The New Yorker Stories (73 page)

The talk back at the house was about perfection. In a perfect world, all wines would be perfect. Ditto marriages. All books brilliant (a toast was drunk). Superior music (again, glasses were raised) would be listened to, keenly. In that fairy tale, which was not Dale’s, and which was not Brenda’s, either, no woman would lie badly wounded on her kitchen floor.

Brenda crossed the room and stood at Dale’s side. “Doughnut hole,” she said quietly, looking down, then picked it up, at the end of its trail of powdered sugar, as if plucking a shooting star from the darkness.

This time, Tyrone showed interest. Dale picked up the other two. The dog was definitely interested. There was no dirt on the doughnut holes that Dale and Brenda could see, as they examined them closely.

“Why not?” Dale said, giving voice to what Brenda was thinking. They could pretend to be people at a cocktail party, eating pleasant tidbits.

But sirens pierced the night.

They signified a problem for someone, Nelson knew. Another problem, Jerome also thought.

The sound overwhelmed Bartók on the stereo. The sirens were shrill and constant: a sound you might say was annoyingly like a woman’s voice—if one could still say such things, but of course one could not.

Then the crescendo of noise, demanding their attention.

One man preceded the other out of the house. That door, too, was left open to the wind.

A police car, a second police car, an ambulance, a fire engine—the full militia leading the way.

To what? The two words were like a heartbeat:
to what, to what
.

Down a dirt road in a country far from France.

Down a narrow road across from a rented house.

The meal left behind, one or the other having remembered to extinguish the candles.

That Last Odd Day in L.A.

K
eller went back and forth about going into Cambridge to see Lynn, his daughter, for Thanksgiving. If he went in November, he’d miss his niece and nephew, who made the trip back East only in December, for Christmas. They probably could have got away from their jobs and returned for both holidays, but they never did. The family had gathered for Thanksgiving at his daughter’s ever since she moved into her own apartment, which was going on six years now; Christmas dinner was at Keller’s sister’s house, in Arlington. His daughter’s apartment was near Porter Square. She had once lived there with Ray Ceruto, before she decided she was too good for a car mechanic. A nice man, a hard worker, a gentleman—so naturally she chose instead to live in serial monogamy with men Keller found it almost impossible to get along with. Oh, but they had white-collar jobs and white-collar aspirations: with her current boyfriend, she had recently flown to England for all of three days in order to see the white cliffs of Dover. If there had been bluebirds, they had gone unmentioned.

Years ago, Keller’s wife, Sue Anne, had moved back to Roanoke, Virginia, where she now rented a “mother-in-law apartment” from a woman she had gone to school with back in the days when she and Keller were courting. Sue Anne joked that she herself had become a sort of ideal mother-in-law, gardening and taking care of the pets when her friends went away. She was happy to have returned to gardening. During the almost twenty years that she and Keller had been together, their little house in the Boston suburbs, shaded by trees, had allowed for the growth of almost nothing but springtime bulbs, and even those had to be planted in raised beds because the soil was of such poor quality. Eventually, the squirrels discovered the beds. Sue Anne’s breakdown had had to do with the squirrels.

So: call his daughter, or do the more important thing and call his neighbor and travel agent, Sigrid, at Pleasure Travel, to apologize for their recent, rather uneventful dinner at the local Chinese restaurant, which had been interrupted by a thunderstorm grand enough to announce the presence of Charlton Heston, which had reminded Keller that he’d left his windows open. He probably should not have refused to have the food packed to go. But when he’d thought of having her to his house to eat the dinner—his house was a complete mess—or of going to her house and having to deal with her son’s sour disdain, it had seemed easier just to bolt down his food.

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.”