And Sons

“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.

“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

Rather than one of those seed-filled tubes with holes and perches, his wife insisted on a miniature bird pavilion, two hundred dollars plus installation, which in her perfect world would attract Blue Jays and Cardinals, but in reality only charmed the crows who screeched like witches until Avery Price, on the sixteenth of July, chopped the fucking thing down.

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:

A. N. DYER

I don’t believe in the romance of writing, in inspiration, in characters taking over, in any of that sham magic. I know exactly what I do. I sit alone in a room all day, those days starting mostly at night, and I chip away until there’s a likeness of a book on my desk, about yay high.

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:

To: andyer@andyer.com

This can’t be you. Last time I mentioned email you thought I was talking about a boy named Emile. Anyway, hello whoever you are. Your unrelated son, Andy.