But he wasn’t late, and he’d known he wouldn’t be. He’d known it even as he was doing his emergency pack while the taxi waited on Wimbledon. Traffic to the airport late on Christmas night was going to be easy.
Along with a certainty he’d make the plane, however, he felt something else. Grabbing suits and shoes and shirts, doing what in the old days he had called his coup d’état pack, he felt something he had not felt for so long that at first he was not certain.
He sat in the cab racing through the already sagging lights of everyone else’s holiday along the highway, and knew that a wave was in fact building and that he himself was on the front face of it.
This was what you felt when suddenly you were into a fastmoving deal. And when you felt it, you simply tried to stay in it. If you could stay in the wave, you knew that it would carry you.
Wouldn’t you know that as soon as he admitted out loud he was never going to make any calls, he would pick up a wave. But that was the way it had always worked for Barnaby.
Jogging to the plane at the last minute, Barnaby felt as if he were already onto a deal with genuine money, a deal large enough to move the tennis association headlines back to the second section of the newspaper.
The wave that Barnaby and his deal had caught felt as if it might be a tidal wave out of dead calm, a wave only Barnaby knew and only Barnaby rode. The plane took off, and it was an inexpressible thrill to lift into the night with that kind of wave beneath you.
Some people might have advised their friends that this was a manic episode and needed to be contained, but Barnaby, free of friends for the moment and full of his own personal history of manic successes, only wondered where the wave was headed, and really he didn’t wonder very much about that.
He had enough on his hands managing the actual geographical destinations. To get a ticket on Christmas Eve for travel on Christmas night was to arrange a tour of the country. Barnaby’s itinerary passed through Phoenix and Dallas and Atlanta, where there was a layover until a dawn flight to Pittsburgh and then on to La Guardia in time to catch a shuttle flight to Boston and then the train and a taxi out to the Point.
Was it when he learned he’d be coming into La Guardia that he began to feel the very first stirrings of the wave? Perhaps it was, because La Guardia was so close to town that on the way back Barnaby could stop in for lunch at La Cote and still make his return flight. Since he couldn’t afford even a salad at La Cote, here indeed were the first stirrings: financial considerations fell away. They had already fallen away to some extent with the rush back to Winott Point, but that had a goal. There was no goal in La Cote. Yes, somewhere, the foolishness of a deal was opening itself and beckoning to Barnaby.
As Barnaby rode at least partly in answer to that beckoning, as he toured the southern night, his wave built still more. There was nothing else to notice.
Well, there was hunger to notice. The goose in Picadilly Manor had never been carved; there had been no Christmas dinner, and at the time Barnaby had not regretted it. On the flight to Phoenix there were no nuts left, and Barnaby did not too much regret that either. He did regret their absence on the legs to Dallas and Atlanta.
Hungrily, he watched other travelers for the ghost of his own past Christmas travels. There had been one or two very good deals cemented during the cheer of exactly Christmas Day in parts well removed from his hearth. Naturally there had been not-so-good Christmas deals that likewise had claimed his Christmas presence as a firefighter, but it was the good ones he remembered especially on this Christmas night when, just hours after he’d as much as admitted he would never do another deal in his life, he found himself riding an enormous, inexplicable wave of momentum.
And then while he sat for several hours in Atlanta, Barnaby lost the wave.
Barnaby sat in Atlanta and tried by force of will to keep the wave beneath himself, and felt it slide away and leave him.
Gone.
No one but Barnaby would have noticed, but the wave rolled on, and Barnaby was left eddying.
He tried to console himself with the fact that even after the expense of this trip, he did have enough money to live as he was doing for a couple of years. Once he would have considered those years as a limitless time in which a million great things could happen. But now he calculated like an insurance actuary that he might have another forty years to live. Which meant thirty-eight years with no money.
Less than a week until January 1, and it couldn’t matter less, regardless of what he’d promised Ada. If another deal ever did come along for him, he couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t stay on the wave.
He had to hope that Oklahoma was looking for a résumé like his.
A résumé?
A job. He’d told Ada he was thinking of a job, and he had meant it, even if he had only begun thinking about it in the moment he spoke. But now the truth came home. A job. Just the word was a terror to his soul.
The thought that he might have to get one—would have to, and no jokes about lawn work—was enough to make him want to climb down off his plastic chair in the Atlanta airport and hold his cheek against the footprints of people who were glad to have jobs and belonged somewhere because of it.
He tried to tell himself, and it was true, that he had gone irredeemably beyond the precipice of financial doom more times than he could count, and those had always been the times when he had soared. Risk and reward were the terms he had used to talk about it with the graduating nephews of friends, kids who imagined he could tell them about the nature of work with investments, but in his heart he had always known that his own dynamic was the buoyancy of foolishness. It was: leap, spread your arms, and think exhilarating thoughts of money. Only now he had lived through every wreck he was entitled to survive. His odds were up. There could be no more leaps, and money would never again be anything but the humiliating measure of its absence.
No, the money was not coming back. And a fool like Barnaby Griswold, after a certain age, which Barnaby had long since passed, needed money for his foolishness. Without money, the fluff blew away. Without money, foolishness like Barnaby’s withered, and in the Christmas of Atlanta’s airport, Barnaby had to acknowledge that he himself was withered. His nature had dried up. He had pretended for as long as he could, and now it was time for a job. He was afraid of a job, but he would get used to the idea. He would have to. Everybody else did, and Barnaby Griswold was no different now than everybody else. Now he had to hope that he qualified for a job.
Finally, before his flight to Pittsburgh, he went to the can, shaved, bathed as best he could, put on a good suit and saw in the mirror that the suit hung on him as if there were nothing left of all the fat and noise that had made Barnaby Griswold. Which of course was the case. What would become of him without his noisy fat? Would he have to eat and drink and give up the gym to get a job? Oh Christ, a job.
He got on the plane to Pittsburgh with a Wall Street Journal and with half a dozen financial magazines so that the other still-going ghosts of himself in years past would imagine he belonged in his suit. He never looked around to see if the wave were alive and might pick him up once more and carry him somewhere. The wave had passed through.
By the time he got to La Guardia he had learned only that the market was continuing up and that trading was erratic but heavy for the holiday season and that there had been no tax sell-off earlier in the month, no selling to lock in year-end profits for decoration. Any ten-year-old watching the evening news could have told him that. So Barnaby had become a slower learner than ever before. Just as he was about to go back into the job market in the suits he couldn’t fill. After twenty-five dollars of the moment’s financial literature, Barnaby passed through the holiday wasteland of La Guardia without any perspective whatever on a holiday market up and erratic and heavy.
Which made the tennis association a blessing. The association took his attention. The association became again his focus by default. Today, Barnaby Griswold was going to see to something more important,
his daughters’ birthright. He was tired, and he dozed on the train up from Boston.
By the time he got in the cab at the station for the run out to the Point, he had reclaimed purpose in his life. He instructed the driver to hurry and he threw a twenty into the front seat. He told the driver to blow the God damned horn every inch of the way down the Point Road, and when he got out of the cab he threw another twenty into the front seat and said, “Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and come back in an hour or so.”
For Ada, despite a membership at the Driscoll Hills Country Club, there had never been tennis or even golf.
To the best of Barnaby’s knowledge, in the last fifty years Ada had never walked when it was avoidable.
Since the big stroke, she had not moved a muscle for any purpose other than to chew and turn her dominoes and do whatever Happiness helped her with back in the bathroom.
But make no mistake. There was strength now. She was a large woman, which was easy to forget when she was in the wheelchair. She was large, and right now she was passionate. Right now she was a Valkyrie.
She faced Barnaby, and with one arm she held his neck in a brutal headlock.
With the other arm she alternately beat away Happiness and tore at her own buttons and at the cotton brassiere to give Barnaby her antique but still hefty breasts. With her mouth she kissed soakingly into Barnaby’s mouth and at the same time cried, “Touch me. I want you to touch me.”
Happiness may have been speaking too, but Barnaby didn’t hear it. He could make out Happiness’s shape beside them only as an indistinct component of the room’s furniture, a weaving, witnessing lamp.
Barnaby himself stood with his arms out to the sides and with his neck painfully forward, with the bottom of his face wet and his mouth lost to another nation. He stood with Ada’s bras-siered sacks of breasts swinging their oddly substantial Cream of Wheat weight into his rigid trunk.
Christ Almighty.
And there was no getting away.
There was instead a squeal of horror from the outside, from Happiness.
From Ada at the same moment came an animal shout of triumph.
One breast was actually loose in the air, loose against Barnaby. God, he could feel its nipple.
“There,” she cried. “Touch me.”
He made one mighty surge of flight, tried with all he had to get free, and could not do it. She had him. She beat Happiness away and had him.
So he held her.
What else was there to do?
He brought his arms forward and around her, and he stood into her. And he held her. He hugged her.
“Barnaby,” she said.
She pressed her hands now against his chest, driving her fingers into him like a lover. He hugged her more tightly, and her hands went around his back and now she hugged too.
“Keep away, Happiness,” she shouted. “Keep away or I’ll kill us all.”
She was up against the length of him now, and her head was onto his shoulder, beside his ear. She stopped shouting at Happiness, and she whispered, “Barnaby?”
Was it possible that Barnaby had the slight, the very very slight, beginnings of an erection?
Oh, he didn’t want that.
He hugged Ada as tightly as he could, and she was no dead weight the way she was when she was going into the car. She stood and held herself against him, and he could feel her shaking with the exertion. He could feel the furious beat of her heart in the squeezed pressure of her breasts against him.
“Oh, Barnaby,” she whispered. “Do you love me?”
“Of course I love you,” he said with great heartiness as he tried to think of something besides that tiny, appalling hint of swollen eagerness below his belt.
“Barnaby,” she whispered, her voice a gasp in his ear. “Do you want to get in bed?”
He took a deep breath and said loudly, “Yes. Let’s go to bed.”
He brought his eyes into focus and found Happiness, and to his amazement, Happiness was watching now with quiet bliss, with a sympathetic, transported joy.
“Happiness,” he said. “We’re going to go to bed. Will you help us into the bedroom?”
Ada hissed into Barnaby’s ear, “Happiness?”
“You don’t want to have to go in the wheelchair, do you?”
“No,” she said. “Not the chair.”
He arrived at the Winott hut after everyone else had arrived. The parked cars, covered with road salt and the other slop of winter driving, looked, on the afternoon after Christmas, like tired ornaments. They were strung around the circled, otherwise empty Winott lane, in eight inches of snow, under black-barked, winter-bare trees and an iron sky. The tracks of boots went at the door of the hut.
But Barnaby didn’t think anybody would have begun proceedings yet.
They all had to have heard the horn of the taxi blaring down the length of the Point Road. The Portuguese driver, who hated everyone ever connected with the Point, except now Barnaby, had been more than happy to blare. He had in fact offered to go to a friend’s boat and get a couple of air horns to further disrupt the holiday quiet of the rich, but time had not allowed. It was a near thing for Barnaby as it was, with his several flights and then the local train from Boston.
It was a doubly near thing when, before Barnaby reached the door to the hut, his good shoes slipped on ice beneath the snow and he hung suspended on the balance of one fine English heel, his other heel far before him and above waist height, one arm up, one arm back, the velvet collar of his chesterfield prying into his mouth. It couldn’t have been more than a second, but it felt like the eternal minute during which an acrobat falls to his death in front of thousands. During that minute, Barnaby balanced on the precipice of final humiliation when he had thought all final humiliations were behind him. There would be no splendid entrance after a sprawl—if he got to make an entrance at all; they might open the door, all of them, and see him go down flailing. He would present himself prone, beside the sagging, snow-thatched wall of pea vine that had taken over the old boat racks in the decades since the last Winotts moved to their ritzier compound down the coast.
He had time to imagine that and to listen for the opening of the door to the hut. He had time to imagine them lifting him, a sopping wreck in a handmade, oversized suit. He imagined acceding to expulsion from the association on grounds of ridiculousness before he was taken by some expendable teenager to the emergency room. Back to the emergency room when he’d only two weeks ago gotten the stitches out of his mouth from a previous ridiculous moment.
And then an organic message reached his core of cerebration and balance, and the message told him to turn around.
So he turned around on one foot with composure but rather rapidly, spun would be more like it, his weight shifting miraculously, athletically, from his heel to his toe while the other foot stayed in the air, while the velvet edge of the overcoat’s collar slid back under his chin, while his arms spread wide for flight back toward the taxi. While his taxi driver stared at him, begging him silently not to fall, not to let the rich people win again. The cabdriver could not know about the covenants, but he had to know that Barnaby, no matter how he spoke, no matter what his clothes looked like, was here in the bastion of summer money as an adversary.
“Stand up,” the lips of the cabbie said noiselessly through the dirty glass of his window. It was the voice of all the policemen and firemen from the town gym, all the locals who had hated him impersonally forever and in person for the couple of years while he became healthy in their midst. Was there also on the cabbie’s face a conviction that Barnaby didn’t have it in him to stand, that only a town guy would be able to walk down a path to a door and not fall?
Barnaby stood up.
He brought his other foot down, and his chesterfield fell straight onto his shoulders, and there he was.
The cabbie grinned. Barnaby had pulled it off, and the cabbie showed Barnaby a fist with his thumb pointing up. Two of the cabbie’s fingers were missing, Jes
us, but his thumb was up; that was the message. The cabbie brought the fist to his cab’s horn and blared, and drove around the rest of the dark circle of maples and off. And as the blaring sang back away on the Point, Barnaby managed to hear in it the grudging approval of a whole locker room of civil servants, even the ones who worked with free weights.
Barnaby turned and opened the door of the hut and strode in.
It was one bare little room, generations removed from stored sails and centerboards, but still with its tiny, salt-pitted cleat at the end of the pull string for the light. There was even a feel of summer to the rows of cast-off chairs in which sat many of the people (minus the children and most of the old ladies) who had watched Barnaby triumph in the Winott Cup up the hill on the buried Richardson court.
All twenty or so of them watched at Barnaby again, though their chairs faced across past Barnaby to where youthful Jerry Childs stood dressed in a brand-new everything out of one of the catalogues for people who want to look as if they graduated from boarding school to a life of country-weekend privilege on Winott Point. It was clothing not unlike what Barnaby wore most of the time, but it was so new and so perfect that Barnaby felt ready to subscribe himself to all the prejudices of the townies. Childs even had the stern, fatuous upper lip of the catalog models, and now he aimed that stern lip at Barnaby.
Barnaby tried to see if the sweater under Childs’s canvas jacket had a monogram of the association. After all, there was stationery these days.
But the jacket was not open enough for a view, and so Barnaby turned from Childs to greet the rest of the room.
Barnaby said a quiet, inclusive “How do you do” and scanned all of the faces and made what he thought was a gesture of courtly graciousness with his right hand and arm out to the side in the balletic shape of a scythe. He could afford to speak quietly because there was not another sound.
Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 21
