About Schmidt - Louis Begley [28]
Have you told Charlotte that you will give her the house and move out?
No. I couldn’t explain it very well on the telephone, and I was afraid if I didn’t make myself quite clear she would feel it was some sort of abrupt, hostile action. She will need some money from me. I have to talk to her about that as well. I don’t want her to refuse my money.
I think she will see your leaving the house, not wanting to try to share it with them, as hostile, however much you explain. Can’t you let up and work out some rules for when they come? After all, it will only be some weekends, when the weather is good. I can’t imagine they will be spending every weekend here, with you.
Mary and I spent every weekend in this place, even when Martha was still alive, and our summer vacations as well.
That was you and Mary! You had Charlotte right away, and that was once upon a time, in the Hamptons of the sixties! What a lovely picture in Technicolor. Flaxen-haired children back from pony lessons or the beach, clean and dressed. In the club car, the paterfamilias asleep after the third gin and tonic, mouth open. Suntanned Mom, legs freshly shaved, at the station waiting in the Chevy with the top down—or did she take the Ford station wagon?—worried about the lasagna in the oven and whether it’s that time of the month. The au pair has just enough time to get into the bathtub in the master bathroom and do her toenails. Where is my camera? I’m ready to film! This script will be different. I see Charlotte and Jon on the Colorado River or waist deep in powder snow at Alta—pleasures you and Mary have never known! Meanwhile you’ll take care of the trees and the cracks in the swimming pool.
Very nice, Gil. Do make that film. The trouble is that it will be even more difficult to clear out of there later, after I have fixed the one or two things that are left to fix. Right now, this is still a summerhouse, even for me, and I have a little snap left in my garters. But that isn’t really the nub. You know how I am: if a corner can be found, I’ll back myself into it, even if no one is coming at me. I just don’t seem to know how to change the way I feel.
But as yet you haven’t said anything to Charlotte—or Jon. And you really don’t know the parents?
Never seen them. We don’t bother about the background of our young lawyers or partners either, and we certainly don’t interview the parents to see whether we approve! I believe they’re psychiatrists, both of them—of the analyst kind.
You approve of Jon. But haven’t you been curious about the father and mother? This is the guy your daughter has been living with for some time!
Mary was beginning to be tired by the time they got really serious. As a matter of fact, though, I am not curious and I don’t approve! I don’t approve of Jon, and I don’t approve of Charlotte. That’s one more hurt.
How can you not approve of Charlotte? She is one hundred percent all right. She has always done what you and Mary wanted, and she has done it faultlessly. And that boy is your partner! A partner in the prestigious New York firm of Wood & King. Isn’t that what the Times squib will say? I would think that was eminently respectable.
On the surface. I hadn’t expected to see Charlotte turn into a smug, overworked yuppie. I’d rather she had a deadend magazine job, if that was what she really enjoyed doing. A job like Mary’s, like your girls’—perhaps that’s why I envy you!
Schmidtie, you don’t know what you are talking about. The jobs Lisa and Nina have are the only employment they could get. Sure, they like magazines and people who write for magazines. But they can’t write, they can’t edit, and they refuse to learn about production. They are tourists in the magazine landscape, like someone on a safari admiring elephants from a Land Rover; the basic difference is that they are doing their looking from the lowest rung of the research department. What they earn isn’t enough to pay the rent—let alone for the