Agnes Among the Gargoyles

by Patrick Flynn

  At daybreak Agnes encounters her mother on WEGE. Agnes kicks the remote control across the room and forces herself to watch.

  "...Fearless? I should say not! When she was small the craziest things used to frighten her." Hannah is at ease before the camera. "We had a set of illustrated Dickens, and Agnes was terrified of the pictures on the covers, especially the one for Martin Chuzzlewit. How she hated those books! I finally had to throw them away...."

  Agnes calls her friend Barbara Foucault.

  The phone rings about twenty times. When Barbara answers, her voice is comically clipped.

  "Yes?".

  "I know you were asleep. It's six in the morning. I need a favor."

  "Anything at all," says Barbara. "Who are you?"

  "This is serious. I need a place to stay for a few days."

  Barbara groans and coughs. Agnes can hear the igniting of a lighter.

  "What did you do, kill someone?" Barbara asks.

  "Would that I had. Didn't you see the news?"

  Barbara coughs again. "No. Last night I watched six hours of the Westminister Kennel Club finals. I taped it last year, and it's been nagging at me."

  "Hang on, would you?" says Agnes. She lowers the receiver. Her mother is on a roll.

  "...For a long time she couldn't set eyes on the image of George Washington without bursting into tears. Even his silhouette could set her off. And I seem to remember her being terrified of certain typefaces...."

  "What's happening?" says Barbara.

  "A portrait is emerging of a child with severe psychological difficulties," Agnes tells her. "I'll be right over."

  Agnes throws a few things into a knapsack and goes down the fire escape to avoid the reporters. She emerges in a courtyard between two of the Duke of Exeter's wings. She hops a short fence and runs down the street.

  The sun is barely up. The streets are empty and silent. Agnes reaches the subway entrance. She bounds down the steps and runs smack into a bum urinating on the wall. She screams. He screams. The sight of his diseased penis is bad enough, but it is his face that is truly alarming. It is a face from Agnes's past. It chills her. It is a gray face, creased and stubbled, with deep-set eyes that mock her as she passes.

  My God, she thinks. It's him.

  After all these years.

  Chuzzlewit!

  Chapter Six

  Barbara Foucault lives in Brooklyn, in Borough Park, a center of Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism.

  "I think Lamark was right," says Barbara. She sits in the Eames chair her therapist sold her when he moved his office from Manhattan to Hartsdale. "Acquired characteristics can be passed on. How else could Madelaine Wegeman look so aristocratic? Her nose looks like the rudder of a yacht. Her greatgrandfather was a complete prole. Black Jack McKibbin—they never talk about him."

  Barbara folds up her legs under her. "The McKibbins are new money, and they might as well admit it. I remember when Madelaine got married. June of '68. I was already wasting time reading Town & Country. I followed Madelaine quite closely in those days. I thought we looked alike. I read somewhere that she had enjoyed the Mushroom Planet books as a child—I loved the Mushroom Planet books! I was shocked when I saw the pictures of her wedding. It was incredibly tasteless. I loathed her dress. It had puffed sleeves and this absurd conical headdress. She looked like Rapunzel. Then I found out she and Ron went to Puerto Vallarta on their honeymoon. Puerto Vallarta! That was where you went with your chaperone when you won on The Dating Game. So tacky."

  Barbara is an actress. Agnes sees all her shows. She goes to storefront theaters in the plant district, the antiques district, the office supplies district. Barbara belongs to an acting company that specializes in highbrow revivals, Moliere and Racine and the like. Agnes first saw her as Lady Teazle in The School For Scandal. The show was genteel and irrelevant, a Georgian sitcom. On a sweltering night you take refuge in an air conditioned movie theater and when you come out the heat is a shock; when you leave one of Barbara's shows, the strains of the final minuet ringing in your ears, the shock is life itself, unchoreographed and in the basest prose.

  "I had to get away," Agnes tells Barbara. "Let everyone else scramble for that little slice of fame. I'm not interested."

  "It's always people like you who have opportunity handed to them," says Barbara. "It's not fair. You don't even like Wegeman."

  "I despise him," says Agnes. "Look what he's done to New York."

  "He's egregious, certainly, but I don't care," says Barbara. "I'd let him show his appreciation by adopting me. I'd renounce the theater and move right in."

  "Don't you think Madelaine might object?"

  "We'd get along like a house afire. We're very similar."

  "I'll bet they don't even sleep together," says Agnes.

  "Granted, Ron naked must be an appalling sight."

  Agnes spends a peaceful week at Barbara's. The reporters either can't find her or have lost interest, and Agnes doesn't care which. Agnes gets up early in the morning and makes breakfast, and after Barbara has gone off to audition or be an office temp, she shops for dinner or takes long walks through the neighborhood. She doesn't turn on a television. The newspapers are all in Hebrew. She soaks in Barbara's bathtub, which stands on brass lion's paws.

  Barbara is too disorganized to cook. She eats a lot of scalloped potatoes out of boxes. Agnes once considered going to cooking school. She spends hours making the kinds of desserts that haven't been seen since Delmonico's closed.

  "There's a tourniquet of butterfat tightening around my heart," says Barbara. "I love it."

  The two women eat like horses. Barbara blames her appetite on depression. She has broken up with her boyfriend Jack.

  Jack the Pinboy.

  Barbara met him at a cast party at the newly refurbished Hippodrome Lanes in Times Square. There were a lot of Wall Street people there that night. Barbara and Jack clucked their tongues at the money-grubbing Yuppie assholes they were forced to be near.

  Barbara said, "It was like someone picked up the brokerage houses and shook them and this was what fell out."

  The next thing Barbara knew, Jack was setting the pins in her alley. He tried to help with her horrific bowling. He shouted instructions. He contorted his body for the english. Then he tried something else. After dropping the rack for Barbara's turn, he would move several pins an inch or two to improve the action. Any contact at all guaranteed a strike. Barbara bowled nothing but strikes and gutter balls and 10-pin spares.

  "My score sheet was covered with slashes and dashes," Barbara tells Agnes. "It looked strangely cuneiform."

  "So the first thing you did together was cheat."

  "Agnes, you have no romance in you."

  Barbara pursued him. She went to hear his band, Anonymous, which plays rocked-up arrangements of traditional Irish folk music.

  "The young professionals go apeshit for us," Jack told Barbara.

  "Assholes," said Barbara. "Have you read much Joyce?"

  "Only Ulysses."

  That sealed it. Barbara, a fanatical reader, has always been a pushover for a man with a book. Barbara herself so loves books that she dropped out of college after a single semester because reading had become drudgery.

  Barbara thought she and Jack were in love. But his discontent soon became apparent.

  "We want different things," he said.

  She felt nauseated. "Like what?"

  "You want to talk all the time. You're always asking me about myself."

  He made it sound as though she had committed a crime.

  "I'm interested in you," she said.

  "You're rushing things. You'll find out about me in time."

  "How will I find out if I don't ask any questions?"

  "In a good relationship, things just emerge," he said scornfully. He was making her feel horribly empirical. "I think we should stop seeing each other. I can't spend my life telling you when your behavior is inappropriate. You certainly don't have a handle on it."


  "Tell me. I don't mind," said Barbara.

  At the recounting of this, Agnes's gin and tonic goes down her windpipe.

  "That was my low point," Barbara admits.

  "Good Lord. How debasing."

  Jack said to Barbara, "I need some time to think. I'm going to visit my brother for a few days. Can't you see how upset I am? Isn't that proof that there's something wrong between us?"

  Agnes and Barbara sit in the front room of Barbara's apartment. Octagonal in shape, with six windows, it is the perfect place to watch the winter sunsets. Agnes and Barbara can see all the way to the water, to the ghostly trellis of the Coney Island Parachute Jump. The mayor, a tireless booster of the city, never wearies of calling it "The Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn."

  Barbara is morose. "He was supposed to call me. We haven't even finished breaking up."

  "No one ever finishes. He's probably having too good a time with his brother."

  "I doubt it. His brother works for IBM. He bowls."

  "So they have a lot in common."

  "I mean he really bowls. In a league."

  "I don't know what to tell you," says Agnes. "You handled the whole thing badly."

  Barbara doesn't hide her annoyance. "What would you have done?"

  "I wouldn't have been so eager. I'd have let him come to me."

  "You always say that," says Barbara, fed up with Agnes's self-righteousness. "What if everyone waited for the other person to do the pursuing? Things would grind to a dead halt. The species would die out in a generation."

  The next morning, a postcard arrives from Jack the Pinboy.

  Babs,

  Just sitting here in desolate Binghamton, listening to the factories padlocking their doors and thinking of you.

  I feel real bad about our last conversation. I think that things were said that weren't meant.

  When I get back to the city I think we should talk again.

  I want to see you.

  Peace,

  Jack

  You are so lucky," says Agnes, handing the postcard back to Barbara. "I can't believe it."

  "What?"

  "You've been given a second chance. He wants to get back with you. Now you can really make him eat shit."

  "Really, Agnes. Control yourself. Tell me something constructive."

  "I am."

  "No. Tell me what you think. What you seriously think."

  Agnes snatches the postcard back and takes a second look. "I think if he wrote it in Binghamton it shouldn't be postmarked Ansonia Station."

  "I noticed that too, but I'm not troubled," says Barbara. "I always write my postcards before I actually leave the city. It's the one area where I'm brutally organized."

  "I give up," says Agnes.

  "What do you think of the style?"

  "I don't get you."

  "It's nicely abject, isn't it?"

  "He never actually apologizes," says Agnes. "He never says he was wrong. Look here where he takes a swan dive into the passive voice: 'things were said that weren't meant—give me a break."

  "But he also writes that he feels 'real bad.' That 'real' is interesting, don't you think? Why 'real' and not 'really?' The effect is very emotional, very passionate."

  "Very illiterate."

  "And I'm completely blown away by that 'I want to see you,'" says Barbara. "I don't know what to make of it. Does he want to see me just to talk, or does he want to see me—is the resumption of our relationship a foregone conclusion?"

  "Your textual analysis is brilliant. I think you're having some kind of fit."

  Barbara collapses on the sofa. "You may be right."

  "I don't know where you got the idea that men are cryptic. They tell you they love you or they tell you to fuck off. They're hopelessly screwed up in a million ways, but they are direct."

  "So what do you think he's saying?"

  Agnes makes two more drinks. "He's lonely, he's horny, he's bored."

  "You're very harsh," says Barbara.

  "I take that as a compliment. At least I'm not in tears over his choice of commemorative stamp."

  That angle had never occurred to Barbara. She rolls off the couch and reaches for the card.

  "Lindbergh!" she says. "A wonderful husband to Anne."

  "The Lone Eagle," counters Agnes. "A notorious anti-Semite."

  Barbara and Agnes take some psilocybin. All laughter and perception, they walk through the bazaar that is Thirteenth Avenue, the main commercial drag of Borough Park.

  "Thirteenth Avenue," says Agnes, coming to an insight. "Of course there wouldn't be any triskaidekaphobia in Jewish culture."

  "What about the twelve tribes?"

  "Ah, yes...."

  The street shimmers with unreality. The sidewalks are jammed with families squeezing past display tables and curbside peddlers. The Orthodox women are baby factories producing at capacity. Nearly every couple is trailed by a mob of children, and it is not unusual to see three babies jockeying for position in a carriage built for two. In Borough Park, the procreation is frantic and race-saving, with every ejaculation of semen another gob in the eye of the Reich. Agnes and Barbara pass a cobbler, and a man who blocks hats. They browse in shoe stores displaying styles perfect for island wear—if the Island were Ellis.

  "It really is the end of the earth," says Barbara.

  Barbara shows Agnes a recent issue of National Geographic with stories on Zimbabwe and the South China Sea and Borough Park.

  That evening, Agnes and Barbara, still a bit high, listen to Hendrix's "Are You Experienced." Agnes notes that a grammatical ambiguity lies at the heart of the song: is "experienced" a transitive or intransitive verb? "Moliere said that grammar could control even kings," says Barbara. The two women theorize that revolutions in word usage were at the heart of the social changes of the 1960s.

  "The civil rights movement led blacks from the passive to the active voice," says Barbara.

  Rabbi Bloch, the landlord, comes upstairs to talk to Barbara. She gives him the rent, and they exchange pleasantries. Lurking behind the rabbi is his son, Dov. Dov is eighteen or nineteen. He is all arms and legs, a spindly copy of his father. He has the rabbi's long earlobes and darting eyes. He wanders as far from his father's side as he can, exploring as much of Barbara's apartment as he dares.

  Dov interrupts his father to ask Barbara a question. "Do your radiators knock at night?"

  Barbara doesn't get a chance to answer.

  "Why would they?" says the rabbi. "We flushed out the whole system."

  Dov is adamant. "I've heard them."

  Agnes hasn't heard a peep out of the radiators. Barbara tries to spare Dov some embarrassment.

  "I guess they might knock a little," she says.

  "May I?" says Dov. He heads into Barbara's bedroom. His father stops him.

  "What's the matter?" says Dov.

  "Weber Heating did the work. Let them come and see what's the matter."

  "But I can take a quick look—"

  "No. I don't want you in there fiddling around, voiding warranties."

  After they leave, Agnes and Barbara speculate about which piece of Barbara's underwear Dov would most like to sniff.

  "Underneath his religion, he's a teenager," says Barbara.

  Agnes asks about Mrs. Bloch.

  "She's a shadowy figure," says Barbara. "We don't speak very much. I catch glimpses of her at the window—a little worried face under a dark wig."

  After a week at Barbara's, Agnes is ready to go home. Barbara convinces her to stay one more day.

  "We'll go out and have some real fun," says Barbara.

  Agnes waits to meet Barbara at the South Street Seaport. Barbara was having her hair cut after work. She doesn't have a pot to piss in, but she goes to Juan Gris in Wegeman Tower. Top models have their hair cut there; Barbara jokes that she is the only one in the appointment book with two names.

  When Agnes sees her, she is shocked.

  "You look great," says Agnes.

  B
arbara's hair is little-boy short, and bleached blond.

  "I wanted to do it for a long time," says Barbara. "I think it's neat."

  They look for a place to eat. Barbara scowls at the men in suits.

  "Why did we come here?" she moans. "Why are we here with all these corporate shitheads?"