And Sons (10 page)

“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?”

“Sure. Just heads up, Dad’s going to beg you to come home.”

“Right, okay, whatever.” And with that Richard hung up. After a deep breath he gave the room a where-were-we grin, and for a moment it seemed like the office had reverted back into a film set, a perfect reproduction of false reality, where brothers chatted with brothers and fathers called sons and Richard might actually be successful.

“Everything okay?” asked Rainer.

“Yeah, fine.”

“If you need to go …”

“A friend of my father’s died. My godfather actually.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, he died last week.”

“Well he’s still dead.” Rainer rose from his chair, like Oscar Wilde playing Wins ton Churchill getting bad news from the front. “And dead is dead.” He pointed to the painting behind the couch. “See that, that’s a Clyfford Still. He’s dead too. My father was good friends with him and he told me when I was a boy that this was a portrait Still had painted of him. A Still life, he called it. My father loved pulling our legs. Despite that, I believed him and I can’t help but see his face in the brushstrokes, his tight-lipped smile, his droopy left eye. It might as
well be a photograph of the man. He’s also dead. When we were divvying up the estate, it was the only thing I wanted. My siblings thought I was insane. They gravitated toward the more valuable work, the Schieles, the Klimts, the Kirchners, while I went for a then-unfashionable Still.”

All eyes rested on that Still, embraced its outer stillness. The red slash seemed to record the saddest kind of sound wave, where silence is the only possible response. Richard, ever the literalist, tried to spot recognizable features in the paint and thought he caught a disapproving frown coming from a streak in the upper right corner. “It’s quite something,” he told Rainer.

“Of course it’s a reproduction.”

“Oh.”

“I couldn’t keep the real one here. A Still nowadays is worth a fortune. It’s a decent reproduction, though the original has a browner red.” Rainer turned back to Richard. “You know I used to see your father walking around Central Park, around the boat pond. I’d watch him do his laps and I’d try to imagine what was percolating inside that head. It seemed such athletic thinking. I never had the nerve to actually stop him and tell him how much I loved his books. I think I was”—a knock on the door—“around sixteen”—an assistant came in with champagne and four glasses—“when I first read
Ampersand
. I still have that cheap paperback copy, all underlined and dog-eared.” Rainer started unwrapping the foil. “I lost my literary virginity to that book.”

Eric Harke accompanied the sentiment with some phantom drum fills against his chest. “So cool that he’s your dad, just so fucking cool. I mean, A. N. Dyer. Hello. I’ve read
Ampersand
four times and I don’t even read menus more than once, but the book, it speaks to me, yeah, yeah, yeah, actor boy goes blah-blah-blah, but it does, it recharges me, makes me want to do great art.” In his excitement Eric balled his fists into exclamations of
FUCK
and
YEAH
. “It seems to me you have
Catcher in the Rye
people and you have
Ampersand
people, and I definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent fall into the
Ampersand
camp. I mean
Catcher
is excellent on a lot of levels, but it’s basically a character piece which stays stuck in the muddy bog of adolescence. That’s part of its
charm, for sure, but that’s also its limitation, that teenage sentimentality. But
Ampersand
, man
Ampersand
explodes adolescence into its core existential parts and it keeps on expanding with you, year after year, right up until your last breath. To me, Salinger is a stray dog you want to adopt, but A. N. Dyer is a different beast altogether.”

Yeah, a tick, Richard thought.

The cork popped, and Rainer began to fill glasses. “You might find this interesting, Richard. You know how many copies
Ampersand
has sold since its publication? Over forty-five million. That’s a nice big number. And every year it sells about a hundred thousand more. Or used to. The sales are slipping. Did you know that, Richard?”

“No,” Richard said, wishing the topic would spit up blood and die.

“It’s down about thirty percent over the last six years, while
Catcher
has maintained its sales. Some of the problem is high schools, that they have to choose between
Catcher
and
Ampersand
, and
Catcher
is three hundred pages shorter and not nearly as difficult, so
Catcher
wins with two hundred and fifty thousand copies sold a year and
Ampersand
falls further back into the rank of unread classics.”

The bubbles in the champagne shimmied up the flutes, a hundred phony smiles breaking the surface, like some Esther Williams routine, Richard thought, a memory of stinging sweetness flooding his mouth.

“I should tell you up front,” Rainer continued, “that for the last ten years I’ve been courting your father, more like courting his agent, about getting the rights to
Ampersand
. I know I’m not alone in this. Every decent producer has given it a shot, going back fifty years, big-time people too, much bigger than me. I know Robert Evans got close, at least that’s the story he tells. Your father has made it abundantly clear that he’s not interested and never will be interested in seeing any of his books, let alone
Ampersand
, turned into films. Maybe he’s still competing with Salinger, I don’t know, but I respect the impulse. Movies of great novels, for the most part, are disasters. Give me a flawed story anytime. That said, I do think we at Aires have a strong track record as well as the right kind of sensibility for this kind of project. I mean, look at
The Erasers
. Robbe-Grillet bringing in two hundred and fifty-four million worldwide, that’s a medium-size miracle, let alone
the critical response and the awards and the boost to book sales—I could get you the numbers if you’d like.”

Richard could feel his body shrinking.

“So I have a proposition.”

Or maybe everyone else was getting bigger.

“I want to make your movie, Richard, I want to make it right, with good people involved, like Eric here, and I want to get a proper budget, but satire is a tricky game, especially, no offense, from an unproven writer. You have to appreciate there are numerous strikes against this project from the get-go.”

Richard was yet again the boy who understood life far too late.

“But a package deal, that’s another thing. Maybe you could talk to your father about giving us a chance with
Ampersand
, just a chance, and based on your script as a writing sample, I think you should do the adaptation. Who better than the son? The publicity alone. And it would certainly pay well, and of course we would pay your father well, very well. It would be a nice windfall for the Dyer clan, not that money is the issue, of course. But if you could deliver
Ampersand
, just a twelvemonth option, I could guarantee you
A Flea and a Louse
with all the bells and whistles.”

“
A Louse and a Flea
,” Curtis corrected.

“What’s that?”

“
A Louse and a Flea
.”

“Oh, yeah, right right right right right. It’s a total win-win, Richard, with Eric doing both films. Just imagine this guy as Edgar Mead.”

“Man-oh-man-oh-man,” Eric said.

“But in five or six years, he’ll be too old, no offense.”

“None taken.”

“Nobody’s getting any younger, Richard, and heart-on-sleeve time, I’m desperate for this to happen. I love this book more than anything and I know it can be a great movie. So have a talk with your father and see if you might sway him toward us. Minimum, try and get me—”

“Us,” Eric corrected.

“Us a meeting.”

The champagne glasses were passed around and Richard took one. It seemed huge in his hand, the liquid vaguely laboratorial.

“To beginnings,” Rainer said.

What is the exact science of failure? Richard wondered.

Then Eric Harke stood up and after lifting his glass, did a curious thing: he sort of tossed a grin over his shoulder as if whatever deity that had so blessed his life was giving him a congratulatory pat, after which Eric froze and squinted, spotting a shape, it seemed, a person approaching, possibly familiar, yes, yes, I know this person, his face suggested, his brow treading deeper, his mouth momentarily hitching on the proper weight of the words before giving them voice,

his delivery obviously practiced in front of the mirror, along with every interstitial stammer and twitch, those tricks of authenticity, as well as the false naïveté of a mid-century American boy,

Eric paused to allow for his earthly return, then he smiled that famous smile as if invigorated by a dip in one of his native ten thousand lakes. “I hope that wasn’t too ridiculous.”

“Could there be a better Edgar Mead?” Rainer pronounced. He raised his glass in artistic salute, while Richard tried to anchor his insides, unsettled by the personal effects of gravity, and though he did lift his glass along with the others, he never took a sip. No, after cheers Richard put the glass back down on the table without comment, just like he let the phone keep on vibrating in his pocket without saying a word.

L
ET
’
S NOW TURN
to the second son, Jamie Dyer, sitting in a rented Honda Odyssey parked across the street from the Riverbank Cemetery in Stowe, Vermont. It was two in the morning, the temperature outside in the twenties. Jamie sat there and waited—I can picture him, sitting perfectly still, beyond still, pretending to be a lizard-like creature either on the hide or on the hunt, that motivation forever uncertain. I am nothing, he thought. Nobody sees me. He sat there and he waited and after some minutes he broke the pose and lit a joint. Because of his fondness for marijuana people assumed Jamie was a relaxed individual, one of those semiprofessional stoners in high school and college and beyond, but in reality he was often anxious, not in ways fearful or troubled, certainly not neurotic, but more like a juggler with too many thoughts tumbling through the air. Most of those thoughts tended toward the innocuous yet deeply felt, in the realm of I should learn how to fly an airplane, or I should run a marathon next year, or I should really pick up the guitar again, which he had only played for six months in seventh grade, but a few of those thoughts were machete-sharp, as in issues of personal worth and failed promise—oh man, that was a buzzing chain saw—but after a cleansing hit of dope a small pure sense of self seemed to open up—here he is, ladies and gentlemen, the man you’ve been waiting for—and Jamie settled onto the stage, the minivan’s dash his footlights. All of those previous doubts were reduced down into brief soliloquy: I am me. Three hits quelled him, the fourth he wisely denied. After all, there was hard work to be done tonight. The windshield carried the grimy aftereffects of snow, the wiper blades describing an arc similar to an
open book, with this chapter landing on a full moon, a cemetery, a quiet country road, a setting evocative of madmen and axes. Jamie lowered his eyes to the navigation screen. He imagined a dot creeping up from behind, a crazed bloody dot dragging its left foot. Jamie locked the doors. He smiled. For distraction and fun, he pushed the button on the steering wheel and asked the minivan for the nearest Friendly’s. In seconds a Friendly’s popped up ten miles away. Maybe afterward he’d have a burger. “Nearest ATM?” There were four within two miles. He pushed the button once more. “Tell me, O muse, what the fuck am I doing here?” The computer asked him to restate the question. “Never mind,” he said.

Evidently there were four never-minds in the state of Vermont.

Since yesterday the minivan had doubled as Jamie’s temporary home. It was a rather comfortable nest, even if this morning a layer of frost covered the inside: an ice palace of his own breath, he reckoned, pleased that this metaphor from
Here Live Angry Dogs and Brutal Men
mingled with his own life (despite Dennis Dormin’s fate). Jamie scraped the glass with his fingernail and wrote his name, just like Dennis did. It’s a small moment in the book, and a lesser writer would have wrung the image of every sniff and snore, but A. N. Dyer simply let the scene play, with Dennis late for work and waiting and waiting—“Goddamn it!”—waiting for those vents to defrost the despair of last night. It was a lovely bit of writing, Jamie recalled, as he watched the physical record of his sleep melt under that rising Vermont sun. He wondered which of those drips belonged to his dreams and which belonged to his father.