And Sons (36 page)

“It’s a satire about the movie business.”

“Sounds cool.”

“About an old actor, sort of like Brando at his lowest.”

“Okay.”

“And he’s starring in this ridiculous lowbrow comedy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Not that I really know the movie business, except what I see in the movies.”

“I’m sure it’s great.”

“It’ll probably never happen.”

“You’re meeting with Eric Harke. That’s huge.”

A pause between brothers. Silence seemed written into the wood of the bar, which both of them traced with their eyes. Richard and Jamie hadn’t talked much over the last twenty years. Mom was the usual intermediary, the wall through which they tapped, dependent on her dividing presence to keep them connected. Without her, the prisoners might riot before fleeing. But right now she was forty minutes late.

Richard thumped the bar. “Where the hell is she?”

Jamie suggested they just order some food.

“What could they be talking about?”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”

“You don’t think they’re rekindling the old flame.”

“No,” Jamie said, “she’s just feeling sorry for him. What are Candy and the kids up to?”

“I think the Statue of Liberty.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever been.”

“Me neither.”

“They having a good time?”

“I think,” Richard said.

“And Candy?”

“Sure.”

“And how about you?”

“Despite Dad’s behavior?”

“Yes, despite that hiccup. How’s it been, being back?”

Richard thought for a moment. “I keep on expecting to run into people, you know, like people I’ve wronged one way or another. Or worse than wronged. I’m walking around with an apology speech running in my head, what with the way I left, you know, without a word to friends. Like if I see Ryan Swift—you remember Ryan?”

“Of course.”

“I was kind of awful to him,” Richard said.

“I thought that was one of the twelve steps. Amends, right?”

“He’s one I missed.”

“He lives in Denver anyway.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Divorced. Has three kids.”

“Wow.” Richard propped his chin on top of clasped hands. A hundred old friends could have walked through that door—I could have walked through that door and Sal the host would have seated me ahead of everyone else, and Margie, who had worked there forever, would have put in my order without asking—bacon burger medium, cottage fries, Diet Coke—or maybe the Irish girl, Sheila, or even better the newcomer Kivi with those big glistening teeth like a wet T-shirt—but only strangers swung through. A few days in the city and Richard had bumped into just one old friend, Roger Braxton, who was hardly a friend, practically a sworn enemy since the second grade—Roger the crybaby snob, the weenie rich boy, the self-professed king of the club scene, there he was walking down Madison in his size-stout suit and balding pate that resembled the hair around an asshole, walking right toward Richard, who recognized this nesting doll of awful Braxton men, Richard letting this idiot pass with good riddance, but a few steps later he let go with “Roger? Roger Braxton?” and Roger turned around and seemed baffled until Richard identified himself, and they chatted for a minute, Roger dropping a few kind words into Richard’s outstretched
hand. Two blocks later Richard was back to hating the prick. Goddamn New York. Goddamn me. “I did run into Roger Braxton,” he told Jamie.

“Oh Jesus.”

“I was almost happy to see him.”

“You used to beat the crap out of him,” Jamie said.

“I did?”

“All sanctioned school violence but you made a point of it.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You don’t remember breaking his leg?”

“Not really.”

“He was the catcher and you barreled into him.”

“Maybe I remember him blocking the plate.”

“I can still hear the way he screamed.”

“Oh shit.”

“Now you remember.” Jamie started to laugh, half-fake, half-real.

“He did seem sort of jumpy when I said hello.”

“I bet he was.”

Now Richard started to laugh, a third fake.

“Poor guy must have been petrified.”

“I’m an idiot.”

“He probably thought you were going to slide-tackle him.”

The laughter continued to grow in percentages until its genuine form took over, the brothers giddy from waiting and relieved to find themselves in good company, perhaps even driving the laughter forward and riding its smooth wake.

“I almost hugged him,” Richard said.

“He would’ve shat his pants.”

Richard pulled a cellphone from his pocket.

“Is it Mom?” asked Jamie.

“No. This is Emmett’s phone.” On the touchscreen sweet Emma sported a fish face, her lips touching toward the infinite. She always called him Mr. Dyer no matter how many times he insisted on Richard. Brown eyes, brown hair, brown sunbaked complexion, so cute, so young. So persistent. This must have been her tenth call.

“Why do you have Emmett’s phone?”

“Not really sure. I need to give it back to him.”

“She’s cute.”

Richard turned the phone away from his brother. “She’s sixteen.”

“Even better.”

“Perv.”

“I’m just happy for Emmett.”

“You can’t believe how many phone calls and texts he gets.”

“I bet. He’s a good-looking kid.”

“I mean, who has that kind of time to keep in touch?”

“It’s all pseudo-connection, the device of the device.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Not sure,” Jamie said, finishing his beer.

“I think he’s done something lousy to this girl, and she’s upset with him, which is too bad because they’ve been friends a long time.”

“You ever answer any of the calls?”

“Of course not.”

“I would,” Jamie said in a wicked tone.

Did Emma know that Emmett was in New York? Or had he just disappeared on her? Emma and Emmett. & Emmett. Already he seemed more of a man than a son, though Richard could still see the boy, even the baby, within those accumulated days. Like the universe, we are at our youngest and our oldest at the farthest edge. “He’s reading
Ampersand
,” Richard told Jamie.

“Well, it is a classic.”

“I kind of hate that he’s reading it.”

“Why?”

“It’s like what the hell have I done in comparison?”

“You’re meeting with Eric Harke.”

Richard made an uncertain sound, a sort of dubious groan.

“You’ve certainly crushed Dad in the fatherhood department,” Jamie said.

“That’s like getting a trophy for showing up.”

“But hell, you showed up.”

“Doesn’t seem like much of a success to me.”

“What, success like Dad’s?”

“Nobody cares what kind of father he was.”

“Except for his kids,” Jamie said. “Ergo nobody really cares about him. When A. N. Dyer dies, he’s dead. A thousand, a million people loving his books won’t change that fact. They’ll just read his obituary and move on to sports.”

“You never had that big a problem with him,” Richard said.

“Not like you.”

“You just did your thing.”

“What the hell was my thing?” Jamie asked. “Whatever it was, it seems so fucked up, what I did, what I do, did did, do do—I swear I’m not that stoned, but whatever the doing or the didding, it was all about other people’s truth, that’s what I wanted to capture. I hate that word.
Capture
. I don’t trust anyone who captures anything except escaped prisoners. As far as I can tell I mistook misery for truth and spent a dozen years making the World’s Most Horrific Home Video with me as the smiling host, stoned most of the time, weirdly suicidal but in the laziest, most passive-fantastic way, like I could die the good heroic death without doing anything good or heroic. Dirty little secret, half my time, probably more, was spent in hotels or bars or resorts decompressing. Hence my financial situation, which any reasonable person would be pleased about but is certainly not near what it was. I think I had an idea of what I was doing, back when I started, but I seriously can’t remember.”

“Seems important to me,” Richard said.

“It was all self-serving.”

“What isn’t self-serving?”

“Somebody dying, to start things off.”

“But you were there for them.”

“Maybe the camera was but not me. I was too busy watching myself watch these things, and the whole time I swear I felt nothing. I tried, but I felt nothing. Maybe that’s what Dad gave me. That ability, or inability, to see the truth outside my own head. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just me. But it drove me to scarier places, hoping I might see something that would finally prove that I was real and not some clever machine. It was like my own fucked-up Turing test. Even hearing me talk”—Jamie
spun his finger like a wheel—“it’s like, it’s like hearing me talk. I am my own worst simile.”

Richard thought about touching his brother’s back but the engineering seemed difficult.

“I might as well have been smoking crack with you, no offense.”

“None taken,” Richard said. “But I see you more as the heroin type.”

“I always did prefer my opiates.” Jamie paused. “Myopiates.”

“The crackhead and the junkie,” Richard said. “We could solve crimes.”

“Our own forgotten crimes.”

“You do the drawing, I do the writing.”

“I’m thinking stick figures,” Jamie said.

“Yeah, but the world around them is like—”

“Vivid.”

“Yeah, vivid,” Richard agreed.

There was another head-lowering silence but this time the bar held a different grain, like the wood was a door and on the other side Richard and Jamie were boys again and free of the complications that were inconceivable at that age, their father perfectly fine, their mother just right, the brothers running around their homemade world and if they came within a few feet of each other shoulders would bump and they would fall into a grapple, like magnets always aware of the tug. When does that change? And why? Richard and Jamie sat at the bar and waited, and while the days of easy camaraderie were gone, they were for a moment content with the distance.

Five minutes later their mother showed up.

She strained against the crowd as if a train had just rolled in and she was the waving handkerchief. Richard and Jamie remained unmoved in the corner, letting her push forward, past the phone-booth-size kitchen and into the back room jammed with tables. They stayed brothers a bit longer, eyes mocking Mom, clueless Mom, fifty minutes late and with her desperate-to-be-young haircut and her almost annoying competence and hard-to-get-a-handle-on jumble of pride and shame, like she was constantly grading herself, though she did look good, their mom, the calm water in which the men in her life could
admire themselves, never sick a day and probably the same weight as when she was twenty, a decent mom, better than most. Richard and Jamie played the same game without a word about the rules until their mother spun back and spotted them. She seemed caught between emotions. And the brothers straightened, reshaped as sons.

“Sorry I’m so late,” she said, “but he didn’t want me to leave.”

“No problem,” from Jamie.

Richard went to the host and told him their party was finally complete, the host consulting a slip of paper with all the focus of impossible math. Richard was ready to hate New York all over again, certain they would have to wait for—“Okay,” the host said, “your table’s ready.”

“Really?”

“You used to come here, right, like years ago?”

“Yeah, yeah. Melon’s was my favorite.”

“I thought I recognized you. And your brother. Then your mother came in.”

A sudden surge of unexpected belonging lifted Richard.

“Your father still writing?”

Even that didn’t spoil the fine feeling. “Working on something, I think.”

“Great.” The host glanced into the back room. “Take the corner table.”

The act of sitting down at Melon’s involved a series of scoots from the people sitting nearby, the tables and chairs like the internal mechanism of a clock. Their spot was famous in a way: Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep had argued here in
Kramer vs. Kramer
. On the wall a small photo commemorated the scene, of Ted pointing his finger at Joanna seconds before he flings that wineglass against the wall. But in this scene Richard and Jamie patiently listen as their mother tells them about her visit, about this boy who opened the front door, shirtless in a pinstripe suit, funny and sensitive and maybe even a touch bold, like a fond memory, she says, and she knew, deep down, deeper than her bones, down in that, that, that small but sturdy hollow where your sense of self finds its rare, ineffable fit, down there she knew that Andrew was telling the truth, absolutely, that this boy was the boy she fell
in love with, the boy she married, the boy who broke her heart, the boy who stood by her side, now impossibly old, as they watched the past bound up those stairs.

The brothers didn’t know how to respond.

Isabel brushed a few imaginary crumbs from the tablecloth.

“I know how it sounds,” she said, near tears. “Believe me, I know.”

I imagine the brothers sitting at the table as if sudden participants in a séance, spirits entering the room and creating another world right there in Melon’s where not only do you understand your parents as a combination of everyday delusions and misapprehensions, but now that you’re older, as old as they were when you first glimpsed their flaws and foibles, you understand something else, something more as your eyes wobble on the gingham blur of the tablecloth: that without this deception the crystal ball reveals nothing but your own misshapen eye. So I say bring up these worlds. Worlds upon worlds. Let me sit at that table by the window with my mother during one of our Friday lunches before heading to Long Island. Let me be ten years old again with a solid construct of home. Let Melon’s still stand instead of that artisanal Asian tea boutique now anchoring that corner. Let me glance toward that table where they filmed that sad movie about fatherhood and divorce and let me see the Dyer boys and their mother sitting quietly. Let me think about raising my hand hello.

A.N.D.

November 3, 1959

Charlie, you devil,

Just got the tremendous news from a flightless old bird at Doubles—you know this bird, rhymes with drunk and I’m being kind since she could rhyme a lot worse. So who is this girl you’ve been hiding? I hear she’s from a good Boston family and might be a few years your senior. And a Smith girl. You know what they say. Actually, I don’t know what they say though I’m sure they say something. Every Smith girl I ever knew fit me like a bruise. That’s a lie. I just lied. I look forward to giving a congratulatory kiss to your bride-to-be, and Isabel tells me to tell you to tell her that she’s landed one of the last decent bachelors in all of New York. Hope that doesn’t mean you’re thinking of staying in the Bean state. Caught sight of your father at the Raquet last week but he didn’t mention anything so my guess is you’ve surprised us all. Then again he was afume about losing in court to Buffalo Knox. A funny game unless your father is playing, I suppose.

How am I? you ask. I’m pretending to work on the Floor while finishing this novel. Finishing? I mean finished. As in done. As in sent to a friend of my stepfather’s at Random House—at least I think Bennet Cerf works there. Of course THAT has to be his friend. I’ll let him do me this favor. It makes him feel literary instead of pituitary. The novel is called
Ampersand
. Don’t really know what the title means but I like what it suggests. Like Groucho Marx in type form. Or a drunk lemniscate a bit of broken infinity. Really I just like the word. The feel of the beach after a long hot day. What binds us, I suppose. Who the hell knows? Exeter has slouched its way onto the pages much more than I anticipated so I hope you’ve learned something about libel cause I might need lawyering. Not really. I think the book is all right. I think I’ve made it true without once showing my face. More bludgeon than bildungs. But today is a better day. Tomorrow I will hate the goddamn thing. Who knows when old Bennett will get back, probably wrapping his NO! in a corny joke. Have you read
A Separate Peace
yet? Not bad, not great. Knowles hardly disguised his Exeter, I mean Devon. What a terrible name. Might as well have called it Dexter. I prefer my nom de schul—Shearing Academy. All of us were sheep and some of us got shorn worse than others. I could go on about the symbolic importance of wool and the theme of mohair but I will spare you. I do hope you’ll like it, if it ever makes it to print.

Will you be back for Thanksgiving and perhaps bring your fiancé to the table? If so we all need to get together for a proper dinner. Or will you be in Southampton, your father slaughtering geese? Let me know. Isabel and I would love to see you and of course meet this woman who has converted you. Now I can spoil your wedding. I’m thinking something from Elvis Presley. In all honesty—and never trust a person who says “in all honesty”—but in all honesty congratulations. I’m so happy for you. To Topping &
   
(I don’t even know her name yet). Welcome to the club.

Your friend,
A.