Follies

by Ann Beattie

  Keller sat on the sofa.

  “Would you not tell my mother I came here?” the boy said.

  “Okay,” Keller said. He waited.

  “Were you ever friends with my dad?” the boy asked.

  “No, though once we both donated blood on the same day, some years ago, and sat in adjacent chairs.” It was true. For some reason, he had never told Sigrid about it. Not that there was very much to say.

  The boy looked puzzled, as if he didn’t understand the words Keller had spoken.

  “My dad said you worked together,” the boy said.

  “Why would I lie?” Keller said, leaving open the question: Why would your father?

  Again, the boy looked puzzled. Keller said, “I taught at the college.”

  “I was at my dad’s over Thanksgiving, and he said you worked the same territory.”

  In spite of himself, Keller smiled. “That’s an expression,” Keller said. “Like ‘I cover the waterfront.’ ”

  “Cover what?” the boy said.

  “If he said we ‘worked the same territory,’ he must have meant that we were up to the same thing. A notion I don’t understand, though I do suppose it’s what he meant.”

  The boy looked at his feet. “Why did you buy me the raffle tickets?” he said.

  What was Keller supposed to tell him? That he’d done it as an oblique form of apology to his mother for something that hadn’t happened, and that he therefore didn’t really need to apologize for? The world had changed: here sat someone who’d never heard the expression “worked the same territory.” But what, exactly, had been Brad’s father’s context? He supposed he could ask, though he knew in advance Brad would have no idea what he meant by context.

  “I understand Thanksgiving was a pretty bad time for you,” Keller said. He added, unnecessarily (though he had no tolerance for people who added things unnecessarily), “Your mother told me.”

  “Yeah,” the boy said.

  They sat in silence.

  “Why is it you came to see me?” Keller asked.

  “Because I thought you were a friend,” the boy surprised him by answering.

  Keller’s eyes betrayed him. He felt his eyebrows rise slightly.

  “Because you gave me six raffle tickets,” the boy said.

  Clearly, the boy had no concept of one’s being emphatic by varying the expected numbers: one rose instead of a dozen; six chances instead of just one.

  Keller got up and retrieved the bag of doughnuts from the hall table. The grease had seeped through and left a glistening smudge on the wood, which he wiped with the ball of his hand. He carried the bag to Brad and lowered it so he could see in. Close up, the boy smelled slightly sour. His hair was dirty. He was sitting with his shoulders hunched. Keller moved the bag forward an inch. The boy shook his head no. Keller folded the top, set the bag on the rug. He walked back to where he’d been sitting.

  “If you’d buy me a bike, I’d work next summer and pay you back,” Brad blurted out. “I need another bike to get to some places I got to go.”

  Keller decided against unscrambling the syntax and regarded him. The tattoo seemed to depict a spike with something bulbous at the tip. A small skull, he decided, for no good reason except that these days skulls seemed to be a popular image. There was a pimple on Brad’s chin. Miraculously, even to a person who did not believe in miracles, Keller had gone through his own adolescence without ever having a pimple. His daughter had not had similar good luck. She had once refused to go to school because of her bad complexion, and he had made her cry when he’d tried to tease her out of being self-conscious. “Come on,” he’d said to her. “You’re not Dr. Johnson, with scrofula.” His wife, as well as his daughter, had then burst into tears. The following day, Sue Anne had made an appointment for Lynn with a dermatologist.

  “Would this be kept secret from your mother?”

  “Yeah,” the boy said. He wasn’t emphatic, though; he narrowed his eyes to see if Keller would agree.

  He asked, “Where will you tell her you got the bike?”

  “I’ll say from my dad.”

  Keller nodded. “That’s not something she might ask him about?” he said.

  The boy put his thumb to his mouth and bit the cuticle. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t want to tell her it was in exchange for doing yard work for me next summer?”

  “Yeah,” the boy said, sitting up straighter. “Yeah, sure, I can do that. I will.”

  It occurred to Keller that Molly Bloom couldn’t have pronounced the word will more emphatically. “We might even say that I ran into you and suggested it,” Keller said.

  “Say you ran into me at Scotty’s,” the boy said. It was an ice cream store. If that was what the boy wanted him to say, he would. He looked at the bag of doughnuts, expecting that in his new-found happiness the boy would soon reach in. He smiled. He waited for Brad to move toward the bag.

  “I threw your trash can over,” Brad said.

  Keller’s smile faded. “What?” he said.

  “I was mad when I came here. I thought you were some nut-case friend of my dad’s. I know you’ve been dating my mom.”

  Keller cocked his head. “So you knocked over my trash can, in preparation for asking me to give you money for a bike?”

  “My dad said you were a sleazebag who was dating Mom. You and Mom went to Boston.”

  Keller had been called many things. Many, many things. But sleazebag had not been among them. It was unexpected, but it stopped just short of amusing him. “And if I had been dating Sigrid?” he said. “That would mean you should come over and dump out my trash?”

  “I never thought you’d lend me money,” Brad mumbled. His thumb was at his mouth again. “I didn’t…why would I think you’d give me that kind of money, just because you bought twelve bucks’ worth of raffle tickets?”

  “I’m not following the logic here,” Keller said. “If I’m the enemy, why, exactly, did you come to see me?”

  “Because I didn’t know. I don’t know what my father’s getting at half the time. My dad’s a major nutcase, in case you don’t know that. Somebody ought to round him up in one of his burlap bags and let him loose far away from here so he can go live with his precious turkeys.”

  “I can understand your frustration,” Keller said. “I’m afraid that with all the world’s problems, setting turkeys free doesn’t seem an important priority to me.”

  “Why? Because you had a dad that was a nutcase?”

  “I’m not understanding,” Keller said.

  “You said you understood the way I feel. Is it because you had a dad that was nuts, too?”

  Keller thought about it. In retrospect, it was clear that his father’s withdrawal, the year preceding his death, had been because of depression, not old age. He said. “He was quite a nice man. Hardworking. Religious. Very generous, even though he didn’t have much money. He and my mother had a happy marriage.” To his surprise, that sounded right: for years, in revising his father’s history, he had assumed that everything had been a façade, but now that he, himself, was older, he tended to think that people’s unhappiness was rarely caused by anyone else, or alleviated by anyone else.

  “I came here and threw over your trash and ripped up a bush you just planted,” Brad said.

  The boy was full of surprises.

  “I’ll replant it,” Brad said. He seemed, suddenly, to be on the verge of tears. “The bush by the side of the house,” he said tremulously. “There was new dirt around it.”

  Indeed. Just the bush Keller thought. On a recent morning, after a rain, he had dug up the azalea and replanted it where it would get more sun. It was the first thing he could remember moving in years. He did almost nothing in the yard—had not worked in it, really, since Sue Anne left.

  “Yes, I think you’ll need to do that,” he said.

  “What if I don’t?” the boy said shrilly. His voice had changed entirely.

  Keller fro
wned, taken aback at the sudden turnaround.

  “What if I do like I came to do?” the boy said.

  Suddenly there was a gun pointed at Keller. A pistol. Pointed right at him, in his living room. And, as suddenly, he was flying through the air before his mind even named the object. It went off as he tackled the boy, wresting the gun from his hand. “You’re both fucking nutcases, and you were, too, dating that bitch!” Brad screamed. In that way, because of so much screaming, Keller knew that he had not killed the boy.

  The bullet had passed through Keller’s forearm. A “clean wound,” as the doctor in the emergency room would later say, his expression betraying no awareness of the irony inherent in such a description. With an amazing surge of strength, Keller had pinned the boy to the rug with his good arm as the other bled onto the doughnut bag, and then the struggle was over and Keller did not know what to do. It had seemed they might stay that way forever, with him pinning the boy down, one or the other of them—both of them?—screaming. He somehow used his wounded arm as well as his good arm to pull Brad up and clench him to his side as he dragged the suddenly deadweight, sobbing boy to the telephone and dialled 911. Later, he would learn that he had broken two of the boy’s ribs, and that the bullet had missed hitting the bone in his own forearm by fractions of an inch, though the wound required half a dozen surprisingly painful sutures to close.

  Keller awaited Sigrid’s arrival in the emergency room with dread. His world had already been stood on its head long ago, and he’d developed some fancy acrobatics to stay upright, but Sigrid was just a beginner. He remembered that he had thought about going to her house that very night. It might have been the night he stayed. Everything might have been very different, but it was not. And this thought: If his wife held him accountable for misjudging the importance of their daughter’s blemishes, might Sigrid think that, somehow, the violent way things had turned out had been his fault? Among the many things he had been called had been provocative. It was his daughter’s favorite word for him. She no longer even tried to find original words to express his shortcomings: he was provocative. Even she would not buy the sleazebag epithet. No: he was provocative.

  In the brightly lit room, they insisted he remain on a gurney. Fluid from a bag was dripping into his arm. Sigrid—there was Sigrid!—wept and wept. Her lawyer accompanied her: a young man with bright blue eyes and a brow too wrinkled for his years, who seemed too rattled to be in charge of anything. Did he hover the way he did because he was kind, or was there a little something more between him and Sigrid? Keller’s not having got involved with Sigrid hadn’t spared her any pain, he saw. Once again, he had been instrumental in a woman’s abject misery.

  Trauma was a strange thing, because you could be unaware of its presence, like diseased cells lurking in your body (a natural enough thought in a hospital) or like bulbs that would break the soil’s surface only when stirred in their depths by the penetrating warmth of the sun.

  Keller remembered the sun—no, the moon—of Lynn’s cradle. The cradle meant to hold three babies that held only one. He had suggested that Sue Anne, depressed after the birth, return to school, get her degree in art history, teach. He had had a notion of her having colleagues. Friends. Because he was not a very good friend to have. Oh, sometimes, sure. It had been a nice gesture to buy a plane ticket for someone who needed to visit a dying friend. How ironic it was, his arranging for that ticket the same day he, himself, might have died.

  Sigrid was wearing the gray sweater, the necklace with the cross. Her son had blown apart her world. And Keller was not going to be any help: he would not even consider trying to help her put it together again. All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men…even Robert Penn Warren couldn’t put Sigrid together again.

  Keller had tried that before: good intentions; good suggestions; and his wife had screamed that whatever she did, it was never enough, never enough, well, maybe it would be enough if she showed him what strength she possessed—what strength he hadn’t depleted with his sarcasm and his comic asides and his endless equivocating—by throwing the lamp on the floor, his typewriter against the wall (the dent was still there), the TV out the window. These thoughts were explained to him later, because he had not been home when she exhibited her significant strength. The squirrels had eaten every bulb. There was not going to be one tulip that would bloom that spring. He suspected otherwise—of course the squirrels had not dug up every bulb—but she was in no state of mind to argue with. Besides, there were rules, and his role in the marriage was not to be moderate, it was to be provocative. His daughter had said so.

  And there she was, his daughter, rushing to his side, accompanied by a nurse: the same person who had once been shown to him swaddled in a pink blanket, now grown almost as tall as he, her face wrinkled then, her face wrinkled now.

  “Don’t squint,” he said. “Put your glasses on. You’ll still be pretty.”

  He stood quickly to show her he was fine, which made the nurse and a doctor who rushed to his side very angry. He said, “I don’t have health insurance. I demand to be discharged. The gun got discharged, so it’s only fair that I be discharged also.”

  The nurse said something he couldn’t hear. The effort of standing had left him light-headed. Across the room, Sigrid appeared in duplicate and went out of focus. Lynn was negating what he’d just said, informing everyone in a strident voice that of course he had health insurance. The doctor had quite firmly moved him back to his gurney, and now many hands were buckling straps over his chest and legs.

  “Mr. Keller,” the nurse said, “you lost quite a bit of blood before you got here, and we need you to lie down.”

  “As opposed to up?” he said.

  The doctor, who was walking away, turned. “Keller,” he said, “this isn’t E.R., where we’d do anything for you, and the nurse isn’t your straight man.”

  “Clearly not,” he said quickly. “She’s a woman, we assume.”

  The doctor’s expression did not change. “I knew a wiseass like you in med school,” he said. “He couldn’t do the work, so he developed a comedy routine and made a big joke of flunking out. In the end, I became a doctor and he’s still talking to himself.” He walked away.

  Keller was ready with a quick retort, heard it inside his head, but his lips couldn’t form the words. What his nearest and dearest had always wished for was now coming true: his terrible talent with words was for the moment suspended. Truly, he was too tired to speak.

  The phrase nearest and dearest carried him back in time and reminded him of the deer. The deer that had disappeared in the Hollywood Hills. His own guardian angel, appropriately enough a little mangy, with hooves rooting it to the ground, instead of gossamer wings to carry it aloft. And his eyes closed.

  When he opened them, Keller saw that his daughter was looking down at him, and nodding slowly, a tentative smile quivering like a parenthesis at the sides of her mouth, a parenthesis he thought might contain the information that, yes, once he had been able to reassure her easily, as she, in believing, had reassured him.

  In appreciation, he attempted his best Jack Nicholson smile.

  About the Author

  Ann Beattie has published seven novels and seven collections of stories. She has been included in three O. Henry Award collections and John Updike’s Best American Short Stories of the Century She has received an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story form. She and her husband, the artist Lincoln Perry, live in Maine; Key West, Florida; and Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is the Edgar Allan Poe Professor at the University of Virginia.

 

 

 
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