And Sons (6 page)

“He’ll say no,” Andy said.

“Well maybe you should insist then. What did the school do to him except provide an excellent education and a setting he put to good, if overdetermined, use? I think he owes us something—that’s just me to you, not you to him.”

“I promise, he’ll say no.”

“Just ask him.”

“He’ll say—”

“Just ask him, for Christ sake, with sugar on top. And maybe do that trick with your eyes when you don’t know the answer to one of my questions, all recoil and droop, dereliction and dismay, like a poem with its title not yet fixed. And after that, maybe beg.” Unlike some other people in this book, Bertram McIntyre is still alive, nearing an amazing ninety-two years old and retired in Maine. He’s one of the reasons why I became a teacher, without his success, of course, and when my father died, he wrote me a condolence note (
 … I always enjoyed his visits during those trustee meetings, his good company, his love of old-fashioned poetry, a nice nice man, your father. I shall miss him.…
) that warranted a reply (…
My father loved old-fashioned poets? Which ones? …
) and developed into an unexpected friendship. You call a man Bert and everything changes. But enough of the future past. Bert must
remain Bertram glowering behind that book-laden desk, at least until the very end.

Back in his dorm room, Andy thumbed through the fourteen books his father had recently sent. While he was embarrassed to have only read
Ampersand
, he had skimmed the others and for the most part enjoyed the writing. The man on the page seemed so confident, so sure and settled, unlike the man in the flesh, who could stare at Andy like he was the only route toward salvation. “You are a wonderful boy,” his father would say. “I just want you to know that I love you, very much.” Maybe it was sweet. Maybe it somehow repaired the damage of his own upbringing and shored up the ruin of his first go-around as a father (classic fatherhood, the sequel, behavior). But for Andy the neediness was exhausting. His dad called him multiple times a week, always on the verge of stumbling into tears. He had no true friends. He couldn’t sleep. He was anxious. He was old. He missed his wife and his other sons. Christ, the guilt. Oh, and he was in constant pain. “Thank God I have you,” he’d conclude. “Otherwise, well, what’s the point?” It was no fun being someone’s reason to live. Andy hungered for the A. N. Dyer of the blurbs, of the precise prose and biting humanity, who began
Dream Snap
with

Where was that man with the axe? Andy flipped the book over and read the familiar quotes, the snippets of reviews. Was his father really so different thirty-plus years ago? “Dyer is savage and funny and oh-so-human, and this book might be his knockout blow. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new champeen, perhaps the greatest of his generation,” said Anthony Kunitz from
The Washington Post
. How was the man in that author photo even related to his father? Whatever sly humor had dried up and what was left behind was a husk. Even his best
days seemed like a nervous performance from an understudy. Of course, Andy knew the backstory; knew his status as the result of a May-December affair; knew his birth was a secret until his mother’s untimely death forced the issue of paternity; knew his sudden arrival as an eight-month-old wrecked the Dyer marriage and resulted in a minor scandal—he knew these things, he was spared no detail, but a long-dead mother, bitter half brothers, a frail and increasingly unstable father, was nothing when compared to his normal, everyday emotions, which had all the qualities of spin art: thrilling in movement, uninspired at rest. Andy stared at the old photograph of his father. A. N. Dyer was good-looking in the style of those vintage pictures where everybody shimmered by dint of their bad habits, and while Andy had similar dark eyes and shared the same thin lips, the rest of his features seemed lumpy with adolescence, as if every night a pair of tiny fists pummeled him raw.

Near the bottom of
Dream Snap
he spotted an Internet address: www.andyer.com. Discovering this seemed as reasonable as discovering a tattoo on his father’s neck. Computers were hardly his domain, and the idea of his own website was beyond laughable. Andy plugged in the URL. The loading icon was a cardiograph and after the red line had fulfilled its journey the screen formed into a Saul Steinbergian view of A. N. Dyer’s world. Every landmark was a link, to his novels, to his biography, to his awards, to his upcoming events (an almost sardonic blank), to a handful of essays, even to that rare interview in
The Paris Review
that Andy had read in his early teens, when he was first curious about his father’s career:

The website was an obvious selling tool, so there was some sense here, but the email address that popped up after clicking on the contact moon seemed plain silly. As a joke, Andy sent him an email:

Later that day, he got a response:

Andy read and reread the email, even printed it out twice, the first time not quite sharp enough. It must be him, he thought. This was by
far the longest piece of correspondence he had ever received from his father, who normally preferred Post-it notes attached to an article or a book. In the writing he heard the echo of his authorial voice, strong and unsentimental and, best of all, for Andy alone. It was like a first game of catch.

It was exciting, and scary, to communicate with his father in this way, but it also seemed safe and self-contained, without the fear of a quick rebuttal or a stupid thing said, just the words themselves. And maybe for the first time in a long time Andy enjoyed writing. He spent an hour on the above reply, tinkering with the style, the voice, the rhythm, trying to re-create himself on the page, this son who might stand before his father. And he liked this Andy. This Andy seemed smart and funny and open. And then, this Andy was crushed.

What an idiot, Andy thought, to mistake his father for a girl, probably an intern, probably one of those literary groupies, even if she did do a decent job of capturing his voice, or what Andy imagined his voice might sound like in email form, but instead his father was a spoiled brat from Manhattan who enjoyed toying with the vulnerable, which doubly sucked because it seemed like he was getting somewhere with his dad, really talking, like a friend instead of a reflection. Andy was pissed. Who did this girl think she was and what did she mean by sweet? He reread her emails and between the lines emerged a sneaky yet apologetic and perhaps beholden twenty-four-year Dalton grad, a school known for its attractive, progressive-minded girls, a likely bookworm who thought Andy was a genius and might not frown on his seventeen years of virginity. Pittypat indeed. He decided to email her back. His response was only seven words but it took three days to compose and one day to send, and though it was nothing like the real Andy, it was truer than anything he had ever written.

The next day, they were IM’ing. And the rest is, well, Andy sat on those church steps and saw no point in leaving. Why walk away now? Time’s gamble had already proved him to be a loser, might as well be the biggest loser possible. He had left school a few days before the official start of spring break just so he could attend this funeral with his dad. Another spin of the wheel. Most of his classmates were going skiing or hitting some tropical clime, while Andy was staying put. Another spin. He was going to see a bunch of movies and hang with his fellow New York captives but mainly, hopefully, have sex if Jeanie Spokes ever—

“Andy?”

He heard his name rattle into a slot and turned and saw her standing near the steps, grinning awkwardly. She had reasonable good looks, like many a reasonable girl at Exeter, the product themselves of reasonable mothers, always with dark hair never cut too short and surprisingly bad teeth—if not crooked, then yellow; if not yellow, then with large gums—and naturally UV-protected skin, glasses almost mandatory but stylishly framed (their most overt fashion choice), bodies solid but never fat, athletic from those reasonable genes that had survived past feminine hardship and now chased field hockey balls instead of wayward sheep, this type of reasonableness not necessarily smart but often very focused, and not guaranteed plain Janes because there was plenty of sex appeal and humor in that reason, a sharpness that stood in contrast to the groundless swell around them, so that these girls, these women, with their chunky jaws and dirt-brown eyes and honest opinions of themselves, held the secret of their own common sense, which, if discovered, would shock you blind. These women often work in publishing.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said as if towing a heavy piece of luggage.

Andy smiled and got up. “That’s okay.” It was strange. Here she was, a voice, a face, a context, Jeanie Spokes as a specific presence in front of him, breathing in the same air, warmed by the same sun, all of his previously imagined shapes and forms and fantasies, those liquid details—and there were plenty, many of them more beautiful than this version—leaking into her and filling her with everything he ever
wanted, leaving him with the peculiar sensation of feeling both drained and overflowing.

“Traffic was crazy,” she said. “I had to jump on a subway.”

“No problem.”

“And the subway took forever.”

“No problem.”

“Just a mess.”

“No problem.”

“You look a lot like your dad,” she said, tilting her head.

“Well, we are related, you know.”

She—success—smiled, her lips rolling under like she was hiding something in her mouth, a small round pebble, and Andy could sense her flirty enthusiasm, which is by far the greatest aphrodisiac, knowing that your smile is being returned, possibly twofold, in that lovely escalation of mutual assurance, and he thought, This is really happening, the happening part still undefined.