Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  After a long moment, Happiness said, “I’m going to sing you a little song, Barnaby. Are you ready? Here is a song especially for you. It goes,

  Wonnnn day at a time, SWEET JEEEEEEEsus, wonnn day at UH tiiiime.

  Wonnnn day at a time, SWEET JEEEEEEEsus, wonnn day at UH tiiiime.

  Wonnnn day at a time, SWEET JEEEEEEEsus, wonnn day at UH tiiiime.

  Barnaby said, “Thank you, Happiness.”

  You get what you deserve, when you ask your mother-in-law’s companion if she isn’t pleased for your successes. You would have thought Barnaby could have learned that much after all the years of au pairs and maids and, for a brief time there, real cooks.

  “It’s a good song, Barnaby. You can sing it yourself if I’m not there to sing it for you. Would you like me to do it once more?”

  “No, thank you. It is a good song. But I have to run. I’ve got to make the train and catch a late shuttle back to New York so I can be sure to get my flight out tomorrow afternoon. If I miss that, I’m stuck. Tell Ada I called. Tell her I haven’t forgotten and I’m on my way. There’s the cab outside, so I’m going to go. Bye-bye, Happiness.”

  “Good-bye, Barnaby.”

  He hung up and stared out at the cab’s headlights. Was it beginning to snow? He was sure he could feel the girls approaching, and he was equally sure that he did not feel as much up to managing them as he wanted to feel. He wished he had someone else to talk to. He looked to the Point phone sheet on the wall and dialed Dicky Kopus.

  And it was Kopus who answered.

  “Richard. Barnaby Griswold here. Didn’t get a chance to talk to you at the meeting. Just wanted to say Merry Christmas.”

  “Griswold. You put on a fucking movie this afternoon. Great. So what else are you doing? Watching over your ex-wife’s mother? Is that true? You get paid for that? There any money in that, Barnaby?”

  No, Kopus was not going to be what he’d hoped for.

  “Nope,” he said. “No money.”

  “What are you going to do? You’re broke, aren’t you? You just giving up?”

  “Actually, I have a job offer, but I’d rather not talk about that right now.”

  “Hell, if you want a job, I can offer you a job. I might be able to use you. I drive my guys pretty hard, but if you hustle, there’s bucks to be had. You’re a good bullshitter.”

  Enough. He could feel the girls approaching. They’d probably gone out for a video.

  Yet he couldn’t help himself.

  He said, “Actually, Kopus, as well as Merry Christmas, I thought I’d offer you some free advice. I’m not telling everybody, but I did just get some very reliable information to the effect that the stock market is going to take a real hit tomorrow. I don’t know if you’re in the market, but if you are, it would be worthwhile doing something first thing in the morning. This is going to be a big move. Who knows; if you sold short before the ball got rolling, it might not be too late to actually make a killing. Just thought I’d mention it. In the spirit of the season.”

  “Are you crazy, Griswold? Yeah, I’m in the market, and now that I’ve talked to you, I’m buying more. You flunked, Griswold. You’re broke, and you’re changing your mother-in-law’s diapers. So either you’re kidding me, or you’re wrong. And nobody who’s broke kids me about money. Who paid for your ticket back here? The mother-in-law? See, that’s me kidding. Merry Christmas, Griswold. I hope your new job works out. Now I’ve got to go. Janice has caterers downstairs and I’ve got to write some checks. Bye.”

  Barnaby waved out the window in the hope that the cabbie might be watching and know that everything was fine.

  Car lights came down the Point, but went on past. It was beginning to snow.

  Barnaby dialed Tom Livermore’s home number from memory and got a maid who was indecipherable.

  But when Tom came on, he said, “Barnaby. Great to hear from you. Another Christmas without Barnaby Griswold is another Christmas down the drain. Where are you? In town? Can you come over? How are you doing? Somebody is having fun somewhere around here, but I don’t know them, and I just get duller and duller. I need your help. The world needs your help. What can I do for you?”

  Just like that, Barnaby was going again. Tom Livermore liked him and missed him. The letter about staying away was ancient history, once necessary and now forgotten, as it deserved to be. “The world needs your help.” That was gushing for Livermore. It was Christmas, and nobody had teased Tom.

  “How about a job?” Barnaby said. “You want to give me a job?”

  Silence.

  Christ. Had nobody teased Livermore all year?

  Barnaby made a laugh and shouted, “No, no. Tom. That’s a joke. You can tell it to your directors. Barnaby Griswold asked for a job at the Crenshaw Foundation.”

  Small laugh from Tom. “I’m sorry Barnaby. I knew that. I’m just a little, you know. Market’s got me uneasy just when I’m trying to put together year-end results. Also, Penny left me again this Christmas, but of course that’s not much of a distraction anymore.”

  “Tom,” Barnaby said. “Listen. I think Fiduciary is going to dump enough stocks that if anybody else comes along with them the market will go off a cliff. Tomorrow. I think they’re probably selling tonight in Japan, and I’ll bet they’re going to sell fast enough that it shows.”

  Silence.

  But a good silence this time. Barnaby let it go on.

  “What are you doing with it, Barnaby?”

  “I’m not doing anything. I don’t have a nickel. You know that, Tom.”

  “Any particular reason for thinking it?”

  “I’m up at the Point and I heard a guy from Fiduciary talking to people while he kissed their asses. I’m the only one whose ass was not being kissed, so I’m probably the only one who caught the drift. Pure hunch, but I’m right.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out. Are you at your old number up there on the Point? I’ll get back to you and let you know.”

  “It’s not my number anymore, and actually I’ve got to catch a train and a plane. Coming down to the city tonight so I can fly out late tomorrow afternoon. If I’m feeling flush, I may go have an appetizer at La Cote for old time’s sake. Think Michel will let me in during friends week? Want to come?”

  “I might look in. Call me tomorrow. Did you tell anyone else?”

  “I told a local jerk who wouldn’t really make a splash if he did anything, but he won’t do anything. I also told Choate Winott, the banker, and actually he was going to call around. Less than an hour ago.”

  “Choate Winott’s an unlikely victim, Barnaby. You really haven’t taken a position for yourself anywhere?”

  “Goodness of my heart, Tom. Merry Christmas. But you want to know something? I may have a job in the works, and I’m in love. Well, I like her. If I really thought she liked me, I would love her. She talks to me. I think she will love me.”

  “A job? What do you mean, a job? Don’t do that, Barnaby. You’re the only crazy person I know. I don’t think you’d like a job.”

  “Hey, Tom. Come on. I’m broke.”

  “I’m sorry. I know your suspension is up this week. But you don’t want to become like me. Give it a month, and I’ll see if I can’t find you a desk and a secretarial pool and some kind of stationery. You didn’t really call about a job to begin with, did you?”

  “No, Tom. I didn’t call about a job. Forget the job. How about love? Doesn’t love sound like a good thing for me? She’s a pretty girl.”

  “Does she know you, Barnaby?”

  “No. Not really. But I’m not myself anymore. No booze. I’m so healthy from the gym that my suits will never fit again.”

  “Is she twenty-eight?”

  “Yes, she is twenty-eight. God damn it, Livermore. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “All the girls in the jokes are twenty-eight this year. Don’t you know that? I thought you were going to tell me why it was funny. Anyway, here I am, day after Christmas with
Penny gone again. What do I know? Listen. I’m going to check on this other thing. That’s where I do my best. It used to be where you did your best too, in your own way. Maybe we should both forget love. Call me tomorrow, and I’ll tell you what there is to tell.”

  “So long, Tom.”

  And that was that. Barnaby’s last deal.

  Barnaby Griswold was finally going to live a life like everybody else, and that was a good thing. It was the very best thing. Soon he would be fifty for Christ sake.

  And if all he was doing was judging and sorting the Tulsa soy skin entrepreneurs, that was better than competing with them. He would take home a paycheck like a human being.

  Already his father was relieved at the news. Was it possible that one day his father might actually be proud? Would his mother cease weeping in her grave? Would his daughters remember who he was?

  He wondered if his daughters knew who Marian was. They might. They might be able to tell him what sort of hell she had raised. Did Marian already know that he had lost his foolishness? Was that why she liked him, might like him?

  But clearly the girls were not coming back right away, and Barnaby had to get going if he was going to make his train.

  Out the window, it was snowing heavily.

  Snow was pouring down.

  Was the cab moving? Oh shit.

  Barnaby sprang away from the phone and ran down the stairs and out the front door and sprinted to the cab in his fine English shoes with the snow covering him as he went, covering his tracks as he made them.

  The week between Christmas and New Year’s was a week of French perversity at La Cote. They took no reservations, and the coach light under the awning was dark, and on the door was a discreet little sign saying the place was closed. But the door was not locked, and if you were a favored soul you could go in and have lunch off an abbreviated menu, a lunch prepared by, of all people, Michel’s three crooked cousins. There was cachet to it, despite the cousins, but it was never crowded because most people of style were out of town, or out of midtown, and the tourists were easily brushed off if they chanced in. When very occasionally someone arrived who was known and not liked by the establishment, which was to say Michel, then that person was told that only invited friends were in the restaurant which was closed and please, please come back in the second week of January with a reservation of course. Michel delivered the words with such exquisite ease that rarely did anyone try to push past him into the restaurant. Nobody wanted whoever was inside, the friends, to see and remember who it was that was not a friend. Only once, apparently, had someone from a time before Barnaby’s era in fact pushed past Michel, someone, perhaps not unlike Barnaby, who had once been a friend and disqualified himself for awful behavior. When that deluded soul had brazened in among the tables of real and desirable friends, having pushed Michel, tiny, revered Michel, then men had risen from their seats prepared to thrash the offender. Women, so it was said, had thrown cutlery and even one of the cousins’ weighty custards, which would itself have been cause for de-friending in any other circumstances.

  Barnaby, needless to say, had (before his fall) been a friend. The Christmas after the Old Ladies Bank deal came in, he had essentially spent every daylight hour of the entire friends week in La Cote, much of the time with his sleeves rolled up and washing dishes. It was one of the most cunning things he had ever done; people came back to look at him and to have him call, “Bonjour. I hope that was not you who didn’t finish the soup.” The fact that his alternative quarters in La Cote were a good part of his escape from the firestorm in his own house was also cunning.

  When everything came undone, he was never actually refused entry. He only was looked at by people, customers, never Michel, until he didn’t have the heart to come anymore.

  The heart or of course the money.

  Although, during friends week, Michel often refused payment. The week Barnaby washed dishes, he ate for free all week long and told everyone that he was working for board, which was considered as charming a thing as could be said because everyone knew that Barnaby was closing in on the kind of money that endowed real libraries at good boarding schools.

  Really, there was no reason Michel would not let him in. Barnaby had never actually set fire to anything.

  Except that if you weren’t around for several years, what kind of friend were you? Were you a friend at all?

  Was ruin alone cause for de-friending? Barnaby didn’t know. He figured a friend came in for at least a half-dozen lunches a month, but couldn’t there be exceptions?

  Last night he had stayed in the residential hotel where he had used to go when domestic uproar dictated. Instead of the comforts of the old days, they gave him a cubicle fit for addicts, but the town was full and Barnaby was lucky that one of the guys he had over-tipped all those years before was still around.

  So he’d slept until noon and had a shower and shaved. He was clean when he got to the door of La Cote, but his other suit did not fit any better, and he didn’t know the rules about that either. Did an ill-fitting good suit disqualify? With the English, presumably a well-tailored but now ill-fitting suit, even with a measure of gravy, would be a recommendation. But with the French, such things were not sure.

  Barnaby stood tall, holding his suitcase in one hand (to be ready to go on to the airport) and put his other hand to the door knob.

  It was after one-thirty, and his itinerary to Oklahoma was routed in a way that allowed him to spend several sleep-allotted hours on plastic chairs in Dallas rather than Atlanta, but the originating flight didn’t leave La Guardia until early evening, so he had time to kill. Instead of going in here, he could go to a museum. He could go to another restaurant. He could go to a movie for God sake (though a suitcase at a movie would be awkward). But those were all options in other people’s lives. If Barnaby Griswold was in town during friends week he would go to La Cote for lunch if it was the last thing he did. It wouldn’t be the last thing he did— Michel would not shoot him. But it would probably be the last time he went in, tried to go in. La Cote had been the headquarters of the pinnacle of his earlier life, the only life that anyone would ever want to speak about, the life before he had to learn what went in the drawers of his desk. Oh, God but he didn’t want to have to learn those kinds of things. He didn’t want to have to learn to work anything more complicated than a quote screen.

  No. That wasn’t fair.

  He was curious. What it would be like to have a desk he was supposed to use and a room in which he could be expected to be found? Would his new, young office mates in Tulsa call him Barnababy?

  He stood tall, turned the knob, and walked in.

  “Who is this?”

  Michel was there in the vestibule and looked at Barnaby with alarm.

  The restaurant was quiet, but Barnaby could tell by the click of silverware against good china that people occupied some of the tables beyond the gilt partition.

  Barnaby held out his hand to shake, and Michel stared at him.

  “Who is this?”

  Did Michel not even remember him?

  Barnaby said, “Can you use a dishwasher? I could start right away.”

  Michel threw himself at Barnaby, and the physical understanding inside of Barnaby was that this was how Michel got rid of the most contaminated of the un-friends, drove them with the fury of a 130-pound pulling guard right back out onto the street where they belonged and then hurried in again to wash his hands.

  But now Michel was no longer pushing.

  He was hugging.

  Oh God.

  Barnaby’s heart swelled almost to bursting.

  Michel was hugging him. Tiny arms wrapped around and tiny head pressed hard against the placket of the chesterfield below Barnaby’s collarbone.

  Michel was hugging and not letting go. Shaking? Was Michel crying for Barnaby’s return? Barnaby’s heart did burst, and tears came out of his own eyes.

  By God. He was still a friend. He had been away to the furthest reaches o
f cold waste outside the pale—he was still away (why not be frank) and would be away forevermore. But he was remembered. Oh God, to be a friend.

  He dropped his suitcase and brought his own big, now stronger, arms around Michel’s tiny, exquisitely tailored shape, and hugged in return.

  When they both let go, and Michel stepped back, Michel’s cheeks and eyelashes were indeed jeweled with tears, and he looked up at Barnaby to see if Barnaby too had been crying, and when he saw that, yes, Barnaby too had wet his face, then Michel threw himself at Barnaby once more. He hugged with the force of a tiny bear and then once more stepped back and stood to attention and faced Barnaby with the formality of an honorable soldier meeting a comrade who had been given up for lost and yet just now had made it back by grace and courage from apocalypse.

  “You are the only American I have known who is all American and also truly French. I salute you.”

  With which he began ripping at the buttons of the chesterfield in a frenzy, and when they had in continuing urgency gotten the coat hung in the unstaffed check room, and the bag tossed in there with it, Barnaby was pulled by his large and loosely sleeved arm around the palatially golden partition and into the dining room where Michel stood Barnaby like a hero at the head of the class and called aloud, most unlike Michel, called to the eminent souls arrayed down the narrow dining room in the informal sanctity that a shrine imposed outside of business hours.

  Michel called, “Look. Look who is here. Barnaby Griswold. My brother of the blood. They have released him. They have let him out for Noël, and he has come back to us.”

  Barnaby stood and felt all of the surprised eyes turn on him and marveled about the releasing and letting out. He hadn’t been sure anyone in this arena had known about him going to Oklahoma; that Michel should know, and should even understand that Oklahoma could hold you against your will, was wonderfully de Tocqueville.