The New Yorker Stories полностью

“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?”