Schmidt Delivered by Louis Begley Read Free Book Online

would you do?
    Move into your house, dummy.
    And what if my house falls down?
    Hey, what’s with you? I’m falling down, not your house. We’re going to walk all the way to Montauk?
    They had reached the jetty made of stones as huge as Mr. Jackson’s, which had been flung into the ocean before Schmidt first knew this beach. The storms had let them be, perhaps because they were useless. So many endeavors with little to show for them. He put his arm around Carrie’s waist and, suddenly tired himself, whispered, Let’s go home. We’ll swim another day. And mindful that change is said to keep sorrow at bay, he added, Let me take you out to dinner.
          She orders shrimp in hot sauce, steak au poivre, and a raspberry tart. Schmidt likes to watch her eat. Where did she get those easy and natural manners, such complete elegance? Observing the merry revelers at O’Henry’s? Not likely. Exceptfor a few oddballs, including himself, of course, they are a repulsive lot, with no manners at all. Perhaps a crash course in old movies about old money, with focus on the two Hepburns, Katharine and Audrey, Leslie Caron, and Ingrid Bergman. Or is it something God given, like perfect pitch or a slum kid’s knack for booting the soccer ball? Her fabulous, healthy appetite is another gift of nature: she has no food manias and no worries about excess calories. They will be burned off as though in a flame, for instance when she makes love. Schmidt leans back. Seize the moment. He wishes he could smoke in this place, but even though the hour is late, and the room half empty, the old biddies at the table on the other side would jump him. A brandy? She might have a sip from his glass. When Charlotte was at college, yes, already then, when he took her out to a restaurant in Boston, alone or with her friends, there were intimations of conflict. Did she really have to dress up? Was she going to get back to the dormitory by ten, so she could get her paper done for tomorrow, and why did he order that third cup of coffee when no one else was having any? All insignificant and easily resolved, if he had kept his mouth shut, or had at least kept smiling. Why couldn’t he have done just that? After all, these conflicts didn’t involve matters of high principle; they were about her refusal to be affable. Could he lay a sincere claim to being always imperturbably pleasant? He would have liked her to be kittenish with him, like certain daughters he had seen in the old movies he had studied, like Carrie without the sex. Charlotte managed it occasionally, and then at once they wouldbecome very good friends. Mostly, though, she gave the impression that he got on her nerves. Isn’t it the truth that she got on his as well?
    Right then, the Puerto Rican kitten piped up: Schmidtie, you want me to cook on Friday or you want to bring Charlotte here or the Automat?
    “Here” was the hotel in Sag Harbor with a wine cellar Schmidt envied and a supply of first-class cigars that he wished he could smoke on the premises. A plague on tobacco abolitionists. Can’t those cranks stay at home or wear gas masks when they go out? For two centuries, cigar smoke had accompanied the end of a meal. Where had they learned that it spoiled the taste of food? The Automat was another ball game, a temple of undercooked tuna, black on the outside, not quite raw when you got past the crust of pepper, and of dubious room temperature—Schmidt’s bête noire, given his conviction that tuna should be eaten raw or out of a Bumble Bee can—shiitake mushrooms on spinach leaves, and fifteen varieties of bottled water. Clientele fat or anorexic: living reminders that it’s all in the genes, baby. If you haven’t the right metabolism, give up. Don’t bother wrecking your knees as you pound the highway under the noonday sun in your three-hundred-dollar professional running shoes.
    This place will be mobbed and noisy, he replied. The Automat and everywhere else too. Why don’t we