And Sons (22 page)

—kind of. Richard read the text twice. Was this Emma, sweet Emma from school, with the brown eyes and the long brown hair? Richard was just wrapping his head around this information when he arrived at the restaurant. He slipped the phone back into his pocket and found his family sitting in a booth, minus Emmett, who was hanging by the gate. Richard went to find him so he could get rid of this damn phone now vibrating nonstop as more and more of Emmett’s friends were waking up and exercising their thumbs.
Zzzzzz. Zzzzzz. Zzzzzz
. God knows the messages now. What had Emmett done to Emma exactly, cute Emma with all her shades of brown, a friend of Emmett’s since forever.
Zzzzzz. Zzzzzz
. Richard was ready to hand over the phone without ceremony or teasing, without any paternal condescension whatsoever (every
Zzzzzz
was like a poke at Emma), but then he spotted Emmett sprawled across two chairs reading
Ampersand
, no doubt in anticipation of meeting the author. And that was fine. That made sense. Of course he’d be curious. There was no need for permission to be granted. But Richard stopped short, and Emmett looked up and seemed to measure the distance between them as if space and time were defined exclusively by confrontation. Or was Richard putting across this view, remembering his own teenage years? Regardless, a father’s memory is longer. A few feet is merely a continuation of all those previous steps from infancy to—Richard’s pocket gave another nudge. Just give him the fucking phone, he thought, and walk away. He must be missing it. “What?” Emmett finally said full of accusation, and Richard answered with “Nothing,” thrusting his hands into his pockets and turning back toward the restaurant.

After the Brill Building, Jamie called Alice because Alice lived nearby, in Hell’s Kitchen, or what was once Hell’s Kitchen, and Alice was his
girlfriend, or almost girlfriend, a girl he saw on occasion, an actress you might recognize from a Xerox commercial (“So real it’s almost … real?”) and a short-lived Apple iMac campaign (she played Eve) but mostly you would know her if you ate at Orso on West 46th Street since Alice had been on the waitstaff there for eighteen years and was well known to its regulars, her presence representing a sort of Kuleshov effect, whether a barometer of consistency in New York—
Alice at Orso
—or an uncomfortable reminder of dreams gone stagnant—
Alice at Orso
—or the flat progress of other people’s timelines—
Alice at Orso
—or the disappearance of once-lovely youth—
Alice at Orso
—and if you mention Alice at Orso to certain people, first they smile—she’s
the best
—then they grin—she’s been there forever—then they just grow quiet. We all know Alice. It was early afternoon when Jamie stopped by for a cup of Sanka. This was their code for sex. Sometimes it was Folger’s, sometimes it was Maxwell House. Once he made her laugh by asking if she cared for a Brim job, her laugh sustaining him for the rest of the day. He was saving Chock full o’Nuts for a special occasion. Alice wanted more than just casual coffee—Jamie knew that—but Alice had forgotten how to ask for more and nowadays just took what she could get without much complaint. She was a forty-three-year-old waitress/actress who tried her best. As they drank their coffee, across town Ram Barrett grew more curious about what his old friend had brought him, so he put aside his work and watched this pretty woman answer “How are you?” over and over as if Ram had asked the question, which seemed almost cruel when gauged against her obvious decline, and Ram’s stomach, or not quite his stomach but the area within his belly where that weepy boy took cover, tightened as the question gave its final answer with a funeral and a husband and daughters and a coffin going into the ground, the time code confirming the silence of 12:01
P.M
. Then Ram put in the other tape. It took a moment to understand what he was seeing in that tidal light, the stillness of the face and its terrible but affecting reality, as the darkness rose and fell like waves and this woman was made of sand. Jesus. It was hard to watch. But it also inspired Ram, like he was in college again, and he went about assembling the footage long into the evening, tweaking the visuals to enhance the oblique liquid movement, putting in a haunting temporary score (
My
Neighborhood
by Goldmund) and trying to give every cut and transition a particular tone. No doubt about it, the man had talent. As he worked he thought about his younger sister, who had died ten years ago, and when he was finished he emailed the short video to his older sister—
Just wanted you to see this
—who after crying for an hour forwarded it to her best friend—
Warning, the ending is rough but ain’t that the truth
.

Richard and family were thirty thousand feet in the air, three hours into a five-hour flight. Candy and Chloe were watching a romantic comedy about time travel, one of those eve-of-marriage plots where the bridegroom-to-be gets confronted by his older divorced self. They were enjoying the movie, the two of them laughing—too loudly, thought Richard, who was busy pushing aside notions of impending death, convinced the plane was going down—now—now—now—and wondering if he had the wherewithal to say the things he should say, like “I love you” to his family, rather than scream or shit his pants or reach over and give Candy’s boobs a quick squeeze. That was still his go-to impulse when presented with the concept of disaster: find nearest girl, squeeze boob. When do those stupid urges go away? Adolescence seems to open a small hole in which the rest of our lives drain. Emmett was sitting in the seat in front of him, and occasionally Richard pretended to search through his carry-on so he could peek through the gap at his 2Q2C POS son. He was a third of the way through
Ampersand
, roughly the section where Stimpson, Harfield, Matthews, and Rogin begin to plot their senior prank. Should they steal the license plates from the faculty cars, dress the statue of John James Shearing in a nurse’s uniform, remove the clapper from the church bell, all pranks committed by previous classes? Then Edgar Mead, lowly but accepted junior, gives them an idea:

Richard thought about reaching through the seats and tapping Emmett and saying, “Pretty good, huh?” But esteem for his father seemed a zero-sum game. Rather, he leaned back and rehearsed the next twenty-four hours in his head. “Dad, I need
Ampersand
.” Nobody knew about the quid pro quo proposal from Rainer Krebs and Eric Harke. “You owe me this.” They were simply going to New York so Emmett and Chloe could meet their grandfather. “It could be a real opportunity for me.” Candy could meet her father-in-law. “I’ll make it a good movie, I swear, and we can write it together, if you want.” They could all meet Andy and get to know him, just like his father wanted. “It’s a win-win.” And maybe Richard and his father would reconcile and shake hands and who knows, maybe even hug. “I’m glad I came.” The plane’s engines—was that sound normal? And the flight attendants—did they look nervous? “Give me
Ampersand
or I swear I’ll fucking kill you.”

So much happens to us without our knowing. People might talk about us, whisper and judge, and those whispers and judgments are forever in our company, a groundless shadow. Let me defend myself, we might
plead, if we were aware of the charges, but they only smile at us and we smile right back. Who knows what about whom? And then there’s the undeniable role of coincidence, the thousand chances in a day. Good fortune. Bad fortune. How many times have we almost died without our realizing it? Life, I’m convinced, is filled with far more near misses than we dare to imagine. Late in waking up, missing a train, not answering a phone, going down 79th Street instead of 80th Street—how many of those moments have spared our life? Until, of course, the blade drops, reverse engineered, it can seem. Like that morning when a bus driver in Queens—let’s call him Stan, Stan Mocker—was tiptoeing to the bathroom so as not to wake his wife, which Stan had done numerous times without incident, but today his right foot slammed into the bureau and he viciously stubbed (in hindsight broke) his toe, and because of that and a few other choice bits of happenstance, at 9:12
A.M
. on a Friday near the end of March he would be a few seconds slow in noticing the distracted person stepping from the curb and—
boom!
The sound would travel with terrible speed. All hearts within hearing would hold a beat, all lungs would gasp, as the world briefly constricted around a newborn center, as if a noise could describe the radius of a soul. Then the sirens would come. All because of a toe. There might be no gods but we are still their playthings. So while Jamie was having his kaffeeklatsch in Alice’s apartment, he had no idea that
12:01
P.M
.
was being uploaded, forwarded, linked, liked, and shared a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times, until it quickly became one of the top-rated and most-viewed videos on YouTube with user comments like
This is devastating
and
What an amazing woman
and
@#$% nasty
and
I’ve never seen anything like this, thank you, thank you, thank you
. It crossed generational lines since it combined the sentimental with the macabre, wrapped up in mothers and wives and tied together with cancer and that greatest of universalities, decay. By the time Jamie mustered the strength to return to RazorRam to pick up the edited version, two days and almost two hundred thousand views had passed. Jamie’s brother was arriving later that afternoon, and that, plus the situation with his father and his uncertainty over the video’s extreme postscript, gave Jamie a distracted air, which Ram Barrett read as soon-to-be-unleashed
fury. Ram was ready with an explanation and an apology—“I swear I never thought it would go viral”—though mostly he appreciated the exquisite reality of the situation. When Jamie finally broke the silence and said, “I’m not going to watch the thing so just tell me the truth,” Ram searched for the proper angle. “The truth?” “Yeah,” Jamie said. “Like is it a total disaster?” Ram considered this for a moment. “No,” he said, “it’s pretty great.” The things we don’t know until it’s too late.

Coming into LaGuardia, Richard was on the wrong side of the approach. The other windows gathered up the skyline view with its rows of razor-sharp buildings, like a shark bursting through water. Candy strained for a peek, as did Chloe, while Emmett remained stubbornly uninterested. He was nearing the final chapters of
Ampersand
, his attention periodically flipping to the back of the book and the photo of his grandfather. There was a definite resemblance, Richard thought, returning his seatback to the upright position, a resemblance in those eyes, like odds were being calculated, emotions dictated by a set of knowable rules. The boy was probably destined for a full ride at Stanford or Caltech, robotics one of his interests. The landing gear went down, its thump introducing the possibility of catastrophic failure, but Richard had moved into the acceptance phase of the flight, as if there were a special providence in the fall of a Boeing 737–800, and he almost dared a fireball. The last time he was in New York it was a mecca for a person in his line of abuse. He could give the family a tour of his humble chemical beginnings, sit them in a double-decker bus and start with the Red Dragon on 73rd and Third and the bartender who never carded and knew Richard as Jack-and-Coke, and after that head into Central Park, where pot and speed had their early reign, the dealers singing sense-sense-sensimilla and ice-ice as if a musical number were about to commence, and while in the Upper East Side be sure to peek into the parentless apartments where Whip-its and poppers were the party favors of choice, and definitely go west and pass the natural history museum and mention how a tab of acid could put flesh back onto bone. Funny, he could think back on those days and blush at their innocence.
The plane took its final turn, banking over the gray lake of a cemetery. “That’s a lot of dead people,” Candy said, and she gave Richard her hand. She hated the landing part. But Richard’s gloom was lifting, even if he was wary of what hid under the sheet, something he discussed in his last meeting—that excited feeling of return. His chemical tour would continue down in SoHo, where eighteen-year-old Richard discovered his true passion, cocaine in all its forms (imagine Lou Reed covering Lou Rawls’s “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”), like in that loft on Wooster where he dabbled with free-base (
viva la liberación
) and that other loft on Wooster where he pondered speedballs (picture a ménage à trois with Rogers and Astaire) and from there get your camera ready for the ex–ink factory on Grand where he met his number-one-true-love (do you take this rock to be your lawfully wedded wife) and after that stumble into Alphabet City (the ABCs of being fucked) into one of those near-abandoned tenements near Tompkins (no plumbing, no electricity) lit by the flicker of butane (oh, the multilevel thrill) revealing all you can imagine (a full-blown crackhead) and all you can never understand (this is the person I deserve to be). The plane touched down. Candy clapped. Richard always hated the people who clapped.