About Schmidt by Louis Begley Read Free Book Online

weight of his sadness, he hadn’t left the house all day. The only place where he might still get food was the delicatessen with a misleading Russian name that sold cold cuts and shamelessly marked-up groceries. Cold cuts didn’t tempt him. He could dine on the sardines, hard-boiled eggs, and bread he already owned and had paid for, and wash them down with bourbon or the Côtes du Rhône he hadn’t finished the night before, when he had cooked hamburgers. Schmidt’s feelings about leftovers didn’t extend to unfinished bottles of wine, provided the wine hadn’t waited more than two days and, during warm weather, was kept in the refrigerator. He had eaten sardines, hard-boiled eggs, and bread for lunch, but lack of variety was no objection; after all, he ate the same thing for breakfast every day, and sardines and eggs were food he liked. The alternative was to go out to dinner, not to a friend’s house, since no friend had suggested it, but to a restaurant. He got the ice, the bottle of whiskey, and a glass, and carried them to the living room. The fire was laid. He had done that after clearing the breakfast dishes and making his bed in the morning. It took with the first match. He poured a drink and sat down on the sofa that faced the fireplace.
    To go out, actually to speak to someone, even if it was onlythe waitress, to hear the sound of his own words, struck him as desirable. It might make him sleep better. It wasn’t a question of having a hot meal; he could take care of that by making scrambled eggs, instead of having them hard-boiled. The cost of the meal shouldn’t deter him, although the local restaurant prices were absurdly high in relation to the quality of the food and the service. He had done more arithmetic since the meditation in the cellar: he wouldn’t need to apply for food stamps or live like a hermit, provided he bought an inexpensive, simple house. The yearly saving on upkeep alone would pay for many outings. But if he were to have dinner at O’Henry’s, which was surely where he would go since he liked his conversations with Carrie, the waitress whose name he had recently learned, chances were strong he would, on the way to his table, be inspected by the Weird Sisters. These were the three writers’ widows who lunched and dined there most days—every day, he was willing to bet, unless one of them or one of the larger circle of similarly situated hags was entertaining at home. He knew them, had known them for years, and had always greeted them with a smile and a wave of the hand and passed on. Mary occasionally paused for a few words—they were of her world—while he waited at a respectful distance. He had understood that he was in fact invisible to them, as a lawyer, a married man, and the husband of an editor who had not had the honor of publishing the works of their husbands. His new person seemed to be acquiring an alarming opacity; after a few more smiles, a hoarse summons to join them might issue. Could he refuse without giving offense? He might get away with it the first time, but politeness would require that he ask to join them himself thenext time he arrived, if it wasn’t obvious that they were at the point of finishing their meal. Unless his having been a lawyer was a fatal social bar, his presence would not be without precedent. At lunch, there were occasionally men at their table. Two of them were also known to Schmidt. They were both local writers, gaunt, tall, and trembly, of whom one must believe that their work was done in the early morning or late at night, before the prandial intake of martinis or long after it had been slept off.
    Schmidt wasn’t sure he would thrive in this particular seraglio. He feared that, except when free legal advice was needed—how to recover the deposit on the tour of Sri Lanka, booked just as the Tamils had gone on their most recent rampage and canceled only two days before flight time, or in which court a libel action might be started to