A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

  “Hello?”

  “Good morning,” Charlie said. “I’m looking for Jerry Barnes.”

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  Charlie had been expecting a formal and lilting European to answer the phone when he called the number Jerry gave him, but he got this guy instead—another American hire, he presumed.

  “This is Charles Barnes calling. I’m Jerry’s father.”

  “Oh, right,” the guy said. “Right. No, Jerry is, uh … Jerry just stepped away. From his desk. For like a minute. For lunch. Can I take a message?”

  “A little late for lunch, isn’t it? What time is it there?”

  As Charlie raised a starched wing under basement rafters to consult his wristwatch, a vintage Rolex, the only authentic piece in his stable of fakes, the man on the other end made no reply.

  “Never mind. Have Jerry call me, will you? Tell him I have news. Tell Jerry that his father has pancreatic cancer.”

  “Pancreatic?”

  “Oh,” he said to the man. “Sounds like you know a thing or two.”

  The man went quiet.

  “Personally, I knew very little until just recently. Turns out it’s the most aggressive of all the cancers. Hard to detect. Spreads quickly. Five percent survival rate. I should have all the details later today.”

  The man again said nothing in reply.

  “It’s arguably the worst way anyone can die, with the exception of being hacked to death, I suppose. Tell Jerry he might want to fly home. Up to him.”

  “I’ll give him the message,” the man said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I have to go now. I don’t have much time.”

  He hung up.

  If Jerry had doubted that Charlie would ever “get real,” if the Zen master suspected that Steady Boy would never touch some fundament of the True, which he himself was always passing back and forth between his Buddha’s hands, here was the Angel of Death in his pancreatic disguise to prove him wrong. Charlie would not elude the long nightmare that was motherfucking reality this time around.

  6

  But he couldn’t die just yet. He had to get out of that house first.

  How he hated 105 Rust Road! He had arrived there in ’93, an eventful year in Steady Boy’s life. He was through with Bear, had fallen in love with Barbara, finally managed to serve Evangeline divorce papers, and launched TTAA. That house was intended to be a temporary station in which to summon up the blood once more, make a killing, have his second act. Then, with Jimmy Cayne–like money, he would leave behind the low ceilings of 105 Rust Road, its bad carpeting and cramped bedrooms, to name just three of its odious features, and buy for his dearly beloved the house of her dreams.

  But TTAA hadn’t panned out, and now his temporary station was turning fifteen years old. He knew he was lucky to have it just as the banks were foreclosing on so many others. But would he die there? Would he really go to his grave right there in the house on Rust Road?

  Not if this new idea of his was as good as he believed it to be. He needed only: a name, a tagline, a logo, a trademark, a color palette, a marketing plan, an angel investor or two … so much to do! Then he recalled that he could strike one of those line items from the list, as the perfect name had come to him (during the previous night’s tossing and turning) all in a flash: Chippin’ In.

  “I’d like to send a Word doc your way,” he said in the next phone call he made that morning, intended to get all good things rolling. “An idea still in its planning stages, so go easy on me, but give me your gut, too, if you don’t mind. Do you mind?”

  “I don’t mind,” Rudy said.

  His kid brother, two years his junior. Rudy lived in Tucson, Arizona, but Steady Boy could still see him clearly: skeptical brow furrowed like a hound dog’s, flaring nostrils one cup size too large for the slender stem of his nose. Charlie didn’t want to burden him with the bad news. If Rudy, their mother’s favorite, knew Charlie was sick or dying, it would quickly derail the conversation, for his brother was a quack who ran an online venue for vitamin supplements and miracle cures. Charlie didn’t need some dubious regimen. He needed honest feedback.

  “Sending now,” he said. “Call you later.”

  He hung up.

  7

  He stepped away for a quick bite, walked up the stairs to the kitchen. That’s right: fifteen years after leaving Bear, he was still headquartered between a clothing rack full of winter coats and a Whirlpool dryer—the only honest boiler room in the brokerage business. Honesty tossed you down the basement stairs, and no amount of whimpering would persuade the gatekeeper to let you up again, to feel the sun, breathe fresh air and take a much-needed piss on the green green grass. An honest man was a damn dog in this world, made to heel and told to stay put, while the dishonest man got filthy stinking rich and stuck the country with the tab.

  He went outside to retrieve the morning paper. As he emerged from under the portico, the bright day bushwhacked him. The warmth percolated, pricking him. Steady Boy paused, lifted his face to the sun. He felt a little drunk. He was present, in heat like that, at the launch of Apollo 11. He felt the same heat ten years later, on a rare vacation, under a Florida palm. He ran naked in summer as a little boy. He shucked corn during an Illinois drought. He watched his pebbly footprints evaporate behind him on the poolside concrete. He rode in a canoe under a canopy of trees as a trickle of sunlight danced over the water, as elsewhere in memory it did over old barnyards and forest floors. A thundering, brain-clearing sneeze, exquisite in every way, followed in the next instant, and he opened his eyes and carried on in the shuddering aftermath to the curb and the Chicago Tribune.

  On his way back up the drive, he was filled with rage again, briefly, as he read the headline through the blue plastic sleeve. It was a terrible time to be dying, what with the world in the crapper. He took it personally. For what did any of it matter, what was the point of life, if you couldn’t sense, however dimly, that we were making progress? Almost instantly, he recalled his son. No, not Jerry—Jerry’s younger brother, the boy called Jake. Of all his children, Jake represented Charlie’s own private hope and change, with his intelligence, his eloquence, his handsome—

  Wasn’t picking up.

  Having regained the portico, a concrete slab one step up from the lawn, Charlie turned to survey the neighborhood while Jake’s voice-mail greeting played in his ear. Ordinarily a suburban blight—there were tarred cracks all down the asphalt and cheap chain-link fencing around not always the best yards and crabgrass burned to a crisp and rusted grates to catch the rainbow runoff—Rust Road looked almost beautiful that morning, tranquil, even, as birdsong and blue sky made him grateful to be out of the basement. He left a message for his son, then speed-dialed his daughter—let’s call her Marcy—who lived, let’s say, in Deer Park, Texas. She was a good person, this Marcy, though she was also quick to anger and reluctant to medicate. You just never knew which Marcy you were going to get: the sweet, docile Marcy who exhibited the decency of all the best daughters, or the standard-issue Karen who did not give a fuck and delighted in tormenting a one-armed kid by holding him down and dangling saliva over his face in a faraway Florida of the distant past.

  “Kinder Morgan, Bethany speaking.”

  “Good morning, Bethany, Charlie Barnes calling. I’m looking for Marcy Mahony.”

  “Could it be Marcy Barnes you want?”

  Marcy, who worked as an operations manager for an energy company, had divorced so often herself that Steady Boy could hardly be expected to keep straight what surname she was going by on any given day.

  “That’s the one,” he said. “Didn’t know she had returned to her maiden name. Is she available?”

  “I’m afraid Marcy’s on-site today. May I take a message?”

  “I guess you can, sure. This is her father calling. Can you tell Marcy that her father has pancreatic cancer, please? You might know something about pancreatic cancer, Bethany. I never like to presume.”

 
; There was a long pause.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” she said.

  “Well, I can tell you this: it’s not good. People with pancreatic cancer go to their graves as if shot out of a cannon, okay? Hospital personnel can hardly collect a gurney quickly enough to send that particular patient off to hospice care before he keels over right there in the lobby of the hospital. You want to know what it’s like?”

  There was a long pause.

  “I’m sorry, are you asking—”

  “It’s like priority mail,” he said. “It gets you where you’re going faster than the other methods, but you have to pay extra—in fear, I mean, and the surprise factor, and physical devastation. There’s no time to make amends or settle your accounts. You just die.”

  “I will be sure to give Marcy this message right away,” Bethany said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Odds are she won’t know much about pancreatic cancer. Ask her to do a simple Google search. Two minutes should be more than enough.”

  “I will absolutely give her this message the minute she comes back into the office.”

  “But what I really need her to do is to fly into O’Hare. I’d happily pick her up, take her to lunch. Her stepmother will be of enormous help to me during this time, but there are one or two things I can’t ask her stepmother to do. Her stepmother has to work. She’s an ER nurse. She can’t take off as easily as Marcy can. Ideally, Marcy would set aside this silly little beef she has with her stepmother, and then everyone could come together like family. The doctor will be calling me later today to give me the rundown. It’s not going to be pretty. In the meantime, I’m hoping Marcy will look into making the necessary arrangements. I know there are no guarantees, but tell her that I’m really looking forward to seeing her in Chicago.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to tell her all this yourself?” Bethany asked.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. Upon further reflection, he added, “No, definitely not.”

  He hung up.

  8

  Sure, he’d married young. Nineteen years old—just ridiculous. The only way they could … you know. Although technically, little Jerry was already on his way. Just a real different time, back then. Totally different world. Yeah, they’d divorced. Of course they had. They were a bad match, still kids themselves when Jerry came along—a recipe for unhappiness all around. You know the score. No one could blame Jerry for holding a grudge.

  Then, in 1970, he met the woman of his dreams, his life partner, his soul mate.

  Just kidding: his second marriage, forged over whiskeys at 810 Tap, was a classic rebound and lasted all of six months. Her name was identical to his current wife’s. She was the first of his two Barbaras, Barbara Lefurst.

  It was the third time’s the charm for Charlie Barnes.

  A revision, forsooth! Each divorce a discarded draft, every remarriage a fresh page upon which to write a new story, this time with a happy ending. We will meet each of his ex-wives in due course. Right now, it is enough to convey the fact, the indisputable fact, that he was indeed married a total of five times, despite a tendency among certain people to revise that number downward, to reconfigure an epic cast so that a perfect shit show might be retold as a pretty little fairy tale. Never mind. The facts speak for themselves.

  His third wife was, fatefully, named Charley—note, however, the minor yet tantalizing variant spelling, which effeminized his ho-hum handle to such wild sensual effect that it drove him crazy just thinking about it. They were Charlie & Charley of Danville, Illinois. Charley was a local beauty. She looked just like Ali MacGraw in Love Story, although her confidence and sass were more in keeping with the sitcom star of the day, that Mary Tyler Moore. He was madly in love. But then Charley Proffit of Peoria, Illinois, decided to start fucking someone new, so the third time wasn’t the charm for Charlie Barnes after all. You had to marvel that he would marry a fourth time, let alone a fifth … but hope springeth eternal, and where hope is, change can’t be far behind. His fifth marriage was alive and well, and not simply because timewise, pancreatic cancer will always move faster than divorce proceedings. With his earlier wives, he was a work in progress: a scoundrel to some, a salvage job to others, a real slow learner all around … but here he was with the nurse at First Baptist, in a successful union at last. The kids didn’t care for her much, especially Marcy in a bad mood, but he couldn’t worry about that. He had this one thing going for him, and he wouldn’t fuck it up for the world.

  “Hello, young man,” she said.

  Speak of the devil: it was Barbara calling from the hospital. He spoke to her via the wall-mounted landline in the kitchen. Forty-nine that May, she was three days older than his eldest son and three days younger than his fourth ex-wife, an awkward bit of coincidence better never to bring up in conversation. Barbara preferred no talk of Evangeline whatsoever—in fact, wished to blot out of existence all of Charlie’s romantic history. It diluted the dream.

  “Hello, young lady.”

  “And what are you up to this morning?”

  “Oh, not much.”

  “Thinking about Jimmy Cayne again?”

  Boy, did she have him pegged! He swiveled around with the cord in hand.

  “Honey,” he said. “I’m under the gun here. Do you really think I have time to be thinking about that rat fink bastard?”

  She didn’t immediately reply.

  “But did you know,” he said, “that to kick off his long weekends—get this. Oh, boy, this burns my ass. To kick off his long weekends, the almighty Jimmy Cayne would leave his office in midtown Manhattan on Thursday at noon—by helicopter, Barbara, at seventeen hundred bucks a pop—just so that he could play a round of golf in New Jersey before it got dark? Same man who then demanded a taxpayer bailout!”

  He drifted off after that, into a bitter reverie about Jimmy Cayne.

  “And there’s plenty more where that came from,” he added.

  “I don’t doubt it,” she said.

  Barbara was a workaholic with a single outside interest: her husband’s well-being. She was eager to hear the latest from the doctor—and to get her hands on the raw data from Charlie’s recent round of tests to do her own interpreting. She was quite clever, this Barbara Ledeux, despite however Marcy might feel about her. At the same time, it was a busy morning inside the emergency room. A tall man with a parrot on his shoulder had just appeared before the triage window, bleeding from the hand. “What have you heard from the doctor, Chuck?”

  “Nothing yet,” he said, fighting a dizzy spell brought on by his reverie. “Listen, young lady: some of us are out here trying to play fair, we’re trying to play by the rules, and we’re meeting with resistance because the damn game is fixed. I never knew it before, but the dice are loaded in favor of the rat bastards who lie, cheat, and steal. If you don’t keep that in mind, you could attribute a lot of these disparities … in compensation, I mean, and media attention, that sort of thing … simply to personal failing.”

  “I think you’re doing just fine,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  “I do.”

  His first handful of wives would not have agreed. They would have wanted him to interrogate those personal failings a bit more. Matter of fact, they’d have gone so far as to insist that the game was not rigged and that Charlie’s gripe was a convenience meant to obscure his preoccupation with other things, like his hard-ons, the sports page, trips to the mall, workday matinees, and afternoon naps. They saw his failings crystal clear while missing the bigger picture. Barbara saw the bigger picture.

  “Love you,” he said.

  “Love you, too,” she said. “Call me when you know more.”

  9

  His lower back pain was a function of bad posture. His rare headache was always the result of too much beer. Otherwise, he was healthy. But he had smoked for years, which haunted him.

  How he loved to smoke! Pulling the lever
on the cigarette dispenser (he is back at 810 Tap, the man in midwinter all muttonchops and wool), retrieving the new pack amid neon and noise and packing it still tighter against his palm before tearing into it—first the ring of gold plastic, followed by the square of silver foil. He would then gently pry out the first of those intoxicating cylinders and pass it under his nose for a woodsy whiff of tobacco. It was all such a sensuous delight—and this long before he’d taken the first puff.

  He kicked the habit with everyone else sometime during Carter’s only term, when the evidence became irrefutable and overwhelming and after which no one ever smoked another cigarette again. Cancer was canceled! He put it completely out of mind. Years later, walking down the street, if he saw a pretty young lady puffing away, he would not hesitate to go straight up to her and caution her, hector her, chide her. For she had her whole damn life ahead of her, and all that youth, and all that beauty. God, how he loved beauty. He was in thrall to it. He lived and died by it. And there beauty was, blackening her lungs. It broke his heart.

  Trouble was, he’d recently weighed himself. Since losing his teeth at the age of twenty-four, a mortal misfortune in its own right—his dentist, a Dr. Paul O’Rourke of Bethlehem Dental, had pulled twenty-two in one go, an absolute hell, before fitting him for a pair of dentures, whereupon he gained thirty pounds overnight because he could chew solid food again without pain—since then, Charlie never moved on the weight scale more than three pounds in either direction. It was not for a lack of effort. He zipped through double cheeseburgers. He inhaled racks of ribs. He ate like hell morning and night—and yet what followed the bloody civil war in his poor rotted mouth was four decades of good solid health. Then the last two weeks of July rolled around and he lost nine pounds. It was a decline unaccompanied by other symptoms, or even an apparent cause. Some portion of him simply vanished—was vanishing still.