by Ann Beattie
He stood still. Then he thought to walk back into the house, far away from it. It was dead; it wasn’t. Time passed. Then, finally, as he stood unmoving, the possum twitched and waddled off—the flicker of life in its body resonated in Keller’s own heart—and then the event was over. He continued to stand there, cognizant of how much he had loathed himself just moments before. Then he went out to retrieve the bucket. As he grasped the handle, tears welled up in his eyes. What the hell! He cried at the sink as he rinsed the bucket.
He dried his eyes on the crook of his arm and washed the bucket thoroughly, much longer than necessary, then dried it with a towel. He put the Comet, the Windex, and the rag and the brush back inside and returned the bucket to its place under the sink and tried to remember what he had planned to do that day, and again he was overwhelmed. The image that popped into his mind was of Jack Nicholson’s girlfriend, the blonde in the bikini with the denim shirt thrown over it. He thought…what? That he was going to get together with Jack Nicholson’s girlfriend? Whose last name he didn’t even know?
But that had been what he was thinking. No way to act on it, but yes—that was what he had been thinking, all along.
The water had run off, though the tiles still glistened. No sign, of course, of the possum. It was doubtless off assimilating its important life lesson. On a little redwood table was a waterproof radio that he turned on, finding the classical station, adjusting the volume. Then he unbuckled his belt and unzipped his fly, stepped out of his pants and underpants, and took off his shirt. Carrying the radio, he walked to the deep end of the pool, placed the radio on the rim, and dove in. He swam underwater for a while, and then, as his head broke the surface, he had the distinct feeling that he was being watched. He looked back at the house, then looked slowly around the pool area. The fence that walled it off from the neighbors was at least ten feet high. Behind the pool, the terrace was filled with bushes and fruit trees and pink and white irises—Keller was crazy: he was alone in a private compound; no one was there. He went under the water again, refreshed by its silky coolness, and breaststroked to the far end, where he came up for air, then used his feet to push off the side of the pool so he could float on his back. When he reached the end, he pulled himself out, then saw, in the corner of his eye, who was watching him. High up on the terrace, a deer was looking down. The second their eyes met, the deer was gone, but in that second it had come clear to him—on this day of endless revelations—that the deer had been casting a beneficent look, as if in thanks. He had felt that: that a deer was acknowledging and thanking him. He was flabbergasted at the odd workings of his brain. How could a grown man—a grown man without any religious beliefs, a father who, in what now seemed like a different lifetime, had accompanied his little daughter to Bambi and whispered, as every parent does, “It’s only a movie,” when Bambi’s mother was killed…how could a man with such knowledge of the world, whose most meaningful accomplishment in as long as he could remember had been to fish an animal out of a swimming pool—how could such a man feel unequivocally that a deer had appeared to bless him?
But he knew it had.
As it turned out, the blessing hadn’t exactly changed his life, though why should one expect so much of blessings, just because they were blessings?
Something that had profoundly changed his life had been Richard’s urging him, several years before, to take a chance, take a gamble, trust him, because the word he was about to speak was going to change his life. “Plastics?” he’d said, but Richard was too young: he hadn’t seen the movie. No, the word had been Microsoft. Keller had been in a strange frame of mind that day (one month earlier, to the day, his father had killed himself). At that point, he had hated his job so much, had stopped telling half-truths and finally admitted to Sue Anne that their marriage had become a dead end, that he assumed he was indulging the self-destructiveness his wife and daughter always maintained was the core of his being when he turned over almost everything he had to his nephew to invest in a company whose very name suggested smallness and insubstantiality. But, as it turned out, Richard had blessed him, as had the deer, now. The blonde had not, but then, very few men, very few indeed, would ever be lucky enough to have such a woman give them her benediction.
“You’re fun!” Rita laughed, dropping him off at LAX. On the way, he had taken off his white T-shirt and raised it in the air, saying, “I hereby surrender to the madness that is the City of Angels.” It had long been Rita’s opinion that no one in the family understood her uncle; that all of them were so defensive that they were intimidated by his erudition and willfully misunderstood his sense of humor. Richard was working late, but he had sent, by way of his sister (she ran back to the car, having almost forgotten the treat in the glove compartment), a tin of white-chocolate brownies to eat on the plane, along with a note Keller would later read that thanked him for having set an example when he and Rita were kids, for not unthinkingly going with the flow, and for his wry pronouncements in a family where, Richard said, everyone else was “afraid of his own shadow.” “Come back soon,” Richard had written. “We miss you.”
Back home, on the telephone, his daughter had greeted him with a warning: “I don’t want to hear about my cousins who are happy and successful, which are synonymous, in your mind, with being rich. Spare me details of their life and just tell me what you did. I’d like to hear about your trip without feeling diminished by my insignificance in the face of my cousins’ perfection.”
“I can leave them out of it entirely,” he said. “I can say, quite honestly, that the most significant moment of my trip happened not in their company but in the meeting of my eyes with the eyes of a deer that looked at me with indescribable kindness and understanding.”
Lynn snorted. “This was on the freeway, I suppose? It was on its way to be an extra in a remake of The Deer Hunter?”
He had understood, then, the urge she so often felt when speaking to him—the urge to hang up on a person who had not even tried to understand one word you had said.
“How was your Thanksgiving?” Sigrid asked. Keller was sitting across from her at the travel agency, arranging to buy Don Kim’s stepdaughter a ticket to Germany so she could pay a final visit to her dying friend. The girl was dying of ALS. The details were too terrible to think about. Jennifer had known her for eleven of her seventeen years, and now the girl was dying. Don Kim barely made it from paycheck to paycheck. It had been necessary to tell Don that he had what he called “a considerable windfall from the eighties stock market” in order to persuade him that in offering to buy Jennifer a ticket, he was not making a gesture he could not afford. He had had to work hard to persuade him. He had to insist on it several times, and swear that in no way had he thought Don had been hinting (which was true). The only worry was how Jennifer would handle such a trip, but they had both agreed she was a very mature girl.
“Very nice,” Keller replied. In fact, that day he had eaten canned stew and listened to Albinoni (probably some depressed DJ who hadn’t wanted to work Thanksgiving night). He had made a fire in the fireplace and caught up on his reading of The Economist. He felt a great distance between himself and Sigrid. He said, trying not to sound too perfunctorily polite, “And yours?”
“I was actually…” She dropped her eyes. “You know, my ex-husband has Brad for a week at Thanksgiving and I have him for Christmas. He’s such a big boy now, I don’t know why he doesn’t put his foot down, but he doesn’t. If I knew then what I know now, I’d never have let him go, no matter what rights the court gave that lunatic. You know what he did before Thanksgiving? I guess you must not have read the paper. They recruited Brad to liberate turkeys. They got arrested. His father thinks that’s fine: traumatizing Brad, letting him get hauled into custody. And the worst of it is, Brad’s scared to death, but he doesn’t dare not go along, and then he has to pretend to me that he thinks it was a great idea, that I’m an indifferent—” She searched for the word. “That I’m subhuman because I eat dead animals.”
Keller had no idea what to say. Lately, things didn’t seem funny enough to play off of. Everything just seemed weird and sad. Sigrid’s ex-husband had taken their son to liberate turkeys. How could you extemporize about that?
“She could go Boston, London, Frankfurt on British Air,” Sigrid said, as if she hadn’t expected him to reply. “It would be somewhere around seven hundred and fifty.” She hit the keyboard again. “Seven eighty-nine plus taxes,” she said. “She’d be flying out at six p.m. Eastern Standard, she’d get there in the morning.” Her fingers stopped moving on the keyboard. She looked at him.
“Can I use your phone to make sure that’s a schedule that’s good for her?” he said. He knew that Sigrid wondered who Jennifer Kim was. He had spoken of her as “my friend, Jennifer Kim.”
“Of course,” she said. She pushed a button and handed him the phone. He had written the Kims’ telephone number on a little piece of paper and slipped it in his shirt pocket. He was aware that she was staring at him as he dialed. The phone rang three times, and then he got the answering machine. “Keller here,” he said. “We’ve got the itinerary, but I want to check it with Jennifer. I’m going to put my travel agent on,” he said. “She’ll give you the times, and maybe you can call her to confirm it. Okay?” He handed the phone to Sigrid. She took it, all business. “Sigrid Crane of Pleasure Travel, Ms. Kim,” she said. “I have a British Airways flight that departs Logan at six zero zero p.m., arrival into Frankfurt by way of London nine five five a.m. My direct line is—”
He looked at the poster of Bali framed on the wall. A view of water. Two people entwined in a hammock. Pink flowers in the foreground.
“Well,” she said, hanging up. “I’ll expect to hear from her. I assume I should let you know if anything changes?”
He cocked his head. “What doesn’t?” he said. “You’d be busy every second of the day if you did that.”
She looked at him, expressionless. “The ticket price,” she said. “Or shall I issue it regardless?”
“Regardless.” (Now, there was a word he didn’t use often!) “Thanks.” He stood.
“Say hello to my colleagues hiding under their desks on your way out,” she said.
In the doorway, he stopped. “What did they do with the turkeys?” he said.
“They took them by truck to a farm in Vermont where they thought they wouldn’t be killed,” she said. “You can read about it in yesterday’s paper. Everybody’s out on bail. Since it’s a first offense, my son might be able to avoid having a record. I’ve hired a lawyer.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded. Unless she had two such garments, she was wearing the same gray sweater he had spilled tea on. It occurred to him that, outside his family, she was the only woman he spoke to. The woman at the post office, women he encountered when running errands, the UPS deliveryperson, who he personally thought might be a hermaphrodite, but in terms of real female acquaintances, Sigrid was the only one. He should have said more to her about the situation with her ex-husband and son, though he could not imagine what he would have said. He also could not get a mental picture, humorous or otherwise, of liberated turkeys, walking around some frozen field in—where had she said? Vermont.
She took an incoming call. He glanced back at the poster, at Sigrid sitting there in her gray sweater, noticing for the first time that she wore a necklace dangling a silver cross. Her high cheekbones, accentuated by her head tipped forward, were her best feature; her worst feature was her eyes, a bit too close together, so that she always seemed slightly perplexed. He raised his hand to indicate good-bye, in case she might be looking, then realized from what he heard Sigrid saying that the person on the other end must be Don Kim’s stepdaughter; Sigrid was reciting the Boston-to-Frankfurt schedule, tapping her pen as she spoke. He hesitated, then went back and sat down, though Sigrid had not invited him back. He sat there while Jennifer Kim told Sigrid the whole sad story—what else could the girl have been saying to her for so long? Sigrid’s eyes were almost crossed when she finally glanced up at him, then put her fingers on the keyboard and began to enter information. “I might stop by tonight,” he said quietly, rising. She nodded, talking into the telephone headset while typing quickly.
Exiting, he thought of a song Groucho Marx had sung in some movie which had the lyrics “Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go, and still you had the feeling that you wanted to stay?” He had a sudden mental image of Groucho with his cigar clamped in his teeth (or perhaps it had been Jimmy Durante who sang the song?), and then Groucho’s face evaporated and only the cigar remained, like a moment in Alice in Wonderland. And then—although Keller had quit smoking years before, when his father died—he stopped at a convenience store and bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked one, driving home, listening to some odd space-age music. He drove through Dunkin’ Donuts and got two plain doughnuts to have with coffee as he watched the evening news, remembering the many times Sue Anne had criticized him for eating food without a plate, as if dropped crumbs were proof that your life was about to go out of control.
In his driveway, he saw that his trash can had been knocked over, the plastic bag inside split open, the lid halfway across the yard. He looked out the car window at the rind of a melon, then at the bloody Kleenex he’d held to his chin when he’d nicked himself shaving—he had taken to shaving before turning in, to save time in the morning, now that his beard no longer grew so heavily—as well as issues of The Economist that a better citizen would have bundled together for recycling. He turned off the ignition and stepped out of the car, into the wind, to deal with the mess.
As he gathered it up, he felt as if someone were watching him. He looked up at the house. Soon after Sue Anne left, he had taken down not only the curtains but the blinds as well, liking clear, empty windows that people could go ahead and stare into, if such ordinary life was what they found fascinating. A car passed by—a blue van new to this road, though in the past few weeks he’d seen it often—as he was picking up a mealy apple. Maybe a private detective stalking him, he thought. Someone his wife had hired, to see whether another woman was living in the house. He snatched up the last of the garbage and stuffed it in the can, intending to come out later to rebag it. He wanted to get out of the wind. He planned to eat one of the doughnuts before the six o’clock news.
Sigrid’s son was sitting with his back against the storm door, his knees drawn in tight to his chest, smoking a cigarette. Keller was startled to see him, but did his best to appear unfazed, stopping on the walkway to extract a cigarette of his own from the pack in his pocket. “Can I trouble you for a light?” he said to the boy.
It seemed to work. Brad looked taken aback that Keller wasn’t more taken aback. So much so that he held out the lighter with a trembling hand. Keller towered above him. The boy was thin and short (time would take care of one, if not the other); Keller was just over six feet, with broad shoulders and fifteen or twenty pounds more than he should have been carrying, which happened to him every winter. He said to the boy, “Is this a social call, or did I miss a business appointment?”
The boy hesitated. He missed the humor. He mumbled, “Social.”
Keller hid his smile. “Allow me,” he said, stepping forward. The boy scrambled up and stepped aside so Keller could open the door. Keller sensed a second’s hesitation, though Brad followed him in.
It was cold inside. Keller turned the heat down to fifty-five when he left the house. The boy wrapped his arms around his shoulders. The stub of the cigarette was clasped between his second and third fingers. There was a leather bracelet on his wrist, as well as the spike of some tattoo.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Keller said.
“Do you…” The boy was preoccupied, looking around the room.
“Have an ashtray? I use cups for that,” Keller said, handing him the mug from which he’d drunk his morning coffee. He had run out of milk, so he’d
had it black. And damn—he had yet again forgotten to get milk. The boy stubbed out his cigarette in the mug without taking it in his hands. Keller set it back on the table, tapping off the ash from his own cigarette. He gestured to a chair, which the boy walked to and sat down.
“Do you, like, work or anything?” the boy blurted out.
“I’m the idle rich,” Keller said. “In fact, I just paid a visit to your mother, to get a ticket to Germany. For a friend, not for me,” he added. “That being the only thing on my agenda today, besides reading The Wall Street Journal”—he had not heard about the boy’s arrest because he never read the local paper, but he’d hesitated to say that to Sigrid—“and once again forgetting to bring home milk.”
