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from this present mess, let me unlink him from my past so I might fade from his view, a retroactive suicide. The stupid things I’ve done, the outright bad things. My memory is like a series of kicks in the gut, including this beaut: my father on his deathbed and here I am a foundling on my own doorstep.
    “A fire would be nice,” Andrew said again.
    “Should I?”
    “No, no, just speaking in old code.” He went and refilled his glass. His drinking hand trembled in an almost rhythmic meter, like a seismograph registering the effects of nearby destruction. “I feel for you,” Andrew said. “It’s impossibly hard, a father’s decline. You both want to say so much but you’re both so afraid of saying the same thing, something like, I hope I wasn’t a terrible disappointment, or some variant on that theme. Of course in the end the only decent answer is a lie.” With that he took a satisfied, almost ceremonial sip.
    Maybe in the back of my mind I took offense. After all, the brutaltruth was dying down the hall and I, the weaker truth, was simply doing his best. But I was mostly intrigued by this intimate disclosure and decided to lawyer through the opening and ask about his own father, if he remembered him, since I knew the man had died when A. N. Dyer was quite young. Was this a conscious jab? Not at all. I was just curious and if anything wanted to ingratiate myself and express an understanding of his biography without revealing my absolute dedication. But Andrew’s eyes fell onto the floor as if he spotted a nickel that was hardly worth picking up. “You’re right,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
    “I didn’t mean—”
    “And it was a car accident. There was no big goodbye between us. I remember almost nothing about him, in fact. Maybe I could claim my stepfather but he seemed fully sprung from my mother’s single-mindedness and didn’t need any words from me when he died. Yes, Philip, you have exposed me.” Andrew opened his arms, a lick of whiskey sloshing over the side. “I am exposed.”
    “But—”
    “Even worse,” he said, “I think I was cribbing those words of wisdom from one of my books, can’t remember which.”
    “
Tiro’s Corruption
,” I told him, “when Hornsby dies in Formia.”
    “God, not even one of my better attempts.”
    “Oh, I like that one.”
    Andrew made a displeasing sound and put down his drink. A heavy gust hit Park Avenue and for a moment the windows belonged to a small hunting cabin in the middle of nowhere. Later that afternoon and all night it would snow and tomorrow school would get canceled and I would email my mistress (forgive the word but all the others are worse) and arrange an afternoon tryst while my wife took the kids sledding. Bad weather always makes me horny. Christ, the recklessness.
    “I should go see him,” Andrew said.
    “I know it means a lot to him, you being here.”
    “I suppose, I suppose,” he said in a defeated tone. What with his boyish mop of white hair and his bygone Yankee exoticism, his meter and repetition, Andrew put me in mind of Robert Frost and his poem“Provide, Provide.” I always did like that poem.
Some have relied on what they knew / Others on being simply true
. While Frost as a man exists in our head as eternally ancient, A. N. Dyer stands in front of us as forever young, peering from his author photo, the only photo he ever used on all of his books, starting with
Ampersand
. In that picture he’s pure knowing, his darkly amused eyes in league with a smile that edges toward a smirk, as if he’s seen what you’ve underlined, you fiend, you who might read a few pages and then pause and glance back at his face like you’ve spotted something magical yet familiar, a new best friend waiting for you on the other end. Fourteen novels written by a single, ageless A. N. Dyer. No doubt this added to the mystery, along with his total avoidance of fame. The photo is credited to his wife, Isabel.