About Schmidt - Louis Begley [32]
He put his hand under the light summer blanket, found the hem of her nightgown, pulled it up, and stroked her thighs. When he tugged and pushed, they parted. She had been shaving them since she was a girl but of late used wax. Her headaches must have made her neglect that chore. The stubble was rough, reminding Schmidt of the first time she had allowed his hand under her skirt. His eyes on Mary’s face, watching for a change of expression, he uncovered her legs. Like her buttocks, the thighs were heavy, as though formed for the saddle. Mary was ashamed of those thighs, but they and her rear were Schmidt’s joy. Still careful not to awaken her, he lifted her knees until she was ready to be mounted, continued stroking the insides of her thighs, moving up gradually, and then opened the lips. She was dry. He licked the middle finger and began a circling motion. There was no quickening in the tempo of the snoring, in fact no change at all, but she began to wet abundantly, and he moved his finger, and later two, easily up and down between the lips and inside her, and then lower. Without warning, pleasure overcame him with such force that he didn’t even have time to put his other hand inside his trousers. When the spasm was over, he placed one of her hands, which had remained crossed over her stomach, where his hand had been, drew the covers back across her body, and turned off the reading lamp. Although the blinds were lowered, the room remained light, the days were so long. Mary’s face was completely still. He wondered whether snoring so loud and so long—he supposed that, like the old man, she would keep it up until the morning—ever damaged the vocal cords. But perhaps they weren’t involved, and all that rasping and sawing took place somewhere behind the nose. He checked her hand. Its position hadn’t changed, but the fingers had a comfortable, lively look about them. Mary claimed that she never touched herself. He wanted her to learn to masturbate, in the hope that it might unlock her, make it easier for her to come instead of being so generous and telling him not to worry, she had really liked it anyway.
He swam laps in the pool and changed. Then he went into the kitchen, feeling a great hunger. No one was there; presumably, Corinne was still putting Charlotte to bed or had gone straight to her room, which was at the other end of the pantry. The glass of bourbon he poured for himself warmed him. Standing at the stove, he ate the rest of Mary’s soup and the cheese and was about to put the plates and the casserole in the dishwasher when she stopped him. Monsieur shouldn’t wash dishes, she said to him, that’s my work.
He looked at her with curiosity. The girl was barefoot. That’s why he hadn’t heard her come in; quite possibly these were the first words she had ever addressed to him directly. He had been getting home late since the beginning of June, when she arrived, and on weekends she had seemed more timid than her predecessors. In any case, she had hardly any accent in English, and, according to Mary, her French was very pure. Perhaps being half Indochinese accounted for her shyness. He couldn’t remember what Mary had said about her father’s having been an official in the French administration in one of those places of which he, Schmidt, was good and sick: Vietnam, Cambodia, or most probably Laos. Whichever it was, he had married a local woman of good family and brought her and the child back to France quite late, some years after Dien Bien Phu. Then he died.
I don’t mind at all cleaning up after myself, he replied. In fact, I think one should.
Please. Monsieur should be in the salon.
He made himself another bourbon—on second thought, took the bottle and the ice bucket—and avoiding the living room, went into the library. It was his and Mary’s favorite room, especially pleasant in the summer, when all the windows were