Schmidt Delivered Read Online Free Page B

risk of an unannounced visitor who might surprise him in his nakedness, lay down in the sun. Really, it couldn’t be simpler: just like Carrie, he was déclassé. Since deep down the last thing he wanted was to rejoin his class—even if giving up Carrie weren’t the price—he must look for a social life elsewhere. Alas, not among the waitresses and busboys at O’Henry’s or the chattering Ecuadoreans and Dominicans who trimmed his hedges and picked up broken tree branches. He was too old for the former; the latter didn’t speak English. Not among the funny men and women with oversize smiles who sold local real estate, placed insurance, or fixed your teeth in an emergency, if you couldn’t go into town. They were too unattractive. He needed to find people who belonged to no class and, indifferent to his loss of status or simply too ignorant to understand, might be drawn in by his availability and style. That was supposed to be the one advantage of a comfortable retirement. You want Schmidt at lunch? You’ve got him. Someone’s asked you to fill a table at the gala benefit for the opera at fifteenhundred dollars a seat? Schmidtie’s check is in the mail. Couldn’t Carrie’s looks do it for them? In his youth, they might have been adopted by members of café society, like the Greek shipowners who had been his father’s clients. Was there still a café society, even though El Morocco and the Copacabana had vanished, and the “21” Club kept changing hands like a used car? Exposure to articles on “lifestyles,” which had spread inside the
New York Times
like a malignant growth, and the occasional furtive dips into a weekly New York publication that had made a specialty of studying the vulgar rich, with reporting by young persons some of whose parents he had known, led Schmidt to believe that there did exist a similar subclass, completely outside society as he had once understood it, composed of parvenus—not especially beautiful or idle—sitting on mountains of vastly appreciated shares in companies they had started or bought on the cheap. With his billions and Levantine aroma, Michael Mansour was surely in it. Perhaps other friends of the Blackmans qualified. One would have to see.
    The telephone rang in the house. Let it go. Until recently, when Carrie’s mercilessly teasing compelled the acquisition, Schmidt had had no answering machine, on the theory that if anyone really needed to reach him it was easy enough to call again. Now that he was the owner of such a contraption, he compensated by listening to messages only rarely—when he thought Carrie might have left one. The ringing continued. It was someone persistent, who took into account the possibility that he was in the garden. He might answer in time if he ran, and then he might not. He remained on his deckchair. Carrie wouldn’t be calling; she was in class and, anyway, didn’t have the telephone habit. What if it was Charlotte? He had planned to call her himself, a little later. Nobody else mattered; it wasn’t as if there were still the chance of his getting a new assignment or, that miracle of miracles, a brand-new client. He would have liked to wipe the slate clean of the last years of his practice, before Mary’s illness brought him to retire early: a shrinking workload, feelings of helplessness (although he had not done anything to lose clients; how could he have prevented the consequences of his specialty’s having gone the way of the telex machine?), guilt, and shame about not having enough brains or energy or force of personality to drum up business of some other sort. A number of fellow financing lawyers he knew and respected had done just that. In the jargon of the profession, they “retooled.” Loneliness and not knowing what to do with his time were a cheap price to pay for early retirement, for having been set free. Besides, a couple more years, and he would have had to leave the firm anyway. Without the miracle of Carrie to