Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  It lay in the collapse of oil prices.

  Oh, Humpty-Dumpty from the Chrysler Building, and Barnaby was the first to know.

  Unless it was happening even as he sucked his last lovely spoon of tapioca beside the first of Ada’s strokes.

  “The honor of the Harolds,” Ada said, invoking her maiden name and her own father’s righteousness in a voice too loud and too genuinely censorious to belong to someone with Ada’s humor.

  But Barnaby could not pay attention to Ada, because the price of oil was going to fall, and Barnaby had to take his short positions before it did fall.

  He could not pay attention to any scruples about leveraging his own credit now either. This was the big one and he wanted as much of it as he could get.

  He could not even pay attention to Peterpotter and TJ when after lunch they gave him a thousand-dollar cowboy hat and announced that he had won, retroactively no less, a senior executive position in their company as liaison to local oil banks and Wall Street. Could this ever look like insider trading? No, of course not. He put on the hat and laughed at the absence of salary and smiled for a picture with the go-go guru president of the Old Ladies Bank. Was he offered a position at the bank as well? Who knew? All the while in his head he was doing nothing but lining up his ducks.

  Three o’clock, on the dot, he gave the hat to a cashier, threw someone’s take-out burrito up the stairs to the line for the custodian’s closet, and went full speed back to the Waterford to begin his calls.

  Barnaby had to change sides and keep playing. He had to serve out the match.

  And he did.

  He shut away everything else and had no awareness even of sitting in his chair on the changeover.

  He threw up the toss for his serve and hit it hard, and Kopus whacked it back into the net. He threw up another and slammed it, mindless, and Kopus slammed it back into the net again. He was going to win. He slammed another, and Kopus slammed it back, over the net, and Barnaby watched it land a foot long.

  Triple match point, and he slammed in another. Cheating made you better even when the cheating was past. He’d never served like this in his life.

  The fourth serve, Kopus patted at and got back, a floater, and Barnaby froze, swung, almost fell over, and missed entirely. Forty-five. Kopus patted another back, and Barnaby froze again, swung crazy and lined it off the end of his racket on a backhand into the crowd on the hillside. He thought they oohed at that, but he could not hear them. Forty-thirty.

  One match point left and he slammed another serve in, and ran in at the net behind it. He ran as hard as he could, and he could hear his breathing like a dragon inside his ears, and Kopus puffed another one over, and Barnaby was there, and there was no time to freeze. He slammed at the thing like a murderer, and he hit it square and hard and drove it straight down into Kopus’s court and the God damned thing bounced right on up and out of the court, over the rope fence behind Kopus. He saw the yellow fuzz of it disappear and wondered for an instant if he’d hit a bad shot. But his shot was good. It had hit in Kopus’s court and Kopus was already coming to the net to congratulate, and Barnaby had won.

  Won.

  Barnaby turned and looked at all the chimneys above all the roofs that piled up into the sky above ancient Richardson. Barnaby had won the final point, and a current of every energy coursed through him. God damn son of a bitch, he had won, and as if he were angry, he knew that he would drink from the Winott Point Championship Cup and no one could stop him. His name would go on the cup, and it would be there forever, and fuck them all because he really had quit the booze and he really had gone to the gym like a stalactite martyr and he had said he would win it and he did win it. Let his father suck his teeth and look at that line of his son’s name proved in thumbable silver. Except he was not angry. He was blessed and he was grateful, more blessing and gratitude than anyone could contain, so he slung his racket away over the rope fence at the end of the court toward the crabgrass lawn and the slope at the harbor. Up. The racket sailed up like a fiberglass gospel of milk and honey for everyone, up higher than any chimney and out into the air above the harbor, air which now could begin the march through autumn, summer gone. Oh Christ, gone.

  But he had won, and he was exhausted with joy. He let out a breath, and felt that every muscle had left his body and that that was fine. He looked into the crowd before him, the clapping, whistling, laughing crowd now finally able to grab up their stuff from the hillside to go, and he did not care about the applause, though it washed over his exhaustion like a river that would sustain and carry him. He looked for his family. He sought out his girls and Win. He looked for his tender, ruined mother to silently promise that he would get her home always. He cast through all the faces of friends in the audience to meet his father’s eyes and tell his father that everything had turned out and that his love was what had made the difference.

  VICTOR

  Three and a half years ago now? Yes.

  Impossible as it would have been to predict, the horror began only a year and a half after Barnaby ran out of the Old Ladies Bank to make his extraordinary, mind-bogglingly successful play on the collapse of oil. And then once it began, for the subsequent year and a half the horror mounted and mounted, and the prospect of jail became more real and more real and nearly damn certain, until Barnaby’s life took on a cast of ashes and plague, and the wide waiting gates of jail became for him and him alone (whom could he tell? Win and the girls?) the concrete incarnation of death. This for someone who treasured life.

  The good thing about it was that the need to focus on avoiding jail became a distraction from all the rest.

  A year and a half after Barnaby had won everything he had ever wanted in his oil bonanza, everything was as good as gone in the snap of Peterpotter’s fingers. Peterpotter. And Barnaby was so diminished by the loss that sometimes he could not even summon his fury. He ached night and day. There were moments he would not look down for fear of seeing that he’d lost the very arms and legs that his mother had given and admired on him when he was a baby.

  Not that Barnaby hadn’t lost, or come close to losing, everything before. Not that Barnaby was anything but a past master in the fraudulence of good clothes and empty pockets. Not that in the other matter anyone, Barnaby least of all, could possibly have been surprised at Win finally cashing out. But, Win aside, Barnaby had never before possessed anything approaching such a vast everything as his Old Ladies windfall. And to lose it all. To have achieved sufficient size that everyone knew, everyone noticed, everyone watched and waited with the understanding that Barnaby Griswold had had his highest tide and it was all out to sea now. Barnaby Griswold had become something so hypnotically in the process of final dismemberment that people actually gathered in crowds to look. If it had not been for the pressing issue of prison, Barnaby would have felt compelled to look with them, and might not have been able to stop looking.

  Was his father’s death two years ago, right when a penal sentence seemed most imminent, also a part of what distracted him? No. His father was more than prepared to die, and secretly Barnaby was even grateful to lose his father’s variety of witness. Not that Barnaby rejoiced, but one hardly would pray to be examined in a moment of ultimate weakness by the ultimate judge of what an only son’s life had come to.

  No, prison was the real distraction. There was first and foremost the issue of prison.

  And Barnaby moved his camp to the Point house to focus on that issue.

  Which was to say there was eventually nowhere else for Barnaby to live. And so he went to the Point, and from there, where in winter he would be invisible and where even in July and August he would be only one of the many wounded and peculiar in unquestioned retreat at the shore, from there he managed his campaign for freedom. And to manage that campaign in the best possible fashion, he quit the booze, and really, after quitting smoking, the booze was not as hard as he’d expected. Furthermore, he began working out. Yes, in testament to how the fear of jail could transfo
rm a man, he signed in at the town gym with the cops and firemen, with the third and fourth and eighth generation of Massachusetts North Shore Portuguese and Italians, and he sat on the stationary bicycles with his big feet folding over the pedals and with his knees waving drunkenly and with his elbows wide, and he went as if his life depended on it.

  He pedaled like the warden was chasing him in his dreams. He pedaled with his thighs so heavy and hurting that his suctions and explosions of breath turned to moans. Sometimes he went so slowly and with such difficulty in these agonies of purification that his head was drawn down right to the red digital readouts on the aimless handlebars, and he pulled on those handlebars with all the strength in his flabby arms and grasping, uncalloused hands until his arms and his fingers ached as much as his skinny, pitiable legs. Sometimes he went so slowly that only he could have known the pedals were still turning. But he went. The pedals did turn. He turned as red as sunburned poison ivy, and he sweated. Barnaby was a man naturally inclined to sweat, and now he sweated to fulfill a potential he had never dreamed for himself. He dripped and streamed and splashed. He soaked his shirt front and back; he soaked his jock and his short pants; he soaked anything he touched or leaned over or blasted his breath at. But he never stopped. The warden never caught him.

  And every time he wanted booze, he came back and did it again.

  It was a use for his father and the Puritan in him. Antidote to the Griswold diet. It put him to sleep from exhaustion. It gave him the strength to look away from his own wreckage, to make the calls and the concessions he had to make. He began using the machines with weights on them, woofing in great grunts of effort.

  And the cops and the firemen watched him and circled him as if he were a barely visible scum. Not because he was running from the warden (they couldn’t have known that), but because of course he was scum. He was a rich guy, a Griswold, a snob. Oh, more than he had ever had to do before, Barnaby understood the blessings of class. Class hatred was as eternally reassuring as the sun coming up, so much more agreeable than the slithery lines of anathema drawn around him at all his old places in New York, even La Cote, anathema not because he’d done anything wrong, which he hadn’t, at all, but just because he’d lost so colossally much. Well, he couldn’t afford those places anyway, if he was going to last out his suspension once the judgment was paid and Win was paid and the lawyers were paid.

  He nodded and smiled at the cops and the firemen while he flailed on his bike like a boiling lobster, and he didn’t mind that they hated him. He loved them and he loved their hatred. He was making a comeback. He was a monk, and he was getting healthy. He did not yet feel like a secret weapon (he’d only just started, really), but he could imagine becoming one, an unrecognized athlete in his monk’s innocuous robes, slipping up to the starting line when his suspension was lifted.

  Meanwhile he used every contact (by then there were far fewer contacts than had been the case not so long before) and every posture of begging he’d ever known (which was a significant roster of postures) to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to promise they would take every material asset he possessed that Win was not already sure to collect, if only he could stay out of jail.

  The threat that Barnaby might mount a high-powered defense in an expensive trial, the news that an influential federal agency would get a windfall, Barnaby’s windfall, if that trial were avoided, the certainty that Barnaby could be cast into utter ruin no matter what—these things were all brought serendipitously together after months and months of arduous conjuring, and they persuaded the Oklahoma City judge to ask only for a public apology.

  Of course it was also true that the case had been manufactured out of Barnaby’s honorary, but apparently formalized, affiliation with Sooner First City, an affiliation celebrated in a cowboy hat photo. It was an affiliation solid enough to support a wheelbarrowful of charges by enviously vindictive locals, but it was also finally a tenuous enough affiliation that the judge didn’t want it at the heart of one of his prominent sentencings. So, an apology.

  Really? Finally? As easy as that?

  Because Barnaby had been apologizing all his life.

  Well, as easy as that and giving up any claim to all but a few dollars, an amount of dollars that in the good-and-so-very-recent old days would have hardly been maintenance for six months.

  But all right. He got on a plane, and he was exuberant.

  He’d stayed out of jail, and on the flight to Oklahoma City, a far different flight than the one with Peterpotter and TJ, he sat in coach class and he felt freedom’s importance. He felt at one with Eastern European dissidents and with people in undergrounds everywhere. He felt that if he applied himself, if he kept up with the gym he’d started, he could take Dicky Kopus in the Winott Cup, not the next summer maybe but certainly the following year, which would still leave him an autumn of holiday until his suspension was lifted.

  He went to his apology with that, with the positive vow to beat Kopus within two summers. He went to his apology and out from under the threat of jail with the powerful understanding that he was Barnaby Griswold and that he was alive with possibilities. He went to his apology already eager to get back to the gym and begin training, really training, for Kopus and the cup and the rest of his life.

  It was an early morning apology, so he spent the night at Ada’s condominium, and in the morning, for appearance sake and to coax himself into what he assumed was the appropriate mood of sack clothed remorse, he drove the cheapest rental car he could find. He parked on one of Oklahoma City’s many downtown streets without people and went into a half-empty, no-longer-new office tower and found his way to the designated place for saying you were sorry, whether you were or not. And that place turned out, much to his surprise, to be an actual courtroom.

  Barnaby had never been in a courtroom before, and as plain as it was, it confused him. On the one hand, with its ominously bland officialness, it was a proof of jail, of lives shunted away almost before they could make a smell, proof of all that Barnaby and his own precious life had escaped and preserved, and in that way it was a cause for measured jubilation. On the other hand, it was viscerally not a comfortable place. It was a place of judgment, and Barnaby had never favored judgment where he himself was concerned.

  And as soon as the door had swung closed behind him, he became aware of two or three dozen people all turned in their seats and looking at him. It was a smallish room, so certainly he had been aware as he came in the door that he was among people, but they had felt like an audience in a theater where the object of attention was all out ahead the other way, on stage, and he himself could slip into a back pew and watch things anonymously if he wanted. Ordinarily, in fact, he might have coughed or struck his heels to bring people’s attention to himself; it wasn’t like Barnaby to not want to be noticed at all. But as soon as everyone in this fluorescently windowless courtroom looked at him, he knew that anonymity was what he did want.

  At least the separated territory where the jury would have been was empty. Barnaby tried to let that comfort him.

  “Thank you for joining us, Mr. Griswold. Why don’t you come up here and stand in the witness box.”

  The judge said this. Barnaby assumed it was the judge who sat without robes, just in a sport coat and tie, behind the raised desk at the front of the room, under the flags.

  Barnaby knew what a witness box was from television, and so he walked down the aisle through the middle of all the spectators, and it was a much different aisle and procession from the sort he usually imagined. There was no choir for one thing. The choir would have gone where the jury belonged. And everyone who looked at him, all of them, hated him. And this was a much different hatred from the other guys in the gym who thought Barnaby was just any one of the assholes who’d been born on the top of the shitpile. These people here hated exactly Barnaby Griswold, nobody but Barnaby Griswold. Barnaby didn’t look at them, but he knew. He could feel it, and there was no sense that he was the one on top of the
shitpile anymore.

  He glanced around for someone to swear him in or process him, but there was no one like that in evidence, and so when he was past everybody but the judge, he went and stepped to the witness chair beside the judge and began to sit.

  “Stand up, Griswold,” the judge snapped too loudly for someone sitting as close as he was now to Barnaby. “And remain standing until we’re through with you.”

  Barnaby didn’t like the judge’s tone of voice, but he stood up as straight as he knew how to do, which was straight indeed, and he looked out over the heads of the audience facing him and pretended that this was all a play, a dour legal bit of theater in which he was deservedly the star. It was not so different from something he might have staged during a prolonged moment of inspiration in a saloon or for that matter in a pitch during business hours. Though in both cases, he would have tried to insert a bit of humor and good cheer into the proceedings. He stood straight and tall in a good suit (but not a flashy suit) and he wondered if he might not be able to lighten these proceedings too.

  Out in the audience, the only soul he was able to recognize without actually studying the faces was Peterpotter.