by Ann Beattie
A few days after the ill-fated dinner, he had bought six raffle tickets and sent them to her, in the hope that a winning number would provide a bicycle for her son, though he obviously hadn’t given her a winning ticket, or she would have called. Her son’s expensive bicycle had been taken at knifepoint, in a neighborhood he had promised his mother he would not ride through.
Two or three weeks before, Sigrid and Keller had driven into Boston to see a show at the MFA and afterward had gone to a coffee shop where he had clumsily, stupidly, splashed a cup of tea onto her when he was jostled by a mother with a stroller the size of an infantry vehicle. He had brought dish towels to the door of the ladies’ room for Sigrid to dry herself off with, and he had even—rather gallantly, some might have said—thought to bite the end off his daily vitamin-E capsule from the little packet of multivitamins he carried in his shirt pocket and urged her to scrape the goop from the tip of his finger and spread it on the burn. She maintained that she had not been burned. Later, on the way to the car, they had got into a tiff when he said that it wasn’t necessary for her to pretend that everything was fine, that he liked women who spoke honestly. “It could not have been all right that I scalded you, Sigrid,” he’d told her.
“Well, I just don’t see the need to criticize you over an accident, Keller,” she had replied. Everyone called him by his last name. He had been born Joseph Francis, but neither Joe nor Joseph nor Frank nor Francis fit.
“It was clumsy of me, and I wasn’t quick enough to help,” he said.
“You were fine,” she said. “It would have brought you more pleasure if I’d cried, or if I’d become irrational, wouldn’t it? There’s some part of you that’s always on guard, because the other person is sure to become irrational.”
“You know a little something about my wife’s personality,” he said.
Sigrid had lived next door before, during, and after Sue Anne’s departure. “So everyone’s your wife?” she said. “Is that what you think?”
“No,” he said. “I’m apologizing. I didn’t do enough for my wife, either. Apparently I didn’t act soon enough or effectively enough or—”
“You’re always looking for forgiveness!” she said. “I don’t forgive you or not forgive you. How about that? I don’t know enough about the situation, but I doubt that you’re entirely to blame for the way things turned out.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Some people say I’m too closemouthed and I don’t give anyone a chance to know me, and others—such as you or my daughter—maintain that I’m self-critical as a ploy to keep their attention focused on me.”
“I didn’t say any such thing! Don’t put words in my mouth. I said that my getting tea dumped on my back by accident and the no doubt very complicated relationship you had with your wife really don’t—”
“It was certainly too complicated for me,” Keller said quietly.
“Stop whispering. If we’re going to have a discussion, at least let me hear what you’re saying.”
“I wasn’t whispering,” Keller said. “That was just the wheezing of an old man out of steam.”
“Now it’s your age! I should pity you for your advanced age! What age are you, exactly, since you refer to it so often?”
“You’re too young to count that high.” He smiled. “You’re a young, attractive, successful woman. People are happy to see you walk into the room. When they look up and see me, they see an old man, and they avert their eyes. When I walk into the travel agency, they all but duck into the kneeholes of their desks. That’s how we got acquainted, as you recall, since calling on one’s neighbors is not the American Way. Only your radiant face met mine with a smile. Everybody else was pretending I wasn’t there.”
“Listen: Are you sure this is where we parked the car?”
“I’m not sure of anything. That’s why I had you drive.”
“I drove because your optometrist put drops in to dilate your pupils shortly before we left,” she said.
“But I’m fine now. At least, my usual imperfect vision has returned. I can drive back,” he said, pointing to her silver Avalon. “Too noble a vehicle for me, to be sure, but driving would be the least I could do, after ruining your day.”
“Why are you saying that?” she said. “Because you’re pleased to think that some little problem has the ability to ruin my day? You are being impossible, Keller. And don’t whisper that that’s exactly what your wife would say. Except that she’s a fellow human being occupying planet Earth, I don’t care about your wife.”
She took her key ring out of her pocket and tossed the keys to him.
He was glad he caught them, because she sent them higher into the air than necessary. But he did catch them, and he did remember to step in front of her to hold open her door as he pushed the button to unlock the car. Coming around the back, he saw the PETA bumper sticker her husband had adorned the car with shortly before leaving her for a years-younger Buddhist vegan animal-rights activist.
At least he had worked his way into his craziness slowly, subscribing first to Smithsonian magazine and only later to newsletters with pictures of starved, manacled horses and pawless animals with startled eyes—material she was embarrassed to have delivered to the house. In the year before he left, he had worked at the animal-rescue league on weekends. When she told him he was becoming obsessed with the plight of animals at the expense of their marriage and their son, he’d rolled up one of his publications and slapped his palm with it over and over, protesting vehemently, like someone scolding a bad dog. As she recalled, he had somehow turned the conversation to the continued illegal importation of elephant tusks into Asia.
“You always want to get into a fight,” she said, when she finally spoke again, as Keller wound his way out of Boston. “It makes it difficult to be with you.”
“I know it’s difficult. I’m sorry.”
“Come over and we can watch some Perry Mason reruns,” she said. “It’s on every night at eleven.”
“I don’t stay up that late,” he said. “I’m an old man.”
Keller spoke to his daughter on the phone—the first time the phone had rung in days—and listened patiently while she set forth her conditions, living her life in the imperative. In advance of their speaking, she wanted him to know that she would hang up if he asked when she intended to break up with Addison (Addison!) Page. Also, as he well knew, she did not want to be questioned about her mother, even though, yes, they were in phone contact. She also did not want to hear any criticism of her glamorous life, based on her recently having spent three days in England with her spendthrift boyfriend, and also, yes, she had got her flu shot.
“This being November, would it be possible to ask who you’re going to vote for?”
“No,” she said. “Even if you were voting for the same candidate, you’d find some way to make fun of me.”
“What if I said, ‘Close your eyes and imagine either an elephant or a donkey’?”
“If I close my eyes, I see…I see a horse’s ass, and it’s you,” she said. “May I continue?”
He snorted. She had a quick wit, his daughter. She had got that from him, not from his wife, who neither made jokes nor understood them. In the distant past, his wife had found an entirely humorless psychiatrist who had summoned Keller and urged him to speak to Sue Anne directly, not in figurative language or through allusions or—God forbid—with humor. “What should I do if I’m just chomping at the bit to tell a racist joke?” he had asked. The idea was of course ludicrous; he had never made a racist joke in his life. But of course the psychiatrist missed his tone. “You anticipate the necessity of telling racist jokes to your wife?” he had said, pausing to scribble something on his pad. “Only if one came up in a dream or something,” Keller had deadpanned.
“I thought you were going to continue, Lynn,” he said. “Which I mean as an observation, not as a reproach,” he hurried to add.
“Keller,” she said (since her teenage years, she had called him
Keller), “I need to know whether you’re coming to Thanksgiving.”
“Because you would get a turkey weighing six or seven ounces more?”
“In fact, I thought about cooking a ham this year, because Addison prefers ham. It’s just a simple request, Keller: that you let me know whether or not you plan to come. Thanksgiving is three weeks away.”
“I’ve come up against Amy Vanderbilt’s timetable for accepting a social invitation at Thanksgiving?” he said.
She sighed deeply. “I would like you to come, whether you believe that or not, but since the twins aren’t coming from L.A., and since Addison’s sister invited us to her house, I thought I might not cook this year, if you didn’t intend to come.”
“Oh, by all means don’t cook for me. I’ll mind my manners and call fifty-one weeks from today and we’ll set this up for next year,” he said. “A turkey potpie from the grocery store is good enough for me.”
“And the next night you could be your usual frugal self and eat the leftover packaging,” she said.
“Horses don’t eat cardboard. You’re thinking of mice,” he said.
“I stand corrected,” she said, echoing the sentence he often said to her. “But let me ask you another thing. Addison’s sister lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and she issued a personal invitation for you to join us at her house for dinner. Would you like to have Thanksgiving there?”
“How could she issue a personal invitation if she’s never met me?” he said.
“Stop it,” his daughter said. “Just answer.”
He thought about it. Not about whether he would go but about the holiday itself. The revisionist thinking on Thanksgiving was that it commemorated the subjugation of the Native Americans (formerly the Indians). Not as bad a holiday as Columbus Day, but still.
“I take it your silence means that you prefer to be far from the maddening crowd,” she said.
“That title is much misquoted,” he said. “Hardy’s novel is Far from the Madding Crowd, which has an entirely different connotation, madding meaning ‘frenzied.’ There’s quite a difference between frenzied and annoying. Consider, for instance, your mother’s personality versus mine.”
“You are incredibly annoying,” Lynn said. “If I didn’t know that you cared for me, I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone and let myself in for your mockery, over and over.”
“I thought it was because you pitied me.”
He heard the click, and there was silence. He replaced the phone in its cradle, which made him think of another cradle—Lynn’s—with the decal of the cow jumping over the moon on the headboard and blue and pink beads (the cradle manufacturer having hedged his bets) on the rails. He could remember spinning the beads and watching Lynn sleep. The cradle was now in the downstairs hallway, used to store papers and magazines for recycling. Over the years, some of the decal had peeled away, so that on last inspection only a torso with two legs was successfully making the jump over the brightly smiling moon.
He bought a frozen turkey potpie and, as a treat to himself (it was not true that he constantly denied himself happiness, as Lynn said—one could not deny what was rarely to be found), a new radio whose FM quality was excellent—though what did he know, with his imperfect hearing? As he ate Thanksgiving dinner (two nights before Thanksgiving, but why stand on formality?—a choice of Dinty Moore beef stew or Lean Cuisine vegetable lasagna remained for the day of thanks itself), he listened with pleasure to Respighi’s “Pini di Roma.” He and Sue Anne had almost gone to Rome on their honeymoon, but instead they had gone to Paris. His wife had just finished her second semester of college, in which she had declared herself an art history major. They had gone to the Louvre and to the Jeu de Paume and on the last day of the trip he had bought her a little watercolor of Venice she kept admiring, in a rather elaborate frame that probably accounted for the gouache’s high price—it was a gouache, not a watercolor, as she always corrected him. They both wanted three children, preferably a son followed by either another son or a daughter, though if their second child was a son, then of course they would devoutly wish their last to be a daughter. He remembered with bemusement the way they had prattled on, strolling by the Seine, earnestly discussing those things that were most out of their control: Life’s Important Matters.
Sue Anne conceived only once, and although they (she, to be honest) had vaguely considered adoption, Lynn remained their only child. Lacking brothers and sisters, she had been fortunate to grow up among relatives, because Keller’s sister had given birth to twins a year or so after Lynn was born, and in those days the two families lived only half an hour apart and saw each other almost every weekend. Now Sue Anne and his sister Carolynne (now merely Carol), who lived in Arlington with her doctor husband (or who lived apart from him—he was forbidden to inquire about the status of their union), had not spoken for months, and the twins, Richard and Rita, who worked as stockbrokers and had never married—smart!—and shared a house in the Hollywood Hills, were more at ease with him than his own daughter was. For years Keller had promised to visit the twins, and the previous summer, Richard had called his bluff and sent him a ticket to Los Angeles. Richard and Rita had picked Keller up at LAX in a BMW convertible and taken him to a sushi restaurant where at periodic intervals laser images on the wall blinked on and off like sexually animated hieroglyphics dry-humping to a recording of “Walk Like an Egyptian.” The next morning, the twins had taken him to a museum that had been created as a satire of museums, with descriptions of the bizarre exhibits that were so tongue-in-cheek he was sure the majority of people there thought that they were touring an actual museum. That night, they turned on the lights in their pool and provided him with bathing trunks (how would he have thought to pack such a thing?—he never thought of a visit to sprawling Los Angeles as a visit to a beach), and on Sunday they had eaten their lunch of fresh pineapple and prosciutto poolside, drinking prosecco instead of mineral water (the only beverages in the house, except for extraordinarily good red wine, as far as he could tell), and in the late afternoon they had been joined by a beautiful blonde woman who had apparently been, or might still be, Jack Nicholson’s lover. Then he went with Rita and Richard to a screening (a shoot-’em-up none of them wanted to see, though the twins felt they must, because the cinematographer was their longtime client), and on Monday they had sent a car to the house so Keller wouldn’t get lost trying to find his way around the freeways. It transported him to a lunch with the twins at a restaurant built around a beautiful terraced garden, after which he’d been dropped off to take the MGM tour and then picked up by the same driver—a dropout from Hollywood High who was working on a screenplay.
It was good they had bought him a ticket for only a brief visit, because if he’d stayed longer he might never have gone home. Though who would have cared if he hadn’t? His wife didn’t care where he lived, as long as she lived in the opposite direction. His daughter might be relieved that he had moved away. He lived where he lived for no apparent reason—at least, no reason apparent to him. He had no friends, unless you called Don Kim a friend—Don, with whom he played handball on Mondays and Thursdays. And his accountant, Ralph Bazzorocco. He supposed Bazzorocco was his friend, though with the exception of a couple of golf games each spring and the annual buffet dinner he and Bazzorocco’s other clients were invited to every April 16—and except for Bazzorocco’s calling to wish him a happy birthday, and “Famiglia Bazzorocco” (as the gift card always read) sending him an enormous box of biscotti and Baci at Christmas…oh, he didn’t know. Probably that was what friendship was, he thought, a little ashamed of himself. He had gone to the hospital to visit Bazzorocco’s son after the boy injured his pelvis and lost his spleen playing football. He’d driven Bazzorocco’s weeping wife home in the rain so she could shower and change her clothes, then driven her, still weeping, back to the hospital. Okay: he had friends. But would any of them care if he lived in Los Angeles? Don Kim could easily find another partner (perhaps a younger man mo
re worthy as a competitor); Bazzorocco could remain his accountant via the miracle of modern technology. In any case, Keller had returned to the North Shore.
Though not before that last odd day in L.A. He had said, though he hadn’t planned to say it (Lynn was not correct in believing that everything that escaped his lips was premeditated), that he’d like to spend his last day lounging around the house. So they wouldn’t feel too sorry for him, he even asked if he could open a bottle of Merlot—whatever they recommended, of course—and raid their refrigerator for lunch. After all, the refrigerator contained a tub of mascarpone instead of cottage cheese, and the fruit drawer was stocked with organic plums rather than puckered supermarket grapes. Richard wasn’t so keen on the idea, but Rita said that of course that was fine. It was Keller’s vacation, she stressed. They’d make a reservation at a restaurant out at the beach that night, and if he felt rested enough to eat out, fine; if not, they’d cancel the reservation and Richard would cook his famous chicken breasts marinated in Vidalia-onion sauce.
When Keller woke up, the house was empty. He made coffee (at home, he drank instant) and wandered out through the open doors to the patio as it brewed. He surveyed the hillside, admired the lantana growing from Mexican pottery urns flanking one side of the pool. Some magazine had been rained on—it must have rained during the night; he hadn’t heard it, but then, he’d fallen asleep with earphones on, listening to Brahms. He walked toward the magazine—as offensive as litter along the highway, this copy of Vogue deteriorating on the green tiles—then drew back, startled. There was a small possum: a baby possum, all snout and pale narrow body, clawing the water, trying futilely to scramble up the edge of the pool. He looked around quickly for the pool net. The night before, it had been leaning against the sliding glass door, but it was no longer there. He went quickly to the side of the house, then ran to the opposite side, all the while acutely aware that the drowning possum was in desperate need of rescue. No pool net. He went into the kitchen, which was now suffused with the odor of coffee, and threw open door after door looking for a pot. He finally found a bucket containing cleaning supplies, quickly removed them, then ran back to the pool, where he dipped the bucket in, missing, frightening the poor creature and adding to its problems by making it go under. He recoiled in fear, then realized that the emotion he felt was not fear but self-loathing. Introspection was not his favorite mode, but no matter: he dipped again, leaning farther over this time, accepting the ludicrous prospect of his falling in, though the second time he managed to scoop up the possum—it was only a tiny thing—and lift it out of the water. The bucket was full, because he had dipped deep, and much to his dismay, when he saw the possum curled up at the bottom, he knew immediately that it was already dead. The possum had drowned. He set the bucket down and crouched on the tile beside it before he had a second, most welcome epiphany and realized almost with a laugh that it wasn’t dead: it was playing possum. Though if he didn’t get it out of the bucket, it really would drown. He jumped up, turned the bucket on its side, and stood back as water and possum flowed out. The water dispersed. The possum lay still. That must be because he was watching it, he decided, although he once more considered the grim possibility that it was dead.
