Authors: David Gilbert
They sat around a table, ten of them, nineteen, twenty years old, six males, four females, none of them as attractive, as outright irresistible, as the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds of the imagination. Then again, this was the New School. These kids were the hand-me-downs from NYU, their sleeves longer than their reach. They stared at Jamie and propably wondered Who the hell is this guy and what gives him the right to teach our class? I mean, NYU has Errol Morris. And Columbia has Miloš Forman. Jamie Dyer? Ooh, a film course with
the
Jamie Dyer. Jamie drummed a fuck-you-too rhythm on his chest, a nervous yet enjoyable tic, and in terms of beat and tempo, one in which he excelled. He grinned at the class. Thirty thousand dollars a year for this chest-drumming maestro? Serves them right. They were foolish enough to sign up for something called Dramamentary: A Search for
the Real in the Hyperreal. They had lost all credibility at the door. Jamie considered putting in
12:01
P.M
.
and maybe getting their opinion (he was still unaware of its growing viral status, though his class was aware, was in fact buzzing about its strange effect and were curious who had made the uncredited thing and if it was even genuine), but Jamie wasn’t yet ready to suffer through that memory. Since Sylvia was on his mind, he started to tell them about that time in college (and there was a point, he swore) when he went to Vermont for a ski trip: “I was driving with my high school girlfriend, like my first love, my first everything, and we were at that off-and-on-again stage, both of us at different colleges, but we were going on this ski trip together and I was really excited, not sure how she felt, but I was really excited, and we were driving on one of those almost too-perfect Vermont country roads, near Middlebury—she went to Middlebury College—and there wasn’t a lot of traffic on this road, it was empty, and I remember seeing this dog up ahead, a brown Lab, he was sort of jogging along the side of the road, and I remember thinking, Watch out for that dog, you know, in case it makes a sudden turn, and my girlfriend, she wasn’t really my girlfriend then, we had basically broken up because of the distance thing, anyway, she pointed at the dog because she was probably thinking the same thing, when from the other side of the road another dog bursts through the bushes and shoots out right in front of the car, like it was playing a game of how-close. Well, too close. I swear every tire rolled over him. It was the sickest feeling I had ever felt. I remember thinking, Oh no, oh no, God no. Did that really just happen? That moment of instant change. My girlfriend took such a deep breath that it was like she stole the air from my lungs. We stopped the car, quickly got out. The dog, it was some kind of collie mix, it wasn’t dead but you knew it was not long for this world. All crumpled up. Blood was coming out of its mouth. All I could say was, Oh no. The dog tried to get up, but its spine must have been broken. But damn if it didn’t try, again and again. Just terrible. By now the other dog, the brown Lab, he stopped and watched us from a distance. It must’ve been its friend, not to anthropomorphize. At one point it sat down. I tried to touch the dog, the dog I had hit, but it bit at my hand, like I was planning
on hurting it more. That was hard. I didn’t know what to do. This is before cellphones, mind you. I wanted to find the owner, obviously. So I tell my girlfriend, not really my girlfriend, to stay with the dog while I start running from house to house, but the houses around here aren’t very close together and I’m running and I’m getting winded and I’m not in the best of shape and either nobody’s home or they don’t have a dog or their dog is by their side, it’s all no luck until I get to a house and it’s a nice house, like a gentleman’s farm, and this woman answers, middle-aged but hell, I’m probably her age now, and I ask her if she has a collie-like dog, and she says yes, and I tell her that I think I just hit it with my car, that I hit it badly, that I don’t think it’s going to live. Now she’s pretty cool and collected, calm and collected, even-keeled, whatever, maybe she’s just reacting to my obvious panic, but, she gets her husband, they seem to be Boston transplants with some money, and the two of them jump into their car, a Range Rover, with me in the backseat, and it’s like they’re my parents and I’ve done something very, very bad. We drive about two miles, I can’t believe I ran that far, and we get to where my car’s pulled over and where my no-longer-girlfriend-but-the-woman-I-still-totally-love is sitting with the dog, trying to comfort it, her jacket covering its body, keeping it warm. The second the couple sees the situation, they know it’s hopeless. But the dog is definitely still alive. And the woman, it must’ve been her dog, and maybe the brown Lab was his dog, maybe this is their second marriage, their Vermont reinvention, anyway, the brown Lab goes over to the man’s side, and the woman runs to the injured dog but at the five-foot mark she stops, because it is undeniably grim, and those last few steps she takes real slow, like she’s walking down the aisle or something. By now I’m at the side of my car. I’m almost in tears. My girlfriend leaves the dog, to give this woman some space. I’ve never killed anything before. This woman kneels and puts her hands on the dog like she’s going to heal it, like she still has that fantasy from childhood, that you can magically heal something with your touch, but she can’t, of course, no matter how much she tries, and she buries her face into the fur, and she’s crying, weeping really, keening, and she looks up at the sky and stretches her arms heavenward in that classic pose of
why, why, why—I remember thinking, Wow, that’s dramatic—and she lets loose with this cry of pure lament, like it was scraped from the bottom of her soul, so real, you know, and almost beautiful, I thought, like this right here is the meaning of life, right here, and then she um, she um, she howls the dog’s name.” Jamie stopped, no longer sure what the point of the story was. He had lost his way, sidetracked by the unexpected pleasure of its active remembering. At eighteen it was hands down the worst thing he had ever seen, watching this dog suffer, watching this woman wail, watching it all and knowing it was all his fault. Sylvia seemed almost comfortable in the situation, like high emotion was a shared experience, two players or more. And Jamie thought maybe this will bring us back together, maybe this is what we needed. Then the woman cried the dog’s name—“Mr. Bumpus, Mr. Bumpus, Mr. Bumpus!” Mr. Bumpus? Who the hell names their dog Mr. Bumpus? There he was, his whole world thrown open, like he was the key and the dog was the lock and on the other side he glimpsed life, or life as reflected through pain and loss, that must have been the point of the story, but then he heard “Mr. Bumpus” and it slammed the door shut and turned the whole story into a punch line, a goddamn joke. Maybe that was the point. The woman rested her head on Mr. Bumpus’s chest, gathered up the fur around its neck and started to lull, “You’re a good dog, you’re a good dog.” The class waited for Jamie to regain the story’s thread but instead he apologized for this tangent and dove straight ahead into a discussion of their short film projects, which were uniformly awful.
The taxi drove over the Triborough-now-RFK bridge, the sunset an hour behind lower Manhattan, its vestige of light almost ultraviolet. Candy and Chloe and Emmett were in the backseat talking, or Chloe and Candy were talking, but the protective barrier and the Persian music made it impossible for Richard to hear what they were saying. For the first five minutes he kept turning around and asking, “What?” and caught the gist of their excitement—Bergdorf’s and Tiffany’s,
Friends
and
Seinfeld
and
Sex and the City
—but after a while Richard gave
up and returned to New York, alone. He was feeling carsick. It might have been the music, with its electric oud and high-pitched singer, like Scheherazade on the dance floor. Or the foul perfume of that bottle stuck to the dash. Maybe it was just coming back that turned his stomach. This particular approach Richard knew well since it was how they drove back from Southampton every weekend, Mom behind the wheel, Dad doing the Sunday crossword, Richard and Jamie in the back playing Twenty Questions. “Is he dead?” “No.” “Is he famous?” “No.” “Do I know him?” “Yes.” “Is he me?” No, Richard told himself, I have a life beyond my old life, the family in the backseat a testament to that fact. At first Richard never wanted children. “I’ll fuck it up,” he told Candy when she told him she was pregnant. “I’ll fuck it up and you’ll hate me for it and that’ll fuck us up and then I’m back to being a fuckup instead of a fuckup who’s trying his best to be less fucked up.” And he was trying his best, albeit unsuccessfully, unlike Candy, who was two years sober and dating him against the advice of everyone. “I have faith in you,” she said in a way that was never annoying, “and I’m feeling all this love and I want to share it with whatever’s brewing inside me.” But Richard didn’t rise to the occasion. Instead, he disappeared. For seven months. But near the end he tried his best again, and he was in the delivery room for the arrival of eight pounds’ worth of shrieking, shaking, light-blue-shading-to-pink boy. “He’s lovely,” one of the nurses told him as she wiped clean the gunky mess. But all Richard could see was a stranger, or worse, an intruder, or even worse, a fellow addict suffering through detox. “A future heartbreaker,” another nurse said. Richard wanted to throttle them. Because his first thought, his forever first thought was, I could so easily pick this thing up and smash it to the floor. The taxi merged onto the FDR Drive, and Manhattan was underfoot again. But feelings for the boy did come, haltingly, every month Emmett carving a slightly bigger space within Richard. It was almost like Richard’s own pregnancy; the extra weight might have gone unnoticed but by the first year it was there, not entirely pleasant, and Richard delivered himself into the world of fathers, powerless but clean. But for the sin of that first thought, Richard had to imagine the boy always hanging on by a thread. The taxi turned onto
96th. “This is my old neighborhood,” Richard told the backseat, and he realized that the whole way in he never once looked for the missing twin towers.
Released from the subway at 77th and Lexington, Jamie headed toward the Carlyle on Madison. It was almost ten o’clock. The weather was chilly, winter still in control of night despite the day’s advances. Jamie wore an inadequate corduroy jacket, but he was meeting his brother at Bemelmans and no matter his low-down fantasies he wanted to look presentable, hence the shave and the shower and the lack of his warmer but grubby Carhartt. He passed Lenox Hill Hospital, people loitering around in a sort of 1970s tableau of New York. He remembered when Richard had done some time here, when he was twenty-two, a fuckup beyond measure, and ended up at the emergency room after a harrowing night, the details of which he never discussed with anyone. “I need to die,” he told the admitting nurse. “I’m trying my best but it’s just not working.” Up to the psych ward he went. Jamie visited a few days later, went through those locked doors on the eighth floor and wondered what he was going to say. People milled about the central common area. It almost seemed as if the visitors were the ones afflicted, as if in here the world was reversed, the sad and suicidal, the psychotic, in total understanding of the truth, that they were lost, while family and friends and lovers tried desperately to find their way home. There was no screaming, no oddball behavior. Voices whispered and hands rummaged for something to do. Jamie saw Richard sitting by himself at a table near the back. He was pale and skinny, dark around the eyes but otherwise intact, like a house gutted by fire. Richard made no sign of noticing Jamie even when Jamie touched the table and said, “I’m glad you’re safe.” There was silence until Richard finally spoke. He spoke slowly and calmly. “I’m not sure I like you,” he said. “I think maybe you’re full of shit. But hey”—Richard lifted his arm to the scene around him—“look at the triumph I’ve made. But for the last six years I’ve pretty much wanted to hit you in the face.” Typical of his brother to lunge rather than embrace. “I don’t know why I don’t let myself like
you. Maybe one day I will. Or I hope so.” Jamie nodded, neither shocked nor amused. “I’m just here to show my support,” he said. “To tell you I love you and I’m glad you’re getting help again.” Did he mean this? Did he care? Or
was
he full of shit? Jamie crossed Park. The last time he saw Richard was two years ago, when he visited L.A. for Christmas. As a gift he drew pencil portraits of Emmett and Chloe, and Candy overreacted to their artistry, though Jamie did put in extra effort, hoping they might get framed and Richard would have to pass them every day. Near Madison “Whole Lotta Love” sounded and Jamie checked the caller ID and its accompanying photo: Sylvia smiling, snapped a few months before she died. Who was this ghost? Jamie stared at those eyes in sad retrograde, and instead of answering and breaking the spell, he allowed himself to be haunted.
Bemelmans was New York in its heyday, whatever heyday you might conjure, say when the city was really fun, yes, back then, when money and smoking and drinking were part of the great grand implied, when men looked great, women looked greater, and everybody was having sex on the sly. All of this happened before our time. Even our parents lamented about what had been lost, as if we all peeked from the banister and watched the grown-ups mingle downstairs. Our someday never quite came. Except at Bemelmans. At Bemelmans the walls were decorated with charming murals by what’s-his-name of
Madeline
fame, his Central Park inhabited by dapper cats and dapper dogs, which added to its storybook quality, the children’s fantasy of where adults congregate after they kiss you good night. It was a place of mysterious low light and red leather booths and uniformed waiters serving cocktails with names like Whiskey Smash and The Valencia, and a piano player playing “As Time Goes By” every hour for all the new arrivals, like good old Ned Durango who bushwhacked through the crowd and planted his elbow on the bar like Balboa at the Pacific taking possession of all he surveyed.
Unlike Ned Durango in
Pink Eye
, Richard divided his twelve-dollar Diet Coke into fifty-cent sips and resented every plink of the piano
that clogged the middle of the room. His brother, no surprise, was late. Every newcomer carried an expectation of Jamie but the truth was another couple overdressed or underdressed. Irving Berlin turned into Cole Porter. Candy and the children were upstairs in a two-bedroom suite courtesy of his father. A chilled bottle of champagne greeted their arrival—
love Dad
—which enraged Richard but made Candy laugh. “He’s trying,” she said. Chloe bounced from room to room eager for the morning curtain and its first showing of
New York!
starring Chloe Dyer. And Emmett? He complained about sharing a bedroom with his sister. “It’s not like we’re ten anymore,” he told Richard, and Richard gave him an anachronistic, out-of-the-blue “Dem’s de breaks, bud.” The stupid things fathers say to their sons. Cole Porter turned into George Gershwin. These songs brought to mind more glamorous people leading more glamorous lives and underscored Bemelmans as a movie set in search of a proper star. This is for you, the piano player lied. Finally the door delivered Jamie—thank God—his eyes blinking as if darkness were the brightest of lights, and Richard practically jumped and waved, Jamie touched by his enthusiasm. The brothers smiled and shook hands as if a net divided them. Despite everything they were the only ones who knew how to play certain games. History receded into a gentler past. Or was it the past that receded into a more gentle history? Either way, they shared that old conspiratorial Dyer air. I watched them from a corner booth, the best in the house. I wish I could claim some Dickensian coincidence in my being here, but that afternoon I had overheard Jamie talking to his father on the phone, mentioning Bemelmans and meeting up with Richard, and I decided to take the opportunity to bump into the brothers. Richard? Jamie? Oh hey, wow, long time, et cetera, et cetera. Quite the gamut of conversation chased its tail in my head. I would run into them with Bea on my arm, Bea who sat next to me in the booth, drinking her Carlyle Punch and looking almost thirty in her hydrangea-blue Anita dress, though the silk choker rendered her neck grade school. No doubt my lawyer would disapprove, and my wife, my children, my dead father, my dead mother. But I didn’t care. I reached under the table, unrestrained by order. If only this was the worst thing I’d ever done. George Gershwin
turned into Harold Arlen. Bea perked up. This song she recognized. I readied myself to get up, slightly disappointed that the brothers hadn’t seen me first, and I was almost on my feet when Richard and Jamie started to laugh and shake their heads, and I wondered if maybe they had seen me—
Don’t move, Philip Topping at five o’clock!
—if maybe I looked like a joke. Was the velvet jacket a mistake? The pocket square? Those brutes. With a certain kind of fury I tossed a hundred-dollar bill on the table and grabbed Bea, who protested, but I prevailed. Near the door the waiter rushed over and stopped me. It seemed I was sixty dollars short.