And Sons (15 page)

Down below a young man emerged from the Frick; he was in white tie and gloves, a cane in one hand and an impressive fur cloak in the other. He gave his friends a bow, elegant even if exaggerated, and his aspect seemed both ironic and fully invested, as if he would die for the sake of a good pose. Even from this height I recognized him: the mustache curling at the ends, the hint of a goatee, the high-society Musketeer
who was Comte Robert de Montesquiou. His portrait hangs in the Frick,
Arrangement in Black and Gold
, one of Whistler’s less facile attempts, simple, austere in its palette, the subject emerging from a haze as if the paint had been mixed in an opium den. Montesquiou also famously inspired Proust, in his construction of Baron de Charlus, while Whistler took on the role of Elstir, the painter who sought to re-re-create the world. The Frick must have been having one of their
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
parties. Every five years or so they choose this tired theme, and the benefit committee becomes giddy with their delicious inventiveness—we can serve madeleines!—and people raid attics and costume shops and in some cases employ stylists (in my day I went as Swann, though I still regret not going as Scott Moncrieff).

A horse carriage pulled up to the Frick and this—

“Andy?”

Startled, I spun around and saw A. N. Dyer standing in the doorway. Shirt unbuttoned to his navel, pants rolled up around his knees, he resembled a castaway.

“Not Andy, no, it’s me, um, Andrew, Philip.” I confused even myself.

“Philip?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So you are here, as in here.”

“Yes.”

“Away from the Wales.”

“Yes,” I said, like some chastened Jonah.

“And is Andy here too?”

“Yes, but he’s just gone up to bed.”

“Goddamn I hate this,” Andrew said.

I didn’t dare ask what he hated.

“Was he okay? Was he in fair mood or foul?”

“He seemed fine,” I said.

“He seemed fine,” Andrew repeated, insinuating that my answer, while acceptable, was weak. He listed to the left and put more weight against the doorframe, like he was remembering the shipwreck that had brought him here. I assumed he was drunk. “I thought I heard
something,” he muttered, and he grew distant and silent, still listening, it seemed, until a cough tore through his lungs, its color both pink and black. Andrew lowered his head and—I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing here—spat, letting the phlegm meander from mouth to floor. It was quite a performance, reminding me of a schoolboy’s provocation of gravity, something the younger Dyers used to call snicker-snagging. Andrew stared at this newborn presence near his feet and said either to me or to it, “They’ll be here soon,” after which he turned and hobbled back to his study.

Who were they?

And where was here?

And how soon was soon?

A ghost seemed to linger in his place, roughly the size of that glob of spit, but my attention eventually returned to the window and a car impatiently honking its horn. The young man playing Montesquiou playing Charlus climbed into the back of a waiting, horse-drawn carriage, bound for Jupien’s, I imagined, and after holding up traffic a bit longer, three other characters, none of whom I recognized, joined him. Once all were on board, they trotted down Fifth, their youth a jealous, if ironic, echo.

KEEWAYDIN
L
AKE
T
EMAGAMI
, O
NTARIO

July 12, 1948

Dear Charlie,

Just got back from the big Lake Sawamaui canoe trip and my arms are spaghetti without the meat sauce. I can barely hold this tiny paddle of a pencil, and my eyes see nothing but water water water everywhere. But the trip was great. No injuries this time though there was a massive mosquito attack and we were without any proper ack. Poor Jeremy Fosckett almost got sunk. How’s the leg? Does it still hurt? I can still see you fall and hear you scream and you’re still lucky nothing worse got broken, like your head. It must’ve hurt like hell. Everybody here says hi and get well soon and watch your step and beware of the lemonade. You’re not missing much. I’m jealous you can go to the beach. How are the waves? Charlie buddy I didn’t mean to laugh when you were crying, honestly, but the sound you were making was funny in an awful sort of way. If you saw me laughing I am sorry. When I get home you can throw rocks at me. By the way I found some more stromatolites for you. I have to go now. Tonight’s the epic campfire. I’ll write your name on a log. Can’t wait to get home and sign your cast.

Your pal,                   
Andrew

A. N. D
YER MANAGED TWENTY-ONE PAGES
before finally retiring to the couch. Nowadays he preferred naps to more defined sleep, even if those naps lasted many hours and stretched the semantic bounds, still Andrew held firm to the notion of temporary rest. It was three in the morning. Sleep was sponsored by Vicodin, with a two-finger assist from Dewar’s. All the previous typing had imprinted on his eyelids the residue of motion, sheet after sheet of Eaton twenty-pound stock rolling behind his tired platen brow. Eaton had been his brand since the beginning, its rag like onionskin but thicker, its overt quality as pleasing as a fountain pen with his signature. As a young man he could produce eight, maybe nine pages a day, an average of four hundred words per page (he always counted), which on a yearly basis would yield roughly six reams and still allow for five weeks of vacation. Oh, to dream such math again. Tonight he had ground through an entire chapter, the twelfth. The pages measured a quarter inch of hard linear labor. It was impressive work, regardless of the dubious task, and after he had finished he jumped right into the editing and took care to imbue his handwriting with as much youthful vigor as possible, striking the deliberately overblown words, refashioning the clumsy sentences, x’ing an entire wayward paragraph, and scribbling its correct version in the margin. This part was fun, almost like painting: Andrew put red pencil to manuscript and gave his brushstroke to the canvas—lines, arrows, swirls, in some cases well-practiced doodles, even a mysterious phone number for a man named Roberto Lupe, just for kicks. Make it messy, he thought, make it real. He imagined himself as twenty-seven again, an age that still seemed sadly
within reach, just yesterday really, before everything went wrong, before his biggest regret turned into his greatest success—Andrew flinched as if startled from a thirty-second, decade-spanning dream, the type that can snag you when sitting through opera. Lying on the couch, looking for sleep, Andrew’s body seemed like a house with a possible intruder inside—what was that? that noise? His study certainly appeared ransacked. Earlier that day he had been searching for something to read, something special, something of worth, please, give me something to help me through the night. Good old Coleridge finally tempered the panic:

But now the abstruse had turned to crap. Books were all over the floor, papers too, file cabinets practically dumped, newspapers, mail, mostly unopened, dirty plates, coffee mugs, clothes, all the clothes, the socks and the underwear, pants and shirts woefully overemployed. Just close your eyes and think of those twenty-one pages, he told himself, eight thousand words, fifteen thousand individual keystrokes. He had always been a decent typist. (Thanks to Exeter, we were all decent typists.)
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
. Instead of sheep he tried counting foxes, the image of fox inspired by the crafty Mr. Tod. Andrew loved Beatrix Potter as a boy, the fond memory of being read to aloud, the words coming on trails of smoke and scotch, his father’s wonderful voice. He decided the lazy dog would be his own, a cocker spaniel named Smear. One of his other clear memories of his dad was the delight he took in calling the dog. “C’mere Smear!” He had promised a Smudge and a Splotch some day. Oh, all the numberless goings-on of life, inaudible as dreams. Almost asleep—or so he hoped—Andrew’s attention fell heavily on the fireplace. It took only
eight months to write
Ampersand
. Amazing the speed. Just eight months to give up his soul. He closed his eyes and found something warm and wriggling inside.

Tomorrow Richard and Jamie were due to arrive.

Andrew would continue his writing in the morning.

The goal was to get the book finished in the next week or so. It was a self-imposed deadline, with death running hard in the line, outpacing all other thoughts and expanding its ever-expanding lead. After all, this was the man who wrote in
The Bend of Light:

And that was thirty-five years ago, when he was in good health. Imagine him now. Or imagine yourself if your lifelong obsession was no longer in the distance but in the same room; imagine the sepulchral couch; imagine the strange anticipation, its sad sort of achievement; imagine the blackness, the eternal nothingness, which of course is unimaginable. We the living might appreciate our mortality, but no matter how deep we delve into the subject, of our bodies as our sieves, death is just wordplay. We all have something to steal.

In
The Bend of Light
Hardy Rohem dies of skin cancer and he dies alone. “I love you all” are his last words. The Tin Man is given his illusory heart. A. N. Dyer struggled for months over that line. He typed pages and pages of potential last words, veering among the faux philosophical, the absurd, the spiritual, etc. Whatever the choice, these words would end the novel, that was obvious, but the heaviness of the situation, even in the shallowest of characters, overwhelmed him. He gave the manuscript to Isabel, always his first and best reader, to see if she had any ideas, and while a few of the female characters were given a better shake and a subplot was tightened and those Isabel-averse words were circled (
drapes
and
sofa
had become their private joke), she had no explicit answer for the dying Hardy. “He can say almost anything
and it’ll be moving,” she told him. “All this time he’s been searching for a sense of his own meaning, but essentially he’s incapable, he’s just a polished surface, but now meaning is forced upon him and whatever he says will be powerful, I think. Nobody dies a worthless death, at least in my view. We all die together.” As she talked Andrew rubbed her right foot as payment for her critique, his thumb planing the arch of her serious size-elevens. How he loved those feet, missed those feet, the way they existed in harmony with her shoulders, as if she stood balanced on generations of big-footed, broad-shouldered Isles women. That smile completed the picture, dimples like tiny fists pulling you in, catching you within its net.

“You should go.”

Those were her last words to him, seventeen years ago. Could he have said anything differently, done anything differently beyond the obvious, like craft a story that would have made it right, that would have repaired this injury and broken this terrible spell? Of course, a few months later he did come up with something, but by then it was too late. On the day in question he remained tongue-tied in the doorway of the living room while she sat unmoved on the couch, reading some thick and redolent magazine. The narrative part of his brain had been so sure that she would forgive him, eventually, and she would help him raise the boy, the combination of resentment and perverse pride too great for her to pass up. Even if this was miscalculation on his part, his miscalculations often ended in success, his thoughtlessness bringing on his greatest triumphs. No doubt about it, his life would have been happier with less luck.