And Sons (19 page)

“Don’t be a ghost haunting your own life.”

“Yeah, okay, thanks.” Anything to make him stop.

And that was just one of many good-nights.

Andy repositioned the pillow from under his stomach to between
his knees. Would he be a different person if he had had his mother in his life? Well, sure. But it wasn’t like something he missed, plus he had Gerd and a certain amount of nonmaternal freedom, with a touch of demi-orphan appeal, that brought back to mind last night and the Brearley girl and her thick caterpillar eyebrows, their fur a hint of the butterfly between her legs. “Have you read
Ampersand
?” Had he really asked her that? Was he so desperate for a little sway?

“No,” she’d said.

“Well, you should. It’s like a total classic.”

“And that’s your dad?”

“Yep. His name is my name too.” Then Andy had half-sung, half-shouted, “a na na na na na!”

The girl had frowned playfully, those caterpillars arching their backs. “A John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt reference?”

“That’s right,” Andy had said. “All the cool kids are singing it nowadays. Very addicting. Once you start you can never stop. And speaking of jingle and heimer …”

From floor level, tucked within his pants, the Hallelujah chorus sounded, courtesy of Andy’s new ringtone, which was probably the most awesome ringtone ever, with its high holy majesty, even if it interrupted a half-asleep-semi-erotic trending-toward-full-blown fantasy involving a girl with metamorphic eyebrows. Andy dragged his pants up. It was proba—Jeanie Spokes?

“Andy?”

“Oh, hey, yeah, hey. Howdy.”
Howdy?

“Sorry I missed you last night.”

“Oh yeah, no problem, just a flier, you know. A reach-out.”
A reach-out?

“I’ve been in a weird mood lately,” she told him.

Hmm, weird? “No need to explain.”

“I’d like to see you,” she said.

“Yeah, sure—”

“Like now,” she said.

Andy sat up as if barged in on.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Um, in bed.”

The agreeable noise she made wavered between a sigh and a purr, with Andy caught in the middle. “Do you know where I am right now?” she said.

“At work?”

“No.”

Andy’s pulse rate was like an elbowing friend. “Outside my building?”

“Try a museum.”

“Okay, a museum.”

“Try guessing which one.”

“Um, MoMA?”

“Nope.”
Nope
never sounded more bilabial.

“The Frick?”

“Nope.”

“The Whitney? The Guggenheim? El Museo del Barrio?”

“Nope, nope,
ni siquiera cerca
. You’re missing the obvious.”

“The Tenement Museum?” he said, proud of his flirty misdirection.

“Andy.”

“Hey, it’s a fine museum.”

“I’m at the Met, you loser, and I’m standing in front of my favorite work of art, practically blushing, Andy, like I’m the secret inspiration for this artist. I feel positively pinned between rough hands.”

“Oh,” Andy said, suddenly feeling very young.

“Now listen, I’ll be here for the next, let’s see, hour and thirteen minutes. I’m not going to move an inch. I’m just going to stand here and wait and see if you can find me. Think of it as a game of hide-and-seek and like any game there’s a prize for the winner. You think you’re up to the challenge?”

After a pause that unpacked many thoughts,

the ball-peen of significance shattered all deliberation into core instinct—
Just fucking move!
—and launched Andy from bed and once launched put him into a state of panic, his hourglass head leaking sand into his empty, increasingly anxious, stomach.

“Somewhere in the Met?” he clarified.

“Yes.”

“Like the Met on Eightieth and Fifth, with the knights and stuff?”

“Yes, doofus, that Met.”

Andy reanimated the clothes from last night. “That’s a big place,” he said.

“It is.”

Andy stepped-wiggled-stomped into his shoes. “Any hints?”

“No.”

“No hints?”

“No.”

“Like maybe it’s a painting?”

“No hints.”

“Because it’s a big place.”

“And getting bigger by the second.” And with that Jeanie hung up.

Andy stood there, bogged down by a quick strategy session concerning art history and the feminine spirit and the geography of the Metropolitan Museum and Jeanie Spokes’s possible position within that geography, Jeanie waiting for him, Jeanie perhaps ready, willing, and ableing for him in European Paintings; in Modern and Contemporary Art; in the Temple of Dendur; in Greek and Roman Art; in Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; Arms and Armor; Ancient
Near Eastern Art; Asian Art—Andy shook himself free and rushed from his room, nearly barreling into me, kneeling by his door.

“Everything all right?” I asked, pretending to tie my loafers.

“Can’t talk,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

But he was already halfway down the stairs.

Who could begrudge this virginal enthusiasm? Certainly not me. I myself was twenty-one, a full-fledged adult, when I finally unloaded that burden. Her name was Helen Dieter. She was stout and freckled, a soccer player, I recall, a fixture among a certain boisterous group of Yale women, Helen deemed the funny one though funny seemed defined by flashes of public nudity. I always assumed she was a lesbian. We were acquaintances our first year, classmates and coursemates sharing nods and hellos in hallways but never lingering for conversation, but by our last year we had progressed to minor speaking roles, our relationship based on being competitive English majors. Late spring she knocked on my door. It seemed she was celebrating a perfect mark on her senior essay, something about George Eliot and George Sand titled “By George” (I remember laughing at that asinine title), which went on to win her the Paine Memorial Prize for best senior essay and the Steere Prize for feminist theory and the Tinker Prize for Outstanding Senior in English, this half-drunk girl right here, who leaned into my room like a sister sticking out her tongue. Before I knew it, she was inspecting my bookshelves and my desk, where my own senior essay, “The Hostage Taker: The Kidnapping of Identity in the Works of A. N. Dyer,” lay blindfolded and gagged. I was on my third and final extension; another week late and I would fail. Papers, drafts, books were scattered everywhere, along with various forms of caffeine and desperation. Seeing this, Helen surprised me with a few supportive words—“You can do this, Philip, you can finish”—and then she was on me like a squirrel on a tree, with her small, sharp claws and nibbling teeth and evident love of nuts. Thankfully she did most of the work, since our styles were ill-suited (particularly since my style was all bluff), but I did have a sense, whether right or wrong, of her laughing at me, as I kissed her neck and blew into her ear, of her laughing with
friends later in a bar, as I thrust, and came, and rolled over on my back, helplessly ashamed and pitifully transformed.

Helen Dieter is now a managing partner at Goldman Sachs.

And Yale still talks about the Dieter trifecta.

But Andy, seventeen years old and thrilled with possibility, hustled from the apartment in hopeful pursuit of art. Dix, Bonnard, Poussin, Klimt, Munch played a game of innuendo in his head, and as he waited for the elevator he called Doug Streff, who lived not far from the Met and could easily wander into another person’s misadventure.

“Where are you?” Andy quickly asked.

“You are never taking command of the stereo again.”

“I need a favor. Where are you? Doug? Doug?”

He lost the call in the elevator. Floors ticked down, every number firing a plosive
fuck
from Andy. Doug had been his best friend since Buckley, though Doug had departed in sixth grade for Indian Mountain and now went to Millbrook and if his highest academic dream came true he would finish up in Boulder. Considered a terrible influence by parents, he bore the brunt of much vestigial blame, like an overweight, overbred golden retriever with a minor drug habit. But he was always good company. All of your ideas were excellent ideas to Doug Streff.

“Doug?”

“So what was up with that music?”

“I was stoned.”

“You were such an asshole about it.”

“I know, I know.”

“You were like the listen police, listen, listen, listen.”

“It’s a very influential piece of second-rate music, like every movie score—”

“There you go again.”

“Whatever, where are you right now?”

“I’m in the park, watching kids in the playground—remember that playground on Eighty-first where I broke my nose? I’m sitting here watching the kids not break their noses and I’m sitting next to this guy named London, right, like the city, but his last name isn’t England, or
I don’t think it’s England—is it England? No, it’s not England, it’s Williams, London Williams, which is a cool fucking name, and he has a son named Manchester, Mani for short, six years old and Mani is definitely not breaking his nose today because Mani is a careful little kid, right Mani.”

Andy blew past the doorman and hurried north. “Have you been smoking?”

“Perhaps.”

“It’s not even noon.”

“High noon.”

“Jesus.”

“And the big deal is? I believe last night you were fairly levitated. You certainly had your head up Uranus.”

“It was Jupiter and was I that bad?”

“Besides the whole Mein Stereo thing you were a hundred percent outstanding. At one point you had us all believing we were part of your massive déjà vu and you told us exactly what we were going to do next, and we believed you, or some of us believed you, or maybe just one of us, but it was fucking genius.”

Andy cringed. “Oh God.”

“No, no, it was superb. And you kept the ball rolling way longer than anyone thought possible. People started to walk away and you’d describe them leaving like you were five moves ahead.”

“I shouldn’t smoke.”

“You kidding me? You should smoke more. Just avoid the stereo.”

From 75th Street, through the trees on the western edge of Fifth, came a partial view of the Metropolitan Museum, and Andy remembered the point of this phone call. “I need your help,” he said, “if you’re not too incapacitated.”

“I’m in. Excuse me, London; later, Mani.”

“Can you like meet me in front of the Met, like right now?”

“Like
now
now?”

“Pretty close to now, yeah.”

“Got it, chief.”

The Met slowly revealed itself, low-slung yet massive, intimidating
in its grand bureaucratic design, as if the world’s most important mail was being sorted inside. But all Andy saw was a hiding place. He rushed past the fountain and up the broad steps where tourists mingled in a strange kind of order, like notes on a sheet of music. Looking for Doug, waiting for Doug—where the fuck was Doug?—Andy grabbed for his cellphone when he heard his name and spotted his friend approaching, arms pumping faster than legs, like a salesman selling hurry.

“Hey.”

“We have an hour—”

“I packed you a bowl.” In his palm was a pipe the shape of a small wooden bird.

“I can’t.”

“It’s the Met, man. I’d be scared to go in there not stoned.”

“We don’t have time.”

“It’ll take two seconds.”

“I need to be focused.”

“On what?”

“I have like an hour to find this girl, a woman really, she’s twenty-four, brownish hair, hair to here, chunky glasses, cool chunky, though; kind of looks like Heather Topol from Chapin, but better-looking, Heather Topol if Heather Topol had a fairy godmother, but the same sort of features, sort of the most attractive version of the Heather Topol type.”

Doug stared at Andy.

“Fuck it,” Andy said.

They sidled to the shady, less populated side of the steps.

“So we’re looking for a Heather Topol–like girl,” Doug said, newly enthused.

Andy nodded as he took a hit.

“And what happens when we find this Topolian girl?”

“I get laid” from Andy with a smoky smile.

“Laid as in bow-chicka-bow-wow?”

Andy nodded, took another hit.

“Right there in the museum?”

Andy squinted. “No, you fucking idiot. Or I don’t think. Shit, that
would be nuts. No, no way. Look, all I know is she’s standing in front of her favorite work of art. That’s the hint she gave me. I find that, I find her.”

“You fuck her.”

“That’s my guess.”

Doug refortified himself.

“I’m assuming European Paintings,” Andy said.

“Definitely. Like Renoir, Monet, Manet.”

“Might be too obvious.”

“Balthus. Modigliani.”

“I’ll check that area. But I need you to cruise Greek and Roman, Egyptian—”

“All those vases,” Doug said.

“Exactly. It’s a big museum.”

“The American Wing.”

“A really big museum.” Andy started to feel the task’s thin air.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Uncertain with how to start exactly, they both took one last hit until a hazy if genuine purpose sank in and they marched into the museum, past security peering into bags, into the great hall where pods of people crowded the information desk and the coat check and the circular seating areas, so many people, class trips, group tours, a dozen buses cracked open and whipped up in this inverted bowl, everyone’s clothing just a little too bright, everyone’s shoes just a little too comfortable, people of every stripe, visitors from other countries, parents with children, families on vacation, tri-staters in for the day, college students, couples in love, voices, accents, languages traveling up and around the rotunda and swirling in a batter of half-understood echoes—Andy rushed past them, disdainful of their blocking ways. He played the role of detective and these folks belonged on the other side of the crime-scene tape.