Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  No need for a mirror. He could feel the tears.

  He was finally crying. It burned, and it felt good.

  He was going to weep himself away. He would puddle and then leak through to the living room. He had to leave his house and his Point and his family’s tennis association, and this was the way he was going to do it. In tears. This was the end. Absolutely, and it was not happy at all.

  Only it was not the end. It was only the beginning, and he knew it. How could he have not kept in touch? How could he have made no calls at all when all of his life had always been lived in his deals? How could he ever have thought that tennis…

  If Win were here, he would kneel and hold her bony ankles and weep onto her big, dry feet. He would tell her again that he had tried to change himself. He would tell her not to forget to put suntan lotion on her feet. And not to let Duane do it. If the girls were here and tiny again, he would make them laugh again, just so that when he got to this stage in his own life they would keep him from harm.

  It was too late for any of that, however; there was no one here or anywhere to keep him from harm, and there was nothing at all for Barnaby himself to do. Somewhere, yes, were good deeds to be done, but Barnaby could never do them. He had no resources left.

  There would be no more deals. There would be no making it all back.

  He put his head out the window and regretted that his house was only two stories. He threw off his shirt from the tennis match and leaned his whole naked torso out the window and stared down at the rusted, iron bloom of the old drying rack that stood up out of the edge of the flower bed. It was a massive umbrella of clotheslines, and he wondered if he threw himself down on it whether he would be able to drive his forehead hard enough against the center post. He thought he would; he was an athlete now.

  He put one of his own big bare feet up on the windowsill, but then, before he could quite decide, he heard the phone ring out with its bang of possibility.

  And he ran to that noise with the release of a puppy let off the leash. He galloped in his jockstrap down the hall to the upstairs phone where there would be the voice of someone who wanted to talk to him.

  Oh, let it be someone with something for Barnaby to do and somewhere to go for the next four months. Somewhere inexpensive it would have to be. Starting tomorrow.

  “Hello?”

  Oh, if only he had somewhere to go. He would promise to make his calls. He could still be ready when his suspension was up. He was ready right now. He was even ready to do good, if that was called for.

  “Hello?”

  PILGRIM

  Like the veteran caregiver he had become, Barnaby wheeled Ada into the doorway to her bedroom and helped her out of the jacket of her sweat suit. He helped her to stand in the doorway in her sweatpants and an undershirt, and he took hold of the flesh that hung congealed and forgotten but not yet quite withered behind her upper arm.

  “Here we are again,” she said. “Almost in the bedroom with me half undressed.” She tried to say it with her old, coy humor, and then added with undisguised revulsion at herself, “Don’t pretend you don’t hate to touch me.”

  The back of her arm, even the wrinkling, was smooth as marble and soft as silt and moist from being in the jacket, and Barnaby touched it almost every time he came, two and three times a day, every day for months now.

  And once he had taken that dampness in his fingers, once he was inside the apartment and the door was closed and he had taken again his first deep breaths of the condominium’s liquid pungency of death, then he was all right, a vessel purely of goodwill.

  “One,” he said. “Two,” guiding Ada’s arm out to the door frame and back for her, timing his pilgrimage onward with the rhythm of her exercises.

  Ada swayed for balance and farted a long clapper, and, “More gas here than in all Russell County,” she said. If it had been the old Ada, Barnaby would have laughed, but her voice had only disgust for herself.

  So, “Five,” Barnaby said with as much compassion as he could give a number that wasn’t a quote.

  And if she didn’t die before his suspension was up? What did that mean? Without the rules of pilgrimage written down anywhere, it was difficult to speak about details, but Barnaby knew as well as anyone that he had been explicit about the first of the year.

  Ada lifted her arm out, six, and with her activated disgust and the increasing repetitions came the pain.

  “Shit God damn,” she screamed. “Shit God damn. Shit God damn.”

  And from away in the condominium’s kitchen came the voice of Happiness calling with ominous severity, “Don’t take the Lord’s name. Do not take the Lord’s name. We’ve talked about that, and I’m sure it doesn’t hurt so much. You’re stretching, is what the Rehabilitation said. Besides, Mr. Griswold is there with you, and you don’t want him to hear such talk. Any more than you want the Lord to hear, because the Lord is right in that very doorway too. And the Lord is helping you. The Lord wants to help you heal your arm, and He can if you let Him.”

  Barnaby let Ada rest, and then in a moment guided Ada’s arm out once more, and she went along with the exercises quietly again, conjuring a response to Happiness.

  Barnaby wondered briefly whether screaming warranted a drink. He thought that it might, and thought a drink would taste good besides, but no; monks, especially superstars of the cloister, as he had come to understand himself, did not fall back into the booze.

  Early on, when he had gotten through the business of activating the support system, of interviewing the companions with the agency and getting a sense for the flow of dollars to everybody, when Ada had finally cleared from the truly big stroke that had summoned Barnaby on Labor Day and when he had actually brought Ada home and begun what he rightly supposed would be his pilgrimage, then Barnaby had had to confront the renewed temptations of thirst. And he had confronted, and persevered. He had learned to sense immediately when the ship seemed to be sinking, and at those times instead of watching the water rise and begin to look like gin, he simply thought of something else, and if what he thought of was a drink, then he thought of something else again.

  The bad news was that Happiness, this latest of Ada’s companions in the nine weeks since Ada had been home from the hospital, would be leaving forever at the end of her shift. Happiness was a companion who could manage Ada’s fury without batting an eye and who could speak if not the king’s English at least a language Barnaby understood. Alas, she was also (as Barnaby had been thoroughly instructed) a child of the Lord who would not abide unholy profanity.

  Barnaby was not of an order whose members refused profanity, and he preferred not to think of having to find yet another companion, and so he tried to think about matters of the heart. He tried to think about love, or even just sex for that matter. Because he couldn’t, after all, survive forever on the memory of his beautiful girl from the Winott Cup.

  Yes? And his order’s position on sex? That wasn’t entirely clear, but Barnaby had to suspect there were restrictions. Which meant he had pilgrim’s work to do in his own front yard, special circumstances or not. His yearnings for women had gone largely unsatisfied for as long as he could remember, and that had lead to a lifetime of yearning for deals, where satisfaction always came more easily. But now, with deals long in abeyance, with tennis done, with monastic proscriptions the ruling imperative, now out of the blue, fleshly appetite seemed eager to have its day.

  So he did try to think of finding a new companion for Ada, through “the Rehabilitation” as Happiness called the agency. That would be an occupying chore, and Barnaby needed occupying.

  Then he wondered whether he could summon the nerve to buy a Playboy in a drugstore at some distance from his neighborhood. He knew he didn’t have the nerve, in any neighborhood, to root around in the racks of magazines next to upstanding hot-rodders and computer geeks for something as raunchy as a Penthouse. Even with the Playboy and its purported articles, everyone in the store would know Barnaby for what he was, a lia
r least of all.

  “Ow. Ow. Shit God damn. Fuck. There I said it.” Ada dropped her arm back to her side and turned so her speech would carry toward the kitchen. “I finally said it. Fuck. Now before I die I can go to parties with people in the malls. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Stay away, Happiness. I finally said it.”

  Happiness’s briskly angry steps came squishing from the kitchen, and Barnaby gave away control of Ada’s upper arms and retreated to the living room where he turned off the early-afternoon editions of the household’s favorite television evangelist.

  He took from the bookshelves one of the late Doctor Briley’s opera books, the one with a singer’s cleavage on the cover. He didn’t bother to look at the pages; he’d done that before and knew the cover was the book’s only good picture. He sat on the sofa and put a hand over the cleavage, partly to touch it and partly to keep himself from it. He did not listen to the furious moans and hissings that emanated from the bedroom. He sprawled out of the sofa like a fifteen-year-old and wished, as if he’d ever been able to make a spiral, that he had someone to throw a football with.

  Then here came the rolling infusion of Happiness bringing Ada back into the living room.

  Barnaby turned his book facedown and sat up like a human being as Happiness parked Ada at the corner of the couch and hurried with unlikely decorum back to the kitchen. Ada cradled the sore arm in her lap and stared at Barnaby.

  Barnaby smiled with what he believed was a pilgrim’s joy.

  And Ada said, “You’re going to die too.”

  Laughter was the only response that came to him, so Barnaby laughed.

  And, “You won’t think it’s so funny,” Ada said, “when your time comes.”

  So he stopped laughing and Ada called over her shoulder to Happiness in the kitchen, “Well, I made him laugh,” as if confessing to a sorry chore done without pleasure.

  “You see?” came Happiness’s voice from the kitchen.

  Ada shouted over her shoulder now in the voice of someone who could hire and fire, “Well, how much longer are you going to be in there?”

  “Just. One. More. Sec. Ond,” Happiness shouted back in the singsong perkiness of a day that Jesus might have favored even more than most days.

  Ada swiveled her attention and leaned toward Barnaby from her wheelchair. With a loathing beyond expression, she said, “Are you listening?”

  “I didn’t mean,” Barnaby said with the martyred sorrow of a fifteen-year-old car wrecker, “to laugh about death.” In fact he had never felt so obscenely alive, but it was life at the grave’s edge of the universe, and so he was surprised to hear his fifteen-year-old voice.

  “She’s like that all the time. Sec. Ond. She can go a week without making a whole word at once, much less a sentence. And she’s as pleased about it as if her education were the Lord’s work.” In the center of her face, Ada’s mouth puckered with its own separate fury.

  In now the limpest approximation of a pilgrim’s holiness, Barnaby said again, “I’m sorry I laughed at death.”

  And Ada said, “I heard you the first time. Why are you sorry? What else are we supposed to do? Laugh. Go ahead and laugh. We should all laugh.” She stared at him with her mouth still pouched down by the taste of hatred. “Let’s laugh right now. Together.”

  It was such a great delivery that Barnaby did laugh.

  He stopped not because Ada didn’t laugh along but because she stared at him with so outraged an amazement that he feared she was into another stroke.

  “You laughed,” she said.

  He nodded.

  And she said, “Ha, ha, ha,” half in sarcasm but also half in an earnest attempt. “How’s that?” she said.

  “Well,” he said. “Not great.”

  “Not great,” she said honestly, and she reached a hand out to touch his knee. “You try with me.”

  He shook his head and said, “We need something funny.”

  “Ha, ha, ha,” she said, louder than before, not exactly angry again but not far from it.

  So he joined her, “Ha, ha,” and in another moment they were quiet, and he said, “Pathetic.”

  He looked at her disappointment and laughed more or less a real laugh. Surely there was something laughable here.

  She looked at him as if he were ridiculous, which he was, and laughed herself, more or less a real laugh.

  Of course he was ridiculous; it had been the buoying comfort of his life, and here it was serving him again. The pilgrims who survived used what resources God gave them. He laughed out a great, exuberant laugh of foolishness, and Ada came with him unfettered. He raised his hands for a touchdown, and she laughed with pride in her own abandon to ridiculousness. He thought ever so briefly about putting his own hand over hers on his knee, but he didn’t want to encourage that sort of thing.

  At which point Happiness turned out the light in the kitchen, and then the hall light, and then scurried past the living room window to pull its curtain and scurry away again.

  Ada and Barnaby ceased their laughter.

  Oklahoma City’s desolate daylight still washed over the wall and through her unwashed plants to Ada’s patio door. But this was a week after Thanksgiving, the very end of November and late afternoon.

  It was plenty dark enough to see the candles as Happiness now padded with a cake, ever so slowly for processional effect and to keep the candles lit, toward the coffee table from the kitchen.

  Everything about the furtive triumph in Happiness’s face said that the cake was a surprise. But whose surprise? Something in the aim of Happiness’s peculiarity did not say Ada. Could it be Happiness’s own birthday? Happiness was not too peculiar for that kind of thing. A real surprise. Barnaby liked the idea.

  Happiness began singing, and Ada sang along right away as if she were in on the surprise. Barnaby smiled back at the giggling delight in Happiness’s face and joined himself to the second cry of “Happy Birthday to you,” singing it out exactly to Happiness. But, while giggling and singing and precariously handling the lighted cake, Happiness shook her head at Barnaby as if she were not in fact surprising herself, and so Barnaby very quickly—he’d always been agile in these things, the legacy of so much booze and bullshit—shifted his delivery of song toward Ada. He’d never known her birthday, though his secretary had of course, along with Win’s and the girls’ birthdays, in the days he’d had a secretary.

  “Happy Birthday, dear…”

  But Ada was singing at him, which he could have dismissed except that she appeared so very sure. Had the pilgrimage moved as it often did onto the dry land of terra truly incognita? Christ, how he wished for rules on some days.

  Unconsciously he brought the fingers of both hands to his chest and looked inquisitively back to Happiness whose delight transcended itself to the point that she nodded like one of those spring-necked Ted Williams dolls he’d always wanted to put on the shelf behind the back seat of the car as a kid.

  “Happy Birthday, dear…” Happiness’s spring bounced with rapture.

  “…dear Barnaby.”

  By God, it was a surprise, and Barnaby shouted out his name just as loudly as Ada and Happiness did. He’d always before had birthdays in the summer, but Ada and Happiness had changed that.

  And now Happiness, Ada’s potent angel, was waiting for Barnaby to make his wish and blow out the candles. She knelt down on the carpet beside the table and held the fingers of her wings, her hands—gad, Barnaby—to her chest in expectation. Barnaby looked at his own fingers on his own chest, and brought his hands down solidly onto his thighs where they belonged and leaned over the heat of the candles and made his wish. If there were enough candles to generate so much heat, perhaps he was old enough to die today. Was that what Ada was saying? Regardless, his paramount desire was for Happiness to stay on as Ada’s companion. He wished for that. Truthfully he did not want to work with the Rehabilitation to replace Happiness; he did not want to smell that sequence of lives and their menus. No. He wanted Happiness to stay. This worl
d, with its new birthdays and its early darknesses, had become all of his life for the time being, and he didn’t want any more disruption than necessary.

  Would he have been better off wishing for something else? It was the end of November; one more month and he was back in business. Shouldn’t he have wished that he had business to go back to? Shouldn’t he have wished that at least he’d used his time to…What? Learn a paying trade? Come off it, Barnaby. To make some calls then? Ah, yes, that was something he could have been doing. Except that he was here because he was needed, and what was needed of him was that he immerse himself in the doing of good, for months. This was the real thing, and it asked real commitment, and Barnaby’s embracing nature told him that the commitment was appropriate. If you gave yourself to your pilgrimage, everything else fell into place. On the other side waited Barnaby’s good life, restored. He was a pilgrim, and he was winning his way home, and calls were beside the point.

  He lay down for another night in the camp bed he’d taken from Winott Point. Monastic sensibility and the terms of the divorce had persuaded him that there would be no use for a larger or more comfortable bed, and so he lay on his back with his arms at his sides in a straight but sagging line and felt not too differently than he’d felt in his alcove in boarding school during the long, monastery nights of first form year—cramped and lonely, but grateful for the dark relief from everything in the assigned world, from classes and sports and homework and other children.

  Tonight, he closed his eyes and relaxed his pilgrim’s robes and savored relief at the fact that Happiness was staying on after all.

  And so, yes. Tonight, rather than in his boyhood’s institutional wilderness of bricks and lawn, he lay in a leased bungalow with thin walls and a postage lawn and one stunted tree on a street with other bungalows and other achingly small trees, a street in Oklahoma City called Wimbledon of all things, one block past Westminster at the fraying edge of the best suburb that was Driscoll Hills.