Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  Before he had time to respond, she nodded his response for him and turned to shepherd her youngish women on to their table.

  Barnaby turned away himself, and not toward the bathroom. He was too shy to risk another moment in Doug’s despite his emergency and his moment of bravery. No, he turned for the door out to the parking lot, and as he turned and began to run off with what he’d won before he could lose it, he glimpsed the young family that had come in the restaurant while he was waiting for Peterpotter to beat him. The father was engaged with linguine, and the mother was stirring a jar of something she’d brought for the baby. The baby, who had been elevated from stroller to high chair, stared at Barnaby with more amazement than Barnaby had ever before inspired. Barnaby hesitated. Was it Barnaby’s power of love the baby saw, and recognized with the same purity of vision Ada possessed? Had the waitress seen it too? For an instant only, Barnaby stared back at the baby. And as Barnaby’s and the baby’s eyes met, the baby began to cry.

  Christ Almighty. He was frightening to small children.

  But there, beyond the weeping child, was the insignia for the men’s room.

  And emergency won out.

  Leaning precipitously forward, sprinting from the knees down, Barnaby powered toward the weeping baby, and the baby began to scream. Barnaby did not look anymore at the baby, but he had to pass that table, and the baby looked at him, and the screams went to shrieks. Barnaby could feel the parents looking up aghast as he went passionately by.

  It was one of the new urinals at shin height and he flooded into it, dampening the bottoms of his pant legs.

  It was transcendent.

  It was more than relief.

  He had a date.

  He came home and looked at himself in the long mirror of his own bathroom, and he knew that he couldn’t possibly go. He wasn’t a boxer. He wasn’t even a boxer who’d lost. Happiness was right. The shrieking baby was right. The waitress herself had said it. He looked like a drunk who’d been beaten up in the parking lot.

  Even as he studied himself in cheap, three-quarter length on the back of his narrow bathroom door, even as he acknowledged that Happiness, no less, could be more astute than he was about his own God-awful appearance, he did not for a moment believe he was disqualified from the courtship of his beautiful waitress. He’d known too many eminently lovable men who’d suffered beatings in parking lots to believe that.

  But to pick her up tomorrow at noon was utterly out of the question. For the next couple of weeks until he looked like a human being again, he would have no choice but to lurk out of sight.

  Since a couple of weeks brought him that much closer to the end of his suspension, since the hopeful concerns of love were already clearly augmenting his commercial mass, maybe this would be an opportune time, finally and no kidding, to begin making his calls and putting himself back in the world of investments. “Remember Barnaby Griswold?”

  How painful could it be to pick up his old associate the telephone? No more painful than boxing, certainly. Because the thing with Livermore had been about Barnaby wanting to move in, which anybody but Barnaby (in a time of some stress, to be fair) would have understood beforehand was not something the directors at Crenshaw could ever condone. The president of the foundation has a securities felon for a roommate. Not a felon, but close enough.

  On the other hand, keeping in touch, dropping a hint here a hint there, collecting a tidbit here and there, that sort of action wasn’t going to frighten Livermore’s directors or anyone else. Especially some of the anyone elses Barnaby would call after Livermore. In two weeks, everything would be up to speed again; word would be out and Barnaby would be having to lose all over again the crazy (but very successful) asshole who cornered drugs taken off the market and for ten years had wanted nobody but Barnaby to do his respectable-making initial public offering.

  Remembering that kind of thing for the first time in years made a future in the world beyond Oklahoma seem finally to be at hand. It was at hand.

  Of course with Ada buying his groceries and with hardly any expenses beyond his dirt-cheap rent and the gym, he actually had enough dough to last in Oklahoma quite a good while past the end of the month, maybe years past.

  But why?

  It had always been understood that he would be leaving on the first of the year. The year was up. There were professionals who were prepared and contracted to step in and watch Ada, and they would do a far better job than Barnaby. Barnaby was decoration in the larger picture of Ada’s care. Also, Win would be back. He’d forgotten about Win.

  Yes, with love on his side (if held in sensible abeyance for the moment), Barnaby Griswold was ready at last to roll up his sleeves and do what he did—dial, to begin with. If he made his calls and got things going, he could absolutely be ready on the first of the year, and he’d take his glorious princess of the busing stand, whatever her name turned out to be, back with him. Tomorrow was Sunday. So he’d start calling Monday. First thing, what with the time change. He had put off making any calls for four years, but procrastination had always been his genius. Now was the last minute, the time when he thrived; now his métier was summoning him back with an urgency that could not be denied. Love had made him large again, and it was all he could do to keep from reaching for the phone right this minute. “Hello? Remember Barnaby Griswold? Of course I know it’s Saturday night.”

  He looked at himself in his thin mirror, surrounded less by love (since he knew he had to wait weeks to see her again) than by the operating-room-green paint of his plywood bathroom. At night, as it was now, and with the light on, the green walls showed all the scalloped shadows of their peeling, and the door to the shower revealed its tracings of rust around the edges of scummed, milk-gray glass. With that as background, he tried to see in his own battered face the tiger who could claw his way back to prominence as sorry Peterpotter would never manage to do. Whatever your size, after all, clawing was necessary. He said aloud to the mirror, “Remember Barnaby Griswold?” and hoped that a real tiger would answer with a list of names in the order he should call them on Monday. He wondered if the tigers had heard about how he whipped Peterpotter. He’d tell them on his date to the zoo in a couple of weeks. By then, hell, by then…

  And his father said, Take a look, for God sake, at where you’re living.

  What was that supposed to mean?

  He wasn’t entirely surprised to hear from his father, but he would have expected his father to side with the tigers and insist that Barnaby get to work and make calls right now if he had to, and all day Sunday too.

  His father said, Somebody’s used a flat paint in the bathroom, and it’s peeling from every surface but where they splattered the mirror over the sink.

  Barnaby looked, and certainly paint (flat paint, ever inappropriate to bathrooms), was there on the corners of the medicine-cabinet mirror. Until now, Barnaby had willed himself not to notice, but there it was. He could scrape it off. He could scrape the walls too and repaint the whole bathroom in a suitable gloss. Christ, the entire damned house needed scraping and painting, but what a thankless task. Especially when he was on his way out of town.

  He bent over the sink and stared into that medicine-cabinet mirror. Even with its current disguise, it was his own face in the mirror, and disguised or not it was a face that would benefit from a thankless task. It was a face that looked as if it was itself a thankless task.

  “But I’m renting,” he said aloud to the face, hoping as he said so to conceal the fact that the rent was only four hundred a month. “I might be leaving any day. I’ve got calls to make.”

  You’re living in a pigsty, his father said.

  It was what his father had also said after Barnaby’s freshman year of college when Barnaby’s grades, despite his best efforts, found their way home. Barnaby had planned to summer at school and had very nearly lined up an illegal bartending job, but his father arrived unannounced and delivered the pigsty line while standing knee-deep in dirty clothes and be
er cans in a room with sheets over the windows and no sheets on the bed. Strangely, it was the report of Barnaby’s grades at which his father was looking while he spoke, while Barnaby got dressed in the middle of the afternoon, and so there was the sense that his father was referring to all of Barnaby’s life as a pigsty. To be fair, it all was a pigsty. Barnaby had discovered that he liked a pigsty.

  His father said, “You’re going to get things here cleaned up straight away, but some time you may find yourself in a larger sty for which the remedies are not easy. This summer we will practice a remedy, so when the time comes you’ll be equipped.”

  It was the sort of thing his father could say and sound so cryptically like Moses that Barnaby, and plenty of other people too, would expect all the tents of Israel to turn blue by morning.

  The meaning in this case was that Barnaby and his father were going to paint the house on the Point. By themselves. Without pay. Barnaby’s labor would be repayment of the tuition fees he had squandered, it being his father’s most fervent hope that Barnaby arrive at school again in the fall with no spending money whatever.

  As it would turn out in the fall, Barnaby was to get his illegal bartending job the day classes began, and all was to be well. But at the start of the summer, facing two solid months of hard work six days (six days) a week, the world and the future were a dark tunnel with no light in any direction, with only his father beside him, watching him, telling him how to scrape, how to feather a brush, how to cut an edge. When had his father ever painted? But he had. His father never faked it. And his father was taking two months away from the law firm. Admittedly this was before the firm began its consuming decline, but it was still the firm; it was still his father who never did allow himself the three weeks he’d promised Barnaby’s mother to take her once more to Florence.

  For the briefest interlude on the drive away from his life at school, Barnaby remembered with a skulker’s epiphany that the house on the Point had been painted just the autumn before. But it was not the outside of the house that would be addressed.

  It was the kitchen, and two coats inside all of the cupboards, oil base. It was steaming and scraping and finally clawing with their fingernails at the layers of wallpaper on the horsehair plaster in the upstairs bedrooms. It was oil base in the bathrooms. It was two coats around every pane of glass in eighty windows each of which had twelve lights. For which, his father said day after day, they could be grateful because an older house might have had twenty-four light windows.

  His father loved it.

  His mother hated it. She had no hiding places anymore, and fewer moments of secret oblivion. She had to consult on the new wallpaper and the new colors of paint when she didn’t want to change a thing.

  Then finally she loved it, because Barnaby’s father was so happy. Barnaby’s father laughed. He wore an undershirt and his old navy khakis cut off at the knee. He swaggered at the end of a day. Maybe they had sex.

  Barnaby, not without difficulty, endured.

  But he endured as a different man than either of his parents knew, because during his freshman year at college, Barnaby had begun to come into his own.

  At college, as his peers had begun to recognize the worth of a fool in a new and ever more celebratory light, so had Barnaby. Freshman year was a laying of foundations for deals to come, for a lifetime of deals. Not from the connections—Barnaby deplored the notion of pursuing and trading in other people for commerce, such a shabby attitude toward human beings and such a waste of a good time. Barnaby believed in friends. Barnaby believed in fun. And in his freshman year he saw his beliefs begin to crystallize in his own capacity to be a sort of maestro of friends. As month to month through the school year Barnaby’s nature unfolded into the freedoms and privileges of a good and tolerant university, Barnaby could feel himself growing, transcending himself. He, was, what? How did you put these nuanced ripenings of a man into practical terms? Perhaps it was coming to understand that three times in one week he could throw up and still carry on. Other people saw that and came to count on Barnaby. And by the end of freshman year, he wasn’t even throwing up anymore. His legend had been established, and he simply carried on, and was happy to carry on. He was Barnaby Griswold. The deals were out there waiting for him, and to tell the truth, once the deals began, then after each deal for the rest of his life he never did have a clue what the next one would be. He learned to pretend that he had a clue, a plan, another deal waiting down the line, but he never did, and he understood the clueless absence of direction as his compass, his true north. Freshman year for Barnaby was unmitigated joy, and the joy was compounded because he knew it was only the beginning.

  Now, Barnaby let himself wonder, as he ordinarily refused to do, what the people had felt like who had finally ended up holding the bag on his various deals when the fluff blew away. They weren’t people whom Barnaby knew. They were the market. They were strangers who made a mistake after all the people that Barnaby knew had made lots of money. Those happy moneymakers were the people Barnaby liked to think of. His friends. But the other ones, the ones who ended up with less than they’d hoped they might, sometimes quite a lot less, the stupid ones whom he had always blessed in his heart and occasionally extolled aloud over Thanksgiving dinner…

  No apology, he still knew, was ever owed on the Old Ladies Bank deal; Barnaby had simply recognized a market disequilibrium and made a bet.

  But why dwell on that?

  Why, for that matter, wonder about all of the happy friends from all of the years of other deals, friends who had turned out again and again to be parts of the deals rather than parts of Barnaby’s life? He could still call Tom Livermore, even if not for a place to stay just yet. He could call Dicky Kopus, if he wanted. Would Kopus qualify as a friend?

  The good news was that here, under his own two large feet, above his many-colored face, was a house which needed scraping and painting. Wasn’t that good news? Perhaps because of his father’s reassuring presence, Barnaby felt that it was. It was a chance to build up his credit again in the balance sheet of bad behavior before he went back to work, and that sort of thing was much more important to a guy like Barnaby than anything as sensible as phone calls.

  Those calls had waited this long, and they could wait beyond Monday morning.

  They might have to wait a good deal beyond, because this was no one day job.

  So. Solid ground from which to leap back into the securities fray, with the coincidental benefit of a shipshape little bungalow in which to present himself to his waitress.

  He turned off the bathroom lights, went to the kitchen, and got out cold chicken pieces that he had baked early in the week with a jar of picante sauce. He steamed some broccoli. And then as he ate those things, he made a list, not of options in life or of victims to phone but of what he really needed: brushes, scrapers, spatulas, razor knife, electric sander.

  He went to bed right after his frozen yogurt and thought about colors of paint.

  He sat up in the middle of the night gripped by the realization that he had not told his beautiful waitress he couldn’t meet her.

  Or that he would meet her, but just not tomorrow.

  That he wanted to go to the zoo very much but that he had to be unseen for some weeks.

  Should he go back in and call across her tables that they’d meet same time same place in, say, three weeks to be safe? Had she said that she could only meet tomorrow?

  He saw from the luminous dials of his electric clock that it was after three and that Doug’s was long closed.

  All right. To avoid being seen, it was better to call anyway.

  But he couldn’t call at three o’clock in the morning.

  Could he find her phone number?

  He didn’t know her name.

  “I hope you can forgive my face,” he said resolutely but not very hopefully out the window of the station wagon as she came across the parking lot from her Volkswagen convertible with its ragged knife slit in the top. He hadn’t seen he
r at first, but she seemed to know it would be him in the station wagon and jumped out of her Volks and came in long, direct strides. She was wearing corduroys and light hiking boots. Barnaby was wearing corduroys. It was a gray, cold day, an awful day for the zoo. She hurried, though she wasn’t very late. Doug’s was open for brunch, so Barnaby could have called in the morning. But what would he have asked? For the name and number of the girl with the whatever, like he was a kid hoping for a date, picking her up? As opposed to a forty-six-year-old brawler hoping not to see her until he healed? She was almost to him before he could get out and call, even though she was just across the hood now, call again to get it over with, “I’m sorry about my face.” She wore a maroon turtleneck (a turtleneck) and a dark blue, heavyweight flannel shirt, an L.L. Bean flannel shirt if he’d ever seen one. Barnaby had on a lighter flannel shirt and a Shetland sweater and an old tweed sport coat. He’d finally decided to come as who he was, and if it turned out that that was from outer space, then outer space it was. She was stopped and looking at him across the big, poxed hood of the station wagon, and she was smiling in nervous formality, but smiling. She’d come. He’d hoped she wouldn’t come. He wasn’t from outer space if they both knew L.L.Bean. She was just as beautiful. More beautiful. He wanted to button her inside his shirt. Gad, what a peculiar thought. He wanted to crawl across the weather-blasted hood to her on his knees and beg her. But beg what? She stared at him without a bit of makeup on. With her hair still tied back for speed. Was it more red, more golden? She brought a gray day into glory, into a dream of the zoo on a Sunday. Why on earth had she come?

  She said, “What?”

  “Forgive me,” he whispered.

  She said, “Your face looks just as good in daylight,” and in her smile there was almost mischief. “Do you have a camera? We should take a picture.”

  We?

  He started to go around the colossal hood to open her door, to shake hands and be a gentleman. To be a date? But she said, “I got it,” and opened her door herself, and he bumped into the fender but did not fall and did not flinch. He got back in his own door and pulled it mostly closed and did not try to pull on it a second time. He turned to her, and they were in this tiny space alone together. Christ, it really was a date, and there on the seat between them was the garlic.