And Sons (11 page)

“I need to see you.” That’s what Dad said on the phone, his voice catching with improbable yet unmistakable emotion, like hearing a middle-of-the-night train whistle in Manhattan. “I need to see you, you and your brother. I want all of us together again, not like old times, of course. I’m not pretending there were old times to be had, though there were more old times than you care to remember, but how about new times, the three of us, you and me and Richard, and Andy, of course, you need to get to know Andy better. He’s a sweet boy, a caring boy, a good boy, hardly a boy anymore but a young man, a young man
who needs more family than just me. Whatever happened between you and us and me was hardly his fault.”

“Um …”

“Please.”

“Ahh …”

“Please.”

Unlike his brother, Jamie had constructed a pragmatic relationship with the old man, even if the fix was rather leaky. They talked maybe six times a year, which seemed right for the both of them, and once in a while they shared a meal but always under an air of formality and obligation, as if documents were to be signed after dessert. Maybe Jamie would have preferred a closer bond with his dad—we all have our optative moments—but in his heart he understood that the man was ill-equipped for the task. Being a good and attentive father was neither in his nature nor in his nurture, and that was fine, even a relief as he became older and feebler and there was no reciprocal pressure on Jamie to be a good and attentive son. Jamie didn’t suffer over the relationship, not like Richard. Plus Jamie had his mother. Isabel quite obviously favored her youngest, who was the spitting image of her own adored brothers and a happy reminder of her scrappy male-dominated childhood, right down to her own mannish mother, a swimmer of some renown. Yes, Isabel saw in Jamie a certain charm she admired (whereas Richard just exhausted her) and with this maternal affection securely in pocket, Jamie the boy often preferred his father’s absence, not only as a means to spend more time with Mom, but also as a means to a greater end, which were those novels he admired from an early age, first as mysterious totems with a strange, tangible mass, their smell and touch evocative of stubble and cigarettes, all those words inside with their slow hatchings—d-o-g in
Ampersand
, h-o-u-s-e in
The Bend of Light
—until whole paragraphs were born into meaning, their exact significance unclear but the hope of significance present in their cries and squirms, in all those paragraphs and all those pages that pointed both to the future and to the past, the length growing longer as Jamie hit his teens and imagined writing a ten-page term paper fifty times over—what Herculean effort lay bundled in those books, his father’s
quiet yet aggravated labor, and when Jamie in his late teens, early twenties, sat down and read all the books, they were better than any bullshit father-son bonding even if he only grasped half of what was being said, which became clearer over subsequent rereadings and opened up deeper understandings and engendered a different kind of awe—how funny and smart his father could be, how human, how moral, even after he carelessly broke Mom’s heart and rubbed all their noses in his bastard namesake, regardless, the books, these amazing books, they spoke to Jamie and he knew they would continue to speak to him, the author a far greater father than the man. Plus the residual fame helped with a certain kind of girl.

“Come and visit, please,” his father said. “I’m feeling … like dust.”

“Like dust?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Um—”

“I’ve never asked for much.”

That’s true, Jamie thought, and you never gave much either. Of all the Dyers, I knew and know Jamie the best. Friendship was imprinted upon us from the start, despite our obvious differences. We were born five months apart (me first) and were nurtured side by side by adoring mothers who embraced their youngest extra tight, though, more important, our nannies were from the same Caribbean island. There are photo albums filled with pictures of Jamie and me in Central Park, at the beach in Southampton, at the zoo holding hands. I was always taller than everyone, until ninth grade, when I stopped growing and soon became the shortest. We matriculated through the same schools in the same years and part of our education was learning that, like our fathers, we could be friends without all the fuss. We were probably closest in fifth grade, when Jamie briefly flirted with my Transformers obsession (I worshipped Megatron), but by upper school it was obvious that he was destined for cooler things, and with each matriculation our relationship became more asymmetrical, so that by the time we finished with Yale our years together had a funhouse-mirror effect. I was the type of student who reinvented himself with each new school, never satisfied with my status as both person and peer. I took the
change of environment as an opportunity to fine-tune my persona, until junior year abroad, where I hit upon earnest dilettante and returned from Paris newly found. I graduated from Yale with a degree in English literature, my senior essay focusing on A. N. Dyer and the kidnapping of identity. It received a passing grade. But Jamie was one of those rare exotics who emerged fully formed, without pretense, it seemed. Everything was always possible for him, so why bother changing. From an early age he stood apart as the most striking in any group, man, woman, or child, blessed with perfect skin and mink-brown eyes and a smile that revealed crowded incisors but crowded in a way that Walt Whitman would have celebrated. You might have guessed he had some Cherokee blood. He was the first to swim in the ocean, the first to ride a ten-speed, the first to break his arm. Parents called him wicked, though they all adored him, teachers included. Jamie was the mirror that brought back the most alluring aspects of youth and everybody wanted to see themselves in his glow. A day in his company invariably produced uncalculated adventure: start in Chinatown searching for fireworks and end up in Queens watching a cockfight with three Chinese kids and a Russian switchblader named Stahn. I myself found these adventures exhausting (and always frightening), but for Jamie it was just another Saturday afternoon. Nothing was out of the ordinary, certainly not a cemetery in the middle of the night.

The almost full moon shone against the snow and created a drift of ghostly light. The last time Jamie was here, the trees were doing their best advertisement for autumn in Vermont. He had stood on that hill and watched his old girlfriend, his first real girlfriend, get planted into the ground. It was like Sylvia was a seed and cemeteries were gardens in reverse. Her daughters, Delia and Clover, had painted flowers and butterflies on the coffin, sentiments of
I’ll Never Forget You
, and
I’ll Miss You
, and
Love
and
Peace
in heartbreaking purple and green, a family portrait done on the lid—the girls, the house, the horses, the dog, Mom and Dad standing hand in hand—the backdrop of Green Mountains rendered by Sylvia herself over the course of a week in August. It seemed a shame to bury such a lovely thing. Nearly everyone was crying as two friends played “We Bid You Goodnight” on mandolin and
violin. Delia and Clover leaned against their father like ponytailed two-by-fours holding up an unsteady wall. Jamie tried not to stare. Ed Carne did not like him. Jamie knew this because Ed told him so. “I don’t like you,” he said. “I don’t like you being here, I don’t like what you and Sylvia are doing, but this is her call, and whatever makes her happy, you know.” At 12:01
P.M
. Jamie started to film, discreetly, he hoped. The coffin would stand as the final shot.

“Me going into the earth,” Sylvia had said.

“You going into the earth,” Jamie had said.

But here he was, six months later, checking for a sprout.

Jamie sat in the minivan, waiting on Myron Doty, who was late, but who could begrudge a man named Myron Doty, particularly when the man resembled the Myron Doty type, unimagined until the moment of introduction. Myron operated a ski lift in the winter and buried bodies in the summer. “I take ’em up. I take ’em down. I’m cold when they go up and I’m warm when they go down.” Jamie liked Myron, but then again Jamie provided favorable weather conditions for people like Myron to thrive, much like the panhandle of Florida. During our sophomore year I remember when Jamie quit painting (he was quite talented) and picked up a video camera instead. Almost instantly his weekly Sunday night Ecce Homo movies attracted a cult following, the screenings migrating from dorm room to coffee shop to midnight showings at the York on Broadway. His piece on Lord God, the New Haven street preacher/celebrity impersonator, created a minor stir around campus. Was this exploitation of a poor deluded black man or a happy vehicle for creative self-expression? Who knew and who cared, because it was funny and it was real and soon after Jamie found a white actor to play Lord God and he did a shot-for-shot remake and spliced the two together, like a Siamese double feature. More outrage followed—this was Yale, after all—but the movie became a hit on the festival circuit and even won an award at Telluride. For a brief moment Jamie Dyer, filmmaker son of the reclusive novelist, was the school’s most famous undergrad, until an actress took his place. During his senior year Jamie began to investigate the rougher neighborhoods around New Haven in search of similar characters sporting harder
truths. He had this vision of a reenacted documentary titled
The Pin Tumblers
, using a Yale lock as his visual metaphor, but somewhere in the process, maybe when he saw that teenager get stabbed or watched that mother stare at her crying baby, stare without doing anything, something in him shifted, something infinitesimal yet essential—a matter of perspective, I suppose—and whatever life Jamie was trying to capture became stuck in his own head. He started to consider himself a professional witness, a type of superhero bystander, powerless yet unblinking. To me it seemed he was overcompensating for his natural optimism, which he distrusted. The films became darker. Fewer and fewer people attended those Sunday night screenings. I remember once telling him I no longer understood the point.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I just watched ten dogs get euthanized and for what reason?”

“What reason? Maybe because it happens.”

“But to what end? It’s not cathartic, it’s just sad. Toss in some narrative. Interview the ASPCA guy. Give us a sense of his job, his daily routine, his coping in the face of all that death. Denounce the practice. I don’t know, but say something I can hang my hat on.”

“But that’s a lie.”

“No,” I said. “That’s life without the
f
.”

“I know what you can do with that
f
.”

“I’m almost serious,” I said.

“Almost, huh? The safety of qualifiers. So what do you suggest, Philip, that we follow this guy home, that we see him make dinner, feed his kids, walk his own dog, see him wake up the next morning and start his day all over again? Is that what you require, oh audience? Because that feels ridiculous to me, feels like a device, a filter, even worse, a manipulation. Should we also follow the dogs on the street, or in their loving homes, humanize them as well? I’m not looking for art here. I want the opposite. I want the world without the person behind the camera constructing the scene. This is how dogs die, period.”

“Charming,” I said, lighting a Gauloises.

Jamie sighed and packed a bowl. “You know that famous photograph from Vietnam, the one of the soldier shooting the guy in the head, like
the war photo of all war photos. It was taken by this guy Eddie Adams and he captured the exact moment the trigger was pulled.
Boom
. These two men, one in profile, in uniform, middle-aged, the other in full view, in casual wear, young—it’s almost like a wayward son meeting his disappointed father—anyway, those two men are forever connected by that bullet. An absolutely iconic image, almost beautiful in its true expression of horror. But do you know there’s a video as well? An NBC News crew filmed the whole thing, from almost the same exact angle, but there’s nothing iconic about that fucking footage, nothing artful about that man getting shot in the head, no innate drama, no archetypal story, just a cap-gun-like snap followed by the guy falling to the ground, a brief fountain of blood spraying from his head. Whatever sense of timelessness is destroyed in four seconds flat. It’s just plain horrible.” Jamie lit the pipe, the act carrying a certain native intensity, as though the smoke told the story of prehistoric man. “Look,” he said, after exhaling, “my goal is to fight that easy art-making instinct. People die. People suffer. This is how they die. This is how they suffer. It’s unspeakably small yet unspeakably big.”

“But the ‘art’ of that photograph is pretty effective,” I offered.

Jamie disagreed. “The ‘art’ of that photograph plays into our voyeuristic inhumanity, to artistically empathize with the horror, to transfer all our own dread into the image, turning a person’s death into a personal metaphor.”

Despite the college-worn earnestness, I did understand the motivation: the almost incandescent urge for the dreadful thing. When you are a decent person and you have grown up safe and comfortable, with parents who themselves have grown up safe and comfortable, in New York, no less, the Upper East Side of New York, no less, you often find yourself admiring the poor and desperate as if they are somehow more honest, more legitimate, than your tribe, Buddhists to your Capitalists, and you want to prove yourself conscious with a capital C by dipping into hardship—lower—into degradation—lower—into self-abasement. There is liberal guilt and there is liberal sin, where you go slumming, the most cheerful of vagrants. I know I was guilty of this. The stories I wrote in my creative writing classes always gravitated toward seedy
locales, dive bars and trailer parks, with low-down folk in the dirtiest of circumstances. Ugliness seemed to signify emotional authenticity. Half of my characters had problems with heroin, and I had never seen heroin before but please give me a hit of that tragedy so I might swim in more human waters. This desire thankfully passed after graduation, when genuineness was no longer an issue for debate. The concrete had hardened. But Jamie, he became worse, turning into a tourist with forensic intent. He started to travel to ridiculously dangerous places and videotape whatever he came across. The siege of Sarajevo. The redlight district of Mumbai. The civil wars in Algeria and Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone. The everything in Palestine. Why did he do this? Maybe he was rebelling against his father. This, right here, this is the real world, Dad. This is true tragedy. Or maybe he was rebelling against his own artistic tendencies, which tended toward the glib and too clever by half. Nobody was sure what the point was, least of all Jamie. He didn’t work for the press; he didn’t ask questions; he didn’t pursue stories; he just shot video like he was on vacation in Venice, hours and hours of video, animals, children, women and men, trees on fire, houses in ruin. Every few months a box of videotapes arrived in New York and his roommates added it to the stack in his otherwise empty room, Jamie Dyer growing in cardboard form. What are you going to do with all this stuff? was a regular question, and Jamie would just shrug. He had no plans to expose these miseries to the less miserable. He even turned down a few news agencies that were interested in his Darfur footage. His mother begged him to stop. You’re thirty … thirty-four … thirty-eight … forty-one, enough of this lunacy. What could he tell her, that it made him feel something in his gut, as though feelings were a rare substance formed only in places of high pressure and heat?