About Schmidt - Louis Begley [52]
We did not speak afterward because she was running back and forth to the kitchen and the cash register, filling orders, bringing checks, taking away dishes. When I paid, some fifteen minutes later, she asked whether my car was in the parking lot, and when I said yes, she told me she would take me to it.
We went out of the restaurant into the night air like a father and daughter, my loden coat over her shoulder. She saw in the dark like a cat, and led me straight to my Saab. I asked when she had seen the man before. Sometimes these crazies and winos come from the city on the bus and wander around here, was the answer. She sounded uneasy and evasive. Why?
When I was in the car, before I closed the door, she punched me in the arm and said, Hey come back soon, will you?
Friday, 12/6/91
Bad dreams all night. After breakfast, I called the police, told the operator I have been supporting their benevolent association for the past thirty years, and asked to speak to someone in charge. A Sergeant Smith came to the telephone—once I pointed it out to him, he seemed to appreciate the affinity of our names. I told him about the man and the interest he was taking in me, and said I was worried, because I live alone in a large house outside the village and because, in fact, the man might seek me out anywhere. Smith asked me to describe him in detail and having written it all down said it sounds like one of those loonies released by mental hospitals because of a shortage of funds or space.
I suppose that is the case.
Then he told me that with a description like that the guy was bound to be picked up by one of the cruisers. They could charge him, but with the courts being the way they are, they would, more likely, just make sure he “departs the area” and doesn’t ever feel like coming back again.
He added that he would make it one of his personal projects, and gave me a telephone number at which I could reach him directly. I thanked him quite effusively.
Later, when I went for a walk on the beach—as usual not a soul there, brilliant sunlight, high waves ending in bursts of foam, sand reduced to a narrow strip, bizarre forms buried there, back in the twenties and thirties, I think, to serve as a barrier against the winter ocean waves, cement cylinders with rusty loops of cable embedded in them, segments of pipe, and piles of compacted metal, protruding dangerously from the surf, all of it completely futile and perhaps aggravating the erosion—I realized that the conversation with Sergeant Smith had not left me pleased with myself. These nice-looking local cops, so polite and understanding with the likes of me, must be totally brutal with the likes of the man. Here I was, with my waterproof shoes, wool socks, corduroy trousers, pigskin gloves lined with cashmere, and an old but expensive parka designed to be light as a feather and yet keep one warm in the bitterest gale, freshly washed and shaved, and so healthy and fit despite my old codger face and the number of years I have lived. The man had disgusted and embarrassed me, and frightened me as well, but there had been no other harm. What right had I to let loose on him Sergeant Smith and his men, with their clubs and boots, and long black flashlights?
Reread yesterday’s entry in this book.
Voice 1: What if Carrie gets it into her head that she is the object of “unwanted attentions” and lets me—and all her colleagues at the restaurant as well—know it? Gives me the back of her hand; I have seen, with the man, that she knows how. Disgrace. End of those pointless, melancholy, but not unpleasant evenings. And if she welcomes my attentions, what then? She won’t. She isn’t a dissatisfied housewife filled with booze looking for furtive sex with a traveling salesman. There are enough good-looking boys here, of her age and her kind, to satisfy her needs.