The New Yorker Stories

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 goodbye, 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.”

Keller sat on the sofa.