And Sons. David Gilbert
father-son bonding even if he only grasped half of what was being said, which became clearer over subsequent rereadings and opened up deeper understandings and engendered a different kind of awe—how funny and smart his father could be, how human, how moral, even after he carelessly broke Mom’s heart and rubbed all their noses in his bastard namesake, regardless, the books, these amazing books, they spoke to Jamie and he knew they would continue to speak to him, the author a far greater father than the man. Plus the residual fame helped with a certain kind of girl.
“Come and visit, please,” his father said. “I’m feeling … like dust.”
“Like dust?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Um—”
“I’ve never asked for much.”
That’s true, Jamie thought, and you never gave much either. Of all the Dyers, I knew and know Jamie the best. Friendship was imprinted upon us from the start, despite our obvious differences. We were born five months apart (me first) and were nurtured side by side by adoring mothers who embraced their youngest extra tight, though, more important, our nannies were from the same Caribbean island. There are photo albums filled with pictures of Jamie and me in Central Park, at the beach in Southampton, at the zoo holding hands. I was always taller than everyone, until ninth grade, when I stopped growing and soon became the shortest. We matriculated through the same schools in the same years and part of our education was learning that, like our fathers, we could be friends without all the fuss. We were probably closest in fifth grade, when Jamie briefly flirted with my Transformers obsession (I worshipped Megatron), but by upper school it was obvious that he was destined for cooler things, and with each matriculation our relationship became more asymmetrical, so that by the time we finished with Yale our years together had a funhouse-mirror effect. I was the type of student who reinvented himself with each new school, never satisfied with my status as both person and peer. I took the change of environment as an opportunity to fine-tune my persona, until junior year abroad, where I hit upon earnest dilettante and returned from Paris newly found. I graduated from Yale with a degree in English literature, my senior essay focusing on A. N. Dyer and the kidnapping of identity. It received a passing grade. But Jamie was one of those rare exotics who emerged fully formed, without pretense, it seemed. Everything was always possible for him, so why bother changing. From an early age he stood apart as the most striking in any group, man, woman, or child, blessed with perfect skin and mink-brown eyes and a smile that revealed crowded incisors but crowded in a way that Walt Whitman would have celebrated. You might have guessed he had some Cherokee blood. He was the first to swim in the ocean, the first to ride a ten-speed, the first to break his arm. Parents called him wicked, though they all adored him, teachers included. Jamie was the mirror that brought back the most alluring aspects of youth and everybody wanted to see themselves in his glow. A day in his company invariably produced uncalculated adventure: start in Chinatown searching for fireworks and end up in Queens watching a cockfight with three Chinese kids and a Russian switchblader named Stahn. I myself found these adventures exhausting (and always frightening), but for Jamie it was just another Saturday afternoon. Nothing was out of the ordinary, certainly not a cemetery in the middle of the night.
The almost full moon shone against the snow and created a drift of ghostly light. The last time Jamie was here, the trees were doing their best advertisement for autumn in Vermont. He had stood on that hill and watched his old girlfriend, his first real girlfriend, get planted into the ground. It was like Sylvia was a seed and cemeteries were gardens in reverse. Her daughters, Delia and Clover, had painted flowers and butterflies on the coffin, sentiments of I’ll Never Forget You, and I’ll Miss You, and Love and Peace in heartbreaking purple and green, a family portrait done on the lid—the girls, the house, the horses, the dog, Mom and Dad standing hand in hand—the backdrop of Green Mountains rendered by Sylvia herself over the course of a week in August. It seemed a shame to bury such a lovely thing. Nearly everyone was crying as two friends played “We Bid You Goodnight” on mandolin and violin. Delia and Clover leaned against their father like ponytailed two-by-fours holding up an unsteady wall. Jamie tried not to stare. Ed Carne did not like him. Jamie knew this because Ed told him so. “I don’t like you,” he said. “I don’t like you being here, I don’t like what you and Sylvia are doing, but this is her call, and whatever makes her happy, you know.” At 12:01 P.M. Jamie started to film, discreetly, he hoped. The coffin would stand as the final shot.
“Me going into the earth,” Sylvia had said.
“You going into the earth,” Jamie had said.
But here he was, six months later, checking for a sprout.
Jamie sat in the minivan, waiting on Myron Doty, who was late, but who could begrudge a man named Myron Doty, particularly when the man resembled the Myron Doty type, unimagined until the moment of introduction. Myron operated a ski lift in the winter and buried bodies in the summer. “I take ’em up. I take ’em down. I’m cold when they go up and I’m warm when they go down.” Jamie liked Myron, but then again Jamie provided favorable weather conditions for people like Myron to thrive, much like the panhandle of Florida. During our sophomore year I remember when Jamie quit painting (he was quite talented) and picked up a video camera instead. Almost instantly his weekly Sunday night Ecce Homo movies attracted a cult following, the screenings migrating from dorm room to coffee shop to midnight showings at the York on Broadway. His piece on Lord God, the New Haven street preacher/celebrity impersonator, created a minor stir around campus. Was this exploitation of a poor deluded black man or a happy vehicle for creative self-expression? Who knew and who cared, because it was funny and it was real and soon after Jamie found a white actor to play Lord God and he did a shot-for-shot remake and spliced the two together, like a Siamese double feature. More outrage followed—this was Yale, after all—but the movie became a hit on the festival circuit and even won an award at Telluride. For a brief moment Jamie Dyer, filmmaker son of the reclusive novelist, was the school’s most famous undergrad, until an actress took his place. During his senior year Jamie began to investigate the rougher neighborhoods around New Haven in search of similar characters sporting harder truths. He had this vision of a reenacted documentary titled The Pin Tumblers, using a Yale lock as his visual metaphor, but somewhere in the process, maybe when he saw that teenager get stabbed or watched that mother stare at her crying baby, stare without doing anything, something in him shifted, something infinitesimal yet essential—a matter of perspective, I suppose—and whatever life Jamie was trying to capture became stuck in his own head. He started to consider himself a professional witness, a type of superhero bystander, powerless yet unblinking. To me it seemed he was overcompensating for his natural optimism, which he distrusted. The films became darker. Fewer and fewer people attended those Sunday night screenings. I remember once telling him I no longer understood the point.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I just watched ten dogs get euthanized and for what reason?”
“What reason? Maybe because it happens.”
“But to what end? It’s not cathartic, it’s just sad. Toss in some narrative. Interview the ASPCA guy. Give us a sense of his job, his daily routine, his coping in the face of all that death. Denounce the practice. I don’t know, but say something I can hang my hat on.”
“But that’s a lie.”
“No,” I said. “That’s life without the f.”
“I know what you can do with that f.”
“I’m almost serious,” I said.
“Almost, huh? The safety of qualifiers. So what do you suggest, Philip, that we follow this guy home, that we see him make dinner, feed his kids, walk his own dog, see him wake up the next morning and start his day all over again? Is that what you require, oh audience? Because that feels ridiculous to me, feels like a device, a filter, even worse, a manipulation. Should we also follow the dogs on the street, or in their loving homes, humanize them as well? I’m not looking for art here. I want the opposite. I want the world without the person behind the camera constructing the scene. This is how dogs die, period.”
“Charming,”