About Schmidt - Louis Begley [100]
His first inclination, therefore, when he opened the Walkers’ lengthy, many-times-folded-over invitation to their thirtieth wedding anniversary celebration to be held at their house in Quogue on the second Saturday in May, was to decline. The invitation had been addressed to his office; he didn’t recall receiving a letter of condolence from them; the past was the past; they weren’t intimate anymore. There would be other people at the party in the same embarrassing category of former friends: couples who made up Schmidt’s circle when he was at law school or with whom he and Mary had dined regularly in the years that followed, and the flotsam and jetsam of divorces. As for the latter category, it was hard to predict whether the wife or the husband was more likely to have been salvaged. Looks and charm were often dispositive, the more attractive partner sailing on to other waters.
These were friendships that had bloomed long ago, when most of them lived on the Upper West Side or between Washington Square and Gramercy Park. At that time the grand firms for which the men worked paid young lawyers pitifully low salaries but the old partners fully expected the associates and their wives to dress up like Mommy and Daddy and live like miniatures of Mommy and Daddy, on the assumption that everyone had a small trust fund that made that sort of thing possible. Therefore, they coped; knowing how to cope was a tribal skill, like knowing how to rig a sailboat. Sometimes two couples—inseparable, good looking, and exuberant, with their perfect, picture-pretty, towheaded, and exuberant children—would jointly rent a large house near the beach in Amagansett or on the north side of the highway in Water Mill. The husbands had all been law school classmates, give or take a year. They would ask strays like Schmidt to come out on the train with them for a weekend of corn on the cob, gin, and watching the children play at the edge of the surf. It was during such a weekend at the Walkers’, to which Ted Walker had invited him, that Schmidt was able to dazzle Mimi, Walker’s willowy Philadelphian wife, by poaching for her a whole salmon, and then decorating it with rich-looking, yellow mayonnaise he had made from scratch in a bowl, just stirring peanut oil into egg yolks with a little whisk. Anyone other than Schmidtie would have simply reached for a jar of Hellmann’s, became the universal many-times-repeated comment.
Still, why should he go to that party? Did he any longer care about them or they about him? One couldn’t begin to explain over a drink or a plate of cold roast veal the games life had played with the Walkers or with him since they had drifted apart, soon after his marriage to Mary. And the rest of that group! He expected it would be a challenge even to recognize half of them, requiring instant restoration of hair color, if not of hair itself, airbrushing potholes left in the skin by removal of little cancers, whittling down bellies and rear ends. Nevertheless, after breakfast, as he read the text of the invitation—it was really an illustrated family history, punctuated at every turn by exclamation points, with pictures of the Walkers and their children at various ages—he was overcome by curiosity. Ted and Mimi’s story seemed so happy and their lives so wonderfully simple. What was that like? How did they manage it? He should