Читать книгу And Sons - David Gilbert - Страница 12

A.N. DYER’S OLDER SONS, Richard and Jamie, I knew quite well. We shadowed one another in New York, within the crosshatchings of our fathers, my older brother squaring with Richard, and I with Jamie. It seemed no matter where we were, the Dyers and Toppings were within shouting distance—New York, Southampton, Hobe Sound—brought together by mothers who took the obligation of our fathers’ friendship more seriously than our fathers ever did. I think these women hoped that the continuation of this history might provide the missing words from these heavily redacted men, as if we might provide a full and pleasing account of their life together. We boys attended Buckley, then Exeter, and though Richard was expelled during his upper year for drugs (marijuana in general, LSD in particular), he managed to rejoin the cast at Yale, thanks to his name as well as a tenacious intelligence. This reunion lasted all of six months and ended with a cocaine-fueled car accident and a passenger’s ruptured spleen. His next semester was spent in rehab, the first of many stints. Since we are on Richard, we might as well stay with Richard, who at the time of this story was forty-five and living in Los Angeles, Anaheim to be exact. He had been in Southern California for twenty-three years, after his third and final attempt at college, at UC Irvine. Being an exile from the East was a point of pride for Richard, like a solid golf swing in a game he despised. Fifteen years sober, married with two children in their teens, Richard was handsome in the style of generations of handsome men who marry and pass along their handsome genes like pieces of family silver, in a pinch pawnable. His face was colored with almost exotic damage, like a psychological tan. He. Had. Lived. And similar to an athlete who has a hard time shaking past glories, who misses the sanctioned violence of football or hockey or lacrosse, Richard Dyer was stunted by the depths of his early misery.

I myself was never a fan, but that’s beside the point.

The day after my father’s funeral, Richard had perhaps the most important meeting of his life. Right in the middle of his normal routine as an addiction drug counselor at Promises—group in the morning, one-on-ones in the afternoon—was a forty-minute drive to Culver City and the Sony lot, in particular the Judy Garland building and the ground-floor office of Rainer Krebs, through this door here. The interior seemed swiped from the 1950s of the imagination. Each piece of vintage modern furniture was a classic from that decade, along with the color-field painting on the wall and the rya rug on the floor and the most beautiful standing lamp in the corner, its black and red and white shades resembling hairdryers for three perfect pinheads of various height. Truth be told, nobody from that era ever lived in a room like this; what was once straightforward and utilitarian now stretched up on its toes. But it was an impressive collection, even to a nonexpert like Richard, who walked in and had the knee-jerk desire to smear his feces all over the wall.

“You recognize it?” asked the EVP in Charge of Production. His name was Curtis and he wore a bow tie and a seersucker suit and that was all Richard needed to know about the man.

“Recognize what?”

“The je ne sais quoi of it?”

Richard, on his best behavior, shook his head.

The pre-meeting, a minute old, was already shaping up to be a disaster.

“That’s a clue,” Curtis said.

“A clue for what?” asked Richard.

“Think French, think nouveau roman, think Academy Award winner.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The Erasers,” Curtis said, grinning like the canary that had eaten the cat.

Oh Christ. Richard hadn’t seen the movie, not yet, which was stupid since it was their most successful release, both critically and commercially, their obvious pride and joy, and he should have at least watched it before the meeting and been prepared to talk about it and tell them how much he love-love-loved it. Typical. His big chance and he had already sabotaged himself, like the loser he was and the loser he would forever be, from clueless boy to idiot teenager to delusional adult. Who are you fooling, you motherfucking shithead? The old Richard could have gone on like this to the point of running to the parking lot and doing complicated crack math in his head, but the new Richard (5,475 days sober) took a fair-minded, even-keeled breath and pushed his shoulder against that banging door. “Oh yeah,” he told Curtis, “I see it now. Such a wonderful film.”

“You remember Daniel Dupont’s office. Well”—Curtis let his expression hang for a moment, almost like a boxer’s taunt—“here it is, exactly the same, except for the rug. The rug had to be changed. Obviously.”

Richard nodded Of course.

“We don’t believe in props.”

“Oh.”

“For us, reality is the key.”

Richard—“Absolutely”—whatever the hell that meant. In a flash he pictured punching this Curtis guy in the nose—pop!—his knuckles perfectly designed for the bloodying of seersucker. The thought calmed him down. But he winced at how he started kicking the poor man in the head. His fantasies always turned into felonies.

“I tell you, The Erasers was an amazing project to work on,” Curtis started to say, his hands impatient, as if he constructed balloon animals in his spare time, “because I’m a huge fan of Robbe-Grillet and I remember reading Les Gommes at Brown with Coover and thinking even then that with the right tweaking this could be a terrific film. Very strange, very compelling. I’m the one who brought the idea to Rainer, just like I’m bringing you to him, or him to you, but that’s my job. I’m a facilitator. A connector. I thought it was going to be a hard sell—Robbe-Grillet, not you—but Rainer understood the potential immediately.” Hands in need of something heavier than air, Curtis picked up a small wooden sculpture, a modernist totem carved from ebony. He could have been Yorick if Hamlet were the skull. It was clear that Curtis was part of that Ivy League crowd that Richard called the Moveable East, innately privileged yet no longer happy with the idea of simply making money, these pseudo-creatives embracing the business of Los Angeles, with its ease of living and its lifestyle of plausible deniability. Curtis smacked the sculpture against his palm. “This Noll right here is what Wallas used on Dupont’s head. It’s probably worth thirty thousand, but as a piece of movie memorabilia, who knows, maybe fifteen more. Rainer doubled the value like that.” Curtis put the sculpture back on the credenza, readjusted it numerous times as though its proper alignment would guarantee him a sleek afterlife. “But that’s what we do,” he said. “Attention to detail, Integrity toward the material, Respect for the artist.” Curtis stepped back from the sculpture. Perfect. “That’s the kind of place this is.”

The place in question was called Aires Projects, a production company under the umbrella of Sony Pictures. Aires had declared an interest in one of Richard’s screenplays, which was amazing, not the screenplay but the interest, amazing because Richard had basically given up on the screenwriting experiment. Over the last eight years he had written four and had landed an agent and a handful of meetings but that was about it, the it losing its meaningful referent, which was fine. Richard was perfectly content with his twelve-plus years in the trenches of substance abuse counseling. It was a good job, a sane job, a job he thrived in, bringing a particular brand of tough love to the process, breaking the body and its wants down to base mechanical function, emotion and ego the unwanted fuel. He preached a form of Radical Honesty and Personal Transparency. Some people even told him he should write a book on the subject, and though the idea of self-help literature turned his stomach, he often found himself coming up with imagined titles—The Lasting View—and perfect first lines—When darkness falls, the window becomes a mirror. These thoughts usually hit him during the first few miles of his normal eight-mile run, when his body preached the importance of exercise, his breathing a perfectly composed pop song, verse-chorus-bridge, but by mile five started to go atonal with all the deceptions, all the rationalizations, the near-manic extremes, the nineteen vitamins a day, the regimented breakfast of blueberries and kale, his confidence splintering near the seven-mile mark as he considered his career helping fellow fuckups, his sense of accomplishment losing its wind, his wife and children falling behind, until his father invariably peeked in, disappointed at the square footage and the limited scenery—this is your life?—but by mile eight, as Richard made his final sprint across the Santa Ana River and headed home on South Street, all these old feelings that chased him shifted into action, a building about to explode, a killer stalking his house, the love of his life leaving on an airplane, one of those scenes in which our hero has to run, and it was here, in these cinematic equivalencies, that Richard became happiest. As many people know, or know by way of cliché, everyone in L.A. has a screenplay in their back pocket. Whatever the dubious truth of that claim, the idea can settle on your shoulder and whisper dialogue in your ear until you’re touched by the spirit and born into believing again. Hollywood, like God, needs constant feeding.

The thing is, Richard did have talent. As a boy he wrote comics that Jamie illustrated, stories like “The Destructor” and “Fealty Blaze,” which we all read with great gusto. I was a particular fan of “The Coarsers of Bedlam” and its tale of Random Coarser, who had to kill a person every week in order to keep Death from his terminally ill son. The ending, with Random’s suicide and the older son’s awful new responsibility, still unnerves me. Later Richard devoted most of his writing energy to his journal, which he maintained with teenage vigilance; whenever anyone came over, he made a show of Shut the fuck up until he had finished a particular entry and if you called him a pussy or a fag, as my brother once did, he’d slug you in the stomach hard enough to raise tears. All of this changed when one day his father asked if he could read some of his entries. Most kids would have said, Are you insane? but Richard had been waiting for this moment, had essentially been writing for this moment, and not only did he hand over his journal but he ran upstairs and retrieved his previous journals as well. He was fourteen years old. For three days his father read without comment, and Richard waited. It was like a tight-lipped confession, a silent unburdening of self. There were long passages concerning the man and his literary fame, how Richard was proud yet tormented, wishing their relationship was better though also wondering if either of them really cared, or if maybe they preferred the easier distance. Sometimes I think we should talk exclusively by telegram, he wrote, with its helpful shorthand and stops. August 21 was a long-imagined eulogy to his father. April 5 was a make-believe suicide note. There were other things, feuds and crushes and the overall grind of Exeter, drinking beer and smoking pot in Central Park, Whip-its and minor shoplifting, a bit of sex on the weekend, in particular December 19 with Abigail Hunter, but years later Richard was struck by how father-focused these entries were, how every word seemed crafted for the old man and how even today that lone entry on February 9 (and who knew the cause) could stagger him: Am I a cherished thing? After three days his father finally returned the stack. “You have a good strong voice,” he told him, and gave Richard a tap on the back, like a doctor diagnosing good health without bothering with the stethoscope. Richard might have hoped for more, but this seemed enough, and for a while his lungs took in mellower air and he only slugged someone when they really deserved it.

Jamie recalled this short-lived period as the storm before the shit-storm.

A year and a half later, Percy, By Himself was published.

The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award, which some considered a consolation prize. The judges praised the story of Percy Sr. and Jr. and their silent struggle for connection, citing in particular the journal entries of Percy the younger and their uncanny adolescent verisimilitude (a word Richard had to look up, thinking it had something to do with vivisection). You have a good strong voice indeed. What a crock. Unbelievably his father pled ignorance to lifting so many of the entries word for word. “I swear I was just trying to get a sense,” he said. “I guess the writing stuck, which is a compliment in a way. There was nothing I needed to improve.” Isabel came down hard on him, calling him selfish and clueless, insensitive to the world outside his own head. And she tried to comfort Richard by telling him that it was a good book, a really good book thanks to his writing, and that Jr. was the rooting force of the story, certainly the more likable of the two Percys. But Richard disagreed. If anything he thought the character was an apprentice idiot, confirmed by the last lines of the book:

Sr. secretly watched Jr. eat his lamb, and he wondered if they both wondered the same thing, the two of them unspeakably quiet as they managed the tough business on their plates. Pauline was going on about daylight savings and how quickly the afternoon slipped into dusk. Amazing the difference an hour can make. Then she asked which time was the real time, that she forgot? Neither father nor son had an answer. They hardly bothered looking up, between the chore of cutting and chewing. But maybe, yes maybe they shared a thought on that first Sunday of falling back: Am I a cherished thing?

Curtis gestured for Richard to sit, please. “I really like your script,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“It’s smart, it’s funny, the ending sneaks up on you.” Curtis remained on his feet as if playing a game of charades, trying to get you to guess his future success. “We’re all very excited.”

“That’s tremendous,” Richard said.

“Where have you been hiding? Do you have other scripts in the top drawer?”

“Actually—”

“Because we want to be in business with writers like you.” Curtis checked his phone. “That’s the short answer to what will be a longer conversation. We usually don’t go for movies about movies, I mean Day for Night, sure, The Player maybe, but mostly they tend toward the solipsistic and too clever by half, and the satire, because it’s always a satire, the satire tends to be a snooze. Actors are self-involved pricks, wow, alert the media. But you’ve done something different here. The setting is both real and absurd, and the characters, well, your Martin Forge is right up there with Geoffrey Firmin in Under the Volcano and every other loon from The Day of the Locust. Reading these pages I kept on thinking of Brando toward the end, in one of those junk movies he did, Brando as played by Richard Burton stooping to the level of the gruff but lovable grandfather in—sorry, what’s the name of your movie-within-the-movie again?”

“Dog Daze,” Richard said.

Curtis flexed a smile, his bow tie the dumbbell. “Right right right right right right right. I love it. The whole man-switches-places-with-his-dog story is so perfectly high-concept I’m sure half a dozen studios would green-light your fake movie in a heartbeat. I’m almost tempted—it’s crazy, I know—but I’m almost tempted to push Rainer to do both movies and have you write the fake one and we release them simultaneously. How excellent would that be? Dog Daze and A Louse and a Flea on a double bill, like, like, like a diptych, a mise en abyme. Forget sequel or prequel, how about”—Curtis tossed the word forward with both hands—“metaquel? Maybe that sounds too much like a cough syrup. I’m sure we could come up with something better.”

The funny thing was that Richard had had the same thought when he first toyed with the idea. It usually came to him right before falling asleep, during those moments of pre-dream seeding, where he would start to think about Martin Forge, the once-in-a-generation actor praised for his intensity and admired by the younger set for barreling into life like a bullet, right up until the last stupid movie to pay another stupid debt, and Richard, eyes closing, would imagine both movies intertwined, tragedy and comedy, playing side by side in the same multiplex. Fully awake, he gave Curtis a nod and a grin. Was there smugness in that grin? Richard hoped not, he despised smugness, but here was this Curtis guy, smart and successful and seemingly conjured from a world that finally understood just how special Richard Dyer was. “Yeah,” Richard said, “that would be ama—”

Without warning, the office door flew open and in came Rainer Krebs, the head of Aires Projects. Meeting Rainer was the obvious goal. Curtis was all talk, but Rainer was the action, and Richard was ready. Last night he had practiced the pitch with his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter (his sixteen-year-old son found Dad, the scriptwriter, to be its own lame sort of a movie). Richard had even rehearsed the small talk and was willing to reach back and go down the unpleasant road of growing up in Manhattan and how he always passed the Dietmar Krebs Gallery on 76th and Madison, with all those Schieles and Klimts inside—just spectacular—and from there maybe he’d ask Rainer where he went to school—Collegiate, he believed—and then might fish up a few names they had in common—his cousin, Henry Lippencott—even if Rainer was a few years older and part of that Euro crowd who cared more about clothes and clubbing than baseball, who even in eighth grade reeked of sexual boredom. They all ended up at Brown, it seemed.

Richard rose to his feet with East Coast propriety, but Rainer had company, a boyish man expertly casual in Converse sneakers, a machinist union T-shirt, and a baseball cap pulled tight to the brow. This guise belonged to a familiar species of L.A. duck. One could imagine all the young white males in this city migrating from the wetlands of various Midwestern malls, flying west when the weather turned boring and gray. Rainer and his guest were in mid-conversation, oblivious to anything but the room itself.

“So …,” Rainer said, pleased.

The young man froze with stagey admiration.

“Amazing, huh?”

“You took the paneling too?”

“The paneling is Prouvé; so is the door.”

“Of course, the portholes.”

“I liberated them from a technical school in Algiers.”

“Fucking insane.” The young man continued with the drama, pressing his palms and face against the wood as if his touch could transduce the grain. “When I get to the right age I want to play Le Corbusier. I already have the perfect Charlotte Perriand in mind.”

“Actually that would be a good project,” Rainer said.

“Hell yeah it would. Bring in Pierre Jeanneret and we have Jules et Jim but with an architecture, French Resistance vibe. Total slam dunk. I even have Le Corbusier’s glasses, like his actual glasses glasses. Cost me a hundred grand. I’m told it’s the second-most-expensive pair of modern eyewear ever sold at auction.”

“Very nice.”

Richard stood there, at first annoyed, smiling like a photograph waiting to be taken, but then the young man, his voice, his face—think of the three phases of matter, of a solid heating into a liquid heating into a gas—finally conveyed the steamy presence of Eric Harke, the actor, the movie star, the teen heartthrob. Richard tried to act nonchalant within these strange thermodynamics of celebrity, but being the lesser actor, his posture stroked into a stiff approximation of cool. Eric Harke was taller than expected and less pretty, thank goodness, since onscreen he appeared summoned from the baby pillows of a thousand pubescent girls, including Richard’s own daughter, who was presently screaming Oh-my-Gods in his head.

“You remember Curtis,” Rainer said to Eric.

“Oh-yeah-sure-absolutely-hey.”

Rainer then turned toward Richard and smiled like an oven revealing a loaf of bread. “And it’s really nice to finally meet you,” he said, taking Richard’s hand. “I think our mothers know one another, from the Chamber Music Society or the Cos Club or something small-world like that.” Rainer was huge without being fat, his six-foot-eight bulk belonging to an antiquated class of male who by dint of size exist on another, arguably greater plane. “And aren’t you friends with Henry Lippencott?” he asked.

Richard was thrown by the stolen small talk. “He’s my cousin.”

“Oh, okay. You get back much?”

“To New York?”

“Yeah.”

“Never.”

The oven opened again. “And said with conviction. I hear you. I have my issues with the city as well, mostly family related, ex-wife too, that and my built-in cynicism doesn’t quite jibe with the place anymore. I get there and just turn mean, you know, wonderfully mean but mean nonetheless. Out here my cynicism seems, I don’t know, seems somehow jubilant. I can relax enough to hate the world with a tremendous amount of affection.” Though raised in New York, Rainer spoke with a vague European accent that seemed rucksacked to his shoulders, the straps pulled tight, giving the impression of an overweight boy who had spent long, over-enunciated summers with his grandparents. “I still manage to go back at least once a month,” he said.

“I’m buying a loft,” Eric offered, “in the Meatpacking District.”

“Of course you are,” said Rainer, who, rather than roll his eyes, practically threw them toward Richard as if Richard would find this rush into nouveau trendiness risible. But Richard didn’t. Or not in the way Rainer imagined. Because in Richard’s memory the Meatpacking District still existed as the capital of sex clubs, with roving bands of transvestites sucking five-dollar cock. “You see poor Eric is from Minnesota,” Rainer added, as if this further explained his choice of neighborhood.

“Go ’Sota,” the actor fake-cheered. He was not known for his comedies.

“Son of ice farmers, I believe.”

“Fuck you, you kraut.”

And they both laughed. Richard tried to join in by adjusting his lips and eliciting a ha-ha sound, but he was nervous and sweaty and desperate to please as well as thrown by the image of this teen heartthrob cruising the Mineshaft on Little West 12th, his pockets stuffed with fivers, and this killed his sense of humor, which in many ways had been killed years ago. What remained was a hard-earned optimism that he could survive almost anything, even extreme opportunity.

Rainer sat down. Everybody else followed suit. “Curtis, where are we?”

“We love the script.”

Rainer turned to Richard. “We love the script. It’s funny, it’s smart, it has depth. Whoever plays the lead could well win awards. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not perfect. It still needs work. It’s too long, the middle sags, the individual character arcs could be clearer, the females are weak, but those are small fixes in what is otherwise an outstanding piece of screen prose. We can give you proper notes when and if the time comes, but essentially what we’re saying, Richard, is that we want to do it. We want to make this film. But we want to make it the right way, with the right people and with the right budget.” Rainer lounged back in his Rainer-sustaining chair. The color-field painting hanging behind him was mostly white with a red slash going down the middle. It made him appear newly born. “So what do you think?” he asked.

Richard was the opposite of numb. When your biggest hopes are realized in an instant and childish fantasy transfigures into fact, into the life you only dared imagine, well, numbness is nowhere in the picture. If anything there’s an overabundance of feeling as you finally let go of all that history so tightly gripped within, to the point where Richard experienced an epic, almost literal whoosh throughout his body and for a moment nearly turned liquid. A sense of relief was the first emotion to settle in. After fifteen years of near-constant pressure, of willing himself sane, of focusing on the steps but never the climb, finally, after all these years, he could stop for a moment and turn around and see what he had achieved: possibly the best view in town.

Eric Harke asked who his agent was.

“Um, Norman Peltzer,” Richard said.

“Who the fuck is that?”

“Head of the Norman Peltzer Agency,” Richard said.

“Of course he is,” Rainer said. “Maybe we could hook you up with someone we know. Maybe Koons at CAA. He might be a good fit. Or Vartan at UTA.”

Curtis took the note.

“Koons is really fucking good,” Eric told Richard, his feet keeping a bass drum beat. “You can trust him a hundred percent, well actually ninety percent, the other ten going into his own pocket.” It was beyond bizarre to have this celebrity suddenly play the role of confidant; Rainer and Curtis struck Richard as dubious, with their high-gloss professionalism, but Eric Harke was different, Eric Harke was endearing, which was probably a function of his skill as an actor, the way he could come across as likable, but Richard guessed he was responding to something else, judging by the manic exuberance and the chorus of facial tics and those baby blues with the chewy center: Eric Harke was definitely coked up. Richard figured he had had a pick-me-up before the meeting—snort left, snort right, and in we go, the hologram of a secure young man. “But Vartan’s your guy if you’re looking for someone to take your phone calls and show you around town, if you want some of that old-fashioned agent cheese.”

Rainer requested champagne via phone. “Hope I’m not being presumptuous,” he told the group. “More than anything, I like the ceremony.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” Eric agreed, nodding to his new best friend. “Absolutely we should celebrate. We should all go to my house for dinner tonight and we can really celebrate and discuss the project. I could even call Donal Fenster because I know he’d be interested and we can brainstorm and just fuck around. You married, Richard? Well, bring the wife. Bring the kids. I have a huge fucking pool, a basketball court. You play? Do you bowl? I got every shoe size imaginable. Bring everyone, hell, bring the family dog. The goldfish, the hamsters. We’ll barbecue. Not your fucking pets I promise. I’ve got prime rib you can’t believe.”

“Fenster’s interested?” Rainer asked.

Donal Fenster was the young director recently robbed of an Academy Award.

“He could be. We’re desperate to work together again. You know,” Eric turned to Richard and said without pretense or pause, “I know people, I mean, I know Rainer knows people, but I know people, and people want to know me, that’s just the way it is, no matter how shallow, presidents, dictators, holy men, billionaires, they want to know me, ridiculous, I know, not my value system, but they hear my name and they get interested. It’s a weird kind of power, I tell you, and it’s not like I can ever hide and be Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne, no, no, no, I’m always wearing the fucking cape, which is exhausting, but if I’m in your movie—and I’m seriously considering it, Richard, like seriously—but if I’m in your movie, you can land a healthy budget and book some hard-core talent and schedule a start date for July, like this July, man, and movies are hard, hard to get made and getting harder by the minute. How amazing would that be, the two of us working together during the summer on a big old film written by you and starring me, I mean just plain old straight-up cool.” Eric Harke spoke as if the last ten minutes equaled their lifelong dream.

Richard sat back in his seat. The force of future success started to slam into the humble present, and years later, during those times when he replayed this meeting in his head, he would wonder if his initial reaction somehow dictated all that followed, since his first active thought was, Now I can go back to New York and shove this in my father’s face. Did that impulse trigger what happened? If instead he had thought about his wife and children, of sharing the good news with them, would things have turned out differently? Who knows? But maybe thoughts, their synaptic charge, maybe they bump into surrounding particles and change their direction and spin and help shape some of that spooky action at a distance. We are all socially entangled, especially on the Upper East Side. How often does a random thought generate a coincidence, like the one presently vibrating in Richard’s pocket?

“You all right?” asked Rainer.

“Just my phone.” Richard checked the screen. It was Jamie.

“Go ahead and answer,” Rainer told him.

“It’s just my brother. Believe me, I can ignore him.”

“Never ignore family,” Rainer said with Teutonic sternness. “I insist.”

Richard was in no position to disagree.

“You gotten a call from Dad yet?” Jamie asked, his voice sounding stoned.

“No. Can I call you later, I’m kind of—”

“Well, you will.”

“I seriously doubt it.”

“Oh, you will. He’s all mortal coil since Charlie Topping died.”

Richard lowered his head into a more discreet angle. “Charlie Topping died?”

“Like a week ago.”

Richard was shocked. Though he refused all contact with his father and for half his life had lived successfully removed from the man and his city, forsaking everything, even financial help, the loss of wealth in some ways enduring longer than the loss of love, saying no to those Dyer trusts, no to those yearly tax-exempt gifts, taking nothing on principle (unlike his brother), even when money was scarce, even when his son, age seven, was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia and for two years the hospital bills piled into an economic record of despair, even then Richard held firm (and accepted help from his mother instead), still, the death of Charlie Topping hit him hard, not the death so much as the lack of news concerning the death. No one bothered to call or email him? Like many people who have escaped their past, Richard assumed his absence was suffered on an almost daily basis. But really no one missed him much.

“Did you go to the funeral?” Richard asked.

“No,” Jamie said. “It was yesterday and I’m not in the city.”

Richard didn’t bother to ask where he was since it was likely somewhere annoying. “Can I call you later?”

“Sure. Just heads up, Dad’s going to beg you to come home.”

“Right, okay, whatever.” And with that Richard hung up. After a deep breath he gave the room a where-were-we grin, and for a moment it seemed like the office had reverted back into a film set, a perfect reproduction of false reality, where brothers chatted with brothers and fathers called sons and Richard might actually be successful.

“Everything okay?” asked Rainer.

“Yeah, fine.”

“If you need to go …”

“A friend of my father’s died. My godfather actually.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, he died last week.”

“Well he’s still dead.” Rainer rose from his chair, like Oscar Wilde playing Wins ton Churchill getting bad news from the front. “And dead is dead.” He pointed to the painting behind the couch. “See that, that’s a Clyfford Still. He’s dead too. My father was good friends with him and he told me when I was a boy that this was a portrait Still had painted of him. A Still life, he called it. My father loved pulling our legs. Despite that, I believed him and I can’t help but see his face in the brushstrokes, his tight-lipped smile, his droopy left eye. It might as well be a photograph of the man. He’s also dead. When we were divvying up the estate, it was the only thing I wanted. My siblings thought I was insane. They gravitated toward the more valuable work, the Schieles, the Klimts, the Kirchners, while I went for a then-unfashionable Still.”

All eyes rested on that Still, embraced its outer stillness. The red slash seemed to record the saddest kind of sound wave, where silence is the only possible response. Richard, ever the literalist, tried to spot recognizable features in the paint and thought he caught a disapproving frown coming from a streak in the upper right corner. “It’s quite something,” he told Rainer.

“Of course it’s a reproduction.”

“Oh.”

“I couldn’t keep the real one here. A Still nowadays is worth a fortune. It’s a decent reproduction, though the original has a browner red.” Rainer turned back to Richard. “You know I used to see your father walking around Central Park, around the boat pond. I’d watch him do his laps and I’d try to imagine what was percolating inside that head. It seemed such athletic thinking. I never had the nerve to actually stop him and tell him how much I loved his books. I think I was”—a knock on the door—“around sixteen”—an assistant came in with champagne and four glasses—“when I first read Ampersand. I still have that cheap paperback copy, all underlined and dog-eared.” Rainer started unwrapping the foil. “I lost my literary virginity to that book.”

Eric Harke accompanied the sentiment with some phantom drum fills against his chest. “So cool that he’s your dad, just so fucking cool. I mean, A. N. Dyer. Hello. I’ve read Ampersand four times and I don’t even read menus more than once, but the book, it speaks to me, yeah, yeah, yeah, actor boy goes blah-blah-blah, but it does, it recharges me, makes me want to do great art.” In his excitement Eric balled his fists into exclamations of FUCK and YEAH. “It seems to me you have Catcher in the Rye people and you have Ampersand people, and I definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent fall into the Ampersand camp. I mean Catcher is excellent on a lot of levels, but it’s basically a character piece which stays stuck in the muddy bog of adolescence. That’s part of its charm, for sure, but that’s also its limitation, that teenage sentimentality. But Ampersand, man Ampersand explodes adolescence into its core existential parts and it keeps on expanding with you, year after year, right up until your last breath. To me, Salinger is a stray dog you want to adopt, but A. N. Dyer is a different beast altogether.”

Yeah, a tick, Richard thought.

The cork popped, and Rainer began to fill glasses. “You might find this interesting, Richard. You know how many copies Ampersand has sold since its publication? Over forty-five million. That’s a nice big number. And every year it sells about a hundred thousand more. Or used to. The sales are slipping. Did you know that, Richard?”

“No,” Richard said, wishing the topic would spit up blood and die.

“It’s down about thirty percent over the last six years, while Catcher has maintained its sales. Some of the problem is high schools, that they have to choose between Catcher and Ampersand, and Catcher is three hundred pages shorter and not nearly as difficult, so Catcher wins with two hundred and fifty thousand copies sold a year and Ampersand falls further back into the rank of unread classics.”

The bubbles in the champagne shimmied up the flutes, a hundred phony smiles breaking the surface, like some Esther Williams routine, Richard thought, a memory of stinging sweetness flooding his mouth.

“I should tell you up front,” Rainer continued, “that for the last ten years I’ve been courting your father, more like courting his agent, about getting the rights to Ampersand. I know I’m not alone in this. Every decent producer has given it a shot, going back fifty years, big-time people too, much bigger than me. I know Robert Evans got close, at least that’s the story he tells. Your father has made it abundantly clear that he’s not interested and never will be interested in seeing any of his books, let alone Ampersand, turned into films. Maybe he’s still competing with Salinger, I don’t know, but I respect the impulse. Movies of great novels, for the most part, are disasters. Give me a flawed story anytime. That said, I do think we at Aires have a strong track record as well as the right kind of sensibility for this kind of project. I mean, look at The Erasers. Robbe-Grillet bringing in two hundred and fifty-four million worldwide, that’s a medium-size miracle, let alone the critical response and the awards and the boost to book sales—I could get you the numbers if you’d like.”

Richard could feel his body shrinking.

“So I have a proposition.”

Or maybe everyone else was getting bigger.

“I want to make your movie, Richard, I want to make it right, with good people involved, like Eric here, and I want to get a proper budget, but satire is a tricky game, especially, no offense, from an unproven writer. You have to appreciate there are numerous strikes against this project from the get-go.”

Richard was yet again the boy who understood life far too late.

“But a package deal, that’s another thing. Maybe you could talk to your father about giving us a chance with Ampersand, just a chance, and based on your script as a writing sample, I think you should do the adaptation. Who better than the son? The publicity alone. And it would certainly pay well, and of course we would pay your father well, very well. It would be a nice windfall for the Dyer clan, not that money is the issue, of course. But if you could deliver Ampersand, just a twelvemonth option, I could guarantee you A Flea and a Louse with all the bells and whistles.”

“A Louse and a Flea,” Curtis corrected.

“What’s that?”

“A Louse and a Flea.”

“Oh, yeah, right right right right right. It’s a total win-win, Richard, with Eric doing both films. Just imagine this guy as Edgar Mead.”

“Man-oh-man-oh-man,” Eric said.

“But in five or six years, he’ll be too old, no offense.”

“None taken.”

“Nobody’s getting any younger, Richard, and heart-on-sleeve time, I’m desperate for this to happen. I love this book more than anything and I know it can be a great movie. So have a talk with your father and see if you might sway him toward us. Minimum, try and get me—”

“Us,” Eric corrected.

“Us a meeting.”

The champagne glasses were passed around and Richard took one. It seemed huge in his hand, the liquid vaguely laboratorial.

“To beginnings,” Rainer said.

What is the exact science of failure? Richard wondered.

Then Eric Harke stood up and after lifting his glass, did a curious thing: he sort of tossed a grin over his shoulder as if whatever deity that had so blessed his life was giving him a congratulatory pat, after which Eric froze and squinted, spotting a shape, it seemed, a person approaching, possibly familiar, yes, yes, I know this person, his face suggested, his brow treading deeper, his mouth momentarily hitching on the proper weight of the words before giving them voice,

“You know those games, sir, that start off innocently enough,”

his delivery obviously practiced in front of the mirror, along with every interstitial stammer and twitch, those tricks of authenticity, as well as the false naïveté of a mid-century American boy,

“or almost innocently enough, like a game of catch or tag, and you’re all in it together, in the beginning, you’re all in cahoots, but things sort of evolve on their own, suggestions are made, rules are changed, and suddenly hitting is allowed and that area over there is out of bounds. You know those games, sir? Well, those are the kinds of games that can only happen once. They can never get repeated, no matter how hard you might try. When the game is over, the game is over. Maybe that’s why you don’t want it to end. Maybe that’s why you keep on playing even if the next rule is harsher, maybe even unreasonable. You know what I mean, sir? It’s like those games in the quad, the games you can probably see from your window right now. There’s a moment, who knows when, but there’s a moment when it’s too late and you’re left with nothing else to do but to keep on playing, even if it’s not fun anymore, even if you know it’s stupid, you keep on playing, even if you know someone’s going to get hurt, seriously hurt, you keep on playing because the only way the game can end is with blood, and when that happens, sir, well, it’s not really a game anymore, is it?”

Eric paused to allow for his earthly return, then he smiled that famous smile as if invigorated by a dip in one of his native ten thousand lakes. “I hope that wasn’t too ridiculous.”

“Could there be a better Edgar Mead?” Rainer pronounced. He raised his glass in artistic salute, while Richard tried to anchor his insides, unsettled by the personal effects of gravity, and though he did lift his glass along with the others, he never took a sip. No, after cheers Richard put the glass back down on the table without comment, just like he let the phone keep on vibrating in his pocket without saying a word.