Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  Then Kopus cranked into his second serve, and Barnaby bent his knees and knew with a giggling giddiness that Kopus was slamming wildly, that Kopus…

  Yes.

  “No,” Barnaby shouted. “Out.” He was too loud and too happy, but he couldn’t help it. Kopus had double faulted in the match game, double faulted when he had the advantage of the blind background, double faulted to love-forty. Out of the quicksands of loss evermore, Barnaby’s good life was rising. On a distant horizon, there were the towers of his own shining city again. Banners and trumpets and hope.

  Now he had to be sure not to blow it. He had to get ready for the next point. He had to bend the God damned knees. Watch the ball.

  At love-forty, Kopus hit a safe, composure-regaining serve, and Barnaby stiffened in his knees. With too much time to think, with the game in his pocket, Barnaby seized up for God sake; he puffed the serve back, giving Kopus a floater to put away. And a voice in Barnaby’s stomach screamed, Barnaby Griswold, homeless without a nickel. And the quicksand rose and Barnaby Griswold’s future emptied forever.

  But Kopus rushed and swung with a hard, flat, crazy person’s swing. Talk about not bending your knees. Kopus hit Barnaby’s puff ball almost to the back fence.

  The set was tied. Oh, into a tiebreaker when Kopus had had it wrapped up and then blown his own serve with the lousy background at his back.

  Barnaby was certain again, in the truest way of his nature, that hope justified itself no matter what, and so he allowed himself one quick, hopeful glance at the hillside.

  No, his father had not returned.

  His father had known from conception that Barnaby was a wrong genetic slurry, and the most rigorous expectation even from bag races at birthday parties was that Barnaby would try hard and fail with decent self-respect. For a while the expectation had also been that in the next sons the slurry would take a more favorable posture, but his poor mother’s frail, no-longer-young belly had failed to produce, and Barnaby, left out in full sun, grew into his father’s horror.

  At least his father had been able to die knowing that Barnaby’s sort of life found the rewards it deserved. Two years ago, shortly before he died and just before the admonition against fluffmeistering, an admonition they both knew was long since beside the point—two years ago, not much more than three years after Barnaby had met the Oklahoma boys in La Cote and embarked on the Old Ladies Bank deal, not long in fact before Barnaby’s public apology—two years ago, his father had in fact offered Barnaby an unconditional blessing. By then everybody knew the full extent to which the Old Ladies Bank deal had exploded Barnaby’s business life and personal life and whatever other sort of life Barnaby was ever again likely, or unlikely, to have. And so the blessing was supposed to have settled things between father and son.

  Of course it hadn’t settled a thing, not for Barnaby who had to carry on and who wished at least that the shell of his darling, pathetic dead mother could be on today’s sunshined hillside to see Barnaby humble nasty Dicky Kopus. He also wished for forgiving appearances by his ex-wife and his two Barnaby-abhorring (or Barnaby-oblivious, anyway) daughters. Because, as it was, the slope up from the court offered no soul who liked Barnaby any more than Barnaby liked them.

  Why was it that Barnaby’s friends (waiters and bartenders aside) had always been either people he’d just met or people he would never see again? Why was it that he had neglected his mother like everybody else?

  There was no need to ask why Win and the girls were not around.

  Barnaby Griswold was lonely in a place where he and a thin line of Griswolds before him had summered for a hundred years.

  Wasn’t there a pretty girl? Love would be such a comfort. Wasn’t there a girl anywhere who could love Barnaby Griswold?

  No, and why would there be? Pretty girls had never in his life so much as looked at Barnaby, and very few other girls had looked for more than a minute either.

  As it happened, there was a pretty girl, just beside the court, a girl with a halo of frizzed hair, but there was nothing she could possibly want with Barnaby.

  God, but he wished this was not his last summer. He wished with all his heart that it was a real summer and that he could know again that nothing mattered.

  He tried to imagine his daughters smiling at him, and as if he were himself an idle spectator, he glanced across the net at Kopus who was pacing and breathing and pumping himself up for the tiebreaker like one of the legion of vicious tennis punks on television.

  Kopus was a man of the time. Not so different, but for the aspect of taste, from Barnaby.

  Only Kopus had never gotten caught. And when Kopus did whatever he did outside the light of probity with which the Point lit itself, when Kopus killed someone or other, there was probably not much metaphor involved.

  It was Barnaby who’d gotten caught. Guilty or not, it was Barnaby who’d lost the bundle. It was Barnaby. It was Barnaby. It was Barnaby.

  Holy shit.

  It was the tiebreaker.

  What was he doing?

  The fucking match was on the line, and he was not paying attention.

  Champions fucking paid attention during tiebreakers. They did if they wanted their good lives back.

  He came to the baseline and bounced a ball once and stared across at Kopus. He bared his teeth for Kopus to see. He sucked in his breath with a quick, fearful rush, and then let it out with an aggressively audible, “Yaaaah.” He did not spit, but he did allow a line of drool to escape the corner of his mouth as he bent over before rocking into the motion of his serve.

  Kopus saw it. Kopus knew who (whom?) he was up against.

  Barnaby tossed the shiny, furred yellow ball up into the blue sky above Winott Point and unwound his torso in the beginning of the reach to smack that furry sphere half to death and into Kopus’s misery.

  He wondered, though too late now to do anything about it, if he’d sufficiently bent his knees, if he’d bent them at all. It all felt a little stiff, and as he strained upward, the line of drool laid itself along one earnest, rosy, sweaty cheek back almost to Barnaby’s ear.

  The older, heavier one said, “I’m Tom J. Baker, and if you’d known my father and known Baker Chevrolet in those days, you’d call me TJ Junior. Since we’re just getting to know one another, and here in New York, you can plain call me TJ. We believe in first names in Oklahoma. And this gentleman across the table from me is Peter Potter.”

  Which should have sounded like the name of a banker on the eastern seaboard but was in fact said all the way through like a single Christian name. Peterpotter. Or, as it came out, “Peterpotter Dodge, Peterpotter Chrysler Plymouth,” and around the lots, “Mr. Peterpotter.” It was enough to make Barnaby remember what it had been like getting used to his own name.

  And that younger one, Peterpotter, who looked like a sour fraternity kid waiting to get in a sucker punch at the edge of team fights, Peterpotter stood and put his remarkably little hand on Barnaby’s shoulder and said, “Sit down, sir. I want you to hear what we’re planning to do this afternoon. TJ, I think we ought to tell our friend Barnaby about our idea. Maybe he’d like to join us. Barnaby, you ever gotten to drive the plane on a flight to where the wind comes whistling up your ass?”

  Barnaby had not, but the meat of the idea involved something else anyway. TJ and Peterpotter were since just that morning in possession of an eighty-million-dollar unrestricted line of credit from Chase Manhattan, and on their way out of the bank they had each wanted a cheap cigar. At a newsstand on the street, where they’d found the cigars, they’d asked in fun how much the whole stand would sell for, and the guy who took their money from behind the dirty magazines had said, “How about I sell it to you one cigar at a time? Those are sixty cents apiece. Plus tax.”

  So they’d bought the whole stand for real, for spite, and hired the guy to watch it until they picked it up on their way to the airport.

  Really. They were such easy men for Barnaby to like.

  What was no
t easy right away was imagining how a newsstand might fit into a car. Barnaby had never noticed that there was such a thing as a newsstand and smoke shop that folded up, and he wasn’t sure that TJ and Peterpotter had correctly noticed it either. But once they were all convinced that no stand worth taking home as a souvenir could possibly be small enough for a car, then it all worked itself out. A pickup truck, probably, to do justice to a deal like this Chase Manhattan thing, would also be too small. So a one-ton flatbed, the boys said, and if the stand was much bigger than that, hell, they’d have to start thinking about a bigger plane.

  Anyhow. Details. By that time every customer was gone; even the tigers were gone, and Michel’s gangster cousins had come in from Long Island in their truck to drop off some contraband or other, and so Barnaby and TJ and Peterpotter rode off at rush hour sitting on the bare, small, open, platform of in fact the cousins’ one-ton flatbed. The flatbed platform was made of wooden planks that were enclosed by an open fence of four-foot metal-sheathed stakes which rose in rattling looseness along the framing perimeter. Outside the stakes was a New York river of car tops and other small trucks.

  The truck and its platform, its bed, were up; Barnaby could have crawled over on the yellow roofs of taxis to the sidewalk, to the teeming shoals of people so thick in their release from the day’s work that Barnaby could smell sweat and breath even in the middle of the traffic. He could hear the noise of all the feet and the voices along with the tires and the horns. Everything was going crosstown under the watchful shine of a spring sun that lit and shadowed buildings in a tall, crowded, antically busy harmony with the noises and the smells.

  Yes indeed, Barnaby was out in the middle, riding the bed at the back of a truck. Barnaby felt like a New York afternoon prince in the most splendid position to see and be seen; it felt like more than any man deserved.

  Should he have known it was too good to be true? Should he have made, when he was still in his own territory, one serious appraisal of Peterpotter?

  No, a grand procession can only be the best sort of omen, and when something of the best sort doesn’t work out for the best, that is the fickleness of the gods. Or of God rather. Though he recognized his pagan impulses, Barnaby preferred to think of himself as an upstanding Christian within whom resonated the hymns of his boarding-school youth, hymns that would play through the voices of children and a few thrilling trumpets when he could afford to give the school something marvelous like a new library.

  But the more important point right now was that as Barnaby sat on that heavy wood planking of the truck’s bed and stretched his legs and put his hands out behind himself for support, he could feel the warmth of the planks along with the splinters in his palms. He could feel the warmth against his spreading ass through the good, lightweight wool of his suit trousers.

  Warm? Dry? For Christ sake.

  It was spring.

  After a winter that would not stop and a springtime calendar that had brought only rain, the sun was out. Yes, it might have been out for some time today without Barnaby’s realizing, but out only today; yesterday he was certain he had worn his raincoat, in rain. For a desolate instant he understood he had been carrying that coat at the beginning of this day too, and he looked around as if the coat might be hanging from one of the stakes that surrounded the truck’s bed. He could not have described the coat, but he felt he had liked it, that it had served him well, and that he would know it if he saw it.

  He felt a belch and released it, the tiniest, most fleeting contribution to the noise of this moment in the world. Joyous.

  Around the bed TJ and Peterpotter tried to grip their fingers into the cracks between the planking as if they thought they could really fall off any vehicle during a Manhattan rush hour. As if, for God sake, they had never ridden on the back of a truck in their lives. Barnaby wanted to believe that an Oklahoma boyhood for future car dealers must have involved the back of a truck at high speed on dirt roads, but in today’s world one learned to set beliefs aside quickly. Let them go.

  Taking the precaution of resetting his hands so that they were free of real splinters, Barnaby sprang to his feet, and in doing so tore a gaping hole in the calf of his right trouser leg. It did not faze him. Spring was in the air, and the sun was out, and as they turned off the cross street to head downtown on Fifth Avenue, Barnaby lost his balance, shot out a hand to break whatever the fall would be, and by miraculous chance caught hold of one of the stakes. Oh, this was a day. A taxi below him honked at his salvation.

  Barnaby, holding to his providential stake, sent his attention like Jove to the cowering, grimacing, holding-on-for-dear-life figures of Peterpotter and TJ.

  “Up,” he shouted. “Get up.”

  Hadn’t they seen him get up safely? He looked for their benefit to the stake that had become a staff of steadiness and command, and they did not look. Or they looked about to vomit. Barnaby shucked that corner of belief he’d tried subversively to maintain that Oklahoma boys really did grow up drunk in the backs of trucks. Then, with a surge of sympathy, he realized that certainly if these boys had been drunk in the backs of trucks, those trucks would not have been awash in a canyon of putrid air, air shaken to vibration by thousands and thousands of screaming vehicles traveling fitfully at five miles an hour.

  Barnaby himself loved such air and understood the screams as approval not really for him but for a world of which he was a happy part and which he too applauded.

  He let go his stake and gestured with both hands up at the glorious spring sky and its five o’clock sun, which actually had just gone behind what might have been his own office tower. No, actually it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. In any case this was no time to be thinking about his office. Here were two fine men from Oklahoma who did not understand and who were missing a parade.

  On an exuberant impulse of genius, Barnaby stripped off his suit jacket and hung it over his stake.

  And TJ and Peterpotter saw his suspenders. Suspenders much like their own. Suspenders upon which, for all anyone knew, much depended. Suspenders which suddenly gave heart to TJ and Peter-potter so that they threw off their fear and nausea and sprang up and grabbed on to stakes of their own, and once they had their balance, they too took off their suit coats and were proud in the martial decoration of financiers’ braces.

  “It’s spring,” Barnaby shouted across the open truck bed from his stake to their stakes.

  “Spring,” TJ and Peterpotter shouted back.

  And it was. A few blocks behind, Central Park was coming into leaf. Somewhere were crocuses and forsythia. On the other side of the truck, another taxi made another cheering beep, this time for TJ and Peterpotter’s rising, and TJ and Peterpotter smiled. Now they were beginning to understand. Now they were the boys Barnaby had imagined them to be, and he gave them his city as he had promised to do.

  Had he arranged this truck? For just a second he forgot exactly what they were about, but it was only a second. Who cared? He raised a hand and saluted with delight to all the clogged flow of Fifth Avenue, and a few happy souls on shore, along the packed sidewalk, saluted back in one way and another. Of course they did. Barnaby made large, theatrical motions that were the hailings not of a star or a hero but of any ordinary man who finds himself on a great wave. Oh, this was more than the wave beneath a deal; this was the crest of one of life’s golden surges, and Barnaby hailed everybody else on the crest.

  TJ and Peterpotter hailed and saluted, and there were more answers from shore, and there were more honkings because what else did a taxicab driver have to salute with after all. Barnaby took his jacket off the stake and flared that over his head. A flag, by God. It was spring, and spring demanded flags. He beat his jacket in circles over his head and faced back at his office, sure that his secretary was looking, hopeful beyond reason that she knew where his raincoat was.

  He saluted a policeman mounted on a horse, and the policeman did not salute back.

  The policeman looked across above the tops of the cabs
directly at Barnaby and was not pleased.

  The light had changed and traffic was stopped, and the policeman and his horse came out at Barnaby. There was no shout of instruction or warning. This was a silent cop on an errand of enforcement, a cop for whom perhaps the workday had just begun; Barnaby could sympathize with that, but what about spring for goodness sake? Barnaby wished he had not managed to tear his trousers. He remembered that the objective was to collect a folding newsstand and smoke shop and get it out to a private airplane for these men from Oklahoma, and he hoped that his exuberance had not ruined their chances.

  Barnaby hoped for much, but the policeman’s expression as he threaded his horse to the truck was not promising. Waving from the sidewalks had stopped. Honking had stopped. No, the city had not stopped; Fifth Avenue had not stopped, but on this block spring was in peril and everyone knew it.

  When what should appear?

  A carrot.

  One of Michel’s three dishonest cousins was holding a carrot up out the window and back at Barnaby, a carrot in its native state, with actual dirt on it and a green stalk looping long and feathery out the top of the knobbly orange shaft of the thing. A carrot when you needed a carrot. What a people, the French.

  Barnaby let go his stake and bent his knees for balance. That the truck was stopped seemed to make balance problematic, but two free hands were necessary, Barnaby was sure, for a carrot and a policeman and a horse. Barnaby focused on the horse, a horse with reliable, compassionate eyes, a horse with character. Oh Christ, what a day: a horse and a carrot. He couldn’t help himself. He held the carrot aloft; he brandished the carrot triumphant, and both sidewalks erupted with a roar of cheers drowning out all the throb of motors, and then the horns blared up, not trumpets but thrilling just the same in their twining with voices. It came to Barnaby that local farms could not have produced the carrot this early in the season, and so the dirt was soil from God knew where and that made him think of liberté and Lafayette and the American bond with the French, things people didn’t think of often enough, things he himself had never thought of before even in school when such thoughts were assigned, he supposed.