Free About Schmidt by Louis Begley

Schmidts. In her language that meant doing together the sort of things one might expect of couples bound by a special, secret predilection: casual dinners after an off-Broadway show, vacation trips to the Andes, and what have you, not merely seeing Schmidt and Mary at large gatherings—principally screenings of Gil’s films and the receptions that followed. Another convention regulated Schmidt’s lunches with Gil. Soon after Gil’s
Rigoletto
had made it to Cannes and won, Schmidt sensed from remarks Gil let drop about certain friends that it was on the whole better not to call Gil first but to wait until the suggestion to have lunch came from him. And yet, experience with disturbingly long periods when Gil gave no sign of life whatsoever, even when there was no reason to think he had taken offense or was out on the Coast, suggested that if Schmidt wanted to avoid a de facto rupture he himself would have to make a move at some point. That this was the correct line of conduct Schmidt had no doubt: Mrs. Cooney, who understood a lot more than she let on, had tacitly validated it. She would mention casually, but probably in accordance with one of the schedules she kept in her desk drawer, that she had noticed several openings in Schmidt’s calendar and ask whether he mightn’t like her to call Mr. Blackman’s assistant—since they hadn’t heard from him recently—and set up the usual. That would be lunch at twelve-thirty, eaten, depending on whose turn it was to invite, at Schmidt’s club or at a restaurant in the Seagram Building that was treated like a club by Gil anda number of other sleek men and women with idiosyncratic eating habits the headwaiter had memorized or entered in a computer.
    Why Gil should consider Schmidt’s calculated reserve natural in so old a friend, why he should go off the air abruptly and without any explanation, were questions to which Schmidt thought he had the answer, one that made him sad. It had to be the slow onset of a combination of absentmindedness and indifference so profound that, unless Gil’s assistant told Gil, in accordance with her own schedule, that it was Schmidt time once again, or, increasingly rarely, Gil himself suddenly wanted to exchange a certain kind of gossip, the way Schmidt might feel a craving for knockwurst and potato salad, he wouldn’t think of Schmidt at all. Schmidt supposed it was no different from the way he sometimes forgot to send his annual contribution to Harvard College, Planned Parenthood, the Armenian Jazz Festival, the Girl Scouts, etc., a failure that the Mrs. Cooneys who worked for those institutions were paid large salaries to prevent, even as they took care not to irritate him by overly frequent appeals. The value of his link to Gil was such that Schmidt accepted the humiliation like bad weather. It had not, for instance, prevented him, at a time when he was more ignorant about death, from being pleased to imagine that, when the time came, it was Gil whom Mary would unhesitatingly summon to his bedside. That nice prospect no longer mattered. If Charlotte and Jon did any summoning after packing him off to the hospital, it would be that clown Murphy or some other lawyer of his ilk.
    Is there a new film in the works?
    Yes and no. I have a proposal and a script I should take seriously, but there is something about it I dislike. Elaine has a proposal too—for a show she might organize at the Whitney. We are holed up here, fiddling around and drinking. I write things down and cross them out. What about you?
    There is nothing left to fiddle with! I am discovering that it’s difficult to wean myself away from being a lawyer. I wonder about clients, the firm, whether Mrs. Cooney likes living in Santa Fe, and on and on. I could take the jitney into town, go to firm lunch, and find out, but I hate going to the office and I hate calling up my former colleagues. It makes me feel like an unwanted ghost! I remember what my father used to say after he quit: