Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  And he had not been left here by his parents as at boarding school. He had come largely of his own accord.

  All right, he’d had nowhere else to go, but he had recognized that phone call on the day of the championship as a higher call, and he had answered it. He had recognized a pilgrimage, and he had made himself ready to care-give. He’d come, and he’d stayed.

  Would he have stayed if Livermore had offered the spare room in his good Park Avenue apartment instead of a formal caution under the Crenshaw letterhead that Barnaby was contagious? Who would have thought that when Barnaby needed somewhere to stay in the last months before he came out of suspension, Livermore would write, dictate to his secretary, a letter saying, “Dear Mr. Griswold, don’t come anywhere near me until after Christmas at the earliest, very best regards.”

  The fact was that he had stayed, here in Oklahoma City, and he would continue to stay, and he was glad.

  Even so, he remembered how, as his father had said goodbye in a voice that meant good-bye, his mother had looked awfully sad to leave Barnaby at boarding school that first year, and if in tonight’s darkness, if on a pilgrimage that was tiring even on days without pornography, if tonight he did not cry out, “Mother,” it was because he’d learned once and for all from the world of boarding-school alcoves that that cry did not make life easier. Would the other guys and their families on Wimbledon, hear the cry and call him Barnababy? Of course they would.

  He lay without moving and felt his swollen weight fill the little bed. He had been swollen as a first former too, always swollen until now, and now it was too late, no matter how fit, to change his mirrored self in the blindness of bedtime. He’d never been actually fat, but close. He should have been saved because he was tall, but his long legs had always been too flopping, his feet too big, one arm or another in the wrong place and slow to catch up. It was his father’s length and his mother’s flesh before the flesh left her.

  Tonight, he could feel sweat in the crack of his ass and in the creases between his ass and the tops of his legs. He wasn’t Crisco anymore by a long shot, but there was still some fat in the can. A grown man with no lard in his ass was either out of work or a gigolo, not to be trusted in any case. Barnaby was out of work and not to be trusted, and he wouldn’t have minded making a connection as a gigolo.

  He was also scared to death that in a month he was supposed to go back to real work.

  No, he didn’t want to say scared.

  He lifted his covers and let them fall in order to smell what was there. It was him. Without the booze and cigarette smoke, but him. His own hairs and feet and armpits. His own large heat in this little bed. A satisfactory smell, it still seemed, regardless of his true weight.

  For years before the Old Ladies Bank deal, actually, there hadn’t been any schoolhouse teasing about his weight. He was no longer a pear in those days; he was a businessman porpoise, and he could afford to wear well-made clothes. Also he had learned to move at a measured pace so that if an arm or a foot fell out of sync, there was time to bring it back where it belonged. Those were the days of the Griswold diet, which said all that really needed to be said about body and soul both.

  And after the Old Ladies paid off? After that, the clothes were splendidly tailored and the pace was like a king coming down the aisle for coronation when he could remember to keep it that slow. The Griswold diet went into high gear, and the tigers gamboled in the wallpaper from morning to night.

  When the Old Ladies paid, it was let the good times roll.

  The price of oil fell off a cliff, and Barnaby Griswold was the one who had sold short and made the money on the change, and the money was unimaginable even to Barnaby who had eaten imaginary fortunes for breakfast every day of his life. It was close to a library at one point, and Barnaby could hear the cathedral children singing his anthem as he stepped ever so slowly from his coach and down the aisle between tables at La Cote for lunch. He had Michel decant his clarets at eleven every morning, and it went onto Barnaby’s account whether Barnaby came for lunch that day or not. Somewhere was a vision of Michel’s three crooked cousins drinking Barnaby’s wine a couple times a week as they drove truckloads of stolen computers back out to the island. And why not? Absolutely. Those three Frog hoodlums passing thermoses of Barnaby’s hundred dollar bottles back and forth in the front seat.

  More important on the generosity scale in those days, Barnaby Griswold had made fortunes for several of the market’s very influential people who had in turn made their investors happy for life. Tom Livermore for a while was St. Tom over at Crenshaw. Which had elevated Barnaby to very senior sainthood as well (though with a far different sort of holiness than what was aspired to here in Oklahoma). True, Tom and the others had believed in Barnaby sufficiently to lend him a bit, so he could leverage his own accounts further, but when the returns came in, that was small potatoes. Barnaby was a figure on the Street. A power? Friends? And more power and more friends lay ahead because Barnaby had suddenly acquired the personal funds and the institutional leverage to do the deals he’d seen go by and never imagined he would be able to take for himself. Barnaby had to hold some of the friends at bay, which was not in his nature, but there was only so much time. He had to hold a few women at bay, which was not in his nature either and had never been a remotely pressing problem before.

  And then Peterpotter pulled the plug.

  Pulled and pulled and pulled.

  Who would have thought Peterpotter could or would? Who would have thought Peterpotter anything but fodder for fun. Barnaby from a distance, in days before the long, plug-pulling approach to apology, had lacquered Peterpotter in jovial myth: Peterpotter, guide to Sooner happiness; Peterpotter Dodge, purveyor of high-return vehicles; Peterpotter cigars cigarettes and sundries.

  Who would have thought there was a plug?

  Barnaby lay all by himself in his first form alcove cot and chose to dwell on other things. He thought through the dark to some drunken memory—he assumed it was a memory—of a woman whose face he could not see but whose breasts were near. He wanted a face; he wanted real affection more than he’d ever wanted it in his life; he still wanted his beautiful red-headed blond from the finals of the Winott Cup, but in a pinch the faceless breasts looked good.

  Why? Because he didn’t know if he wanted to make his fortune back again, and who was he if he didn’t want that? Was that why he couldn’t make his calls? What would become of him if he didn’t care whether or not he ever went below Canal Street again? Would he be a fucking pilgrim forever?

  It was his own smell in the little bed and in the little night room around him, but Barnaby thought about the flesh of some woman’s body. Not Ada. Christ Almighty. A girl. A young woman. From beside the tennis court? It wouldn’t be the first time. He slid his hand down to encourage his limp dick, and it did encourage.

  He thought about the young woman rigorously.

  In the morning on the way to Ada’s, in the middle of the best part of Driscoll Hills, the part with real trees, Barnaby felt better. For a man who had once regularly busied himself with late evenings, Barnaby maintained an unlikely affection for morning. If he had no idea how things would turn out, in the morning anything was possible. If he was lacking all company and purpose outside of his struggle with Ada and Happiness and pilgrimage, in the morning he remembered that at least he was not in jail, at least he had not run into anyone from the scene of his apology. If no one at the gas station or in the produce aisle had yet seemed to have any idea who he was, in the morning he remembered what a good thing that was.

  And just like that, he saw Peterpotter driving a gang mower down the slope beside the Methodist Church where TJ had been senior something when he lost his car lots and had his heart attack.

  Barnaby knew it was Peterpotter instantly, and right away felt a shine of pleasure because it looked as if Peterpotter belonged on the mower, as if Peterpotter had found his right self and his place in life. Everybody likes to see those kinds of harmony. Barnaby
stopped the car, rolled open the window, glad to have a window that did roll open, and stared up the broad slope down which Peterpotter’s seven-wide, linked, tractor-towed brace of cutters came in their John Deere—green guise of farmness with a slow, reassuring rush of clatter, with the splendid smell of cut grass for wake.

  Barnaby did love a lawn. He wondered much more than casually if lawn work might be the best course for himself.

  Was that the morning’s glorious possibility, a whole new career choice? That and Peterpotter? That, by God, and the fruition of much of his pilgrimage. Because here it was: he saw Peterpotter, and he felt only generous feelings. Here was a day with suddenly (or not so suddenly—three months, after all) the fruition of things vibrating in the very dew.

  Was it possible that Barnaby had in fact completed the equation of his penance? Forget lawn work. If Barnaby could smile at the notion of Peterpotter, at the fact of Peterpotter, then Barnaby might nearly have won the chance to go home. Which meant that somewhere, everywhere, but basically in New York, his deals and all the real parts of his life were waiting for him with the open, welcoming arms he hadn’t known he would ever see again.

  Then he remembered that Peterpotter had ruined his life.

  Barnaby’s life. Barnaby felt the outrage come up in him like a roar. He had been marinating in venom, and now the venom boiled.

  No. Holiness stand forward.

  Outrage flamed up in him.

  Quench it. Put it out. For a soul such as Barnaby, this had to be made an opportunity.

  It all boiled into the base of his throat.

  Let it go. Let it all go. This was the test. Be a pilgrim.

  He got out and swung the door shut behind him and was surprised to hear it latch properly closed. He looked back at the old station wagon, and the door was in fact closed, and Barnaby felt a bubble of affection. It was not a door that closed all the way very often. It was a station wagon that anyone would have thought destined to rust into its oblivion on Winott Point, but it had made the drive all the way here to Oklahoma, to the prestigious heart of Driscoll Hills this morning, and this very morning the driver’s side door had just closed like the door of a new car. Barnaby appreciated effort and good faith in all God’s creatures but especially in individuals of a foreign tribe, and automobiles were the tribe most foreign to Barnaby.

  It was a sign. God’s will was loose. The sky was blue. The smell of new grass was rich enough to make a bishop drunk. In other directions from the clean, shapeless bulk of the church were ranks of deep-lawn houses, a number of them on sale at fifty cents to the dollar but still surrounded by tended yards and by full-sized trees. Yes, many of the houses had doors that were peculiarly enormous; where there had been oil, doors were always enormous. Barnaby allowed the doors. He was more pleased than he could have said that he’d seen Peterpotter and that he’d stopped, that he was ready to forgive, that he could add such a powerful goodness to the care-giving that was his primary errand of goodness. No, the caregiving was not something he did just because there was nowhere else on earth he was needed. Tolerated. It was not something he did because Ada insisted he buy his groceries on her tab at the Center Market. It was not even something he did because of his horror at neglecting his own mother.

  No, those reasons and a lifetime of others were there, but Barnaby had finally made himself beyond reason into a genuine pilgrim, and this was a morning for all things right, and he walked across the lane toward Peterpotter’s broad, green, Christian pasture. Peterpotter had seen him and stopped in his course down the hill, but the tractor still idled, the mowers all still shook and clicked at a distance. Barnaby stepped over the curb onto the grass. The enveloping, new-mown fragrance of life, a fragrance that Peterpotter of all people was orchestrating, lifted Barnaby and carried him up toward the tractor. In the exhilaration of it, he wished by God that instead of khakis and a plaid shirt he had real robes to wear. The robes of forgiving transcendence which he might very well wear when he went back downtown. He extended his right hand to shake the hand of his enemy. He knew as soon as he saw his hand before him that it was unusual because he still had a ways to walk to the tractor and then would have to negotiate around and inside the mowers to get that hand to Peterpotter, but so what. He kept his hand out and felt medieval or Shakespearean, or both if you could be both. The feeling had vividly to do with carrying a flag of good intentions across a battlefield littered with carnage, a flag that offered, that cried out for, that commanded with the gods and the children and the mothers, peace, peace and good fellowship now and evermore.

  Maybe Peterpotter had in fact been enough distressed by TJ’s death to lose his bearings. Maybe TJ had not, as Barnaby thought, been camouflage for Peterpotter’s obsessive recrimination simply because Peterpotter blew his own car lots through bad investments. Maybe Peterpotter really believed that Barnaby had wronged him, and if so, then maybe the apology had been good. As this was good. Both of them had lost everything (though Peterpotter did apparently have a fine mower), and so the apology, painful as it was, had been prelude to this blessing.

  He held his hand ahead and went up the hill slowly. Not as slowly as a king (regardless of Shakespeare, those days were gone; besides, his rank was of a different sort now), only slowly enough so that he could keep from falling down when his feet caught in the pitch of the slope.

  Peterpotter sat on the tractor and waited for him, exactly as Barnaby would have had it. And it was a different Peterpotter, which was also as Barnaby would have had it. It was Peterpotter in a sweatshirt with the arms torn off, a return to the roots that Barnaby had always imagined for Peterpotter. But it was also Peterpotter in blue jeans and very expensive, very worn out loafers with no socks. From the waist down, which was determining territory in some respects, Peterpotter looked like an eastern gentleman on his fake, weekend farm. Barnaby’s father had had precise and fixed definitions for such things, but for Barnaby, if someone looked remotely like a gentleman, that was usually enough. Barnaby hoped that he himself appeared as much a gentleman to Peterpotter. He reached the tractor with his hand still extended and thought that he did.

  It was meet and right. That echoed from one liturgy or another and sounded just the note Barnaby intended. He wondered if he should say it aloud. He wondered if, along with forgiveness, he needed to offer another, real apology. He felt as if he could.

  He stepped past the small, but not that small, front tire, and looked up over his hand into Peterpotter’s tanned face. Peterpotter had aged and lost a good deal of weight. Good. Good.

  Barnaby suffused his own face with gravitas and spoke just one word at first to Peterpotter. He said, loudly enough to sound out with truth above the reverberating clatter of the idling tractor, an old and rusting tractor as it turned out, he said, “Peace.”

  Peterpotter shouted back two words. Much louder than the tractor. Far louder than Barnaby.

  “Fuck you.”

  Barnaby was taken aback, but he had so much momentum that he could not quite stop playing the event into which he thought he’d brought them both.

  He addressed Peterpotter and was surprised to hear anger in his voice and surprised not to hear more anger.

  He said carefully, “It is meet and right,” and right away he wondered what the hell it meant.

  “Fuck you,” Peterpotter shouted back. “You ruined my life, you piece of shit.”

  Along with outrage in a voltage that made him shake from his ankles to the top of his head, Barnaby felt some surprise that Peterpotter’s Oklahoma cadences had taken on the nasty urbanity of one coast or the other. Peterpotter had been watching too much television. Dry spit was at the corner of Peterpotter’s mouth. Peterpotter also had stolen Barnaby’s line, and that Barnaby would not stand for.

  “You ruined my life,” Barnaby said, shouted, and only now thought to bring his hand of peace back to his side.

  Inside him, his father’s voice said icily that this was a guy you had to hit. A Peterpotter was somebody you
punched, and not just one swing.

  But Peterpotter, without taking his eyes from Barnaby, slammed his own fists at whatever were the gears around his knees and his crotch, and the tractor lifted itself in a roar that drowned even the sound of outrage from inside Barnaby’s ears.

  The mowers joined their noise with the tractor. There was nothing pastoral in that when you were close to it. It was loud like the end of the world.

  As he tried to think how to reach Peterpotter with his first punch, Barnaby shouted again, in vain against the noise, “My life.”

  But that wasn’t the issue. Or it was.

  The tractor was in motion.

  Peterpotter was making a long, silent bellow of attack from inside his machinery’s horror of grating, clanking, ever-faster churning, and the mowers were upon Barnaby.

  Sure, Barnaby was a New Yorker, or he had been. Also a big shot in La Cote, those were the days. So what? Had Barnaby and his supposed eastern friends taken advantage, as Peterpotter had implied at the apology? Had Barnaby wheedled information with what Peterpotter had called his Yankee accent? Had he gotten any information at all? With which Peterpotter had been betrayed? Barnaby had positively enjoyed coming to Oklahoma for that brief idyll in the days when Ada was Ada, and he had only seen what everybody else in town saw, and then gotten his tip from Ada and from his dead father. And as to Peterpotter’s contention at the apology that Barnaby thought he deserved too much, had Peterpotter thought he deserved four desserts and an airplane? Not to mention a newsstand? Had that kind of behavior been healthy for TJ?

  No, Peterpotter had done it to himself, and any baseball-card-trading altar boy could have told him so. Peterpotter had put up all his cards to buy a lemonade stand in November because that’s what everybody else was doing. So it snowed, and the price of oil collapsed.