About Schmidt - Louis Begley [22]
He heard car doors slam. Wednesday—it must be the Polish cleaning brigade. He was too nervous to shave, too nervous to remain in the house with them. The forward observers, Mrs. Zielnik and Mrs. Nowak, poured into the kitchen and caught him by the arms. Kissed, he fled upstairs, wiping his cheeks on his sleeve. The bed in Charlotte’s room was unmade. That was good; they would know it was time to change the nuptial sheets. In the corner, he saw Riker’s running shoes, on top of them thick socks—unwashed, he supposed. At arm’s length, holding them with the tips of his fingers, he carried these articles to the bathroom, dropped them on the floor, lowered the toilet seat and cover, and without looking, flushed, just in case. A contraption for cleaning gums, familiar to Schmidt from drugstore window displays, but new in this place, stood on the shelf. Fearful of electrical fires, he unplugged it. Beside it, in a glass, two plastic attachments for use in the mouth, one with a blue and the other with a pink base. Conjugal hygiene! No doubt one sat straining on the crapper while the other performed advanced oral ablutions. Back in the bedroom, he stripped the blankets and threw them on the floor. There they were, the weekend stains—like a kid’s wet dreams in camp.
By the time he had put on his heavy sweater and descended the front stairs, the vacuum cleaners were in action. Waving with one hand, pointing to his ears with the other, to make sure they understood there was too much noise for conversation, he passed through the front hall. He had avoided the weekly update on Mrs. Zielnik’s eczema and the pesky bladder of Mrs. Nowak’s husband. That was something to be grateful for.
He heard the sea from the road, before he got to the residents’ parking lot. Mauled to the bone by the storm, the beach had become a narrow, abrupt strip. Neat clumps of seaweed, like little brown nosegays laid out in parallel arches, marked the successive limits of the ocean’s heaving advance. Schmidt left his loafers in the dune and walked east, along the edge of the surf, where the sand was hardest. There was no pause between the breakers, no rest from the sucking that followed every crash. He could not imagine making it through that water, heavy with sand, rushing in confused circles while it gathered its force for the next strike. Why hadn’t he done it, right after Mary died, the way he had imagined it? The scene was out of the Woody Allen movie that looked like Bergman, only the figure on the screen would be he: A thin, fairly tall man, to judge by his posture no longer young, in cotton trousers and a large parka, stares from this beach at just such a sea, but the light is less strong. One senses that it’s daybreak. He stands at the edge of the water. A disorderly wave far ahead of the others swamps his Top-Siders, wets him to the knees. The man doesn’t retreat; with his sleeve, he wipes the mist of tears from his face. Then he does take a few steps back, looks to the left and to the right and at the sky, runs heavily, but that’s the best he can do on the wet sand in shoes that are already like weights, and plunges into the surf. Even in these ridiculous clothes, one can tell he is an experienced swimmer. He makes it over the top of the first wave, and then the second, as though he were romping with grandchildren; the third is too high, so he dives through it, recovering in time to take on each newcomer until he is free, at last able to start swimming. He does an improbable sort of crawl, arms in those baggy sleeves lifting in a laborious wobble, the head bobbing up irregularly, quite out of control. At a certain point—the strangeness of the scene subverts the absent spectator’s and perhaps the man’s own sense of time—he seems to have had enough. He goes for the shore, and he is intelligent