And Sons. David Gilbert
funeral reception was at the Knickerbocker Club, on 62nd Street, and people were already on the move, commenting on the pleasant weather and the reemergence of a stroll. I caught my wife glaring at me from the top of the church steps. Ashley had lost weight and was as beautiful as ever, a perfect self-portrait, damaged yet determined, a newfound survivor. Her confident future was already being extruded through my unfortunate past. She stared at me and then gestured toward Rufus and Eloise, abandoned with their aunt. Recriminations radiated from her knuckled lips. You jerk, you asshole. You’ve ruined our life, you pig. This was all true, and I tried to acknowledge the sin on my face, but to be honest I was more focused on my impending move to 2 East 70th Street. Had the Dyer apartment changed much since I was last there? Which bedroom would I sleep in, Richard’s or Jamie’s? Would I share meals with the man, conversations, favorite books and movies, latest pages of our writing? Would we drink and smoke and talk late into the night? My mind raced along old track. I was a foundling found. All told, or totaled, I would spend a week under A. N. Dyer’s roof, which is how I became a witness, the primary witness despite some feuding claims, to everything that happened.
Ashley grabbed the children and started up Madison.
My son waved goodbye to me, or so he told me years later.
“You were looking right at me and you just stood there, like I was nothing.”
It’s the little things they remember, like a raised hand, or the lack of a raised hand.
“Like I was less than nothing.”
How are we meant to see everything?
By late March we would all return to this church.
Master Charles Topping
12 East 72nd Street
New York, New York
USA
Dear Charlie, The Grand Canyon really is quite grand, despite the poor reproduction. The reverse looks nothing like the real thing, believe me! Imagine Dorothy in Oz and all that crazy color and realize we live in a black and white world. In an hour we’re taking mules down to the bottom for three nights of camping. I’ve named my ass after you. He is a stinky ass. I hope my ass doesn’t step in any holes for there are plenty of ass holes here! The sky at night is so dark & clear, the stars so starry you can’t believe what we’re missing in New York. It’s like a firecracker vs fireworks. Next stop the Hoover Dam for a bit of manmade glory. Hope you’re doing well in Canada. Caught any big ugly fish? Looking forward to the lies.
Echo … Echo … Echo …
Andy
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