And Sons by David Gilbert Page B

synaptic charge, maybe they bump into surrounding particles and change their direction and spin and help shape some of that spooky action at a distance. We are all socially entangled, especially on the Upper East Side. How often does a random thought generate a coincidence, like the one presently vibrating in Richard’s pocket?
    “You all right?” asked Rainer.
    “Just my phone.” Richard checked the screen. It was Jamie.
    “Go ahead and answer,” Rainer told him.
    “It’s just my brother. Believe me, I can ignore him.”
    “Never ignore family,” Rainer said with Teutonic sternness. “I insist.”
    Richard was in no position to disagree.
    “You gotten a call from Dad yet?” Jamie asked, his voice sounding stoned.
    “No. Can I call you later, I’m kind of—”
    “Well, you will.”
    “I seriously doubt it.”
    “Oh, you will. He’s all mortal coil since Charlie Topping died.”
    Richard lowered his head into a more discreet angle. “Charlie Topping died?”
    “Like a week ago.”
    Richard was shocked. Though he refused all contact with his father and for half his life had lived successfully removed from the man and his city, forsaking everything, even financial help, the loss of wealth insome ways enduring longer than the loss of love, saying no to those Dyer trusts, no to those yearly tax-exempt gifts, taking nothing on principle (unlike his brother), even when money was scarce, even when his son, age seven, was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia and for two years the hospital bills piled into an economic record of despair, even then Richard held firm (and accepted help from his mother instead), still, the death of Charlie Topping hit him hard, not the death so much as the lack of news concerning the death. No one bothered to call or email him? Like many people who have escaped their past, Richard assumed his absence was suffered on an almost daily basis. But really no one missed him much.
    “Did you go to the funeral?” Richard asked.
    “No,” Jamie said. “It was yesterday and I’m not in the city.”
    Richard didn’t bother to ask where he was since it was likely somewhere annoying. “Can I call you later?”
    “Sure. Just heads up, Dad’s going to beg you to come home.”
    “Right, okay, whatever.” And with that Richard hung up. After a deep breath he gave the room a where-were-we grin, and for a moment it seemed like the office had reverted back into a film set, a perfect reproduction of false reality, where brothers chatted with brothers and fathers called sons and Richard might actually be successful.
    “Everything okay?” asked Rainer.
    “Yeah, fine.”
    “If you need to go …”
    “A friend of my father’s died. My godfather actually.”
    “I’m so sorry.”
    “It’s okay, he died last week.”
    “Well he’s still dead.” Rainer rose from his chair, like Oscar Wilde playing Wins ton Churchill getting bad news from the front. “And dead is dead.” He pointed to the painting behind the couch. “See that, that’s a Clyfford Still. He’s dead too. My father was good friends with him and he told me when I was a boy that this was a portrait Still had painted of him. A Still life, he called it. My father loved pulling our legs. Despite that, I believed him and I can’t help but see his face in the brushstrokes, his tight-lipped smile, his droopy left eye. It might aswell be a photograph of the man. He’s also dead. When we were divvying up the estate, it was the only thing I wanted. My siblings thought I was insane. They gravitated toward the more valuable work, the Schieles, the Klimts, the Kirchners, while I went for a then-unfashionable Still.”
    All eyes rested on that Still, embraced its outer stillness. The red slash seemed to record the saddest kind of sound wave, where silence is the only possible response. Richard, ever the literalist, tried to spot recognizable features in the paint and thought he caught a disapproving frown coming from a streak in