And Sons (49 page)

“Of course I knew,” I said. “You guys aren’t that good.”

“So are you stoned?” the girl asked, still confused.

“No. I do have a little headache, though.” Which was true.

“Mother”—Richard got up—“fucker.”

“This whole thing was an act?” the girl said, growing offended.

“You guys started it.”

“That’s just cruel,” she said.

The other girl, in retrospect much cuter, laughed.

“I have to say I’m impressed,” Jamie said.

“Mother”—Richard threw the baggie of fake weed to the ground—“fucker.”

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said to the girl. “I was just tricking you back.”

“Asshole,” the girl said.

“Maybe we were both being assholes to each other.”

“No, you’re the worse asshole. I really thought you were in pain.”

The room tilted away from me.

“You got us, man,” Jamie said.

“Mother”—Richard began to grin—“fucker”—which was surprising since he seemed pissed, but it was an honest grin, almost proud, like I was a little brother who finally stood up for myself. He came over and pushed me with affection, the way athletes do, and still tongue-tied on
motherfucker
, he put me in a headlock, motherfucker, and thwacked me a few times, motherfucker, this small amount of exertion priming the pump and bringing forth other words—“Fucking A”—though
motherfucker
still reigned—“you motherfucker”—until he rolled me to the floor, still under the auspices of roughhousing—“you funny motherfucker”—and I could feel my helplessness set in—“No Soap Radio my ass”—as he flipped me facedown and scooted onto my shoulders, his knees pinning my arms in a backward straddle. That’s when he began tugging at my pants. Knowing Richard as I did, I panicked, which only doubled his determination. I started to kick. I begged
him to stop. But his body had a scary leverage. I expected one of the girls to step in and calm things down but instead these other hands joined in, grabbing my legs and under four-part harmony shucking my shoes, my pants, even my socks, and now I was alternately pleading to the swampy carpet with its bong-water and chewing-tobacco pungencies and hoping for a burst of superhuman strength, like in those stories you hear, to bull-buck them from my back. But it was futile. I remember them mocking my underwear—“nice Fruit of the Looms”—before they gave a sharp pull. At that moment I knew this was easily the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It’s quite strange when you grasp the immediate impact of something, its endless reach forward and backward, and the present becomes elastic, the tension always there. Jamie and Richard and the two girls took turns spanking me—“You’ve been a bad boy”—my embarrassing acne a source of hilarity and disgust. I was waiting for the inevitable escalation, and when I heard Richard call for a Sharpie, I thought, Oh shit, here it comes, sodomy with a permanent marker. I was so convinced of this, I started to cry, “Please don’t, please don’t,” the promise of awful pain and deep humiliation filling my head rather than what came next: the almost ticklish scribble as one by one they drew all over my ass.

I remember running home and stopping a block short to collect myself. I was one of those people you sometimes see crying in public and you wonder what happened, what kind of disaster has struck? You want to comfort them but mostly you just want to know. When I got back to the apartment my parents were in the library. My father noticed nothing unusual, glancing up from one of the biographies he was always reading and approximating a smile, but my mother, she closed her book and came straight over and asked what was wrong, her hand touching my shoulder. She was regal yet casual, like an early graphite study for a masterpiece. We were close enough where I could’ve told her anything and often did, but that night the shame was too great and I brushed away the question. Perhaps I was open to a challenge. She tried to neaten my hair—she was always trying to neaten my hair—but quickly gave up and said, “Okay.” Did she believe me or did she allow me my private misery? I remember feeling disappointed either way.

In my bedroom I took down the mirror from over the bureau. My backside resembled a bathroom stall. A cartoon penis spurted cartoon cum. Stink lines and flies radiated upward, likely the work of Jamie. Someone wrote
I’M AN ASSHOLE
with a helpful arrow. The four of them signed their names using their best Hollywood autographs—talk about leaving evidence—and I discovered the last names of cute Laura Handler and even cuter Jules Pierce. Laura and Jules. I could still smell the Noxzema. It started to seem almost innocent. They had written on my ass. So what? In the grand scheme of possible adolescent abuse, it was no big deal. Still, I was shaking. I jumped in the shower and scrubbed as if the victim of a far nastier crime, a victim of my imagination, I suppose. What kind of person jumps to such conclusions? I think I expected Richard to rape me.

I wonder if the two of them have forgotten this or if, like me, they just play along in forgetting. But how could my father forget his mistreatment at the hand of a Dyer without performing full-blown amnesia? After reading his letter I realized he was nowhere near some minor character, like Cooley, but was in fact Timothy Veck. What a cruel joke, to stick him in a closet, to tease and torture him, to twist his blameless love into the deformed heart of an ampersand. This part of my father I decided to liberate, a minor loss for the papers of A. N. Dyer but fuck him and his progeny. I was stashing the letter among my other stolen things when I heard that horrible sound coming from down the hall. It was as if someone was being turned inside out. I thought, maybe Andrew’s dying, painfully, I hoped, and I went to go bask in his wretchedness, never expecting to run into Richard and Jamie. I’m sure I surprised them as well. And I wonder—or is this just pure fantasy—but I wonder if bundled within that surprise there was an image of me finally cracking and pulling a gun, holding the brothers at bay as I put my foot on their father’s head and drowned him in his own spew. Did they fear my revenge after all this time? Did they see a muzzle flash before my old face slipped back on?

W
E’VE ALL WOKEN UP LIKE THIS
, in the tail end of a dream, where our bedroom is most certainly not our bedroom, the landmarks of doorway, window, bureau all turned around, the rug and furniture all wrong, these signs pointing to a different bedroom yet here we are, in our room and in our bed, and we shoot straight up, alarmed at what might have happened in the middle of the night. Are we no longer ourselves but instead this other person we always imagined, finally awake? We scrape against those fears of being misplaced, of being discovered and unknown. Our chest grabs. All of this happens within the span of an uncanny second before the room shifts, and the chair belongs in that corner again, and by God that window always faced east. You fall back into being who you were yesterday with an almost audible click. Well, the same thing happened to Andy except the room never shifted but remained misaligned, stripping the thread of memory. Where the hell am I? The easy answer—on a couch, sweating as if I had dengue fever—was quickly supplanted by a desire to remain as still as possible. Holy Christ shit. The headache, the dry mouth, the nausea, the replacement of body fluids with nitroglycerin, all these symptoms were in keeping with a very large hangover and could be explained by last night, but the ache in his legs, specifically behind his knees, that was something new. He was curious if he had been chased last night, by a pack of dogs, by a group of thugs? Or was he the pursuer, hoping to catch up, desperate to stop? Whatever the cause, Andy was clueless, like much about last night, and what the hell was that noise? Had he passed out inside a church?

His phone. It was his phone, Hallelujah no longer so amusing.

He spotted it within reach on the coffee table.

“Um, yeah, hello,” he barely managed through the shag on his tongue.

“Andy? Oh great, it’s you.”

He didn’t recognize the voice.

“It’s Richard, Richard Dyer, Emmett’s dad. I got your number from Gerd.”

“Oh, yeah, hey, yeah.”

“Do you know where Emmett is by any chance?”

“What’s that?”

“Do you know where Emmett is? We’re hoping he’s with you.”

“With me?”

“We’re kind of frantic here, trying to find him. Do you know where he is?”

“No, I don’t think so. Wait, give me a sec, okay.” Andy sat up and heeled his hands against his eyes, which activated a swirl of nebulous light, like a mental screensaver, but there was no information behind this display. He looked around the room and tried to get his bearings. A bookshelf. A couple of IKEA chairs. A lime-green rug. A coffee table with piles of manuscripts, a few of them chimneyed with bottles of beer, and one with an ashtray like a pool, a dozen filters bronzing themselves along its edge. Where was his suit jacket? And why were his pants around his knees?

“Andy, you there?”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry, Richard. My brain’s the size of a walnut.”

“Well get it together, please. Is Emmett with you?”

A definite girl vibe wafted through the place, lavender based, and his suspicions were confirmed when he caught sight of the photograph on the side table: Jeanie Spokes posing with a few girlfriends around one of the New York Public Library lions. Okay, he was here, in her studio apartment. In all honesty, Xanadu fell a bit short.

“Andy?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“What time is it?”

“Seven-fifteen
A.M
. I really could use your focus here. My wife is—”

“No, yeah, yeah, yeah, Richard, absolutely. We were pretty, well, I guess drunk last night.”

“I know.”

“Was I dancing?”

“I don’t know. You guys disappeared.”

“My legs are killing me. But I’m sure he’s fine.”

Where was Jeanie in this scenario? Did he lose his virginity here on this benighted couch, too wasted to remember, his unbuckled pants the only forensic clue? He peeked under his underwear and saw his prick huddled against pubes. What was he expecting, a high-five?

“Andy?”

“I’m on it. Just one second.”

“Where are you at least?”

“The Upper West Side, I believe, way north.” Andy used the couch and coffee table as parallel bars to pull himself up—the world’s lamest gymnast. He tried to bolster his crushed spirits with the nearly magical concept of waking up tomorrow feeling fine but instead caught himself saying fuck you to that smug, smiling asshole. He buckled up his pants. A thought buzzed near his ear, of never feeling good again, of being stuck like this forever. Then a cement block dropped onto his head—

—like he was standing in front of McIntyre again, his stomach similarly queasy.

“Okay, okay,” Andy said, hoping to motivate himself. “Yes, okay.” And that’s when he got his first full view of the apartment, a decent-size studio, with a raised section on the far end that defined the sleeping
area in three steps. There was a mound of person under the sheets, a bare leg draped over the side, a female leg, pale and powerful, one of Jeanie Spokes’s spokes. Was she naked under those sheets? As he approached, an odd sort of negative space opened up within him, the shape around her body pushing against his insides, like plaster into a mold. Feelings started to settle. All of this and I should stress that Jeanie Spokes was not naturally beautiful, with her pumpkin-shaped rear and boxing-glove breasts, but Andy was ready to awaken her with a kiss. Then he realized there was a bigger mound beside her, another species of arm and leg peeking free of the sheets. Andy instantly—you stupido, you sap, you schlemiel—understood the nature of this substrata. “I found him,” he said to Richard.

“Oh thank God.”

“You want to talk to him?”

“Please.”

Andy went to where Emmett was sprawled, a pillow over his head as if bludgeoned by a sack of flour. He thought about ripping him from sleep with an angry pull or push, but after a few seconds of failed planning, he just nudged him. “Hey, Emmett.” The pillow rolled away and Emmett did some basic intimate navigation, triangulating himself between Jeanie and Andy.

“Hey,” he said.

Andy handed him the phone. “It’s your dad.”

There was only small pleasure in Emmett’s discomfort.

“Hey.… Yeah, I’m so sorry.… No, I’m fine.… I should’ve called but the night got away from me.… I know.… Stupid.… I know.… It was bad judgment.… Just drinking …”

By now Jeanie stirred, her hands a washcloth on her face.

“Hello there,” Andy said with faux cheer.

“Hi,” Jeanie said.

“You have a good night’s sleep or was it restless?”

“… Absolutely.… It was totally irresponsible of me and I’m sorry.… Yes.…”

“I’m not”—an ill wind blew against Jeanie—“I’m not proud of this.”

“I think officially it’s statutory rape,” Andy said, as if his seventeen
equaled thirty. “Plus he’s my nephew and he’s been celibate for almost, well, for almost forty-eight hours, so you fucked that up too. Good going.”

“I don’t know what happened.”

“Really?”

“Seriously, I don’t.”

Andy was too fuzzy for sustained hard feelings. “My own personal history stops somewhere around Eric Harke—right? We were hanging with Eric Harke, how nuts is that. But even I can tell you how penis plus vagina times alcohol equals wash, rinse, repeat, but I thought it’d be me with the super-clean hair. I don’t even know what the fuck that means. I just thought—did I like run somewhere?”

“… Uh-huh.… Right.… Right.… I will, Dad.… As soon as I can.…”

Jeanie winced. “I’m really sorry.”

“The thing is I liked you,” Andy said. “I probably still do. Is that totally pathetic? I should be righteously pissed, but maybe I’m not.”

“… Okay.… Okay.… Yeah.… I will.… Okay.… Bye.… Love you too.”