NEW YEAR’S EVE, eight o’clock in the morning. Sixteen more hours until the end of another shitty year of a shitty decade. What would the year ahead bring? For the nation that had—unbelievably, miraculously—overcome its history and was sending Barack Obama to the White House, Schmidt hoped it would bring redemption and cleansing. He was caught off guard by the tears that filled his eyes and wiped them away with the sleeve of his parka. Sweet tears of pride. Was there anyone, he wondered, outside Obama’s family, of course, whose affection for the man was as great and as pure as Schmidt’s? He dared to think there wasn’t: his feelings for this extraordinary young man transcended partisan politics. They had little or nothing to do, he thought, with his having backed the Democratic ticket in national elections ever since Adlai Stevenson’s second run for the presidency. The first time around, he had been too young to vote, but in 1956, realizing that Ike was going to win, he cast his vote against him out of principle and also for the fun of exasperating his father, who had adopted the reactionary convictions of his Greek shipowner clients along with their taste for custom-made shoes and suits. No, this love—why not use that word?—for Obama existed on an altogether different level, melding with Schmidt’s love for his country. Schmidt had another, more personal reason to rejoice: the hope that the curse he had laid upon himself thirteen years ago—a curse compounded of all the worst in him: jealousy and its cognate envy, blind pride, and quick unforgiving anger—had been conjured. Perhaps there was a better time ahead for him as well.
He picked up the New York Times at the beginning of the driveway, walked back to the house, and before going in checked the thermometer on the front porch. A chilly twenty-five degrees. With luck, by late morning it would be noticeably warmer, a good thing, inasmuch as he wanted Alice’s adjustment to the caprices of Eastern Seaboard weather to be a gradual one. Four days earlier, the temperature had risen to an astonishing fifty-eight degrees, a record Schmidt had read in the Times. Christmas Day had been a cooler but still ludicrously balmy fifty-four degrees. According to the Times’s weather forecast, the pendulum would swing all the way back on the first day of 2009: low of ten, high of twenty-five. He deposited the newspaper on the kitchen table and went out again for his ritual morning inspection of the property. Sonia would be arriving in a few minutes to put his breakfast on the table. It was an unnecessary task—he was quite capable of preparing his own breakfast—but there was so little work in the house these days that, believing firmly that nothing demoralizes staff as quickly as idleness, he felt pressed to find things for her to do. The big snow—more than five inches—dumped on Bridgehampton in the space of a few hours the week before Christmas had melted in the warm weather, reviving the grass. It sparkled green as in early June. Everything else looked good too, especially the azalea and rhododendron on the far edge of the back lawn. Somehow the marauding deer had spared them, even without the usual protective black nylon netting he had instructed Gus Parrish not to use. When the gardener, taken aback, had asked why, Schmidt heard himself admit the embarrassing truth: the netting made the bushes look to him like prehistoric beasts poised to advance on the house. The sight made him uneasy. It was Schmidt’s turn to be surprised when Gus acceded to the wish without the least indication of thinking his client had gone bonkers. Such discretion was cause once again for Schmidt to congratulate himself on having hired Gus’s outfit to take over when Jim Bogard’s nephew finally followed his uncle into retirement. All told, the Bogards had looked after the property since before it had passed to Schmidt, when it still belonged to Mary’s aunt Martha, and he and Mary, his late wife, and their daughter, Charlotte, would come to spend weekends and vacations there as Martha’s nearest relations and guests. Confidence is rewarded more often than mistrust. He had told Gus that he had a special reason for wanting the place to look spick-and-span on New Year’s Eve, and Gus had come through. In fact, Schmidt’s experience with Gus had led him to believe that when it came to reliability and finish, which at Schmidt’s old law firm was quaintly called “completed staff work,” Gus’s people were to other gardeners in the Hamptons what Wood & King had been to the lesser breeds of New York lawyers practicing personal injury law out of offices near City Hall or Borough Hall and, ever since all restraints on advertising had broken down, touting their services in Spanish-language ads in subway cars. Gus’s eye-popping bills were part and parcel of the deal, and they too recalled W & K. The name of each of the friendly Colombians who lavished care on Schmidt’s lawn, edged the flower beds, and blew away fallen leaves with the infernal roar that threw into a panic Schmidt’s old Siamese Sy and his new Abyssinian kitten Pi, was followed by his billing rate, a description of the services performed, and the time spent on the task. The hours, Schmidt was sure, were discreetly padded, a time-honored practice of W & K associates as well. Telephone call with Mr. Schmidt, so many tenths of an hour, revising a memo in accordance with his remarks, two hours and seven-tenths of an hour, researching at Mr. Schmidt’s request points X, Y, and Z to back up the memo, eleven hours and one-tenth. Really, Mr. Schmidt would ask himself: eleven and one-tenth hours in one day? Whether the invoice was from W & K or Gus, the billable-hour entries would be followed by a list of expenses subject to reimbursement. Telephone toll calls, postage, messenger services, duplicating, late-evening meals, and taxi fare home from the office became, in the backup to Gus’s bills, so many bags of eight sorts of fertilizer and weed and insect killers, and when the chattering Colombian ladies, who planted and weeded, joined the crew, also bulbs and plants and potting soil.
He heard Sonia’s car on the driveway, a white Mercedes, and a fairly late model no less, the provenance of which had been puzzling him ever since the summer when she first showed up in it. Did it belong to a boyfriend? Had she won it at a church raffle or bought it with her savings? In the latter case, he was overpaying her. But how would he get the answer if he persisted in not asking the question? Time for breakfast. He greeted Sonia and sat down. The coffee was boiling hot and strong, the yogurt not half bad, the grapes excellent. Missing were the croissants and scones that he used to buy each morning at Sesame, the wonderful caterer where he still got chicken salad, cheese, and ravioli in brodo. The memory of those pastries, banished from his breakfast table by Dr. Tang, the Chinese-American lady who took over from his old friend and family physician, David Kendall, upon his retirement, made his mouth water. It made him wonder, too, whether he knew anyone who had not retired. Yes, of course: Gil Blackman, his college roommate and best friend, still making films; Mike Mansour, as busy as ever with his billions; and the splendid Caroline Canning and her awful husband, Joe, scribbling away.
Silly business, Schmidt thought, Dr. Tang’s attention to his diet. In their own way so were the ministrations of Gus and his predecessors, continued in accordance with his orders every year since Aunt Martha died and left the house to Mary. How many years did that make? He shrugged: almost forty. How much longer would they continue? His guess was no more than ten years. He had asked Dr. Tang whether she could foresee the form in which death would come for him. You won’t scare me, he had said, everyone has an appointment in Samarra, and I own a cemetery plot with a view of Peconic Bay I rather like. She laughed gaily in reply and told him that with a patient in such good health it was impossible to predict. Schmidt’s simultaneous translation was Don’t ask stupid questions, leave it to team death, they’ll figure it out. Ever polite, he had merely laughed back. In truth, he had his own hunches: stroke or cancer, demonic diseases that don’t always go for the quick kill. But whatever it might turn out to be, no one, absolutely no one, would get him to move into a nursing home. If he was compos mentis, and not yet paralyzed, he would find his own way to the exit. Otherwise, the instructions left with Gil, naming him the sole arbiter of Schmidt’s life and death, should do the job, with a little friendly nudge from Gil if need be. It was no more than he would do for Gil, who had made his own arrangements giving Schmidt the power of decision. Dementia, the illness most likely to cut off the means of escape, held more terror than any other. But he had not heard of a single ancestor, going back three generations, who had been so afflicted. The other side of the coin, the agreeable side, was his overall good health. Once he got going in the morning, he was still quite limber. In truth, he doubted there was much difference between his condition thirteen years earlier, when he first called on Alice in Paris, to take an example that preoccupied him, and the way he was now. Not unless you wanted to fixate on the deep lines, running to the corners of his mouth, that had only gotten deeper or the hollow cheeks or the fold of skin sagging from his neck. Taken together, they gave him an expression so lugubrious that efforts to smile made him look like a gargoyle. The situation was less brilliant when it came to his libido and sexual performance. The grade he had given himself when last put to the test had been no higher than a pass, but as he had told Alice, he had not yet tried any of the miracle pills that old geezer-in-chief Bob Dole swore by on television. Besides, the test in question had been unfair: the lady whom he may have disappointed could not hold a candle to the incomparable Alice. Did his age and the ravages of time make it reprehensible to keep overpaying the Hampton mafia of gardeners, handymen, carpenters, and plumbers for the pleasure of having everything at his house just so? Or to pay the outrageous real estate taxes that financed town services, neatly itemized on the tax bill as though to taunt him by proving that he derived no personal benefit from them? Hell, there were lots of men unable to get a hard-on and lots of women who had faked orgasms until the blessed moment when they could finally declare that at their age they’d given the whole thing up, living comfortably in houses much grander than his. Spending more money than he! Why shouldn’t he do the same? He had to live somewhere, and this was the place he liked the best. Who was there to complain about it? It was his money, his to spend or give away. He no longer had a legal heir, and his bequests would be covered by his estate many times over, leaving a handsome pile for Harvard. Unless he decided to leave the bulk of that money instead to Alice, in which case Harvard would still receive an elegant though no longer extravagant gift. Alice! Alice would be in Bridgehampton in four hours! In his house. She would be sleeping under his roof. Would he have preferred to receive her elsewhere? For instance, in some cutesy cottage in Sag Harbor with crooked floors and a permanent smell of mold? The answer was a loud and clear no: the costs be damned!
He told Sonia that he was going out to run errands, and no, she didn’t need to stay to help with lunch, or to clear and do the dishes afterward, and that if his guest Mrs. Alice Verplanck called while he was out she was to say that he would be home within the hour and would call back. In fact, he didn’t believe her cell phone would work in the U.S., but it was possible that she’d use the driver’s. Elated and anxious, he got the Audi station wagon out of the garage, the successor to the Volvo he had traded in regretfully at the one-hundred-forty-thousand-mile mark, and drove first to Wainscott for fish chowder, then back west on Route 27 to Sesame for the bread and cheese and ravioli in brodo that would be their lunch on New Year’s Day, as well as croissants that would be Alice’s breakfast, and finally back to Bridgehampton, where the florist had prepared the small bouquets he had ordered for the kitchen table and for Alice’s room. That took care of their needs through New Year’s Day, when only convenience stores would be open in the Hamptons. Restaurants would be closed as well, but he didn’t need to worry about dinners. They were going to Mike Mansour’s New Year’s Eve party, and Gil and Elaine Blackman had invited them to dinner the next day, a thoughtful gesture that had made Schmidt childishly grateful.
Alice had telephoned on Friday, the day after Christmas, and said she would take a New Year’s Eve flight from Paris that was due to land at Kennedy at ten-thirty in the morning. She would have to get up before dawn, but she preferred that to the traffic on the way to the airport and the mob she would face once she got there if she took a later flight. She wouldn’t hear of his meeting her at JFK; in fact she absolutely forbade it. But she accepted his offer to send a car to drive her to Bridgehampton. After they hung up, he went out on the back porch and stood there motionless, letting what she had told him sink in. Alice was really coming! He had told himself over and over that she was much too serious to change her mind and say she had decided after all that she didn’t want to see him. Nonetheless, hearing her actually say I will take such and such a plane and I will be at the New York airport at such and such hour, and you can send someone to bring me to your house had the effect on him of a miracle. He had considered briefly sending Bryan, his combination handyman and house and cat sitter, who knew all the back and service roads, but in the end he concluded that the conversation of that loquacious dropout and reformed drug dealer was more than Alice should be asked to bear after eight hours in the plane. A wizened Irishman ferried Schmidt to and from JFK when Bryan was busy or Schmidt was able to put him off without giving offense. And so it was the Irishman who was sent with instructions to be early at the arrival hall beyond customs, well ahead of the flight’s landing, and to hold very high and visibly the sign with Alice’s name.
He looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty. She must be on the Long Island Expressway. Having checked the Air France Web site, he knew that the plane had landed fifteen minutes early. At that hour of the morning lines at immigration shouldn’t be long, even on the eve of a holiday. Therefore, unless there was a hitch at the baggage claim, she would have been in the car at eleven-fifteen and therefore should be due at his house within an hour and a half to two hours. That was a conservative estimate. It took into account both the chance of bad traffic and Murphy’s tendency to obey the speed limits, for which one couldn’t really fault him. In a momentary regression to his days as a hard drinker, Schmidt poured himself a double bourbon, added an ice cube, and sat down in the rocking chair. The kitchen table was set with the good china and silver. The red bouquet was a nice touch. Really, there was nothing to be ashamed about in his household arrangements. He could rock in his chair and sip his whiskey in peace. At one, the telephone rang. It was Murphy reporting that they were approaching Water Mill. The man was smarter than he looked! Traffic was moving well. So they’d be arriving in fifteen minutes. His sixth sense told him when the car approached his driveway. He downed the last of his drink and rushed out to the front porch. Someone had taught Murphy to be respectful of the gravel on his clients’ driveways. The car was creeping toward the house. At last it came to a halt. Schmidt opened the door. The hand that pressed his was enclosed in a long glove of dark red suede that he recognized. Alice had worn that same pair when they dined in the restaurant on rue de Bourgogne on the fourteenth of October, two and a half months ago.
Schmidt’s first sight of Alice was at her marriage to Tim Verplanck, a young associate at W & K who had become his favorite. It took place at a church in Washington, Alice’s father being then French ambassador to the U.S. That afternoon he danced with her at the embassy reception. She had white freesia in the coils of her hair, which was the color of dark old gold, and wore a veil of billowing ivory lace that Mary had said must have been her grandmother’s. In the coming months and years there had been dinners—Mary would have remembered how many, it was the sort of thing she kept track of—at the Schmidts’ apartment when, according to W & K custom, they entertained associates who worked for him, with their wives or fiancées; there had been also the annual office dinner dances for all lawyers and wives and, after Tim had been taken into the firm, much smaller dinners for partners and wives. Each time Schmidt had been taken aback, truly bowled over, by her beauty, her chic, and her bearing, so perfectly erect, her head held high, the rich mass of her hair twisted into a chignon or gathered by a clasp over the nape of her neck. She had the imperturbable good manners of a diplomat’s daughter. Her vertiginously long and perfect legs had a prized place in his memory. An opportunity to inspect them had been offered to the entire firm when she came to an office function wearing a fire-engine-red miniskirt and black mesh tights, no other office wife being attired in anything remotely so eye-catching. But Schmidt was able to swear that he had not coveted her then or at any other time while Tim was alive, office liaisons, not least adulterous ones, being taboo for him and, he believed, all other decent men of his class and generation. There was another, unavowable reason: while Mary lived, all the women who had excited him had something louche about them. They were women he had picked up at hotel bars, a law student with whom he had inexcusably smoked pot while on a recruiting trip to the West Coast. The one exception would have been the half-Asian au pair who had looked after Charlotte. That shy and polite girl had offered herself to him so innocently, and yet with such explicit urgency, that prudence and principles flew out the window. But even if he had allowed himself to become aroused by Alice, he would not have dared to think of her as someone who might assent to an afternoon’s copulation on her living room sofa or in a Midtown tourist hotel. It was the sort of proposal she would have repelled with scorn. She was in love with Tim, that was obvious, and even if something had gone awry between them, which he had no reason to suspect, she was too splendid, too proud—had she been a man he might have said a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche—for some squalid affair with Schmidt or another married partner of her husband’s. Then she disappeared from Schmidt’s horizon. In fact, the whole family dropped out of sight when Tim took over the direction of the firm’s Paris office, Alice and the children naturally joining him. He showed up at the New York office rarely, much less frequently than his predecessors, who had all been punctilious about staying in touch, regularly attending firm meetings in New York and pacing the corridors on the lookout for open doors whereby partners signaled that a visit would not be unwelcome. It was a useful way to keep a finger on the firm’s pulse and be sure nothing was brewing that would affect the Paris office.
So it happened that when he called on Alice in Paris in April 1995 to offer his condolences in person after Tim’s shocking and completely unexpected death, he had not seen her for thirteen years or more likely longer. It seemed to him that she was even more beautiful: her aspect was more womanly, gentler and less haughty. The gamine had grown up. Astoundingly—in moments of subsequent bitterness he would think absurdly—he had fallen in love at once, without his lips ever having touched hers, without a single embrace. Call it late-onset puppy love; he believed it would have happened just as certainly if he had been blindfolded and had merely heard her laughter again. And now, after the hiatus of another thirteen years since that April meeting, it seemed to him that his love was intact. If there was happiness in store for him, it had to be a future shared with her.
She traveled light like a young girl, with a single smallish suitcase decorated with red decals to make it easily recognizable on airport conveyor belts and a carry-on shaped like a sausage that she hadn’t bothered to zip up, so that a great number of French magazines and newspapers, and what looked like manuscripts, peeked out from it. He carried her bags upstairs and showed her the room she would stay in. It had been Charlotte’s: sunny, with the bow windows looking out onto the back lawn and garden and, beyond the boundary of the property, the great saltwater pond whose population of wild geese no longer migrated. Alice exclaimed over the loveliness and said she must have a complete tour of the house and the garden. But first she would like lunch, then a bath, and then a long nap. After lunch, however, she changed her mind and said they had better look around before it got dark. When they had finished and were standing at the door to her room, he said, You like this place. You might like living here.
She didn’t answer but remained motionless. Wondering whether he had guessed what she wanted, he put his arms around her. Her mouth tasted of the lunch; her hair and her clothes smelled very slightly of sweat and other odors that told the story of the hours spent in airports and on the plane. The unmediated intimacy excited him like a stolen sweet. He prolonged the kiss, but just as he felt himself harden she pulled away.
It’s bath time, she said very quietly. Where will you be?
Right there, he said, pointing to his room, directly across the hall. I’ll be pretending to read and listen to music.
May I come to see you?
Schmidt turned up the upstairs thermostat slightly and settled into the red armchair in his room. Ordinarily he kept the house on the cool—some would say downright cold—side, but Alice wasn’t yet used to the cold of a wooden beach house pounded by North Atlantic gales. Or to sharing it with an old fellow with a lifelong habit of scrimping on heating oil. On his night table were a desperately sad novel by a Russian Jew set around the time of the battle for Stalingrad and a stack of unread issues of the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books that had been accumulating since right after Election Day, when he left on an inspection tour of Life Centers operated in Central and Eastern Europe and some states of the former Soviet Union by Mike Mansour’s foundation, of which Schmidt was still the head. He was finding the novel so powerful that he had to pace himself in absorbing its terrors; he didn’t think he was up to another scene of human degradation just then. Were the clean-cut, affable Ukrainians who received him at the Kiev Life Center familiar with that tale of horrors—horrors that must have engulfed their grandfathers if not their fathers? Before going to sleep the night before, he had put down the book just as an old Bolshevik, a commissar of superior rank, was being arrested for reasons he didn’t understand. A much younger commissar slapped him repeatedly just to break his prisoner. For the moment, the most Schmidt could handle was to listen, while his mind wandered, to the Connecticut classical music station to which the radio was always tuned. Alice drew him to her powerfully, yes, but what he felt for her was far beyond sexual attraction. It was love, albeit an old man’s love. He wanted to keep her at his side. He had offered marriage, which he devoutly wanted out of a belief, which he knew was contradicted by experience, that marriage held out a promise of stability. But he had told her he was prepared to settle for living together anyplace, on any terms she might wish. And the offer of himself was on a satisfaction-guaranteed trial basis, with assurances he would creep away quietly if she found him wanting. Was it fair, was it reasonable, to propose marriage or some other form of cohabitation with a man who had just turned seventy-eight to a woman who was sixty-three? The only honest answer was no, but he didn’t want to take no for an answer and thought sincerely that arguments against his suit might be overrated. He had fully disclosed the risks, which anyway were obvious, going so far as to say that were he her father or brother he would advise against her taking them. But it was up to her. As for the wisdom of his own position, although marriage was what he ardently desired, he knew full well the penalties for entering into one that fails. In the worst case, you live with a cell mate slowly becoming your enemy and, on average, with someone more or less annoying. This was to say nothing of the physical intimacy that cohabitation made difficult to avoid. Bad enough for the woman, feeling obliged to submit to an unattractive old fellow’s groping—Schmidt did not exclude himself from the thesis that all old men are intrinsically unattractive—and rather worse for the man called upon to take the initiative and accomplish repeatedly the miracle of penetration. A voice reminded Schmidt that divorce laws had fixed those problems. One could agree in advance that the unhappy husband or wife could cut and run. Perhaps his questions could be answered definitively only after the fact; it was a case of proceeding at your own risk.
Schmidt abruptly ended these ruminations. She was beautiful, fragrant, and more desirable than any woman he had known, with the sole exception of Carrie, Hecate herself, who had come to him in the form of a twenty-year-old Puerto Rican waitress. For two years indelibly marked on every nerve in his body she had been his mistress. The idyll had ended just as one would expect. She had found a blond giant gentle as a lamb and went to him with Schmidt’s blessing, carrying a child whose paternity was to be uncertain. As for Alice: she may not be a magical creature of the night, but she was his type! Who is to say that the game is not worth the candle? Cowardice, he knew only too well, carried its own penalties: sour solitude and despair. Concerns about being unfair to Alice were balderdash. She was a big girl. A moment ago, she had asked whether she could come to see him after her bath. That was hardly an ambiguous gesture.
At breakfast, he had not so much as scanned the first pages of the Times. Now he retrieved it from the kitchen and soon found the only piece of half-decent news: Al Franken continued to lead the deplorable Norm Coleman in the Minnesota recount, but only by fifty votes. Recount! Schmidt had hoped never to hear that word again, after that interlude of thuggery carried on all the way up to the Supreme Court that had put W in the White House. Other than that, only tales of horror and perplexity. The day before, Hamas had fired a rocket from Gaza that reached eighteen miles deep into Israel killing a mother of four. According to the UN, the Israeli assault on that wretched strip of land had already killed three hundred seventy Palestinians, of whom sixty-two were women and children. What did those figures prove, other than the futility of killing large numbers of Palestinians? It had hardly broken their will to fight. On the other hand did Hamas try to spare Israeli women and children? That issue was not touched upon by the Times. Would Hamas and Hezbollah settle for anything less than pushing Israel into the sea? Probably not, but if they pushed hard enough, the Israelis would drop the bomb. Just where they would drop it was a good question to which he was willing to bet not even Mike Mansour had an answer. And if the Iranians too got the bomb, they would surely use it on Tel Aviv in response, a catastrophe for the Jews on the scale of Auschwitz, whereupon the Israelis would nuke Tehran and Kharg Island, the latter move starting a chain reaction of chaos for every country dependent on Iranian oil. Wouldn’t someone—Russians or Pakistanis or the Chinese, or even North Koreans—come to the aid of their Iranian and Arab friends? And do what? At that point Schmidt gave up. He didn’t know, and he wasn’t a Times columnist required to pretend that he did. With any luck he’d be dead before the answer was revealed. Another article touched on a subject nearer his old expertise. The SEC was sticking to its guns defending mark-to-market accounting, which required financial institutions to write down daily the assets carried on their balance sheets to whatever amount a buyer would be willing to pay that day. Schmidt adamantly believed that if the rule were suspended or abolished, the banks would rob the public blind. Anyone who had ever dealt with them had to come to the same conclusion. There was, however, a reasonable counterargument that the journalist hadn’t mentioned. It held that an asset wasn’t necessarily worthless just because there were no takers for it at a given time. Should such an asset then be really written down to zero on the bank’s balance sheet? It would be the same as saying that your house on a shady street in Scarsdale, for which you paid two million dollars three years earlier, was suddenly worth zero just because the Dow had crashed and for the moment no buyers were to be found. Another headaching puzzle. Perhaps Mike Mansour had the right answer. When Alice and he saw Mike at dinner that evening, he might ask him. The great financier was never short of convictions or shy about pronouncing them. One could mock Mike’s high-roller style, but when he opined about financial matters, it was well to pay attention. Schmidt had learned that lesson in October 2007, when Mike told him to sell shares and buy treasuries and gold.
Had he dozed off? How long had she been in his room? He became conscious of her presence only when she said, Knock knock, it’s the lady from Paris. So silent when she moved, so like his cats, and his lost Carrie, Alice stood before him smiling, barefoot, toenails painted a red he found heart-rendingly gallant, clad in a beige sweat suit that he realized, when he put his arms around her, was made of a cashmere so soft it felt as if he were touching her naked body. He tried to kiss her, but she turned her head and said, Schmidtie, I’ve come for a serious talk. (That was the name she had discovered by which his friends called him; he disliked his given name, Albert, and its odious diminutives.)
Of course, Alice, he said, we can have a serious talk, but will you allow me an opening statement?
She nodded.
It’s very simple: I love you. I’ve gone over everything I told you when I saw you in October. I meant it then, and I mean it now. Please give me a second chance and live with me wedded or in sin, here in this house, or in New York or Paris—or anywhere, so long as we are together and I give full satisfaction.
He wasn’t sure what kind of response he expected, but he was relieved to see her smile. Schmidtie, was that the opening statement or the conclusion? What do lawyers call it? Prayer for relief?
A bit of both, he answered, but please remember that I haven’t rested my case.
Then go ahead and rest it, Schmidtie. She giggled. Don’t keep me waiting.
He took one long step approaching the armchair where she sat. Sinking to his knees, he put his arms around her legs and pressed his face against them.
Wait, wait, she whispered, I too have something to say. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like you, if I didn’t want to be with you. But thirteen years have gone by. At our ages that is like a lifetime. Do you remember how you told me I shouldn’t tie myself to an old man? Now you’re even older. But I’m not afraid of that, Schmidtie. I’m more worried about what you will think of me. Now I’m old too with an old woman’s body.
His notion of what the occasion demanded moved him to protest. He told her that she had not changed, that she was still the magnificent blond beauty he’d fallen in love with, that she had never been more desirable. The wonder of it, he realized, was that he was telling her the truth.
Hush, Schmidtie, she said, I know you’re chivalrous. Do you also have to be silly? Have you asked yourself what you’ll find when I take off my clothes?
She took his hand and guided it under her top, pressing it to her breast. Can you feel how it has changed? It’s flabby. My whole body has changed. Puff and flab.
He renewed his protest, but she said: Shush! This afternoon will be all right, because it will feel new, like doing it the first time. But tonight, and then tomorrow? You’ve such good manners that you’ll probably try to make love to me every day while I’m here. But it will feel like a chore, not because you don’t love me or don’t want to give me pleasure, but because we’re old. What will you do? Use those pills? On the sly, of course. You’re so very proper.
Oh, Alice, he whispered. No more talk.
But I told you that we must talk. How can we just forget that dreadful party in Water Mill? And then you had me come to London. For what? To berate and humiliate me. To make sure I knew that you were in a rage? And that awful loveless sex that followed. More like rape. And then all those years of silence, until you reappeared out of nowhere. Why? Because you had figured out that I’m available. Am I right?
Alice, we both know what happened thirteen years ago. I was a fool. An idiot. I’ve admitted that, I’ve begged your pardon for it.
And I’ve told you I’m not angry, not anymore. I accept my share of blame. But let’s make sure that this time we don’t stumble. I couldn’t bear it.
She had done nothing to make him take his hand away from her breast, and he had kept up the caresses, extending them to the other breast. Equal treatment. She began to moan.
Wait, wait, she said. Listen. Please, no more talk about the future. Not now. Don’t make me think you are foolish. Let me propose marriage to you. When I think we are ready.
I promise, he answered. I promise.