And Sons (24 page)

PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY

April 25, 1951

Dear Charlie,

I feel really bad about what happened. I am sorry. Truly. I was still mad about that grade on my Coleridge paper—I deserved better, it was a good paper, well thought-out and perfectly executed. Zeus forbid if you don’t constrict yourself to the Exeter mold. I put a lot of effort into that paper and tried to write like that old opium eater and it was fifty times more interesting than your run of the mill term paper with its tired thesis statements and conclusions. I did something different and now I am rolling the rock back up the hill. And then I got your letter and I thought maybe it was a joke. It was all bad timing. You were just trying to make me feel better. I know that now. And it was late and I was tired and when you came into my room and said those things and maybe you were starting to come down with whatever you have now and that would explain a lot but I lost my temper and I am sorry. I over-reacted. I should
not
have hit you and said the things I said. That was wrong. I was just so bloody upset about that paper. I am the best student in English class. Everyone knows that. Mr. Halley has it in for me, if that’s not obvious. And you were just trying to make me feel better and you were tired and sick and I was tired and frustrated. How are you feeling now? Are you coming back to school soon? I certainly deserved my suspension and was lucky I didn’t get expelled. You said what you said only meaning the nicest thing in the world. We are the oldest friends after all. I should have never gone as far as I did and called you the things I called you. You are nothing like that, Charlie. You’re a good man, an even gooder friend (that’s a joke, Mr. Halley). You were exhausted and feverish. I should have been more understanding but I had to write that damned paper all over again, make it boring just to satisfy the way it’s done. So forgive me, Charlie. I hope you feel better and come back to school soon. You are, as Coleridge might say, a companionable form. Unlike Mr. Halley, bells his only music.

Your friend forever,
Andrew                 

W
HEN ALL OF THIS HAPPENED
I thought of myself as old. Amazing. Every day I am more and more convinced that we can only use time to measure our own shadows, and while we might think of memories as the sun, they are at best a torch. In terms of Bea I was certainly old. Much too old. I should have known better. After losing my family and my job and my good name—whatever that means—I still called her and still took her to Bemelmans and still
brought her back to the Hotel Wales where, despite everything, I still kept a room. Absurd. Amazing and absurd. But Richard and Jamie had put me in a mood. I hoped for a reunion but all I found was the old flickering, and me feeling around for a path. The Dyers perform their secret ministries, and we Toppings, or this Topping in particular, strains to catch his name on their lips. I remember summer beach picnics organized by the Dyer and Topping women, the mothers curating our good cheer; Isabel
took the photographs as Eleanor posed the players, the two of them hoping that these happy pictures might stand in for how we looked back, a prefabricated nostalgia. If fathers are unknowable, then mothers are all too visible, a reminder of our earthly attachments. At some point between the swimming and the exploring of dunes and the tossing of various discs and balls, I would gravitate to the doldrums, hoping for sympathy. My dad was always quiet yet genial, like a foreigner who could only
respond with a few common expressions. By the age of twelve I had pretty much given up on him and even told my mother so in a moment rife I’m sure with Freudian overtones. “I don’t think I really love him,” I said. She looked at me as if I had handed her something homemade and easily broken. “That’s
okay,” she told me, touching the back of my head. “You will someday.” During these family get-togethers my attention
would wander over to A. N. Dyer, and I swear I could read my own discomfort in those inkwell eyes. I’d watch him toss a stick for one of the dogs, his right arm cranking it a good distance, my legs tempted to give chase. Absurd. At the Wales I ordered room service—champagne and strawberries, shrimp cocktail, crème caramel—since I had shortchanged Bea on the glamorous portion of the evening. She stretched herself on the bed, on a duvet of faded florals, geraniums
mostly, and began to answer texts on her phone, thumbs flying, feet heeling away shoes, a youthful gravity spreading her legs, like branches wet with snow. In my defense, I loved her. Then again, I’m guilty of easily falling in love, of confusing the abstract with the concrete, hoping those words might cast me as a caring individual and dispel my notions of a sinister center. I believe in love at first sight so that I might be seen.

I went over and touched her.

“The Bea’s knee,” I said.

She grinned but continued with her texting.

There were no other affairs before Bea, though I had become prone to late-night wanderings into the seamier side of the Internet. To my eyes at least, a new sexual revolution was taking place. Self-exposure now seemed a rite of passage, a flash of breast carrying the weight of a wink and full frontal nudity nothing more than a big warm hello. So many women, barely women, were allowing themselves to be photographed in all sorts of compromised states. And every day more flesh was
added to the rolls. Were these amateurs or pros? Was this the way of the world or simply the way of the World Wide Web? I honestly had no idea. But regardless, these youthful exploits went begging at my fingers. In my day pornography was a pleasant if offensive joke, strictly the province of professional creeps and dirty uncles. At Exeter and Yale I was a good citizen, a thoughtful man, certainly better than I am today, marching in Take Back the Night rallies, volunteering at Planned Parenthood,
reading Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. I would have spat on anyone using the word
bitch
, let alone
whore
or
cunt
. My world had no fucking. Maybe people screwed or got
laid. They banged on occasion. But even one-night-stands went through a certain due process. Between Helen Dieter and my wife I had seven sexual partners, only three of whom I dated for any length of time. This is no excuse, I understand. Nine is a
fine number. And I was happy with Ashley, happily married, happily entangled in parenthood, the love functional yet consistent. But then came the second blush of middle age, which, in combination with the discovery of Internet porn, roused my hibernating adolescence, who realized all that he had missed and all that he was missing, one naked girl at a time.

I unzipped for Bea.

Many a night grading papers was spent intermittently clicking onto another couple fucking, ass fucking, cock sucking, double cock fucking, fist fucking,
click-click-click
, yet still I needed more. I couldn’t rest until I had seen it all and please God let me see it all so that I may rest. Hell is other people fucking. To allay myself of the virtual, I began to dabble in the consequential and created a secret email account ([email protected]) and trolled
Craigslist and joined an online dating service. I never moved past the most superficial contact and more often scared myself into three or four days of abstinence, that is, until one afternoon in mid-January. I was in SoHo shopping, hoping the J.Crew down here had a hipper edge than the J.Crew uptown, when a dark-eyed woman came up to me as I thumbed through a stack of chambray utility shirts and asked if I needed help. I said yes, please, and she took me around and updated my wardrobe to the
tune of two thousand dollars. Somehow during the exchange I charmed her—I remember teasing her about her almost hidden tattoo—and by the end I signed her up as my personal shopper. That’s when the emails began. Of course, when I came home loaded down with bags, Ashley praised my self-reliance—she usually bought my clothes—though a few of my fashion choices she found dubious.

Bea started rubbing me while finishing her text one-handed.

I’ll spare you the details of that night and all the nights before, non-nights really, nights stolen from the middle of the day, like the two hours at the Sheraton near LaGuardia, or the hour and a half at the Howard Johnson’s in Brooklyn. It’s all too easy to imagine. Nothing
new there. But on occasion I find myself crouching down and shining my light in her direction, seeking a great and passionate affair instead of a twenty-year-old
girl making shadow puppets with her hands. Forgive me. And forgive me for the next morning when I waited outside my old building reeking of cocktail sauce and sex. I knew that Ashley would soon be down to walk Rufus to Buckley—he was in kindergarten—and then taxi Eloise to Chapin—she was in second grade. Except for the funeral, I had been dodging them, too mortified to deal with the situation, though I did have the excuse of my father dying. Strange, I was at my best as a
son when I was at my worst as a father. A. N. Dyer would have had a field day with the likes of me.

Ashley was unsalvageable. She was forever devastated by my actions, as she told me, rather dramatically, early on—“I will never get over what you’ve done to me! Never!”—though soon she discovered her survivor’s instinct, her ability to plow ahead, that sharp McCracken chin the furrowing blade. She began to exercise every day. She ran a marathon. She got back into graphic design and rekindled an interest in experimental theater (whereas
I was an opera man). A year later she met an Irish expat and remarried and had another child, a girl named Charlotte. Funny how life has a way of justifying itself. Thanks to her misery, she was never happier. Plus she had the pleasure of watching me curl into a small turd-shaped ball, my destiny guided by a dung beetle. But as of that morning her happy prospects still seemed an impossibility, and I was the asshole king finally making an effort with his kids. I would take Rufus to school, the
logical paternal choice; I would lift him onto my shoulders and bounce him to Buckley, show my face to the teachers, to the administration, to the parents: Philip Topping, guilty yet resilient. I grew Hollywood hopeful. But when 8:10
A.M
. passed and there was still no sign of them I went over to Carlos the
doorman and asked if they had come down yet. He told me they had left two days ago for spring break. Fuck me. Of course they had. A week in
Lyford Cay. I even said, “Fuck me,” and Carlos, fuck him, grinned, and I slipped further into A. N. Dyer’s world.

When I returned to the apartment Gerd was frantic. Richard and Jamie were due in thirty minutes, and Andy was still upstairs in bed while Andrew was in the bathroom downstairs, the shower running for twenty minutes, like maybe he had slipped and broken something, like maybe he was trying to yell but instead was drowning, “like maybe he’s getting poached,” Gerd said to me. The poor woman. Bagels and cream cheese and smoked salmon and a variety of muffin and
morning pastry and fruit overwhelmed the kitchen, the sink bunched with an assortment of flowers in search of vases, and on top of this, on top of the squeezing of oranges and the brewing of regular and decaf coffee, Gerd was trying to resuscitate the apartment, to shock the living room into breathing again, to peel open the eyes of the dining room and let it glimpse once more a table spread with food. “I just want it to be nice,” she told me as she straightened the chairs,
“for Andy.”

I took off my overcoat and helped with the flowers.

I knew flowers thanks to my mother. In Southampton we had wonderful gardens, in all states and styles, which she constantly tended to in green clogs, an oversized button-down shirt, a tennis visor. She snipped at whatever needed snipping, never pleased with the lilacs near the tennis court or the rhododendron around the cottage, dreaming of a greenhouse, a gift my father offered every year but which she pooh-poohed as too expensive. She was wary of ever appearing to try too
hard, which of course took great effort. She was a believer in the natural graces, and when she got sick, she never once thought of putting up
a fight. But she was famous for her gardens. And I was her faithful assistant. I deadheaded, I pruned (there is a difference), I weeded, I mulched. By the time I was nine I could identify most varieties of flower, whether in the field or in chintz, and my older siblings accused me of sucking up, as if being a loving son was the same as
being a teacher’s pet. Typical. The teasing was particularly merciless when I won best of show for juniors at the Southampton Garden Club’s annual flower show (won it three years in a row, in fact). Once married, I forsook Long Island for the McCracken family compound in upstate New York and gave up gardening, without regret. But as I stood over the sink and rushed through arrangements, I must have remembered my mother somewhere in the task, a loss briefly filled, an illusion of a
life maintained, like water for those stems. I placed the vases around the apartment and was putting the last one on the table in the front hall when the doorbell rang.