About Schmidt (8 page)

Schmidt felt his heart pound. Gil was going to offer him
work: ask that he negotiate the financing for his production company’s next movie deal. Or some sort of consultancy—if only it wasn’t a purely legal job. Then he could take it without running afoul of the no-practice rules of the W & K retirement plan!

No dice. All Gil had to offer was advice to be endured patiently. Isn’t that man DeForrest who runs Wood & King your friend? Can’t you work something out with him? If they don’t want to redistribute partnership percentages, why shouldn’t you go back as a partner on salary? A sort of senior adviser?

Schmidt laughed.

It’s too late for that. Too many irreversible steps have been taken. I have bargained for a pretty decent deal by W & K standards, I have no clients left—they too have been redistributed and seem quite happy. Where would I live in the city? Let’s talk about something cheerful: like the Blackman children!

We’ll do the children in due course. You have a problem.
Quite
seriously, Schmidtie, isn’t there anything you want to do? How about a foundation? Even better, go on some boards. What’s the name of that lawyer with bad skin who raised money for Reagan? That’s what he has done.

You’ve put your finger on my problem! All I’ve done is work for W & K. I am a product nobody needs. That’s why you can’t get me back on the shelf. I have thought about foundations. And even if there were some harmless small outfit that would hire me, I am not sure I’d go for it! In the first place, there is the practical angle: it would cost me more to move back to the city and take such a job than it would pay. More important, I’ve always disliked charities and the sort of
people who run them. It’s my vision of hell. You raise money and set aside a fat slice for salaries and overhead. The next thing you know, you have to invent programs so that what’s left can be spent on them. Then da capo! Jaw-breaking boredom!

Seeing Gil’s blond face darken, Schmidt added with alacrity: I don’t mean all not-for-profits, for instance not the home for actors with Alzheimer’s you support, that’s quite useful, and I don’t dislike all foundation presidents, just most of them. The simple truth is just as I said—nobody wants me. Not my firm and neither foundations nor boards. I haven’t had the right extracurricular activities, so I don’t have the right profile!

Schmidtie, what you don’t have is the right attitude!

Believe me. I am like some guy on a bus who got up to pee and comes back to find that his seat has been taken, along with every other one. What can he do? Get off? You know what that means in the case of the one and only bus ride. It’s better to look stupid and hang on to a strap. What do I care if I look stupid!

You certainly shouldn’t have gone to pee while your pal DeForrest was getting himself elected presiding partner of your firm. I’ve never understood it. You as much as told me the job could have been yours; all you had to do was to say you wanted it. Then you would be running the firm and asking your partners whether their clients or anybody else needs them!

Schmidt salted his French fries. He had been picking at them daintily, with his fingers, as though he really meant to leave them on his plate. They weren’t bad. To hell with abstinence. He decided he would eat them, down to the last
one. What would he get in return for denying himself a little fat? Sometimes Gil’s memory was more irritating than charming. One could go for months without seeing him, and he would take the conversation up just where it had ended, remembering tidbits one wished had been forgotten or never mentioned.

That’s precisely it. DeForrest wanted the job. He wanted it more than I. In fact, I’m not sure I had a reason for wanting it. I might have only wanted to be sure I could get it. That’s not enough.

And DeForrest?

He had this ambition to be presiding partner for years; at times he seemed quite childish about it. Also, he had gotten rather tired of practicing law. It’s something that happens to lots of lawyers, but it hadn’t happened to me. So it was natural he should get the job. Besides, he had all sorts of ideas about what should be done—quite a manifesto. I had no program—I guess I would have just tried to keep things as they were.

What would have been wrong with that? You always liked that firm, and you seemed to make enough money. Do you wish now you had been less accommodating?

Not really. DeForrest might have put up a fight and won. That would have been very tough on me and bad for the firm. Anyway, I would have left just the same, at the same time, and I would be in the same spot now.

Schmidt was stuck with this answer. What was the use of admitting that he had stood aside because Jack DeForrest had told him over and over they would each have what they wanted most? Schmidtie, you want to shape the practice and
that’s what you should do, leave the administrative headaches to me, you don’t like that stuff. An unofficial, happy duumvirate. It hadn’t worked out that way, though; there was no sharing with Jack. Overnight he had been diminished, and it escaped no one that something had gone wrong: Schmidt remained just as he had been, with his own clients and his own shrinking practice—for the likes of Riker to carp at.

He smiled at Gil and helped himself to half of what remained in the bottle.

Let’s sound that cheerful note. How are the sublime Blackman girls?

Still working hard at their dead-end magazine jobs. Refusing to be grown-ups. Lisa is without a boyfriend and becoming frantic about it. Nina has found a new one who doesn’t earn a living and never will. To be precise, he is having his voice repositioned—from baritone to tenor, because he thinks he looks more like a tenor. By an Albanian coach! And his father is an Orthodox priest in Scranton! I wonder what the paternal voice is like. Lisa and Nina haven’t stopped playing with dolls. Perhaps they had too many dolls’ tea sets.

And Elaine’s kid?

Schmidt had forgotten her name, something that never happened to Gil.

Lilly. Lovely Lilly. No change. She’s a harmless, dull child. I wish she spent more time with her father. It would make it easier for Elaine and me to travel. His girlfriends are practically her age! I tell Elaine that’s built-in company for Lilly and should make it easier for him to take care of his daughter. She doesn’t see it that way. Why do you and I always carry on about our children like a couple of barnyard hens?

Because we love them.

No, it’s guilt. I have a reason—I abandoned mine and their mom and have lived with silly Lilly and her mom, so I can’t grow up and act like the father of grown-up women. But you? You and poor Mary were always perfect, and at least there you have got what you deserved—the beautiful, intelligent, and completely successful Charlotte! Any news?

She told me last weekend that she is getting married. No surprise there: to Jon Riker.

Ah, Schmidtie, how right and how wonderful! Your family has been reconstituted! I shouldn’t have had to drag this out of you.

I was going to tell you but we got bogged down in my sorrows.

What a relief! Both of them have real, grown-up jobs, and they are getting married instead of playing house! I was wrong—you don’t need a job, you have one! You will be the indispensable baby-sitter! I assume that Mary knew. That must have made her very happy. Elaine will call you. She will be thrilled. And a little envious!

In fact, I don’t know whether Mary knew. I rather think they made up their minds afterward. And the truth is that I haven’t taken the news well. We’ve had a sort of quiet but deadly tiff, and I don’t know how to end it.

Tell me about it—everything.

Pride and a shared preference for dryness in discourse: Schmidt could not have brought himself to tell Gil that what had happened to their friendship made him suffer, or that for a moment he had hoped to work for him somehow. Everything else was fair game; one accomplice confessing to the other. In consequence, they were often indiscreet. Thus
Schmidt had told Gil about Corinne. And Gil, newly famous and newly rich, had come to Schmidt, although Schmidt had been the best man at his wedding and it wasn’t Schmidt’s sort of work, to say, I deserve to be happy and instead I am wretched, I must divorce Ann, handle it for me. Schmidt negotiated the arrangements with more zeal than if his own money and rights to children had been on the line, obtaining a perfect success, and wasn’t surprised that Ann never spoke to him or to Mary again.

He wanted to answer Gil, but only in part; he wasn’t going to say that he didn’t have enough money. Therefore, he told Gil about the house not being really his and how he couldn’t live in it with Charlotte and Jon, once they were married, on those terms, that they were trying to extract from him a show of enthusiasm it wasn’t in his power to give, and about the Thanksgiving lunch with the Riker parents, which had turned into a test by fire.

Have you told Charlotte that you will give her the house and move out?

No. I couldn’t explain it very well on the telephone, and I was afraid if I didn’t make myself quite clear she would feel it was some sort of abrupt, hostile action. She will need some money from me. I have to talk to her about that as well. I don’t want her to refuse my money.

I think she will see your leaving the house, not wanting to try to share it with them, as hostile, however much you explain. Can’t you let up and work out some rules for when they come? After all, it will only be some weekends, when the weather is good. I can’t imagine they will be spending every weekend here, with you.

Mary and I spent every weekend in this place, even
when Martha was still alive, and our summer vacations as well.

That was you and Mary! You had Charlotte right away, and that was once upon a time, in the Hamptons of the sixties! What a lovely picture in Technicolor. Flaxen-haired children back from pony lessons or the beach, clean and dressed. In the club car, the paterfamilias asleep after the third gin and tonic, mouth open. Suntanned Mom, legs freshly shaved, at the station waiting in the Chevy with the top down—or did she take the Ford station wagon?—worried about the lasagna in the oven and whether it’s that time of the month. The au pair has just enough time to get into the bathtub in the master bathroom and do her toenails. Where is my camera? I’m ready to film! This script will be different. I see Charlotte and Jon on the Colorado River or waist deep in powder snow at Alta—pleasures you and Mary have never known! Meanwhile you’ll take care of the trees and the cracks in the swimming pool.

Very nice, Gil. Do make that film. The trouble is that it will be even more difficult to clear out of there later, after I have fixed the one or two things that are left to fix. Right now, this is still a summerhouse, even for me, and I have a little snap left in my garters. But that isn’t really the nub. You know how I am: if a corner can be found, I’ll back myself into it, even if no one is coming at me. I just don’t seem to know how to change the way I feel.

But as yet you haven’t said anything to Charlotte—or Jon. And you really don’t know the parents?

Never seen them. We don’t bother about the background of our young lawyers or partners either, and we certainly
don’t interview the parents to see whether we approve! I believe they’re psychiatrists, both of them—of the analyst kind.

You approve of Jon. But haven’t you been curious about the father and mother? This is the guy your daughter has been living with for some time!

Mary was beginning to be tired by the time they got really serious. As a matter of fact, though, I am not curious and I don’t approve! I don’t approve of Jon, and I don’t approve of Charlotte. That’s one more hurt.

How can you not approve of Charlotte? She is one hundred percent all right. She has always done what you and Mary wanted, and she has done it faultlessly. And that boy is your partner! A partner in the prestigious New York firm of Wood & King. Isn’t that what the
Times
squib will say? I would think that was eminently respectable.

On the surface. I hadn’t expected to see Charlotte turn into a smug, overworked yuppie. I’d rather she had a deadend magazine job, if that was what she really enjoyed doing. A job like Mary’s, like your girls’—perhaps that’s why I envy you!

Schmidtie, you don’t know what you are talking about. The jobs Lisa and Nina have are the only employment they could get. Sure, they like magazines and people who write for magazines. But they can’t write, they can’t edit, and they refuse to learn about production. They are tourists in the magazine landscape, like someone on a safari admiring elephants from a Land Rover; the basic difference is that they are doing their looking from the lowest rung of the research department. What they earn isn’t enough to pay the rent—let alone for the whole-grain cereal for them or the smelly
gravel they feed their Abyssinians! I support them and the Orthodox priest’s son. The only alternative would be a rich boyfriend or husband. There is no such animal in sight.

You can afford it, and so could I, though less well. Never mind, this isn’t some adaptation of an Ibsen play you are about to film. If you want to know about Jon, he is all right but not what I hoped for either—not for my son-in-law or the father of my grandchildren or the guy I want to live with in a house that’s morally my daughter’s.

Let’s get some more coffee, said Gil. Maybe we could use a brandy. I’m not working this afternoon and this interview isn’t nearly over. What’s the matter with Jon? Isn’t he exactly your kind, the sort of fellow you were at his age—a brilliant young lawyer on the way to fame and fortune?

I haven’t found either. No, I wasn’t like Jon. Not inside—you, of all people, shouldn’t define me by my profession. I’ll tell you a guilty secret: I was a romantic when I was in college; when we met, more of a romantic than you, and I’ve never stopped being one. Jon never began. It’s a real difference. He has all he needs to be a W & K partner, but there are other things that W & K doesn’t care about and I do. Such as the value to be accorded to material success. Maybe it’s his background, the taboo subject in the office!

Background? He is the son of two doctors, and you don’t even know them! I am beginning to think their Thanksgiving is something you should thank God for. Go to the lunch graciously, and try to behave yourself once you are there. The parents will fall for your faded charm. That and a home-cooked meal will get you out of your corner.