The New Yorker Stories полностью

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.”