Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  Here was the horse. Eyes as big and wet with memory as tennis balls lost in the swamp. Also hungry, those eyes.

  Barnaby did not look at the policeman. Never push it. Good businessmen and good Christians will give you the same advice on that. Never rub it in.

  Barnaby brought the carrot down from aloft, and where there had been cheering and honking, there was silence. The roar of life from other blocks, other avenues, came from a tinny distance that might have been as far as Mars. Barnaby offered the end of the carrot to the lips on that hinging, nostriled mouth, a mouth very close to Barnaby suddenly, a mouth that seemed to have a life of its own and a beginning interest in one of his suspenders—was that an Oklahoma connection? But then the carrot was sniffed, and the lips flopped over it like a retired trumpet player at a martini, and half the carrot was gone.

  Barnaby did not look at the policeman; he thrust the carrot, the half carrot, back into the air, and the cheers and the horns resounded once again.

  The light changed and the truck lurched. Barnaby brought the carrot down for balance, and the horse, quite understandably, mistook the gesture for an offer and snatched the rest of the carrot from Barnaby, and stayed there between lanes of rolling-again traffic with the feathered green of stalk weaving out the side of his mouth.

  Good-bye. Good-bye.

  After he won the tiebreaker, and won it easily, he stood beside the court not to look but to be looked upon. Against insurmountable odds, he was dead even in the match, and with the one set left to play, momentum was on his side. Let those who had ever thought to write off Barnaby Griswold, in tennis or in life, think again.

  Up on the shingled porch of the old Richardson place, companioned by the dangerously overgrown granddaughter Jerry Childs had married to join the tribe, yes, ancient Richardson looked vacantly out into the sky above the court. Given the whiffs of reputation that still adhered, maybe he imagined he like Barnaby was on the court, surveying the hillside for young ankles exposed beneath the folds of linen dresses, spotting the firm flesh of a shoulder offered beneath the gauze and umbrella of a girl known for appetites. Fine. Barnaby wanted ancient Richardson to be undressing the summer women of his youth.

  But Barnaby wanted the rest of the hillside at today’s finals to be looking at Barnaby, and this was no careless exercise of vanity. This was how champions took possession of an arena. This was how tigers announced themselves to the other eyes of the night. So that everyone would understand what had happened and who was winning. And everyone on the hillside was indeed looking at Barnaby and understanding very clearly. Even the pretty girl with her frizzed wildness of hair, though she might not know Barnaby was presumed finished, washed up, in realms outside of tennis. Actually, she probably did know. Everybody knew. Barnaby lifted his chest. As he had all along meant to do, he was winning back his life, and he couldn’t have cared less that his father chose not to watch. Because everyone else’s preparation for departure had ceased utterly. Everyone else was rapt before Barnaby Griswold’s phoenix.

  He did wish that his own two daughters were here to witness the perspiring reissue of their father’s life. Also to represent the succeeding rank of Griswolds; that was important even if the girls had already gotten most of what money they’d ever need from his old life. And all right, he did wish they would root for him. Was that so wrong? Hadn’t gladiators always, regardless of how they behaved at home, hoped to hear their children’s loving voices cry down into the battle, Go for it, Daddy. Kill ’em.

  Barnaby went ahead and put his daughters on the hillside and drank in their admiring approval, winked at them from where he stood in the dusty, bloody arena.

  Should Win sit with the girls? Or would the girls insist on being apart from their mother so that they could be more available to the possibilities of the final weekend of summer? Either way would have been better than the last of the Winott Point Griswold males playing his last match on the Point by himself. Win could still hope for Barnaby to pull through, couldn’t she? His own wife, ex-wife as it was now. He remembered the feel of holding her bony hand, the feel of the skin over her knuckles. Was it wrong to wish for skin you were welcome to touch? It had been Barnaby who held the girls upside down when they were tiny and taught them to laugh. Surely that counted.

  The sun was far into the humid afternoon, and it was still Labor Day hot. Barnaby loved that.

  He breathed deeply and allowed all the generations of hillside audiences, Richardsons, odd Winotts, Swifts and Goodwins and Bryans, Griswolds of course, and now even the eager Childses and the Kopuses, to meditate one last moment upon the new, gymnasium-earned, chest-of-athlete that swelled valiantly beneath Barnaby’s own sopping shirt.

  Then he turned and settled into his chair and imagined his dead father standing at the bottom of the country lawn that went down toward the harbor. With his hands behind his back, the ghost of Barnaby’s father surveyed his own steaming battlefield, the first Griswold to have lost everything, the archaically principled, senior partner of a distinguished Boston law firm that had lost cachet and lost the good clients and lost the good associates, that had finally lost its very nameplate, to the graceless inattention of a speeding world in which Barnaby for a while had learned to flourish. Was it possible that despite everything, Barnaby was his father’s son? They were alike in having both failed to be good stewards of what they’d made. Barnaby’s father was horrified at the similarity. Barnaby was horrified.

  Because it was not true. Barnaby was making his back, right now.

  Into the relentless aftermath of his father’s battle, the ghost of Barnaby’s mother went with ever-so-careful steps, down the crabgrass, to give his father the disappointing news: Barnaby had won the set. Barnaby now needed only to win the third set to win the Winott Cup. Wouldn’t Barnaby’s father come back up to the court and encourage his son?

  Barnaby didn’t stick around for his father’s answer. As he sat there in his court chair beside the net post, he chose to watch out the back of his head the pretty girl with the halo of frizzing hair. She had seen him limp, and she had laughed, he thought. Because the limp had worked? He could not truthfully have said he’d registered her features, yet he knew she was pretty in the way one knows those things. There had unquestionably been a grinning, mischievous range of teeth after the tiebreaker, and when a man wins a tiebreaker all smiles are for him as a matter of course. She had long, bare arms with a slight shine of golden hair on them that was paler than the hair on her head. And the hair on her head, reddish hair, kept Barnaby, even in his imagination, from quite seeing into her face.

  Was it true that Barnaby had never loved Win? Had he really just thought to trade mortgage payments and tuition payments for occasional dinners at home? Yes, but he had always understood love to be beyond someone like himself. In any case, he had kept his part of the bargain. As time went on, he had even bought all his dinners out.

  But that wasn’t what he meant right now. Right now things were coming apart, and he needed love. That wasn’t it either. Things were changing. And he could change. He could offer love.

  Barnaby was forty-six years old, and, God forgive him, he decided he loved the girl behind him. He could not bear the thought of growing old as alone as his parents, and he sat up straight. He prepared himself to turn around and kneel and propose marriage.

  Thank Christ that Win and the girls were not actually here to spoil things.

  And Dicky Kopus whacked his racket loudly against the red plastic watercooler.

  That quickly the pounding of love was turned into alarm.

  Kopus leaned down and whispered, “Come on, you crook. We have to play before the cops repossess your fucking racket.”

  Kopus strode away into his own side of the court, leaving Barnaby with a heart that pounded now beyond alarm to fear.

  Despite himself, Barnaby glanced for police.

  Then he ran on the court for safety, and Kopus cheated and won three games so fast that Barnaby didn’t know what had happ
ened.

  Barnaby found new but not-yet-likely corners of endeavor that were being staked out by more or less capable people with ambition. If he could work with those people, talk sympathetically with them, eat and drink with them and reach an understanding about providing an appropriate profile and connections, which he usually could do, then he did that. Barnaby ate and drank with everybody until he and the owners and the accountants and so forth were all very clear about what it was the company did and how and what were the prospects and why. It was a delicate process, and sometimes a long process, which was why one developed strategies for physical survival like the Griswold diet. To take a concept, even one that has begun to function in a primitive way as a business, and to turn that into a posture that displays in an instant all the inherent virtues of marketability and underlying worth, of decoration and substance, that process was not fluff.

  It wasn’t even fluff, entirely, when you knocked on doors to find a susceptible underwriter.

  No, the fluff started to mix when the issue was imminent and when you went to your friends like Tom Livermore who ran the Crenshaw Foundation and you ate and drank with them, though God knew Tom never drank more than one glass of sherry. It was Barnaby who drank, and enjoyed drinking. Barnaby drinking was part of the fun. When they went from saloon to saloon, Tom brought his one sherry along with him. If they sent their cars home, Tom carried his sherry with him in cabs to Christ only knew where. And then, if Barnaby had a product, or the presentable posture of one, then Tom Livermore and maybe a few other thoroughly real sorts of people came on board early, and the word got out. Barnaby himself in fact took the word out as zealously as St. Paul after his left-side stroke at Tarsus. Which was the same stroke Win’s mother, Ada, would have. Actually, Ada would have the stroke, a little one, again and again, but Ada’s moment was different from Paul’s moment, and of course Ada’s Oklahoma was different from wherever. Was it left side? Getting the word out, anyhow, was essential labor, and if the Johnny-come-latelies who couldn’t afford to buy in early thought of Barnaby as nothing more than a tout, well, tough. When the issue opened, if the temperature in the oven was right, things rose. Egg whites. A meringue. The fluff fluffed. And in that fluff, the good Lord willing, was a dollar for Barnaby.

  Marinas were a case in point. Who would have imagined a chain of marinas? Except one day suddenly everyone who spilled a drink on Barnaby had a yacht of some kind and was boring the party with worries about where to berth and where to whatever else. Enter a ne’er-do-well with a résumé of expulsions from respectable schools and respectable families and with money from New Jersey garbage-industry skimming and with connections to sail lofts and engine types and with a dream of a chain of marinas in which to live life. A part of Barnaby was sorry to have sold as soon as he had, but it didn’t take much perspective to remember that only so many people, even in the high season of buyouts, were ever going to have yachts, and sooner or later a lot of those folks were going to lose their money or realize what a pain in the ass a yacht was for fifty-one weeks a year.

  So, no, it wasn’t as if Barnaby were without perspective altogether. There were in fact people, Tom Livermore among them, who turned to Barnaby when the market was hard to read.

  Barnaby was a divining rod, and a good one, but he used his gifts at the beginning of things in very small companies.

  With a different background, with a different part of the puzzle than the beginnings upon which he was accustomed to work every day, he might have understood the significance of Peterpotter and TJ sooner. As it was, he had only the voice of indeterminate instinct, which told him to stay close to those happy Oklahoma boys even though he knew rather quickly that there was nothing for him in their start-up oil outfit. He was happy for them with their wad of money and their enthusiasm, but the world was already awash in speculative drillers. He could, with effort, imagine them doing something besides losing it all, but unless he was an out-and-out burglar, and he was not, there was no obvious part of that eighty million from Chase with Barnaby’s name on it.

  Which made the plane ride only more difficult.

  After their marvelous parade, and then after loading the stand, which was not easy but not without amusement, and then after the ride the rest of the way to Newark Airport, which was frankly a matter of endurance—after all that, a plane ride with Peterpotter and TJ could have seemed superfluous.

  Did he really have to get on the plane?

  It was not as if Barnaby wasn’t a man who was good for the long haul. That much he had inherited from his father: stick it out. But to have endured the sobering discomfort of the open-air commute to Newark Airport without knowing the reason why, and then, then to board a plane and head out into the actual desert with no vision whatever of a deal, that had more to do with theology than Barnaby liked.

  He boarded, nonetheless.

  And the cigars, the cigarettes, the merchant’s apron while holding for takeoff, were entertaining.

  There were seats that swiveled and enough room to swivel them even with the newsstand underfoot.

  There was, comfortingly, a pilot on the other side of a door to the cockpit. And, just as comfortingly, Peterpotter and TJ showed no interest in opening that door.

  There was some contagious exuberance on actual liftoff.

  Fair enough.

  Once they were airborne, however, it did seem to Barnaby that there should be a quiet time in which you laid your head back and closed your eyes. A nap was what honored the headache following a parade, not to mention the aches attendant on wrestling pieces of a newsstand and smoke shop into an airplane without the help of teamsters (because no one should ever have to be told not to pay Frenchmen before a job is done).

  “What’s the matter, Barnaby? You don’t like girls?”

  The moment they were airborne and stabilized, Peterpotter had gotten out all of the newsstand’s dirty magazines. Peterpotter had regained the self-assertion that for a while the truck and the traffic and the size of New York had drained from him. As though it were a sovereign ship, stepping aboard the plane put Peterpotter, and TJ with him, back onto Oklahoma soil. Well, Barnaby liked everyone to feel at home, and Barnaby himself had always felt a perverse affection for Oklahoma, but did Peterpotter and TJ know how long a flight it was to Oklahoma City in a small plane with two fueling stops?

  “Hell, we’ve got enough booze on board to get us to China and back,” was the answer, and it occurred to Barnaby that planes rather than trucks might have been the venue for these boys’ adolescence.

  So be it.

  You pulled up your socks and you plunged into the dirty magazines like a twelve-year-old schoolboy among other twelve-year-olds on the train home from boarding school for Christmas. You went page by glossy page identifying anatomy. It was the closest any of them would ever get to medical school, and the thrill was there if you shouted and pretended.

  “Look at that!”

  With more cheap cigars for atmosphere.

  After the unsettled first landing for fuel however and during the bilious takeoff that followed that landing, Barnaby was momentarily taken aback by Peterpotter squashing a sugar-powdered little roll of devil’s food cake and whipped cream into the back of one of Barnaby’s hands. Barnaby was a devout, eye-shut gripper of armrests in small plane takeoffs, but he opened his eyes for the devil’s food.

  TJ, already wearing his own badge of devil’s food, giggled, and Peterpotter blurted in a cracking voice of pimpled anticipation, “Didn’t your fraternity have any food fights, Griswold?”

  What a question for someone to whom Manhattan had long been a battleground of meals.

  What’s more, despite being tired, Barnaby was still powerfully committed to these boys.

  But no. A literal food fight was not for Barnaby. He smiled, granting permission, approval even, of Peterpotter and TJ. But he did not reach for the pile of cellophane-wrapped snacks himself. He unfastened his seat belt, but he stayed in his seat and nodded encouragement at t
he joyous Sooner squeals as Peterpotter and TJ went beyond their first formal mashings to full-flung war upon each other with frosting-filled cupcakes and little pielettes and fruit-filled turnovers. Peterpotter and TJ naturally applied these things to Barnaby every bit as much as they did to one another, and Barnaby was a very good sport; he resisted the urge to shield himself with centerfolds. But no, he was not persuaded to participate, and if anybody thought he was shirking, so be it. Barnaby had spent too much of his life on airplanes mustering other illusions. He also believed that the nature of airplanes, the suspension of life so far above ground, deserved an inviolable measure of respect. Frankly, he worried that a food fight could take air out from under the wings of a small plane.

  Meanwhile, cherry became the favored weapon for both Peterpotter and TJ because of its livid stain when applied to broadcloth or thinning hair. Peterpotter ate the cherry where it adhered to him, and ate the chocolate as well. TJ ate the beef and sausage jerky for some reason. Barnaby, in yet another testament to the Griswold diet, was not hungry. Instead, as things finally wound down, Barnaby felt like either throwing up or else opening a window to clear the cigar smoke, but the night outside the windows had gotten black and empty enough to make anyone glad the windows didn’t open. When Peterpotter vomited chocolate goo and cherry stain into the litter of magazines, Barnaby decided to keep his own nausea to himself.

  Earlier, there had been talk that at the second set-down for fuel (in Memphis?) everyone might want to head out and hee-yah the late clubs. Or was one of the women in the magazines from Memphis? In any case, after the vomit, there was no more talk of hee-yah.