Schmidt Delivered Read Online Free Page A

and dinners, hewas of no use to them. Most of the lawyers among his acquaintance were practicing partners in first-class New York law firms just like his old firm, a handful taught at Columbia or New York University, and an even smaller number, a couple of classmates and one former partner, had become federal judges. He hadn’t kept up with them. And their wives, their dreary wives! If you put aside the few aging beauties among them, who had kept the self-assurance and good humor that having first-rate looks when you are young can give you for life, about the only good thing you could say for them was that they were women. Schmidt resolutely preferred women to men.
    Were there former colleagues, active and retired partners of Wood & King, who liked him, with whom he could reestablish some sort of ties? He thought that, on the whole, their feelings toward him were pleasantly benevolent. The exception, of course, would be Charlotte’s husband, Jon Riker. If by some miracle that fellow could push a button and electrocute his father-in-law in his own swimming pool, there wasn’t a force great enough, Schmidt thought, not even Wood & King’s presiding partner, that could keep his big fat finger off the button. As a practical matter, none of this mattered. His old legal pals didn’t happen to pass their summers or weekends anywhere nearby, and, to Schmidt’s surprise, until he divined that she didn’t especially care to live nearer to Brooklyn and her parents, Carrie showed no interest in the suggestion he had floated that they get an apartment in New York. And suppose they did, how would he go about launching them as a couple? Would he arrange a round ofcocktails, little dinners, and theater outings? He had been used to seeing his partners mostly over lunch. The wives he saw twice a year, at firm dinners for partners and their spouses—since they had begun to take women into the partnership, spouses were no longer necessarily wives—and the firm outings for all lawyers and concubines of any sexual orientation designed to promote good fellowship through a day of tennis, golf, and drinking. It had suited Mary to keep her distance from his firm, and Schmidt wasn’t sure that left to himself he would have preferred to be more gregarious. Even if Carrie were not in the picture, it would have been awkward, and perhaps not possible, to live down his past aloofness, to become one of the boys. But imagine Jack and Dorothy DeForrest—or even the W & K man-of-the-world Lew Brenner and his wife, Tina—invited to a small dinner at Schmidtie’s brand-new penthouse to meet Miss Carrie Gorchuck. They would get through the meal and the coffee and brandy all right, though the men might be too unsettled to cluster as usual in the corner of the living room to talk about the firm’s finances, but afterward, what a fuss! Schmidt with a girl younger than his own daughter, yes, younger than Jon Riker’s wife! No, she’s not a lawyer. I asked what she did and she came right out with it; she was a waitress until that old goat came along and made it worth her while to give up working. Beautiful as the day is long, absolutely—and then, depending on the speaker, a further graphic detail might follow—but, you know, with just a touch of the tarbrush. Some sort of Hispanic. Yes, Puerto Rican. It was just as well that the issue didn’t need to be faced. The very young partners—andcertainly the associates—would think the new Mrs. Schmidt was a ten. But what was Schmidt to them or they to him?
    He executed a very correct turn and looked up at the clock. Twenty-five minutes. To keep going for another five was intolerable, not because it was hard but because it was too boring. Another daily defeat. Cut short the swim, skip the exercises intended to tighten the stomach, fall asleep over
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
He climbed out, dried himself, and, with the towel wrapped around his midriff, out of habit, although there was no