WHEN THE DOORBELL RANG, Andrew was in his study and Andy was upstairs, while Gerd was outside doing her Gerdie things. And me? I was visiting my old apartment, since Ashley and the children were away. Okay, maybe I was snooping. Maybe I was imagining myself as a ghost, invisible in this world, trying to understand the family I would haunt for the rest of my life. Maybe I was being overly dramatic as I buried my face in my son’s pillow and put a hand on certain stuffed animals like I could read their plush minds. I touched everything, photographs, drawings, the table in the kitchen. I was father as guilty fingerprint. Then I made myself a sandwich. I’d like to say that I left soon after but I didn’t. I started to nose through my wife’s desk, her closet, searching for something, a secret maybe, a letter to a friend in which an old boyfriend was mentioned or a crazy night in Marblehead or a skinny-dip gone wrong, something where she might open up to me. But I found nothing. That didn’t stop me from going through her underwear drawer for the sake of more base privacies, which in their absence had become a mystery. That’s where I was when the doorbell rang, fingers deep in lace, while Andy was upstairs and Andrew was in his study.
Both of them assumed Gerd would answer the door.
Andy stared into his closet, hand scratching his tummy, in particular the trail of hairs recently budded from his navel, which struck him as undeniably excellent, like a waterfall splashing down into a pool of pubes, his penis the dude floating on his back. This seemed big-time, stage-four man stuff, though the few hairs poking from his nipples kind of disturbed him, like filling coming through upholstery. Anyway, what to wear tonight? All of his pants looked like slacks and his jackets were either too blazery or too tweedy and uniformly too small. Usually he went shopping with Gerd, who pushed him toward the Nordic idea of American Preppy, which fell somewhere in Chicago, mid-1980s. But Andy never cared much. Except for tonight. Tonight he wanted to look decent even if he had a problem defining decent. Not hip. Not stylish. Not fashionable. He wanted to look older without looking like someone trying to look older. Jeanie’s age. Hi, Jeanie. Hi, Andy, you look, you look, well, great. Yes, that’s what he wanted, standing in front of his closet. Like something in a stupid movie, he supposed, except in a movie he would be the young girl and Jeanie would be the older man and he would be tempted—he as in Jeanie—and maybe she would kiss him—she as in Andy—but at the last second he would stop her and she would be hurt yet she’d understand, having dabbled in the scary messed-up world of grown-ups. But screw that. Andy wanted Jeanie Spokes riding down his waterfall, butt first and screaming. He slapped his tummy a few times. How dressy is this affair?
I eased slipped the key into the lock, briefly imagining that noises were sparks and the room was full of gas. The latch clicked. Nothing ignited. A few tiptoe steps inside into that familiar darkness. Though windowless, an inky light seemed to seep through the seams pressed through the brick and mortar as if composed of colander as if hand-pressed. I put the bucket down. The normal musty smell dank of the basement mixed with the normal mustiness of all those books mingled with the fingerprints once held by the hands of old students, some of them dead in Normandy, dead in Bastogne, dead boy eyes flickering against these pages, the words recording every tired blink, every eventual snore, of pimpled Shearing ghosts, their rotten teenage breath breaking over “This is the saddest story I have ever heard” and “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and all the other worn-out beginnings. I have to admit, I always liked the smell. It was like an old dried sponge, pleasantly nasty. But today there was another smell underneath beneath that dogeared those pages. I picked up the bucket.
Doom set in, the ridiculous doom of having nothing to wear, which was a new kind of doom for Andy. He limped his wrist and lisped, “You big old fag,” hoping this might defuse things. It didn’t. It just made him feel like a pig. What was he looking for anyway? A suit? A velvet jacket and leather pants? A cowboy shirt? He had no clue, but he knew it was definitely not in here. He remembered how for a party last Christmas he had borrowed a tux from his dad, the size a pretty close fit, the early-seventies vibe a success with people who cared about those things. In one of the pockets he had found two ticket stubs to Don Carlo and he liked the image of his father in black tie sitting in the audience, with his wife, he supposed. Andy had even downloaded the music—it was by Verdi—and enjoyed “Dio, Che Nell’alma Infondere,” though he could never tell anyone since he was unsure of its proper pronunciation. But the song made him feel closer to the man. Andy went down the hall and opened his father’s closet, and as he browsed through those clothes again, he was struck by the smell of cedar mixed with shoe leather, the suits and jackets and pants dusted with his breath, it seemed. There must be something in here, Andy thought.
I turned on the overhead light and whatever precious overwrought overrefined dusky atmosphere disappeared – it was just books, walls of fucking old books on rickety prose cheap pine shelves. I was always bothered by the stains on the carpet, ridiculous me noticing this first and thought that when I was in charge I would ask for – no, I would demand, new carpeting. There must have been a leak or a broken pipe long ago, and sometimes I draped a towel over the most offensive section, which resembled a litter of puppies consumed by fire. I would have moved a bookcase too if not for the effect on the flow. A new carpet was the only solution, period. Why did I care so much about the carpet? Then I heard the noise. You really had to listen, to the point where you might have guessed it was something else, like regret, like your own pulse sloshing through your ear. I am someone prone to hearing phantom screams in the shower and often catch songs in the hum of modern convenience, “Double Crossing Blues” “Goodnight, Irene” murmuring from behind the icebox. But I’m avoiding the present noise, spent my life avoiding the noise. I went over to the far right side of the room, to the shelves with Dumas Dostoyevsky its Edgar Alan Poes, and reached between the books and slid free the bolts, one high, one low, after which I pushed aside three copies of Poems and Tales and turned the doorknob. Talk about a bad dream. It might have been a long forgotten janitor’s closet, but it was our secret lair. On the other side of the door large gothic letters dubbed the 6×8 space Malbolgwe The Wombat Cave with all the previous emperors listed below, dating back to its founder, Dewer Darny, in 1924. Rogin was the present scholarship Caesar. For him, this was an exclusive club with a maximum occupancy of four, five if knee-to-knee. Once inside the door could be locked with another set of bolts leaving behind a sealed tomb of infinite possibility. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. The walls were like the bathroom stalls of Lascaux. But no one could get lost in here. I flicked on the light. Timothy Veck looked up with wide desperate please-save-me eyes, obvious to see even if they were hidden behind a blindfold.
Suit after suit had that old Brooks Brothers label stitched inside, the Golden Fleece like a sheep being airlifted. There was the gray pinstripe. The every possible shade of navy blue. The herringbone. The charcoal. The summer weight or the winter wool. They seemed stuck in time, not timeless but timeful, like an old newspaper. None of the pants had cuffs or pleats, and the half-dozen khakis were all identical. There were two blazers. Multiple tweeds. A lone outlier of Italian design that still sported its price tag, its cost fifteen years ago. In general, no overt personality existed here, only a sober sense of purpose—to clothe—uncolored by opinion, unswayed by advertisement. All the news that’s fit to wear. Andy tried on the pinstripe. He would need to cinch the pants with a belt but the length was good and the jacket was near bespoke. The mirror revealed a decent young man, perhaps a tad in costume, like he was starring in a high school production of Adult! The Musical. And while the pockets were void of Dad-like clues, the fabric seemed adrift in memories without content, a floating physical presence that despite everything was nice. Andy buttoned up the jacket. He had the feeling of something inescapably sad and fatally present.
Matthews, the Eagle Scout Nazi, had a background with animal torture and knots and had managed a doozy of loops and hitches so that Veck seemed upholstered to that chair. He must have tried to free himself because he had tipped over and was lying on his side. I thought of an animal in a trap. Not true. I thought of an animal dead in a trap. I thought of me. But Veck was alive. Where the rope found skin, the skin found blood. I bent down and grabbed the chair and tilted him upright. His head flopped over. I hadn’t seen him in a few days, and they must have been slapping him around. His face seemed a few days fallen from the vine. Did they butcher cut his hair as well? Tears, snot, piss, drool scored a terrible path through the memory of dry and clean and comfortable. They had gagged him with a pair of dress socks that were held in place by the yellow and blue of the Shearing School tie. The blindfold I recognized from Stimpson’s ratty bathrobe. I still hadn’t said anything yet. I was mute. Edgar-free. Was that a cigarette burn on his hand? God, this is horrible. I held this goddamn bucket with a sandwich and a Coke inside, a chocolate chip cookie, and if he needed I figured he could use it to go to the bathroom in, but seeing him, my oldest friend, all squirmy and miserable and hoping for rescue but fearing the opposite, I wished I had a plan in my head instead of a meal for the prisoner.
Andy finally heard the doorbell and in hearing it recognized that it had been ringing forever. He went to the top of stairs. “Gerd! Door!” he shouted. “Gerd?” Still nothing. “Jesus Christ,” he said, taking the stairs. “Yeah, yeah, coming,” he said, pulling the jacket tight over his bare chest, full of haste and annoyance, like he was a businessman, an advertising executive, interrupted in the midst of coitus, like in a TV show or movie, and he had a woman sprawled on his bed upstairs, a blonde with a nice slope, and maybe the doorbell held the brunette from the airplane who had wiggled past him in the aisle, her ass erasing a dirty limerick. Imagine that, Andy imagined. The speed of fantasy seemed faster than light, and he projected some decent velocity by the time he hit the front door.
I removed the sash from Timmy’s eyes and he blinked me into existence, blink, blink, a friend. The gag was sopped. I hoped the socks had at least gone in clean. Timmy uncramped his jaw, like a snake swallowing a rat’s worth of air. A snake? Hardly a snake. There was nothing snakey about Timmy. It might be a worthwhile image but it is a poor description of the boy. If anything he was sadder, like a forsaken choirboy trying to comfort himself with a hymn. The smell of piss mingled with perfume, probably the Hypnotique that Harfield had swiped from Mrs. Willets’ bedroom. The jerk. What was next for Timmy? The stolen brassiere and girdle? Paint on some ruby-red lipstick? The combined odor was unbearable. Hypnoreek. They must have really doused him and I pictured green smoke rising from the first few splashes. “I want this to stop now,” Timmy finally said to me. I think it was his grab for bravery that broke my heart.
As Andy opened the door, the sexy brunette crashed into a woman of indeterminate age, though well beyond middle and short of ancient, a wedge of human existence Andy hardly noticed. “Hello,” he said. This woman, she didn’t move but rather stared at him like he was a distant pinprick of light, perhaps moving forward. Did she have the wrong apartment? Was she confused? Was she here for his father? Silence started to push into the awkward extreme and Andy wondered if she had Alzheimer’s or something, if she had wandered from her floor and had fallen into a mental hole, decades deep, if perhaps her super-cute granddaughter was presently searching for her. “Hello?” Andy said again, this time leaning in and trying to break whatever trance held her. Something slotted within his consciousness, as if she was passing through a similar adolescence. And he liked the short hair. Her sharp nose. He had an intense desire to see her smile. “Is there anybody in there?” he asked, his face like a flashlight.
Success. “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head.
“Welcome back.”
She nodded without much sureness. “You must be Andy.”
“I must be.”
“I’m Isabel.”
She reached her hand forward, seeming embarrassed by the formality, her eyes creasing, maybe seeing more clearly through a blur. She sort of flinched. Andy hoped he hadn’t given her a weird handshake.
“I have a sandwich for you.”
“I just wanna go home, Edgar,” Timmy said, his lower lip tapping a more frantic code.
“I don’t like this anymore.”
“It won’t be for much longer.”
“They beat me up, Edgar. I don’t know why. I know I tried to leave but why are they beating me up? And other stuff too. I just want it to stop and go home. I want to see my dog. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
I showed him the sandwich. “It’s bacon on bread.” I had swiped the bacon from the dining hall that morning, no easy task.
“Why are they doing these things?”
“It’s part of the prank,” I assured him.
“It’s not funny.”
I opened the Coke. “Shoot, I should’ve brought a straw.”
“I don’t want a stupid sandwich, Edgar, I want to go home. They burned me. And my jaw. Everything hurts. I just want to go home. Please.” Timmy could no longer control himself, the muscles in his face tightening around a pitiful center, eyes and nose and mouth draining what little courage remained. “I don’t understand. Please help me. I won’t tell, I swear.”
“Have some sandwich. And a Coke.”
“Please.”
“It might make you feel better.”
“I need to go to the bathroom,” he whispered, like Huck Finn and Billy Budd and David Copperfield were listening. “I really need to go, and I don’t want to do it in my pants. Please. I can’t hold it much longer. I thought this was going to be fun, like camping, like an adventure. They burned me, Edgar. And I think they’re going to do worse. And I need to pee.”
I think I kneeled down close and said something like, “Calm down,” and Timmy did calm down, briefly, an uncanny kind of calm, like adrenaline was involved, his breathing settling on a horizon, miles beyond me, to the edge of God knows where, and I thought of those smaller animals taken down by their larger counterparts, how after all the running and all the struggling, when those teeth finally clamp down, they seem to slide into surrendering and wrap themselves around what’s happening, experiencing it fully, like death is a different kind of birth, equally warm. What did he see?
“Isabel Dyer,” she explained, “or once Dyer.”
“Oh hey,” Andy said, and he started to nod with growing enthusiasm, like a long shot possibly coming through—“Isabel Dyer”—and though he hoped his reaction remained within the bounds of good manners—“Wow, it’s really, really nice to meet you. I mean, I’ve always been curious”—he feared he was blowing his cool and so retreated to more familiar insecurities, touching his suit and saying, “I swear this isn’t my normal look.”
“You look nice.”
“I’m going to a party tonight. Imagine a shirt and a tie, my hair combed.”
“Devastating then,” she said.
This woman had certainly aged better than his father, her face a series of clean, strong lines, something Matisse might have sketched to infuriate Picasso. As she stepped into the apartment Andy noticed the smell that trailed behind her, pleasant if medicinal, similar to witch hazel splashing against his pores and turning them taut. She must have been beautiful when she was younger. They stopped near the stairs and she took in the changes, or lack of changes, in the apartment. Andy wished he could have somehow seen his own history in her eyes. Isabel Dyer. The mother he almost had. In less than a minute he might as well have belonged to her, and when her eyes returned from their brief tour and fell back on him, he noticed tears, her hands quick to wipe them aside, but they continued and soon she gave in to crying. Andy wanted to comfort her. More than anything he wanted to wrap an arm around her and squeeze, but he realized he was the likely source of this emotion. Instead of long lost, he was bitterly found.
“No, I am.”
“I wasn’t expecting this,” she said.
“I can only imagine.”
“It’s not you, I promise.” She touched his arm.
Something in Andy fell, something like the feeling of feeling old.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been back here,” she told him.
“Right.”
“And I’m a little thrown.”
“I’m sure.”
“And I wasn’t expecting this.”
Before he could fall any further he was pulled back by a familiar voice.
“Isabel?”
They both turned and saw him standing there.
That’s when I bent down and started to work on Matthews’ vicious knots, which were torturous and tight, every intersection a car wreck of rope. A tug near the foot tightened around Timmy’s throat. It was like a string instrument designed by Torquemada. A knife would have really helped, but Timmy cheered me on, he was so thankful, and while I could have been annoyed – I mean, he was raining thank yous all over me and I was reminded of what a terrible pain he could be and how now I was his hero, even if the hostage prank was my idea, but now I was the Timmy savior, the emancipator of Veck, and I wondered how like in some countries, those island nations in the Pacific, where Gauguin lived the life and had his way with thick brown girls, if since I freed Timmy our souls would forever be conjoined, the saver and the savee, and I almost stopped right there, said Okay, enough, because the knots were tough as hell and the smell was beyond the realms of the real, and in the movies I bet right now is where change-of-heart Edgar Mead gets interrupted by either Stimpson or Matthews or Harfield or Rogin or even better all four standing by the door – Well lookeehere fellas! – and jump to the next scene, where that sap Edgar is tied up as well. But nobody was standing behind me. I was free and clear and Timmy was slowly coming undone, and I thought of what my mother used to do on my birthday when she spun these giant string webs all over our house, rooms crosshatched and double stitched, like a new visible dimension had opened up, and we the players would grab our predetermined end and start winding our way in, up, around, under, over, over, under around up until a few rooms later we found a bow around a cheap prize: Timmy Veck, piss-stenched but shit-free, standing on his own two feet.
For the first time in a long time Andy was happy to see his father, the unexpected relief rendered as affection. He went over and guided his father forward, like a member of the audience pulled into action.
“Is that my suit?” his father asked.
“Yes it is.”
“It looks good on you.”
“Thanks.”
“You need a shirt, though.”
“Yeah, thanks for the advice.”
“Seeing the two of you I thought for a moment I was unfettered from time.”
“Stay with me here, Dad.”
“What?”
“Just try to be normal.”
“Do you think I’m crazy too?” his father asked this poor woman.
Andy shook his head. “Most people would start with ‘How are you?’ and then maybe move on to ‘What brings you here?’ and ‘What are you up to?’ That said, Mrs. Dyer, he really is crazy.”
“Platt actually.”
“Mrs. Platt then. It was nice to meet you. I hope I wasn’t …”
“No,” she said, picking up where he hesitated. “It was nice to meet you too.”
There was no departing handshake, only a quick wave and Andy started back up the stairs, taking them by twos, speeding up the curve like he needed to remind himself of his youth, like regardless of where he was, he could be somewhere else in a flash, though halfway up he did glance back down and see that they were watching him with the same look on their faces, as if about suffering they were never wrong.
Timmy stared at me and I swear it was like he was trying to bore sympathy into my skull, trying to steer me, to guide my hands into untying the rope like I was controlled by strings, like I had the choice and the choice was now – challenging me, really, this royal pain, this lurker, clueless of his effect on people, particularly yours truly, greeting me from distances as great as a quarter mile, Edgar! Edgar! Edgar! like he was going to jump up and lick me, or worse kiss me, like I was Sarge back home from the war and he was my three-cent Penny, and people would laugh without him noticing and mutter – “Here comes your gal” – and I’d wonder what I did to deserve this, all because my father insisted I should rise above the tide and show him companionship, like I was his shadow of the war, the foxhole chits scrawled in mud and blood, even if back home Father Mead and Father Veck had almost nothing in common, the insurance salesman and the snob, but regardless I was nice to Timmy and treated him buddy buddy, a through-and-through pal, or I tried to, I swear I tried to, but here he was lips trembling and staring like freeing him was already part of our history, and the more I absorbed that future the angrier I got, like he held this secret over me, this weakness on my part. I dropped the sandwich and the Coke into the bucket with the resignation of a Civil War surgeon. I kicked him in the shins. It was a half-hearted kick. That was going to be the extent, a kick and then I’d leave, but I kicked him again, harder this time, and I told him he knew nothing, he was a fool, a laughingstock, a terrible queer, I’m sorry as I jammed the socks back into his mouth and retied the necktie tight, you probably like this, I said, you inverted jackass, and maybe I slapped him, maybe whenever a comma appears you should imagine my open palm, and he probably still loved me even after I closed the door and slammed those bolts home, probably still forgave me. I restraightened the books on the shelves. The other Edgar. I had baseball practice in ten minutes and I started to run for the gym. The day was perfect, the green fields freshly mowed, the few clouds in the sky the sort landscape painters put in to deepen the flat blue nothing. A yellow birthday balloon was snagged in a high branch of a tree. I made it in time for fungoes.
The scene downstairs stayed with Andy for less than a minute before he turned back to his father’s closet and wondered if black wingtips would go well with the suit and which one of the neckties he should wear. But as Andy tonight took shape in the mirror, another part of him came back with a different assessment, as he looped a Windsor knot around his bare neck, that he was teaching himself something important even if it might be something about failure.