And Sons (51 page)

“Would you like to buy a picture?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“A key chain?”

“No thanks.”

“Toilet paper?”

“Um—”

“That’s a joke. Picture and key chain, that’s for real.”

“No thanks. What do they call the chick again?”

“A chick,” Herb said.

“I thought it was like
eyeglass
or something.”

“Eyas,” Herb said.

“Right. They’re funny-looking.”

“Very. Hopefully in a couple of weeks we’ll have one or two here.”

“Cool.”

“Come by again,” Herb said. “We’re always looking for young recruits. Or I am at least, first thing in the morning and last thing in the afternoon. A lot of birds will be coming through over the next few months. The great northern migration.” Herb popped his eyes both ironically and earnestly, a pleasant tightrope walk. “It’s quite a bevy of activity.”

“Cool,” Andy said, knowing he’d be back in school.

“Cool,” Herb repeated, sweetly mocking. “Buy some binoculars and join us.”

“Okay, maybe.”

“Okay then.”

Andy left Herb and his fellow birders and continued around the boat pond, his eyes still on the hawks and their aerie. There were starlings here too. Grackles. Ducks of course. Sparrows and robins. Andy remembered once hearing an owl late one night and going to his window and searching the trees across Fifth. The call was so clear. So close.
Hoo-hoo-hoooooooooo-hoo-hoo
. His ten-year-old imagination pictured the cartoon genus of the bird perched on a branch, wise and sleepy. He wondered if his father heard the call, if he was amazed by its presence as well. His study was right below. Andy could see the light bleeding into the darkness. Come and look, he tried to tap with his thoughts, but of course the window remained shut. Oh well. Andy even wrote a poem about that owl for his fifth-grade English class. It was good enough to get into Buckley’s literary magazine and wound up (with my assistance) in a national scholastic publication, which I think was more embarrassing than anything else, particularly with the whispers of his father’s name attached to the writing.

When Andy showed the poem to his father, with my bursting A++ circled and exclaimed on top, displeasure grew on his face as if the words spat back. “
Yet tonight asks what I do know
is a weak line,” he finally said, “and I’m not sure the meter is very consistent. Or the form. Is there a form? And ‘The Owl’ is a terrible title. ‘Awake I Dream’ might be better, if pretentious, and there’s nothing worse than a pretentious ten-year-old.” He handed the poem back, his fingers leaving a damp mark. “I do like ‘cheerful poise,’ though. And well done on the grade, even if the double-plus business is silly.” Andy smiled, not then but now, as he approached 72nd Street. He had worked so hard on that stupid poem. He wanted every word to somehow speak to his father. The memory of that desire came back stronger. We need to talk. I need to talk. There are things that need to be said, Dad. There are hawks in this park too. Walking onto Fifth, Andy passed a pigeon near the curb working on a piece of bread, and though he had seen a million pigeons before, this pigeon, with its formal gray attire and ascot of iridescence, struck him as maybe the first pigeon he had ever seen.

I
’M DYING
, A. N. Dyer thought, lying in bed, arms crossed, staring up at the ceiling, which, he swore, was slowly lowering, now only a few cranks from his nose. It was strange being back in this bed, a citizen again of this super-king-size island. As boys Richard and Jamie were awed by its expanse and would jump on board and play games of stuntman, tossing and leaping and tumbling. Isabel never cared, though all the roughhousing tightened Andrew’s nerves. He constantly heard screams in their laughter. Split skulls. Blinded eyes. Stitches and scars.
Please stop, please stop
, he would whisper, begging for safety from all this spirit. Last night they brought him up here. They cleaned him. They tucked him in. The sheets on his left were still sealed, like a half-opened envelope. Seventeen years without Isabel but yesterday was on repeat in his head and how wonderful she looked and how seeing her reminded him how alone he was. His arm reached over. I’m dying, he told the chilly linen. This will be my deathbed. Articulo mortis. Richard and Jamie pooh-poohed him when he informed them of this last night—perhaps it was the extra tremolo in his voice and the vomit on his breath—the two of them looking down like death was a splinter and tomorrow they’d get the tweezers. In the middle of the night Andrew startled awake and tried to grab whoever was tasked with tending to his bedside—Richard, he believed—to pull him close, but it was just a sympathetic shadow, likely the curtain, the morning sun presently curling around its edge. We are all born twins, Andrew thought, wondering if the line was his, twins we only meet on the day we die. At least there’s a companionable form in the end. The ceiling now seemed ready to squeeze. Andrew closed his eyes and attempted to
swami his body toward that introduction, his pulse tapping softer and softer on that door until the door would finally open. I am dead, he thought.

And then he got up.

He still needed to type the epilogue for
Ampersand
. That would be his final act, his last words, Edgar Mead after college, a successful lawyer in the making, his future bright. A man spared. It was only a page and a half and it would take maybe an hour, including his patina of edits and scrawls, his illusion of life. Andrew was determined to change the tone so that when Edgar bumps into Timothy Veck in New York, he would at least reveal his eternal shame rather than express his glib apology, effectively splitting himself between the then and the now. “Christ, we were a disturbed lot, weren’t we.” That’s what he said, smiling and shaking his head, a master of rhetoric. But this time pick up a damn spear, Andrew thought, and start poking. Put some blood on the page. Let sorrow run its endless course and try to wrestle that twist into a unity. “Not a day has passed …” Once this revision was done, Andrew would swallow every last Vicodin and exit either by razor or by window. Maybe that would set Andy free. So inspired, Andrew grabbed from his closet a bathrobe, paisley silk, circa unknown, and shuffled from bedroom to hallway to stairs, gimping carefully, desperate not to die until he had managed this last bit of creative reverie. None of his ailments mattered anymore. There was something to write. It was like he had stumbled onto a mysterious relic from his younger days and he cradled the charm close to his chest.

Near the bottom Andrew was struck by a thought: I haven’t had sex in a very long time. This detour surprised him. Was it the feel of silk against his skin, its vaguely biological fabric? The bathrobe, tight and harboring a better quality of smell, seemed a stowaway from Isabel’s wardrobe. But whatever the synaptic path, the above statement was true, and below loomed an even larger truth: I will likely never have sex again. This was no loss on the carnal front. Andrew would need multiple medications to merely consider a woman’s hands in prayer. But it did strike him as metaphysically sad that he had no more of that game in him. Only doctors and dental hygienists and barbers touched
him now. Sex had never been a huge focus for A. N. Dyer. Sure, his characters got caught up in the great congenital churn, but for Andrew personally it always played as too intimate, too clumsy to impose on anyone but his wife. A climax was more purge than pleasure, a banishment, and when finished, he wanted to apologize, like he had spilled something and sorry it’s sticky. That’s not to say he was a hundred percent faithful. I mean, who was? No matter how conservative a person might be, the seventies were the seventies. Funny, Andrew had no dream of ever being with another woman, yet he had his dalliances, while Isabel probably often dreamed of being with other men, more loving men, easier men, yet she never touched a soul. But occasionally Andrew could still park in fantasy. There was that particular bank teller he liked, her index finger ribbed in rubber. And there was a moment where he considered Gerd as a possible partner, but he could never muster the necessary energy. His bathrobe seemed to press harder. When was the last time? He remembered those wicked blue pills, diamond-shaped, like he might reclaim something.

Andrew opened the door to his study and headed right to—Richard, standing by his desk, papers in his hand, not papers but manuscript pages. “Is this the original?” he asked, his being caught red-handed shading toward innocent daybreak.

“What are you doing here?” Andrew’s voice choked on outrage.

“I spent the night,” Richard said. “I’ve never seen—”

“In here?”

“No, no, in the living room, on the sofa. I’ve never seen—”

“Couch,” Andrew corrected.

“What?”

“It’s a goddamn couch, and if you slept in the living room, why are you in here now?”

“I woke up early.”

“And decided to peek into my study.”

Richard squinted. “You feeling okay?”

“Do not patronize me. I will not have that. Not from you.”

“Patronize? You were in pretty rough shape last night, Dad.”

“I get dizzy, that’s all. They think I might have Meunière’s disease.”

“Meunière? Are you seeing a doctor or a French chef?”

A grimace at this blunder. “Oh, aren’t you clever?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I meant the other one.”

“Ménière’s,” Richard said.

“Yes, yes, Ménière’s. Are you happy now? Anything else you’d care to mock? My labored breathing? My poor digestion? Trust me, the life inside this body is a laugh riot.”

“Look, I’m sorry—”

“I’m in pain.” A crack of emotion, as if forecasting tears.

“I know, I—”

“In constant pain,” Andrew said, curious if he would tear up, “so much pain,” but after the third try, he hobbled over to his desk, tearless. “You have no idea.”

“It was a bad joke.”

“It was a decent joke, cruelly timed.”

When had he cried last?

“Okay, Dad, I’m a cruel bastard.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

Richard kicked the ground with his breath. “Whatever.”

Andrew looked for his Vicodin on his desk. It was normally right next to his typewriter, a small brown silo,
V
for
Vicodin
, ever stalwart but now gone. He opened drawers and moved aside papers, and finding no sign, opened the same drawers and moved aside the same papers. Where are you? You must be here somewhere. He was like a giant fee-fi-foing for a pill-popping Jack. He started to search in absurd places, as if this bottle had the wherewithal to hide. Under the phone. Inside the pencil holder. Within the antique inkwell. Once more with the drawers and the papers but this time with more flinging involved, and with nowhere else to go, Andrew went on all fours and investigated the clutter beneath his desk. It was a goddamn mess down here. All evidence of civilization had been lost below the knees.

“Is everything okay?” Richard asked.

“I’m looking for something.”

“You need help?”

A quick “No” as Andrew panned through royalty statements and balled-up Kleenexes and mounds of opened and unopened mail, newspapers and magazines, haphazard socks, dozens of cast-aside books, piles of index cards with random jottings, some with enigmatic words or phrases—
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; the new Adam; the tonic key
—others with a sentence or two seeking a home—
This is not a story, this is a life
—one sheet of typescript giving him a minute’s worth of pause:

Andrew had no idea when he wrote this, for what purpose. There was a brief doubt that he was even its author since he liked the writing so much. Were there more pages like this floating around? It could have been a year old or thirty years old, a random start folded up and forgotten. Whatever its origin, its quality unnerved him. It was like coming across a photograph of a happy memory you don’t remember, like your dad on the beach holding you upside down, your smile reflected in his face. Was that really you? Was that once your life? When did you become so dispossessed from yourself? Andrew tossed aside the sheet. Everything old seemed a rebuke. And with all that was lost and all that was unknown, goddamn if his big toe wasn’t beating a war drum against his foot.