Beaten, he thought.
You’re dying anyway.
You tried your heart out, and then, suddenly, it was over. The point, the match, the career, your whole fucking life. The cloister was in ashes, and the other pilgrims had been asked to work for Disney somewhere, and you were naked in the town square. And glad of it. Tried. Could always say that. But lost it all, and glad of it. The point of the pilgrimage had never been doing good or sneaking back to the lark of easy money, or even passing time. The point had always been to make it clear that Barnaby Griswold really and truly was finished. Dying, dying, dead.
He began his plunge at the bar, and the pretty girl from the gym walked right by him carrying dinner orders out to a table of the young well-to-do-ish somewhere beyond the pale. She walked so close to him that he could have pursed his lips and blown from her left eye the kinky, curly strand of hair that had gotten loose from the rest of her hair which was pulled back tight. Was it golden hair in this light? He’d thought it was red. She was gone before he could be sure. Certainly though she was that girl from the gym who stretched before she ran. Who had seen right into Barnaby’s septic tank. Whom Barnaby (was he crazy?) had almost determined to speak to on Monday. A waitress. And more than a waitress—weren’t they all? He tried to watch her, and some new guy, a big fat guy like Barnaby used to be, got in the way. God damn him. Maybe Barnaby would get in a fight tonight. He smelled her, imagined he could smell her. Not sex for Christ sake. She smelled like falling in love in the summer by the ocean. Barnaby had never been able to quite do that, when it was the time to do it, as he imagined it should be done, but he knew what it was like. It was just like that pretty girl. And he knew perfectly well that all he could really smell was the garlic and oregano in bad sauces, that and the sweet mash coming off the booze around the bar.
The hell with the booze.
He would wait for her to come back. He would speak to her.
And if she were too busy?
He would wait all night for her.
He would?
She would look at him—Barnaby fucking Griswold, for Christ sake, aiming toward fifty and broke, an almost ex-con wishing he could die with Ada back in the Picadilly Manor— she would look at him and tell him to go fuck himself. Just like she would have done if he’d been twenty years younger. She was that pretty, would always have been too pretty for Barnaby. Only before he had always thought that tomorrow was going to be his day.
And some days truly had been.
No more. No more days, period. He wouldn’t speak to his pretty waitress. He wouldn’t wait for her. Ada was whom Barnaby charmed today, and there would be no tomorrow.
She came back by him, just as pretty, just as close and without all the food this time, and he watched her pass like an express subway train going the wrong way on an unreachable track.
He stepped to the bar rail and knew that this was the kind of place where, as a stranger, he’d have to spread out and speak up, and he didn’t feel he was as large as might be necessary. Yet, lo and behold (friendly Oklahoma), the barkeep stopped before him and made the half smile of every barkeep’s eternal question.
Barnaby could see himself through the bottles in the mirror behind the bar. And among those bottles, Barnaby Griswold shook his head at the barkeep.
He didn’t order.
He couldn’t so much as order a drink, and the barkeep was gone. Barnaby fucking Griswold and he couldn’t even drink himself to death. Flunked. Just like caregiving. There was nothing left of him. Right here, surrounded by a lifetime of colleagues, he was done. The muscles in his legs did let go, just like Ada and for real this time, and as he began to go down, as he fell, he began to weep more of the real tears that had become his only specialty. By the time he hit the floor, he’d be making the wet noise of a blubberer. He would try to tell Doug that he’d meant only to throw up in the greenery.
All that, the falling and the tears, was glitteringly full of motion downward, but it stopped.
Men grabbed him under his arms from both sides, and they held him up.
Barnaby had long been a believer in the milk of human kindness that occasionally flowed in the very lousiest saloons. This time, however, he didn’t want it. He wanted to lie down and cry on the floor among all the careless feet of strangers.
But they held him up.
“You okay, good buddy? You don’t look so good.”
It was Peterpotter.
Peterpotter stood in front of Barnaby, smiling, wearing fancy sneakers instead of the alligator loafers he used when he drove his mowers.
“Peterpotter?”
“You got it. Real life. Sorry I missed you this morning.”
“No,” Barnaby said with the last of what strength he had left, with even some residue from the discarded righteousness of his asinine pilgrimage. “No, I’m sorry. Maybe it really was all my fault somehow. I shouldn’t have asked you about your plane. But can we talk about it another time?”
Peterpotter smiled more widely and said, “I don’t think you understand,” and he stepped up close to Barnaby with his smile.
And Barnaby remembered that he was wearing the hat. He confessed. Finally a genuine confession. He said, “I found your hat, forgive me.”
But then Peterpotter shrugged hard, and although Barnaby didn’t see it, Peterpotter punched Barnaby in the stomach.
At first Barnaby thought it was only the surprise he felt, and then it hurt. Peterpotter stood in front of him smiling. It hurt, and Barnaby didn’t know what to do, but before he had a chance to figure it out, Peterpotter started backing away, and Barnaby was following him. The young men on either side were carrying him. They were large young men, one of them the guy who’d blocked his view of the pretty girl however long ago that was. They could have been TJ’s sons from the apology. Wouldn’t that have been something? Did Barnaby need to be afraid? He saw the greenery at the end of the bar and thought again about throwing up.
“No, you don’t look good at all, buddy. Let’s get you some air.”
Barnaby didn’t say a word. He didn’t think a thought except that he’d never been slugged as an adult when he wasn’t drunk, and so he didn’t know what it would feel like. Only he did know. His stomach hurt. Was he drunk? He felt like he was.
He was outside and around the corner with them, and he could not understand why Peterpotter was running away. But then Peterpotter turned around and ran back, ran right at Barnaby, and Barnaby watched him and wondered without a thought. Peterpotter ran and jumped, jumped at Barnaby from close in, and swung a flying punch into Barnaby’s mouth, and then Barnaby’s mouth was full and he was falling down like he’d wanted to do before, so there was nothing he could say anyhow. This was probably why some timid souls refused to leave their cloister, but Barnaby didn’t care. He wanted the truth.
He curled into the ball you make when you’re giving up on everything, and a voice in him said, “Hooray for sneakers,” as all of them kicked at him.
He knew he could get up. He knew the hat was lost somewhere, and still he thought he could get up. And then if he made a great roar and charged at them, he might have a chance.
But he didn’t want to get up. He didn’t want to make any sound. This was what he wanted and what he deserved. He cried silently, and they kicked the shit out of him.
LOVER
His father’s time for nature and that sort of thing was the summer, when they were all at the shore, and what his father wanted was for Barnaby to learn about shore life. So there was a book about tide-pool creatures, and on Saturdays for the whole summer he was ten, after Barnaby had spent the weekdays in sailing and tennis lessons and his father had spent that time in town at the office, Barnaby and his father walked along the shore.
There weren’t quizzes, though Barnaby knew that the reason there weren’t was because his mother forbade it. After a couple of weeks, there were hardly even lectures and pointings out. Still, his father carried the book. His father learned about anemones, w
hile Barnaby stood and wondered why kids that summer thought he himself looked like an anteater. Before the middle of the summer, since it was uncomfortable trying to spend a lot of time at any one tide pool, Barnaby and his father began walking around the end of the Point every Saturday, from the pond and the cove all the way down to the lighthouse, along the boulders and the ledge on the ocean side. After the first few times, his father had found the several pools he wanted to keep track of, and Barnaby had found near those pools the supplies of rocks with which he could practice throwing.
Because if Barnaby practiced a thing, he could do it eventually, and throwing rocks, really throwing them, was something nobody would ever think of him being able to do. If he practiced again and again, which he did while his father checked on other lives in the tide pools, then Barnaby could pick out one split granite boulder a good ways away and hit it; sometimes he could even hit ones when the tide was in and a boulder was surrounded by water. He imagined bringing kids out on the walk, though he wouldn’t call it a walk, and saying, “Hey, can you hit that?” and then throwing at a boulder, or at a tree if they were close enough, and hitting it as if it was nothing. Or else he wouldn’t say a thing, just throw when he was sure they were looking. Then they would know. Pretty soon everybody would know.
Afterward, if they met people on the road back, Barnaby and his father both said that Barnaby was learning about tide pools.
The next summer was supposed to be the pond summer, the first of several pond summers because there was so much life around a shore pond and there would be individuals of species to follow from year to year. Except that before they had even begun, Barnaby’s father accepted the job of managing partner at his firm, which meant him staying in Boston to work on Saturdays all through the summer. Which meant Barnaby could wear long pants to sail in on Saturdays. Which meant, really, that Barnaby’s father could not bear to spend another summer of Saturdays with Barnaby.
Barnaby’s father, after all, didn’t want to be managing partner. Barnaby’s father didn’t want to manage at all. He wanted to do good law, period; everyone had heard him say that. In the summer he wanted to be at the shore when he could. He wanted to study the pond, especially after having read all the books about pond life over the winter, all the books Barnaby did not read.
The problem was Barnaby.
Barnaby’s father could not bear the thought of capturing turtles, of learning where the night heron slept, of recording dates when the swan babies appeared, of mapping the marsh on graph paper—with his son. Not when there was little walking or when there were no rocks to occupy Barnaby for whatever in God’s name reason. Not when Barnaby would end up simply standing there like a thumb with his hands in the pockets of his long pants on even the warmest days. Not with Barnaby, for Christ sake, trying to crawl through the swamp edge of the pond and under the lowest thatch of the swamp maples to get near the swan nest, still with his God damned hands in his pockets. Barnaby’s father knew that if they spent a summer around the pond together, he would not be able to keep from saying something awful to his son. He knew that the better thing to do was to undertake the abhorrent chores of the firm’s management, and to do so on Saturdays particularly, and in that way maintain for himself and everyone else the illusion of love for his son.
Barnaby’s father knew these things, and knew that Barnaby knew them too. Barnaby and his father knew them together.
Barnaby wandered through his father’s disgust with his hands in his pockets, focused on finding perfect targets to throw at. Which was somewhat the way Barnaby’s mother focused on her cooking whiskey, because of course when Barnaby’s father wasn’t having to spend time with Barnaby, Barnaby’s father had to spend time with Barnaby’s mother.
So it was arranged that on one Saturday afternoon of what was supposed to be the pond summer, Barnaby and his father would go to the zoo.
That came to be the summer event for Barnaby and his father in the summer after tide pools.
On the given day, Barnaby took the train into Boston by himself for the first time. The conductor knew Barnaby’s father and was expecting Barnaby and kept an eye on him, and the near-empty train rattling through bright salt marsh and into the slag of the city made Barnaby feel like this was a special day for tigers and that he, Barnaby, was especially ready to meet them.
The conductor held him by the hand on the platform, and his father was right there, and they walked back to his father’s office to drop off something. The downtown was quiet, and his father’s office was mostly empty except for the young associates who wanted so seriously and respectfully to please his father that Barnaby could imagine his father as their idea of a tiger. Certainly Barnaby knew from watching the associates that seriously and respectfully was how you wanted to approach tigers.
It was a sidelight during those minutes in his father’s office that Barnaby realized he himself wanted the trappings of respectability but did not want a real job. He was only eleven, but he knew.
Then they took a taxi.
Ordinarily his father disapproved of taxis. Legs were intended for walking. So a taxi meant that again this was a day gloriously designed for tigers. Barnaby vowed to himself that he would always take taxis and that he would make an effort to talk agreeably to the driver as his father did. And he vowed in whatever were the words of his heart to always revere tigers, because a train and an office and a taxi to the tigers made the tigers more magical than even Barnaby had understood. To go to tigers was a pilgrimage, and Barnaby no longer regretted that he didn’t have on his sneakers. The associates at his father’s law firm wore shoes with laces, and so did people at church in his mother’s universe. Which was not at all to say that once you’d been respectful you couldn’t be friends. Barnaby wanted to hurry for just that reason, so that he and the tigers would have all the time they needed to become friends.
Barnaby’s father felt, though, when they first entered the zoo, that it might be good to stop and see the seals.
After the seals, though he knew tigers were what Barnaby wanted to see, Barnaby’s father followed the map to the jungle birds, and after that to the monkeys. In order that Barnaby would get the benefit of more in the zoo than just one thing.
Barnaby said, “Can’t we go to the tigers?” but he only said it once and he didn’t whine. Whining never helped with Barnaby’s father, and it occurred to Barnaby that tigers might not care for whining either, so he made himself listen to the birds and he made himself look at the monkeys. In the snake house he pretended to look at the snakes, and back in the bright sunlight he was dizzy, but he made himself strong enough for that too.
All he said was, “No, thank you,” when his father asked if he wanted a hot dog before the tigers, and so his father took that extra time to walk by the elephants.
But then.
There they were, and Barnaby was a better person for having had to look at everything else before he got to them. Much more now than an ordinary person ever could, he deserved to know them, which they would recognize. He realized he was tired, because when he saw them the tiredness fell away. He left his father and stood up straight and walked firmly along the path that approached.
Tigers.
They didn’t see him yet. They paced.
And Barnaby’s father caught up with Barnaby and walked with Barnaby right to the edge of their world. Didn’t his father understand?
“Did you study tigers in school?”
His father said that as if tigers, or Barnaby either, could have anything to do with school.
“Were they homework for everyone, or did you do a project of your own? What caught your interest?”
Barnaby ignored his father and hoped the tigers had not heard. He put his hands on the rail and looked through the bars to the tigers, and both of them stopped pacing and turned their heads to look at Barnaby. Only at Barnaby. They were magnificent tigers. They were real tigers. They were orange and black, and their eyes were yellow and as big as baseballs. Barnaby let t
hem know without speaking that here he was. He wanted to smile and to be friends with them right away, but he understood that respect came first and so he slid one of his feet to where they could see that he wore dress shoes.
“What can you tell me about them?” his father said. “Are they Bengals?”
The tigers stared at Barnaby, and Barnaby looked back at them and urged them to pay no attention to his father.
“Let’s see what it says.”
Barnaby’s father went to the board that told about the tigers and began reading silently.
Barnaby looked at his father and then looked back to the tigers and shrugged. The tigers did not make any sign to Barnaby at all, although he wished that they would. He smiled, and the tigers stared at him, and he stopped smiling. He tried to make clear to them that if he were wearing his sneakers he could climb through the bars, but the tigers did not seem impressed. So he let them know that he could probably even throw a rock through the bars and hit whatever he wanted. Wouldn’t that be something.
Barnaby held to the rail in front of the bars while down the way his father read.
And the tigers stared at Barnaby as if, despite everything, they knew Barnaby was no more than an eleven-year-old kid out of school for the summer and too big for his age.
He couldn’t even say why he was interested in tigers, because he didn’t know anything at all about them. He didn’t even know if they were Bengals. He was supposed to be visiting; he was supposed to be a friend, and he didn’t know what Bengals meant.
He had as good as pretended that he was a tiger himself, and the tigers stared at him, and he was ashamed.
More than anything in the world, Barnaby wanted the tigers not to be disappointed in him, and they were. They stared at him and were as disappointed as could be.
He let go the rail and turned away. He turned his back to the bars so that the tigers couldn’t see him.
When his father looked up and saw Barnaby with his back to the rail, Barnaby expected his father to tell him all about Bengals and insist that Barnaby look and then be angry because Barnaby didn’t care anymore.
Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 14
