And Sons (50 page)

Emmett handed back the phone. “I don’t think we had sex,” he said.

Jeanie covered her face. “I’m pretty sure we did.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“And what was I doing?” Andy asked.

“You kind of passed out,” Emmett said.

“Your dad pissed?”

“Why do they always assume you’re dead?”

“Yeah, right, I know,” Emmett said. “I’m sure I’m dead somewhere too.”

Jeanie shook her head. “I feel like a high school slut.”

“But weren’t we all wasted or was I the only one?” Andy asked.

“We were all wasted,” Jeanie said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Eric Harke was hiding under the bed,” Emmett joked.

Jeanie smiled—postcoitally, Andy thought.

“So I just passed out?” he asked again.

The other two had no answer except mutual agreement and Andy was hit with the awkwardness of being the only person in the room clothed and unscrewed. “I’m such an idiot.”

“It’s just a stupid thing that happened,” Emmett said.

“No, you guys had fun. We all did. My fun just stopped on the couch.”

“Andy—”

“I should go, totally the third wheel here,” he said, starting to sense the lack of a future past, even if sex with Jeanie was always theoretical and whatever love seemed dubiously attached, still, it was love, if a lesser form, and the longer he stood by that bed the more he could feel how desire pushed back, often harder than the initial force, and whatever the gain could seem minuscule when compared to the loss. “Yeah, I’m going to go.”

“I’ll come with you,” Emmett said.

“No, I kind of want—”

“Of course,” Emmett said, looking injured. “Yeah.”

Andy found his shoes and jacket curled near the couch. Everything seemed too big, as if a spell had broken after midnight. “I’ll talk to you later,” he said.

“We go to Connecticut tomorrow,” Emmett told him.

“Oh, okay.”

“So …”

“Yeah.”

Near the door Andy turned around to give them another goodbye, so long, whatever. It seemed that his earlier awkwardness had crawled into bed with them, Emmett and Jeanie crowded by the gap sitting between them, twiddling its thumbs.

Andy closed the door.

Five seconds later he realized he should have gone to the bathroom.

In no mood to wait for the elevator, Andy took the stairs, which fell in twos, sometimes threes, a few leaps of four, until ten floors later he landed on the ground floor and emerged into the low hundreds on the most western edge of the Upper West Side. It was unfamiliar terrain.
But adrenaline beat against his hangover, humiliation and pride cheering him on, like he was a team accustomed to losing but losing well. In other words, he was feeling all right. Almost good. He headed east, into the dyslexic sunset. This brand of light was relatively exotic to Andy, as well as the quality of people on the street at this hour, walking dogs, going to work, jogging, all of them noticing this teenage glitch in haggard pinstripe, or Andy imagined they noticed him and perhaps remembered themselves in earlier incarnations, when they could break the night. Cross West End, cross Broadway, cross Amsterdam, and the fresh air and the rising sun and the oddly exhilarating shame made him want to run. He also really needed to pee. Faster across Columbus, across—what the hell?—something called Manhattan Avenue, a street he’d never heard of before. It sounded like one of those movie streets occupied by every New York type, extras dying to look straight into the camera. It was sort of creepy. Thank God good old Central Park West appeared on the horizon with its namesake green opening up behind. Andy sprinted in. He searched for a stand, a copse, a boscage of secluded trees—there, to his right, where he unzipped and mimed an interest in oak or elm, a mighty water rolling at his feet.

What was it with these Bertram McIntyre hauntings? There was no way Andy was going to talk to his father about coming to Exeter. Imagine if he said yes, the embarrassing possibilities, the various opportunities for public mortification, Andy easily accessing the anxiety like a bruise that takes color before an injury. Finished, he slunk from the tree, and as an apology to the organic littering and to appease Mr. McIntyre, he opened his arms and proclaimed, “And let the young lambs bound as to the tabor’s sound! We in thought will join your throng, ye that pipe and ye that play, ye that through your hearts today feel the gladness of the May!” which had its positive effect even if the dark side of his brain found Emmett taking Jeanie from behind.

It really is a beautiful park, Andy thought, walking south, and he wondered when spring did its springy thing. Late March? Early April?
The gladness of May? Concrete has no season and those trees along sidewalks are about as natural as lions in a zoo. Invariably there’s a day in this city, one day when you bounce along the edges of Central Park without any mission and you—Hey!—realize that spring is here, just like that, the trees are lost in low hanging clouds of pink and white, and you’re amazed, not just because it’s thrilling, which it is, but because it seems to have happened without your noticing, without your participation, and that’s the dumbfounding part, at least to Andy, how heedless he could be beyond the arrival of shorter skirts and thinner knits, and when he finally did notice, it seemed the blossoms were already falling and the whole miraculous shebang was already rolling away, like there was no spring, only sprung. But not today. Today the buds were just nibs on the trees. The terrain this far north was novel and every hundred yards or so an unexpected view opened up: a glade, a rocky outcrop, a wooden bridge over a stream, a lagoon, right there in Central Park, a fucking lagoon. Andy imagined nature heaving through pavement and insisting on itself, like the undead bursting through hard earth. Or maybe it was just the sight of fellow stragglers walking with dazed purpose and sneaky grins like they had just brushed dirt from their shoulders. Shhh, they seemed to say. Up ahead trees gave way to baseball fields with coquettish fans of infield. Screams were heard—a game of soccer bounded between two outfields, the players sprinting and leaping and tumbling and j’accusing. They were all so serious. That’s what Andy hated about sports, its humorlessness after a certain age. The ball flying through the air was no longer about joy but about pursuit. And with this thought still in motion, when he came to the reservoir and commingled with all those joggers, he pictured them being chased. He dug a cigarette from his pocket. Look at this, people, but after a few drags he tossed the butt aside, his lungs charred from last night. Faker. And then he felt bad for littering. He wished that Emmett had come with him. So he and Jeanie Spokes had hooked up, so what? Well done, nephew. Because it would have been nice to compare notes from last night and commiserate over a greasy breakfast and maybe call up Doug Streff and the three of them could have gotten stoned. Andy thought he should apply to a few colleges in California,
around L.A., maybe one of the Claremont schools, or USC, UCLA, whatever the difference was. Imagine the weather. The girls. Abandon the East. And did Eric Harke really mention something about having an awesome guesthouse and he should come and visit? Was that in the realm of possibility or merely the domain of the wasted? What would his dad say? Well, obviously no—Andy unhitched from the reservoir and started the meander around the Great Lawn—no, no, no, no, no. You can’t. Please no. Not California. Not there. Too far away. He’d probably weep like a spoiled boy losing his favorite toy. What am I going to do without you? You can’t leave. It’s not fair. Even if I do send you to boarding school and over the summer ship you to Keewaydin; even if Gerd is more of a parent; even if when you’re home I hide in my study and when I see you all I can do is blather about how special you are, about how much I love you, you know that, right, I love you very, very much. See, I say those important words. Those meaningful words. But if you leave, Andy, I swear I’ll die. Christ, the drama. Andy pictured his father patting at his shoulders like he was putting out a hundred microscopic fires. Listen, please, listen, just listen. You have to know by now that you and I, we’re the same. Andy jerked as if catching sight of an impending blow. We are no different. Maybe he was overhearing his own guilt, his own desire to be left alone. You are who you are, Dad, and that’s cool, but I honestly don’t need a big father-son thing. No offense. I just don’t. And that’s not to deny our decent times together. The Yankee games. The Disney World vacation. Skiing—actually skiing with Gerd but you tended to the fire in the condo. Those Augusts in that rental in Bellport where you knew no one and we would spend the day on the beach and swim in the ocean, you fearless in the waves even if your old-man flesh was like mold on bread. Pass a tree and you’d suggest a quick climb, cheering me on from the roots. I bet you can go higher. Andy kicked at the path.
You
climb the goddamn tree, he thought. By now he was getting tired but he could see that obelisk—Cleopatra’s Needle—peeking, and he knew he was getting close to home. And maybe from exhaustion, from all the drinking last night, from the sight of Emmett and Jeanie in bed, from his stupid father and the coming apparition of spring and the innocent
brightness of a newborn day, for whatever reason, Andy almost wanted to cry—actually was crying, crying those weird kind of tears you get from being so tired and raw, his axis aligned toward the sentimental, and he swore it was more performance than anything else, like an actor unfolding weepy beauty from a hangover. And maybe from somewhere deeper he was remembering his father at the natural history museum, years ago, Andy just a boy running from diorama to diorama, a box-shaped world that pressed against his palm, the cheetahs, the rhinos, the zebras, those elephants storming down the middle as though busting loose from this dead zoo, then up to the dinosaurs like dreams from the earth’s unconscious, then down to the blue whale that transformed the swarming children into plankton, and it was in the creepy Hall of Human Origins that Andy reached up to take his father’s hand and discovered a different man up there. You’re not him. You’re somebody else. It was like falling into a different life. He was no longer a son but just a boy. Andy quickly let go, ashamed, like he had somehow disowned his dad, and he circled around the exhibition with its various models of hominids, its skeletons and skulls. What if I’m missing forever? What if he’s missing forever? What if I’m never what I once was? Twenty seconds bred multiple questions until he spotted his dad near the entrance, in front of the life-size display of early man and woman, more primate than anything else, upright and furry and naked, breasts and penis catching the light and putting a blush on a six-year-old. But what was most striking—and maybe this was why his father stopped—was how the ape-man touched the ape-woman’s shoulder with a sort of primal sympathy as the two of them stepped forward, both distracted by possible dangers. Andy spied his father through the display. Was he crying or was that the natural warp of glass? Because he looked close to crying, like these stuffed things were old pets, a memory of what remained behind. Our meager link. Andy waited for his dad to notice that he was missing, but after a few minutes, he gave up. Dad? Yes. Can we go to the planetarium now? Sure, sure, lead the way. There were tears in his eyes. Not much but something. Did his father even remember this?

Andy entered the backyard portion of the park: Greywacke Arch—hello-hello-hello—the
glassed-in slant of the Temple of Dendur—where had Jeanie hid?—the toddler playground—this scar right here—down the decent skateboard hill toward Alice in Wonderland and the model-boat pond. It was too early for hot dog carts. Too bad. Even an inferior pretzel would be welcome right now. He passed a small crowd with an impressive array of cameras and binoculars gathered near the Hans Christian Andersen statue, their focus tilting east toward the buildings that canyoned the park. No doubt these were those birders checking on that hawk, or was it a falcon?

“I think, I think,” Andy heard one of them murmur.

“Oh yes,” another agreed.

“Get ready,” from a man, his nose a zoom lens.

Everyone quieted, their eyes like listening ears, until suddenly they broke into a count, “One-two-three-four,” and after five came up short, cheered and congratulated the world with their unmagnified sight.

“Way to go, stud.”

“Seduced by a dead pigeon.”

“That’s three times this morning. You hear that, Herb?”

“Don’t think you’d appreciate the technique.”

“Perhaps not. But sheesh, the volume.”

Laughter.

“What just happened?” Andy asked.

“Some lovemaking on the ninth floor.” This Herb man pointed. “See that building there, two windows over, on the metal railing—that’s Pale Male on the left, and next to him is his mate Paula. Above them is their nest.”

“Above them is their nest,” Andy repeated, liking how it sounded.

“They just had a diddle,” Herb said. “We were counting the thrusts.”

“Really?”

“Instead of fact checkers, we’re fuck checkers.”

“Oh, Herb.”

“Is it a hawk or a falcon?” Andy asked.

“A hawk, a red-tailed hawk.”

“Right, right, I knew that.” From this distance the hawks were just a brownish quirk against the limestone, an impression of birdlike stature,
but Herb of the huge zoom lens offered a peek and in an instant Andy was up close, like right there close, which first made him coo about the wonders of technology but was soon eclipsed by the sight of this kind of nature in New York, on Fifth Avenue no less. Andy had seen Pale Male before—they both lived in the same neighborhood, after all—but seeing him in such detail, with his bright yellow talons and barrel chest and eyes that seemed to question a non-birdlike existence, was thrilling.

“You think any eggs yet?” someone asked.

“Still too early. Maybe in a couple of weeks,” someone else answered.

“Hopefully this year they’ll take.”

Chicks. Andy grinned. He knew the birder crowd went full paparazzi when a chick was born. He stepped back from the camera, his eyes still on Pale Male as if unsure how the distance translated. “Thanks,” he said to Herb.