And Sons (54 page)

I’m all right
.

Sylvia was now answering from bed, her voice clotted, her eyes dim with palliative care. Over the course of two months she had time-lapsed from sick to brutally sick, her complexion chalky and mottled. Jamie had no sense of the transformation while filming. Back then it was just another day, just another awkward interruption. “Sylvie, how are you?” It all seemed ineludible yet gradual. But watching now, the daily loss staggered him.

I’m good
.

Even toward the end she answered without pretense. Never had so much effort gone into such banalities. But again, something had changed. The social pleasantries had taken on weight, and not just the easy weight of juxtaposition but the harder weight of pressing on and crafting meaning from meaninglessness. It was like Sylvia was holding our hand and giving us permission to die.

I’m okay
.

That was her last reply. She was gone by the next morning. After a bit of interstitial black, Ed Carne and his daughters appeared and that painted coffin was lowered into the earth as if next spring a mother might bloom. The funeral section lasted about a minute but after all the previous cuts it played like an hour. And this was where Sylvia would have ended things, probably with her name and dates, but instead the fade to black gave way to the briefest breathings of muted light and there she was, definitely dead and in the coffin, in the midst of cycling through decay, but Ram Barrett had done a masterful job with the postproduction, blowing up the film to its grainy limit so that
Sylvia seemed shaped by dust, her face dissolving within the dissolves, focused only on specific, near-abstract details, like her nose, her pierced ear, her lips, her eyebrow, these parts passing through to the reconciling whole.

Then it was over.

And how did Jamie feel? Sad, certainly. But less sad than expected. If pressed, hardly sad at all but genuinely moved. Or generally moved. Yes, moved. I am moved, he said to himself. But how much of that movement was based on relief, on being liberated from this morbid yoke? I am free. No longer liable. That seemed closer to the truth, if narrowly defined. I can move on, he tried. Start fresh. All those boxes of videos in his apartment, maybe he could construct something from them, a piece of art in high-def relief, a lava flow of magnetic tape. He rose to the idea of lava. The hot and the cold, the liquid and the solid. I am lava, he half-joked. From the bathroom he heard the shower stop, the map of the world screeching aside, the toilet seat banging down to make a platform for drying legs. Lava from the
Lavare
—funny how his Latin stuck—to wash. Larvae, Jamie riffed. Pupae. Imagos. The lessons of holometabolism from high school biology with Mr. Schwank, which a few kids twisted into homometabolism and tossed at various students, like a faggot maggot might emerge from Steve Lowenthal’s head. Jamie imagined his father hollowed out. Hallowed out. It was coming, of course, maybe soon, the great decomposition. The meaning of life is that it stops. Who said that? Was that from one of his novels? Jamie shut his eyes. His head seemed a weary ravel of interconnections. He wondered how much of him was the empty space left behind by his father. Like those poor plastered souls in Pompeii. The Garden of Fugitives. Is that who I am? A placeholder? A representation of something lost? The bathroom was quiet now. Alice was either plucking her eyebrows or waiting for her nerve to reenter the bedroom. Jamie opened his eyes and watched the door. Was it too late to leave? He wasn’t sure what to do, but he watched that door with absolute conviction, putting all of his squirmy shame onto the wood, the knob, the light between rail and sill. I should go, he said to himself as he waited.

W
HERE AM
I? Do you even care? Or am I blocking your view? Sit down, sit down. Okay, I am sitting, on the curved bench of the Robert Morris Hunt memorial on 70th and Fifth, my eyes tinting toward yellow, my ears ringing a low-fi buzz. I have no idea who Hunt is beyond this recognition of his services to the cause of art, as the inscription on the pedestal reads. The bronze bust shows him with a Vandyke and a penetrating, mildly annoyed gaze, like he’s just caught someone passing gas on 71st Street. Standing guard on either side of him are full-blown statues of women in togas—muses, I suppose, one holding a chisel and a palette, the other holding a small building, which I recognize with my present eyes as the administration building for the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, part of the famous White City. Why would this temporary structure be chosen as Robert Morris Hunt’s crowning architectural achievement? Either way, sitting there, I regard these muses as aloof, the one with the hammer ready to brain me.

Unsure of the effect, I swallow another Vicodin, and again take pleasure in reading A. N. Dyer’s name on the prescription label. That’s eight pills in twelve hours, not including the one I offered Bea when she visited at the Wales and the ten I handed her upon her leaving.

“Please stay,” I told her.

“I can’t.”

“Please.” Her skin was so smooth, it seemed unfair.

“Sorry,” she said.

I had already given her all the money in my wallet, because it was late and she was heading back to Staten Island and needed to take a car
service, and though I was probably being too generous, I needed to prove my worth, especially after making a fool of myself with all the I-love-you’s in bed. That’s when she mentioned the Vicodin.

“How about some for the road?”

“Why?”

“Because they’re fun,” she said, “and I like having fun.”

“You have to be careful, you know. They can be very addicting.”

What a joke.

“You know what else is addicting.” The ball of her foot started to till my lap.

I shook my head. “Man, I was nothing like you when I was your age.”

“What were you like?”

“Not so put together.”

Bea stopped. “I just wear the clothes ’cause I get them half-price.”

“Yeah, but you’re so confident.”

“I live at home. My career is folding shirts and finding right sizes.”

“You’re young.”

“I’ve never felt older.” Bea got up and put on her clothes.

I loved watching her get dressed. “You ever wear a bra?”

“You know the second I leave here I feel totally out of control.”

“Then stay.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Hey,” I said, “I’ve ruined my life for you.”

“For me? I never asked you to do that. That was your fault, your screw-up. Don’t put that on me.” Bea zipped up her dress, made a few adjustments in the mirror followed by a catalog pose. “I like this one,” she said. “It’s part of the Creatures of the Wind collection. You know what my brother calls my place of employment? B.J.Crew.”

“Sounds like a typical brother.”

“I think I’m going to go to a club,” she said.

“I’ll come with you.”

“That’s okay. But how about some more Vicodin?”

She went from distant and hard to wispy and soft, my downfall and my revival, and I was helpless and tapped a pile onto her palm, her hand
closing before I could get a proper count. Then she gave me a kiss and was gone. I imagined her dancing with friends, all of them hardly noticing their own sweat. Did I mean anything? Two more pills went down my distressed gullet. It warmed me to think of A. N. Dyer in pain somewhere, the man who locked my father away in a novel, even worse, in a cheap, cruel joke. Of course the irony, the Dyerian irony of the whole situation, is that without Andrew and his ugly reaction, maybe Charlie would have become brave and migrated down to Greenwich Village, and maybe I would have never been born. I had A. N. Dyer to thank for my crap existence. A decent wife gone. Two sweet children broken. A job lost. A sense of purpose squandered. A father misunderstood. A mouth insanely dry and nothing to drink.

As I sit on that curved bench and catalog my present difficulties, I feel small and lonely, like the world will never understand Philip Topping, like I hardly understand him myself. I’m sorry, is this boring? Well, luckily for you I see Andy Dyer in the distance. He’s about a block away, coming home from a night that has stumbled into day. As if from another era, he wears a grown-up pin-striped suit, with his shirt untucked and his necktie draped like a skinny scarf. I lift my head to be seen, but he doesn’t see me, like all those goddamn Dyers. He doesn’t even see me when I wave. Rather he’s looking up toward the sky. In that moment I no longer see Andy but see his father and the past he’s written for me, my grim future a glint in that impenetrable eye.

Andy stops near the curb; he turns south, still looking skyward.

Sirens sound in the distance, the harsh sonic bleat of fire engines.

I don’t follow his gaze or the gaze of anyone else on the sidewalk.

My eyes are focused on the old man’s back.

All I can say, and this is hardly descriptive and a real literary chestnut, but what follows is like a dream, and like most dreams is probably best left to the dreamer. I remember how my muddled head floats and carries my reluctant body along, and though I’ve barely moved, I’m standing right behind him. I notice moth holes in the suit jacket, the left pocket slightly torn from its flank by decades of burrowing deep. From the wool I smell hints of cigarettes and booze, Chanel No. 22 mixed with Speed Stick by Mennen. Those teenage shoulders are as
manly as a coat hanger. Andy, still looking up, totters on the edge of the curb, leaning like he’s trying to grasp something with his chin. The first fire engine approaches with its staggering
bwaaaaaaaa
. I take note of the bus in the bus lane, not traveling fast but traveling fast enough, the driver yielding to the emergency on his left. A pigeon kicks up. A pedestrian shouts, “Over there!” The rest is a blur. Chestnut meet saw. I know I yelled his name. But did I push or try to pull him back?

The bus hits him square on the shoulder and spins him. I can still clearly see the driver’s face going from Oh shit! to Oh no! to Oh God! and if I had the talent I could draw him in near-perfect detail though even a child’s crayon could capture those eyes. The rate of speed is almost slow enough and the driver is almost quick enough on the brakes to provide a sense of blessing. Tires never touched Andy. He wasn’t run over. But the impact is strong enough to send him flying. He lands back-first followed by his head whiplashing against the curb. Between bus and body and head, it is a fugue in three notes, the last the tragic strike, and where Andy once stood, a pair of wingtip shoes seem casually kicked away.

I am the first person on the scene but others quickly follow. One man screams, “Don’t touch him!” which I read as accusatory. Andy’s eyes are—how much of this do you want? Do you want to hear the sound he was making? Do you want to see the bus driver weeping? Do you want to know about the ridiculous advertisement plastered on the side of that bus, which would give ironic counterpoint to what was happening? Do you want to have a sense of how pale Andy was, how he stared up like a giant beast was descending? Do you want—a blink, another blink, until his eyes narrow onto mine and he asks me more bemused than broken, “Did I just get hit by a fucking bus?”

I nod.

“I just got hit by a fucking bus,” he repeats now as a statement of wondrous fact.

I try to grin, but this resurrection seems scarier than the accident.

His tongue rolls around like he’s working taffy from his teeth.

“Are you okay?” I ask, an absurd but necessary question.

“Remember the times in school when I pretended to trip and fall?”

I nod again. Blood starts to trickle from his left nostril.

“This would’ve gotten a huge laugh.”

I don’t know what to say, so I just nod some more.

Suddenly Andy sits up, like he’s overslept. “Shit, he’s going to think I’m dead,” he says. “Tell him”—he wipes his nose and scrutinizes the blood—“tell him that I’m fine, okay.” He pauses then lies back down and closes his eyes, no longer believing the dream, it seems.

Do you want to know exactly what happened next?

More sirens, like they were chasing this tragedy down Fifth.

Do you want to know how he began to convulse?

A crowd has gathered around us.

“I don’t think he’s breathing.”

“Someone should do CPR.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“Don’t touch him, that’s like the first rule.”

“But he’s not breathing.”

“He seemed okay.”

“Give him room.”

“Hang in there, kid, it’s going to be all right.”

Do you want to know if I buried my head on his chest?

“You need to do CPR. I don’t think he’s breathing.”

“Here come some firemen, thank God.”

“Hit by a fucking bus, man.”

“Is he okay?”

“Just a kid.”

“Give him room.”

Someone reaches around my waist and I am lifted into the air, my arms and legs flailing like a child removed from his stricken father. These arms carry me back to the Hunt memorial and sit me down and hold me half for comfort, half for restraint. They belong to a young fireman who tries to calm me down by saying, “It’s going to be all right,” and then yelling, “Where the hell is EMT?”

Space opens up around Andy, a resigned ripple effect.

I see two firemen working on him.

“Just hang in there,” the fireman tells me, though his attention is clearly elsewhere, and I see where he’s looking, toward the building on the far corner, where smoke streams from sixth-floor windows, not the black heavy smoke of consequence, just the cloud-like haze of easy combustion.

“I know them,” I say.

But the fireman isn’t listening. His wedge of a face, Hispanic in shade but all-American in cut, presses forward, taking in the action around him. He only eases up when a fellow fireman leans from one of those smoldering windows, more interested in what’s happening on the street below. Soon an EMT and a policeman come over, and I am guided to the back of an ambulance, where I am draped in a shiny metallic sheet, the type marathoners wear after finishing their race. I have no idea how long I sit there. Nobody questions my part beyond the heartbreak of coincidence, the general sentiment being one of thankfulness that an old teacher and family friend had chanced upon the scene. I was the familiar face, the loving touch, the unlocked door offering a bit of shelter. According to Lenox Hill, Andy’s official time of death was 10:25
A.M.
, but I am the real keeper of that last minute.