And Sons

“But—”

“Even worse,” he said, “I think I was cribbing those words of wisdom from one of my books, can’t remember which.”

“Tiro’s Corruption,” I told him, “when Hornsby dies in Formia.”

“God, not even one of my better attempts.”

“Oh, I like that one.”

Andrew made a displeasing sound and put down his drink. A heavy gust hit Park Avenue and for a moment the windows belonged to a small hunting cabin in the middle of nowhere. Later that afternoon and all night it would snow and tomorrow school would get canceled and I would email my mistress (forgive the word but all the others are worse) and arrange an afternoon tryst while my wife took the kids sledding. Bad weather always makes me horny. Christ, the recklessness.

“I should go see him,” Andrew said.

“I know it means a lot to him, you being here.”

“I suppose, I suppose,” he said in a defeated tone. What with his boyish mop of white hair and his bygone Yankee exoticism, his meter and repetition, Andrew put me in mind of Robert Frost and his poem “Provide, Provide.” I always did like that poem. Some have relied on what they knew / Others on being simply true. While Frost as a man exists in our head as eternally ancient, A. N. Dyer stands in front of us as forever young, peering from his author photo, the only photo he ever used on all of his books, starting with Ampersand. In that picture he’s pure knowing, his darkly amused eyes in league with a smile that edges toward a smirk, as if he’s seen what you’ve underlined, you fiend, you who might read a few pages and then pause and glance back at his face like you’ve spotted something magical yet familiar, a new best friend waiting for you on the other end. Fourteen novels written by a single, ageless A. N. Dyer. No doubt this added to the mystery, along with his total avoidance of fame. The photo is credited to his wife, Isabel. This marital connection was sweet early on and a possible clue as you imagined those newlyweds in Central Park, in the middle of Sheep Meadow, Andrew reluctantly posing while Isabel framed Essex House for its maximum subliminal message. Click. Hard to believe that was fifty years ago. © Isabel Dyer. The photo remained even after the affair that produced Andy and finished the marriage and secured the final estrangement from his already distant sons. I suppose nothing keeps the end from being hard. But for most readers, A. N. Dyer was forever twenty-seven, so when he took the lectern in that church and looked as old as he had ever looked, the congregation practically gasped as if aging were a stunt gone horribly wrong.

Andrew flattened his eulogy. Hands frisked pockets for reading glasses, the microphone picking up a few grumbles, all vowel based. “Okay,” he said, after which he cleared his throat and pinched his nose clean. “Okay,” he said again, the sentiment towing an unsure breath. Finally he began to read. He was like a boy standing in front of class trying to get through an assignment without a possibly catastrophic lull. “What are we in this world without our friends if family is the foundation then friends are its crossbeams its drywall its plumbing friends keep us warm and warmhearted friends furnish and with a friend like Charlie Topping I was never without a home.” Andrew paused for breath, which was a relief for all our lungs, until he glanced up and asked if everyone could hear him. A handful nodded while a few of us lowered our heads. He went back to reading. “Whenever I was in need of succor—succor,” he repeated the word as though surprised by its appearance, “I could count on Charlie.” From here he started to read slower. “He was an unlocked door with something smelling good in the oven. He was the fire in the fireplace, the blanket draped over the couch, the dog at my feet. He was the shelter when I was the storm.” Andrew paused again, interrupted, it seemed, by higher frequencies. He turned around and pointed to the top of the gilded altarpiece. “Zadkiel,” he said with newfound authority, “that’s the name of that angel up there, the fifth from the left. Zadkiel. Kind of like a comic book character, that’s what Charlie always said to his audience. Mandrake the Magician. Zadkiel the Absolver. Faster than a speeding regret.” Andrew turned back around. “Sorry,” he said to his audience. “I am the storm, right, that’s where we were, me as the raging storm.” Watching him was like watching Lear forget his lines on the heath. He removed his glasses, shielded his eyes from the glare of the inner dim. “Has anyone seen my boy?” he asked. “Andy Dyer?” He searched the crowd as if every face were a wave and there was a small boy overboard, possibly drowning. “It’s important, please,” he said. No answer broke the surface, though I could imagine the whispers of bastard, the giddy apostasy of gossip. “Is he even here?” Still nothing. “Are you here, Andy?” Silence. “I need to find him. Please.”

Somewhere within this infinite realm of being, or potential being, I’m the one who stands up and approaches the lectern, who gently takes A. N. Dyer by the arm and guides him back to his pew, rather than my stepmother, who did the charitable thing while I just sat there and waited for my name to be called.

I.iii (#ulink_f976ba53-925b-52f4-a46e-21ada17aa4d7)

OUTSIDE ON THE STEPS, Andy Dyer smoked cigarette number five and watched the well-heeled walk up and down Madison. The newly minted warm weather offered an exuberance of flesh, women the main demographic on this avenue, their shopping bags swinging on a spring harvest of clothes. Many of them circulated through the nearby Ralph Lauren store, and I wonder if Andy realized or even cared that old Ralph was originally Lipschitz from the Bronx. Oh, the ironies of American reinvention: we appreciate the striving, the success, the superior khaki, while also enjoying the inside joke. The store was situated within the old Rhinelander mansion, a fabulous example of French Renaissance Revival, its insides decorated with horse and dog paintings, portraits of precious boys and athletic men, sailing scenes, candid snapshots from the club. It was enough to make any self-respecting WASP queasy if also a tad envious. We should all still live like this. But Andy hardly cared about such things. No, he was busy sitting on those church steps, smoking cigarette after cigarette, waiting for one of these mysterious New York women to stop and smile and take possession of the name Jeanie Spokes.

He had no idea what she looked like, even after numerous Internet searches. She refused to friend him on Facebook and the only picture publicly posted on her page was of Ayn Rand photoshopped onto a beach volleyball player, her right hand powering through a self-determined spike. All he knew about her physically was her age: twenty-four years old. As he sat there the air between shirt and skin puckered with extra humidity. Twenty-four. That number came like rain down his back.

“How will I recognize you?” he had asked during their last IM chat.

“When you see me, your heart will skip a beat,” Jeanie pinged back.

“That scary?”

“Absolutely frightening.”

“You’re not a dude, are you?”

“Um, no,” she pinged, “I swear,” she pinged, “Really.” Her words fell in a series of seductive rows, like dialogue in a sexy comic strip. “Wait,” she pinged, “Define dude.” Jeanie Spokes had impeccable timing.

“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?”