And Sons (5 page)

“I’ll be on the steps of St. James, 71st and Madison,” Andy typed.

“You sure you want me to come?”

“You sure you want to come?”

A pause.

“Cum?” he typed.

“Nicely done, Cyrano.”

“Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking the same thing.”

Andy waited, waited, waited, until “No cumment” pinged back.

What was it about instant messaging that invited this kind of innuendo and pun, this straight-up dirty talk, as if a transcript of future sin? It was all very tilted, of course, in the vein of a separate identity, the Internet’s lingua franca, but sometimes the tilt straightened and a high-speed intimacy entered the exchange. Suddenly you start bouncing your innermost thoughts back and forth just to see if those feelings can be caught.

“I can’t wait to see you,” Andy wrote.

“Me neither.”

“Seriously.”

“Mean either.”

“Circe.”

“Man eater.”

Andy knew only a few concrete details about Jeanie Spokes: she grew up on the Upper West Side; her mother was an architect, her father an editor at Random House; she attended Dalton, then Columbia, with a year abroad in Paris; she graduated magna cum laude with a degree in comparative literature and presently worked as an assistant at Gilroy Connors, A. N. Dyer’s literary agency; she lived in a studio
apartment on Riverside Drive, the rent outrageous, but she was a Manhattan girl to the core and anywhere else gave her vertigo. Many of these details were analogous to Andy’s own biography: Trinity to Exeter; Central Park West to Fifth Avenue; Sharon to Southampton. He was, in concept, familiar with this type of girl, or woman, and that’s where the whole business got tricky: Jeanie Spokes was a full-fledged adult while Andy Dyer hovered around 83 percent in terms of development and experience and areas of skin without acne and even grades, which could ruin his chances for Yale and screw up his equivalency with this Columbia grad, dooming whatever outside chance he had beyond a mere online flirtation.

Andy lit his sixth cigarette. He wanted her to find him smoking, that seemed important, but she was thirty minutes late and he was light-headed and almost done with his pack. Organ music murmured from behind the church doors. The previews were over and the feature was about to begin, with its cheesy special effects and tired script and ludicrous, entirely unbelievable character named God. Andy wondered if Jesus was once a supreme embarrassment to his Father, this hippie carpenter who ran around with the freak crowd until finally he gave up on his dreams and stepped into the family business, probably to his mother’s regret. What a sellout, Andy thought. A truly kick-ass Jesus would have said, Go forsake thyself, and remained a humble builder. Now that would have been something to worship: the son of God rejecting God in favor of life, meaning death. Andy glanced back at the church, suddenly reminded of why he was here. Charlie Topping had been a nice enough man, formal without being too serious, like a pediatrician, though Andy often caught him staring like he could spot hidden symptoms of some terrible future disease. Every Christmas and birthday he gave Andy a set of vintage tin soldiers—dragoons, grenadiers, hussars, highlanders, whole battles, whole wars, the American Civil War in ten deluxe boxes. The least Andy could do was go inside and pay his respects.

But where was she?

Andy checked the distances, north and south, for potential Jeanies. Every one of these women seemed awash in extra light, as if throughout
the city young men awaited their arrival. But none of them noticed this 17 percent boy with the zit goatee and the shaggy hair and the stubborn baby fat around his middle like he was halfway through digesting his younger softer self, or if they did notice, they thought—who knows what they thought of this half-boy, half-man, though one older woman did do a double take as she rushed up the church steps, late for the service. She was almost attractive, for seventy-plus, tall and slender with a handsome face and one of those I’m-no-granny haircuts. And her shoulders. They were a reminder that the collarbone could also be called a clavicle. Andy imagined himself a lucky old man.

Recently he had become more conscious of the female form, or not so recently, since in his early teens he had noticed the obvious—breasts, backsides, a certain leanness he found intriguing—but nowadays he noticed something else, noticed what he couldn’t see: the mystery of the girls at school and the women on the street, how under their clothes lay secrets by way of particularity, the variety of style and shape and color, the Platonic ideal of Woman falling to the ground and breaking into a thousand pieces. A hint of nipple under a shirt was like discovering a hidden safe, the combination unknown but the lock visible, and he would speculate over the pubic hair sealed within, the areolas and freckles and moles, the rifts and gaps. Those tantalizingly fine hairs on cheeks and arms and how they caught the sun killed him. But it wasn’t like he was a sex fiend or anything (though he could be a bit of a perv), it was just, well, you witness a woman naked, like truly witness her naked, like up close and in full natural light, and you almost want to cry, an instant martyr to the cause. Maybe because you’re offering so little in return.

In total, Andy had kissed fifteen girls, tongue-kissed twelve of them.

Of those twelve he had felt up nine.

Of those nine he had fingered five.

Of those five, four had touched him in return.

Of those four, four had given him head.

And of those four, just three weeks ago, one had let him go down on her—Felicity Chase, his girlfriend since October. Five months as a couple and she was happy giving him blowjobs, which was certainly
great—blowjobs in the library bathroom, blowjobs in the nearby woods—but she never seemed comfortable with the reciprocal side of the proverbial coin. “I prefer your hand,” she’d tell him, much to his frustration. Andy was ready for the next logical step, his rather misguided instinct telling him he had to go down on a girl before he could get laid, that there was a natural progression, an order, and you had to graduate from one act before you could move on to the next, even if you were dry-humping in the basement of the Phelps Science Center and Felicity was moaning and edging down her pants and undoing your zipper and saying something porno about how your schlong would feel deep inside of her—Andy probably could have lost his virginity right there and then but he was too focused on crossing cunnilingus from his list and Felicity muttered something about soccer and no shower and not now and Andy got upset as if he were dealing with a prude who presently had his dick in her mouth. But finally three weeks ago she said yes. Andy took his time going down, his tongue skiing on powder until he finally hit hair, just a forelock, and he spread her legs. He found the taste interesting, sort of sour, like a stale lemon drop, and he assumed he discovered her little nose of a clit though it was dark. Much too dark. He wanted a flashlight. But he made do and tucked in as if he were reading a thin but important book, like
The Great Gatsby
, relishing each sentence, even as Felicity’s hands tried to pull him back up.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Sure. Was I doing something wrong?”

“I guess not.”

“Can I go back down?”

“That’s all right.”

“Why not?”

“I’m kind of weirded out right now,” she said.

Three days later Felicity broke up with him, and a month later she was having a full-blown fuck-a-thon with Harry Wilmers, one of Andy’s best friends. “Hope you’re not pissed or anything,” Harry said.

“No, it’s cool,” Andy told him, which was true.

“I’ve always liked her.”

“Yeah, she’s great. You ever notice how her nipples are kind of puffy, like a Hershey’s kiss except pinker. Kind of European, I think.”

“You’re a total fucking freak,” Harry said, and not in a nice way.

The problem for Andy was that his birthday was in a few short months (June 24) and the idea of losing his virginity at eighteen seemed like a lifelong disaster, whereas seventeen, well, seventeen seemed perfectly respectable. He imagined Jeanie Spokes: meeting her, grabbing a quick cab back to her apartment and in a matter of minutes going through the preliminaries of kissing, feeling, fingering, sucking, licking, all above the sheets and with the shades wide open, and then jumping into the historic act. Andy rose a minor boner on those church steps. Even if she was unattractive, he would fuck her, because he kind of loved her.

“How many guys have you slept with?” he once IM’d her.

“Andy,” she pinged back.

“Yes.”

“None of your business.”

“At least send me a picture.”

“Nooooooooo. Let’s keep the

“M

“Y

“S

“T

“E

“R

“Y,” she pinged.

The two of them had met by accident. It was after his father had mailed him the latest reissue of all his books with a note attached:
Pretty slick, huh, maybe too slick, missing you, always, me
. Of the fourteen, Andy had only read one in its entirety,
Ampersand
, which he was now reading again, this time for English class. He was a bit of a celebrity around campus, having the inside scoop on the famous alumnus author. All of Exeter was obsessed with the book. And not just Exeter. Most high schoolers who dove into A. N. Dyer and his Shearing Academy found themselves head over heels. When
Ampersand
was first published,
the Exeter community denounced the book and its barely disguised portrayal of their beloved school. It was as if a turncoat had taken
A Separate Peace
(the previous favorite and only a few years old) hostage, and tortured it, and brainwashed it, until it emerged from the darkness as a less forgiving version of
Crime and Punishment
. This fiction was not their beloved school. They did not abide such behavior in their students or faculty, even in prose. The headmaster went as far as to insist on a statement from the twenty-eight-year-old author attesting to this fact, and A. N. Dyer, claiming contrition, decided to compensate the school with a percentage of the book’s profits. He sent them a check for fifty thousand dollars, made payable to the Shearing Academy. Once the Pulitzers were announced and he became the youngest winner ever, the check turned up framed and on permanent display in the library, where it still hangs today.

Twenty years after its publication,
Ampersand
became a part of the school’s upper-year curriculum and soon led to an ongoing tradition, Exeter’s version of Bloomsday, where on May 4 an upper-year student is whisked away by five seniors and taken to the student-run used bookstore, to that closet hidden behind bookshelves, the actual real-life spot where in the novel the headmaster’s son, Timothy Veck, is held captive for fourteen days. But in this literary reenactment Veck is detained for only a few hours, with bathroom breaks, and afterward he, or nowadays she, is released and marched up to the school assembly, where they announce the winner of the annual A. N. Dyer award in creative writing (an award I myself almost won). To be chosen as Veck is in its way an honor, and this particular year was noteworthy: not only was the namesake of the author an upper-year student, but get this, Andy was an upper-year student on the fiftieth anniversary of the book. It was a happy coincidence that even the oldest, most skeptical faculty member, Bertram McIntyre, commented on one afternoon in mid-February, “We think your father should come up this year and release you as Veck, and then the two of you can announce the winner of his award.”

Andy just grinned. As with so many questions about his father, he had no answer.

“It’s a good idea, don’t you think?”

“I guess,” Andy said.

“I guess,” McIntyre aped back, his mouth appropriately slack. They were sitting in his office. If time held true, it was covered in books, stacked up in columns, some as tall as four feet, like a reconstruction of a Roman temple with Bertram McIntyre as its resident god. Eighty years old and head of the English department since he was thirty-seven, Bertram was one of those asexual educators who used teenagers, in particular teenage boys, as his own rickety altar. During your years at the school he might strike you as most impressive, impossibly well-read, an intimidating and occasionally inspiring teacher, but after graduating, his status would shift and your recollection of him would wane into an absurd character, likely a closeted queer, all those books his folly, and he was scary as a garden gnome. You would mock his old-fashioned insistence on reciting poems, with all those hours spent on memorization. What a worthless endeavor. But like Wordsworth, who is wasted on the young, decades later you might wake up one morning thankful for a few remembered lines that lie too deep for tears. All things have a second birth, even old high school teachers.

“You know, your father’s never been officially feted by Exeter, and we’ve tried, particularly when your brothers were here. Christ, how we tried.”

“Half brothers,” Andy corrected.

“Full sons to him. He could have come up here and attended a class, could have said a few words about writing, a lecture perhaps, but for whatever reason, he refused. We just want to celebrate our esteemed graduate. We’re not looking for a commencement address. All they want is a goddamn picture for the goddamn alumni magazine. A. N. Dyer smiling. Is that so much to ask?”

“I really can’t say, sir.”

“That wasn’t a question. I for one think
Ampersand
is an emotionally dishonest, self-satisfied, cruel, overly schematic, cynically adolescent exercise in pseudo-European pretensions with a dollop of American hucksterism thrown in. But that’s just me. The rest of the school swoons. But his attitude toward this place is ludicrous for a man his age. It’s as if he’s still a teenager, mistaking pigheadedness for principles.”
A pause and that famous McIntyre tongue poked free like an alien finger reaching up from occupied depths and searching for leverage. “But maybe you could ask him to come up for a little visit?”

“Me?”

“You are related to him, aren’t you? Not to put words in your mouth but you could tell him it would mean a lot to you, a short visit, no big fanfare, just you and him and good old Exeter. One day is all we—all you ask. An afternoon really, though a dinner would be fantastic. Nobody is getting any younger. A hard wind blows and some of us, sadly, can hardly breathe, but Exeter, Exeter will outlive us all, so let us stand together in this most fleeting of moments and celebrate our shared history. You understand what I’m saying, right, or should I quote from
Henry V
?” The famous McIntyre tongue now investigated the inside pocket of his left cheek, always the second move in any student’s impersonation.