About Schmidt - Louis Begley [27]
He smiled at Gil and helped himself to half of what remained in the bottle.
Let’s sound that cheerful note. How are the sublime Blackman girls?
Still working hard at their dead-end magazine jobs. Refusing to be grown-ups. Lisa is without a boyfriend and becoming frantic about it. Nina has found a new one who doesn’t earn a living and never will. To be precise, he is having his voice repositioned—from baritone to tenor, because he thinks he looks more like a tenor. By an Albanian coach! And his father is an Orthodox priest in Scranton! I wonder what the paternal voice is like. Lisa and Nina haven’t stopped playing with dolls. Perhaps they had too many dolls’ tea sets.
And Elaine’s kid?
Schmidt had forgotten her name, something that never happened to Gil.
Lilly. Lovely Lilly. No change. She’s a harmless, dull child. I wish she spent more time with her father. It would make it easier for Elaine and me to travel. His girlfriends are practically her age! I tell Elaine that’s built-in company for Lilly and should make it easier for him to take care of his daughter. She doesn’t see it that way. Why do you and I always carry on about our children like a couple of barnyard hens?
Because we love them.
No, it’s guilt. I have a reason—I abandoned mine and their mom and have lived with silly Lilly and her mom, so I can’t grow up and act like the father of grown-up women. But you? You and poor Mary were always perfect, and at least there you have got what you deserved—the beautiful, intelligent, and completely successful Charlotte! Any news?
She told me last weekend that she is getting married. No surprise there: to Jon Riker.
Ah, Schmidtie, how right and how wonderful! Your family has been reconstituted! I shouldn’t have had to drag this out of you.
I was going to tell you but we got bogged down in my sorrows.
What a relief! Both of them have real, grown-up jobs, and they are getting married instead of playing house! I was wrong—you don’t need a job, you have one! You will be the indispensable baby-sitter! I assume that Mary knew. That must have made her very happy. Elaine will call you. She will be thrilled. And a little envious!
In fact, I don’t know whether Mary knew. I rather think they made up their minds afterward. And the truth is that I haven’t taken the news well. We’ve had a sort of quiet but deadly tiff, and I don’t know how to end it.
Tell me about it—everything.
Pride and a shared preference for dryness in discourse: Schmidt could not have brought himself to tell Gil that what had happened to their friendship made him suffer, or that for a moment he had hoped to work for him somehow. Everything else was fair game; one accomplice confessing to the other. In consequence, they were often indiscreet. Thus Schmidt had told Gil about Corinne. And Gil, newly famous and newly rich, had come to Schmidt, although Schmidt had been the best man at his wedding and it wasn’t Schmidt’s sort of work, to say, I deserve to be happy and instead I am wretched, I must divorce Ann, handle it for me. Schmidt negotiated the arrangements with more zeal than if his own money and rights to children had been on the line, obtaining a perfect success, and wasn’t surprised that Ann never spoke to him or to Mary again.
He wanted to answer Gil, but only in part; he wasn’t going to say that he didn’t have enough money. Therefore, he told Gil about the house not being really his and how he couldn’t live in it with Charlotte and Jon, once they were married, on those terms, that they were trying to extract from him a show of enthusiasm