Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  The approach of the second landing became instead an occasion for seat belts again and for nervous sweat. The vapors from so much smear of chemicaled dessert (not to mention the throw-up) fostered a mortal sureness that the plane would crash. The black of American night out the windows seemed suddenly to Barnaby not just a premonition that he had come too far beyond his own pale; it seemed actually a mouth already swallowing him.

  Nor was Barnaby alone in mortality.

  “Oh, please Lord, don’t let me die,” Peterpotter cried as the plane shuddered down in tight banking circles designed to bring three people alone in all the world right then through the clammy, breathless anteroom of death. Down they went, hurtling to the hard earth and the flames none of them would feel except as they felt it all now.

  “Don’t let me burn,” Peterpotter cried.

  With the rational membranes that remained under his control, Barnaby wondered if there was any nitroglycerin on board for TJ who, in ominous silence, sweated through his shirt so prodigiously that his suspenders curled from the soaking.

  “Take Griswold,” Peterpotter cried, pointing. “He’s the one from New York. He’s the one too good for a food fight. Take fucking Griswold.”

  Barnaby did not glance again over at the pretty girl with the halo of copper hair. Jesus, he was forty-six and she was probably a kid. He did glance over, and he couldn’t tell if she was a kid or not. Well, past her teens anyway, for God sake.

  Barnaby gave her a glance full of “No more fooling around,” and then found himself wondering with which clan she was affiliated because he had never seen her before. Though he knew as well as anyone that girls could grow into whole other butterflies overnight. Yesterday she might have been twelve.

  With love in his heart, Barnaby turned to Kopus who had already spent a full allowance of cheating.

  Barnaby bent his knees, and he won his serve, and he broke back, and he won his serve again.

  Bam. Just like that. Three games apiece. All even.

  Barnaby had always (to put it kindly) been growing into his size, so he had never made any of the varsity teams at boarding school, but he had played for intramural teams, and his father had visited school more than once to watch as Barnaby whiffed on a big clearing kick from beside the goal at his own end of the soccer field. His father had given up weekends to watch Barnaby catch a blade and fall down on the ice while a five-foot, 120-pound wing skated past him alone across the blue line with the game to be decided. Always Barnaby’s father had stood (as Barnaby imagined he stood now, amidst all the other seated fans on the slope), with the rigorous spine of a man who has seen his son play and is prepared nonetheless to acknowledge a connection to the boy.

  Now, however, Barnaby had trained and was fit and his strokes were grooved. Now Barnaby was an athlete on the varsity, and he was going to win the championship; he was going to win back the good Griswold name.

  And as Kopus gathered balls on the other side of the net, Barnaby looked again to the copper hair that sun and damp heat had frizzed into a divine announcement of what Barnaby hoped would be his long-term future in matters to do with affection, matters where he had always been so naked. He didn’t want to be naked anymore. Please, he didn’t want to be lonely.

  And yes, there she was.

  But she was not looking back at Barnaby. She was turning and getting up, and she had long beautiful legs and a perfect ass in her short pants, and she was going away.

  She was leaving.

  Didn’t she know that everything had changed and that his tide was coming back in besides?

  Was there time to yell after her before Kopus served? What would he yell?

  My name is Barnaby Griswold. Should he yell that as loud as he could?

  His father (who never owned a German car but did serve in the war) had told Barnaby during the summer he was thirteen that Barnaby should announce his name clearly and then most people would understand how he wanted to be known. Those who didn’t understand, he would have to fight if he wanted to live the rest of his life with any self-respect. Who knew what a life of self-respect was supposed to mean, but the boarding-school boys had in fact called him Barnababy, Barnababy every day of the previous school year, of first form year. And on the first day of second form year he walked toward all the same boys and saw that the worst and stupidest of them was about to call out the name again. So Barnaby made his hands into fists and held them out from his sides and walked hard, with his necktie over his shoulder and his sport jacket flapping, directly at that stupidest boy, ready to fight, but calling loudly beforehand, “My name is Barnaby!”

  Except the boy was even stupider than anyone knew and called back, “Baby Farm, Baby Farm.”

  Baby Farm?

  Everybody laughed, and Barnaby was so startled himself that he tripped over his own feet, and as he fell down he caught one of his fists in a side pocket of his jacket so that it took a long time for him to hit the ground, and when he did hit ground he couldn’t help rolling around on his back. Everybody laughed so hard at that that it was agreeable. They weren’t laughing from hatred. They were laughing because Barnaby was funny, and so he rolled on his back some more until he could hear them not laughing as much, and then he stood up and said to the stupid boy, “It’s supposed to be Barnababy, you asshole.”

  That was funny too.

  When he turned to all the other boys, they were going away. They knew who he was, and he had made them laugh, and now they were leaving. They were going on to lunch, which was only fair, and so he hurried after them with, strangely enough, his real name established and Barnababy forgotten.

  And that day and for the rest of his life he had always eventually caught up with those other boys. They had always had somewhere they had to go, often somewhere for lunch, and they had waited there for Barnaby.

  He just had never caught up with the girls.

  No matter how he had tried, he had never ended up wherever it was the girls had to go.

  Girls left Barnaby’s vicinity, and no matter how he wanted to follow, they never waited.

  They couldn’t wait even now when Barnaby had changed into someone so overflowing.

  Just like a hundred girls a summer when he was a kid, and long past a kid, this girl was going away with the rest of his life, and today, on the last day of his last summer, it seemed like she was the very last girl.

  Win’s mother, Ada, was hardly a girl, but Barnaby felt he had enjoyed her in the past, and as luck would have it, the plane did not crash. So when Barnaby got to his hotel in Oklahoma City, he called Ada.

  And she was amused. She said, “I’ve been expecting you.” She assumed Barnaby had arrived to join the children of friends in stealing other people’s money, which of course Barnaby hoped would turn out to be the case.

  Frankly, he hoped Ada could tell him just how the children of her friends were doing it and where Peterpotter and TJ fit in. He especially hoped she could tell him where he himself might fit in.

  Truly, he’d always regretted not spending more time in Oklahoma with Win’s parents.

  Though it was also true that he’d been too busy to visit during the occasion of Dr. Briley’s final illness some years before.

  The fact was, alas, that Barnaby lived his life in his deals, so who could be surprised if there had not always been time for him to come along on the very few visits Win made back to the home ground she despised?

  Nonetheless, he described to Ada the progress of luncheon and plane ride in some detail, and when he was done, Ada said icily, “I don’t believe one word of it.”

  And then she laughed.

  Did Ada have a taste for outrage that Barnaby had never bothered to suspect? When Barnaby told her it was all the truth, she laughed again in a rich and throaty laugh unlike anything he’d ever imagined from her. Was she also a flirt?

  Well, what satisfaction to discover other worlds in a mother-in-law, and he told Ada that.

  Ada stopped her laugh and said, “I’ve alway
s loved a fool.”

  She said it in a voice of bored, judgmental intelligence, a voice that drove Win crazy and that was just like Win’s except that under Ada’s tone was the possibility of humor and the hope of pleasure.

  “No kidding?” Barnaby said, ever hopeful himself.

  “Before I married, the love of my life was a fool.”

  The delivery was still bored and judgmental, but the words themselves were revelation. They were what Barnaby had often imagined as, despite so many discouragements, the way women ought to speak of people like himself.

  “So you always knew that I was a fool?”

  “I certainly did.”

  “And not just from my looks?”

  “Oh, Barnaby. There’s more to a fool than just looks. Charles, the fool of my youth, looked like a senator.”

  If he had been in the room with her instead of on the phone, Barnaby could have seen that she was teasing, but on the phone her delivery was almost perfectly without inflection.

  “When did you know about me?” he asked.

  “The moment you opened your mouth.”

  Barnaby might have been waiting his whole life for women to tease him. He had been waiting his whole life. “Why did you never tell me?”

  And now her voice became all dreary disappointment and southern diction. “You so rarely came calling. Women of my generation need to be called upon.”

  He laughed more, and his laughter got Ada to laugh again, and from all of that pleasure came a felicitous sense that life was on course in Oklahoma.

  What did not come, unfortunately, was any clue as to why he, Barnaby Griswold, was in Oklahoma. Ada vaguely knew the names of Peterpotter’s and TJ’s car dealerships, and had met at one time or another TJ’s parents when they were still alive, but for her, as in fact for Barnaby, much of the interest in Barnaby’s adventure was the very nature of Peterpotter and TJ as car dealers. Not everyone knew car dealers, and who could imagine car dealers with eighty million dollars, and who could imagine them, once they had it, doing anything other than throwing food?

  So there was some disappointment that Ada could not tell Barnaby what sort of a deal he’d hooked into. On the other hand, she could tell him precisely where in Driscoll Hills to get his trousers rewoven quickly and well.

  The real disappointment, as always, was calling home.

  Because Barnaby understood himself as a generous man. He had to. Witness all the energy he gave to his professional life, all the abundance of affectionate attention (and you can’t fake that the way you can fake figures) he gave to successions of clients and near clients and possible associates of clients, all the beating his body accepted in these duties. Really, he had given the physical vigor of his youth to entertaining the Peterpotters and TJs of this world. The plain fact was that Barnaby was too generous for his own good, as his cardiologist had been telling him for some time, and yet when he called home, Win translated his every breath into a litany of selfishness.

  As soon as she answered the phone, Win was angry to the point of ultimatums. Barnaby told her, “But I just had a long and marvelous conversation with Ada,” and Win was angrier still. What sensible woman could be angry that her husband and his mother-in-law liked one another? What wife wouldn’t be delighted that her husband had tried to pump his mother-in-law for business insights and then stayed on the line to chat? Unless that wife couldn’t get along with her mother any better than she got along with her husband. No, Barnaby apologized profusely to Win on all counts, but it was very clear that he was not the bad guy in this story.

  Nor had he been missing for thirty hours. “Thirty? Come on. A busy man’s failure to appear at the Nightingale-Bamford School dance recital does not start wheels turning at the Missing Persons Bureau.”

  When he called his secretary, she said she hadn’t noticed any unusual absence on his part at all.

  What was more, his secretary as a matter of course had found his raincoat. Which was the sort of thing that confirmed it all for Barnaby. A good carpenter lived in his carpentry. A good scientist, one supposed, lived in his science. A good fluffmeister lived in his fluff, and it took only something as simple as a raincoat turning up unexpectedly to remind Barnaby what a right place that was to live. In fact, with news of the raincoat, Barnaby recovered his conviction that he was profoundly at work. Even as he bid the East Coast good night, he recovered altogether his conviction that somewhere in the jubilantly tasteless vicinity of Oklahoma City, there was a substantial deal just for him.

  “Griswold,” Kopus called from the other side of the net.

  Barnaby turned, and Kopus quick-served him, and Barnaby was so completely caught off guard that he was pure reflex and slammed a backhand up the line for a winner.

  But after that backhand, Barnaby realized with terrifying immediacy that he really might win this championship and now was the time. Which was different from training years for the competition, different from dreaming of victory, different from being afraid of losing. Much different. Hard to breathe different.

  And Kopus, despite his better balance sheet, must have felt some of the same thing.

  Because abruptly now both of them began playing afraid to miss and afraid to hit out. They, both of them, played complete puff ball.

  Christ. Grown men patting balls back and forth. And yet when Barnaby tried to pound an approach shot and come into net, he was so stiff that he hit the rope netting behind Kopus on the fly, and he could see Kopus decide right then not to try another hard shot himself for the rest of the day. The points went on and on. Other people left from the hillside, a few, the hostesses Barnaby figured, though he only sensed the departures. He kept his attention so riveted on the court that he could not straighten his arms entirely. The sun was lower, but it was still hot, and Barnaby let the sweat run into his eyes. They pushed balls back and forth to one another like old ladies, and Barnaby would have been glad his pretty girl was gone if he had let himself think about her. His knees were bent, and he could not straighten them. He walked like Groucho Marx, and the world was a tiny, brittle, near-motionless event inside the lines of this court.

  And then somehow, as if the tennis balls rather than the players finally arranged things, Barnaby was one point away from breaking Kopus’s serve. One point from getting to serve for the match himself.

  Barnaby’s shirt and shorts were soaked, and yet he was cold. He had goose bumps up his arms and legs. He tried to wipe his eyes clear of salt sting and could not loosen his neck and shoulder enough to get his sleeve up to his face.

  He got into position to receive Kopus’s serve, and out of the corner of one eye he saw, darkened by the shade of the smaller of the great red-leafed copper beeches—that was the name of the tree—he saw, in the shade at this end of the court, right outside the rope netting beside where he stood, the silent, attentive halo of his beautiful girl’s copper hair.

  He’d thought she’d left like every other girl he’d ever imagined.

  But she hadn’t. He could not look more than the instant of recognition, but she was here. Things had changed after all. Barnaby had changed, and because of that, someone had decided to stay with him.

  Kopus served.

  Barnaby bent his knees for real, and took Kopus’s patted serve on the rise and stroked through it. He hit a bullet return and was amazed at himself. What a shot. He was one game from the match. He was going to win the championship. He turned toward the beautiful girl.

  And on pure reflex, Kopus slammed Barnaby’s return back.

  And as soon as Kopus connected, Barnaby knew he could not hit the ball again himself. He had lost his connection to the point, even if he could reach the ball. But he also knew that the ball would land near the line on the far side above the shaded lane and the pitch down into the swamp, the side away from every-body sitting on the honest hillside that sloped down from the Richardson porch.

  Which meant what?

  Cheating.

  Kopus’s ball was hit hard, and yet
there was time to swivel and take a long leaping step and a half. There was time to reach back with his racket as if he actually meant to swing at the ball. There was time to bend forward and study where the ball would land, time to study that his leg and foot precisely blocked his father’s line of sight, time to realize with a giggly elation that virtually everyone else was blocked too.

  There was time suddenly, fearfully, very consciously, to wait.

  Do not call the ball out before it lands.

  Here it came, for one instant a perfectly still yellow sphere with every hair of fuzz distinguishable, a today’s world of tennis ball that still smelled of its rubber before contact with the faded, gray-white, two-inch line of weather-worn paint, which separated one swath of powdered green asphalt from another, which separated the singles court from the doubles alley, which separated one man from championship and another from dismay, which separated Barnaby from all he wanted now and forever.

  He had decided to cheat before he was born.

  Was he sorry for Kopus? Yes, because Kopus would never expect this of Barnaby. Kopus knew Barnaby as someone of the old school for whom the tennis court was a repository of principles. Which was how Barnaby knew himself. It was one of Kopus’s advantages; Kopus cheated at tennis and Barnaby did not. Except that now much more than tennis was at stake. Everything was at stake.

  The next instant, the tennis ball was a blur not dropping down but racing across, skidding so fast that Barnaby, who stared with fixity at where it should land, could not even be sure it was in. It had to be in for him to cheat. Christ, maybe it was out. But this was no time to wonder.

  “Out,” he shouted.

  If you’re going to cheat, shout; everyone understands that. He stood over the spot, staring at where it would have had to land to be out, and maybe it had landed there.

  He had meant to cheat, had planned to cheat, wanted to cheat and didn’t care. He was a cheater, whether he wanted to think of himself that way or not.

  He looked out through the old rope fencing that he loved for its persuasion of a gracious past that was gone, and there was the only girl who had ever not left Barnaby. She was half hidden in the dappling of shade, but she was there, with her glorious hair and her long limbs as neat as a real athlete, with her hands on her hips and one hip cocked to the side, with her face still not visible except for the shine of her eyes.