The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [253]
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.
“Would you not tell my mother I came here?” the boy said.
“Okay,” Keller said. He waited.
“Were you ever friends with my dad?” the boy asked.
“No, though once we both donated blood on the same day, some years ago, and sat in adjacent chairs.” It was true. For some reason, he had never told Sigrid about it. Not that there was very much to say.
The boy looked puzzled, as if he didn’t understand the words Keller had spoken.
“My dad said you worked together,” the boy said.
“Why would I lie?” Keller said, leaving open the question: Why would your father?
Again, the boy looked puzzled. Keller said, “I taught at the college.”
“I was at my dad’s over Thanksgiving, and he said you worked the same territory.”
In spite of himself, Keller smiled. “That’s an expression,” Keller said. “Like ‘I cover the waterfront.’ ”
“Cover what?” the boy said.
“If he said we ‘worked the same territory,’ he must have meant that we were up to the same thing. A notion I don’t understand, though I do suppose it’s what he meant.”
The boy looked at his feet. “Why did you buy me the raffle tickets?” he said.
What was Keller supposed to tell him? That he’d done it as an oblique form of apology to his mother for something that hadn’t happened, and that he therefore didn’t really need to apologize for? The world had changed: here sat someone who’d never heard the expression “worked the same territory.” But what, exactly, had been Brad’s father’s context? He supposed he could ask, though he knew in advance Brad would have no idea what he meant by context.
“I understand Thanksgiving was a pretty bad time for you,” Keller said. He added, unnecessarily (though he had no tolerance for people who added things unnecessarily), “Your mother told me.”
“Yeah,” the boy said.
They sat in silence.
“Why is it you came to see me?” Keller asked.
“Because I thought you were a friend,” the boy surprised him by answering.
Keller’s eyes