EXCERPT: 'Schmidt Steps Back' by Louis Begley

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 eyecatching. 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, 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 wasn't a bad 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 fourteen 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 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.

From "Schmidt Steps Back" by Louis Begley. Copyright © 2012 by Louis Begley. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.