Nor, despite his surprise at so liking her long, awkward body, had he ever loved Win. As she would be the first to tell anyone. Perhaps right now she was telling Duane for the umpteenth time, trapped as they were with one another’s conversations somewhere out on the isolation of the world’s liquid surface.
How could he ever have hoped to be a first rate at what he did and get home for dinner? How could he have passed out in time to get up in the morning, how could he have remembered what promises he’d won from Tom Livermore, if he had had to talk before bed?
Of course it had been Win’s happy assumption, and Barnaby’s too, a bargain really, that when they married Barnaby would cease at foolishness. And he had tried harder even than he’d tried for his father. Barnaby took his bargains seriously, and he was still young then. But his nature refused. Foolishness was his being and his calling.
Which was something he should have brought to his father’s notice in so many words. He should have, when it could have been done, told his father, Here, look at this, look what I’m terrific at. Rather than pretending at respectability, he should have told his father that he had found the one thing he could do, and was doing it for all he was worth, killing himself with doing it.
Who knows, maybe it would have made an impression.
After all, his father had taught him to ignore his mother.
That wouldn’t have been a comfortable truth to tell either his father or himself out loud, and so, really, Barnaby would never have brought it up. But the fact was that neither he or his father felt anything but relief when Barnaby’s mother died. Barnaby wished he hadn’t been late to say good-bye at her death, but it had still only been good-bye. His father had said good-bye years earlier in order to grieve and sweat entirely for his dying law firm.
Just as Barnaby later, in different but no less consuming fashion, grieved and sweated over the toilets at La Cote when the Old Ladies Bank deal was going belly up and the Griswold diet had begun to scour his bowels.
Good-bye, Tiger.
Barnaby might as well have said it himself, said it to her, to Marian, instead of the other way around. Because whether it was a deal going belly up forever, or a saloon shutting down for the night, Good-bye Tiger meant Turn out the lights.
It meant Marian didn’t like him, and it meant Barnaby could never have loved her anyhow. Barnaby held the steering wheel of the station wagon as if it were all he had, which it was, and he felt fine.
She was gone.
Where had he been? How had he not expected? Peterpotter, yes, Peterpotter had been a surprise, but Good-bye Tiger with Marian should never have been a surprise.
In his earlier incarnation, in saloons and deals, Good-bye Tiger had always eventually been a cause for excitement, a beginning toward new deals and new saloons, and Barnaby Griswold was somebody who loved beginnings.
So Barnaby, who also enjoyed maple syrup, put his mouth to the plastic of his steering wheel, which had long since come to look like crystallized maple syrup, and tried to imagine beginning.
He felt as if all his victories were ridiculous and his failures were true. It was a way he’d often felt. That was who he was.
Good.
Barnaby scraped and painted and did his best to forget about love. Day after day for weeks. He was a good scraper and a good painter, and since Marian would not be back, he became a good forgetter. It helped the forgetting to finally confess about Marian to Ada and then to hear Ada’s own consoling tale about having loved Charles, the senatorial fool in Wichita who turned to a cheap blond. Charles, the wastrel and plunger who married the blond and stayed with her and stayed in Wichita and years later struck oil.
Barnaby also went several times to the zoo, where the large tiger with the furry jowls remembered him and came over to gurgle deep inside a busy stomach and occasionally to sweep a majestic tail. Barnaby gurgled back. Sometimes Barnaby kneeled. Barnaby and the large tiger admired one another across their moat and shared stories about moving on between episodes of fat children and waitresses.
The day before Christmas, the letter arrived from Jerry Childs and the Winott Point Tennis Association.
He would not even have mentioned the letter to Ada unless he had to, but plainly he did have to. He mentioned it directly on Christmas Eve and then discussed it at depth for most of Christmas Day.
He tried to explain it as the weight and motion of history. Martin Luther’s theses. The Winott Point Tennis Association covenants. When Ada would have none of that, he tried to invoke the hero in history, Bonaparte, Budge. When that provoked Happiness to tearful discourse on Jesus and Galilee and problems of degradation around holy sites, then Barnaby invoked at full voice the theory of the asshole in history.
This was a risk on Christmas Day, with Happiness trying to maintain the Lord’s joyous moment, with everyone dressed up more or less, with goose fat reeking in the kitchen, with holy music turned on and off to assist Barnaby in focusing on an issue that was both political and genealogic.
But the notion caught Ada’s attention.
And of course the asshole in this case was Jerry Childs who had persuaded the very vaguest of ancient Richardson’s grandchildren to marry again so that he, Jerry Childs, could become installed in the tennis association. Now installed, even though he was not a tennis player, Jerry had taken the reins of the association’s official chariot. It had always been true that assholes had wanted and been encouraged to run the association; several generations in fact of Swifts had had the qualifying gene. But now that the association had been sued as the de facto governing body of the Point’s private acreage (which was all the Point except the lighthouse and breakwater), even the most devout of the Swifts balked at further service. Jerry Childs was so desperate to be director of anything with the illusion of inherited propriety, so desperate to belong in the venomous nest of old families and newly arrived Kopuses, that he not only submitted to the vilification attendant upon making up the annual tournament draw, but he also stood tall in the face of fire from the litigious parents of all the drunk off-Point delinquents who cared to murder themselves and their motorcycles against the Point’s good stone fences.
Barnaby might once have found Childs interesting, since Childs happened to be one of the newly risen technical stars at Fiduciary Funds in Boston and had much to do with lots and lots of money, even if Childs’s digitalized relationship to all that money was not exactly Barnaby’s cup of tea. But Childs had arrived on the Point and risen in Fiduciary just as Barnaby was evaporating professionally. And then Barnaby’s focus within the Winott Point Tennis Association had gone entirely to hitting the ball, beating Kopus.
And after that of course it had been Oklahoma.
But now, here was a letter from Jerry Childs on Winott Point Tennis Association stationery—he’d had fucking stationery printed up—announcing the annual meeting in the Winott hut on December 26. At the end of the letter—but still part of the letter, sent to everyone—was the casually dictatorial assertion that “since Barnaby Griswold has severed Winott Point connections and his children have never expressed an interest in the Association, if neither Griswold child attends the meeting on the 26th, it will be assumed that the Griswold family is to be removed from membership rolls in the Association.”
Phrased in the best tradition of Swift family attorneys. And drawn from the covenants, naturally.
“Everyone must continue to own a house on the Point and must attend the annual meeting to be held in the week between Christmas and New Year’s or face expulsion from the sacred privileges and premises of the Association.”
Well, fine. Or fine if the letter had come from a Swift. The Swifts had been paying lawyers to try and throw out families and reprobates and spouses and Brittany spaniels for fifty years, though in fact there were no premises, and the only privilege was playing in the tournament on the old Richardson court. The tournament, to be fair, really was a privilege, since there were only very few people in the association who could hold a tenn
is racket and walk at the same time, giving the Barnaby Griswolds of this world a chance to win at something physical. What was much more, Griswolds had been members always. Always. Which counted with Barnaby. The Winott Point Tennis Association was the last arena left in which Barnaby could do his part to keep Griswold history honorably alive in the world and in his children.
That was probably all Jerry Childs had to understand (and he would have understood it along with everybody else) to decide Barnaby and his kin were not a sufficient credit to the association. The Griswolds’ worth, in other words, had been reduced to a playable card for Childs: successfully expunge an old-liner family like the Griswolds from the association, and Childs was established as arbiter of Point behavior, not to say Point genes.
And with Jerry Childs, it didn’t matter that the covenants were famously a joke, written when the only people anywhere near the Point during Christmas week were the last retarded generation of ice cutters and the first wave of off-season thieves and private police.
Before her strokes, Ada would have gotten it right away, but on this year’s Christmas Day, with Happiness for foil, she interpreted Barnaby’s troubles as part of some deception to do with Babylon, and despite Barnaby’s pleas for intercession, Happiness nodded and listened and stared with such a crushing weight of mindlessness that Barnaby wondered for a few minutes whether she might herself not be a lost Richardson grandchild, an Anastasia of the Point’s idiot royalty.
Nobody but Barnaby seemed to understand, or care, that Jerry Childs was not a Swift.
What had happened to Barnaby’s powers of explanation and persuasion?
Was Ada actively refusing to grasp the fact that the Swifts were known assholes? Everyone had swum in the same pond with one Swift or another. But Jerry Childs was a new and unknown asshole. Unknown except that his fervency had been proved twice over by his marrying the Richardson princess and by his seizing directorship of the association. Jerry Childs came to the Winott Point Tennis Association covenants with the fresh, humorless ardor of a shouting Baptist to an Episcopal pulpit. Jerry Childs was not pretending; he really was capable of anything.
“Don’t you see?”
“You’re leaving. I knew you would leave as soon as you fell in love with your blond. Your Marian. All this about her disappearing. Your painting wherever you paint every day. I’m still enough of a woman that I know when I’m not loved any more. I know when I’ve been discarded. I don’t know why you bothered to pretend anything. Except that Charles pretended right up to the end just the same way.
She tried to bring part of her stack of religious comics across the coffee table to her, and Barnaby grabbed them away.
“I want to read,” she said.
“I’m weak,” Barnaby said. “Don’t you understand even that much, Ada?”
“Oh, Barnaby,” Happiness said. “You’re not weak. You’re a big strong man. You go to the gym.”
It was the sort of line she could offer with such deadpan abundance of truth telling that Barnaby, never a violent man, understood, in the flash of time it took to clench a fist, all he’d ever want to know about the nature of violent souls.
“He is, too, weak,” Ada said. “He is horribly weak. What’s the matter with you? Look at him. He’s a spineless betrayer. And I love him. What does that make me? Pray for us, Happiness. Pray for us all.”
“Now listen to me, Ada. I’m weak. And Jerry Childs is an asshole, an extreme, fundamentalist asshole whom no one knows but who has gotten hold of power. Should I let him come near me with a sharp knife?”
“What?”
“I’m ruined financially and every other way; I’m defenseless, and Jerry Childs is a crazy asshole with a knife. Do I turn my back on him?”
“No. Don’t turn your back on anyone. That’s what they say in the mall parking lots.”
“Do I ignore him, like I ignored Peterpotter? Remember Peterpotter? And in those days I was far from defenseless.”
“Happiness, isn’t this what happened to the Assyrian kings?”
“Forget the Assyrian kings, Ada. I’m talking about Jerry Childs, who is really and truly going to try to get Griswolds thrown out of the Winott Point Tennis Association to which Griswolds have always belonged. If the Griswold name comes off that roll of membership, Ada, I will have lost my very last anything and everything. And lost it for my children, for my daughters and their children. Can’t you understand? This is what I have left to hand on to my girls.”
“When I didn’t make Theta at O.U., because of all those women who still hate me, the ones who aren’t dead, I went to Arizona and made it there.”
“Yes. Absolutely. The Thetas. But there is no chapter of Winott Point in Arizona.”
“No, I don’t suppose there is.”
“Absolutely there is not.”
“You really have to go?”
“Yes. I have to. I’ll be back in no time, a couple of days, but I have to go. I have to be there in person to protect our membership.”
“Then I understand. He has to go, Happiness.”
And in that moment, Barnaby deluded himself into thinking he had made everyone happy, and so he was pleased with himself.
He was a tiger of Christmas ease despite Jerry Childs.
It was Christmas afternoon and time to eat the goose of which Happiness (a farm girl, Barnaby’d thought) was afraid.
Barnaby imagined growing sideburns like his friend the immense tiger once the business with Jerry Childs had been wrapped up.
He said to Ada, “May I turn the Christmas music back on?”
“I always hated Christmas,” she said to Happiness, spitefully. “Hated it.”
“Then this can be the first happy Christmas,” Barnaby said. “Happiness, will you carve the goose? Or should I?”
Barnaby stood up from the sofa and stepped around the coffee table and started for the kitchen.
And Happiness said, “You’re crying.”
“No, I’m not,” Barnaby said, surprised she could think so.
Ada was crying.
Barnaby turned back and stood before her wheelchair. He’d thought everything was fine. He said, “What’s the matter?”
“You’re leaving,” Ada said.
“I’m not.”
“You are,” she sobbed.
“I’m coming back in a couple of days. We’re going to spend New Year’s Eve together.”
“You aren’t,” she sobbed. “We won’t ever. Ever. I’ll be dead before I see you again. I’m going to die alone. Or with Win. My daughter who hates me. It’s her turn now. Your sentence is up. Why would you come back? It was always the first of the year. I haven’t forgotten. Don’t let Win come. I want to die alone.”
“I have a return ticket, Ada. I don’t care about the first of the year anymore. I’m going to stay with you. The hell with the first of the year.”
“I know perfectly well that you want an early release from my jail. Well I don’t care about the first of the year either. Go ahead. I’m giving you a pardon. You can leave a week early. I don’t know why you came in the first place, and I don’t know why you stayed so long. Good-bye.”
Already she had wet her face with tears, and their gloss on the thin, translucent softness of her wrinkles was like a decoration. It could have been gaiety. Her lips were pulled back from her large teeth and her shrunken gums, and she could have been hilarious in a grin.
“I promise,” Barnaby said. “I promise with everything that makes a promise sacred, that I will be back and that we will spend New Year’s Eve together. The end of my suspension doesn’t mean a thing now. I haven’t called a soul, and nobody would know who I was if I did call. I have to finish painting the house here on Wimbledon. The landlord’s going to give me free rent. I’m thinking about a job.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said, and suddenly her wetted face grew smaller, and her mouth became nothing but a grimace. She might have been in the real throes of death.
“Ada?” Barn
aby bent to her in the earliest tide of panic. “I promise, Ada. Ada? I don’t care about the securities business anymore. It’s been four years, and I don’t want it anymore. That’s why I never made any calls. I live here now.”
“On the telephone?” she said.
“On the telephone. I never made a single call.”
And she threw her arms up at him.
She threw her arms up so suddenly and so surprisingly that Barnaby stood away from her in a start.
But she had him around his neck. She had ahold of him and she held on and she stood up after him, with him.
Against him.
She stood in sweatpants and a silk blouse with a green ribbon pinned to it like St. Patrick’s Day, with a hooded gray sweat jacket tied around her shoulders.
Her soaked face was almost up to his.
Her arms held rigid around his neck.
She said, “I don’t care about promises. I want you to love me. I don’t want anything else.”
She let go with one arm and pulled at the sweat jacket in a quick, manic jerking until it fell from her, and then she grabbed at the collar of her blouse and tore at that so three buttons broke loose and the bone white curtain of skin that lay loose across the top of her chest was bared to the tops of her large weights of breast supported in thick cotton brassiere.
Happiness appeared close beside them.
“Get away,” Ada shouted, and beat with her free arm to keep Happiness off.
And then put her mouth at Barnaby.
With her mouth open and soaking, Ada kissed onto Barnaby’s mouth.
Into his mouth.
She pushed Happiness away again, and said into Barnaby’s face, “I’m taking my clothes off for you. I’m taking them all off. I love you. I want to go to bed. You can touch me anywhere.”
FOOL
By the time he finally got to Will Rogers World Airport on Christmas night, he was nearly late for his flight, which was the last flight out and his only chance to make the association meeting.
Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 20
