About Schmidt - Louis Begley [29]
You can afford it, and so could I, though less well. Never mind, this isn’t some adaptation of an Ibsen play you are about to film. If you want to know about Jon, he is all right but not what I hoped for either—not for my son-in-law or the father of my grandchildren or the guy I want to live with in a house that’s morally my daughter’s.
Let’s get some more coffee, said Gil. Maybe we could use a brandy. I’m not working this afternoon and this interview isn’t nearly over. What’s the matter with Jon? Isn’t he exactly your kind, the sort of fellow you were at his age—a brilliant young lawyer on the way to fame and fortune?
I haven’t found either. No, I wasn’t like Jon. Not inside—you, of all people, shouldn’t define me by my profession. I’ll tell you a guilty secret: I was a romantic when I was in college; when we met, more of a romantic than you, and I’ve never stopped being one. Jon never began. It’s a real difference. He has all he needs to be a W & K partner, but there are other things that W & K doesn’t care about and I do. Such as the value to be accorded to material success. Maybe it’s his background, the taboo subject in the office!
Background? He is the son of two doctors, and you don’t even know them! I am beginning to think their Thanksgiving is something you should thank God for. Go to the lunch graciously, and try to behave yourself once you are there. The parents will fall for your faded charm. That and a home-cooked meal will get you out of your corner.
I sort of doubt it.
And then Schmidt no longer cared whether he broke one of Gil’s and his rules.
Gil, he said, I am lonely and lost. Don’t badger me. I feel like a big enough fool already. Mary wouldn’t have let this happen. I make no sense without her.
I think we will have that brandy.
Gil drank his, ordered another one, and told Schmidt, You are right. You are lost—I mean in your feelings—without Mary. You are probably also right about that house. If you have a new place to live, one that you have put together yourself, you can make a less complicated new start. You can motor over to your baby-sitting job. But there is some stuff going on between you and Riker that’s like a subplot I don’t understand. What do you have against him? Am I hearing code words: Psychoanalyst parents? Background? Not romantic? Schmidtie, have you been hinting that the boy is a Jew?
He is.
And is that upsetting you, the last of the Grove Street Schmidts is marrying a Jew?
That’s the least of it.
Gil finished the second brandy.
Schmidtie, you’re keeping me in suspense. This is where you are supposed to remember suddenly that you are speaking to a Jew. You should turn red and say, Oops, I don’t mean your kind, you are so different!
As a matter of fact, you are.
You mean famous, known to you for forty-three years, and, above all, a sort of artist!
Isn’t that better?
Not really. In any case, I don’t want you to be my father-in-law. Call me when you come back from Thanksgiving. If those Riker parents haven’t got you on their couch I may try mine.
They were the last lunch guests still in the restaurant. Their waiter had disappeared. Gil paid at the bar, interrupting a low-voiced colloquy between the owner and a pensive fat woman in a jersey dress almost the same shade of green as her rubber shoes. Her hands were badly chapped. In one she held a watery whiskey and in the other a filter cigarette. The Black & White ashtray beside her was full of butts—hers by the look of the lipstick smudges. A few stools away, the video store man and a companion Schmidt feared might be a child pornographer were staring at their draft ales. No conversation there. It occurred to Schmidt that the woman might be the owner’s sister, come to visit from Montauk where she managed a cabins-in-the-dunes sort of motel for low-ranking Mafia types, or his bookkeeper. The former hypothesis