About Schmidt - Louis Begley [76]
You smoke.
Sure. I’ve got nothing against fun and games, but they aren’t very useful—except to people who play them. You don’t like your job very much, and it’s hard, but you get something done. You bring real food and drink to people, you collect real money, and you take away real dirty dishes. The other stuff is expensive make-believe. Charlotte wouldn’t agree, but, in my opinion, her education is wasted on it.
I’m not going to wait on tables all my life either, I can promise you that, and I’ll finish my education. I bet she went to a good school.
Schmidt nodded his head.
It’ll blow her mind. You with a Puerto Rican waitress seven years younger than her!
Any woman would be hard for her to take. Her mother died last April. Charlotte has never known me to be with anyone else. But we can see each other just as much as you will like, without rubbing her nose in it, and if you are my friend I’ll want you to look at any house where I might want to live.
Don’t worry, I’m your friend.
In the car, after she had finished checking out the Saab’s dashboard and the full range of adjustments that could be made electronically to its seats and climate, she punched him in the arm and said, If you really want to buy a house, you’d better take me when the real estate agent isn’t there. You wouldn’t want them to turn you down!
Then when he asked whether she wanted to go out to lunch—he had in mind the hotel in Sag Harbor that in the winter served lunch until late and where, because it was expensive, she was unlikely to be known and would, therefore, avoid any embarrassment—she told him he had to be crazy. She didn’t want to eat.
Let’s go to your house, Schmidtie. Quick, while you still live in it.
She began to undress as soon as they were in the door, throwing her clothes left and right, so that except for her tights she was naked when she ran ahead of him up the stairs. Frantic, catching her by the shoulders, trying to kiss her shoulder, he pushed her in the direction of the bedroom.
The bed astonished her: Hey, that’s really something! Two queens put together? We can have a party! Then to test it, she jumped on it, up and down, as if on a trampoline.
Just king-size.
OK King, don’t you want to pull off my tights? I’m all clean for you. No, wait, I’ll undress you first. Look at that, your little man isn’t here. What’s the matter? He must be shy.
She had scattered his clothes on the floor, on the chest of drawers, stopping him each time he attempted, yielding to habit and feeling foolish about it, to hang them over the back of a chair. When he had finally removed her tights and the pantyhose she wore under them, and she lay quietly on the bed, her arms folded under her head, he realized Carrie had existed only in his imagination. He knew, of course, her hair, face, and neck, her hands and gestures, and her voice. But for the first time he was seeing—and soon would be able to touch as long as he could bear it—the triumphant limbs of Diana the Huntress, between them the tight triangle of hair, a sliver really with red bumps on its sides that told him she shaved it to wear the skimpiest of string bikinis, the pristine valley of her stomach, her belly button, so small and perfect it moved you to tears, and her breasts that were like sacred hillocks. The tabernacle! He would pry open her legs. But she wanted him to be able to see. Before he had touched her, she raised her knees and her pelvis.
She asked very softly, Are you ready, darling?
There was an interval between unconsciousness and waking during which he was certain only of his disorientation. It was turning dark outside. He must have slept very hard. Then he saw the outline of her body under the covers. She was lying on her stomach, her head