Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  “You see?” said a voice that could only have been the kind barkeep running the ship at the end of the night. “It’s not so bad after all. A mouth gets smacked, it bleeds.”

  Barnaby opened his eyes and looked up to see the guys on either side of the barkeep nodding, but they looked like citizens who’d never been punched in the mouth in their lives.

  The girl took her fingers away from his lips.

  She looked at him and smiled and took her forearm back from him too.

  She smiled, and he could see her teeth, and behind her teeth, somewhere on her tongue which he could not see, there she was. He didn’t know her name. Her lips thinned for her smile, and the smile was happy and worried but a real smile, and her lips were the tenderest lips on God’s green earth. He would have told her that, if he’d thought she could understand it.

  He would not have told her again that he loved her, though he loved her only more.

  His courage was gone.

  Courage wasn’t something he was used to, so he didn’t mind.

  She looked at her fingers which were as red as he’d known they had to be, and she arched her eyebrows and rolled her eyes to say Christ Almighty without a word like only kids could do and really mean it.

  She dipped and rubbed her fingers in her water like a finger bowl at a good dinner party, and then she smiled at him again.

  She smiled, and a sun shone in Barnaby’s chest, and she stood up, tall and thin, almost skinny, a goddess who’d come to Barnaby Griswold.

  “Thank you,” he called out, and she understood that. She made a little shrug that said, “Oh, okay, no big deal,” but that said also that she knew what he thought about her lips on God’s green earth—that she knew he’d seen her in her eyes and her smile—that it really was a crazy thing to touch his gory mouth.

  Then she wiped the shine of snot from under her nose on her Brooks Brothers shoulder and was gone.

  He saw her black sneakers go away beyond other people’s legs, and he looked up to the good-hearted barkeep for help in managing the practical things now.

  A helping hand out to the station wagon.

  Directions maybe to the emergency room after all.

  It did hurt.

  With a month left on his suspension, Barnaby Griswold was as far from a pilgrim as could be. He was courting.

  The next day, Saturday, when except for clean clothes he looked far worse than the night before, he went to Ada’s for Saturday afternoon dominoes. He had missed his morning visit, but that had been overlooked in the past. He had called. He was a hundred percent on time for the dominoes, and he was eager.

  It wasn’t, after all, as if he wanted or could afford to leave town yet. Nor, to be fair to the goodness of his heart, did he mean to throw over caregiving altogether; just caregiving wouldn’t be all consuming. Even by his own calculations, he owed Ada through the first of the year, and he meant to honor that debt. But the baton of pilgrimage, thank God, had been passed off somewhere in the night, and Barnaby had much else on his mind.

  He was sore, for one thing, though he had pills for that. And actually, between the pills and some confusion with his olfactory operations, he couldn’t smell. Which meant that the vapors of death were not such a shroud inside the door to the condominium, not for Barnaby anyhow, and he could concentrate on feeling with his tongue at the stitches reattaching the inside of his lower lip to his chin.

  Yes, because the ultimate issue had never been anything other than to resurrect a whole and healthy Barnaby, the Barnaby of old who would issue from suspension (and from Oklahoma as things had turned out) with not just the same old gifts and enthusiasms, but with above all the same size, the same cohering mass of self that magically attracted money. For a while he had thought tennis and fitness would recover that size for him, and they had in part. A championship could never be taken away.

  Then, out of awkward, perhaps diminishing, necessity, he had thought someone like himself might actually approach his version of magnetic mass through a pilgrimage into deeds as pure as driven snow.

  But now.

  Now Barnaby’s size, and with it all the good things his gravity would once more attract, now Barnaby’s size was building itself back hour by hour, minute by minute. And the agent of all this, the combination which opened the lock that athlete and pilgrim could not crack? It was romance, it was a beautiful woman, it was the age-old vitamin of courtship. It was love.

  Would Barnaby the lover have the necessary gravitational mass to launch himself back to his true pole on the first of the year? Would he get himself to New York and to La Cote and to one recognizable version or another of his good life on New Year’s Day? Yes. He would. He had always known he would, but now the proof was in any mirror. Barnaby Griswold was a different man this morning than he had been yesterday afternoon, and anyone at all could see it.

  The truth was that he couldn’t wait to show himself off to Ada. She might or might not be able to see in as far as the stitches, but the outside of his face was plenty to look at. His mouth was so swollen and bruised he could have been someone else entirely, a movie star playing a career boxer who was more sexy than Barnaby had ever hoped to be. His eyes, which he hadn’t realized were also a problem during the initial excitement about his mouth, had taken on layers of putridly glistening color while he slept, as if the boxer had decided to masquerade in the sunglasses of a raccoon. His nose, blessedly, had not been broken at all, so why he couldn’t smell was a mystery, but a happy one; he was left with the smells that had surrounded his very pretty girl last night. All in all, he looked rakishly amused, overpoweringly masculine, just the kind of man who would profoundly interest that pretty girl at Doug’s when he dropped in tonight to thank her for her attentions. This was Barnaby Griswold.

  Rather than hesitating at the door of the condominium to chat, he cruised past Happiness with only a cheery hello so that he could observe her without having to suffer her reaction frontally.

  She stared, and as best he could tell, she might have been expecting Barnaby to show up looking like this. It didn’t feel to Barnaby as if she disapproved, exactly, but clearly Happiness was not pleased. Good. He’d made an impression.

  He was wearing an old turtleneck shirt, which was not his usual style unless he was shoveling snow and which had been hell to get on over his face. It might have been the turtleneck that put Happiness off. If so, too bad; boxers wore turtlenecks after a fight. Also the girl at Doug’s would see a new side to Barnaby from the Brooks Brothers shirts. And just the same, he was glad he had lost the beret his daughters had given him for whatever was his last loved Christmas. He would have worn it, and it would have been too much.

  But Ada wasn’t waiting expectantly at her desk as she always liked to do. Where was she? Did she know already that the pilgrimage was over?

  No, sometimes Ada thought mail might not be delivered on Saturdays, and then she abandoned her usual post in the hall to avoid appearing confused by whatever was on her desk. So Barnaby cruised on into the living room. Ada’s scrutiny would decide official approval of his appearance, but he already knew from Happiness that he cut a splendid figure. Who would have thought last night when Peterpotter led him outside that Barnaby would be grateful for a sock in the mouth and then all that kicking while he was down? But he was grateful. He looked like a new man just as he was undertaking the looks-intensive business of love, and he felt in his every fiber ready and able to preach about gratitude. Perhaps television was nearer in his future than he thought. He would have to attend to his list of priorities some time, and evangelism was moving up the rankings. Should he preach to Happiness? That was fertile ground, if ever there were. Happiness, though, with her relentlessness, might turn into a long session. By the time he finished with Happiness, Barnaby could very well look like himself all over again, which was exactly why people preferred to preach on television where the congregation couldn’t get you into a dialogue after the sermon.

  But should he worry about
that, his face healing? Would he have to ask Peterpotter and the big friends to punch him again in another few weeks if the pretty girl wanted him only as a boxer? Oh, come on. Listen. You worked one scenario at a time, and if the deal didn’t close before there was trouble, if your scenario didn’t migrate into the truth, then you just had to hope a new and better scenario would present itself as necessary. It was not, after all, as if everyone didn’t always live next door to the end of things. The market could crash tomorrow, and if it did, there would be opportunities. This week, if you looked like a boxer, you were a boxer. And this week Barnaby did.

  Ada, however, was not in the living room.

  She was already around the corner and wheeled up tight to the dining room table. She had the dominoes out of the box and turned down. She had chosen her own dominoes and pulled them over in front of her, but she had not yet turned them up. She stared at her dominoes, waiting for Barnaby.

  Barnaby checked his watch. On the dot. Not that in today’s mood, now that he was limber enough to have gotten out of bed and taken a shower, he was likely to be late for anything. In fact it was going to take all his resources of will not to be first in line when they opened the door at Doug’s this evening.

  Though, actually, Doug’s door was already open. Doug’s served lunch, and just that thought was enough to send Barnaby’s pulse into a spike.

  He stood beside Ada, and she did not look up, so he sat down in his assigned chair from which he could reach her dominoes and adjust things when she made impossible plays.

  He leaned his face over in front of her, and he smiled largely and gruesomely, and he said, “Good afternoon, Ada.”

  Briefly, with stony indifference, she glanced at him, and then looked back to her unexposed dominoes spread across her nice but no-longer-polished mahogany tabletop.

  “You love somebody else,” she said.

  “What?” He stayed leaning toward her, showing her his face, giving her a second chance.

  “You heard me. You love somebody else. Fine. Choose your dominoes. I’ve already got mine. You don’t have to worry. I shuffled them. I didn’t cheat.”

  Out of the blue, this came.

  And she meant it. She said it all with the stoic, accusatory conviction of a broken heart.

  How did she know?

  He marveled at her radar. Did Ada, of all people, understand something about love? Ada was one soul Barnaby would have classified, along with himself until just recently, as a thoroughgoing inept in love. Her life, as best he’d gathered, had been bitterly deprived of romance. Her late, long and admirable marriage of friendship (but for Win) was the proof of her deprivation and the seal on her bitterness. One of her favorite lines of martyrdom was that the important achievement she’d managed in her life was to become the doctor’s wife, and on hard days, she admitted that that was what her father had thought too. Otherwise, she never mentioned the doctor. And now for God sake she’d had all these strokes.

  How could she possibly know?

  He smirked.

  He wasn’t sure why he did. A light, dismissing laugh was what would have been appropriate, and maybe his mouth turned it into a smirk. If so, his mouth, with its swollen and bruised contortions, should have hidden it too. But Ada was oblivious to all those swellings and bruisings that were the large events on his face; she knew about the smirk instantly.

  She hunched lower in her wheelchair and swiped the back of her hand like a flipper across what she could reach of the tabletop, sending a dozen dominoes to the floor.

  “Go ahead and smirk. Is she a blond? Of course she is. Happiness, come congratulate Barnaby. He’s in love with a blond.”

  All of a sudden, Barnaby was as furtively giddy as a fat boy could be when teased jealously on the playground, when teased out loud for loving the girl he could hardly dare to imagine.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

  Now Ada did look at him. “Do you deny it?” she said.

  Barnaby wasn’t dumb enough to actually answer any more of the teasing, but because she was looking at him and because he was confident (how could he not be?) that his face would distract anybody from anything, he met Ada’s look. He smiled back at her. He ran his tongue out over a particularly scabby corner of lip.

  She continued to stare at him with her question until he was almost giddy enough to blurt out everything. But now he didn’t want to blurt it out; he didn’t want to jinx his pretty girl by talking about her. To keep from blurting, he squatted uncomfortably down and picked the dominoes up from the good, gray, soupcrusted carpeting beside Ada’s wheels. Two double sixes. He was giddy with love, but two double sixes were interesting just the same. Barnaby would have to decide whether to keep those sixes himself or arrange for them to fall into Ada’s hand, in which case he’d have to be sure she played them properly and got her points. Ada did like to win. But she also liked for him to win, particularly with the big numbers. Here, in other words, was a moral quandary right up Barnaby’s alley: what to do when you can please people no matter how you fluff.

  “Happiness. Come in here and congratulate Barnaby on leaving us.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said smugly, and sat back up with his illicit dominoes.

  Happiness came to them out the near, swinging door of the kitchen, and Ada said, “Tell him good-bye.”

  Happiness said, “You look terrible, Barnaby Griswold.”

  There, finally: acknowledgment, even if it was stern.

  “You poor man,” she said.

  You poor man, that was better.

  “He’s leaving us for a blond.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. Would you tell her that, Happiness?” He heard himself trying to sound irritated because Ada would be looking for irritation as proof. Then he checked his watch. He knew he had hours, but he wanted to be sure how many hours, and he wanted Ada to see him checking.

  “He’s checking his watch,” Ada crowed. “He has a date.”

  He sat silently and let his silence suggest that she was right. He was properly ashamed of lying, and he was nervous about pretending to something he wanted so much. But a date. If Ada thought so, it could be true.

  Happiness took his hand and pressed into it two whole bulbs of garlic.

  “I could feel evil near you, Barnaby, and I knew something was going to happen. I should have given you these before. Whenever I am not well, or fear illness, I take extra garlic. You can read about it. Even when the Lord is near and the day is bright, I take a regular amount. When your body gets used to it, it doesn’t hurt your breath a bit.”

  “Is she talking about garlic again? Oh for God sake.”

  Barnaby was moving (because of the garlic? Barnaby was in a state of mind for almost anything, but garlic?); he was moving anyhow beyond his knee-jerk giddiness. And beyond that giddiness was something serious and calm.

  “I’m glad to have garlic,” Barnaby said to the insistently hovering presence attached to the bulbs. “Thank you, Happiness.”

  Love. Barnaby was calm and serious with love.

  “Well, I’m not going to eat it,” Ada said. “Period. Do you hear me? So don’t give me any.”

  Happiness ignored Ada and bent closer at Barnaby. “You need it,” she said. “I can tell.”

  “Actually, I got beaten up last night. That’s why I look like this.” He spoke more to Ada than to Happiness, and he watched to see what Ada would make of it, if it changed her sense of portent, but she was now intent only upon setting up and arranging her dominoes.

  Happiness squeezed his hand that held the flaking, papery wads of garlic and said, “I was in danger and sick a lot of times before I found out about the Lord and about garlic.”

  “Let’s play,” Ada said. “No more talking. Choose your dominoes, Barnaby. And you can go first. I’m going to win today, but I’m going to give you a chance.”

  Happiness looked at Barnaby with deep significance and backed off into the kitchen, and Barnaby set the garlic down on the
table away from their playing area. He put back, facedown into the common pool of dominoes, those pieces he had picked up off the floor, and then he drew the two double sixes, which he played to start. Ada made a wonderful groan of outrage, and he beat her horribly for a while, and then he let her begin to win a little, and then by the end they were close enough that they could each argue the other had won the day because Barnaby’s accounting was confusing, as ever, even to him.

  Through it all, he was calm.

  The afternoon was a success, and Barnaby was calm. In his way, he was serious. How much easier things were when you were courting.

  Ada had fun and became tired and ready for dinner and for early to bed. Barnaby had managed to string the afternoon along into early evening, much later than he’d thought he would be able to hold out, but still early enough that there would not yet be lots of diners at Doug’s when he went over.

  He was calm about that too. He was serious about it. He did look like a boxer, and now there was so much more.

  There was more because the real success of the afternoon was Ada’s accusing him of being in love. She had said, “Barnaby’s in love,” and that reverberated outside any boxer’s giddiness, outside the teasing of envious children; it reverberated like honest encouragement from the real world of adults.

  Ada was supremely an adult, after all. She was old enough to have had strokes.

  That was what it was. The strokes had taught Ada about love.

  Barnaby was surrounded, maybe for the first time in his life, by love, and Ada couldn’t help but notice with her new and marvelous stroke-activated radar.

  When he’d finished stacking the dominoes in their box, he stood up to leave and Ada said, “You’re off to see your blond. Have a good time.”

  Now, at the end of the day, Ada spoke without her earlier power. She was tired, and she sounded almost glad Barnaby had somewhere to go so she didn’t have to worry about entertaining him herself.