Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  But his father only took his hand and brought him away.

  His father led him without a word to the rhinos and the giraffes and the ostriches, and Barnaby ate four hot dogs which he didn’t want and threw up out the window of the taxi on the way back to North Station. His father quietly, almost even gently, wiped Barnaby’s mouth with his handkerchief, and after that let Barnaby pretend to sleep on the train.

  The next summer Barnaby went to camp, and then to boarding school. He became devoted to short pants, and he went to college, and he never so much as imagined another tiger until he ran into those most personable and cosmopolitan of tigers in the afternoon wallpaper at La Cote.

  Those were not the same tigers as the ones at the zoo years before, but they had heard about Barnaby; tigers all knew one another apparently, and the La Cote bunch were quick to say that there had never been any ill will toward Barnaby. And just like that Barnaby found himself telling them in their marvelous wallpaper forest, telling them over his right shoulder after he had completed the preliminary subscription on a so-so deal, telling them without any shyness whatever, that for the end of that day at the zoo when he was eleven, for not saying a word when Barnaby had turned away from the railing on the tigers, Barnaby loved his father.

  Barnaby told this loudly to the tigers in La Cote, and the tigers could not have understood more completely. They nodded and murmured with every sympathetic appreciation.

  And it was with just such an understanding that he opened his eyes in the grimy shrubbery behind Doug’s.

  He lay on his back, and he was surprised to feel that his legs were straight out. He remembered Peterpotter, naturally, and he thought he’d had the sense to curl into a ball as everyone in a decent city is eventually advised by their pessimistic friends to do in violent circumstances.

  He looked up and saw a part of the pale green neon palm tree that overhung the script of doug’s. He could make no sense of Doug and a palm tree and Italian food in Oklahoma City—he was perfectly aware that the municipality within which he lay on his back was Oklahoma City—but it was mostly of tigers that he thought. He looked at the palm tree and thought, with no basis in research, that tigers could live anywhere.

  He raised himself halfway from prone, and he sat.

  Inspired, he shifted himself onto his hands and knees. Beneath him was a carpeting of small, porous bits of volcanic decoration which Barnaby had once before (when, he couldn’t say) met in the dark. So be it. He didn’t bother to look for his hat. The hat was gone. Carefully, sensibly, he got to his feet. Once he was to his feet, he straightened himself with decorous caution until he was erect. This was the sort of procedure he had learned when he was a drunk, and now it stood him in good stead, and he was grateful.

  Barnaby was by nature a grateful soul; tigers alone were cause for gratitude.

  Because tigers did things. Tigers attacked. It wasn’t a question of waiting to die by himself behind Doug’s. Nor was it a matter of waiting to be kicked to death by Peterpotter (should he return), much as Barnaby honored Peterpotter’s distress. It was not a matter of waiting somewhere else to be drowned in Ada’s death, much as he owed Ada and much as he loved her. Did he love her? Of course he did.

  The point was, Barnaby had to more than wait.

  And he had to more than simply refuse to die.

  He had to more than fucking care-give.

  Barnaby had to act, and he had to act with passion; he had to act like who he was. Not some simpering pilgrim for Christ sake. This was Barnaby Griswold. Had he been out of his mind?

  He didn’t yet know what, but Barnaby Griswold was going to do something.

  He took a step without thinking and very nearly fell down. If he had really been drunk, he would never have taken such a careless step. He felt as if he were drunk, and was surprised that he was not. He walked with stately care out of the knee-high trailings of black leaves and around the dim, stucco corner for the door. He did not try to figure out from the glinting shadows of the few automobiles left in the parking lot what time it was. The first priority had to be getting back inside to avoid more kicks and punches. Then he could sit down and decide what to do. He could make lists of possibilities. Other people might have made lists at earlier times in life, certainly at some earlier point in a suspension, but for Barnaby this was the necessary moment.

  One possibility was to begin cheating on his suspension right away. Or he could begin almost but not quite cheating. He could at least begin making the calls he should have begun making ages ago. Not to Livermore looking for a place to stay, but real calls, to Livermore and all the rest of them, to get his name in the pot again and to learn in what swamp the strangest deals were fermenting (because he knew he was going to have to start back with the strangest of the strange). Yes, because the wrong calls during a suspension would be illegal, but now he would just be priming the pump; now, with just a month left, anything short of moving real money would be legal. “Hello? Remember Barnaby Griswold?” Face it; these were actually calls he could and should have been making twice a month for years now, and some of the people might be nice to talk to besides. Of course he didn’t want to refuse evangelism out of hand. Nor lawn work, even if he couldn’t count on overflow recommendations from Peterpotter to prime that pump. He wondered if his financial magazines were still in the Dumpster behind the Center Market.

  At the door of Doug’s, before he went in, he brushed himself off as best he could to be ready for making his lists. You didn’t want to look like a bum when you were laying out your future.

  But inside Doug’s, before Barnaby even got to a chair, was another cause for gratitude. The door bumped shut behind him, and ahead in saloon illumination no brighter than the parking lot, long before he’d found pencil and paper to list anything, was exactly what Barnaby wanted to do.

  The pretty girl.

  She was stopped in her tracks, by Barnaby apparently. She held her tray at her side, with the darkened, near-empty dining area behind her, and she stared at him.

  There had been moments in his life when Barnaby understood that he achieved a presence, rather a prolonged moment just after the Old Ladies Bank deal, but those moments were hardly the rule, and even less frequently, if ever, did they involve girls. Never pretty girls. Still, this prettiest waitress from the gym stared at Barnaby, and Barnaby was resolved to action.

  He knew what was called for.

  He stepped directly to her. He held out his hand and said, “How do you do? My name is Barnaby Griswold, and I think you are perfectly beautiful.”

  She looked at him as if she couldn’t understand a word, and he turned toward the bar and caught the eye of that good-hearted Oklahoma barkeep and called, “Where are all the tigers?”

  Which he knew was a peculiar thing to say, particularly in a place with no wallpaper, but he was overflowing suddenly with new horizons. He was as happy as a clam to be in Doug’s. With the hand that the girl had been too shy to shake, he reached for a chair that one of the secretaries must have abandoned. There were in fact numbers of chairs and very few secretaries, so, yes, time must have passed since he was last in the area.

  Sitting into his chair he felt vividly for an instant as Ada must have felt when she was falling with blind terror back into the Buick.

  But he made it down.

  He gestured to another chair nearby, and he smiled at the pretty girl.

  She did not register the gesture, which he could understand; she was still on the clock after all. She did register his smile, which was the important thing, and as if in a panic of shyness, she ran from the smile. What long legs she had. She ran in black sneakers and in long, black pants. Above the pants she wore a white shirt that was winningly too big for her; it billowed, a man’s oxford cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up. And before he could list all those ingredients of her dress, she had disappeared through the crowd of other people. Just one long stride, and she was gone, and Barnaby was sorry she was gone. He was also sorry for tigers
because it occurred to him in a new light that their quarry too would always run away.

  The other people stood around and stared at him, people he’d never seen before in his life. He nodded to them. The first lunge of his attack had missed, but Barnaby was not daunted. He didn’t want to use the word stalk in the current tabloid climate, but he could understand that there might be a need for patience. Right now, among these strangers who gaped at him, he would be patient in his chair where he was comfortable. No wonder the judge had not let him sit at his apology.

  Immediately, his patience was rewarded.

  The pretty girl came elbowing her way back through the crowd.

  Had he been on television, Barnaby would have spoken about the virtues of patience to his congregation. Had he the time and more quickness in his lips than he felt at the moment, he might have given a little homily to the very strangers before him.

  As it was, he steadied himself to watch her go on past with a load of desserts or something. Patience. She had work to do. She was not coming to Barnaby yet.

  Except, she was. And carrying only a stainless bowl and a bar cloth, she kneeled down before him.

  Who needed to stalk? No, that wasn’t what he felt. What he felt was that if he didn’t hurt all over he would have gotten up and run away.

  She kneeled, and she stared into his face. Since when was Barnaby Griswold afraid of a pretty girl? Since always, for Christ sake, but he didn’t feel able to run away, and so he smiled at her with as much delight as before. He pretended it was a pitch.

  Along with all the late Friday night bar strangers surrounding them, she gaped at him in a kind of horror again, but this time she didn’t leave. Nor did Barnaby leave. That was a real beginning for someone as worried as Barnaby had always been about his aptitude for love.

  With a pitch, with deals, he had never worried, and from the very first plunge he had known he was where he belonged. With his marriage, of course, it had been Win who plunged, an Oklahoma only child determined to have an eastern quarry and not sure or not caring about the markings. Barnaby had just kept quiet and pretended it was meant to be, though if he had been someone who bet on the downside in those days, if he’d had the sense to think of marriage in corporate terms, if he hadn’t been persuaded (by his mother and father? Gad) that a proper life of love was a necessary undertaking and that it went (true enough) through a part of the forest for which he possessed no maps… But that was all water under the bridge. Right now, he wanted to do something else. He wanted to court this lovely girl for real, but he was a fat boy; the few times he had gotten pretty girls to listen to him before, years ago, he had never had anything to say to them, and he had nothing to say now. He sat now with one arm on the top of the tiny, round, wobbly, steel table, and he could feel whatever the secretaries had spilled coming all the way through the sleeve of his tweed sport coat. He could feel himself failing in a singles bar when he should have known better. He didn’t belong in singles bars. Real bars, yes, of course. He was a drunk. But he drank in saloons, in places grown men in good suits ruined their lives and pissed on their shoes. Never in singles bars.

  Yet here she was, deliriously pretty and kneeling in front of him. No wonder he was scared.

  Was it a singles bar? He didn’t think so, actually. He was sore enough that he could hardly remember a thing.

  And what was she doing? She was wringing water from her bar cloth into the bowl she held in her other hand.

  Now she looked at his face as if his face were a messy spreadsheet upon which she had to concentrate if there was going to be any hope, and she raised the cloth toward his mouth. Was he still smiling? He didn’t think so, but it looked as if she meant, considerately, to wipe any smile off of his face. There. That was something he could have said. That would have been funny. He was often funny when he was pitching. Barnaby Griswold, after all. Just now, however, he was not using his mouth and so could not speak even to be amusing.

  Instead, he smelled the warm wet of the cloth which she seemed reluctant to go ahead and apply.

  Much more than warm water, he smelled her work. He smelled a night’s worth of food on her hand and her wrist and on the sleeve of her shirt which came almost all the way down her forearm even though the cuff of the sleeve was rolled back. He glanced at the collar. As he thought, it was a Brooks Brothers shirt. She was from another life than here at Doug’s. She might be from his life. Now she might.

  He could smell oil and butter which had begun to turn rancid with the length of the evening and with the heat of the place, with her own heat. And mingled in that, he could smell her sweat. It was bitter, and it was hers, and he wished it was his. Was that what he tasted? Yet she only studied his mouth, against which she could not bring herself to press the wet cloth that she held.

  A fleeting current of self-preservation passed through him, and he scanned the crowd for Peterpotter and the big friends. He should have thought to do that before, but outside of himself and his family, he had never had real enemies until Oklahoma.

  He leaned forward and pressed his mouth, his lips as he understood it, against this lovely girl’s damp bar cloth.

  With six or eight Friday night stragglers watching him, Barnaby made a puckering and kissed at the cloth of the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. Gym or no gym, he could feel his stomach slop over his belt when he leaned. He was a fat old drunk, and he waited for the other drunks to laugh and to razz him. But he didn’t care. This was a brave thing to do. He kissed.

  He felt the cloth, and he stared into this lovely child’s face, willing her to look at him rather than at her cloth or at whatever it was about his mouth.

  Her hair was still mostly pulled back, but it had been damp and had dried now, and so it was loose. Her forehead was high and smooth beneath the frizz of hair that had fallen forward. Her eyebrows were thin but pronounced and wanted to meet above her nose, and that made her concentration appear fierce like an eagle. Her skin had been slicked and dried with her sweat, and still it was the rose and golden color of all the shore girls Barnaby had ever dreamed. Barnaby imagined he could taste her salt and taste the summer with it. Her nose was not at all a beak, but it was straight and strong and proudly there because she held her chin up. Across her cheekbones she had freckles like pale war paint on an Episcopal savage. Her mouth was wide, but her lips were more thin than full.

  Her lips were delicate and very smooth, and now they were pressed close, holding everything inside herself except for a drop of wet in the slight, freckled channel beneath her nose. She had a cold.

  He could feel the cloth, but he could not feel it with lips.

  He felt it with pain, and there was whimpering. Whimpering? Christ, it was him, Barnaby, out loud. It hurt that much. But out loud? He was appalled; people were watching. He was also appalled that it hurt so much, as if his mouth belonged to a museum of precious breakables.

  She took her cloth away because of his whimpering, and there, on her sleeve, was blood.

  He looked down the front of himself, down an old Brooks Brothers shirt which should have been just like hers, as if she were wearing something of his the way he’d always hoped any girl would do when he was a teenager. And he was covered with blood. Some of it was damp still, some caked; altogether it was a lot, as much blood as if there’d been a pouring.

  His own blood was what he tasted.

  Oh, no. Oh, no.

  Barnaby was a sissy and he hadn’t, even when he’d whimpered, realized how much this hurt. Was he proud? Did he want to stand up so the other drunks could get a good look? No, he was afraid. Because, Christ. How had he managed to do this when he wasn’t even drunk?

  “No,” said the pretty girl, and she put her hand and its cloth back in her small, stainless bowl.

  No? Her voice was deep and not quite sure of itself and as full of good things as crystal on a summer evening.

  “Somebody has to take him to the emergency room,” she said.

  The emergency room? Barnaby? He lo
oked anxiously up into the faces for confirmation, and the good-hearted Oklahoma barkeep nodded.

  The pretty girl shifted into a crouch. She was going to leave him.

  “Don’t go,” Barnaby said, and even to himself he sounded like oatmeal, but she looked at him and she hesitated long enough for him to reach out for her forearm. It was a thin, strong forearm, and he got it, and as soon as he’d gotten it, he couldn’t believe he held it. She didn’t seem afraid. He could feel her bone and her veins and her skin and the fine hair.

  Did she look at him? Did she see him?

  She let go her cloth in the bowl, and her fingers were still wet. The water ran in her palm and over the smoothness of her wrist and touched Barnaby’s thumb.

  He brought her hand back to his face.

  She didn’t stop him. He wouldn’t have made her.

  Her eyes were brown and green, and she was there, the same person inside her eyes who was inside the firm tenderness of her concentrated lips.

  Somebody alive was looking right at Barnaby.

  She absolutely saw him, and as soon as he understood that, he didn’t want her to see after all. He closed his own eyes to hide from her.

  Still, he brought her hand to his mouth, and even with his eyes closed, that was more courage than he had ever imagined for himself.

  He held her forearm gently back and forth, and her true fingertips touched wet and slowly like windshield wipers across his mouth.

  He was glad the other drunks were there. The kind barkeep. He would never have had the courage alone. He would have run away even if his legs were broken.

  He felt the muscles and the bones of her wrist roll and swivel ever so slightly, weightlessly, soundlessly, full of the same life she held in her eyes and her mouth. She wiped at the pain that should have been his lips.

  With his eyes closed, but out loud nonetheless, he said to the tips of her fingers which he knew were red by now from the mess of his bleeding, “I love you.”