Barbara Greer

by Stephen Birmingham

  He smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose I am.’

  Peggy shrugged. ‘It’s not surprising,’ she said. ‘Most men are.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course. Men turn to jelly over Barbara. It’s easy to see why. It’s because she’s beautiful, is why it is. She’s the pretty one and I’m not, why deny it? Personally, I’d rather be as I am. I think self-awareness is a very important quality in a person, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Yes. Barbara’s beautiful all right. But the trouble with Barbara is she’s a sponge about that, too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sponge. Just sits there and soaks it up. Now my theory about wealth and advantages might be extended to physical beauty, too. Because beauty is a kind of wealth, too, isn’t it? Beauty—and intellect—things like that, things some people have and others don’t? Well, my theory is that beautiful people ought to deliver, too.’

  He laughed softly.

  ‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘I mean I think people who are beautiful ought to work harder because of it! But not Barbara. No, she just sits back and accepts, and accepts.’

  ‘You mean you think she’s selfish?’

  ‘No, not selfish actually. But lazy. Ye gods, she’s the laziest girl in town, the laziest girl in the world. Ye gods, you’ve never seen a girl so lazy as my sister! And it’s having looks and luxury that’s made her that way, if you ask me. Now, I didn’t always feel this Way.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No. Up until about a year ago I used to absolutely worship Barbara. Oh, of course, I still do. I think she’s absolutely wonderful and kind and generous—generous most of the time—and I have the highest respect for her. But I used to worship her, literally, like she was some goddess or something! I mean I literally wanted to model my life on hers! But then I started reading some mythology, about goddesses and all, about the kind of person I thought Barbara was. And I suddenly realised that all those goddesses had to work to stay goddesses! They didn’t just laze around on Olympus all the time. They went out and rescued some starving mariner, or something! Now of course Barbara thinks I’m looney and acts hurt when I say, ye gods, do something for your fellow man! She’s definitely not the rescue-a-starving-mariner type. She wouldn’t decide to give somebody the gift of fire. But, oh well,’ she shrugged. ‘Perhaps you’ll be good for her. If you agree with my theories, perhaps you’re just the sort of person Barbara needs. Have you got a coffin nail?’

  He had come down to the pool wearing only his trunks. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t bring any with me,’ he said.

  ‘Skip it,’ she said. ‘I only smoke Murads anyways, and nobody else ever does.’ She stood up abruptly, raised her arms above her head, sprang, and performed a neat little jacknife into the water. She came to the surface and swam to the side of the pool, next to where he was sitting, and rested her arms on the smooth concrete ledge. She looked up at him, her short-cropped hair plastered smooth against her skull. ‘You were Woody’s roommate, weren’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said.

  ‘He didn’t come to the picnic,’ she said. ‘Woody’s having trouble coping.’

  ‘Is that so?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was sick. Did you hear about that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I did.’

  ‘Sick,’ she said, ‘or that’s what they say. Actually, he tried to commit sewer-pipe with his bathrobe cord. Did you know that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘But don’t you ever dare mention those words around this family,’ she said. ‘It’s supposed to be the deepest, darkest secret. Instead, we say, “He was sick.”

  ‘I understand,’ he said.

  ‘How did you and Woody get along?’ she asked him.

  ‘Oh, I always liked Woody,’ he said.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, I like him all right I guess. Ye gods, he’s my cousin so I suppose I’ve got to like him. But he bothers me. I mean I’m worried about him. Not Barbara, though. He and Barbara are the same age and they’ve always been thick as thieves. When they were little they used to play together constantly. But I mean constantly. And you should have seen what they played! Dolls, and dress-up, and house. Woody used to dress up in girls’ clothes, what do you think of that? And then they’d have secrets—secrets all the time. Ye gods. Well, in my opinion what Woody has turned into is a morphodite.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A morphodite. Don’t you know what a morphodite is, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Well, I think I know what you mean. But where did you pick up that word?’

  ‘In Freud, for God’s sake. Haven’t you ever read Freud?’

  ‘Have you?’ he asked her.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘perhaps I haven’t read all of Freud. But Daddy’s got all the books right in our own library, and besides everybody at the school I go to knows about Freud. I’m really surprised you’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve heard of him,’ he said, amused. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of him all right.’

  ‘Well, the morphodite business is on every other page, practically. I mean it’s all right there, in black and white. But of course!’

  ‘I’ll have to look it up,’ he said.

  She sighed sadly. ‘Well, of course Woody’s being analaysed. They’re having him analysed and analysed. They’ve got a doctor that charges thirty dollars for every hour, just for talking to Woody. But I could analyse him,’ she said, ‘for a lot cheaper than that.’ She ducked her head under the water briefly and came up dripping, ‘Mother complex,’ she said. ‘That’s Woody’s trouble. Woody’s got a mother who’s an absolute creep, and I mean it. I mean she used to think it was cute when he dressed up in girls’ clothes! Can you feature that? And after he did—you know—did what he tried to do, at Christmas time—after that Woody cried a lot. I mean he kept crying. So you know what Aunt Mary-Adams told my mother she did? Got into bed with him and rocked him, to comfort him! I mean, now really. How creepy can a grown woman get?’

  He had said nothing because, once again, he had begun to feel very sad. And he remembered again the curious cobweb of feelings, tightly spun and taut as piano wires, and invisible, that had seemed to stretch everywhere within the walls of that room at college, and the tender treading between these wires, and the feeling of choking. He sighed and tried not to look at Peggy’s small brown face that gazed intently at him from the water.

  Suddenly Peggy reached out and grabbed his bare foot with her wet hand. ‘Come on in the water!’ she said.

  ‘No thanks. Not just yet—’

  ‘Come on!’ Bracing her feet against the wall of the pool she had begun to pull him and, for a skinny girl, she was remarkably strong.

  ‘Hey!’ he yelled.

  But she laughed and cried, ‘Come on, you coward!’ and pulled him into the pool.

  ‘We’ll have a race!’ she said.

  He had raced her for four laps of the pool then, and had won, but not by much. And when the race was over and he stood at the shallow end, panting, shaking his dripping hair out of his eyes, he had felt quite relieved to see Barbara coming down the path in her suit—to his rescue, as it were.

  ‘Hey!’ he called to her. ‘Come rescue a starving mariner!’ and he glanced at Peggy, who looked glum.

  Lying now on his bed in London in the darkening room, smoking a cigarette, with no lights on, he tried to remember and reconstruct the rest of that day so many years ago and miles away. Strangely enough, though they had met late at night at the guesthouse, the details surrounding that meeting had grown fuzzy with time. He could not, for example, remember whether he or she had got there first. And he could not remember taking one of the canoes across the lake, though of course he must have done so. He could not remember what, if anything, they had said to each other when they had met in the darkness, nor what she had worn. It seemed, now, trying to reme
mber it, as though suddenly they had appeared together on the veranda from nowhere, and the only vivid moments that stood out now were disconnected ones, fragments of time, little flashes of the picture—as though he himself had been standing somewhere a short distance away and watching his image move with Barbara. He saw her, for instance, clearly, reaching for the key in the pocket of her skirt and pushing open the door of the guesthouse. And he saw them both enter. He remembered the damp, stale smell of unused rooms that had assailed them inside and he saw her go to a window and open it, letting in fresh air. They had turned on a light, he remembered, for he could see them both clearly, smoking cigarettes, sitting in chairs and talking, he was sure, about nothing at all. Their cigarettes, too, had been damp with summer and had burned slowly, and his thoughts had moved slowly with the weariness of anticipation. ‘So this is a rendezvous!’ she had said. ‘I’ve always wanted to know!’ And somehow the light had been extinguished and the cigarettes had been stubbed out, and he remembered her saying uncertainly, ‘Carson? We are sure, aren’t we?’ And he told her yes, that they were sure.

  And a little later, in a small voice, she had said, ‘Carson, I don’t know anything! Truly I don’t. I’m a little frightened, I might as well tell you. I really don’t know anything. So you won’t—so you’ll remember, won’t you? That I don’t know anything?’

  And he had told her that there was nothing to be frightened of, although, indeed, he knew very little himself. And he had given her another cigarette then, and lighted it for her, struck blind by the sight of her face in the blaze of the match. And they both smoked that cigarette in silence, passing it like a cup of courage between them. Then the cigarette was gone.

  And then, much later, she had said, ‘Oh, darling. Will it show? Will it show in my face? I’ve heard that it shows in your face? When I look at my mother now, will she know? Will it show?’

  And he assured her that no, it would not show in her face.

  And then he remembered waking, much later, and seeing her across the room. She stood looking out the window, a slender silhouette in the light that was the barest beginning of morning. He had called to her softly but she had turned to him and said, ‘We’d better go now, darling—it’s getting light.’

  A few weeks later there had been a letter from her:

  Dearest,

  I am so happy and love you so much, and I do not regret anything, no, nothing—not one part of it, ever. Why should I? Do not ask me a question like that, Carson! I would do it again, now, tonight, and without the slighest, tiny doubt and this is because I love you, it must be. And do not worry because I am not p. I will not say that I wasn’t frightened because I was. Awfully. I thought if something happens what will I do? Only run away, far away, as far as I can go because there is no one I could bear to tell about it here—no one, not Mother, Father, anyone. They expect me to be more than I am. Or maybe it is me who expects me to be more than I am. Remember I told you how I daydream? This is what I daydream about the most …

  You see, my darling, I am such a coward. I have always been a coward, and I want you to know this about me since you said we will be married some day. And I know some day we will. I want you to know how cowardly I am and perhaps that is even why I love you. Because I am weak and you are strong, because I am a coward and you are brave. How simple!

  All my love,

  B.

  They had not gone to her grandparents’ house that weekend in June. Grandfather Woodcock had been too ill to see them. That was the year that seasonal changes had begun to affect him, and each fluctuation of New England weather brought on new coughing spells and sent him to bed.

  As it turned out, Carson did not meet Barbara’s grandfather until several years later.

  In between had come Barbara’s year in Hawaii and his own two slow and uneventful years in the stateside Army. He had gone up to the farm on leave from his base in Louisiana—with the end of his Army career just two months away—and they had started making plans to announce their engagement. In fact, he had almost forgotten that he was supposed to meet Barbara’s grandfather when Mrs. Zaretsky telephoned to say that the old gentleman expected him. He had gone to the old house on Prospect Avenue wearing his Second Lieutenant’s uniform, with his brass and his shoes especially polished for the occasion.

  Mrs. Zaretsky met him at the door and ushered him inside. ‘Speak up good and loud when you talk to him,’ she had warned him in the hall. ‘Don’t worry about her, though. She’s got ears like a fox.’

  Mr. and Mrs. Preston Woodcock, Senior, sat side by side in the turret-shaped bay window of the living room, bathed in the oleograph radiance of sunlight through stained glass. Their chairs were close together as though, from time to time, each one liked to reach out and touch the other. Of the two, Mr. Woodcock was clearly the more frail. His long face was cavernous and ruined, transversed with ridges and arroyos. His eyes, set in craters beneath jutting white eyebrows, were almost colourless. He wore pyjamas, slippers and a heavy bathrobe. A crocheted afghan lay across his knees and an ancient yellow cat lay asleep on his lap. Still, enough remained of Mr. Woodcock to make Carson realise that he had once been an imposing man. This fact appeared, first of all, in his handshake; when Carson took his hand the old man’s grip was firm. His voice, too, was surprisingly hard and clear. ‘How do you do, young man?’ Mr. Woodcock said.

  ‘How do you do, sir?’

  He turned to Mrs. Woodcock. ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ he said.

  She held out her hand. And, as Barbara had instructed him to do, he bowed slightly, took her hand, and raised it to his lips.

  ‘Won’t you sit down, Mr. Greer?’ Mrs. Woodcock said.

  He sat in the window seat, facing them. For several moments, there was silence. Periodically, Mr. Woodcock’s hand moved to stroke the cat’s back. The gold signet ring on his little finger caught the sun as he first ruffled, then smoothed, the cat’s crackling yellow fur. The cat purred noisily. Carson looked around the room.

  His first impression of the room was that it was very dirty. The winter sunlight, pouring in through filmed and rain-streaked coloured panes, was cruel to it. It revealed the dust that covered everything. Dust hung from the fringed lampshades; it furred the dry petals of the straw flowers that sprouted, in a stiff arrangement, from a blackened silver vase; it rolled and gathered in kittens beneath the chairs and tables. Suspended in the stained glass window from rusty chains were planters which held two huge and drooping Boston ferns, and dust covered the leaves of these like a fine, October frost. The room smelled of dust and antiseptics, rubbing alcohol and medicines that stood in sticky bottles on a tray at Grandfather Woodcock’s side. Housekeeping appeared to have been abandoned long ago, and now every effort was devoted to the preservation of the two relics who occupied the house.

  Presently Mr. Woodcock spoke again. ‘Young man,’ he asked, ‘have you settled on a career for yourself?’

  Barbara had warned him, ‘Don’t let him talk you into going into the paper business!’ So Carson mentioned several offers of jobs he had received and that he was considering. Among them was the offer made by the Locustville Chemical Company.

  Grandfather Woodcock looked up. ‘Locustville Chemical?’ he said. ‘It’s a good place. An excellent place, excellently managed. I know a great many of the men there, including Harvey Kendall.’

  Carson had said that, after all, he had several months during which to decide, and that he was weighing all his offers carefully.

  ‘Don’t put it off too long,’ the old man said. ‘They say man wants but little here below. That’s horse manure. Man wants a damn lot, everything he can get his hands on.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Carson said.

  ‘So don’t put it off. If you put things off, someone will get there ahead of you. Of the offers you’ve got, Locustville Chemical is the best. Take it. That’s my advice.’

  A few minutes later the interview ended. But Carson remembered it a week later when a letter arrived from Mr.
Kendall, the president of Locustville Chemical. He had heard of Carson’s interest in the company; he hoped Carson would give the company’s offer his serious consideration; there were a number of other applicants for the position, so he hoped Carson would reach a decision soon. He mentioned, also, a slightly higher salary than had been discussed before.

  It was really Barbara’s grandfather, then, who had made him decide to take the job. He had never told Barbara this. At the time, he hadn’t thought that it was important. Since then, he had not been so sure. It was Barbara’s grandfather, actually, who had brought him last night to London, and who had separated them through so many other journeys. Often in the past, when she had complained of Locustville and the trips and the life they were leading, he had thought of telling her, but he never had. There was no point, really, in trying to blame her, or her family; it had been his own decision, he had made it. At the time, it had not been possible to look ahead. Of course it was never possible to look ahead.

  He wondered what would have happened if it had been possible to look ahead, to see himself, years from the day Kendall’s letter arrived, to see himself lying on this bed, in this hotel room, hearing these night sounds, thinking these night thoughts. ‘And here you are,’ he would say to the picture as he turned to it in the imaginary album. ‘This is London, summer, 1958. You have come to sell American paint to British automobile manufacturers. You look as though you’ve been through a lot, and you have. You’ve been through four promotions, three salary increases, a number of birthday parties, and two prescription changes for your reading glasses, your eyes having grown weak and unreliable from reading reports and memoranda and watching television. You will surely develop lung cancer if you don’t switch to filter cigarettes. You have survived many angers. You even had a brush with the law a while back when you were stopped for speeding on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but—a true salesman—you talked yourself out of a ticket. Your forehead is wider than it once was, but the mind inside it is perhaps a little narrower, shrunk by habit and corseted by duty. Your gut sags somewhat, but the paraphernalia inside it still manages to churn lustily upon occasion. Once, when your wife’s complaints about your job seemed more than you could take, you offered her a divorce, which she refused, which pleased you secretly. Since then, with the help of a few rules, things have not gone too badly with you both. Once, in a nightmare, you dreamed you read your own obituary. It was buried in the paper and the headline, in small type, said: ‘Carson V. Greer Dies; Was Paint Salesman,’ and when you woke you were not sure whether it was the announcement of your death, or the words that followed, that shocked you more … Your tennis serve is good, but it is doubtful whether you could still snap out a lateral pass. You have fathered two children and you own, free and clear, a pretty little house in Locustville. What do you think of yourself?’ He wondered what his answer might have been.