About Schmidt - Louis Begley [43]
And your help, he asked, what might it consist of?
Companionship. Helping you to recognize certain kinds of trouble so you can stay out of the way When I know you better, I may be able occasionally to give you a nudge, point you in a better direction.
Here she let go of his hand and gave him a poke in the ribs.
Like this. Don’t worry about it.
The hand returned, warmer and very caressing.
I had a good life with Mary, Schmidt told Renata. I wish she were alive and could have outlived me. I don’t know anything better one can say. As I said, Charlotte described the way we were accurately. We were every close. For one thing, from the beginning, we were orphans: well meaning, bright, and clinging hard to each other.
It was like this later as well? No great crises either after Charlotte was born?
Important ones? There might have been one, over a stupid indiscretion that Mary stumbled upon, but she didn’t allow it to become anything. It left a hurt, but it was never looked at again or mentioned, even though it may have never quite healed. That’s all.
A woman. And that’s all? No other women?
No.
That was a lie. He let Renata go on playing with his hand. There had been the other world, where Mary never set foot, a world that consisted mostly of business trips. Schmidt arranging to avoid a meal with an associate or a client, or arranging to have the dinner end early Then you could find him at the bar of his hotel, checking the place out, to make sure that the associate wasn’t there too, in some corner or on a bar stool, hidden from view by an obese fellow drinker. Some evenings nothing happened. More often, he would manage to find a woman drinking alone. Women of all sorts: high-class bar girls, sluttish telephone operators, secret drunks, too chummy with the bartender, who might turn out to be anybody—an unmarried hairdresser, a librarian, the wife of a doctor. First an inane conversation, and then sex in his room that he would think about for months, while in bed with Mary. They brought a kind of excitement to sex that had been absent except during the time with Corinne. Why? He had never asked her for things that he did at once with those other women. But then, why hadn’t she offered?
No, he continued, and there certainly weren’t any crises about money or about Charlotte’s upbringing or about our jobs. No midlife crises! We both liked our work and knew we were good at it. Of course, Mary had less tranquillity in her job. Power struggles in publishing houses are ferocious, and editors need to feel they have power. If they don’t, they feel they can’t publish their authors right.
And Mary?
What do you mean?
Did she have other men? Were you jealous? She must have been, after that indiscretion.
I’m not sure she was jealous. She probably thought she had taught me a lesson that would last me for life—and, in fact, in a rather good way, it did. I never gave her any reason to be jealous again.
That was true enough. Nothing ever happened after the encounters with those women. No presents, no letters, no phone calls. No diminution in Schmidt’s ardor. Absolutely nothing to be jealous about.
But Mary? Did she have adventures?
Schmidt laughed. She had loosened her grip on his hand. He took advantage of it to stroke her forearm. He wondered if he dared to extend the motion a little higher, where he might encounter her breast.
Adventures in the other direction? I have always supposed that all sorts of things go on at the Frankfurt book fair and those booksellers’ conventions that editors go to, or when a beautiful editor goes on a couple of weeks’ book tour with an author. But Mary? She was so very fastidious—as well as serious. I don’t think I could have imagined her participating in that sort of saturnalia! Or making up her mind quickly enough! I was always quite sure that after dinner she was really reading manuscripts in her hotel room, or catching up on sleep, or writing one of those marvelous letters to Charlotte.
That was another