Nineteen

“I suppose I should be glad you recognize my voice,” Dot said. “You haven’t heard it much lately, have you?”

“I guess not.”

“I turned a couple of things down,” she said, “because they didn’t smell right. But this one smells as good as morning coffee, and we’re definitely the first ones called, so you won’t have to be looking over your shoulder all the time. So why don’t you get on a train and I’ll tell you all about it?”

“Hold on,” Keller said, and put the phone down. When he picked it up again he said, “Sorry, the water was boiling.”

“I heard it whistling. I’m glad you told me what it was. For a minute there I thought you were having an air raid.”

“No, just a cup of tea.”

“I didn’t know you were that domestic,” she said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a soufflй in the oven, would you?”

“A soufflй?”

“Never mind, Keller. Pour the tea in the sink and come up and see me. I’ll give you all the tea you can drink… Keller? Where’d you go?”

“I’m here,” he said. “This is out of town, right?”

“It’s White Plains,” she said. “Same as always. A scant forty minutes on Metro North. Does it all come back to you now?”

“But the job’s out of town.”

“Well, of course, Keller. I’m not about to book you in the city you call home. We tried that once, remember?”

“I remember,” he said. “The thing is, I can’t leave town.”

“You can’t leave town?”

“Not for a while.”

“What have you got, one of those house-arrest collars on your ankle? It gives you a shock if you leave your property?”

“I have to stay in New York, Dot.”

“You can’t take a train to White Plains?”

“I could do that,” he allowed. “Today, anyway. But I can’t take a job out of town.”

“For a while, you say.”

“Right.”

“How long is a while, anyway? A day? A week? A month?”

“I don’t know.”

“Drink your tea,” she said. “Maybe it’ll perk you up. And then catch the next train, and we’ll talk.”

“I think I figured it out,” she said, “but maybe not. What I decided is there’s a stamp auction that you just can’t miss, some stamp coming up that you need for your collection.”

“Dot, for God’s sake.”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s a hobby,” he said. “I wouldn’t pass up work to go to a stamp auction.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Of course not.”

“Even if it was a stamp you needed for your collection?”

“There are thousands of stamps I need for my collection,” he said. “Enough so that I can keep busy without having to go to any particular auction.”

“But if there was one particular stamp you absolutely had to have? But I guess it doesn’t work that way.”

“For some collectors, maybe, but not for me. Anyway, I haven’t been spending that much time with my stamps lately.”

“Oh?”

“I wouldn’t say I’ve lost interest,” he said, “but it sort of ebbs and flows. I subscribe to a couple of magazines and a weekly newspaper, and sometimes I’ll read everything cover to cover, but lately I haven’t even glanced at them. A couple of dealers send me selections on approval, and I keep up with those, but that’s about all I’ve been doing lately. Other dealers send me price lists and auction catalogs and lately I’ve been tossing them out without looking at them.”

“That’s a shame.”

“No,” he said, “it’s more like taking a break from it. I was worried myself, that it was turning out to be a passing fancy, but the astrologer said not to worry.”

“You’ve been to the astrologer again?”

“I call her sometimes, if there’s something that bothers me. She takes a quick look at my chart and tells me if it’s a dangerous time for me, or whatever it was made me call her in the first place.”

“This time it was stamps.”

“And she said my interest would be like the weather.”

“Partly cloudy, with a threat of rain.”

“Hot one day and cold the next,” he said. “Variable, but nothing to worry about. And the nice thing about stamp collecting is you can put it aside for as long as you want and pick it up right where you left off. It’s not like a garden, where you have to keep up with the weeds.”

“I know, they’re worse than the Joneses.”

“Or a virtual aquarium, where the fish die.”

“A virtuous aquarium? As opposed to what, Keller? A sinful one?”

“Virtual,” he said. “A virtual aquarium.”

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s something you can buy for your computer,” he said. “You install it and the screen looks like a fish tank, with plants and guppies and everything. And you can add other species of fish-“

“How?”

“By pressing the right keys, I guess. The thing is, it’s just like a real aquarium, because if you forget to feed the fish, they’ll die.”

“They die?”

“That’s right.”

“How can they die, Keller? They’re not real fish in the first place, are they?”

“They’re virtual fish.”

“Meaning what? They’re images on a screen, right? Like a television program.”

“Sort of.”

“So they swim around on your screen. And if you don’t feed ’em, then what? They turn belly up?”

“Evidently.”

“Have you got one of these, Keller?”

“Of course not,” he said. “I don’t have a computer.”

“I didn’t think you did.”

“I don’t want a computer,” he said, “and if I had one I wouldn’t want a virtual aquarium.”

“How come you know so much about them?”

“I hardly know anything about them,” he said. “I read an article, that’s all.”

“Not in one of your stamp magazines.”

“No, of course not.”

“If it’s not stamps, what could it be? A woman? Keller, are you seeing that girl again?”

“What girl?”

“I guess that’s a no, isn’t it? The black girl, the one who wouldn’t eat dinner. I could come up with her name if I put my mind to it.”

“Maggie.”

“Now I don’t have to put my mind to it.”

“She’s not black. She wears black.”

“Close enough.”

“Anyway, I’m not seeing her. Or anybody else.”

“Probably just as well,” Dot said. “You know what? I give up. I was trying to guess why you can’t leave New York, and I got stuck in a conversation about stamp collecting, and it turned into a conversation about fish, and I don’t want to find out what that’s going to turn into. So let me ask you what I probably should have asked you over the phone. Why can’t you leave New York?”

He told her.

Her eyes widened. “Jury duty? You, Keller? You have to be on a jury?”

“I have to report,” he said. “Whether I actually get on a jury is something else again.”

“Many are called but few are chosen. But how on earth did you get called in the first place?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, the jury system isn’t supposed to make use of people like you, is it?”

“People like me?”

“People who do what you do.”

“Not if they get caught,” he said. “I don’t think you can serve on a jury if you’ve been convicted of a felony. But I’ve never even been charged with a felony, or with anything else. I’ve never been arrested, Dot.”

“And a good thing.”

“A very good thing,” he said. “As far as anybody knows, as far as any official records would indicate, I’m a law-abiding citizen.”

“Citizen Keller.”

“And I am,” he said. “I don’t shoplift, I don’t use or sell drugs, I don’t hold up liquor stores, I don’t mug people. I don’t stiff cabdrivers or vault subway turnstiles.”

“How about jaywalking?”

“That’s not even a misdemeanor. It’s a violation, and anyway I’ve never been cited for it. I have a profession that, well, we know what it is. But nobody else knows about it, so it’s not going to keep me off a jury.”

“You don’t vote, do you, Citizen Keller? Because I thought they drew jurors from the voter registration lists.”

“That used to be all they used,” he said, “and that’s probably why I never got called before now. But now they use other lists, too, from Motor Vehicles and the phone company and I don’t know what else.”