A. N. DYER MANAGED TWENTY-ONE PAGES before finally retiring to the couch. Nowadays he preferred naps to more defined sleep, even if those naps lasted many hours and stretched the semantic bounds, still Andrew held firm to the notion of temporary rest. It was three in the morning. Sleep was sponsored by Vicodin, with a two-finger assist from Dewar’s. All the previous typing had imprinted on his eyelids the residue of motion, sheet after sheet of Eaton twenty-pound stock rolling behind his tired platen brow. Eaton had been his brand since the beginning, its rag like onionskin but thicker, its overt quality as pleasing as a fountain pen with his signature. As a young man he could produce eight, maybe nine pages a day, an average of four hundred words per page (he always counted), which on a yearly basis would yield roughly six reams and still allow for five weeks of vacation. Oh, to dream such math again. Tonight he had ground through an entire chapter, the twelfth. The pages measured a quarter inch of hard linear labor. It was impressive work, regardless of the dubious task, and after he had finished he jumped right into the editing and took care to imbue his handwriting with as much youthful vigor as possible, striking the deliberately overblown words, refashioning the clumsy sentences, x’ing an entire wayward paragraph, and scribbling its correct version in the margin. This part was fun, almost like painting: Andrew put red pencil to manuscript and gave his brushstroke to the canvas—lines, arrows, swirls, in some cases well-practiced doodles, even a mysterious phone number for a man named Roberto Lupe, just for kicks. Make it messy, he thought, make it real. He imagined himself as twenty-seven again, an age that still seemed sadly within reach, just yesterday really, before everything went wrong, before his biggest regret turned into his greatest success—Andrew flinched as if startled from a thirty-second, decade-spanning dream, the type that can snag you when sitting through opera. Lying on the couch, looking for sleep, Andrew’s body seemed like a house with a possible intruder inside—what was that? that noise? His study certainly appeared ransacked. Earlier that day he had been searching for something to read, something special, something of worth, please, give me something to help me through the night. Good old Coleridge finally tempered the panic:
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings.…
But now the abstruse had turned to crap. Books were all over the floor, papers too, file cabinets practically dumped, newspapers, mail, mostly unopened, dirty plates, coffee mugs, clothes, all the clothes, the socks and the underwear, pants and shirts woefully overemployed. Just close your eyes and think of those twenty-one pages, he told himself, eight thousand words, fifteen thousand individual keystrokes. He had always been a decent typist. (Thanks to Exeter, we were all decent typists.) The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Instead of sheep he tried counting foxes, the image of fox inspired by the crafty Mr. Tod. Andrew loved Beatrix Potter as a boy, the fond memory of being read to aloud, the words coming on trails of smoke and scotch, his father’s wonderful voice. He decided the lazy dog would be his own, a cocker spaniel named Smear. One of his other clear memories of his dad was the delight he took in calling the dog. “C’mere Smear!” He had promised a Smudge and a Splotch some day. Oh, all the numberless goings-on of life, inaudible as dreams. Almost asleep—or so he hoped—Andrew’s attention fell heavily on the fireplace. It took only eight months to write Ampersand. Amazing the speed. Just eight months to give up his soul. He closed his eyes and found something warm and wriggling inside.
Tomorrow Richard and Jamie were due to arrive.
Andrew would continue his writing in the morning.
The goal was to get the book finished in the next week or so. It was a self-imposed deadline, with death running hard in the line, outpacing all other thoughts and expanding its ever-expanding lead. After all, this was the man who wrote in The Bend of Light:
Take a look. There’s a black hole smack dab in the middle of your eye, a reflection of what looms ahead, of what you can never peer around no matter how much light shines. The fix is in. God dies a thousand times a second.
And that was thirty-five years ago, when he was in good health. Imagine him now. Or imagine yourself if your lifelong obsession was no longer in the distance but in the same room; imagine the sepulchral couch; imagine the strange anticipation, its sad sort of achievement; imagine the blackness, the eternal nothingness, which of course is unimaginable. We the living might appreciate our mortality, but no matter how deep we delve into the subject, of our bodies as our sieves, death is just wordplay. We all have something to steal.
In The Bend of Light Hardy Rohem dies of skin cancer and he dies alone. “I love you all” are his last words. The Tin Man is given his illusory heart. A. N. Dyer struggled for months over that line. He typed pages and pages of potential last words, veering among the faux philosophical, the absurd, the spiritual, etc. Whatever the choice, these words would end the novel, that was obvious, but the heaviness of the situation, even in the shallowest of characters, overwhelmed him. He gave the manuscript to Isabel, always his first and best reader, to see if she had any ideas, and while a few of the female characters were given a better shake and a subplot was tightened and those Isabel-averse words were circled (drapes and sofa had become their private joke), she had no explicit answer for the dying Hardy. “He can say almost anything and it’ll be moving,” she told him. “All this time he’s been searching for a sense of his own meaning, but essentially he’s incapable, he’s just a polished surface, but now meaning is forced upon him and whatever he says will be powerful, I think. Nobody dies a worthless death, at least in my view. We all die together.” As she talked Andrew rubbed her right foot as payment for her critique, his thumb planing the arch of her serious size-elevens. How he loved those feet, missed those feet, the way they existed in harmony with her shoulders, as if she stood balanced on generations of big-footed, broad-shouldered Isles women. That smile completed the picture, dimples like tiny fists pulling you in, catching you within its net.
“You should go.”
Those were her last words to him, seventeen years ago. Could he have said anything differently, done anything differently beyond the obvious, like craft a story that would have made it right, that would have repaired this injury and broken this terrible spell? Of course, a few months later he did come up with something, but by then it was too late. On the day in question he remained tongue-tied in the doorway of the living room while she sat unmoved on the couch, reading some thick and redolent magazine. The narrative part of his brain had been so sure that she would forgive him, eventually, and she would help him raise the boy, the combination of resentment and perverse pride too great for her to pass up. Even if this was miscalculation on his part, his miscalculations often ended in success, his thoughtlessness bringing on his greatest triumphs. No doubt about it, his life would have been happier with less luck.
You should go.
And the sweet everything slipped from his hands.
Now Isabel was remarried and living in Litchfield, Connecticut.
Andrew, trying to fall asleep, wished his cramped arms could detach.
He wondered what A. N. Dyer would say when it came time for his last words?
James Joyce had asked, “Does nobody understand?”
And Heine had requested pencil and paper; Goethe more light.
Emily Dickinson had muttered, “I must go in, the fog is rising.”
We all have our last words, no matter our status. A week before my father labored through his, Andrew had visited the Morgan Library on Madison and 36th Street. Arthur Sinkler, its director, was courting him in hopes he might secure his papers, and he was showing Andrew a few of the library’s treasures, such as the original manuscript of Lady Susan, in Jane Austen’s lovely hand. But all Andrew could think of was poor Jane dying in bed, only forty-one years old, her beloved sister Cassandra asking if she needed anything, anything at all, and Jane answering, “Nothing but death.”
Arthur Sinkler mistook this silence for appropriate awe. “Fabulously immediate, isn’t it?” His enthusiasm was honest yet annoying, like a seller of high-end men’s apparel. Andrew assumed he came from nowhere, one of those self-made intellectuals who modeled themselves on the type of Ivy Leaguer Andrew so disliked: the premeditated WASP. That said, it was hard to rage against his dedication to form and pedigree; people like Arthur Sinkler gave meaning to these small implications, like an archeologist fitting together the shards of an ancient trash heap. “The ink still seems wet,” he practically gushed.
Andrew removed a handkerchief and coughed.
They were sitting around a table spread with various manuscripts, and if Andrew and Arthur were cordial at eleven and one o’clock respectively, an impatience negotiated the quarter-tos, with Sidney Garrow, the Morgan’s curator for literary and historical manuscripts, on one side, and Dennis Gilroy, A. N. Dyer’s literary agent, on the other.
“Never heard of Lady Susan,” Dennis said.
“It’s certainly not her finest work,” Sidney Garrow confirmed. “But it is the only surviving full manuscript of one of her novels, so in that way it’s quite important.”
Arthur frowned at this opinion. “Oh, I think the book’s quite wonderful, almost subversive. Lady Susan is this wicked Venus flytrap of a woman who catches these charmed men. It’s early Austen, and it was never published in her lifetime, but you can see her honing her craft and working through her eventual themes. It’s more novella than novel, an epistolary novella.”
Sidney Garrow slumped closer to twenty-to-whatever while Dennis Gilroy tried to smile without his usual smirk, which resulted in an approximation of good humor, like one of those rigged carnival games involving a water pistol and a clown’s open mouth. “An epistolary novella, hmm,” he said. “I’m sure her agent was pleased with that, and yes, I know dear Jane didn’t have an agent, only her brother Edward, and I know there’s a long, proud history, from Pamela to Les Liaisons Dangereuses to her own Sense and Sensibility, my personal favorite, but my God, talk about a hard sell.” This was classic Dennis Gilroy: to offer himself as a buffoon, a mere moneyman, then undercut that impression with an offhanded display of scholarship, thus deflating all pretension and leaving only cash, great piles of it, on the table. Many a writer owed him their second home. Dennis wooed A. N. Dyer after his longtime agent, Teddy Moran, retired to Greece so he could get pickpocketed by the local boys. “I’ve cut holes in all my pockets,” he wrote to Andrew from Naxos a few years before he drowned, “and glued a drachma to my inner thigh.” Teddy was a functional if expansive drunk who started his career as a copyright lawyer with a penchant for verse. “Give me the fringe rather than the infringement,” he would pronounce with a loony Irish accent by way of New Paltz. But Teddy had an eye for young talent, as well as a sharp editing pen, and even if you only understood 80 percent of what he muttered, the remaining 20 twisting around a warped and non sequiturial universe, you were charmed by his obscure delight. Once as a favor to Andrew (who was doing a favor for my father ((who was pressed by my mother to do a favor for me (((whom I begged not to ask for any favors)))))) Teddy Moran read my first unpublished novel, a miscarriage of deformed autobiography, and he was nice enough to treat me to a midtown lunch like a real writer. “You have the look of the dog chasing you,” he told me near the end of our meal, “and that dog won’t tire so you better grab a big fucking stick and start swinging. Do that and then give me a call.” Evidently Teddy Moran was obsessed with dogs. A. N. Dyer dedicated Here Live Angry Dogs and Brutal Men to TM and his drugged honeycakes.
“She was in terrible pain when she died,” Andrew said of Jane Austen.
Arthur and Sidney Garrow dipped their heads, ever respectful, but Dennis hoisted his smirk to full sail. “Oh, thanks for that fun thought.”
“They think she had Addison’s disease,” Andrew continued. “Suffered terribly, just terribly, severe vomiting and diarrhea, awful convulsions.” He picked up a pair of white conservator gloves and held them like a memento from the days when girls wore white gloves, dancing school days, debutante days, fifty years ago or two hundred years ago, the good old days. The gloves seemed tiny yet they fit his hands rather easily. Andrew regarded them theatrically. “Maybe ending that pain is what makes the end bearable.”
“You feeling all right?” asked Dennis. “Or is this just a mood?”
“I feel fine,” Andrew said, the words dank with disgust.
Arthur Sinkler changed subjects by reaching for another manuscript, wisely passing over Keats’s Endymion and Poe’s Tamerlane and Wilde’s Dorian Gray before landing on Trollope and pushing forward The Way We Live Now. “Have a look,” he said. “Hardly a revision on the page, the absolute cleanest working draft you will ever see. The man just wrote and wrote and wrote, finished Ayala’s Angel in the morning and after lunch started Dr. Wortle’s School.”
“I always hated his titles,” Andrew said. Without much enthusiasm he turned a couple of the pages housed inside a clamshell box, like a secret book hidden within a fake book. The words flowed free of second thought, not even an inky pause. Trollope wrote for money, hence the speed and output, and sometimes Andrew envied that motivation and was curious if he himself would have written more books, looser, faster, funnier books, if he had lived more hand to mouth and needed a real job, not in the postal service like Trollope, but maybe in advertising, with its brainstorming and sloganeering, its hard-to-please clients, its everyday exotic camaraderie. Andrew realized this was an absurd fantasy. Advertising? Please. And who could ever feel sorry for him? By all rights, A. N. Dyer’s life was enviable. Success came fast with Ampersand and, combined with a supportive and loving wife and a generous trust fund, he no longer had to pretend to have a job and could focus all of his attention on writing. A real privilege. Whatever baseless torments he suffered from he kept to himself, the amorphous misery that stagnated into self-fulfilling loneliness, like an affectation that turns into a twitch. Hearing a kind word about one of his books was like going through a seppuku ceremony with his insides acting as the blade. Was it shame? Guilt? We all know how meeting a favorite writer can often be a disappointment, but imagine being that favorite writer who understands the disappointment intimately, who might manage to charm you by signing your book with one of twenty time-tested witticisms but who in the end knows the truth all too well, that this thing of beauty, this kind solace in a dying hour, is nothing more than a well-crafted ruse.
Arthur Sinkler reached for Our Mutual Friend. “Now look at Dickens.…”
Andrew had hoped that spending the morning at the Morgan would somehow push him away from the oncoming bus of his own head, plus Dennis had been begging him to take this meeting, since this was an opportunity to finally mint some real money from the A. N. Dyer name. But being in the presence of these manuscripts just made Andrew feel, well, to use a humble word, sad. The handwriting seemed too personal. Here were these people beyond their undying name; here was the evidence of their brief human existence. Where John Harmon was an abstraction, the hook of the J and the double cruciform of the H was pure Dickens, with his mess of revisions, his revisions of revisions, the unwieldy scratch and scrawl of a man more than a century dead. Andrew peeled off the gloves and let them drop on top of Our Mutual Friend. Arthur Sinkler was going on about the Trollope Society and how they pointed to the sloppiness as evidence of Dickens’s inferiority, but all Andrew heard was his own breath, innocuous yet terribly evident.
It was mid-morning.
The sunlight slanting through the window seemed delivered mid-dream.
He needed another Vicodin, maybe three.
In an office nearby a telephone rang.
Dennis Gilroy, sensing the drift, suggested moving the conversation forward, and after a nod from Arthur, Sidney Garrow removed his glasses, as if speaking and seeing were exclusive acts. “Over the course of a week I made a cursory, and I do mean cursory, inspection of Mr. Dyer’s papers. I very much enjoyed my time in their company, and I thank you, Mr. Dyer, for your hospitality.”
“I hardly knew you were there,” Andrew said.
“Before I start I want to stress that in no way is this a proper catalog of your papers, which is something the Morgan can do and do extremely well. But let’s start with your letters. I made a rough count of three hundred twenty, which span six decades. Within that grouping there’s a very nice and full correspondence with your mother where we have both sides of the exchange. There’s also a complete but smaller correspondence between you and your stepfather.”
“Can’t believe I wrote to him at all,” Andrew said.
“Excuse my prying,” Sidney Garrow said, either grinning or cramping, “but are there any letters between you and your first wife?”
“First and only wife,” Andrew corrected. “If she hasn’t burned them, yes.”
“Any idea the number?”
The number? Well, there was a letter a week for five years, when he was in college and in the army, the letters short and superficially charming, giving Isabel a brief rundown of their time apart, all romance buried in the very-sincerely-yours and the hope-to-see-you-soons, once going as far as thinking-of-you. Only a few kisses had been exchanged and he was using these letters as more of a bookmark, hoping Isabel might remember their place when she ran into him in New York and maybe kiss him again. Which she did. Her lips were thin but strong and always tasted of the ocean. During his military service at Fort Jackson in South Carolina (he was trained in demolitions) Andrew began to fear her loss of interest as she attended Smith and came in contact with all types of Williams and Amherst men, God forbid those Harvard asses. His letters took on more incident, with the day-to-day labors embellished, such as blowing up the latrine or witnessing the sapper lose both legs, a few of them turning into outright fraud, as in the duck hunting trip to Meccapeek Plantation, where Charlie Topping made an appearance since Andrew knew Isabel liked Charlie and maybe liked Andrew for liking Charlie; in that letter Andrew had Charlie chasing down a crippled teal through a flooded corn field, tripping all over and getting soaked and generally ruining the hunt, all in pursuit of a dying bird. As Andrew grew more confident with his writing, the truth became shorter, the bulk of the letters taken up by short stories he enclosed for Isabel to read, love, cherish, and possibly obey, secretly proposing to her with his first published piece, Miserable Army, though it took another two years before he went on bended knee and unscrambled those letters. “I have no idea,” Andrew said to Sidney Garrow.
“Maybe we can talk to her.”
“Good luck.”
“Of all the letters in the present collection,” Sidney Garrow continued, “the most noteworthy are the correspondences from Mr. Pell at Random House, and from your original agent, Mr. Moran. It’s great material, very apropos in terms of process and career. I particularly like the exchange concerning the cover of Ampersand.” Sidney Garrow turned to Arthur. “It seems they originally wanted an image of a tightly knotted school tie rather than the red schoolhouse door we know so well. Amazing to think. There’s also a small but strong batch from other writers, artists, figures of the day, but I wouldn’t say it’s an extensive grouping. Then we have friends, in particular Charles Topping. Now, three hundred twenty letters isn’t necessarily a large archive, but perhaps it’s not indicative of how many letters you yourself actually wrote.”
“I’d be shocked if I wrote half as many,” Andrew said.
Sidney Garrow—and always Sidney Garrow and never plain Sidney or Sid or even Mr. Garrow, his deep yet meek intelligence needing the brace of every syllable to prop up what seemed a delicate presence—straightened the single sheet of paper acting as his notes. “To be honest, the letters are not the strongest part. Which brings us to the notebooks. The notebooks, Mr. Dyer, are wonderful. I counted seventy-three, big and small, some full, some half-full, some barely full, but all loaded with terrific material. There are no journals or diaries, as far as I saw. I estimate over a thousand index cards and loose sheets of typescript, and those are jewels in terms of methodology and nuggets of prose. I also found six sketchbooks.”
Dennis gave Andrew a reappraising look. “You draw?”
“And draws quite well,” Sidney Garrow remarked.
Andrew grimaced. “In my youth. My mother saved everything.”
“That kind of ephemera is great,” Arthur told him.
Ephemera. Andrew imagined the most capricious of Greek goddesses.
“This brings us to the manuscripts,” Sidney Garrow said. “First, the short stories, mostly written early in your career, quite a few unpublished, which is always thrilling. I counted thirty-eight; that’s including the fourteen that were in the collection M. And then we have the novels. For the most part it seems that three drafts have been preserved for each book: the original draft, with the author’s notes and edits; the working draft with the editor’s notes and edits, for the most part Mr. Pell’s; and the corrected draft, first proof pages, with additional notes and edits from the author. I have to say it’s a real boon to have all these drafts together, to get a sense of the evolution. It’s really quite wonderful.” Sidney Garrow liberated a handkerchief and half-blew, half-wiped his nose. Andrew guessed that this man’s love of books started from a defensive position, a palisade in the palm of his hand. “But there is one issue, a discrepancy really. I couldn’t find any drafts for Ampersand. Nothing. Otherwise the manuscripts are very complete. We even have scrapbooks of reviews and articles.”
“My mother again,” Andrew said.
“Maybe there’s an explanation, but it is an issue since we would want Ampersand included, unless of course for whatever reasons the drafts are nonexistent. But it is your best-known work, and we would be foolish to make a significant investment only to see Ampersand turn up elsewhere.”
“Say in Austin,” Arthur Sinkler added. “It’d be institutionally embarrassing.”
The Andrew inside Andrew curled up in the corner.
Dennis shot him a sly-old-fox grin. “Let’s talk significant investment.”
“With or without Ampersand?” Arthur asked.
“Let’s say with.”
“Okay, but first let me give you my quick pitch for the Morgan. As a citizen, a devotee of this city, I feel that it’s incredibly important, Andrew, that your papers remain here, among, well, among your people. You’re a quintessential New York writer and if your legacy were to end up somewhere else, that seems like a shame verging on a crime. You need to be on the East Coast, near East Coast scholars, near East Coast readers, and when I say East Coast I mean smack dab in the middle of Manhattan.”
“What’s the offer?” Dennis asked. “I mean there is a non–East Coast reality.”
“Yes, reality. Thank you, Mr. Gilroy, for keeping us grounded. I don’t need to tell you that the Morgan is a special place. You know that. In my biased view, we are the intellectual heart of this city. A visitor from another planet would do well to visit here first in order to understand our human narrative. We also have a tremendous gift shop. That said, we don’t have unlimited funds. We can guarantee you the institutional respect and support you deserve, but money, alas, is always tight. Regardless, these papers are of exceptional value and with Ampersand firmly on the table, we can go to three five.”
“For everything?” Dennis asked, almost offended.
“Even the paper clips.”
“Full disclosure,” Dennis said: “I’ve talked to Ransom.”
Arthur smiled. “Such an evocative name.”
“And they offered double that.”
“Dennis, if money’s the bottom line, we can’t possibly compete. Ransom and their ilk will always win. And they are a fine institution and Austin is a fine central Texas town. But if you want to maximize profits, may I suggest breaking up the archive and selling the pieces in lots. But if respect, sensitivity, geo …”
As this polite haggling persisted, the Andrew within Andrew drifted behind another thought that began with a glance at the ceiling and its impressive plaster molding and then freewheeled to cake frosting and weddings, to Isabel and her glass-blown neck—she triumphed in turtlenecks—to her lean and sharp features, her generous tongue, her body unfolding again and again in his imagination, tilting back-back-back into a kind of aggregate sexual act that also included their honeymoon in a few short shifts, Isabel naked and willing, the willingness forever the sweetest part and overpowering every other sense, like he was a teenager again where every intimate thought was siphoned through skin, through the funnel of her sideways recline, those thoughts becoming more powerful as he got older, as his need for solitude tightened into a stubborn grip and they—or more specifically he—had difficulties with the mechanics of touching without feeling disgusted with himself, like he was watching from afar, thrusting and grunting, and in his late forties and fifties he lost all sexual fortitude yet still clung to fantasies of her naked and on top of him, like a masochist wishing himself insane. Then the thought of Andy opened up, as if their memories were conjoined. He wondered if the boy had tucked away his virginity yet. He hoped he was screwing a lot of girls, nice, bushy-tailed boarding school girls. On a handful of occasions Andrew tried asking about girlfriends in an attempt to recast himself as the kind of father who had frank conversations with his son, who imparted wisdom concerning the opposite sex, but maybe it was his tone or his advanced age, maybe it was his blatant lack of useful knowledge, or maybe it was just fathers and sons immemorial, but the question made Andy squirm—“Well, sometimes, um, you know”—which in turn caused Andrew’s happy retreat—“Okay, yes, that’s wonderful”—though he could clearly hear what he wanted to say, about how he had lost his virginity to that Miss Porter’s girl, Emily Stackhouse, who only required three dates before giving up her prize, as many a boy could attest, old three-date-Stackhouse from Garden City, a dinner, a movie, a dance, any combination of these three and she’d end up on her back, Emily thick and plain but lovely in her thickness and her plainness, like something born in a stable, a thought he thought only later because at the time she was simply plump and he wanted the ride over with as soon as possible, Emily not moving much but she did hum and she did wrap her arms around his shoulders and she did hold him tight and he realized that this was his reward for his dubious company, the fat girl gives you a fuck, and while he knew this going in, under the waxing of her skin he had to conclude things as gallantly as possible by faking his finish into that ridiculous rubber reservoir. My God, what son would ever want to hear that?
“Respect is a two-way street,” Dennis was saying, “and this—”
That’s when Andrew broke from the ceiling and spoke up.
“I want my youngest involved,” he said.
Arthur gave a foot-in-the-door smile. “What’s that?”
“If I give you my papers I want my youngest involved. All permissions would have to go through him, all research queries, all publication requests, everything, and I mean everything. That’s my condition.”
“Plus real money,” Dennis added.
“Yes, of course, plus gobs of money,” Andrew said. “Now, I realize Andy might not care for this particular responsibility, especially given his age, but he can do whatever he wants with it, rubber-stamp every request for all I care, or let someone in the library handle the bulk, but he has to be made aware of what’s happening. The entire archive can be opened let’s say eight years after my death.”
“Assuming the money issues are settled,” Dennis said.
“Yes, yes, money.” Andrew struggled to push back his chair. “You can pick everything up in a month.”
“Including Ampersand?” from Arthur Sinkler.
“Including Ampersand. But I only have the original draft.”
Arthur nodded like a hummingbird was held captive in his mouth. “Perfect.”
Andrew stood up, which required a bit of balancing. His life nowadays seemed lived on a plank. “I’ll let the three of you figure the details out, but right now I’m tired and if I stay any longer I might have to lie down, on the ground.” Arthur Sinkler did the honor of accompanying him downstairs, going on about how pleased he was, how absolutely thrilled, overjoyed really, Arthur later recalling how the great writer responded with silence, as if words were mere sound and smoke. “I put him in a taxi and he finally said something, in that voice of his, he said, ‘I think I need to buy a goddamn cane,’ just like that. Probably so he could whack me on the head.” That line in concert with Arthur’s poor impression always procured an abiding laugh.
While Andrew was riding back uptown from the Morgan, I was likely on duty watching my father breathe. That’s what I did, I watched him breathe, watched his chest rise, watched his chest fall, ready to call my siblings and stepmother when the end seemed truly near. I rubbed his shoulder and said sorry, which meant sorry for everything, I suppose, sorry for what you’re going through, sorry we never really talked, sorry if I was not the son you wanted, or needed, or deserved, just plain sorry. I was too scared to kiss him. But I did hold his hand. At times it seemed he was newly born and I was both father and son to the man. What with these eerie similarities with that scene from Tiro’s Corruption, I decided to call Andrew and give him an update.
“It’s not looking good,” I told him.
He seemed startled. “With what?”
“With Dad,” I said. “It’s not looking good.”
“Jesus, I thought you were calling to tell me he died.”
“No, not yet, but it’s not looking good.”
“And what do you want me to do about that, Philip?”
“Um—”
“What do you want me to do? I visited. I was there not so long ago. I said my goodbyes as best as I could. But I’m not family. I’m not supposed to be there for the absolute end. I’ve gone as far as I can go.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, mortified by my overreach.
“You know I’m not well myself,” he told me.
“Oh.”
“Ever since I saw your father I’ve been very weak.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“No, no, no. It’s viral, I’m sure. In my lungs. In my feet. I’m a disaster.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But your father, he’s in my thoughts.” And with that he hung up.
What were those thoughts exactly? Did Andrew see my father as a young man or an old man? Our oldest friends, their faces, never really change, as we both travel at the same speed of life. Parents and children are different. They help us measure our existence, like the clock on the wall or the watch on our wrist. But old friends carry with them a braided constant, part and whole, all the days in the calendar contained in a glance. When Andrew went to the bookshelf to retrieve the fresh copy of Ampersand, did he remember the seventeen-year-old Charlie who had sought the safest path through those boarding school halls, head down, focused only on homework and Ping-Pong and the choir and his best friend in the whole world? Charlie had a lovely singing voice, though most of his classmates only recalled his high-pitched screams. Did Andrew think of wedgies and towel snaps and uncle crackers when he retrieved his second-to-last ream of Eaton twenty-pound stock, the company having discontinued that particular brand years ago? He rolled a sheet into his typewriter and typed:
It was always going to be called Ampersand. The title came before the story. But using his initials, that started back in sixth grade, when he first toyed with his signature, pages and pages of different autographs, searching for the right architecture to house his sure-to-be-famous name. Andrew Dyer never scanned well. And Andrew Newbold Dyer just seemed pretentious. But after seeing E. F. Benson and L. P. Hartley in his parents’ bookshelf he gave A.N. a try. It rolled across his pen beautifully, like a baptism in ink.
“I like it,” Charlie told him after seeing the practice page in his notebook.
“Do you always have to sniff through my stuff?” Andrew said.
“I was ju-just, it was right here, open. But I think, it sounds, um, sounds sharp.”
“Just shut up with your Listerine breath.”
Andrew let the title page fall to the floor and rolled in a fresh sheet.
Like hot newsroom copy, he ripped the sheet from the Selectric and placed it facedown on his desk. He could always come back and edit the Andrew part (having forgotten the earlier short stories already published under the auspices of A.N.). Maybe it would turn into something scholars would debate in academic books and journal articles that nobody would ever read. The Denial of Self in the Works of A. N. Dyer. Charlie Topping had it right. It did sound sharp.
In went another sheet and Andrew opened the book and started to retype the first chapter, re-creating what had been burned fifty years ago. The first page. The second page. The introduction to the boys of Shearing Academy. Back then he was so sure of its failure but now he was surprised he ever wrote so well. The third page. The fourth. With gaining momentum, he returned the book to its primal state, running the publication process in reverse. His own line edits long forgotten—God knows the state of that first draft—Andrew crafted new mistakes and corrected them. The fifth page. He noticed bits he wished he could have changed in the original, small revisions mostly, excising that one phrase too many. On the sixth page, almost as a lark, he typed sly instead of slick in his description of Nick Rogin, and let the change stand without amendment. It was thrilling, in its way. And on the eighth page he experimented with something bigger: the woods around Shearing no longer seemed possessed by the wolves of fairy tales but rather whooped with the ghosts of the Wampanoag. Andrew stopped, caught his breath. If this were a tale of magical realism, these revisions might have some effect, Andrew slowly replotting his past and correcting his future in a few weeks’ worth of edits, but of course nothing changed. He thought of Andy at Exeter, reliving his life, and he thought of himself all those years ago burning every scrap that had to do with Ampersand, a ridiculous piece of melodrama since the novel was on the verge of publication. Those flames signified less than nothing; they were a fire without warmth. Andrew continued his transcribing. On the tenth page he came to the headmaster’s son, Timothy Veck:
… like a fondly remembered book from childhood left in the rain, what was once sweet and compelling was now bloated and spotted and, even less forgiving, corny. Poor Timothy. At present he was running from a bee. It seemed Timothy Veck was always running from a bee. Maybe he thought his high-pitched terror was somehow funny. Last year, I tried to feel sorry for him and even defended him on occasion, but this year I decided to let the world sting. Timothy saw me. His eyes—and I still see those eyes, breaking against my studied detachment—popped wide, and he smiled and waved. He began yelling my name. He practically did an Edgar Mead dance. My reply wasn’t negligence per se.
And so ended the opening chapter. By the time of my brief stay A. N. Dyer was well into his reconstruction project. My first night in the apartment I didn’t sleep well, unaccustomed to the sounds of buses roaring down on Fifth. And Central Park seemed to holler as if lit with rape. I also half-expected a visit from a sleepwalking Andy. But most of my restlessness no doubt stemmed from a certain night in this apartment when I was a teenager, but let us focus on the clear bright morning of the next day, when I was in the kitchen pouring a glass of orange juice and toasting some bread. That’s when Andrew limped in. After a brief recalibrating pause—What the hell is Charlie Topping’s son doing with the butter?—he tried to speak, to say good morning, I presume, but his throat was knotted with phlegm, which, after a series of hacks, finally cleared. “Sorry,” he said.
“That’s okay.”
“Every morning it’s like I swallowed a cork.” He poured a cup of coffee, and I grabbed a cup as well, even accepted the milk and sugar though I preferred mine black. His mysterious pronouncement from last night, that they’ll soon be here, was solved when he told me that Richard and Jamie were visiting tomorrow. “Richard’s coming all the way from California,” he said. “He has two children, a boy and a girl I’ve never met. Do you know if I have to come up with a nickname, a ‘Gramps’ or a ‘Pops’ or something? What did your children call your father?”
“Grandfather,” I said.
Andrew smiled. “Of course.”
“If you have a full house, I can …” I gestured the leave part.
“No. I’m putting Richard up at the Carlyle. A nice big suite. Killing him with kindness. And Jamie has his own place, in Brooklyn of all places. I thought the two of them should have some dim sympathies with Andy before I complete my journey down the drain.”
I nodded, uncertain what to say. I was so nervous to be in his company, doubly nervous at such an intimate hour, seeing A. N. Dyer in need of fresh clothes and a comb. A strange, inexplicable sorrow welled up within me, like a call for tears, as if the future were tapping me and telling me to pay attention right here, that this was sadder than I could presently understand. Andrew must have assumed my wobble was linked to my father and he told me that he missed him. And maybe he recognized some fellow foxhole feeling in my eyes, because he asked if my father had said anything before he died.
“Like what?”
“Like last words,” he said.
The question took me by surprise. I’m sure we could go back and trace a final conversation, but in terms of proximity, my father was silent. I know this because I was the only family member with him when he died. My brother and sister and stepmother had all done their bedside best, remaining with him as he weakened, his pillow like a sponge absorbing his demise, and we all sat there, and we waited, and we said our goodbyes, and we waited, and we sat there, and we told him that we loved him, something we rarely did when he was not dying, and we waited, and we sat there, pressing around him and telling him, you can go now, it’s all right, we’ll be fine, because frankly we had other things to do, but we continued to sit and say our goodbyes, for days, for weeks, stewing in our own healthy company, and after a while my brother had to get back to work, and my sister had to take care of her children, and my stepmother had to resume her lunches and Pilates and bridge games and gallery tours and Italian lessons. Me? By then I was full-time free. So I took on the job as a monk takes on a calling, vaguely addicted to the mortal codependency. To borrow a line from The Bend of Light:
Nobody knows who is stationary and who is orbiting.
When I was a boy I could die multiple times a day in a multitude of styles, but once older I stopped with the playacting though I continued to imagine myself getting run over by a car or crashing in an airplane or suffering through a terrible disease—half the fun, I think, was proving myself still alive. But as my father’s breathing grew more shallow and inconsistent, divided by low tones like the upwelling of the soul, and the hospice nurse said soon (but she was always saying soon), I could tell that this time was real and I took in the details of this ultimate performance. I noted his eyes staring at the ceiling like a nasty word problem had been scrawled up there. I studied the nest of his mouth, the straining chick-like tongue. I was shocked by the smell. The overall reek I anticipated, but the hint of stale water in a vase full of lilacs, my mother’s favorite, spooked me, and I stared at him and tried to make sense of this metaphysical association, and he stared back just as hard, unblinking, unbreathing now, his left hand gripping the sheets like he was slipping, like he was going to fall, and I remember reaching over and holding his arm, this lifelong presence I barely knew, and I held his arm and I said again and again, I love you, like Lamaze in reverse, I love you, hoping this sentiment would fall side-by-side with the man rather than Why can’t my stupid son save me? And that was it. There were no last words on his part, only mine. But rather than tell this to Andrew, instead I lied and told him that my father did say something, he said, “What a world, what a world.” I have no idea why that popped into my head. If I had more time I would have reached for poetry and really impressed the man, but What a world, what a world was what lay within my immediate grasp. It was something I used to squeal at my children when I was trying to both frighten and thrill them.
Andrew seemed shaken. “He said that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Exactly that?”
“Yes.”
I was curious if he realized the origin of the phrase, or if I should explain its provenance, but I was already in the hole for lying so I kept quiet. After nodding a few times he went back into his study and I imagine that he rolled in another sheet of that precious Eaton stock. I myself have a piece of that paper, sent to me a few weeks after this story ends. The original folds are now cut into a razor-thin sharpness, the edges framed by my constant handling. I’ll admit I even licked the corner once. I keep it in my wallet and often check it, like a traveler with a passport, just to make sure those six words are still there.
Behind that closed door, A. N. Dyer started on the thirteenth chapter of Ampersand. It was the midpoint of the book. The opening letter of each chapter corresponded with its position in the alphabet, though no one ever picked up on this particular detail. It seemed so obvious to Andrew, unlike the other secrets in his books. The pattern was meaningless beyond its own sense of play, a symbol of symbols, the letters forever married to that preliterate song with its lonely, almost pleading coda: Next time won’t you sing with me.
Andrew typed.
Andy slept upstairs.
I ate my toast.
I wonder how many of us were keeping our mouths shut?