About Schmidt by Louis Begley Page B

held out his arms for her and felt that she was already naked.
    Wait, she whispered, I have to put a towel under me. And then, Right away, please, now!
    We shouldn’t, he whispered back, this will make a mess in the bed, but she put her hand on him, and he found he couldn’t refuse.
    It was the blood on the mattress cover, which Corinne thought she had scrubbed off, that Mrs. Durban found andbrought to Mary’s attention the morning after her return, while Schmidt was at the club, playing singles with the knee surgeon who had won the previous year’s tournament.
              Charlotte is in her room, having a tantrum, because I have just put Corinne and her suitcase on the train for New York, Mary told Schmidt when he came home. If you have to screw some bitch in my house, at least don’t leave stains on my bed.
    You are quite right, he replied, and went to the pool to swim.
    Later in the day, Mary fired Mrs. Durban.
    The woman is a drunk, she told Schmidt. It’s practically Labor Day. I will make do with the Poles until I find someone with proper qualifications.
    That evening, after he had given Charlotte dinner and gotten her to go to sleep—Mary had remained in the bedroom with the door closed—Schmidt went out on the back porch to smoke. Should he sleep in the guest room? What could he say to Mary? He wondered whether Corinne would leave a message at his office. It might be best if she didn’t. In that case there would be no way he could find her.
    He heard footsteps. It was Mary.
    It’s chilly out here, she told him. Don’t you think you should come to bed?

IV
    T HE CLUB where Schmidt might ordinarily have whiled away the interval between his arrival in the city and lunch was closed, its members unlikely to eat the Thanksgiving meal away from their homes or homes of relatives or friends. Unless, of course, they had no family or company or friends. In that case, Schmidt imagined they preferred to bury the shameful secret and shun public places, emerging from their dwellings only at the hour when the lunch or dinner that their self-esteem told them they should have attended would normally be over, having taken care they were appropriately dressed for the occasion. And if they lived in a building where the doorman and elevator men noted each coming and going, and therefore would know, with derisive precision, that Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So was in town and in normal health, and yet had had no visitors and had not gone out to a party? Did those poor souls save their dignity by repairing to Chinese restaurants located somewhere in the boroughs, places where their presence, so puzzling to themselves, aroused neither curiosity nor pity in their boisterous fellow diners? Or was it easier in such a case to find anearly show in a midtown Broadway movie theater, thereby adding to anonymity the protection of darkness? What would Schmidt have done, if he were still living in his apartment and had chosen not to go to the country, where on the whole it’s easier to hide, and had not been the object of the solicitude of his daughter, of the parents of the man resolved to make an honest woman of her, and, by golly, even of his former presiding partner?
    The problem’s beautiful complexity procured for Schmidt a moment of elation and hastened his progress toward the Harvard Club, a temple of gregariousness located but a few blocks from where the bus had deposited him. Memories of bulletins received in the past, touting the holiday menu, made him confident it was open, the membership apparently exempt from the scourge of false pride. He was no longer a member there, hadn’t been for years, but that was no reason why he shouldn’t, for old times’ sake, visit the men’s room, and perhaps even enjoy a short snooze in the library. The hall porter was new to Schmidt or had undergone a face-lift. He shook the man’s hand and walked on to the great hall. Where once the only sound had been that of dice rattled in leather cups