Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  “I would.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “I might.”

  “Are you going to come back from tennis?”

  “I already promised that I would.”

  “Promise again.”

  “I promise.”

  “Promise that you won’t let me die alone.”

  “I promise that too.”

  Barnaby slid his arm out from under her and stood up and walked around to the other side of the bed and bent down over Ada and kissed her lips. She kissed him back with a smack of her lips and a smile.

  “This is the best Christmas I ever had,” she said.

  “I don’t believe that for a minute,” he said.

  With the meeting still going on, but with the battle over and won, Barnaby sat by himself in the front row of seats in the Winott hut and wished he had had the taxi wait for him after all.

  Coming into the hut, however, had demanded the sort of commitment that was incompatible with an easy escape. And then, when he was in the midst of preserving the Griswold name on the rolls, when he was himself bidding noble farewell to the association and the hut and the Richardson court and summers evermore, then he had almost felt as if he had the momentum of the wave beneath him again, carrying him, gathering the secret massive speed which meant he had a future.

  And then, for some reason, Childs had begun speaking about the stock market. Childs had said, for Christ sake, that this was a market that could hurt people, and he hoped all the good people in this room would be safe rather than sorry by the first thing in the morning. What was that? Childs was now more than just a numbers geek who had run up one of the funds; Childs actually was now senior in the operations of the entire Fund Group for Fiduciary, which was the biggest mutual funds firm in the country. Jerry was not going to reveal which stock one of the sector funds was moving into. He wasn’t going to tell people, not even Choate Winott, to go short in technologies. Was he? Because God knew Fiduciary, if it pushed, could move whole neighborhoods of the NASDAQ and the Dow both.

  But what the fuck difference did any of that make to Barnaby at this point? None. The hell with Jerry Childs. There were no more waves for Barnaby, and there was no future.

  Barnaby sat and felt the truth of his own farewells.

  He felt the completion of what had happened last night: the last wash of his final wave had brought him here where he had all along been meant to say good-bye. His suspension had never been a pause or an admonition; it had been the limbo before final termination. The Griswold name would remain in membership and on the cup; people would sometimes shake a head or make an uneasy snigger at the mention of Barnaby. Maybe that would become a cautionary invective: you don’t want to end up like Barnaby Griswold. But Barnaby the person, Barnaby who sat for a few dear minutes more on a cast-off chair in the hallowed preserve of his lost birthright, that Barnaby, this Barnaby, henceforth would walk in the American desert of homogenous banality hoping not for the police to like him but rather for the police to keep him safe. And he would not be safe. His farewell performance had been great for everyone else, but when Barnaby himself left the Winott hut and Winott Point, all walls would be down and every wind would find him.

  Barnaby sat alone in the front row—everyone else was behind him—and he wailed inside himself like a little lost dog.

  He went, “Ohhuuuuuuuu.” He went again, “Ohhuuuuuuuu,” in a high, puppy’s yowl that would have broken his mother’s heart except that his mother was out there dead in the freeway, a ghastly little throw rug for holiday traffic, and so there was nowhere anyone any longer to take care of her baby. “Ohhuuuuuuuu.”

  “Mr. Griswold? Are you all right?”

  Holy shit. He’d been making his puppy noises out loud. He sat up and shook his head like an adult. Jesus Christ.

  “Jerry,” he shouted. “Forgive me. It’s the God damned sinuses when I’ve been away from weather like this. The only thing that helps is to make noises like a whale record. I don’t mean to interrupt. I’ll hold my breath. Please. Go on.”

  Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck. He’d made his noble good-bye, and now everyone behind him would think that he’d been weeping.

  He had been weeping.

  Oh, fuck, what a state of affairs. He wished he was already gone out into the netherworld. He wished he was on his way back to Ada. He would be near her for a couple more months until she died. That would be the next watershed to anticipate now that the suspension was as good as history.

  He held himself erect and tried to concentrate on what Jerry Childs was saying, had been saying. He remembered Marian, but he was not going to concentrate on that. No wonder she had kissed him off. She was the late and treasured daughter of fucking Choate Winott. The wonder was that, knowing who Barnaby was, she had ever gone to the zoo. Except that was the sort of grace those people had; they would go to the zoo with the lowliest scab. Once.

  No, he concentrated on what Jerry Childs had been saying after the market horseshit, something about the theft of seaweed from the Point’s kelp beds.

  Christ, no wonder Barnaby had drifted off. Maybe everybody behind him had lost the thread too. It might have been only Jerry who had heard the puppy. Barnaby thought that was the case.

  All right, he’d wailed aloud and been caught at it. Now he forced himself to concentrate on the last minutes of his last meeting. He followed Jerry out of the kelp and into evidence that off-Pointers had been using the Point’s rocky little beaches even though the big town beach was sand. Barnaby had always favored the town beach, but now, as was being made clear, he had to use that sandy beach whether he wanted to or not.

  He wondered what on earth Marian had thought when she heard him yowling. He wondered what she had thought when he fell to his knees before the empty tiger world at the zoo. Though the tigers had bailed him out of that one. He wondered if Marian thought about him at all. Why should she? She’d known he was from the Point, and that was why she’d condescended to go to the zoo with him the one time. And then, Good-bye Tiger. He could not believe she was in the same room with him.

  Had she ever touched his lips in Doug’s? Had she actually kissed him?

  No.

  Don’t allow that to be even a forgotten memory; surely that part never happened.

  It was over.

  All of it.

  Childs was saying that the tournament would be played again at the end of August with the finals on the Sunday before Labor Day.

  And everyone was rushing for the door.

  Barnaby had thought that he would want to get out first, but he had no chance of that. Everybody else wanted to get out before Barnaby broke down into puppy tears again.

  Just as well. Barnaby would be on foot down the Point Road anyhow, until he met his cabbie coming out to pick him up (if his cabbie was faithful—and Barnaby thought he would be, Barnaby a fireman and all).

  Childs tried to time his exit to go out last with Choate Winott and Marian, and old Winott stopped and smiled with an embracing warmth and managed without saying a word to accept Childs’s motion toward him and to use and guide that motion to keep Childs moving right out the door as if a conversation had been had and irrevocably finished until some future meeting which would be eagerly anticipated.

  Christ, but old Winott was a man to admire.

  No wonder Marian had been so efficient with her Good-bye Tiger to Barnaby.

  Choate Winott and his daughter stood a moment more in the doorway to be sure Jerry got to his car, and then the door closed behind them too, and Barnaby was alone in the hut.

  He got up and stepped through careless rows of worn-out summerhouse kitchen chairs and pulled the tiny cleat at the end of the light string to turn off the overhead bulb. He felt the salt pitting in the cleat and for the first time caught a whiff of the rotten, salt breath of low tide, joyously foul even in winter when nobody noticed except the fishermen like his cabdriver must have been, men who were going out in the cold and losing their fingers to the winches s
o they could drive Barnaby on the last errand of what used to be his life.

  He couldn’t bear it, and he kicked through the chairs to the door and ran out, and with the unlikely, for him, aptitude of a natural athlete, he instinctively balanced to accept the slide of his thin shoes on the slick that had caught him before.

  He called, “Mr. Winott,” and had such momentum that he was upon them with the sliding instancy of a cartoon. And Marian was already smiling with mischief before he stopped, though it was he who came sliding. Had she been in mischief from the beginning, even at the gym? Barnaby stopped as close to her as when she had kissed him at the zoo, and even in an old loden coat and corduroys (the same corduroys from the zoo?), she was as beautiful as if she were wearing one of the evening gowns she had had to have worn to the Christmas dances of earlier years.

  He could imagine, could absolutely see, her shoulders bare but for thin satin straps. She was almost bony, she held herself so straight in a long dress—with hardly any breasts, and not ashamed of it, and no bra beneath the dress. She had kissed him. She had, and as if it were just the two of them again, he could see her with her evening gown fallen to the tracked, snowy floor of this second-growth wood at the edge of harbor at the end of daylight on the day after Christmas. He could see her with no clothes at all and with her nipples right away stiff from the cold. He could see her with her wonderful posture and with her commanding, teasing curiosity about what he would do. She smiled at him with her green and brown eyes and with her eyebrows like an eagle, and all that he could think of was to fall down to his knees as he had at the zoo. And press his cheek against her warm, firm, naked runner’s belly. He felt the curling bristle of her pubic hair against his chin and felt his penis getting hard again.

  Oh no, not again.

  In a lifetime of deals this had never been remotely a problem. Now that all the deals were done, he was an adolescent between racks of dirty magazines.

  He pulled his chesterfield closed across his front and looked violently to Choate Winott.

  “How do you do,” he shouted. “I’m Barnaby Griswold. Mr. Winott, I think Fiduciary is going to dump a ton of stocks before the year end. They may wait a day to see if the market gives them a reason, but they’re going to sell enough to move things even if nobody else comes along. Did you hear Childs in there?”

  Christ, what a thing to say to a real human being. Even if it made any sense, Winott was a banker for Christ sake.

  Barnaby thrust out his hand to shake, and the chesterfield flew open, and Barnaby stared at Choate Winott to hold Winott’s attention. He couldn’t do anything about where Marian would look, but it wasn’t a full-blown erection; also his suit was too big (it was the first time he was glad of that), and then of course it was all gone with looking Choate Winott in the eye, Marian’s father in the eye, his own father in the eye.

  Not his own father, but close enough.

  Winott shook Barnaby’s hand and stared back, weighing whether to make any comment at all upon Barnaby’s ridiculous market advice.

  But Choate Winott had done more worldly things than Barnaby’s father, and in his eyes was the possibility of humor. Winott had Marian’s eyes, and suddenly Barnaby liked him just for that. Barnaby smelled low tide and tried to smell Marian.

  Had the young, second wife drunk herself to death twice as fast as Barnaby’s mother? Yes, she had, and still a sense of humor lived somewhere there in Choate Winott’s eyes.

  “I know who you are, Barnaby. I haven’t seen you for a while, but you’re still recognizable. I wrote to you after your father died. I admired him.”

  Barnaby did like Winott. He drove right past the Jerry Childs crap. He was a banker, but a tolerant banker.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I loved your mother. We dated when we were kids; did you know that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I wish somebody’d watched over her a little more at the end.”

  “Yes, sir. So do I.”

  “Drinkers are hard work. She loved you.”

  “I think she did”

  “I know she did. I kept in touch. Your father on the other hand thought you were a fluffmeister.”

  “He told you that?”

  “It wasn’t something he said to everybody. What he said was that if you’d been a fluffmeister lawyer and he’d had more sense he could have used you to save the law firm. He took a summer off to make you paint the house with him. Didn’t he?”

  Barnaby nodded.

  “I would have shot my sons before doing that. So he must have loved you, whatever he called you.”

  Barnaby nodded again.

  “He would have been proud of you for looking after your mother-in-law.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “News of your activities precedes you. Aren’t you in Oklahoma, taking care of your ex-wife’s mother?”

  “Actually, I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “As an alumnus of Fort Sill, I can say with certainty that everybody has somewhere else to go. Except my own daughter. Naturally.” Winott looked at Marian with a mixture of fake and real irritation.

  Barnaby did not look at Marian. He said, “I took Marian to the zoo.”

  “Yep. The zoo. Marian told me. The zoo with Barnaby Griswold. Why did you do that?”

  “You mean the zoo?” Barnaby said.

  “I’m just asking a question, here.”

  “I didn’t know she was your daughter.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? And why the hell are you getting beaten up?”

  Marian laughed, and punched her father’s shoulder hard. He raised his eyebrows at her and then looked back to Barnaby.

  “Marian takes these things lightly, but she is my only daughter, and my youngest child by a long shot even if she is twenty-eight, and she has been in trouble since the day she was born.”

  “Thanks, Daddy.”

  Choate Winott raised his hands like a boxer in case she was going to hit him again, but he didn’t look at her. He looked at Barnaby and said, “And you, Barnaby Griswold, are a creature of somewhat the same stripe only further down the road. A monster, some would say. A reforming monster by the look of things, by necessity, I’d guess. But still a monster. Am I right?”

  Barnaby hesitated a second, but then went ahead.

  He had to tell someone before he left.

  He said, “I cheated once during the finals of the cup.”

  Marian said, “Actually it was out. The ball down the line? But you were going to cheat anyway.”

  Barnaby said to Winott, “I was going to cheat anyway.”

  “Well, I don’t give a shit about that. I’m a banker. Do you know why Marian and I are here today?”

  And with that, Marian lunged at her father and pushed him so hard his feet went out from under him. God Almighty. He was a solid old man, but he was an old man, and his arms flew up and he pitched back toward the stone wall at the end of the pea vined boat racks. Barnaby had no time even to move, and Marian, as her father went headfirst for the stones, laughed.

  Choate Winott spun, in a much more elegant version of Barnaby’s earlier move, and bent his knees (it was probably always in the knees), and put a hand out to the wall to steady himself. Then he stood up straight and said, “This is what you’re in for if you hang around her for any length of time.”

  What?

  “He’s not hanging around anyone,” Marian said. “He doesn’t even know me.”

  “Then why did you drag me here to see that the Griswolds weren’t thrown out of the sacred Winott Point Tennis Association?”

  She stood straighter and held her chin higher and stared back at her father defiantly. “I thought the association needed to keep up a connection to one serious cheater.”

  Good God.

  Barnaby said, “I thought you told me, Good-bye Tiger.”

  Twenty-eight. That was no child. And she’d known it was Barnaby all along, even in the tennis match.

&nb
sp; “Good-bye Tiger?” Choate Winott said.

  “Nothing,” Marian said to her father.

  Marian Winott liked Barnaby Griswold.

  Old Winott said, “Forget the association, Barnaby. Do you need a job?”

  “Daddy,” Marian said. “He doesn’t need a job, and you don’t have to bribe him. He’s already asked me out once.”

  Christ Almighty. She liked him.

  “Of course he needs a job. And if I were going to bribe him, Marian, it would be to stay away from you.”

  Was Winott offering him a job now? Barnaby tried to feel through his wet and freezing feet whether some sort of wave had come back up beneath him, but no. Could a job ever be a wave? No, but he needed a job, and he wasn’t sure he could find one. A forty-six-year-old fluffer with a bad record. Barnaby said, “Would you give me a job?”

  “No. I admired your father, and I haven’t forgotten his saying essentially that your sort of foolishness might have served his law firm if he’d been able to embrace it. But no. On the other hand bankers are now by definition speculators, and along with every other kind of expert, some of us like to have intuition people around. Dowsers, as my own father used to call them, people who look for money with a bent stick. No insult intended. I’ve always considered myself something of a dowser which is why I don’t need you. But I could call one or two guys, in Oklahoma of all places, who might put you to use.”

  Marian looked at Barnaby and shrugged.

  Barnaby said to Winott, “Why would you do that?”

  “You see, Barnaby, this is one reason I admired your father. I never would have had the patience to raise you. Why? Because if my daughter’s going to go to the zoo with somebody your age, I’d like to know that at least he has a job.”

  Barnaby said, “Oh.”

  And Marian said, “Great, Daddy.”

  “Well, God damn it, Marian,” Winott said.

  And Marian grabbed hold of the sleeve of his parka to tug him away from Barnaby.

  “The other reason I’d help you,” Winott said, ignoring Marian’s hold on him, “aside from my fondness for your father, is because you’re a monster, and I have a natural sympathy for monsters.”