Schmidt Steps Back (2 page)

He told Sonia that he was going out to run errands, and no, she didn’t need to stay to help with lunch, or to clear and do the dishes afterward, and that if his guest Mrs. Alice Verplanck called while he was out she was to say that he would be home within the hour and would call back. In fact, he didn’t believe her cell phone would work in the U.S., but it was possible that she’d use the driver’s. Elated and anxious, he got the Audi station wagon out of the garage, the successor to the Volvo he had traded in regretfully at the one-hundred-forty-thousand-mile mark, and drove first to Wainscott for fish chowder, then back west on Route 27 to Sesame for the bread and cheese and ravioli
in brodo
that would be their lunch on New Year’s Day, as well as croissants that would be Alice’s breakfast, and finally back to Bridgehampton, where the florist had prepared the small bouquets he had ordered for the
kitchen table and for Alice’s room. That took care of their needs through New Year’s Day, when only convenience stores would be open in the Hamptons. Restaurants would be closed as well, but he didn’t need to worry about dinners. They were going to Mike Mansour’s New Year’s Eve party, and Gil and Elaine Blackman had invited them to dinner the next day, a thoughtful gesture that had made Schmidt childishly grateful.

Alice had telephoned on Friday, the day after Christmas, and said she would take a New Year’s Eve flight from Paris that was due to land at Kennedy at ten-thirty in the morning. She would have to get up before dawn, but she preferred that to the traffic on the way to the airport and the mob she would face once she got there if she took a later flight. She wouldn’t hear of his meeting her at JFK; in fact she absolutely forbade it. But she accepted his offer to send a car to drive her to Bridgehampton. After they hung up, he went out on the back porch and stood there motionless, letting what she had told him sink in. Alice was really coming! He had told himself over and over that she was much too serious to change her mind and say she had decided after all that she didn’t want to see him. Nonetheless, hearing her actually say I will take such and such a plane and I will be at the New York airport at such and such hour, and you can send someone to bring me to your house had the effect on him of a miracle. He had considered briefly sending Bryan, his combination handyman and house and cat sitter, who knew all the back and service roads, but in the end he concluded that the conversation of that loquacious dropout and reformed drug dealer was more than Alice should be asked to bear after eight hours in the plane. A wizened Irishman ferried Schmidt to and from JFK when Bryan was busy or Schmidt was able to put him off without giving
offense. And so it was the Irishman who was sent with instructions to be early at the arrival hall beyond customs, well ahead of the flight’s landing, and to hold very high and visibly the sign with Alice’s name.

He looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty. She must be on the Long Island Expressway. Having checked the Air France Web site, he knew that the plane had landed fifteen minutes early. At that hour of the morning lines at immigration shouldn’t be long, even on the eve of a holiday. Therefore, unless there was a hitch at the baggage claim, she would have been in the car at eleven-fifteen and therefore should be due at his house within an hour and a half to two hours. That was a conservative estimate. It took into account both the chance of bad traffic and Murphy’s tendency to obey the speed limits, for which one couldn’t really fault him. In a momentary regression to his days as a hard drinker, Schmidt poured himself a double bourbon, added an ice cube, and sat down in the rocking chair. The kitchen table was set with the good china and silver. The red bouquet was a nice touch. Really, there was nothing to be ashamed about in his household arrangements. He could rock in his chair and sip his whiskey in peace. At one, the telephone rang. It was Murphy reporting that they were approaching Water Mill. The man was smarter than he looked! Traffic was moving well. So they’d be arriving in fifteen minutes. His sixth sense told him when the car approached his driveway. He downed the last of his drink and rushed out to the front porch. Someone had taught Murphy to be respectful of the gravel on his clients’ driveways. The car was creeping toward the house. At last it came to a halt. Schmidt opened the door. The hand that pressed his was enclosed in a long glove of dark red suede that he recognized. Alice had worn that same pair
when they dined in the restaurant on rue de Bourgogne on the fourteenth of October, two and a half months ago.

Schmidt’s first sight of Alice was at her marriage to Tim Verplanck, a young associate at W & K who had become his favorite. It took place at a church in Washington, Alice’s father being then French ambassador to the U.S. That afternoon he danced with her at the embassy reception. She had white freesia in the coils of her hair, which was the color of dark old gold, and wore a veil of billowing ivory lace that Mary had said must have been her grandmother’s. In the coming months and years there had been dinners—Mary would have remembered how many, it was the sort of thing she kept track of—at the Schmidts’ apartment when, according to W & K custom, they entertained associates who worked for him, with their wives or fiancées; there had been also the annual office dinner dances for all lawyers and wives and, after Tim had been taken into the firm, much smaller dinners for partners and wives. Each time Schmidt had been taken aback, truly bowled over, by her beauty, her chic, and her bearing, so perfectly erect, her head held high, the rich mass of her hair twisted into a chignon or gathered by a clasp over the nape of her neck. She had the imperturbable good manners of a diplomat’s daughter. Her vertiginously long and perfect legs had a prized place in his memory. An opportunity to inspect them had been offered to the entire firm when she came to an office function wearing a fire-engine-red miniskirt and black mesh tights, no other office wife being attired in anything remotely so eye-catching. But Schmidt was able to swear that he had not coveted her then or at any other time while Tim was alive, office liaisons, not least adulterous ones,
being taboo for him and, he believed, all other decent men of his class and generation. There was another, unavowable reason: while Mary lived, all the women who had excited him had something louche about them. They were women he had picked up at hotel bars, a law student with whom he had inexcusably smoked pot while on a recruiting trip to the West Coast. The one exception would have been the half-Asian au pair who had looked after Charlotte. That shy and polite girl had offered herself to him so innocently, and yet with such explicit urgency, that prudence and principles flew out the window. But even if he had allowed himself to become aroused by Alice, he would not have dared to think of her as someone who might assent to an afternoon’s copulation on her living room sofa or in a Midtown tourist hotel. It was the sort of proposal she would have repelled with scorn. She was in love with Tim, that was obvious, and even if something had gone awry between them, which he had no reason to suspect, she was too splendid, too proud—had she been a man he might have said a
chevalier sans peur et sans reproche
—for some squalid affair with Schmidt or another married partner of her husband’s. Then she disappeared from Schmidt’s horizon. In fact, the whole family dropped out of sight when Tim took over the direction of the firm’s Paris office, Alice and the children naturally joining him. He showed up at the New York office rarely, much less frequently than his predecessors, who had all been punctilious about staying in touch, regularly attending firm meetings in New York and pacing the corridors on the lookout for open doors whereby partners signaled that a visit would not be unwelcome. It was a useful way to keep a finger on the firm’s pulse and be sure nothing was brewing that would affect the Paris office.

So it happened that when he called on Alice in Paris in April 1995 to offer his condolences in person after Tim’s shocking and completely unexpected death, he had not seen her for thirteen years or more likely longer. It seemed to him that she was even more beautiful: her aspect was more womanly, gentler and less haughty. The gamine had grown up. Astoundingly—in moments of subsequent bitterness he would think absurdly—he had fallen in love at once, without his lips ever having touched hers, without a single embrace. Call it late-onset puppy love; he believed it would have happened just as certainly if he had been blindfolded and had merely heard her laughter again. And now, after the hiatus of another thirteen years since that April meeting, it seemed to him that his love was intact. If there was happiness in store for him, it had to be a future shared with her.

She traveled light like a young girl, with a single smallish suitcase decorated with red decals to make it easily recognizable on airport conveyor belts and a carry-on shaped like a sausage that she hadn’t bothered to zip up, so that a great number of French magazines and newspapers, and what looked like manuscripts, peeked out from it. He carried her bags upstairs and showed her the room she would stay in. It had been Charlotte’s: sunny, with the bow windows looking out onto the back lawn and garden and, beyond the boundary of the property, the great saltwater pond whose population of wild geese no longer migrated. Alice exclaimed over the loveliness and said she must have a complete tour of the house and the garden. But first she would like lunch, then a bath, and then a long nap. After lunch, however, she changed her mind and said they had better look around before it got dark. When
they had finished and were standing at the door to her room, he said, You like this place. You might like living here.

She didn’t answer but remained motionless. Wondering whether he had guessed what she wanted, he put his arms around her. Her mouth tasted of the lunch; her hair and her clothes smelled very slightly of sweat and other odors that told the story of the hours spent in airports and on the plane. The unmediated intimacy excited him like a stolen sweet. He prolonged the kiss, but just as he felt himself harden she pulled away.

It’s bath time, she said very quietly. Where will you be?

Right there, he said, pointing to his room, directly across the hall. I’ll be pretending to read and listen to music.

May I come to see you?

Schmidt turned up the upstairs thermostat slightly and settled into the red armchair in his room. Ordinarily he kept the house on the cool—some would say downright cold—side, but Alice wasn’t yet used to the cold of a wooden beach house pounded by North Atlantic gales. Or to sharing it with an old fellow with a lifelong habit of scrimping on heating oil. On his night table were a desperately sad novel by a Russian Jew set around the time of the battle for Stalingrad and a stack of unread issues of the
New Yorker
and the
New York Review of Books
that had been accumulating since right after Election Day, when he left on an inspection tour of Life Centers operated in Central and Eastern Europe and some states of the former Soviet Union by Mike Mansour’s foundation, of which Schmidt was still the head. He was finding the novel so powerful that he had to pace himself in absorbing its terrors; he didn’t think he was up to another scene of human
degradation just then. Were the clean-cut, affable Ukrainians who received him at the Kiev Life Center familiar with that tale of horrors—horrors that must have engulfed their grandfathers if not their fathers? Before going to sleep the night before, he had put down the book just as an old Bolshevik, a commissar of superior rank, was being arrested for reasons he didn’t understand. A much younger commissar slapped him repeatedly just to break his prisoner. For the moment, the most Schmidt could handle was to listen, while his mind wandered, to the Connecticut classical music station to which the radio was always tuned. Alice drew him to her powerfully, yes, but what he felt for her was far beyond sexual attraction. It was love, albeit an old man’s love. He wanted to keep her at his side. He had offered marriage, which he devoutly wanted out of a belief, which he knew was contradicted by experience, that marriage held out a promise of stability. But he had told her he was prepared to settle for living together anyplace, on any terms she might wish. And the offer of himself was on a satisfaction-guaranteed trial basis, with assurances he would creep away quietly if she found him wanting. Was it fair, was it reasonable, to propose marriage or some other form of cohabitation with a man who had just turned seventy-eight to a woman who was sixty-three? The only honest answer was no, but he didn’t want to take no for an answer and thought sincerely that arguments against his suit might be overrated. He had fully disclosed the risks, which anyway were obvious, going so far as to say that were he her father or brother he would advise against her taking them. But it was up to her. As for the wisdom of his own position, although marriage was what he ardently desired, he knew full well the penalties for entering into one that fails. In the worst case, you live with
a cell mate slowly becoming your enemy and, on average, with someone more or less annoying. This was to say nothing of the physical intimacy that cohabitation made difficult to avoid. Bad enough for the woman, feeling obliged to submit to an unattractive old fellow’s groping—Schmidt did not exclude himself from the thesis that all old men are intrinsically unattractive—and rather worse for the man called upon to take the initiative and accomplish repeatedly the miracle of penetration. A voice reminded Schmidt that divorce laws had fixed those problems. One could agree in advance that the unhappy husband or wife could cut and run. Perhaps his questions could be answered definitively only after the fact; it was a case of proceeding at your own risk.

Schmidt abruptly ended these ruminations. She was beautiful, fragrant, and more desirable than any woman he had known, with the sole exception of Carrie, Hecate herself, who had come to him in the form of a twenty-year-old Puerto Rican waitress. For two years indelibly marked on every nerve in his body she had been his mistress. The idyll had ended just as one would expect. She had found a blond giant gentle as a lamb and went to him with Schmidt’s blessing, carrying a child whose paternity was to be uncertain. As for Alice: she may not be a magical creature of the night, but she was his type! Who is to say that the game is not worth the candle? Cowardice, he knew only too well, carried its own penalties: sour solitude and despair. Concerns about being unfair to Alice were balderdash. She was a big girl. A moment ago, she had asked whether she could come to see him after her bath. That was hardly an ambiguous gesture.