About Schmidt - Louis Begley [13]
Get on board what?
The process, and the underlying principle—that there is no objection to changes we may want to make to achieve greater fairness.
I think you had better write to me, Jack. I don’t think I can discuss changes before I know what they are. Anyway, I don’t see what this has to do with me. My arrangement with the firm is a contract, one that I negotiated with you.
It still comes under the retirement plan, Schmidtie. You know that. There are mechanisms in the plan to permit the firm to make changes at its discretion, but we don’t want the process to be divisive. That’s why we are asking you fellows to sign on. I’ve got to say I am a little surprised that you of all people are getting excited. You’ve been able to salt away quite a bundle, and really you have no expenses or capital needs!
I haven’t gotten excited yet, and maybe I won’t, after I see what you propose. As I said, I don’t understand how it can or should apply to me.
All right. I just hope you won’t screw it up with the firm, Schmidtie. You’ve had a good cruise here, and people like you. Don’t spoil it! Do you want to be switched to anybody else? The invitation to Thanksgiving still stands; do you want to reconsider?
No to both questions, but thanks again for the invitation!
The universality of the advice to watch his step was impressive. Schmidt went into the kitchen and poured himself a large drink of bourbon and sat down with it at the kitchen table. The rain, which had begun as a lackadaisical drizzle in the morning, had turned into a torrent. It pounded on the windowpanes. Schmidt didn’t own a cat or a dog; no need to worry about a pet being outside in foul weather. The roof on the main house had been redone again at the end of the summer. The technologically advanced pool-house roof was still under guaranty. There were no known leaks anywhere, certainly not in the cellar, not in the garage, where the Toyota Schmidt had given to Mary and the VW Golf he had given to Charlotte slumbered alongside his own Saab. No, there was decidedly nothing to worry about. In fact, this savage rain was a fine thing, giving the trees, the bushes, and the more serious perennials one more chance to drink up before the ground froze. Yet everything was badly wrong.
Schmidt knew that lurid confrontations, browbeating of adversaries followed by buttering them up, ambushes miraculously avoided, dramas played out in conference rooms against a backdrop of piles of unfinished sandwiches, during tête-à-tête chats among principals that one lawyer only has been invited to join, games dangerous like a hand grenade from which the pin has been pulled or, on the contrary, banal and tepid, because their issue has been determined in advance, held no starring role for him. They had all been scripted with Jack DeForrest in mind or, even more likely, the ubiquitous Lew Brenner, W & K’s own Jewish Al Pacino, stiletto or charm ready for whomever it might concern, and other imperturbably self-assured and yet esurient men just like them, partners in a posse of firms, each of which claimed primacy in the profession, the right to be the first to go through every door. Schmidt too had been at the top of the profession, but the peak he had scaled—representing two of the largest American insurance companies in their most complex private loans—had been eroded over the course of twenty years until it took on the gentle look of an ancient hillock comfortably lost in a verdant landscape. To retain his standing as an alpinist, Schmidt would have needed to find another range and an ascent of such difficulty that there was no room left for another climber. It was no one’s fault. The same change in capital markets and the practice of law was humbling other grand New York lawyers: insurance company money was a river that had abandoned its old bed and was flowing away from the transactions in which Schmidt had excelled. Many lesser lawyers, in New York and other cities, some of them cities where these insurance companies had their head offices, were pleading to do on the cheap those deals