Authors: David Gilbert
“You guys have got to meet Chris Denslow.”
Whatever the actor’s absurdity in private, in public blossomed into majesty, and Jamie was struck by the transformation and found himself smiling, which was like a palate cleanser for the crowd.
“Chris is a big fan of your father’s work,” Eric told Richard. “He thinks it’s very cool that we might work on
Ampersand
together, fingers crossed. He has a couple of interesting ideas about how you might structure the screenplay, stay in Edgar Mead’s head without doing the whole voice-over thing. Drink?” Eric had effortlessly guided them through the muddle and straight to the bar.
“Sprite,” said Richard.
“What’s this about working on
Ampersand
?” Jamie asked.
“You want a drink?”
“I’ll stick with tequila. What’s this about
Ampersand
?” Jamie repeated.
“You’re a fan?” Eric asked, sipping a beer. “Because Richard—”
Richard put down the Sprite. “I’ll have a bourbon actually.”
“A bourbon?” from a whiplashed Jamie.
“Why not?” Richard said, taking the proffered drink and holding it close to his chest, like it was wired to that grenade tattoo. “It’s a fucking party.”
Eric tapped Jamie. “Do you know who his father is?”
Jamie James showed his street side. “Some asshole like his son?”
“No, man, he’s”—Eric Harke yawned—“A. N. Dyer.”
“Wow,” Jamie said as flat as possible.
“And I’m”—another yawn—“I’m Edgar Mead. It’s going to be
awe”—yawn—“some.” Eric lifted his drink for a ratifying clink, and Richard complied without taking a sip, quickly returning the pin to his chest. He tried to intercept Jamie’s glance before the full weight of criticism could fall on his shoulders, in hopes he might convey through a series of facial tics the whole story, and that maybe Jamie would understand, both from the inside and the outside, without clumsy explanation, and perhaps with this knowledge could forgive Richard, though
forgive
was too strong a word, especially since
Ampersand
was hardly his to give, but Richard, feeling exposed, yearned for those telepathic fantasies of youth.
“You’d be a perfect Edgar Mead,” Jamie told Eric. He reached over and took Richard’s glass and downed the contents in one gulp. “Fuck, I hate bourbon.”
Eric yawned again. “Shit, I’m exhausted. I think I might need another bump.”
“Good idea.” Jamie gave his brother the empty glass, and Richard said thanks without saying a word.
Before Eric Harke could leave for the confines of the nearest bathroom stall, a pair of thick-fingered hands docked on his shoulders, part in greeting, part in massage. “Up past your bedtime, little boy?”
Eric turned around. It was “Krebs!”
Rainer grinned, his cheeks a curtain rising. “Look at this ragtag crew.”
“You been here long?”
“Long enough to wonder where you’ve been. So this is the big surprise.” Rainer sized up the new look. “I like it. Very then and now.” Then he cast his eye on Richard. “Hello, Richard.”
“Rainer.”
“Nice to see you again.”
“Likewise.”
Rainer Krebs turned to Jamie, and before Jamie could decide between truth or fiction, Rainer thrust his hand forward. “And you are Jamie Dyer. I’ve been an admirer ever since Telluride all those years ago.
Lord God
blew me away, blew everyone away. I even have a bootleg copy that I push onto my friends. Why wasn’t it ever released?”
“Music clearance issues,” Jamie said.
“Of course, the songs he sings on the corner.”
“That plus no one really cared.”
“A shame.” Rainer leaned his head toward Jamie. “Have you ever thought about putting it online? I have a site, a cult film site, and I think we could create a nice following. You were ahead of your time with what you were doing.”
“Rainer’s a film producer,” Richard explained.
“
Lord God
would play very well in this day and age,” Rainer said.
“You think?”
“I do. We should have a talk at some point.” Rainer removed the mustard-colored pocket square from his suit jacket and handed it to Jamie, who regarded it like a new form of business card. “Your nose,” Rainer redirected.
“What?”
“It’s bleeding.”
“Oh.” Jamie dabbed his left nostril.
“Wait, you’re a Dyer as well?” from a fading Eric Harke.
“We’re brothers,” Richard said.
“Why didn’t you guys tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Are you involved in
Ampersand
as well?” Jamie asked Rainer.
“Well.” Rainer turned toward Richard. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Still in the preliminary stages,” Richard said.
“So the three of you—” Jamie started to say.
“Could be the four of us,” Rainer said. “What are you working on now?”
“Teaching mostly.”
“Where?”
“At the New School.”
An almost apologetic “Oh.”
“Being brothers is just something you’d tell a person,” Eric said to the growing void.
“We should find Chris.” Rainer glanced around, and seeing no evidence of the man of the hour, became the prow for forward progress.
This kind of New York scene was familiar to Richard and Jamie from when they were boys and went to dances and coming-out parties, events where the Upper East Side groomed its young. Toss any of us into a benefit or gala and we can survive. We are all functionally charming. We all have decent names to drop. And walking with Eric Harke was almost an act of memory for Richard and Jamie. In their day they had the fame of their father. Maybe A. N. Dyer was a cold and distant light but he gave them a shine they parlayed into a swagger. Time, of course, is linear, but as they made their way through this crowd it seemed as if they were ants tunneling through an hourglass. In the packed East Gallery Krebs pointed: over there, Christopher Denslow, standing by Goya’s
The Forge
with two other young men. The three of them seemed stuck in a fit of laughter, particularly the two other young men—not men, but Andy and Emmett, hunched over as if each might collapse without the other’s support. Rainer and Eric Harke walked over, desperate to know what was so funny, but Richard, startled to see his son, held back, and so did Jamie, who was approaching drunk and was suddenly daunted by the idea that his father could be this son. Those eyes and mouth expressed a lunatic joy that he hoped once existed in the man. Christopher Denslow accepted the hellos and congratulations, but Andy and Emmett remained trapped in hilarity. Whenever they tried to surface—deep breath—they slipped further back. People started to notice. It was becoming unseemly. Nobody wanted drunk, perhaps stoned, teenagers at this party. The boys sensed this growing unease and repeated “Okay, okay, okay,” as if propriety involved an act of daring. Finally, Andy and Emmett straightened, socially restored. Rainer and Eric and Christopher, Andy and Emmett, clustered into a tighter group. Introductions were made. This Dyer-rich crowd no doubt flabbergasted Eric Harke, who pointed to where the Dyer brothers stood. Jamie, thus identified, walked over, unsure of what he might say or do, but Andy was caught up in the wholehearted vibe of his family, greeted him with an extended “Hey man” that stretched his arms wide. Jamie perhaps accepted the hug a little too keenly after his long, strange day, his injuries standing as proof. Andy called him a madman, which Eric Harke seconded
with a yawn. Richard watched this group like the last player to be picked. Richard could read Emmett’s expression—
Oh shit, my dad
—no telepathy required. It was obvious the boy was buzzed. And so what? He was sixteen, a near-perfect student, vice president of his class. Christ, the life Richard had led by the time he was sixteen. But what with the combined genetic material of father and mother, Emmett was likely ill-suited to these effects, not to mention his already compromised medical history. Richard and Candy had had their conversations with Emmett, starting when he was twelve, about the dangers of drugs and alcohol and their own struggles with the disease (that word shamed Richard after what Emmett had been through). And here he was, drinking. And having fun. And let the boy have fun. Have fun, Richard wanted to communicate from across the room, but please be back by eleven. He decided to give Emmett an as-you-were salute and then turn and leave, but before Richard could raise his hand, he noticed Andy. It seemed like he was signaling him over. If Emmett was buzzed, then Andy was flat-out wasted. But something about his appearance shimmered. He wore a bulky pinstripe suit and a pair of scuffed wingtips, a gray and burgundy tie. A chill raised on Richard’s skin. Think of a warm bath draining. The water removing and carrying away. A sort of tremulous blue haze. Andy swayed like the distance between them was a span, and Richard noticed the pimple burning bright between those dark anthracite eyes. A mirage of his possible father played. It wavered between the absurd and the slightly less absurd, the one and the same, as Andy made his way across the room, careful with every step as though a chasm loomed between the gaps. “Come on,” he said after reaching Richard. His breath reeked. Just another drunk kid. He started to lead Richard toward the group, his grin forging its own truth. “We need you, man,” he said.
T
HE SOUND OF TINY CLAWS SCRATCHING
, a burrowing, Andrew decided. What started as a post-Vicodin, pre-dinner nap was turning into an aural investigation. It came from deep within the couch. A mouse maybe. A mouse family maybe. It was a comfortable couch and no doubt deluxe accommodations for a mouse. Hopefully just a mouse. Andrew scratched the cushion to test the sound against the sound inside the couch. After a minute he wondered if maybe he was trying to communicate. He stopped. The scratching continued. Gnawing might have been involved as well. As an experiment, Andrew screamed into the crevasse between cushions, rather like a loon. The scratching, and the gnawing, stopped. Silence. Or not quite silence. The pressure within his ear crackled with a cochlear snow, like an internal blizzard. He thought of New York, the sidewalks and streets flattened white, the park quilted. There had been a few heavy snowstorms this year. Probably no more on the docket. Winter was done. On the horizon another spring. Andrew shifted on the couch. He began missing the mouse-like sound. He pressed his ear harder to the cushion and held his breath. He’d always been good at holding his breath. Charlie Topping once stopwatched him at two minutes and thirty-three seconds, a tremendous length of time when underwater. The key was to give up some air early and then sink and pretend to sleep on the bottom. Like the water was your dream. Upon awakening, Andrew would burst to the surface, lungs burning, and Charlie would exaggerate the click like he was a crusty trainer who could hardly fathom this kid. Unbelievable, he’d say, playing every syllable. Everything was un·be·liev·a·ble that summer of holding your
breath. Andrew scratched the cushion in his closest approximation of rodent.
You there? Hey buddy, you there?
Still nothing. He pictured the mouse peering from around one of those springs, his mouse family cowering behind him, a beam of flashlight scanning the upholstery’s inner courtyard. Shhhh. Not a squeak, little ones. He always did want to write a children’s book. Too late now, he supposed.
Ampersand
was likely the last book he would ever write. At least there was some decent irony in that.
Only the epilogue remained. Edgar Mead had saved Timothy Veck in the cruelest manner imaginable, though he did thwart the even nastier plans of Messrs. Stimpson, Harfield, Matthews, and Rogin. But maybe a baseball bat to the head and a shallow grave would have been more charitable. Regardless, the book was essentially done. The last page of the last chapter rested facedown on that pile of Eaton twenty-pound stock:
You can never really know something, at least that’s my absurd defense, that life is unknowable even though all this time I’ve known the exact truth. But I pretend that my own mystery bends along with the mystery of the universe. My father wasn’t a hero. He wasn’t even in the war though the war did do something to him. That confident vigor, that Presbyterian aplomb, that square-jawed purpose thrust forward in old team pictures, that bygone breed of privileged American male, became unnerved once the civilized world lost its spin. My strongest memory of him was his funeral and all the kind if oblique words said as my hand was cranked for water. A terrible accident. A real shock. Yep, yep, and yep. His best friend – and my godfather – Tommy Archibald Jr. cabled his condolences from England. Most of his better friends were already in England or the Pacific. It was women and older lesser men who gave me their weak comfort. The good solid banker, Mr. Byers of Old Westbury and the Lafayette Flying Corps, he was there, and seven years later he would stand in my dorm as my
stepfather, eyeing me like a between-the-crosshairs Fokker from the Luftstreitkrafte. He would let me live but with the understanding that I now belonged to him. “This is not how my son acts,” he said, picking up my suitcase like it was as light as my father’s good name. He had negotiated a suspension rather than an expulsion, and since he was a Hotchkiss man, the name on the future dorm would have to be my own. He led me into the hall. I should mention Alec Guinness in
Kwai
and “Tintern Abbey” and the dissection and the scrabble but is anyone listening? Does anyone care? This will all get redacted, and those who do care will find the proper business in the margins. I knew the red door would stick. Put some dick into it, Nancy, was what the seniors always told us. I strangled him a little. If I hadn’t stopped he would have died and I honestly don’t know how I stopped. A crack and the door opened. It was a cold New Hampshire evening. I remember the distant comfort of chimney smoke. And I remember imagining another fire, and everything burning, the air silent of human suffering except for the smell of boys going up in flames, my father included.
Putting this down on paper was like rendering a carcass into tallow, and Andrew was rather pleased with the light. Probably better than the original, he thought. Of course tomorrow he would have to cross the whole mess out, but right now he was satisfied and he was tired and he wanted to lie down and close his eyes around Isabel and her unexpected visit from this morning. She was still so beautiful. Gravity’s tedious cousin had no effect on her good company. If anything her aging was a move toward minimalism rather than his bombastic turn toward the grotesque. Years of his life reeled behind those eyes and he wished he could step in and understand himself in that context again.