And Sons

Richard stood there, at first annoyed, smiling like a photograph waiting to be taken, but then the young man, his voice, his face—think of the three phases of matter, of a solid heating into a liquid heating into a gas—finally conveyed the steamy presence of Eric Harke, the actor, the movie star, the teen heartthrob. Richard tried to act nonchalant within these strange thermodynamics of celebrity, but being the lesser actor, his posture stroked into a stiff approximation of cool. Eric Harke was taller than expected and less pretty, thank goodness, since onscreen he appeared summoned from the baby pillows of a thousand pubescent girls, including Richard’s own daughter, who was presently screaming Oh-my-Gods in his head.

“You remember Curtis,” Rainer said to Eric.

“Oh-yeah-sure-absolutely-hey.”

Rainer then turned toward Richard and smiled like an oven revealing a loaf of bread. “And it’s really nice to finally meet you,” he said, taking Richard’s hand. “I think our mothers know one another, from the Chamber Music Society or the Cos Club or something small-world like that.” Rainer was huge without being fat, his six-foot-eight bulk belonging to an antiquated class of male who by dint of size exist on another, arguably greater plane. “And aren’t you friends with Henry Lippencott?” he asked.

Richard was thrown by the stolen small talk. “He’s my cousin.”

“Oh, okay. You get back much?”

“To New York?”

“Yeah.”

“Never.”

The oven opened again. “And said with conviction. I hear you. I have my issues with the city as well, mostly family related, ex-wife too, that and my built-in cynicism doesn’t quite jibe with the place anymore. I get there and just turn mean, you know, wonderfully mean but mean nonetheless. Out here my cynicism seems, I don’t know, seems somehow jubilant. I can relax enough to hate the world with a tremendous amount of affection.” Though raised in New York, Rainer spoke with a vague European accent that seemed rucksacked to his shoulders, the straps pulled tight, giving the impression of an overweight boy who had spent long, over-enunciated summers with his grandparents. “I still manage to go back at least once a month,” he said.

“I’m buying a loft,” Eric offered, “in the Meatpacking District.”

“Of course you are,” said Rainer, who, rather than roll his eyes, practically threw them toward Richard as if Richard would find this rush into nouveau trendiness risible. But Richard didn’t. Or not in the way Rainer imagined. Because in Richard’s memory the Meatpacking District still existed as the capital of sex clubs, with roving bands of transvestites sucking five-dollar cock. “You see poor Eric is from Minnesota,” Rainer added, as if this further explained his choice of neighborhood.

“Go ’Sota,” the actor fake-cheered. He was not known for his comedies.

“Son of ice farmers, I believe.”

“Fuck you, you kraut.”

And they both laughed. Richard tried to join in by adjusting his lips and eliciting a ha-ha sound, but he was nervous and sweaty and desperate to please as well as thrown by the image of this teen heartthrob cruising the Mineshaft on Little West 12th, his pockets stuffed with fivers, and this killed his sense of humor, which in many ways had been killed years ago. What remained was a hard-earned optimism that he could survive almost anything, even extreme opportunity.

Rainer sat down. Everybody else followed suit. “Curtis, where are we?”

“We love the script.”

Rainer turned to Richard. “We love the script. It’s funny, it’s smart, it has depth. Whoever plays the lead could well win awards. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not perfect. It still needs work. It’s too long, the middle sags, the individual character arcs could be clearer, the females are weak, but those are small fixes in what is otherwise an outstanding piece of screen prose. We can give you proper notes when and if the time comes, but essentially what we’re saying, Richard, is that we want to do it. We want to make this film. But we want to make it the right way, with the right people and with the right budget.” Rainer lounged back in his Rainer-sustaining chair. The color-field painting hanging behind him was mostly white with a red slash going down the middle. It made him appear newly born. “So what do you think?” he asked.

Richard was the opposite of numb. When your biggest hopes are realized in an instant and childish fantasy transfigures into fact, into the life you only dared imagine, well, numbness is nowhere in the picture. If anything there’s an overabundance of feeling as you finally let go of all that history so tightly gripped within, to the point where Richard experienced an epic, almost literal whoosh throughout his body and for a moment nearly turned liquid. A sense of relief was the first emotion to settle in. After fifteen years of near-constant pressure, of willing himself sane, of focusing on the steps but never the climb, finally, after all these years, he could stop for a moment and turn around and see what he had achieved: possibly the best view in town.

Eric Harke asked who his agent was.

“Um, Norman Peltzer,” Richard said.

“Who the fuck is that?”

“Head of the Norman Peltzer Agency,” Richard said.

“Of course he is,” Rainer said. “Maybe we could hook you up with someone we know. Maybe Koons at CAA. He might be a good fit. Or Vartan at UTA.”

Curtis took the note.

“Koons is really fucking good,” Eric told Richard, his feet keeping a bass drum beat. “You can trust him a hundred percent, well actually ninety percent, the other ten going into his own pocket.” It was beyond bizarre to have this celebrity suddenly play the role of confidant; Rainer and Curtis struck Richard as dubious, with their high-gloss professionalism, but Eric Harke was different, Eric Harke was endearing, which was probably a function of his skill as an actor, the way he could come across as likable, but Richard guessed he was responding to something else, judging by the manic exuberance and the chorus of facial tics and those baby blues with the chewy center: Eric Harke was definitely coked up. Richard figured he had had a pick-me-up before the meeting—snort left, snort right, and in we go, the hologram of a secure young man. “But Vartan’s your guy if you’re looking for someone to take your phone calls and show you around town, if you want some of that old-fashioned agent cheese.”

Rainer requested champagne via phone. “Hope I’m not being presumptuous,” he told the group. “More than anything, I like the ceremony.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” Eric agreed, nodding to his new best friend. “Absolutely we should celebrate. We should all go to my house for dinner tonight and we can really celebrate and discuss the project. I could even call Donal Fenster because I know he’d be interested and we can brainstorm and just fuck around. You married, Richard? Well, bring the wife. Bring the kids. I have a huge fucking pool, a basketball court. You play? Do you bowl? I got every shoe size imaginable. Bring everyone, hell, bring the family dog. The goldfish, the hamsters. We’ll barbecue. Not your fucking pets I promise. I’ve got prime rib you can’t believe.”

“Fenster’s interested?” Rainer asked.

Donal Fenster was the young director recently robbed of an Academy Award.

“He could be. We’re desperate to work together again. You know,” Eric turned to Richard and said without pretense or pause, “I know people, I mean, I know Rainer knows people, but I know people, and people want to know me, that’s just the way it is, no matter how shallow, presidents, dictators, holy men, billionaires, they want to know me, ridiculous, I know, not my value system, but they hear my name and they get interested. It’s a weird kind of power, I tell you, and it’s not like I can ever hide and be Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne, no, no, no, I’m always wearing the fucking cape, which is exhausting, but if I’m in your movie—and I’m seriously considering it, Richard, like seriously—but if I’m in your movie, you can land a healthy budget and book some hard-core talent and schedule a start date for July, like this July, man, and movies are hard, hard to get made and getting harder by the minute. How amazing would that be, the two of us working together during the summer on a big old film written by you and starring me, I mean just plain old straight-up cool.” Eric Harke spoke as if the last ten minutes equaled their lifelong dream.

Richard sat back in his seat. The force of future success started to slam into the humble present, and years later, during those times when he replayed this meeting in his head, he would wonder if his initial reaction somehow dictated all that followed, since his first active thought was, Now I can go back to New York and shove this in my father’s face. Did that impulse trigger what happened? If instead he had thought about his wife and children, of sharing the good news with them, would things have turned out differently? Who knows? But maybe thoughts, their synaptic charge, maybe they bump into surrounding particles and change their direction and spin and help shape some of that spooky action at a distance. We are all socially entangled, especially on the Upper East Side. How often does a random thought generate a coincidence, like the one presently vibrating in Richard’s pocket?

“You all right?” asked Rainer.

“Just my phone.” Richard checked the screen. It was Jamie.

“Go ahead and answer,” Rainer told him.

“It’s just my brother. Believe me, I can ignore him.”

“Never ignore family,” Rainer said with Teutonic sternness. “I insist.”

Richard was in no position to disagree.

“You gotten a call from Dad yet?” Jamie asked, his voice sounding stoned.

“No. Can I call you later, I’m kind of—”

“Well, you will.”

“I seriously doubt it.”

“Oh, you will. He’s all mortal coil since Charlie Topping died.”

Richard lowered his head into a more discreet angle. “Charlie Topping died?”

“Like a week ago.”

Richard was shocked. Though he refused all contact with his father and for half his life had lived successfully removed from the man and his city, forsaking everything, even financial help, the loss of wealth in some ways enduring longer than the loss of love, saying no to those Dyer trusts, no to those yearly tax-exempt gifts, taking nothing on principle (unlike his brother), even when money was scarce, even when his son, age seven, was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia and for two years the hospital bills piled into an economic record of despair, even then Richard held firm (and accepted help from his mother instead), still, the death of Charlie Topping hit him hard, not the death so much as the lack of news concerning the death. No one bothered to call or email him? Like many people who have escaped their past, Richard assumed his absence was suffered on an almost daily basis. But really no one missed him much.

“Did you go to the funeral?” Richard asked.

“No,” Jamie said. “It was yesterday and I’m not in the city.”

Richard didn’t bother to ask where he was since it was likely somewhere annoying. “Can I call you later?”