Schmidt Steps Back (13 page)

It was after six—midnight her time—when he woke up. She hadn’t called. He made himself a cup of tea, shaved, took a bath, and waited. Seven o’clock—nothing. A quick look at the television told him the death toll in Oklahoma City was climbing. Seven-thirty, and still nothing. She had said—he couldn’t remember apropos of what—that dinner parties in Paris started late and broke up very late. Often people didn’t sit down at table before ten. All the same, her not answering at one-thirty in the morning seemed strange. It was close to eight by the time he was ready to go out. Could she have come home and gone to bed without checking her messages? At that late hour, it did not seem impossible; she would have felt sleepy. He knew that the telephone could not be heard in Madame Laure’s room so that if he called again he wouldn’t be disturbing her. If Alice was asleep, she would forgive him. He dialed the number and let it ring five, six times, and hung up. Had she perhaps gone to Antibes? There had been no mention of it, but something might have come up. Perhaps her father wasn’t well. He went into the kitchen, poured himself a stiff bourbon on the rocks and drank it avidly. There were graham
crackers and cashews in the cupboard and nothing else. If he wanted to have dinner—he had begun to feel hungry—and wanted to have it at his club he had better hurry. The sky had clouded over. He took his raincoat and an umbrella and rushed out of the apartment.

Contrary to habit—unless the distance was forbidding or it was raining hard, he liked walking in the city, and the thirty-five-block distance to his club was just right—Schmidt took a taxi. In fact, he needn’t have hurried. His friend, the hall porter, assured him that this being a busy night the kitchen wasn’t about to close; there was even time for him to have a drink at the bar. But Schmidt felt his strength flag. He was feeling the jet lag he’d used as an excuse without believing in it. Deciding to skip his predinner gin martini, he climbed the second flight of stairs to the dining room. The maître d’hôtel was also a friend and greeted him like a returning prodigal son. Yes, it was a busy night, so busy that they had put some members and their guests into the members-only dining room, but there was no one at the long table reserved for members. He suggested that Mr. Schmidt have dinner at a table for two in the main dining room. It was more animated. Although club custom, which he liked to uphold, called for members dining alone to sit at the long table even if no one else was there, because any moment another solitary member might materialize, Schmidt acquiesced. Rafael was a good man, trying to be nice. Why hurt his feelings? Besides, it had occurred to him that it would be interesting to see who—members and guests—was to be found in the main dining room, in which he hardly ever set foot. In fact, he hadn’t used it since a disastrous lunch—two? three? years ago—with Charlotte’s mother-in-law,
Dr. Renata Riker, the dreaded shrink. The memory of that woman’s duplicity and gall distracted him momentarily from his worries about Alice. Imagine inviting herself to lunch with him and during the meal handing him a copy of the tape her sneaky son Jonathan had made of a telephone conversation between him, Schmidt, and his own daughter! The daughter who was then that man’s paramour but not yet his wife. He had pushed the tape away with all the indignation and scorn it merited and hadn’t forgotten the outrage or forgiven Renata or Jon. As for Myron Riker, Renata’s shrink husband and Jon’s father, he was the only member of that awful family to have any merit: he mixed a first-rate gin martini and mostly kept his mouth shut. No, he wasn’t about to breach the armistice between him and Charlotte, but the past couldn’t be erased, certainly not the accusation Charlotte had hurled at him during the taped conversation, the vicious lie designed to hurt. How could she have come up with it? “Aggressive when feeling guilty” had been the bland rationalization offered by Renata the shrink. But even if accurate, that description of the mechanism of Charlotte’s behavior left unexplained and incomprehensible the lie itself, the claim that in his law firm he had been known to one and all as a Jew-baiting anti-Semite. What abyss of ignominy had she dredged to concoct it?

The waiter standing at his right elbow brought him back to the present. He glanced rapidly at the menu and wrote out his order on the chit. Examining the wine list he found that none of the half bottles of red were to his taste; he shrugged and put down the number corresponding to a full bottle. Perhaps it would bring him the uninterrupted night’s sleep he needed. What was left over could go into a sauce or be savored by the kitchen staff. These tasks done, he looked around the room
and waved to members he knew whose eyes he was able to catch. Among them, two tables away, was Lew Brenner dining with his wife. Lew not only waved back but rose from his table and invited Schmidt to join them. They had just ordered their dinner, and there was room for Schmidtie at their table. Tina would be so happy! Advances, technological and social, never ceased to fascinate Schmidt. He had been a member of this particular club for more than twenty years, without it ever having occurred to him that Lew might want to become a member or be invited to join. His election must have happened recently. Good for Lew, who seemed entirely at ease, and, Schmidt supposed, good for the club.

I would love to join you, he told Lew. It’s very kind of you to think of it.

It couldn’t be helped. When two W & K partners got together, even if a wife was present, shoptalk took the place of conversation, its flow facilitated first by the bottle of Bordeaux Schmidt had ordered and then by Lew’s Burgundy. Accordingly, after paying their respects briefly to the Oklahoma City victims and expressing their horror at the monstrous criminal act, they passed in review the recent missteps of Jack DeForrest, still the presiding partner, important additions to the client roster and to whom among the partners they could be attributed, the financial results of the first quarter, and the probable candidates for partnership during the election, which had been moved from the traditional year-end to June, and the candidates’ chances of success. Then they drew a deep breath.

I’ve just been in Paris, said Schmidt. I saw something of Alice Verplanck.

It was out, and it couldn’t be helped. He wanted to say her
name, to feel it form on his lips. What a hard time she’s had, he added, thinking that this was the most anodyne statement he could make and yet avoid sounding brusque. It would have been easier not to have been told that Lew knew all about Tim’s homosexuality and death of AIDS.

Oh yes, Lew replied, a tragedy. We followed it step by step. Tina used to say I had to get it out of my mind, but how could I? I’ve got to hand it to Alice. She was very decent throughout, but without Bruno.…

His voice trailed off, and he seemed atypically at a loss for words.

Brenner was a good man, in Schmidt’s opinion, and had been a good partner. He wasn’t going to play games with him. Therefore he said: Lew, I heard a good deal about what happened to Tim from Alice. She told me. I guess Tina knows all about it?

The possibility that if he said anything more he might become guilty of a gross indiscretion had suddenly crossed Schmidt’s mind.

Oh, I do! He told me before he talked to Lew, Tina interjected, during a weekend when Alice and he came out to stay with us in the country. He was more at ease with me. He knew from being with me on the board of the ballet that I have lots of gay friends, guys with whom I really get along. It’s a fact that gay men like nonthreatening, maternal women. So while we were on a long walk he told me how he loved Alice and the children and all that but also had this other side, which was Bruno. But I said he could talk to Lew, that Lew would understand. Later we met Bruno. What a charmer! It’s too bad he plays on the wrong team.

That’s right, Lew chimed in, he was worried about what I
would say, how I would react. That was, of course, after the affair with Bruno heated up and some months before they left for Paris.

Wait, said Schmidt. You mean he told you before he left for Paris, a couple of years before Alice found out, which was after their daughter, Sophie, died in the summer of eighty-five? And you knew—Alice said only you, Lew, she didn’t mention Tina—and Alice during all that time remained ignorant?

That’s one way to look at it, Lew answered. If you stick to the admitted facts, that’s correct. He told Tina and me. We kept our mouths shut, and so did Tim and Bruno. There’s never been anything like the way those two wanted to stay in the closet and keep the door shut. Then came the tragedy with Sophie, and Alice caught them at it. Is that the whole story? To be frank with you, I don’t know any better than you whether it is, but I’ve found it difficult not to doubt it. Remember that I kept on working with Tim just as much after he moved to Paris as before, and I felt that knowing what I knew I had to watch him like a hawk to make sure that nothing happened that would spook a client. Then after he told me he’d tested HIV positive and began to have symptoms, I had to watch him like two hawks. You can imagine my concern about his emotional state, his cognitive ability, and the quality of his work. This may sound strange, considering what a great lawyer he was, and what a perfectionist! I haven’t kept up with the science, but at the time there was some concern that there could be an impact on how the brain functioned. Let me tell you, except for the ability to concentrate, which was shot once those horrible illnesses piled on, his acuity was A plus—A plus to the very end.

But Lew, Schmidt interrupted, that doesn’t tell me anything
about another way of looking at whether Alice knew or didn’t.

I was just getting to that. The other way to look at it is that there wasn’t a single social occasion from the time Bruno arrived on the scene until Tim was so sick that they had to move him to the hunting lodge in Chantilly when Bruno wasn’t present. By the way, that lodge is a gem. If you ever have a chance to see it when you are in Paris, don’t miss it. All right, Bruno was and is a great guy, he was lovely with the kids, gallant with Alice, liked to sail and shoot with Tim, and on and on, but Alice isn’t dumb. And she would have had to be really dumb not to catch on. And I’m not even mentioning Bruno’s being ever so slightly known in Paris as not being exactly a ladies’ man. That came through to me loud and clear—if you can say that of an innuendo, ha! ha! ha!—in my dealings with his partners at the bank and some other business relations. So I would say to you that it is not impossible, it may even be probable, that Alice being a very smart and very beautiful lady caught on and found it not inconvenient to let bad enough alone. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Brenner’s Ha! Ha! Ha! was getting on Schmidt’s nerves. Had he always laughed like that?

It may be even probable, as I said, Lew continued, that she found consolations. Or one big consolation. But catching them in flagrante delicto, kissing in the garden the day after they had buried Sophie, was just too much, so she let them have it.

I see, said Schmidt. Do you know anything concrete about the consolations?

No. She has never confided in me. The story about the kiss in the garden and the horrifying funeral at Verplanck Point I got from Tim. Let me tell you, I’ve been to Verplanck Point
and met the monstrous parents and the even more monstrous sister when I arranged for Tim to be buried there. How he grew up to be as normal as he did is a complete mystery. Another mystery is why in the devil’s name he insisted on being buried there. Perhaps it was in order to be near Sophie. He was crazy about those children. One other word about Alice’s consolations: As I told you I had been seeing them both in the period when she quote didn’t know close quote, and in the period after she quote found out close quote. There was only one difference. She was truly stricken by Sophie’s death. But otherwise, in the way she was with Tim and with Bruno, there was no change whatsoever.

The violent rain that had fallen while Schmidt was at table had stopped, leaving the air fresh. Schmidt walked home. It was a toss-up in the end whether Alice had guessed or hadn’t, except that if she had figured it out from the start it meant she lied to him. Why should he take Lew’s guess, for that was all it was, as the truth, when Tina, who seemed to have been in the thick of things, had said nothing about that? It wasn’t Lew’s word against Alice’s; it was much less, only his opinion. Lew wouldn’t be the first lawyer in Schmidt’s experience to be convinced that he was capable of great psychological insight. The stuff about Alice’s consolations was of the same order. Perhaps it was true. It hurt him to think it was, because of the way he felt about her, but she had not said or implied that she had been faithful to Tim all those years. If Lew was right about consolations, it still didn’t make her a liar.

There was no telephone message waiting for him. Midnight, therefore six in the morning in Paris. He refused to
call so early, and he was really too tired to wait another two or three hours. Even if he hadn’t been, she could count. She would know how late he had stayed up to speak to her and would realize how hard he had taken not finding her at home and not having his call returned. That was not how he wanted to be perceived. It was time enough to call tomorrow, probably from his house in Bridgehampton.

H
AVING DONNED THE HEADPHONES
that cut out the helicopter’s manic
rat tat tat
, Mr. Mansour told Schmidt he was turning off the intercom function that enabled them to speak to each other or to the pilot, and plunged immediately into studying what Schmidt recognized by its cover to be a deal book prepared by the institutional investment group of a Wall Street firm well known to Schmidt for having brought many loan proposals to his insurance company clients. A college classmate of Schmidt’s ran the group, a Harvard golden boy who had divorced twice, the last time noisily, managing in the process to defy the rule according to which that precious metal doesn’t tarnish. Schmidt unfolded his
Times
. There were still no suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing, but some “unnamed experts” focused on its resemblance to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the possible connection to Islamic militants. That gave some support to the remarks of the director Mike had brutalized at the board meeting. It was too bad the poor guy hadn’t had the nerve to defend them. What were the risks he would have run? A second tongue-lashing, a hint that he resign from the board
and thus forgo the honorarium fixed at a relatively modest forty thousand per year? Unless he had business pending with one of Mike’s companies—in that case, he could count on Holbein, if not the great man himself, putting the kibosh on it. He folded the paper and fought off the urge to doze. They had been flying east along the Sound. The pilot changed course. Under a cloudless sky, the helicopter began to follow the Atlantic coastline. Schmidt watched intently, and it seemed to him that for all the proud houses and their swimming pools, the parking lots adjoining town beaches, and the labyrinth of roads, it was still the fresh green breast of the new world that had revealed itself first, so long ago, to Dutch sailors, overwhelming them with its wonders. The helicopter passed over Mr. Mansour’s beach house and then Schmidt’s, farther inland, separated from the ocean by the pond. Another few minutes and an adjustment of its course, and the little craft put down on the runway. The copilot opened the hatch and helped Mr. Mansour and Schmidt disembark. The great financier’s other Rolls, a yellow convertible, was steps away. He waved the chauffeur to the backseat, took the wheel himself, and, as soon as he had confirmed that Schmidt’s seat belt was buckled, drove sedately to Water Mill.