And Sons. David Gilbert
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