And Sons (14 page)

“I’m good, thanks.”

“Well, good night then,” she said, tugging at her fingers.

I know some biographers—actually just one in particular and hardly a biographer but rather an opportunist who has spun herself intimate with this tale, which, while technically true, is true in the way the evidence of wind can be gathered by its effect on trees without ever stepping outside and feeling its force against your cheek, yet this person, watching from her closed window, wants you to imagine Gerd Sanning and A. N. Dyer intertwined in storm and stress, all because they lived under the same roof for all those years. But Gerd Sanning was no concubine. Her part in this tale is a hundred times more interesting.

After squaring away my clothes, I washed up and peeked into Jamie’s old room. Most of the furniture was gone, replaced by cardboard file boxes piled high and arranged with an almost Stonehengean precision, as if on certain days the afternoon sunlight explained their meaning. While I was curious what was inside—there must have been fifty of them—I refrained from looking, but I did notice a specific year written on the side of each, the years stretching over six decades. I turned off the lights. I noticed that those glow-in-the-dark stars were still stuck to the ceiling, its Milky Way spelling
FUCK YOU
.

I went downstairs under the guise of a drink of water. The kitchen was one of those New York kitchens that predate the use of stainless steel and marble, and seem, in their lapsed luxury, almost quaint, as if a butter churn could have been in the corner. I opened a cabinet and found a glass, opened the fridge and found a pitcher, poured, and as I performed this basic task I suffered a brief but intense moment of crisis,
puzzling over what I was doing here and what I had done, panging for my wife and kids, mourning for my father and his long-drawn-out death, missing my mother, cringing over Bea, absurd Bea, my huge screw-up, in general indulging in a wave of hopelessness and helplessness, the everythinglessness of my current existence. I thought about calling a friend, but it was late and being separated from my wife I suddenly realized my woeful lack of social connections. It was a pitiful drink of water.

As I stepped back into the vestibule an inevitable force drew me down the short hall toward the closed door. I could hear the typewriter going, the keys never pausing, like how writers write in the movies, typing and typing, never napping between sentences, or staring at their own faces in the mirror, or picking up random books and reading random passages, feeling briefly inspired and then mortally defeated. The temptation to knock was undone when I touched the door and sensed the heat of my own infatuation. Step away, Philip, the great man knows you’re here, and obviously he has no desire to greet you. Either way I had no problem being the eavesdropper, imagining in that persistent clatter the opening lines to
Ampersand:

I heard my name and for a moment wondered if A. N. Dyer had set an elaborate trap to catch me spying. I turned. It was just Andy home for the night. “I didn’t know if I should interrupt,” I tried to explain.

“He wouldn’t hear you anyway,” he said, grabbing at his pants like an overgrown toddler.

“Oh.”

“So you’re actually staying?”

“Not for long.”

“Like upstairs?”

“You’ll hardly know I’m there.”

I followed him back into the main entry. His shirttail was untucked in a sort of a preppy mullet, and I wanted to reach forward and give his shoulders an affectionate squeeze, like any old teacher or family friend, to break through the distance and reconfirm our shared past. But his posture did not invite easy companionship. He seemed a veteran of—I don’t know, adolescence, I suppose, which like all wars is particular to the combatant. I was closest with Andy when he was in my class, a sincere boy filled with nervous tics, always fiddling his fingers, always squinting even though he had perfect vision. Can you see this? I was always asking him. For most of fifth grade his number-one priority was learning how to juggle, which he did to stunning effect, thanks in part to my encouragement (I bought him these special beanbag balls). His blend of awkward grace and extroverted shyness led you to believe he might have a career in mime. As a teacher I was perhaps guilty of favoring him over the others. I gave him extra help and provided him with those spiral notebooks made for lefties and in general took on the role of father figure, since I knew his own father was not in tune with normal boyhood concerns. In some ways I was his best friend. Then he
moved on to sixth grade and fell in love with Mrs. Hawes. They all fall in love with Mrs. Hawes.

“Did you really get fired from Buckley? I mean that’s what I heard tonight.”

It was obvious that Andy had been drinking.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Why?”

“Sometimes you become unmoored.”

“I heard it was a girl.”

“A woman,” I countered.

“And she like worked at J.Crew.”

I imagined the
New York Post
publishing my daily humiliations.

“Sounds totally excellent,” Andy said, swaying.

I tried changing the subject. “How about you? How’s Exeter?”

“Was she cute?”

“The woman?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure, she was cute,” though
cute
was hardly the word unless used sardonically, like when Bea tied a necktie around my balls and asked if she should blow my nose. In that way, yes, she was cute. Very cute. But more than anything I was in terrible awe of her vampish, almost anachronistic youth, like a silent film star straddling me with her eyes. The truth is, sex can make you fall in love. It might not be the deepest love imaginable, but it’s the kind of love I can grasp with both hands, even as I’m sinking. “What house are you in?” I asked, trying to steer Andy back to Exeter.

“She live nearby?”

I can’t say I enjoyed the direction of this conversation.

“I’m not really sure,” I said. She lived in Staten Island.

“And which J.Crew?”

“Um.”

“Were you like her best client? Are there like a hundred pairs of chinos in your closet?”

I have to say it was hard to refuse this teenage admiration. “Where you been?” I asked.

“Nowhere interesting. Had some drinks, I bet you can tell, but just a few and I’m not drunk or anything, just buzzed on sparkling wine because I’m an idiot. I thought I’d be out later, thought I’d be out for the whole night. Dare to dream.” He glanced toward the hall and its buffet of continuous typing. “You know he sleeps in there. Says his feet are too messed up for the stairs, and his breathing, you know, the up and down, the hassle of it, so he sleeps on the couch. Eats in there too, just sandwiches, cream cheese on white bread. Says his stomach can’t handle color anymore. If Gerdie weren’t here, he’d be homeless in this apartment. It’s gotten that bad. I can’t wait to get back to school and I hate school.”

I nodded sympathetically. “I feel for you,” I said. “It’s impossibly hard, a father’s decline. Because you both want to say so much but you’re both so afraid of saying the same thing, something like, I hope I wasn’t a terrible disappointment, or some variant on that theme. The only decent answer is a lie.”

“Like with your dad?” Andy asked.

“Well, yeah.”

“What’d you say to him when he was, like, I don’t know, near the end?”

I wasn’t expecting the question. “Um, I told him I loved him,” I said.

“And that was a lie?”

“No, no, not at all.”

“So what’s the lie then?”

“That we weren’t disappointed in each other, I guess.”

“Sounds like too much unnecessary blame, you know.”

“Well—”

“Death isn’t a gift to complain about,” Andy said, tugging at his hair as if testing its hold.

“You think death is a gift?”

“Kind of. Sure. Maybe
gift
’s the wrong word, maybe life is the gift, right, but death is like opening up the box and seeing what’s inside, like the meaning part, what the dead give to those of us still alive. But I’m spewing. Spumanting,” he said, grinning. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry about your dad.”

“Thanks.”

“I still have all the tin soldiers he gave me.”

This interested me since I certainly remembered my father’s collection preserved in the library in Southampton, shelves upon shelves of squadrons and legions and corps, a miniature world carefully displayed as if couch and chairs were disputed territory. Not even my normally indulgent mother let me touch them, which made me a frustrated Gulliver. These were toys, after all. “But not toys for kids,” she told me. She always took my father’s side, not out of agreement, it seemed, but out of maintaining some sense of balance, as if the world pressed hard on him. My father and his collections. Besides decoys and tin soldiers there were inkwells, and vintage mug shots, and books with unique bindings and/or rare fonts, and six meteorites of varying size, and my personal favorite, a steamer trunk filled with examples of fossilized rock, their surface cast with ancient insects and plant life, the occasional small fish. He once walked into an antiques store and spent the next five years tracking down Edwardian sporting medals. My mother embraced these eccentric accumulations, perhaps because otherwise he was so conventional, and if I were to sink into a favorite image of their life together it would be the two of them walking on the beach, my father in his blue Keds, my mother in her floppy straw hat, both looking down like heads of state discussing pressing matters, in this case the geopolitics of sea glass. My mother had jars of the stuff, gathered since she was a girl and organized by color: the greens and browns and whites and blues and the oh-so-rare reds and yellows. The pursuit seemed to fit her Protestant idea of repair, that something broken could become lovely again if given enough time and touch. In my teens I would sometimes tag along, mostly to escape my peers sunbathing and flirting on the beach. The three of us could walk for miles. I pictured us as a line of police officers, British for some reason, systematically searching the ground for the smallest of clues, a shell casing, a tear of fabric. Whenever my mother found a piece, she oohed like she had captured a sliver of firework. I think these were moments my father and I both collected. But as for those tin soldiers, they disappeared once Lucy entered the field of battle and insisted on redecorating the
house. I never wondered what had become of them, till then. “Did he give you a lot?”

“Of what?”

“Tin soldiers.”

“Sure, yeah.” Andy glanced toward the stairs. “I should head up.”

“You know if you ever want to talk about things.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Your dad. Anything really.”

Andy shrugged before starting up.

“Maybe in the morning I can quiz you on medieval history,” I said.

“Oh jeez.”

“Charlemagne. The Magna Carta. You remember the dates I hope.”

Andy stopped halfway up the stairs. “Do fifth graders still read
Alice in Wonderland
?”

“Of course.”

“And do they still memorize ‘Father William’?”

“Absolutely, it’s Buckley tradition.”

“ ‘I am old, Father William, and my hair has become very white.’ ”

“That’s right,” I said.

Andy was never my best student.

He scurried up the rest of the stairs, hopefully in a better mood, and I wandered into the living room in search of a television and the panacea of late-night TV. Finding none and hearing unbridled whoops coming from the street below, I drifted to the window for my fill of distraction. Being New York–born, I’m a natural Peeping Tom. God bless that woman in the building across the street from my childhood bedroom who seemed allergic to shades, and God bless those binoculars gifted under the pretense of bird-watching. The Dyer living room had a nice view of Central Park, the trees still dormant, their bare canopy like a rendering in graphite. From this perch Richard and Jamie Dyer used to toss soggies on the people below, in particular on me when they were bored and in need of game. But I was a willing target. Never sure of my position between the rails of affection and disdain, I was just happy to be invited over, running down Fifth, wet clumps of toilet paper exploding around me.

Outside the Frick the cotillion of smokers had grown, a few of them talking anachronistically on cellphones. Their old-world couture improved their posture and I thought again of my mother, who put such tremendous stock in appearances and the power of personal grooming. She would have loved this sight, especially in people so young. To her all was fine in the world if you tried your best to look attractive. “I know it sounds silly,” she would tell me, “but it rubs off.” In her eyes you were likely depressed if you went a few days without shaving, if you let your hair grow loose around the edges. Holes in pants were grounds for an intervention, and God forbid if you put on a few pounds. Her daily toilet was analogous to church, her bath a baptism, her makeup table a confessional. It was often exhausting for her children, especially my sister, but she arrived at this philosophy genuinely, without pretense or motives of covering up the messy truth, except, that is, when she became sick. But even toward the end she remained well put together and was undeniably pleased by the weight loss. Good appearance was her core belief. I know my adolescence was practically hard on her as hormones split her handsome boy and turned him inside out. Home from Exeter and I could see the horror on her face (and perhaps the commiseration in my father’s turning away). She bought me special soaps. She took me to a dermatologist, to a hairdresser. She sent me back to the orthodontist who had already tried to straighten my teeth in fifth grade. “Don’t worry,” she would tell me, ever the fixer, “we’ll solve this.” For a few weeks, a month, her handiwork might hold, but then—“Oh, honey”—I would return to my natural unruly state. It wasn’t until my early twenties that I finally settled into my face, not bad-looking though nowhere near its earlier promise. I think it took a few years for my mother to recover from the head-on collision of my getting older.