our children even if, on most levels, they go well.
I would say that is where the difference lies between telling the story of Schmidt and that of my other protagonists. Schmidt requires a lighter tone, suitable for comedy. In the end, the tone dictates the choice of incidents to be related.
GA: You have come to be identified by some as a chronicler of the rich and powerful. Even among this elite, billionaires, a fixture of the nineties and of the so-called new economy, seem a breed apart. How typical is the Egyptian tycoon Michael Mansour? Are the rich different by degrees, or are the super-rich truly an “exclusive spiritual brotherhood,” as you say? Do they have a code of their own?
LB:
Ah, the anointed of Mammon! I do think the superrich are a class apart, and I think I have done a pretty good job lampooning them. What is their essential defining characteristic? Perhaps there are two: certainly, their prodigious sense of personal entitlement—the right not only to the pursuit of happiness but also to guaranteed instant gratification; and a belief in their own well-deserved omnipotence. Since, on a whim, they can summon jets and helicopters and buy houses and works of art, why can’t they also buy people? They do—with money. If that is so, why shouldn’t they
be able to direct those people’s lives, for their own good as the billionaire patron perceives it?
As I say in one of my books, Vespasian was wrong: money does smell. Its aroma acts as an aphrodisiac. In sufficient concentration, sniffed by your fellow billionaires, it confers on you admission to the “exclusive spiritual brotherhood” and its many domains on private islands and mountain tops, in deserts and historic palaces.
GA: One inevitably hears your writing described as “elegant.” Does that always describe your goal in crafting prose, or do you sometimes find yourself writing against the grain of such expectations?
LB:
I never write against the expectations of others or in order to meet them. I simply try to do my best. It is true that I correct and rewrite compulsively, sometimes until I am quite discouraged. I try to get to the point at which I can read the text to myself word for word without wincing.
GA: You call this book
Schmidt Delivered
, but though it begins with Schmidt living in bliss, he is aware almost from the start that his heaven with Carrie can’t last, and indeed it ends before the book does. In what sense should we see Schmidt as being “delivered” in these pages?
LB:
I think that “delivered” as applied to Schmidt in this book has at least three meanings. Wouldn’t I be wrong if I imposed any one of them on the reader? Shouldn’t the reader make his or her own choice? And isn’t it possible that more than one of them or perhaps all three are valid?
GA: At the end, Schmidtie seems literally on the threshold of a further adventure. Do you have a plan for another installment of his story?
LB:
Yes, to be written after my friend Schmidt and I have lived a few more years.
GA: As a late-blooming writer you have developed with astonishing speed into a literary veteran, now with this sixth acclaimed book to your name. What has been your most interesting discovery about the writing process since your first novel? Has your way of going about it changed at all?
LB:
I hadn’t realized how hard it is to write. I can’t imagine that breaking stones to build pyramids in Egypt together with my ancestors was harder.
No, my way of going about writing a novel hasn’t changed. I put together in my mind the essentials of the story and try to find the voice in which it can be told. Once I have found it, I get going.
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Why won’t Carrie marry Schmidt? Do you believe she loves him?
In the first chapter, Schmidt considers the scene at Sesame, the local grocery store. What does his vision reveal about his neighbors, and about him?
What do you make of Schmidt’s anxieties preceding Charlotte’s arrival? What worries him the most? Why isn’t he more pleased that she is turning to him in her difficulties?
How do Charlotte and Carrie compare in Schmidt’s mind? What is revealed about these two women as individuals in the way they treat each other?
What do you make of the way Schmidt is treated by his former law partner?
What does Schmidt remember about life with his parents? How does it color his relations with Charlotte?
What do you think of the arrangement Schmidt proposes for investing in Charlotte’s business venture? Is Charlotte justified to be upset? Is one or the other to blame for letting money come between them? Compare Schmidt’s reaction later to Carrie and Jason’s
business proposal. Is there a double standard at work? If so, why?What kind of man is the billionaire Michael Mansour? Why is he so eager to be Schmidt’s friend? What do they have in common? What does each value about the other? Why do you suppose Schmidt takes Mansour into his confidence?
Is Carrie guilty of bad behavior when she visits Mansour in New York City? How do you judge her relations with men other than Schmidt?
Why does Schmidt draft his letter of bequest? Do you think he is treating Charlotte fairly?
Schmidt resists following Mansour’s advice about how to handle the conflict with Charlotte. Do you think Mansour’s tactics make sense when applied to family relations?
How do you understand Renata’s motivations in her lunch with Schmidt? What tactics does she employ and how effective are they? Is there a winner in this duel?
“Generosity begins and ends with gratifying the giver,” the novel tells us. Do you agree? Why does Mansour offer Schmidt the job as head of the Mansour
Life Institute? Why does Schmidt hesitate? What does his initial reaction reveal about his view of human nature?For what reasons did Schmidt as an undergraduate try to cheat the shop girl in Cambridge? Why does he now remember that story, and the one about Laverna Daly, whom he recruited and bedded as a young partner? How do these recollections inform his view of his son-in-law’s behavior?
Do you think Mansour has encouraged Carrie and Jason’s relationship? If so, how do you explain his motivations?
How does Schmidt react to Charlotte’s reconciliation with Jon? How does he react to Jason and Carrie’s coming together? What can we learn by comparing his reactions to these two developments? Where do they leave Schmidt?
In the last few chapters, what change occurs in the way Schmidt views Carrie? And what corresponding change do you detect in his view of himself? How would you describe the transformation his life undergoes?
What was your reaction to Schmidt’s final meeting with Charlotte in the novel? How much has been
resolved between them? In what ways have this father and daughter each found substitutes for the other?In the conversation with Louis Begley preceding these questions, the author suggests the title may be understood in at least three ways and leaves it to the reader to decide. In what sense do you understand Schmidt to be delivered?
How do you imagine the life ahead of Schmidt?
