Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  Barnaby had happened to be passing through and had seen what was up. Then he’d made a bet with bookies who handled that kind of action for fun. Sold short, nothing wrong there; he’d had a hunch and gone home and bet that oil would lose, and it lost. Barnaby was completely outside the solar system of Peterpotter’s misery. The old ladies who got punched in the nose and lost their cafeteria jewels, well, Barnaby felt for them. Still, Barnaby had made a good bet was all, a terrific bet, and all of a sudden got lots and lots of baseball cards, and free lemonade too, exactly as Peterpotter was saying good-bye to all he ever had and all his in-laws and dependents had ever counted on. Put like that, Barnaby could see where Peterpotter might have some envy. But this was life. You didn’t crucify your fortunate neighbor. You pulled up your own God damned socks, as Cain said to Abel.

  No, no. That was just businessman’s vernacular.

  But in the spirit of that vernacular, had it been a mistake for Barnaby to have come back to Oklahoma City in a four-thousand-dollar suit and let everyone know he was hoping to pick up a private plane cheap?

  Perhaps so.

  Had it been today’s mistake not to throw rocks?

  Fuck. That was how he might have had a chance to get at Peterpotter when there was still time. How had he never thought, on such a biblical errand, to keep a bunch of rocks ready in his pocket? Barnaby Griswold was a fighter; the tigers in La Cote would vouch for that. Neither Barnaby nor the tigers had any idea where Driscoll Hills kept its rocks, but Barnaby wished for all he was worth that he had them in his hands to let fly right now.

  Though, as it happened, he didn’t have pockets at the moment, and his hands were not free. Wearing gym shorts and an old whale-watchers T-shirt, Barnaby pedaled his stationary cycle in the second row of cycles at the good, modern Driscoll Hills Y and stared at his RPM readout and breathed in rhythm with his pumping legs. And even at this distance of time from the wreck that had marked his life, the word that had for so long during the wreck been his mantra in anything rhythmic, in booze, in cigarettes, in quitting them both, that word crept back into the rhythm of his cycler’s breathing. Shit. Goaded by the recent encounter with Peterpotter, it sprang to size and volume, repeating and repeating. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  Barnaby had dived head first out away from the blades and been so amazed that Peterpotter really would have killed him, so equally amazed at his own agility in evading mortal peril, that he had simply sat on the grass until it became clear Peterpotter was turning and coming back for him. Then, because the tractor was a clumsy weapon when deprived of surprise, he had thought he could walk away with an air of dignified loathing. Finally, as the tractor and its mowers and still inaudibly bellowing Peterpotter closed in on him once more, Barnaby had had to run for his life back to the station wagon like the chicken he had always been, no matter what he told the tigers at La Cote. After which he’d had to knock on Ada’s door in the Picadilly Manor for the official morning session of the pilgrimage.

  “Hah.”

  Barnaby shouted out loud to clear away the shits.

  He looked around himself. He hadn’t really shouted, but he had made a noise and a couple of guys looked at him. Only a couple. Hah was a burst of breath, which was fine in a gym. He had not, thank Christ, been saying shit out loud again and again. He didn’t want things to have come to that, especially not now when he was so long past the worst of it. And he was past the worst. Sure, life was hard—strange was a better word—but Barnaby Griswold always landed on his feet. He had this pilgrimage to play out with Ada before he went back to work, but he would play it out and win it. He would bring Ada to sustainable contentment, which seemed at bottom to be what the pilgrimage wanted, and that would be that. A month. He held his fingers to his throat and looked at the big, school clock on the wall. His pulse was fine.

  And, yes, all right, Barnaby had made a very avoidable mistake.

  He had rubbed it in.

  He’d genuinely hoped to buy an airplane cheap, but he had known he was rubbing it in. A cardinal rule for God sake.

  He’d looked up Peterpotter before he knew that Peterpotter had lost his entire wad, and he’d asked if Peterpotter knew of any nice planes coming available since the boom was over. Had he asked specifically about Peterpotter’s plane? Peterpotter’s pilot? Oh, Barnaby. Oh, hubris.

  Oh, Peter fucking Potter unleashed. People who’d lost bundles in Oklahoma, people Barnaby’d never heard of, suddenly knew who Barnaby was. Peterpotter taught them who he was, and taught them to hate him, and they did hate him. They came after Barnaby because they didn’t know anybody else to go after. Peterpotter made up apocryphal conspiracies around Barnaby, and even sensible people believed him, and Barnaby’s feet were held to the flames. It went into the legalities and far beyond legalities. In Oklahoma City, people needed a foreign enemy; they needed a Slime From Away who’d ended up with the town treasure. The lives of an astonishing number of people seemed to depend on collaring that poor Slime and ripping his arms out of the sockets, and Peterpotter made them know that Slime was Barnaby.

  “Barnaby, Barnaby, Barnaby,” went the punching of his legs on the bicycle. “Barnaby, Barnaby, Barnaby,” went his mother’s voice as she rocked him in her lap when he was much too big for it. He was fourteen, and no friends had wanted him during a boarding-school vacation, so his mother, impulsive with her afternoon cooking whiskey, had secretly held him and bounced his large head and spoken aloud his name.

  “Barnaby, Barnaby, Barnaby.”

  Oh God, what a comfort mothers were.

  He wiped first one side of his face and then the other on the already wet shoulders of his T-shirt.

  Thank Christ he sweated like a pig, because you didn’t want the other guys at the gym to know you were weeping any more than you wanted them to hear you calling out, Shit shit shit.

  Not that it was real weeping.

  Not that any of this was appropriate preparation for the battles that lay ahead on this evening’s miles of pilgrimage.

  So buck up for God sake.

  What was fortunate was that while he had been riding his stationary bike, Barnaby had also been surreptitiously keeping track of a girl who was a regular at this time in the early afternoon and whom he kept surreptitious track of every day. She was a girl about whom he had even begun to feel a proprietary interest, which he was at liberty to feel because she was always alone and because she wasn’t pretty in the way that rang bells in Oklahoma. Her hair was more rusty than blond, kinky instead of straight or bouncy, and tied back in a coarse, brushy ponytail instead of loose. Also she had just about no tits. With her cheekbones and her high forehead and something intelligent about her lips, she looked like an off-the-range girl from a good family in the east. She looked like a girl he had learned to understand as pretty back somewhere in the provincial, earliest beginnings of his own history. Awfully pretty, really. Which was odd in its way because Barnaby, just like the Oklahoma boys, was somebody who usually preferred fake blonds with big tits. It had always, he thought, in fact been tits that had set off his alarms, and yet what this girl had were great legs and a terrific ass.

  So, good. Buck up, one way or another. And if what bucked you up was outside the strictures of your order, well, there you were. Life was no game. The parable of the wheat.

  Barnaby swiped at each shoulder once more to get the God damned weeping out of his eyes, and he looked over at her. No more surreptitious. She was standing there next to her mat, and she was stretching one elbow and then the other up beside her head. Barnaby recognized it as the last sequence of her stretches before she went outside for her run. Stretching like that and no tits at all. Barnaby was amazed he found her so attractive. He stared at her legs. He made his face into a leer. Who said he was a mama’s boy? Who said he was crying? Barnaby Griswold never cried in his life. He was a guy on the stationary bike at the gym and he was ogling a woman. He was thinking about getting laid. He was a man. Was there any question? He looked her dead in the eye and
leered. Some of the guys around him would notice even if most of them were on their way out or already gone in their short-sleeved shirts back to real Oklahoma jobs.

  Shit. She was looking at him.

  Oh shit. He was staring at her with a face he could not imagine, and she stared right back at him.

  Worse. Jesus. All the years he’d prided himself on not being a crybaby, and she knew he’d been crying. She was across the room and her face was the practiced mask of pedigreed girls he’d never dated in beach summers thirty years ago. But she absolutely knew he’d been crying.

  All right, then. She knew, and he was grateful. At least she wouldn’t believe the leer. She would only know that he was an old man, almost old, who cried when he thought about his mother and about what had become of himself, a man who wanted an old woman’s guiltless safety of dying.

  She let down her other elbow. God, but she was pretty. He couldn’t look away. What did it matter now?

  She looked away as though she had never seen him in the first place.

  She walked out for her run. Gone.

  Barnaby was almost alone among the nine bikes. He was alone. The person on the last bike in the corner was actually something on the wall, one of the colored posters of body parts and muscle diagrams.

  Did Barnaby yearn for the tigers in the wallpaper at La Cote? He did. He missed the smell of low tide and he wanted tigers and he wondered if the pretty girl knew he was afraid of Peterpotter. He wondered if she knew he had stained his khakis running from a lawn mower.

  Was it possible that she was the one? A real chance, a last chance after his beauty from the Winott Cup? Could she have been looking to him with destiny in her heart and seen him, just as he’d been seen in the tennis match, at the one horribly wrong moment that told the truth about him?

  And now she was gone. Lunch hour was over. A single crazy person in a muscle shirt lifted free weights before the mirror in the weird, far lifters’ corner of the room, getting ready to shoot all the people who had ever been rude to him. And why not? Beyond, in the glass room with the machines, an ancient man in short pants and cheap wing tips wandered from machine to machine, sitting and touching the handles. In an hour, kids from a phys ed class at the private school next door would come in, and if Barnaby were still around, he would be no more noticeable to them than mulch.

  Would his pretty girl ever notice him again? If anybody believed in second chances, it was Barnaby. But after this?

  He thought of her standing across the room by her mat, standing up straight as a post and at the same time supple as willow, with tights on for her run, with a gray T-shirt that almost lifted high enough to show her stomach when she lifted one elbow and then the other, with her kinky, rusted hair dull in the gym light but pretty to him, with her eyes dull on purpose but with high fine cheekbones which made him imagine her eyes would shine when she smiled. With her chest like a boy’s except that the nipple of first one breast and then the other pressed out hard against her T-shirt. Did they press out? And she looked right back at him and knew he was undressing her.

  Shit. He was getting an erection. He’d finished his time on the bike, and now he’d have to stay on for another couple minutes. He leaned forward.

  Just as well to go back to Wimbledon, today, to take his shower.

  And in his bungalow on Wimbledon, after his despicably ardent but refreshing shower, he ate his carrot, cottage cheese, applesauce, and dry cinnamon-raisin English muffin. Well and good. Sometimes in every cloister, during sieges, when the dark forces were prowling, when everything was coming due, there had to be a letting off of steam. And then the business of the cloister could resume, as it resumed now on Wimbledon.

  As he ate, Barnaby, in the great tradition of cloisters everywhere, summoned history and culture.

  He surrounded himself with knowledge of Aristotle and Bismarck and Abigail Adams. He robed himself in Alexander the Great and Catherine the Great and Cotton Mather. He cast his lot, today and every day as he ate his lunch, with London and Spain and Virginia, with the tidal stench of the Atlantic and with dear Winott Point, however far. In this fashion he held at bay the lesser and more dispiriting history of Oklahoma such as he knew it; he pressed his crosses and garlics of knowledge resolutely out against the vampire encroachments of Ada’s condominium in Picadilly Manor and his own sanctuary here on Wimbledon, against courtroom apologies and every Peterpotter.

  He sat sideways at the gouged dining room table that had somehow survived the damp in the garage on Winott Point—a table too sorry even to have had a public life in a summer house. He looked across the no-longer-red back of the sofa, bleached like sand from its winters and summers of retirement on the sun porch of the Point house. He looked past the sofa to the built-in bookshelves filled with World Books stolen from the Point house living room.

  When he’d flown back after Ada cleared, to get the station wagon (allowed him by the settlement on the condition he get it off the property) and whatever other provisions might sustain a pilgrimage, he’d been earnest and honest about the divorce settlement to the last inch. Except for the World Books which were forbidden him. He’d known they wouldn’t be missed, and his reason for taking them was that he himself would use them; he would read in them every day and get himself a surer sense of that grid of things a scholarly pilgrim was supposed to know, a grid he had let slip by him from the very earliest grades of elementary school.

  He looked across at the World Books, and he could hear Win instructing the girls to rack their brains for anything else they wanted specified, and something in the drama of domestic gore, the final shucking off of Daddy, must have driven the girls to think with possessive tenderness of the twenty-two aging but barely used blue volumes. Surely it had been their subconscious gesture of affection for Barnaby. Win from the first had disparaged the whole notion of World Books, and the girls had pretty much taken Win’s part, had become real students and gotten themselves real educations. By the time they might have used the books, the girls were already into better source material in the library. It was only Barnaby in the family who had a bricklayer’s ignorant fondness for the idea of knowledge. So Barnaby chose to think that the girls had had him tenderly in mind when they told Win’s shearer of sheep that the World Books were most essential to childhood’s ravaged memories and must must must be sheared from the beast who was already so nearly naked that it couldn’t matter anyhow.

  Must must must and the beast nearly naked. That was how Barnaby used to talk happily to the girls about life’s distractions, about the shearings of people not named Griswold, and the girls had loved him whether he deserved it or not, he knew that they had. He wondered now (now that they had the money themselves) whether the girls ever thought of him as other than the beast of the stories they told to their friends. He wondered if they could possibly care that he had given them one last thing in the Winott Point Tennis Association. He hoped they would learn to care, and not just because it was the last thing he could ever give. The association mattered to Barnaby, and one day he was sure it would matter to them. Even though their membership should have been ensured by their eventual ownership of the Point house, a membership like that could slip away if you didn’t pay attention. He hoped they told the shearing of the beast entertainingly. He hoped they were fine and their friends laughed.

  But the World Books were the point right now, because the books had become a beacon and a staff for Barnaby as he wrestled to comfort Ada’s broken rigging and to comfort Happiness too, and now comfort even Peterpotter it seemed.

  For that sort of work you needed the help of books.

  Good books made perspective possible, and resolve followed perspective, and rededication to goals rightly followed perspective. And the goal here, never forget, was not pilgriming on forever, but returning to New York where you could work in the securities business and make back enough money to live happily ever after and take your children for drinks at the St. Regis. Just like the old days.

 
; And indeed, once Barnaby had made his camp in his bungalow on Wimbledon, he had begun to read the World Books, and to improve for the effort. He read up on his colleagues the Pilgrims and dabbled with satisfied familiarity in Puritans. He remembered cutouts of hats on grade school windows which were either pilgrim hats or witches’ hats, and he remembered the smell of paste and how its congealing gum rolled on his fingers. To read and remember and eat lunch (which was the best time for study) and keep the glossy pages clean was not easy, especially during the handheld dessert that he often allowed himself, so he began to sit sideways at the table, as he did right now, through the whole of lunch, and simply look from a distance across the back of the sofa at the World Books over there in their shelf. He looked at all the volumes at once. He smelled the paste of elementary school days and let all the knowledge come to him by osmosis.

  Today, during his nap after lunch, he daydreamed about a personal library of his own in a penthouse cloister, with an honest chaise for book-drugged naps and with French doors to the Central Park reservoir.

  How sad to wake, but by the time he’d gotten up and swept a bit in the backyard, which was iron beneath its sparse implant of grass, by then actually he felt rejuvenated, and it was time for Ada and their Friday dinner out. That Barnaby found himself looking forward to the dinner told how very tonic knowledge and a nap were in combination. He put on fresh, pressed khakis and a clean shirt and an old sport coat and stepped back into the big sneakers that had been new for his match with Kopus. To wear sneakers all the time was another improvement in life, right along with knowledge. Barnaby bounced in his sneakers. A night out. Two in a row, by God. It would be dark by the time dinner was done, which would make it seem like a night. And Ada was buying.

  On the way to Ada’s he drove past the morning’s battlefield, half imagining that Peterpotter could still be there and that now, in evening calm, a generous, forgiving truce would blossom after all. In less than twenty-four hours Ada and Happiness had even given him a new birthday, and he had faced in person again Peterpotter’s loathing, and he had revealed his weeping, lecherous everything to a beautiful girl. That kind of twenty-four hours could suggest anything was possible in the secret world of pilgrims and catastrophe. But the hillside was mown and stilled, and there was only a curious something that looked magnetically familiar in the loose cuttings where the mower had come away off the curb.