Schmidt Delivered (21 page)

After so many years of listening, out of the supine patient’s sight, for echoes of memories that spring up to give you the lie just when you think you are most unshakably in the right, after all the tapes and all the notes on what the third ear may or may not have heard—why, had he given it thought, Schmidt would not have dared to imagine that Renata would let him stop there, take the “never” he threw her way for an answer. But it had been he, not the hand of a cheap desk clock placed where it can be glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, who brought the fifty-minute hour to a
close, rising from the restaurant table relentlessly and in the nick of time, propelling Renata into the street, pointing speechlessly to his garage, and then striding off without a backward look. Yes, with his cunning he had given that subtle speleologist, who previously had played with him as though with heated candle wax, no chance to follow the trail of the cloven foot into the dank cave where his shame lies hidden. Take money, which Schmidt is so beautifully stiff about. Would he have told her that there was once a shop girl in a Harvard Square haberdashery with white arms, soft breasts under a blouse of white satin, blue eyes, and black hair? She worked behind the cash register. Schmidt acquainted himself with those arms, breasts, and more in the backseat of Gil Blackman’s Nash, which he’d borrow and park along Memorial Drive or off Brattle Street. One by one he’d undo the little mother-of-pearl buttons, his fingers, cold and persistent, interlaced with the Irish beauty’s chubby, hot, defending, but ultimately yielding fingers. It amused Schmidt to cash a fifty-dollar check at the haberdashery, particularly when he also purchased jockey shorts, so that he could play with her fingers on the sly while she rang up the merchandise and gave him change. On one such occasion, in amorous confusion, she handed him a fifty-dollar bill and with it his own check. He saw the mistake instantly, put his free hand over the check and the money, and transferred them into his coat pocket. But what use was such a large bill?

Can you give me three tens and four fives? he asked, and let go of her hand.

She counted the change and, wonder of wonders, did not reach for the fifty, although he held it out, having meantime rolled it into something like a cigarette.

See you tonight?

I’ll pick you up at seven, he whispered.

No, eight, I’ve got to eat with my folks.

The fifty-dollar bill was in his pocket, together with his check. He arranged the other bills carefully in his wallet and nodded agreement. This gave him time to eat at the Lowell House dining room, study for the history quiz, brush his teeth, and pick up the Nash. He knew it was available. Gil had a drama club rehearsal that evening.

She waited in the rain on a street corner two blocks from her parents’ house in Somerville. We’re going for ice cream? he asked.

Later.

I want you.

He saw a parking place, turned into it, cut the motor, and found her mouth. Their fingers got busy. The car windows were streaming with rain. Dim silhouettes slid past.

Then, as always, he came too quickly.

Speedy Gonzalez! she taunted, and stopped moaning, although he continued the motion of his own hand until his wrist ached, the position was so uncomfortable, and she finally pushed it away.

She turned her back to him so he could close the strap of her bra, wiggled back into her panties, rearranged her skirt, and asked the question he had waited for.

Lover boy, you crazy or something? You took the check and the fifty-dollar bill! You should’ve heard Mr. Jacobs when he closed the cash register. Was he mad!

What are you talking about?

I’m talking about how you took the fifty dollars in one bill, and the fifty dollars in change, and the check, and put them all in your wallet. Let’s see it.

He handed it to her. Here, look.

The tens and the fives were there, except what he paid to gas up Gil’s car.

She went through the wallet, taking out the money, his driver’s license and draft card, a wedding photograph of his mother and father, his bursar’s card, and two Trojans. That was all. He didn’t believe in bulging wallets or bulging pockets.

Shit, it’s not there. Bert, what have you done with the money and the check?

She used the abbreviation of his name he affected during his sophomore and junior years, before he got up enough nerve to have people call him Schmidtie, like his parents.

Nothing at all, the money’s all there except what I spent.

She took hold of the lapels of his jacket and tried to shake him. Bert, you’ve got to give it back. That guy will fire me. He’ll kill me. He’ll send you to jail.

No, he won’t. I’ll stop by first thing in the morning and tell him I handed you the check, I got the money, and there was no problem. There’s nothing to talk about.

She began to cry, then shrieked, You bastard, let me out of here! and dashed into the dark street, he supposed in the
direction of her home. That was their last date. In fact, he saw her once again, the next morning, following an interview with a very angry assistant dean. He held his ground during it. He had neither the check nor any money that wasn’t his. What was he to do about it?

Ask your conscience about the money, the dean told him, or your heart. I don’t know. You’ve got to give Jacobs another check.

What if it gets cashed and my first check gets cashed too? Then I’ll be out fifty dollars.

You discuss that with Mr. Jacobs.

He did as he was told. Jacobs was at the cash register, she behind a back counter, pretending not to see him.

He’d brought his checkbook with him and showed Mr. Jacobs how he had entered the transaction on the stub. He was willing to write another check, but what would happen if the check the store had lost resurfaced?

Nothing. Tell the bank not to pay the check you claim we lost, Mr. Schmidt, said Mr. Jacobs. It’ll cost you a quarter. Here it is, take it, be my guest, and don’t show your face here again.

He threw the coin at him and continued, That’s a dumb trick, Schmidt. You stole the cash from that girl.

Yes, but they couldn’t prove it. The owner’s voice carried. Some students, none of whom Schmidt knew, were staring at them. Presumably, they had heard it all. On his way out, Schmidt tried to slam the door behind him. It fooled him and swung instead feebly back and forth. There was no telling what might happen next, such as some follow-up by the
university police or that man Jacobs. In that case, it would look bad if he dropped the business about the check after having made a fuss. His bank, the Harvard Trust Company, was only a couple of blocks away. He went there and, after an officious explanation to a teller and then a manager sitting behind a desk on the bank floor, put in the stop order.

No question. The prospect of having the extra cash, when he understood that all he had to do was take it, had made him literally dizzy. It was like finding a fifty-dollar bill on the sidewalk. He certainly wouldn’t have carried it to the police station and said, Gee, officer, look at what somebody dropped in the street. By the time he had gotten to his room, though, he understood that the disappearance of the money would be discovered, that the girl would be held responsible even though no one would believe she stole it, that she would remember the transaction between them and know he had taken the missing cash, and that taking the check was a crazy move, like redoubling at poker when all you’ve got in your hand is a pair of deuces. At the same time, there was an advantage in having done something so outrageous, so stupidly crazy. If he was going to get caught, it could make the whole thing seem just that: a crazy, absentminded stunt, for which he should be dressed down, perhaps slapped on the wrist, but nothing worse. He knew he should go right back to the store, give back the money, give back the check, say he didn’t know what he was thinking about—get down on his knees to the girl and the owner. But he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep the fifty dollars, or maybe one hundred if somehow he didn’t have to write another check. In the end it
would be his word against the girl’s, and her word couldn’t be as good. She was just a salesgirl with big tits and a big mouth who had let herself be picked up at the pinball machine at Elsie’s and had played with his cock on their first date. Before the haberdashery, she had worked at Snow White, doing the university’s laundry. That was why she knew all about the stains Harvard boys made on their sheets, and how the pads of those chubby, hot fingers got to be so weirdly smooth. Scalding hot water and lye had made the lines on them disappear till she had no fingerprints left. She was not someone he wanted to be seen with; the one time he had shown her to Gil had made that clear.

Well, he had kept the money, and, when he remembered the miserly allowance his mother sent him, less than half of what Gil got from his parents who weren’t rich, didn’t live in a fancy house like his mother and father, his anger at having been made to feel such scruffy need would surge up, sometimes blocking out the shame. Even so, it hadn’t really been about money. After all, he had never picked Gil’s pockets or stolen the books he needed for classes instead of buying them at the Coop and Schoenhof’s or plain stolen books for resale to a dealer near to Central Square, which was something people did. He had acted on an impulse. Resentment had entered into it more than greed—that the best he could do was this little townie slut who wouldn’t go all the way. But once he understood the mess he had made and its likely consequences, the more powerful sensation that made him go on took over, one of fatality, of being carried he didn’t know where by a force he couldn’t and didn’t want to
control. The cards were what they were; they had to be played out.

That in this incident, and certain others apparently unconnected with it, he might have been in fact pushing his luck, lunging headlong toward catastrophe like a test driver at a cement wall, occurred to him when, as a very young partner, he was flying back to New York from a recruiting session on the campus of a southern university where Wood & King had never tried to hire associates before. Unless what linked the incidents was nothing else but malice, the unique quality that turns a man against himself, his neighbors, and, of course, God. What a sense of relief! Legs stretched out, a second double bourbon before him on the pullout table, he was luxuriating in the comfort of his first-class seat. The hangover of the early morning, on account of which he had called American and put himself on a later plane to New York, was present only as a vague, not entirely unpleasant, feeling of increased sensitivity and alertness. He had been able to spread his papers on the seat next to him and was going over résumés of the students he had interviewed and his notes. Laverna Daly! Entitled “A Short Biography,” her c.v. had been professionally printed and had clipped to its upper-right corner a color snapshot. It didn’t do her justice. She had worked in summer stock and small repertory companies as a set designer until she was over thirty and then decided to study law. The rest was as you might have expected: A’s and “Excellent” in soft courses taught by phonies—human rights, international legal order, legal problems of women, and a seminar on prison conditions—passing grades in the tough
subjects that counted to Schmidt and at W & K: contracts, tax, civil procedure, corporations, securities law. On the other hand, she had to her credit an undergraduate degree granted with highest distinction in Renaissance studies at Berkeley, a year at the university in Grenoble, and what was said to be complete fluency in French and Italian. This was his last thirty-minute session of a two-day interviewing stint that ran from eight in the morning until six in the evening, in a windowless cubicle in the administration building. The demand to see the W & K recruiter had been so strong that he agreed to tuck in additional interviews over breakfast and lunch in the law school cafeteria.

He had read the Daly résumé along with the others the night before. She had no chance: the grades were wrong; that students who start law school late, after they’ve abandoned some earlier muddleheaded career, don’t work out as lawyers was an axiom at W & K; he was put off by the “Personal Interests” listed in italics at the bottom of the second page—cooking, modern dance, and poetics. It was a waste of time for which the university’s lottery system of assigning students to oversubscribed interviews was to blame. That girl might as well be applying for the space program. The thing was, though, that she surprised him. He had had trouble keeping his eyes open during the preceding interview and the one before. But as soon as she began to talk—stating, as he had asked her to, the facts and the holding of the most recent case she had read that caught her interest—he perked up, recognizing a remarkable sense for the structure of legal reasoning combined with unoffensive self-assurance. She continued
to do so well that he didn’t cut her off at the end of the allotted time and, in fact, was busy figuring out whether her cause would be better served by his inviting her right away, on his own responsibility, to a full set of interviews at the office in New York or getting the hiring committee to issue the invitation. In theory, only the strongest candidates were to be invited on the spot by the interviewer. She certainly didn’t qualify on paper, and he might not be able to convince the committee, which would read her record with the same biases as he; whereas if he got her in the door, she might do exceedingly well.

Look, he said, I’m going to take a calculated risk. If I just looked at your grades and that sort of stuff, I should be telling you that this has been a very good meeting, that I’ll report favorably to my partners, and that I hope we will be able to invite you to visit us, although the competition at your school is very stiff, and so forth. Instead, I am sticking my neck out and inviting you to New York right now because I want to give you a chance to overcome your record by talking to other partners the way you have talked to me. Don’t get your hopes up too high, and don’t disappoint me.

It wasn’t a blush. She turned red and began to tell him about the fulfillment of her dreams, and how this was the first invitation from a top firm, when he stopped her.