A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

  A year later, she was pregnant with Rudy. Consumed by morning sickness, she did not have the presence of mind to mark the last time Charlie held up his arms to her out of need or to ask when he began sucking apathetically on whatever was at hand—a thumb, a shoelace—or why he so often sat dead-eyed in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  She threw a small baby shower for herself, which Cessarine attended. It was her first opportunity to thank her aunt for the baby book she had given her, as Cessarine had never again returned to the Westville shanty. Without her, Delwina would have done everything wrong. She would have ruined Charlie. She assured her aunt that she would be doing for the new baby everything she had done for Charlie to avoid the irreparable damage of nervous spoilage.

  “That method is now out of date,” Aunt Cess declared. “Now it is recommended that you simply hold them.”

  After that, Delwina smothered all her children with love.

  17

  He stood in the front room in house slippers, on plush carpeting, amid the persistent gloom. The venetian blinds remained shut against the bright day. Why? The cut-glass inlays in the front door didn’t admit much light, either. Afraid. He was terribly afraid. Evelyn dead. His business doomed. And life, for him, a curdled dream with no end in sight. Under the morning’s phone calls, silence reigned. Time flew by. He switched on the lamp, whose cone of light shone down on the TV tray, where he kept a tidy array of remote controls. He was seriously tempted to turn on the TV and resume watching Popeye, the Robert Altman movie, a copy of which he owned on VHS. It was a favorite of his. The recliner, with its brown piping, pillowy arms gone flat as shelves, and a small cowlick of crust on the seat that would not come out, could have belonged to no one but Charlie Barnes, who might have loved himself. Who did not love himself. Who thought himself an ass whose fate was worse than death: it was to live forever in the permanent fear of always dying.

  “Experts at exports”: T-R-U-T-H. The clue eluded him. He tossed the puzzle down on the coffee table and returned to the kitchen, where he took up the landline and called his mother. He had done so without exception every day since she had entered, at age eighty, a North Peoria nursing facility. She was not an easy interlocutor, however, mistaking him six days out of seven for the son she loved most.

  “It’s Charlie calling, Mom, not Rudy,” he said.

  “Well, thanks for calling anyway,” she said. “But I’m not feeling too well this morning, son. It’s all the joint pain. And I have … what do they call it? When you can’t think straight. What do they call that, son?”

  “Brain fog,” he said.

  “That’s right, brain fog. And I can’t see so well anymore.”

  “I know,” he said. “Macular degeneration.”

  “That’s right. Macular degeneration.”

  “And you have restless leg.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “The restless leg was bad last night.”

  The litany had resumed right away, unbroken from the day before. As soon as the conversation began, Charlie wanted off the phone and out of life. For it all seemed suddenly like one long, tired script, our blocks of speech assigned to us at the start of time. And though we might yearn for new adventures, happy ends, we lack the capacity to imagine even alternative lines.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said. “At least it’s not pancreatic cancer.”

  But why bring that up? What was pancreatic cancer to her—or to him, for that matter?

  “There are cures for cancer nowadays,” she replied. “There are no cures for rheumatoid arthritis.”

  “Sounds to me, Mom, like you’ve never looked into the particulars of pancreatic cancer, so I have some news for you. There are no cures.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You don’t know how hard I had it when you kids were growing up,” she said.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I’m just not sure it was worth it.”

  “Jeez, Mom, thanks. I’m sure it was some picnic for all the rest of us.”

  “You have never been grateful for all that I sacrificed.”

  “This again,” he said. “Are you really the only person who suffers?”

  “No one calls me. No one cares.”

  “I just called you, did I not?”

  “I’m dying. Don’t you understand that?”

  “Well, guess what, Mom? So am I. I have pancreatic cancer.”

  Pretense and fakery. But he couldn’t help himself. She was driving him nuts, and it just came out. Could she, for two seconds, think about anyone’s plight other than her own? Well, he’d find out.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “You’re as healthy as an ax.”

  “You mean ‘ox,’ I think.”

  “You’ve been dieting since you were twelve.”

  “That’s Rudy, Mom. The vitamin man.”

  “I told you, no one dies from cancer anymore,” she said. “They have cures.”

  “Pancreatic cancer isn’t just any old cancer, Mom. It’s a full-blown fucking nightmare.”

  “You know I don’t care for that kind of language.”

  “Uh-huh. Well. You don’t seem to be listening to me.”

  “And you don’t seem to be listening to me,” she said. “They have come a long way with cancer.”

  “I have to go now,” he said. “I don’t have much time.”

  “Thanks for calling,” she said.

  18

  His mother would soon lose her mind entirely to dementia. A peculiar variety, it must be said, with brief episodes of perfect clarity. Increasingly, however, she mistook him for Rudy, until at last he had to concede that he was no more in his mother’s mind.

  Then one day, about a year after the phone call documented above, it came to her: she had a firstborn. His name was Charlie. Never had she loved anything as she had once loved him. He was alive—had to be—somewhere in the suburbs of Chicago. She remembered as well a phone number that had not been in her possession for many years. It appeared out of nowhere as if lit in neon, flashing in the dark night for her alone. Eighty-eight that year and living in a different Peoria nursing facility, she dialed Charlie’s number and let it ring. When the man answered, she asked to speak to her baby boy.

  “Who, now?”

  “Charlie Barnes,” Delwina declared, distinctly and confidently.

  “No one here by that name,” the man said, then hung up.

  But she did not have the wrong number, that much she knew. She dialed it again, and the same man answered.

  “I told you, goddamn it!” he snapped at her before hanging up. “No one here by that name!”

  But that was his number! She was as certain of that as she was of Charlie himself. Where have you gone to, Charlie? Where could you be? She felt quite lost in this world. Then she recalled a conversation in which Charlie might have suggested that he had cancer. Did that mean he might have … that he might be … without her knowing, or having remembered—

  Suddenly, her mind went blank again, as if by an act of mercy, and the abyss of forgetfulness swallowed her up. She drifted off into a nap, and when she awoke she carried on as before, oblivious and invulnerable.

  19

  He remembered the shanty where he grew up as a place of packed-dirt floors, thin walls, no hot water, and an icebox in place of a fridge. A delivery man came every morning with a solid block of ice, which he removed from his truck with a pair of giant metal tongs. He could still picture the man approaching the side of the shanty in summer, whistling under a hot sun. Hoping to spook him, Charlie ran to the kitchen and opened the inner hatch. But the iceman beat him to it every time. Having opened the outer hatch, he lay in wait for Charlie, hollering “Boo!” at him, and the boy—a skinny lad in a soiled tee, rings of dirt all down his neck—never failed to jump back. The iceman winked in at him. Then he offloaded the block of ice, shut the outer hatch, and, resuming his whistle, melted away into the morning.

  He was, what—four? five?�
�when he first saw his mother laid out on that kitchen floor, her face contorted and wet with tears, a look of such hopeless agony that he, too, shed sympathetic tears alongside her. She didn’t care for how tall she was, or how flat-chested, or how unloved. “Do you love me, Charlie?” she would ask him. “Do you think I’m pretty? Prettier than your Aunt Jewel? Prettier than your Aunt Ruby? Would you marry your mama if you could? She hurts, Charlie,” she would say to him before breaking into a fresh round of tears. “Your mama hurts so bad.” And he flung himself on her all over again, trying to squeeze the hurt right out of her.

  The years went by, the hurt turned routine, and Charlie, canny by the time he was eight, learned to monetize their little exchange. She had taught him how when, laid out and low one freely sobbing afternoon, she repaid his moony looks with a penny from the coffee can where she kept her egg money, which he immediately took to Santacroce’s Grocery. On the occasion of the next rough patch a few days later, when she was again collapsed on the kitchen floor, he helped get her on her feet again, but then varied the script at the end with a modest request.

  “Do you love me, Charlie?”

  “I love you, Mama.”

  “Do you think I’m prettier than your Aunt Jewel?”

  “You’re much prettier than her, Mama.”

  “Prettier than your Aunt Ruby?”

  “Prettier than her, too.”

  “Oh, who loves me, Charlie? Who loves me?”

  “I love you, Mama,” he said. “Mama, may I have another penny?”

  Soon it was all part of the farce, and firmly established the equation—I flatter you, you pay me—that he would confuse so often for love itself, as if love were a trade on an open market. It was one reason why “Buy me a Coke” would resonate so powerfully with him years later. Wasn’t that how love worked? I pay you, you flatter me … with your eyes, your almond eyes.

  The next time she bestowed a penny on him and he ran off to Santacroce’s, she spied him coming home from the kitchen window. His cheeks bulged, and so did his pockets—and she knew she had a problem on her hands. She rushed down the steps and took him in back of the shanty, where she explained that they didn’t have money to be spending on candy. If his father ever found out, he would thrash them both, and if his little brother saw, he would kick up a fuss and demand his own penny. She couldn’t have that. So this exchange had to be their little secret. Did he understand? He understood perfectly and began to smuggle the Tootsie Rolls and Abba-Zabas and Turkish Taffies and Red Hots and Good & Plentys and Sugar Babies and Charleston Chews into his bedroom, secreting them under his pillow until everyone else had fallen off to sleep. Then he took them out and sucked on them in the moonlight as he had once sucked on his thumb and shoelaces in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  So it came to pass that he fell asleep for many years with candy in his mouth, bathing his teeth for hours at a time in acids, sugars, syrups, and dyes, and when he woke from his dreams, no one ever thought to ask the boy to brush.

  20

  He would hate this. Every intimate detail deprives him of what he firmly believed a man needs most: the projection of a successful image. There is no accommodating the truth in the pursuit of the American dream. Are you kidding? The market does not want the truth. The market wants fantasy and distraction. It wants the sublime. Get out of here with your goddamn realism, you puncturing little prick! You would tell them about my falsies, and my failing out of college? Why not strip me naked on Main Street, USA, and flog me up and down the street, you fuck?

  Charlie had not yet made it back down to his basement office when the kitchen landline began to ring again. The caller introduced himself as Bruce Crowder. “You were just on the phone with my wife,” he said. Charlie had never met Bruce before but had, over the years, heard much about him. He was the apple of Evelyn Crowder’s eye.

  “Please accept my condolences, Bruce,” he began. “Evelyn was like family to me.”

  “Uh-huh,” Bruce said. “And when are we going to get that ten thousand dollars back, Charles?” Bruce asked.

  There was a long pause.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “The money my mother invested in your ‘small business.’”

  By “small business,” Bruce meant the Third Age Association (TTAA). Like all companies, TTAA had required funding, and naturally Charlie asked Evelyn if she cared to invest in an exciting new endeavor. Fifteen years later, that investment had yet to see much of a capital return.

  “Hello?”

  “Would you like to talk about that now?” Charlie asked.

  “Why else would I be calling?”

  “Right. Well, she does get a dividend every year, Bruce.”

  “Does she,” Bruce said.

  “Yes, she does. Every year.”

  “And what was the dividend she earned last year on this ‘investment’ of hers?”

  “Well, I’d have to check … if you’ll just … if you hold on while I …”

  Pretense and fakery. He was deliberately stalling. Not to deceive the man, not to con him, but because that dividend embarrassed him. He had meant to make Evelyn a millionaire.

  “This year, Bruce, looks like we paid your mother”—as if reading from a document, though in fact he was gazing down at the kitchen counter, smoothing the warped linoleum as he had lately done one corner of his desk calendar—“forty dollars.”

  “Forty bucks!” Bruce cried. “On a ten-thousand-dollar investment?”

  “Last year it was more.”

  “And the principal?”

  “What about the principal?”

  “How do I get it back?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not liquid at the moment, Bruce. It’s bound up in a going concern.”

  “Your life, you mean.”

  “My business, yes.”

  “Listen to me, you son of a bitch,” Bruce said. “You stole ten thousand dollars from my mother in her advancing years—”

  “I beg your pardon, that is not—”

  “And now she’s dead.”

  Bruce hung up.

  21

  So it was not just the failure of the Third Age to make him a man of wealth and sway, not just the manifest disappointments of fee-based financial planning or his continued basement dwelling that placed poor Charlie Barnes behind the eight ball on the day he believed he would receive a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, but also the shame of an active and ongoing debt acquired when he decided to leave Bear Stearns and strike out on his own.

  There were start-up costs: rents and supplies, the need for a salary. And there was a marketing strategy essential to the grand design. He needed to speak directly to the people of regional Illinois, which required advertising dollars. Once they saw a better way of doing business, he would corner the midwestern market before expanding out to the coasts. It was that simple, and with a business plan in a three-ring binder, with new letterhead and business cards, and with an unbounded confidence in his product, he solicited men and women to get in with him on the ground floor, including his old boss from Dean Witter, Tom Kennedy; Frank Santacroce, a Danville pal; Evangeline’s mother, Keiko; Jake’s friend Chris’s parents; and a few select clients with a long-term investment horizon, such as Evelyn Crowder.

  He had no intention of screwing anybody. As one by one they presented him with a personal check, saying, in essence, “I trust you, Steady Boy, I believe in you, I’m investing this money in you personally,” he didn’t cash out and head to the Caribbean. He buckled down and completed the necessary paperwork. He headquartered at home to keep things lean. He bought the marketing materials and rented the billboards. He had the ballpoints branded in gold with a drop shadow: TTAA. He hoped that that abbreviation would become a household name along the lines of an HBO or an NCAA. TTAA was certainly nothing like some of the companies involved in the subprime mortgage mess he’d been reading about just that morning: Washington Mutual, Countrywide Financial. Alongside Bear Stearns, they had bilked and def
rauded their way to multibillion-dollar valuations, while his honest operation hummed along to the sound of the Whirlpool spinner winding down in the basement. But hey, Bruce, guess which one remains a going concern in 2008: Bear Stearns or TTAA? And I’m the fraud?

  The two hundred and twenty grand he raised in that initial round of funding went lightning quick—billboards are expensive—and now what did he have to show for it beyond one big debt and Bruce Crowder’s disrespect? Boxes of outdated brochures, that’s what, shrink-wrapped and gathering dust. The minute Bruce Crowder hung up, he dialed the number to Dr. Skinaman’s office.

  “Charlie Barnes calling,” he said. “I’m a patient of Dr. Skinaman’s. May I please speak to the doctor?”

  “I’m afraid Dr. Skinaman is currently in with a patient. Would you like his nurse?”

  “Do you know if the doctor has a financial adviser?”

  “A financial adviser?”

  “I run a company called the Third Age Association. We offer fee-based, conflict-free financial planning along with estate planning and tax services. I noticed that Dr. Skinaman and I had a good rapport, so I thought I would just call, you know, and see if he’d be willing to receive some free literature from the Third Age, in case he needs an adviser or is unhappy with his current one.”