About Schmidt - Louis Begley [3]
It was understood that the house near the beach was the place they both liked, in all seasons and every kind of weather. When Mary worried that he would feel trapped in Bridgehampton, and disoriented without his long-established weekday habits, he reassured her: he had spent more than enough years behind a desk, and they weren’t really giving up New York. The two-hour bus ride to the city was itself a habit as comforting as any other; in time, they might look for a pied-à-terre, perhaps in one of the new condominium buildings people claimed weren’t all that shoddy, and become the owners of a dashing pad on a high floor, surrounded by the sky and humming with central air-conditioning and kitchen and laundry machines no one had ever used before. Of course, they both knew there wouldn’t be time for that. Mary’s strength had lasted, miraculously, until the essential furniture and objects had been transported to the country and accommodated in the house. Afterward, waiting for the end was enough to keep them busy.
Decidedly, there was nothing wrong with Jon Riker. Schmidt had invited him to dinner one night—along with a group of other associates and two investment officers of a Hartford insurance company they all serviced—without in the least imagining that Charlotte would find him remarkably attractive. In fact he was surprised at her turning up, after Mary had warned her that the party would be business entertainment, one of those rank-has-its-obligations affairs older partners have to suffer through once in a while to make the hardworking young fry feel appreciated. But the next morning Charlotte said she was glad she had come. She thought Jon looked like Sam Waterston; that was her pronouncement, enough for Schmidt to get the picture. She had graduated from Harvard the previous year and was still living at home. The time to say what he really thought about Jon as his daughter’s prospective beau was then, or over the course of the next few weeks. But he never told them—either Charlotte or Mary. He gave them only his office point of view: an excellent young lawyer, almost certain to become a partner, except that he works much too hard. How will he find time to take Charlotte to the movies, never mind movies and dinner! Schmidt had behaved with decent consistency, of which he was rather proud, just as he would later, when he became Riker’s principal, probably indispensable, supporter for partnership. Luckily for Riker, that process took place, and was concluded favorably for him, before he began sleeping with Charlotte; anyway before the word had gotten around or Mary had opened Schmidt’s eyes, so that the firm did not need to face the dreaded question of whether the rule against nepotism was about to be breached.
But even if Charlotte had not just informed him that she and Jon had made their decision—now that he thought of it, couldn’t Riker have gone to the trouble of coming to Charlotte’s father to ask for her hand?—and it weren’t too ridiculously late to speak to Charlotte with the utmost candor, there was still nothing he could say against Riker, or, more precisely, against the marriage, that wouldn’t seem to her, and perhaps even to him, once the words were out of his mouth, quirky, possessive, smacking of jealousy or envy. What could he say beyond admitting that, outside the office, he didn’t care all that much for the qualities that in time would make Riker such a useful, reliable partner in that beloved firm—which Schmidt was coming to realize he missed principally as a source of income and a porous barrier against self-doubt—and that they surely weren’t the qualities he had hoped to find in a son-in-law? According to an Arab proverb that one of his partners with oil-rich Middle Eastern clients had assured him was genuine, a son-in-law is like a pebble, only worse, because you can’t shake him out of your shoe. Schmidt knew that the Romans, on the contrary, had prized these intruders. If one really loved a woman, one loved her the way a man loved his sons and his sons-in-law. Since he regretted not having