Authors: David Gilbert
For the first time in a long time Andy was happy to see his father, the unexpected relief rendered as affection. He went over and guided his father forward, like a member of the audience pulled into action.
“Is that my suit?” his father asked.
“Yes it is.”
“It looks good on you.”
“Thanks.”
“You need a shirt, though.”
“Yeah, thanks for the advice.”
“Seeing the two of you I thought for a moment I was unfettered from time.”
“Stay with me here, Dad.”
“What?”
“Just try to be normal.”
“Do you think I’m crazy too?” his father asked this poor woman.
Andy shook his head. “Most people would start with ‘How are you?’ and then maybe move on to ‘What brings you here?’ and ‘What are you up to?’ That said, Mrs. Dyer, he really is crazy.”
“Platt actually.”
“Mrs. Platt then. It was nice to meet you. I hope I wasn’t …”
“No,” she said, picking up where he hesitated. “It was nice to meet you too.”
There was no departing handshake, only a quick wave and Andy started back up the stairs, taking them by twos, speeding up the curve like he needed to remind himself of his youth, like regardless of where he was, he could be somewhere else in a flash, though halfway up he did glance back down and see that they were watching him with the same look on their faces, as if about suffering they were never wrong.
Timmy stared at me and I swear it was like he was trying to bore sympathy into my skull, trying to steer me, to guide my hands into untying the rope like I was controlled by strings, like I had the choice and the choice was now – challenging me, really, this royal pain, this lurker, clueless of his effect on people, particularly yours truly, greeting me from distances as great as a quarter mile, Edgar! Edgar! Edgar! like he was going to jump up and lick me, or worse kiss me, like I was Sarge back home from the war and he was my three-cent Penny, and people would laugh without him noticing and mutter – “Here comes your gal” – and I’d wonder what I did to deserve this, all because my father insisted I should rise above the tide and show him companionship, like I was his shadow of the war, the foxhole chits scrawled in mud and blood, even if back home Father Mead and Father Veck had almost nothing in common, the insurance salesman and the snob, but regardless I was nice to Timmy and treated him buddy buddy, a through-and-through pal, or I tried to, I swear I tried to, but here he was lips trembling and staring like freeing him was already part of our history, and the more I absorbed that future the angrier I got, like he held this secret over me, this weakness on my part. I dropped the sandwich and the Coke into the bucket with the resignation of a Civil War
surgeon. I kicked him in the shins. It was a half-hearted kick. That was going to be the extent, a kick and then I’d leave, but I kicked him again, harder this time, and I told him he knew nothing, he was a fool, a laughingstock, a terrible queer,
I’m sorry
as I jammed the socks back into his mouth and retied the necktie tight, you probably like this, I said, you inverted jackass, and maybe I slapped him, maybe whenever a comma appears you should imagine my open palm, and he probably still loved me even after I closed the door and slammed those bolts home, probably still forgave me. I restraightened the books on the shelves. The other Edgar. I had baseball practice in ten minutes and I started to run for the gym. The day was perfect, the green fields freshly mowed, the few clouds in the sky the sort landscape painters put in to deepen the flat blue nothing. A yellow birthday balloon was snagged in a high branch of a tree. I made it in time for fungoes.
The scene downstairs stayed with Andy for less than a minute before he turned back to his father’s closet and wondered if black wingtips would go well with the suit and which one of the neckties he should wear. But as Andy tonight took shape in the mirror, another part of him came back with a different assessment, as he looped a Windsor knot around his bare neck, that he was teaching himself something important even if it might be something about failure.
T
HE PLAN WAS
for Richard and Jamie to meet their mother at J.G. Melon on 74th and Third, and over a hamburger she would tell them about her visit with Dad and they could discuss what they should do next. That was the plan. But Mom was twenty-five minutes late, thirty if going by the wedge of watermelon clock over the bar, and now the lunch crowd teemed and tables garnered a waiting list, the space between self and food growing longer by the minute. The brothers sat in the corner, the television overhead a thought balloon via ESPN. They were the missed free throw, the shot on post, the lipped putt. When they first arrived the host told them they could have their pick of table once their party was complete. How that word charmed them. “We are incomplete,” from Richard, “You incomplete me,” from Jamie, as they settled into the bar and ordered a club soda and a beer. It seemed a more innocent time back then, the good old days of a quarter-past-twelve. Their bartender was likely Bobby “Big Baby” Frizz, famous for his cantilevering stomach, but Richard and Jamie had no idea of his name. They knew Melon’s, though. We all did. I can still see it on the northeast corner, its exterior painted green with a slice of red neon that seemed forever reflected in rainwater. Most of our childhood haunts had long disappeared, but Melon’s still beckoned like a mirage miraculously real.
“It’s like this place is preserved in amber,” Jamie was saying.
Richard nodded.
“Same menu, same décor, prices certainly different, but essentially we could be those preppy kids over there. Nothing would be anachronistic. Same cash register even. It’s timeless for as long as I’ve known time.”
Richard stopped nodding. “You stoned?”
“Perhaps.”
“And now you’re getting drunk?”
“Drunk? Two beers doth not a drunk make.”
“That’s your fifth refill, Shakespeare.”
“No way.”
“Yep.”
“In my defense it’s a small glass.” Jamie squinted and went all shaggy, the dimple on his cheek like a registered trademark. Fucking Richard, he thought, fuck Richard but fucking Richard, always determined to define himself in opposition to the world, like a linebacker, while Jamie was the running back slipping through the seams. But Jamie should be kinder. After all, his brother was showing impressive patience, though pity the ripped cocktail napkin and the mangled red straw. And Jamie himself no longer breezed through openings but stumbled and bruised easily. This morning he had gotten another call from Sylvia, quickly ignored and deleted, which made a total of three beyond-the-dead dials. And yesterday emails from old friends started to thread his mailbox with subject lines like
Have you seen this?
or
Sylvia Freaking Weston!
or
Oh my God!
All of them contained links to videos on various websites. Obviously something had happened; obviously someone at RazorRam, maybe Ram Barrett himself, had posted
12:01
P.M
.
online and the video had metastasized. Goddamn Ram. Goddamn me. Eyes closed, Jamie could hear Sylvia’s footsteps approaching. How are you? Scared shitless, thank you very much. His solution was simple: no more computer, no more phone. He embraced his own brand of Cartesian logic—I do not answer, therefore I do not exist. The pot helped as well. “I’m starving,” he told Richard.
“Bet you are.”
“Because it’s lunchtime.” Then Jamie added, “Asshole.”
“Right.”
“I’m not that stoned.”
“Whatever.”
“Seriously.”
Richard turned toward the door, where a couple breezed in like a commercial for healthy promiscuity, the man and woman undaunted
by the crowd or the thirty-minute wait or the man glaring from the vicinity of the bar. “This is getting ridiculous,” Richard said.
“Getting? Gotten,” Jamie said.
“Why does she have a cellphone if she never answers?”
“She’s like God that way.”
Richard considered his brother. “Good one,” he finally said.
“I try.”
“Sounds like something Dad would’ve written.”
Jamie placed his hand over his chest. “Ouch.”
“Sorry, low blow. Or high blow.”
“Momma says ‘Blow me,’ ” Jamie said, which was an old joke between them.
Richard smiled. “You remember
The Runaway Bunny
? Of course you don’t, you don’t have kids, but it’s a great little book, for like small kids, two-year-olds, three-year-olds. It’s about this bunny, duh, who wants to run away, or who threatens to run away, is actually asking his mother a totally different question, the way kids do, asking a far more abstract question, which sometimes you hear and sometimes you don’t, or you don’t hear until days later and you’re like damn, that’s what he was asking. Anyway, it’s a great book, with amazing illustrations, truly beautiful, and maybe the best ending in the world. It was Emmett’s favorite, read it to him a thousand times. Chloe preferred
Goodnight Moon
. There’s even a reference in
Goodnight Moon
to
The Runaway Bunny
and vice versa. I mean, it’s all kind of genius.” Richard paused. “Why the hell am I talking about this?”
“I have no idea, man,” Jamie said.
“There was a point.”
“Something about Dad?”
“No.”
“Something about a rabbit you once knew who ran away?”
“Ha-ha,” Richard parried. He tried to keep himself within well-defined boundaries instead of letting his embarrassment poke through, you sentimental ass, talking about
The Runaway Bunny
like it’s some masterpiece of literature. But there was a point, a humorous point, he swore. After a sniffy breath, Richard abandoned the thought. “I really need to go for a long run. I hate using the elliptical.”
“Can I download this book?” Jamie asked.
“Enough.”
“I’m being serious. It sounds interesting.”
“Fuck off.”
“I swear, this is me serious. At least tell me how it ends.”
“The mother shuts the kid up with a carrot, okay, asshole.” Richard checked his watch against the watermelon. “I can’t wait much longer. I’ve got things to do.”
“What do you have to do?”
“I have a meeting.”
“There must be a meeting every five minutes in this city.”
“No, not that kind of meeting,” Richard said, yawning just to change expression. It was almost funny, this misunderstanding, if Richard could have given his brother the benefit of his own self-crushing doubt. Fucking Jamie. Stoned and drunk and deluded into thinking this was rascally and lovable. A long time ago that pleased-with-itself grin inspired the physics of a well-tossed apple, a helluva shot from Richard that slammed into Jamie’s cheek and dented the bone into an adorable dimple. Typical, with his luck. But Richard tried to push aside old trajectories. Because it was funny, this misunderstanding, funnier still because Richard had gone to a meeting meeting earlier this morning, in a church basement on Lexington and 76th. The Manhattan brethren seemed so professional, so clean and well dressed, except for a few scrubbers in the back who appeared recently unrolled from a rug, kidnapped from somewhere south of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God. Richard ended up talking, as planned. He told those gathered about being back in New York after a long absence and how the last time he was here he was squatting in Central Park, finding a perch in an old elm that had his boyhood initials carved in the trunk. The cops shooed him away every so often, but he would circle back and climb higher and of course get higher—a nice laugh from the group—and he would climb higher still and get higher still until he found himself stuck near the top. “I was frozen,” he said. “Because as we all know going up is a lot easier than coming down.” A bit on the nose that. He told them how he pictured a hook and ladder screaming to the rescue, a crowd applauding as the fireman carried down this stranded crackhead
kitty—no laugh here. But instead he unstuck himself when everything was smoked, practically flung his body from branch to branch and once on the ground again searched the surrounding leaves for any dropped crumbs. It was a decent story, if too well practiced from meetings in L.A., and maybe too L.A., too glib and too cute, too corny, desperate to be loved, sentimental—holy Christ, so fucking sentimental, Richard thought,
The Runaway Bunny
still in his head. For all his intense meaning, he was half-assed. Richard tossed the straw onto the bar. No, Jamie, this afternoon he had a different kind of meeting. “It’s a business thing,” he said, watching the straw go through its plastic death throes.
“I thought AA was your business?”
“My other business, movie business, screenplay stuff.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Humility flitted but Richard swatted. “I’m meeting with Eric Harke.”
“Like the actor Eric Harke?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Really? That’s so fucking cool.”
Richard went into immediate downplay mode. “We’ll see.”
“He did that young Albert Einstein thing, right?”
“You’re thinking Thomas Edison.”
“Right, right, right, as like a superhero.”
“A super inventor,” Richard corrected.
“Right, with those electromagnetic thingamajigs.”
“That was the young Tesla.”
“Right. And they lived in a giant zeppelin. What was that movie called?”
Richard picked the straw up again. “
The Steampunks
.”
“Very cool, very cool.” A waggle of the mug and Big Baby poured a fresh one for Jamie, who took a sip, in hindsight a gulp. He was happy for his brother, hence the impressed nodding, a tight rhythmic loop, like his nose was keeping a small ball in the air, an appreciation of Richard’s journey from miserable teen to terrible addict to successful husband and father and now what? screenwriter, all on his own terms,
really impressive stuff, this nodding tried to convey, though the nodding also acknowledged all the years when Jamie depended on Richard’s foundering since it made him shine in comparison, the healthy and presentable son, the charmer feeding his mother casual bits of brotherly criticism, like she was turf won or lost on a daily basis, like one of those hills in one of those wars in one of those countries. Jamie let the ball drop onto his lap. “What’s the screenplay about?” he asked.