And Sons (18 page)

“That’s okay.”

“Every morning it’s like I swallowed a cork.” He poured a cup of coffee, and I grabbed a cup as well, even accepted the milk and sugar though I preferred mine black. His mysterious pronouncement from last night, that they’ll soon be here, was solved when he told me that Richard and Jamie were visiting tomorrow. “Richard’s coming all the way from California,” he said. “He has two children, a boy and a girl I’ve never met. Do you know if I have to come up with a nickname, a ‘Gramps’ or a ‘Pops’ or something? What did your children call your father?”

“Grandfather,” I said.

Andrew smiled. “Of course.”

“If you have a full house, I can …” I gestured the
leave
part.

“No. I’m putting Richard up at the Carlyle. A nice big suite. Killing him with kindness. And Jamie has his own place, in Brooklyn of all
places. I thought the two of them should have some dim sympathies with Andy before I complete my journey down the drain.”

I nodded, uncertain what to say. I was so nervous to be in his company, doubly nervous at such an intimate hour, seeing A. N. Dyer in need of fresh clothes and a comb. A strange, inexplicable sorrow welled up within me, like a call for tears, as if the future were tapping me and telling me to pay attention right here, that this was sadder than I could presently understand. Andrew must have assumed my wobble was linked to my father and he told me that he missed him. And maybe he recognized some fellow foxhole feeling in my eyes, because he asked if my father had said anything before he died.

“Like what?”

“Like last words,” he said.

The question took me by surprise. I’m sure we could go back and trace a final conversation, but in terms of proximity, my father was silent. I know this because I was the only family member with him when he died. My brother and sister and stepmother had all done their bedside best, remaining with him as he weakened, his pillow like a sponge absorbing his demise, and we all sat there, and we waited, and we said our goodbyes, and we waited, and we sat there, and we told him that we loved him, something we rarely did when he was not dying, and we waited, and we sat there, pressing around him and telling him, you can go now, it’s all right, we’ll be fine, because frankly we had other things to do, but we continued to sit and say our goodbyes, for days, for weeks, stewing in our own healthy company, and after a while my brother had to get back to work, and my sister had to take care of her children, and my stepmother had to resume her lunches and Pilates and bridge games and gallery tours and Italian lessons. Me? By then I was full-time free. So I took on the job as a monk takes on a calling, vaguely addicted to the mortal codependency. To borrow a line from
The Bend of Light:

When I was a boy I could die multiple times a day in a multitude of styles, but once older I stopped with the playacting though I continued
to imagine myself getting run over by a car or crashing in an airplane or suffering through a terrible disease—half the fun, I think, was proving myself still alive. But as my father’s breathing grew more shallow and inconsistent, divided by low tones like the upwelling of the soul, and the hospice nurse said soon (but she was always saying soon), I could tell that this time was real and I took in the details of this ultimate performance. I noted his eyes staring at the ceiling like a nasty word problem had been scrawled up there. I studied the nest of his mouth, the straining chick-like tongue. I was shocked by the smell. The overall reek I anticipated, but the hint of stale water in a vase full of lilacs, my mother’s favorite, spooked me, and I stared at him and tried to make sense of this metaphysical association, and he stared back just as hard, unblinking, unbreathing now, his left hand gripping the sheets like he was slipping, like he was going to fall, and I remember reaching over and holding his arm, this lifelong presence I barely knew, and I held his arm and I said again and again, I love you, like Lamaze in reverse, I love you, hoping this sentiment would fall side-by-side with the man rather than Why can’t my stupid son save me? And that was it. There were no last words on his part, only mine. But rather than tell this to Andrew, instead I lied and told him that my father did say something, he said, “What a world, what a world.” I have no idea why that popped into my head. If I had more time I would have reached for poetry and really impressed the man, but
What a world, what a world
was what lay within my immediate grasp. It was something I used to squeal at my children when I was trying to both frighten and thrill them.

Andrew seemed shaken. “He said that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Exactly that?”

“Yes.”

I was curious if he realized the origin of the phrase, or if I should explain its provenance, but I was already in the hole for lying so I kept quiet. After nodding a few times he went back into his study and I imagine that he rolled in another sheet of that precious Eaton stock. I myself have a piece of that paper, sent to me a few weeks after this
story ends. The original folds are now cut into a razor-thin sharpness, the edges framed by my constant handling. I’ll admit I even licked the corner once. I keep it in my wallet and often check it, like a traveler with a passport, just to make sure those six words are still there.

Behind that closed door, A. N. Dyer started on the thirteenth chapter of
Ampersand
. It was the midpoint of the book. The opening letter of each chapter corresponded with its position in the alphabet, though no one ever picked up on this particular detail. It seemed so obvious to Andrew, unlike the other secrets in his books. The pattern was meaningless beyond its own sense of play, a symbol of symbols, the letters forever married to that preliterate song with its lonely, almost pleading coda:
Next time won’t you sing with me
.

Andrew typed.

Andy slept upstairs.

I ate my toast.

I wonder how many of us were keeping our mouths shut?

T
HE ALARM CLICKED
on to WFMU, in midstream of “I’ll Be Zeus” by Bionic Love, which slowly tilted Andy awake, his vision falling on his clothes, disposed on the floor near his bed like a chalk outline. A goddamn crime scene he thought, what with all the stupid things he did last night. Like the way he said, “My father, well, he’s A. N. Dyer, the writer,” to that bookish girl from Brearley whose father was probably a billionaire and partied with rock stars. And the way he got stoned and insisted that everyone listen, like really listen, to “Jupiter” from Holst’s
The Planets
, a choice even the morning radio seemed to vote against. Oh shit and the way he demanded Martini & Rossi Asti Spumanti, and the way he pretended to trip and fall and actually did trip and fall into a bunch of girls from Chapin, spilling their red wine and giving their pants a menstrual pantomime, which he himself pointed out, and Doug Streff laughed because he laughed at all Andy’s antics. “You one silly bastard,” Doug said in a big hug of a Greek accent, totally made-up. But everyone was in a festive mood. It was the first night of spring break, the New York tribes of boarding school kids and private school kids gathering in a neutral setting (the host was booted from St. Paul’s for writing bad checks and now went to Poly Prep) before they all left on their family vacations. Why the hell did he invite Jeanie Spokes to this low-roller affair? She had been unreachable since visiting the apartment after the funeral, and he was still suffering from the blue balls of showing her around, of having her briefly in his room, right near his bed, which he pointed to and said, “Welcome to Hogwarts,” hoping this was clever and funny, but she left soon after and since then had responded with total electronic silence,
like maybe she had wised up and decided that seventeen was way too young. Hogwarts? Jesus. And what does he do to convince her otherwise? He emails her an invite to this lurkathon of seventeen-year-olds, and not cool cinematic seventeen-year-olds but seventeen-year-olds who remind you that being seventeen actually sucks. Fucking Muggles. During the entire party he hoped she wouldn’t show, and when she didn’t, he was devastated.

On the floor his shirtsleeve seemed to stretch toward the bed in a last-ditch plea of Save me please! Andy would have sunk further into the evening’s postmortem except he was happiest waking up in this room, in this bed, the sheets cool and clean, impossibly clean compared to the Exeter papyrus. What did Gerd use, some special Scandinavian flakes? He rolled over and pushed the snooze button mid (
“Dip back your head, into my shower of gold, feel no dread, I’m a swan and I’m cold”
) chorus. It was 10:46
A.M
. He had no reason to be awake. The alarm was set so he could roll over and fall back asleep, without worry yet still conscious of time. It was like floating in an ocean of untroubled purpose. Maybe this is how babies exist in the womb—fetuses, he supposed, if being technical—and we, or me, maybe I still carry a link to that primal buoyancy, to that great grand whatever of my warm watery beginnings. Andy readjusted the pillow under his stomach. Maybe, he thought, this is a trace memory of my mother.

Her name was Sina Astreyl, and she was twenty-three and Swedish, originally from the town of Mora. All Andy really knew about her came from three photographs: Sina on a snowy street; Sina with a poodle; Sina in the doorway of a yellow house with green shutters. In all three photos Sina was smiling, revealing deep-rooted teeth that proclaimed joy as both a natural phenomenon and a fierce pursuit. Her eyes seemed alert, like an athlete parsing the split-second differences between success and failure. The photos had no dates, no inscriptions, but whatever their circumstance they were taken close together: all three Sinas wear the same blue parka and all three Sinas seem lit by the same affection for the photographer. Gerd once told Andy that they were likely taken during something called Vasaloppet week, a popular cross-country ski marathon that finished in Mora. “You can see the
banners and the crowds. It’s a great big party,” she said, scratching his scalp the way he liked. “She’s lovely. I can see her face in yours.” But Andy wished he had more of her blond hair and blue eyes, her easy Nordic complexion. He was determined to visit Mora and someday investigate his maternal side, but in the meantime he just had these photos of a woman who looked as if she were speeding downhill.

The story goes that Sina Astreyl was working as an au pair when she slammed into A. N. Dyer with her charge’s stroller. It happened in Central Park, by the model-boat pond. “She was practically jogging and she clipped me in the ankle,” his father once told him. “There was blood.”
Blood?
“Not much, a scrape’s worth.” Over the next week the two discovered that they were on the same park schedule, and when he saw her he teased her by carefully stepping aside. “She was adorably embarrassed.”
Did you like her?
“She was much younger, so liking never really crossed my mind.” But after a few weeks of these fellow transits they began to hitch up in synchronous loops. “It was nice company, that’s all.”
What did you talk about?
“She liked poetry, Rilke, whom I once adored. She shined her youth against my darkening age.” And then one Thursday, her free day, she appeared unburdened by stroller and “We started on our usual loop but halfway through we sort of moved closer, more for warmth than intimacy.”
Did you kiss her?
“Listen to you. Let’s just say our walks grew longer.” But all this walking and talking and other things only lasted a few months, maybe seven discrete Thursdays in total, until one day, a Monday, she failed to show. “I waited and waited.”
Where was she?
“I don’t know. I never saw her again.”
Never?
“Never.” A year later a lawyer from way upstate contacted him with news of her death. “Seemed she had a cerebral aneurysm.”
What’s that?
“It’s like a heart attack in your brain.” The lawyer also informed him that there was a child, a five-month-old boy, and the boy was—“Me?” asked Andy, cheerful to be finally included in this tale. His father nodded. Sina Astreyl had no immediate family and since he was listed on the birth certificate, he agreed to take custody. At the age of sixty-two became a father again. “Were you glad?” Andy asked.

“Was I glad? Of course I was.”

“And what was she like?”

“Your mother?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmm.” His father seemed to listen for a hint of song through the static. “Well she was wonderful. Full of life. Always swirling about, always busy. But tough too. Brave. She made the best of a difficult situation, that’s for sure, and she loved you very much, would have done anything for you. I’m sorry you don’t have that kind of person in your life. You just have plain old me.”

“C’mon, Dad.”

“I’m not much of a parent.”

“Stop it, okay.” Even at ten Andy knew where this was going.

“I’m not a good person,” his father said. “It’s not like I’m evil, but I’m not good.”

“Stop, please.”

“It’s just the way it is.”

“Dad—”

“But you’re different, you’re all good.”

“But if you’re not a good person why should I believe you?”

“That’s clever,” he said, tapping Andy’s chest. “See, you’re a clever boy, which you’ll need to watch, that cleverness, because it’ll come easily to you. But what kind of father talks to his ten-year-old like this? It’s insanity. And I’m not a terrible person, of course, I’m just saying you should have friends, lots of friends, and find a girl you love, and find a job you like well enough but focus your passions on hobbies. Those are the happiest people. Try to do something beyond what’s inside your measly head. Be a citizen of the street rather than the ruler of your own world. I’m speaking as a cautionary tale.” Cud-like material started to mortar the corners of his mouth, like even his insides wanted him to clam up. “Do you understand?”

“I guess so,” Andy said.