The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [250]
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.”
Lynn snorted. “This was on the freeway, I suppose? It was on its way to be an extra in a remake of The Deer Hunter?”
He had understood, then, the urge she so often felt when speaking to him—the urge to hang up on a person who had not even tried to understand one word you had said.
“How was your Thanksgiving?” Sigrid asked. Keller was sitting across from her at the travel agency, arranging to buy Don Kim’s stepdaughter a ticket to Germany so she could pay a final visit to her dying friend. The girl was dying of ALS. The details were too terrible to think about. Jennifer had known her for eleven of her seventeen years, and now the girl was dying. Don Kim barely made it from paycheck to paycheck. It had been necessary to tell Don that he had what he called “a considerable windfall from the eighties stock market” in order to persuade him that in offering to buy Jennifer a ticket, he was not making a gesture he could not afford. He had had to work hard to persuade him. He had to insist on it several times, and swear that in no way had he thought Don had been hinting (which was true).