Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  And, there, another name from the crypt of Barnaby’s education.

  Fair enough. Barnaby lifted his arms out from his sides and opened his palms to the room and bowed his head. Why not?

  There was quiet, and in the quiet Barnaby could hear the breathing of twenty or thirty of the world’s fortunate sets of lungs, and Barnaby was suddenly not immune to the notion that Michel had gone mad and enlisted Barnaby in some expression of that madness.

  Then they clapped.

  They clapped, and there were voices. A few of the voices said, “Who?” But most of them said, “Welcome home,” and “Congratulations,” and “Thank God you’re out.”

  Barnaby lifted his head and looked above them all, through the chandeliers at the ceiling which he noticed was a richer shade of gold than it used to be, almost a match for the partition. There had been a bathing or a burnishing.

  And Barnaby too had been burnished. Just this minute. He could feel it shining out from within himself.

  Before he left forever (left gladly, mind you), he was remembered and remembered fondly.

  Michel shook his arm fiercely and said with sharp, soldierly command, “Stay right here. Don’t move a step. Do you hear me?”

  Barnaby let his arms drop, and the clapping and the other voices ceased, and Michel was running in his motionless way back to the kitchen for something.

  Barnaby stood, and confronted again the eyes of all the other friends in town on this second day after Christmas. There were familiar faces: nobody he’d ever known, but people for whom he had bought bottles of wine in moments of pure exuberance or in moments of exuberant apology when he had spilled beyond the apron of his own table, people with whom he had toasted the occasional triumph or with whom he had joined, sometimes too passionately he was sure, in singing, to Michel’s horror, a happy birthday at some cherub brought in for the occasion. The eyes, now that the applause was done, were subdued. There was in the place an air of suppressed misery which Barnaby supposed he evoked with his trailing vapors of Oklahoma. The eyes stared at him. The off-brand barracuda was in attendance. Barnaby knew her after a fashion. She was by herself, no boys, which seemed to Barnaby to be tastefully appropriate, and she too looked at Barnaby with a wonder behind which lurked something like horror. Surely it couldn’t be horror. Grave dismay rather, at the truth brought into everyone’s midst, the truth of the other, darker side of life, a side that had claimed Barnaby who was once one of their own. They were all glad with compassion that he had dropped by, and they were also terrified by the possibilities he represented. But weren’t they also thrilled?

  He thought, as he had thought often before, of saintly people like Mother Teresa and the rest of them who came away from their regions of misery periodically to raise money, or to accept awards that they would then translate into money, for the amelioration of that misery to which they gave themselves. The awards and the money raising always took place in splendor, and the saint’s passage through that appreciative, applauding splendor had always seemed to Barnaby to be the sort of thing for which he himself was made. He would so liked to have been graceful and humble in the eye of royally terrified admiration. He could so easily have allowed himself to have dessert because it was best to do so whether he wanted it or not. He could have moved quietly and beamed. He could have swathed himself in splendidly wretched clothing for exhibition to the public at larger events. What he could not have done, and what he could not conceive of the Mother Teresas as ever having done, was go back to the misery. How could anyone do that? Safety pin the wretched rags back around your waist for real, and head away from the palace to live—not to visit but to live—again in the swamp, in the slum, in the chemical waste with all of those people who were so unhappy in so many all-too-imaginable ways. Barnaby had always wished that Mother Teresa would not ever have to go back. She looked like agreeable company. Why couldn’t she make that her life? Why couldn’t she go from award to award and from fund-raising to fund-raising, and just mail the funds and the awards to wherever they were needed?

  But there you were, another reason why retiring from pilgrimage had been the best course for Barnaby.

  And here, everyone else had gone back to their lunches, and Barnaby had almost gotten to the point of wishing that, holy or otherwise, he himself might not have to go back to Oklahoma. When he noticed the wallpaper.

  The wallpaper was new.

  They had put up new paper, and the tigers were gone.

  Christ Almighty. His heart heaved in his chest and he was dizzy. He put out a blind hand for support.

  There was movement near him, but he could not make it out. Michel had him by the arm again, but Barnaby could hardly stand even with Michel for support.

  For God sake. The wallpaper. How could he go away forever knowing that the tigers were gone too? This, he thought, as the universe seemed to melt, was what pregnancy or menopause must be like.

  He reined himself in. He turned himself as sensibly as he could to Michel, and Michel was holding before him a framed something. A testimonial? Wasn’t that going a little far? Had business fallen off for them? Had there been a poisoning? That they welcomed every vagrant off the street with a testimonial?

  With a piece of the old wallpaper?

  It was.

  “You see? We saved you your tigers.”

  Barnaby took the glassed, framed, swatch of old wallpaper from Michel and was amazed, touched, terribly disappointed. It was not a small piece. It was eighteen inches square, anyway. But how could anyone think that the tigers would still be there? Michel might as well have given him eighteen square inches of jungle.

  And yet, here was Michel at his side, swooning with pride and feeling and generosity and all other things that were French when the French were at their best.

  And so who was Barnaby, here on his last visit, admitted only by grand dispensation, who was Barnaby to express anything but the most gracious appreciation?

  “Are you glad?”

  “I am glad, Michel. Thank you. Merci. You have saved my tigers, and I am most glad. May I keep it?”

  “It is for you. It has been waiting for you.”

  And as if they’d been waiting for that cue, a pack of dangerously uncivil creatures burst from the kitchen and rushed up through the tables.

  “Señor Barnaby. Hasta la vista, baby.”

  “Barnaby, mon ami. You look fantastic. The jail is good for you.”

  It was Michel’s three hoodlum cousins, and they swarmed at him covered in tomato paste and reeking of garlic as if they had become Italians in the kitchen. All of them were holding open bottles of wine, and thrusting them at him. Jesus, good Bordeaux.

  Did they say jail?

  “You lost weight, monsieur, and it looks like you have muscles. In jail you lifted weights. And now you have the fashionable suit also. You come from jail and you are a là mode.”

  They thought he’d been in jail?

  He held off the Bordeaux (bottles he’d paid for?), and said, “No. No, I was never in jail.”

  “We know. Everybody knows. To be an American of style and to go to jail is fabulous.”

  Barnaby glanced out over their heads which were lowish despite powerful shoes. Some of the other friends were eating again, some watching the action around Barnaby; all clearly knew—as evidently as one knows a lock from a key—that Barnaby had been in prison.

  “You are a gangster.”

  “Where do you get a suit so perfectly too big? In this country? In prison?”

  Michel moved them all in a troop toward an empty table alongside the barracuda who managed to look up and see Barnaby without at all noticing the busy, vulgar surround of the cousins and Michel.

  “How do you do,” Barnaby said. “You may not remember me, but I’m Barnaby Griswold.”

  “Of course I remember,” she said, and it was Barnaby who had forgotten that she had a voice as hoarse and liquid as a movie star under water. She reached out and touched the back of his hand so quietl
y and forcefully that he felt he had forgotten about hands. “Did you come out with your prison clothes? I would love to see you in them. Have you come straight from a cell?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I understand,” she said with significance past anything Barnaby could make of it.

  The cousins would not let Michel hustle them away, though Michel was trying.

  “Monsieur Barnaby. We are going to get you a woman tomorrow.”

  What?

  “After prison, you need a woman. Tomorrow. We’ll bring a beauty.”

  “No, I’m leaving this evening. I’m going to Oklahoma to look after my ex-wife’s mother. She’s expecting me and she’s not well, but thank you.”

  “Then we bring her to you right now. Sit and we find her.”

  Over the cousins’ heads, Barnaby could see the eyes of the other friends again, the men especially, attending this conversation with interest. An appearance by the cousins was not the usual event for La Cote even during friends week, and loud promises of women delivered to the premises were even less usual. For that matter, Barnaby’s stature as a veteran of prison and a man who needed to be plied with women was new even to his own extravagant imagination.

  But instead of wishing for a scar and a revolver, Barnaby wondered at the gloom in all the friends’ eyes.

  Really the whole room breathed an unstated gloom. Even the most prurient of the men who were thinking of a woman in the hamper for dessert were much more gloom than appetite. Why was that? It couldn’t still be Barnaby himself.

  The cousins weren’t gloomy, and neither was Michel (regardless of his fluster at having let the cousins too far off their leash).

  There was routinely the tired affect of wealth and jaded disinterest here, even in the spring and fall when seasonal hilarity could overtake anyone, but that disinterest was only a Tiffany shade over the fire of appetite, which burned in everyone who could afford to come often enough to La Cote to warrant status as a friend.

  Yet today, as far as he could tell, Barnaby was the only friend who was not genuinely blue.

  “No,” he said to the cousins with a burst of rashness and a furtive rap of his knuckles for luck against the wood of a chair back. “I am on my way to see a beautiful young woman of my own.”

  “You have a lover already? This afternoon?”

  “She waited for him.”

  “She waited? They never waited for me.”

  “And now, Monsieur Barnaby, you go with your lover to your dying mother.”

  “Mon Dieu.”

  “A gangster from the old style.”

  One of the cousins lifted his bottle of Bordeaux, and the others did the same.

  “To America,” the one said.

  “To America,” the others cried, and all three drank from their bottles and then slammed the bottles down on the barracuda’s table and grabbed chairs from other tables and sat.

  The barracuda too had an air of powerful dismay about her, but she looked like she would be able to distract it. She smiled at the cousins and patted the banquette beside her for Barnaby.

  Barnaby was honored, but he said, “One minute.” He wanted to share all this with at least one actual colleague from the old days. He handed the wallpaper to the barracuda and asked, “Would you hold it for me?” To Michel he said, “May I use the phone?”

  The barracuda said, “Yes of course, darling.”

  “Use it. Use anything,” Michel said to Barnaby, and then to the barracuda said, reluctantly, “Madame. My cousins. May I pour?”

  Barnaby went out to the phone in the coatroom, and when Livermore got on the line, Barnaby said, “I’m here at La Cote, and it’s great. They think I’ve been in jail. I’m a paroled gangster. I always knew I should have let them put me away. I didn’t even know if Michel would decide to remember me, and they love me. Come on over and have a laugh before I have to catch my plane back to Oklahoma.”

  “Where have you been, Barnaby?”

  “What do you mean? I’d been traveling almost thirty hours by the time I got to bed last night. So I slept to noon. Hey, I’m still sober. I just said everybody loved me; I didn’t say I was accepting drinks. Come on. The barracuda is here and I told her Penny was out of town.”

  “You can forget about Oklahoma, Barnaby.”

  “What?”

  “You’re back.”

  “I’m back?”

  “The Dow is down eleven hundred and thirty points.”

  Eleven hundred and thirty. Amazing. He’d called it.

  “You called it.”

  A free fall. No wonder the rest of the friends were gloomy. Some of them were probably suicidal. They had their sell orders in and were waiting out the day at La Cote.

  “Barnaby? Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Well listen to this. I told a few people. We made the calls. Wasn’t hard to track Fiduciary overnight with the kind of moves they were making. Here at the Fund we took some hits, but a lot less than we would have. And we got in on short contracts that more than made up the difference. You made me money Barnaby. And you made other people money. The people I told knew it came from you. They’d been telling me for the last couple of years that they missed the Barnaby component in their portfolios. Hell, we missed the component here at the Fund.”

  “Am I really back?”

  “It’s stabilized now; careful money is returning. Actually, Fiduciary has already come in again here and there. But it was the edge of chaos for the first few hours after opening. A lot of folks lost a hand or a foot. And the word is out that you called it.”

  He was back.

  “I’m back.” He whispered it, and listened to the sound.

  “You’re back. Don’t, for Christ sake, spend anymore time in Oklahoma. Your sanction is up on the first, and people are waiting for your call. I’m waiting for your call. If you need a place to live the next couple of months, you can bunk with me. I won’t hear from Penny until the end of May; that’s the usual pattern.”

  Barnaby said, “So you probably can’t come over and say goodbye.” Because of course he wasn’t really back. He was leaving.

  “You come over here. You’re persona grata at Crenshaw. Not only can I be seen with you in the light of day, I want to be seen with you. And I have one more little surprise to tell.”

  “I’ve got a plane to catch in a couple hours. I haven’t had lunch yet.” There, that was the note to sound. It was also the truth.

  “You can have lunch, but don’t get on the plane. The guys I called had made money on you before, and some of them felt they still owed you from the Old Ladies Bank. They never had to give up anything, and they worried about you. There but for the grace of God and whatnot. The first thing we did was buy a few short contracts with you in mind. We figured if you were wrong, we’d eat it just enough to feel we didn’t owe you anymore. You’ve got spending money, Barnaby. Listen. Eleven hundred and thirty points. You’ve got more than spending money. Come over tonight and we’ll talk about it. Hell, you could probably have your old secretary back.”

  “I have to watch over Ada.” Yes, the truth. Perfectly simple.

  “Don’t do that. Ada has a support system in place. You put it there. Actually, isn’t Win coming back soon?”

  “She’ll be back on the first,” Barnaby said.

  “Just like the old days. Blind timing. You’ve been hiding down there, Barnaby. You’ve done your duty. Anything more would be crazy. You’re back, now. You’re back and people need to see you. If people hear you’re in Oklahoma, they’re either not going to believe you called it or they’re going to think it was a fluke. You’re not an Oklahoma guy. You’re no stock picker with a screen. Everybody who knows you knows that. You have to show up. Now. Tomorrow. The day after tomorrow. Get some deals going. If you saw anything down there, bring it back, but not now.”

  “I’m in love, Tom, and she’s going back to Oklahoma too. I think I have a job. I can have one if I want it. A
real job. Friends of Choate Winott. And it’ll be a better job with this call. I have to stay in Oklahoma until Ada dies, but I think that’s where I belong for the long run as well. This is it, Tom. I’m going to begin a new life. I’m going to live like real people.” It did feel good to say it out loud.

  “God bless you for pleasing a twenty-eight-year-old. I always knew you had it in you, but this is not the moment to get carried away with it. And it sure as hell is not the moment for a job. From buddies of Choate Winott? You’ll be the Tulsa freak in charge of the Tulsa freak fund. Winott’s a good guy. Bless him, I say, for finding you a job when it looked like you might need one. But you don’t need one now. And that’s not you, not buying for a fund, not buying for anything. You’re a seller, a finder and a seller and a fluffer. You’re also a player again. You’re a player here. You make the best fluff in the business, and now things are churned up, and everybody will be scared, and the only fluff anybody is going to buy for the next couple of months is going to be yours.”

  Barnaby said, “Come off it, Tom.” Because, after all, what difference did it make? He was going.

  “All right, maybe I’m going overboard. On the other hand, maybe I’m not. Anyhow, this is the moment for you. You’re in the zone. This is a market tidal wave, and you’re the only guy riding it. Get yourself seen and find a dozen deals; you could place them all by Washington’s birthday. I’ll take you to the cabin for celebration and you can fly your girlfriend up with one of her classmates for me.”

  “I can’t do it.” Be frank with him. “I like Ada. I’ve got a responsibility.” There. He’d finally even said that out loud.

  “Don’t be a fool, Barnaby. Of course you can do it. Are you afraid? You sound afraid. That’s not the Barnaby Griswold I know, but I can understand that you’d be gun-shy after what you’ve been through. Well, the time for afraid is over, Barnaby. And it’s over forever. We’ve all missed you. Nobody has had any fun for longer than I can remember. Come by the house once you’ve had something to eat. Stay. Tomorrow have six lunches and three dinners. Be large. Be Barnaby. Bring me a deal. We have money to burn over here.”