About Schmidt - Louis Begley [44]
She patted approvingly the hand that was working over her elbow and grinned again.
It’s all so intricate, she said. For instance, one has to take into account the excitement of being with a stranger. Also, there are sadistic fantasies that people who are married are often reluctant to act out with each other. Don’t you think so?
I am sure you are right. Do you know that these are things I normally don’t discuss, except possibly with one friend, a man I have known most of my life? Why are we talking about them?
I think it’s because I have gotten you started and you find that an intimate conversation with an analyst can be pleasant. I doubt you have many occasions to talk freely—except for that friend. We haven’t gotten very far, because you haven’t been frank, but I should tell you that you interest me very much.
How curious! I think I am the most conventional of men.
That may be interesting in itself. Is Jon right that you and Charlotte have no family?
Essentially. Mary became an orphan when she was a little girl. The aunt who brought her up is dead. My own father died when I was in my early forties, and my mother much earlier. They each had cousins and maybe an uncle or two, but they disliked them. There were no contacts with them. I doubt any of them came to my father’s funeral. On the other hand, in a great big pink villa in West Palm Beach I have a stepmother who is perfectly alive and claims to be hardly older than me!
Jon has never mentioned her—or Charlotte either.
There is no reason they should. Charlotte doesn’t remember her grandfather, and my dealings with Bonnie—that’s my stepmother’s name—have been sporadic. After my father died, I collected his clothes, which he left to me along with an odd assortment of objects. Perhaps they were things she particularly disliked, perhaps there was another reason for the choice. I haven’t tried to think about it. We have written letters to each other—usually at Christmastime.
Schmidt paused and took away his hand. Renata dear, you might give me a tiny bit more whiskey. Actually, I don’t mind talking about that story. It’s so distant.
You pour it. I feel very languorous.
All right. Here it goes. You see, my father disinherited me, leaving absolutely everything to Bonnie, including furniture that had been in our family for a long time. Bonnie isn’t someone I would have talked to Jon about. I doubt I even talked about her to Charlotte. She belongs to the world that existed when I was in law school, and when I started out as a young lawyer. I left it behind when I married Mary.
It must be sad to be disinherited!
It was and it wasn’t. And this is a proper subject for us to discuss—family background, property, ghosts in the closet. It had to do with the quality of my childhood. My mother was a hypochondriac who had the misfortune of being in fact in bad health, so that the gaps between her migraines and backaches were filled by stays in the hospital, where one organ was removed after another: gallbladder, a part of a kidney, thyroid gland, you name it, and finally the usual female stuff. Even stronger than hypochondria was her sense of thrift. We lived in the Village and had Irish maids who did everything for the house. I can assure you that even when she was recovering from what turned out to be her last operation my mother wouldn’t let the maid do the shopping, because she was afraid she would