About Schmidt - Louis Begley [24]
At last! My faith was about to be shaken! Half past two and no Schmidtie! Mrs. Cooney would not have allowed such a thing to happen.
You are right! I don’t know what to say. I’ll just say that I am terribly sorry.
Cooney II or The Return of Cooney! Which title do you like better? Can we install that saintly woman and her telephone in your pool house? I yearn for her calls: May we confirm lunch today at twelve-thirty? Or my favorite: We are on a conference call with a client. Will you forgive us if we are fifteen minutes late?
There was a bottle on the table Gil had been working on. Too bad about Carrie; how could Schmidt get Gil to move to another table when he had already ordered? Perhaps it was just as well. She would be watching from the door leading to the kitchen and perhaps she knew—if not, she would find out!—who Gil was. Schmidt’s prestige was about to skyrocket.
A drink of cheap red wine? All the decent bottles are outrageously overpriced.
He poured Schmidt a glass.
Thanks, I have stopped drinking at lunch. No, I do want it. Gil, I am not just late. The truth is that I had forgotten we were having lunch. The only reason I’m here and haven’t stood you up altogether is that I had to get out of my house. The Sikorski squadron is in it, moving the dirt from one place to another. I have so few appointments these days I don’t bother to look at the calendar.
Yet another reason to make Cooney come back. If you have nothing to do, why haven’t you called us? You know Elaine and I would love to have you come for a meal. We want you at every meal!
I don’t know any such thing. You and Elaine are always working. I don’t want to interfere with the birth of a new masterpiece.
We eat—just like everybody else!
This was disingenuous of Gil, but Schmidt had no desire to say so. In his opinion, the only reason it was possible to maintain that they were still intimate friends was that he had taught himself to observe certain conventions carefully. One of them, which under present conditions clearly needed updating, was to believe that deep down in her heart Elaine liked Mary and him more than the glamorous people, her real friends, she and Gil lived with day in and day out, and that she regretted—oh how bitterly!—the mysterious, irresistible forces that interfered, absolutely prevented, Gil and her from “playing” with the Schmidts. In her language that meant doing together the sort of things one might expect of couples bound by a special, secret predilection: casual dinners after an off-Broadway show, vacation trips to the Andes, and what have you, not merely seeing Schmidt and Mary at large gatherings—principally screenings of Gil’s films and the receptions that followed. Another convention regulated Schmidt’s lunches with Gil. Soon after Gil’s Rigoletto had made it to Cannes and won, Schmidt sensed from remarks Gil let drop about certain friends that it was on the whole better not to call Gil first but to wait until the suggestion to have lunch came from him. And yet, experience with disturbingly long periods when Gil gave no sign of life whatsoever, even when there was no reason to think he had taken offense or was out on the Coast, suggested that if Schmidt wanted to avoid a de facto rupture he himself would have to make a move at some point. That this was the correct line of conduct Schmidt had no doubt: Mrs. Cooney, who understood a lot more than she let on, had tacitly validated it. She would mention casually, but probably in accordance with one of the schedules she kept in her desk drawer, that she had noticed several openings in Schmidt’s calendar and ask whether he mightn’t like her to call Mr. Blackman’s assistant—since they hadn’t heard from him recently—and set up the usual. That would be lunch at twelve-thirty, eaten, depending on whose turn it was to invite, at Schmidt