And Sons. David Gilbert

       I.iii

      OUTSIDE ON THE STEPS, Andy Dyer smoked cigarette number five and watched the well-heeled walk up and down Madison. The newly minted warm weather offered an exuberance of flesh, women the main demographic on this avenue, their shopping bags swinging on a spring harvest of clothes. Many of them circulated through the nearby Ralph Lauren store, and I wonder if Andy realized or even cared that old Ralph was originally Lipschitz from the Bronx. Oh, the ironies of American reinvention: we appreciate the striving, the success, the superior khaki, while also enjoying the inside joke. The store was situated within the old Rhinelander mansion, a fabulous example of French Renaissance Revival, its insides decorated with horse and dog paintings, portraits of precious boys and athletic men, sailing scenes, candid snapshots from the club. It was enough to make any self-respecting WASP queasy if also a tad envious. We should all still live like this. But Andy hardly cared about such things. No, he was busy sitting on those church steps, smoking cigarette after cigarette, waiting for one of these mysterious New York women to stop and smile and take possession of the name Jeanie Spokes.

      He had no idea what she looked like, even after numerous Internet searches. She refused to friend him on Facebook and the only picture publicly posted on her page was of Ayn Rand photoshopped onto a beach volleyball player, her right hand powering through a self-determined spike. All he knew about her physically was her age: twenty-four years old. As he sat there the air between shirt and skin puckered with extra humidity. Twenty-four. That number came like rain down his back.

      “How will I recognize you?” he had asked during their last IM chat.

      “When you see me, your heart will skip a beat,” Jeanie pinged back.

      “That scary?”

      “Absolutely frightening.”

      “You’re not a dude, are you?”

      “Um, no,” she pinged, “I swear,” she pinged, “Really.” Her words fell in a series of seductive rows, like dialogue in a sexy comic strip. “Wait,” she pinged, “Define dude.” Jeanie Spokes had impeccable timing.

      “I’ll be on the steps of St. James, 71st and Madison,” Andy typed.

      “You sure you want me to come?”

      “You sure you want to come?”

      A pause.

      “Cum?” he typed.

      “Nicely done, Cyrano.”

      “Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking the same thing.”

      Andy waited, waited, waited, until “No cumment” pinged back.

      What was it about instant messaging that invited this kind of innuendo and pun, this straight-up dirty talk, as if a transcript of future sin? It was all very tilted, of course, in the vein of a separate identity, the Internet’s lingua franca, but sometimes the tilt straightened and a high-speed intimacy entered the exchange. Suddenly you start bouncing your innermost thoughts back and forth just to see if those feelings can be caught.

      “I can’t wait to see you,” Andy wrote.

      “Me neither.”

      “Seriously.”

      “Mean either.”

      “Circe.”

      “Man eater.”

      Andy knew only a few concrete details about Jeanie Spokes: she grew up on the Upper West Side; her mother was an architect, her father an editor at Random House; she attended Dalton, then Columbia, with a year abroad in Paris; she graduated magna cum laude with a degree in comparative literature and presently worked as an assistant at Gilroy Connors, A. N. Dyer’s literary agency; she lived in a studio apartment on Riverside Drive, the rent outrageous, but she was a Manhattan girl to the core and anywhere else gave her vertigo. Many of these details were analogous to Andy’s own biography: Trinity to Exeter; Central Park West to Fifth Avenue; Sharon to Southampton. He was, in concept, familiar with this type of girl, or woman, and that’s where the whole business got tricky: Jeanie Spokes was a full-fledged adult while Andy Dyer hovered around 83 percent in terms of development and experience and areas of skin without acne and even grades, which could ruin his chances for Yale and screw up his equivalency with this Columbia grad, dooming whatever outside chance he had beyond a mere online flirtation.

      Andy lit his sixth cigarette. He wanted her to find him smoking, that seemed important, but she was thirty minutes late and he was light-headed and almost done with his pack. Organ music murmured from behind the church doors. The previews were over and the feature was about to begin, with its cheesy special effects and tired script and ludicrous, entirely unbelievable character named God. Andy wondered if Jesus was once a supreme embarrassment to his Father, this hippie carpenter who ran around with the freak crowd until finally he gave up on his dreams and stepped into the family business, probably to his mother’s regret. What a sellout, Andy thought. A truly kick-ass Jesus would have said, Go forsake thyself, and remained a humble builder. Now that would have been something to worship: the son of God rejecting God in favor of life, meaning death. Andy glanced back at the church, suddenly reminded of why he was here. Charlie Topping had been a nice enough man, formal without being too serious, like a pediatrician, though Andy often caught him staring like he could spot hidden symptoms of some terrible future disease. Every Christmas and birthday he gave Andy a set of vintage tin soldiers—dragoons, grenadiers, hussars, highlanders, whole battles, whole wars, the American Civil War in ten deluxe boxes. The least Andy could do was go inside and pay his respects.

      But where was she?

      Andy checked the distances, north and south, for potential Jeanies. Every one of these women seemed awash in extra light, as if throughout the city young men awaited their arrival. But none of them noticed this 17 percent boy with the zit goatee and the shaggy hair and the stubborn baby fat around his middle like he was halfway through digesting his younger softer self, or if they did notice, they thought—who knows what they thought of this half-boy, half-man, though one older woman did do a double take as she rushed up the church steps, late for the service. She was almost attractive, for seventy-plus, tall and slender with a handsome face and one of those I’m-no-granny haircuts. And her shoulders. They were a reminder that the collarbone could also be called a clavicle. Andy imagined himself a lucky old man.

      Recently he had become more conscious of the female form, or not so recently, since in his early teens he had noticed the obvious—breasts, backsides, a certain leanness he found intriguing—but nowadays he noticed something else, noticed what he couldn’t see: the mystery of the girls at school and the women on the street, how under their clothes lay secrets by way of particularity, the variety of style and shape and color, the Platonic ideal of Woman falling to the ground and breaking into a thousand pieces. A hint of nipple under a shirt was like discovering a hidden safe, the combination unknown but the lock visible, and he would speculate over the pubic hair sealed within, the areolas and freckles and moles, the rifts and gaps. Those tantalizingly fine hairs on cheeks and arms and how they caught the sun killed him. But it wasn’t like he was a sex fiend or anything (though he could be a bit of a perv), it was just, well, you witness a woman naked, like truly witness her naked, like up close and in full natural light, and you almost want to cry, an instant martyr to the cause. Maybe because you’re offering so little in return.

      In total, Andy had kissed fifteen girls, tongue-kissed twelve of them.

      Of those twelve he had felt up nine.

      Of those nine he had fingered five.

      Of those five, four had touched him in return.

      Of those four, four had given him