• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 316 0

dark, and rather sweet tasting cigars. He cut the end off one of them with the carving knife and lit it with great care. A neat circle of ash began to form. It lengthened faultlessly. Schmidt poured more whiskey into his glass. It struck him as strange that so many of his contemporaries had decided to give up smoking, alcohol, and coffee—and, of course, cheese, eggs, and red meat as well. Had they information about the advantages, perhaps even pleasures, of longevity, of which he had remained ignorant? He must inquire of DeForrest. At least he answered his telephone; Schmidt wouldn’t have to leave the question with his secretary, to be answered by some assistant. Unless there was such a secret, it seemed reasonable to stick to his agreeable, life-shortening habits, perhaps even to acquire new ones. He wondered what they might be and to whom he might put that question. Perhaps Gil, if he wasn’t away. He might do it at the same time he reported to Gil on the Amazon island and, no doubt, received a report on the idyll with the girl.

Abruptly, money and the need to avoid the calamity of a too-long life made him think of Charlotte. He had not called her upon arrival. He could still do it; they never went to bed before eleven. On the other hand, she hadn’t telephoned either, although when he saw her and Jon in New York he had told her the date of his return and had mentioned it again in the postcard he wrote to her from Brazil. It was possible, of course, that she made a mistake entering it in her calendar, or that she hadn’t put it down and had forgotten, or that his card had gone astray or was taking more than three weeks to reach her. Sooner or later he would have to call, there was no rule that said she had to be the first to call when he came back from vacation, he didn’t want to create an unnecessary awkwardness, and it would be nice to know what plans they had for weekends. From the contents of the refrigerator it was clear that they had been around, in all likelihood with friends, as neither of them, to his knowledge, ate margarine, drank prune juice, or saved half-finished bottles of Coors. But he hadn’t found any note from them on the pad of paper on the kitchen counter or in any of the other likely places where he had looked. More whiskey, heartache, and the beginning of another cigar: the telephone call would wait until the morning. It had gotten late; that, and not his feelings, prevented him from dialing their number. In the morning, he would leave a message on the answering machine.

He took the New York Review and moved from the kitchen table to his rocking chair. He leafed through the magazine until he reached an article about women that seemed to span the period from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. The author was an Italian professor called Craveri, whose name he did not recall having seen before. What a well-managed life she must have led to know so much! He imagined perfect index cards with notes on everything she had read, filed in color-coded folders. Or did this lady have perfect recall, might she be one of those people who can rattle off the dates of the Council of Trent and name the day of the week when Napoleon and Alexander met on the river raft? And such orderly exposition! Schmidt had never filed anything. His notes, taken on yellow pads, accumulated in stacks and were of questionable utility when he was still working on the problem to which they related, because he remembered what was in them. Afterward, when he had finished, they had no value: to put them in order would have taken too much time, and where should he keep them? In his own office or in the firm’s central files? The question would be answered by tossing them vengefully into one of those boxes for papers to be shredded that the mail-room staff occasionally brought around. Thus during his last days at the firm he had erased his personal record of his work, month by month, year by year, disposing of the leftovers in an orgy of self-mutilation that astonished even Mrs. Cooney, whose knowledge of his work habits was unsurpassed.