“I’m going back to Oklahoma, Tom.” Say it, and be done with it.
Livermore laughed and said, “Don’t be a fool, Barnaby,” and hung up.
Barnaby hung up himself.
He came out of the check room and out around that opulent partition, and everyone was looking at him again. He had gone to the phone, and today, for them, the phone meant only one kind of information.
He said aloud to the room, “Down eleven hundred and thirty but stabilized. Fiduciary is buying back in. The worst is over.”
A woman looked at the man beside her, and the man stood up and walked out. The woman followed.
Nobody else moved. The rest of the friends must have survived, though Barnaby was sure some of them were already thinking about selling the Paris apartment.
“Everybody else alive?” he said.
They all looked around the room to see if there would be more blood. Michel looked too, with great, great sympathy. The cousins looked with enough eagerness and hunger to make you think they would follow any other casualty out onto the street and eat the back of his or her neck for fun. Barnaby saw them glance at the barracuda hopefully, and the barracuda looked back at them just as hopefully, and the cousins looked away. Barnaby had known she would be all right.
And what about Barnaby Griswold? Would he be all right? Was he really back, and was he glad? Could he feel the wave beneath his feet?
Truthfully, he didn’t want to be Barnaby Griswold anymore.
He wanted to go home to Ada and Happiness, whether it was for another week or another year. He had promised Ada that she wouldn’t die alone, and he meant to keep his promise.
For the first time in his life, he knew what would become of himself. He would have a real job, and he would kiss again— he knew it in his bones—the loveliest waitress on God’s green earth. He would say her name, Marian, and she would be glad that he was the one who said it.
The friends began eating again, privately appraising their own lives again. The cousins stood and retreated to the kitchen.
Barnaby stepped back around the partition and dialed Ada’s number.
And this time he could tell, by the rattle of the speaker and then the breathing, that it was Ada who picked up.
Before she could speak, he told her, “I’m coming home, Ada. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine, and I’m on my way.”
“Barnaby?”
“Yes, it’s me, and I’m going to see you tomorrow, just like I promised. Do you still want me?”
“Oh, Barnaby. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
“Don’t be silly, Ada. We’ll have a party on New Year’s Eve.”
“But what if I die first?”
“You’re not going to die before a big party.”
“I might. I think the doctor is going to come by this afternoon.”
“He is?”
“No, but you promised.”
“I promised I’d be back tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is what they all say.”
“I’m getting on a plane tonight. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“Well, what do I matter? I’m so glad. I had hoped I’d see you one day, but thank you so much.”
“Nebuchadnezzar and the Assyrian kings could not make it any sooner, Ada.”
“But you promised, and I believed you.”
“I know I promised.”
“I don’t want you to come back because you think you have to. I want you to come back because you love me.”
“That’s why I am coming back.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“All right,” she said, and hung up.
So he hung up, too, and came back around the partition and hesitated before walking down the aisle to say his good-byes. The barracuda had the wallpaper balanced carelessly against the banquette, and she looked at Barnaby as if she could already smell his refusal of Livermore. Barnaby had disappointed her again.
Of course he had disappointed her. And that was for the best. He was leaving.
Yes. In fact, wouldn’t it be best if he simply left right now without all the good-byes?
More than enough fond things had already been said.
And best, as well, to leave the disappointing wallpaper too. Michel would understand, or at least imagine leaving it to be noble.
Barnaby was going home. He was on his way back to Ada and Happiness. He was on his way back to Marian. He was on his way to a real kind of work. In Tulsa eventually. Tulsa would be best. Maybe Livermore had made him enough money to buy a house. Would Marian live in it? He thought she might, and one day his daughters would visit. He was a better father now. He was finally his own father’s honest son.
What a wonder life could be.
Barnaby Griswold was going back to Oklahoma where he would do his part in all those invisible days outside history.
It was his last moment in La Cote, and he was sad, but he had some very happy things to look forward to. He wondered what it would be like to put his hand up under Marian’s shirt. The small hard…Well.
The room was quiet again, and all of the friends looked at him again, and he nodded down the aisle to them and to Michel.
He nodded to the cousins back in the door from the kitchen, and saw that one of them did have an actual revolver sticking out the waist of his pants.
He nodded to the tiger there in the swatch of wallpaper that leaned against the banquette beside the barracuda.
And he turned away. Without another word to anyone, he stepped around the partition and walked into the coatroom and grabbed the chesterfield from its hanger and grabbed his bag.
Would it be snowing outside? The Boston snow had not hit New York last night, but there may have been the smell of snow as the one ruined soul had left with his woman a few minutes ago.
Well.
Wait, though. Barnaby took his hand off of the doorknob. He set his bag down, and stepped back around the partition and into the dining room so he could look at that swatch of wallpaper which he had no intention of taking with him back to Oklahoma.
From out of the swatch, a tiger, the great head of a tiger, returned Barnaby’s look.
More than that, it was his giant tiger from the zoo in Oklahoma, come all the way here with his glorious sideburns to witness the farewell ceremony.
Even in a picture frame he was enormous, and he stared at Barnaby like everyone else did.
Barnaby went down between the tables after all. He went to collect the testimonial of his earlier life, a real tiger who could not be abandoned.
He didn’t speak to anybody. He focused only upon the magnificent head of the tiger.
And the tiger focused back. That glorious tiger stared at Barnaby Griswold with such furious intensity that Barnaby wasn’t sure now if he was meant to pick up the swatch or not, if it might not be better just to leave the thing after all.
Because the tiger stared now with fury explicit.
The tiger looked ready to reach out of the wallpaper and use its teeth.
Ridiculous. Barnaby grabbed up the frame.
It was warm to the touch, and he could feel growling come in a vibration up his arm. He held the frame against the side of his leg and could feel the heated growling vibrate threateningly against his knee and the outside of his thigh.
He walked with his framed swatch of wallpaper through the witnessing silence of the friends, and at the partition he turned back to face them a last time.
He said quietly and apologetically, “I called the drop in the market. I knew last night, and I called it on the money. I told a few people, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell all of you.”
Then Barnaby Griswold took a deep breath and said, only a bit more loudly, “I’m telling you now because you are my friends, and I want you all to know that I’m back.”
Oh?
There was silence from the friends, but the tiger’s growling took on the substance of sound, and Barnaby lifted the frame and looked into hi
s wallpaper.
The fury in the tiger’s face had been tempered by a mischief like Marian’s, though suddenly Marian seemed very far away.
Barnaby said more loudly still, and more to his expectant tiger than to anyone else, “I’m back.”
And the tiger’s fury transformed itself, even as Barnaby watched, into furiously eager pleasure.
From one side of the dining room came the sound of a knife rapping against a glass as if for silence, though all was silent already.
Other knives joined the first. Every friend at every table, the barracuda too, picked up a knife and rapped on a glass, and because the knives were good ones and because the glasses were crystal, the sound was remarkable. It was a sound from Tolstoy or from Wellington after victory. It was a sound from known history, and it was appreciative in a way that went in through Barnaby’s solar plexus and quivered him. It was a sound full of deeds done and libraries given after all. It was a sound not so different from trumpets and the voices of children at joyous hymn. It was a sound for a lifetime, and it was a sound for Barnaby Griswold.
He dropped his chesterfield to the luxuriously carpeted floor and he raised his arms, holding his tiger in one hand and holding his other hand in a fist.
“I’m back,” he shouted,
And the knives to crystal rang on.
He said good-bye to Marian, and he was sorry to do that. He was also sorry about Ada. Deeply sorry, as men like Barnaby had to say when they were on the run in a fast game. Maybe she would still be ticking when he went down there to clean out the bungalow, but he wouldn’t be doing that anytime soon. Ada was Win’s mother, and it was Win’s turn now. Livermore was right. Barnaby Griswold had to see and be seen. There were deals to be found, deals to be sewed up, deals to be fluffed. Oh, God, but there was work to be done. And Barnaby Griswold was the man to do it. Who needed a job? Who had time for a job? Against his father’s scrutiny, Barnaby squared his own blessed-again, imper-vious-again shoulders.
For everyone else, he thrust his arms, his roaring tiger, his free fist, higher still so that there could be no question about this anywhere on earth. Lombardi’s Packers and Ali with the heavyweight belt.
“Victory,” he shouted, and he bent his knees to keep his balance as he ripped along the front of this monstrous wave.
“I called the Christmas Crash,” he shouted, bellowed so that he could be heard above his tiger’s bellowing. If it were not past Christmas Day, he would have added, Tra-la. And then he thought of the twelve days, and did add it.
“Tra-la,” he bellowed.
And then why say more? He would see them all again soon. He dropped his arms to his sides and, holding firmly to his now-just-humming tiger, he picked up his coat and went around the partition and grabbed his bag and was out the door onto the surprisingly busy street, where it was in fact snowing.
Barnaby Griswold loved snow.
And there, by God, a taxi presented itself out of the traffic and the snow just for him. When you had a bag and good clothes, a taxi usually did present itself, for the chance of an airport fare. Even so, a dirty, yellow, available taxi in New York snow was a miraculous vision; it had almost the splendor of sunlight shafting through summer storm clouds to the ocean.
He threw his bag in and set his tiger on the seat, and he got in himself and closed the door.
The driver was an East Indian in a turban who half turned to ask over the seat back and through the bulletproof shield, “Where to?”
The man said it with the cheering lilt of a new arrival. He had to be new not to recognize Barnaby Griswold, not to know that instead of the airport, Barnaby was on his way to begin reaping the golden harvests of a resurrected career.
“Where to?”
The musical whimsy of once-British education on a foreign tongue sounded like an unfamiliar evening songbird. How charming, when Barnaby himself had just completed a posting to Oklahoma.
The driver’s eyes now glanced in the rearview mirror, the eyes of another new friend who was ready to see Barnaby Griswold along to any destination on earth. Anywhere he wanted to go. Actually, if it weren’t already late in the day, Barnaby would have gone downtown just to spread his once again ascendant, territorial musk.
As it was, the people in Livermore’s building would let him into Tom’s apartment, and a nap might be nice. Also a sandwich; he’d left La Cote without eating for goodness sake.
Of course the driver would not be happy with Tom’s nearby address. The driver wanted one of the airports, La Guardia at the very least, and Barnaby had been away so long that it seemed important to try and please his new, turbanned friend. And, after all, what a wonderful sound it always made to say, La Guardia. Such marvelous words to spread out in the back seat of a taxicab after triumph on a snowy afternoon.
God Almighty. La Guardia was the wrong direction altogether.
“Where to?”
On the other side of the Plexiglas, the driver’s turban looked not unlike Ada’s hat. There were no earflaps, and it didn’t tie under the chin, but with or without flaps and ties, this was no time to be thinking of Ada. Barnaby turned to the tiger on the seat beside him for support, and the tiger was there, gigantic, smiling. But, oh, unfair. The tiger, who had turned things around in the first place with all the snarling, now the tiger’s eyes were as teasing again as Marian’s. What kind of support was that?
La Guardia was the airport, and the airport meant going back to Oklahoma. Christ. Absolutely not. A few months back there, and Barnaby’s window here would be gone forever.
Barnaby would be a fool to go back. Even Livermore, who wouldn’t give most people advice on whether or not to breathe, had said so. “Don’t be a fool, Barnaby.”
Well.
Ah.
Don’t be a fool.
Barnaby hadn’t thought of it quite like that.
Thought of like that, of course, it all presented itself in a different light.
Barnaby held up one hand to stay the driver.
If he went back to Oklahoma now, it would be without question the most foolish thing he had ever done in his life—no need to try and document it; one knew in the gut. It would be throwing everything away, the unmatchable height of foolishness. He should be shot for even imagining it.
So. Yes?
Remember Barnaby Griswold?
Barnaby Griswold had called the Christmas Crash. He’d made it back. And walked away from it all.
They’d remember that Barnaby Griswold.
Oh, bravo.
“La Guardia,” he shouted.
Were his mother and father watching? Of course they were, and both of them were proud. Ada could only die. And Marian must, probably sooner rather than later, come to her senses and pair off with someone her own age. But Barnaby Griswold would have done the right thing. Astonishing. Perfectly ridiculous.
“La Guardia!”
“Terrific, man. If it is no planes in the snowing, I can bring you here again.”
Barnaby settled himself, waved the driver ahead, and lay an arm grandly along the back of his own seat. Barnaby Griswold’s plane would be taking off. He could already feel the first of many new sorts of waves lifting his consecrated wings aloft.
And even as he felt the lift, he could smell the rank, city tide breathing from the very seat beneath him. Out the window was the whole furious chase of midtown slush, which he loved, which he was leaving. He wondered, for just an instant of longing, what had become of his tennis racket. He brought his arm down to let his hand rest for comfort upon the picture frame of his good friend the tiger. Thank God for friends. A light turned green in the pouring snow, and the taxicab inched ahead.
Good-bye. Good-bye.
Discussion Questions
Do you find Barnaby to be a sympathetic character? Is he an antihero? What happened in the novel to influence your answer? Do you need to like the main character in order to enjoy a book?
Did Barnaby ever succeed at being an athlete, lover, or pilgrim? How?
What is Barnaby’s connection with the tiger? (There are several tigers in this novel, real and, presumably, imagined. Remember the wallpaper at the restaurant?) Does Barnaby wish he were the tiger?
What characteristics depict Barnaby as a fool and a fluffmeister? Is this title fair?
What is a fluffmeister?
Suggestions for Further Reading
For some readers, Barnaby Griswold is a good example of an antihero as a main character in a novel. If you’d like to read more fiction featuring antiheroes, try these:
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is about a man, born Jay Gatz, who builds his life on a series of lies and self-delusions.
Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter is about a serial killer who only murders bad people. The novels are the basis for the hit television series.
Mario Puzo’s classic antihero in The Godfather is Michael Corleone, who finds himself in a situation where his desire to do the right thing can be brought about only by murderous deeds. Similarly, HBO’s The Sopranos depicts the life of mob boss Tony Soprano—the man we love to hate.
Or, you might consider Barnaby to be simply unlikeable. Here are some other works of fiction with unlikeable main characters.
Tom Perrotta’s black comedy Election follows the mishaps of two unlikeable characters: Tracy Flick, an annoyingly ambitious high school student, and Jim McAllister, the teacher who tries to orchestrate her demise.
It’s not always easy to sympathize with Eva Khatchadourian, the narrator of Lionel Shriver’s riveting We Need to Talk About Kevin.
The eponymous heroine of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge is often prickly, sometimes cruel, and probably wasn’t either a good wife or mother. Yet it’s these aspects of her character that make Olive so fascinating to read about, as they help flesh out her character as someone we will come to like.
If you’re interested in reading more about the world of stocks and bonds, hedge funds and commodity trading, take a look at these novels:
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