Eccentric Circles

by Larry Duberstein

  Naturally I tried approaching Frank directly, too. This fellow had a lawyer, and a mother, and he bought coffee and doughnuts at Winnie’s Spa on the corner of Columbine and Orchard fairly regularly. True, he negotiated the purchase in silence, but I knew he could speak and one morning left the spa with him. “So, Frank, have you recovered all right from your fall? When you fell in the snow last week?”

  Not a flicker of acknowledgement.

  “I was the one who found you—I phoned for the ambulance. That’s how I knew about it.”

  Come on, Frank, you owe me—that’s what I was really saying. A word or two, a sketch of how things stand, a little something to go on. And this time I got a sort of response, a brief twitch, a cringe, as in a man with a hornet at his neck, folding away in self-defense. I let him go down Columbine alone with his breakfast.

  That night I told my wife Rachel it was not worth the trouble, and she readily agreed; she had never thought it was worth the trouble, though not because she lacked sympathy for this poor soul. Wherever Frank Barlow was lost—whether in childhood, in Vietnam, inner space or outer space—Rachel was sure he was lost all on his own. Where no one could reach him.

  Then two days later he was standing on his mark, below our front stoop, buttoning and unbuttoning his mackinaw. By the third run-through I was down the stairs with a plate of Rachel’s famous molasses cookies.

  Tess Browning, down the block, had fed him once. Fed him every morning for a month, that is, out her back door like a Thirties’ hobo. Sandwiches and cartons of milk. One time he handed her money, as though she were running an eating club over there. Bizarre transaction all around. Tess never got a word out of him, never saw a smile, yet she believed he was glad of her caring, and clearly happy to eat. “But it was so strange,” she told me, “to ask him what he liked—you know, tunafish versus ham-and-cheese, toast or on a bulkie roll?—and him with those bright faraway eyes just keep chewing.”

  Frank bolted from her porch the day he heard a telephone ring inside the house. Like a dog jumping back from a firecracker, she said. He was gone by the time she returned and he never stopped by again. Tess figured he must be on the lam, wanted by the police, or possibly a mental patient strayed off the reservation. But no: he has this lawyer, cashes his check. So he had run for other, more personal reasons, reasons stronger than hunger, as was pretty obvious every day of his life.

  The cookies were no more than a pretext, a transition from nothing to something; maybe they would hold him a few extra seconds. Plus, I had timed my arrival halfway down a placket (three buttons done and three buttons un) so he would be checked by that detail, too, and stay to hear me out. Such was my reasoning, at any rate.

  Wrong. Stronger than hunger, stronger than autism or whatever it was that set him in pursuit of those buttons, stronger than my will to know was his will to be unknown, and to get clear of all situations. I had barely spoken (“Frank, my name is Frank too—”) when he was off and hobbling, like a turkey through the corn, down St. James to Norfolk, his usual route but triple time, dual exhaust. I might have been fool enough to follow after him had I not felt fool enough already, standing in the street with my cookies. At least I had what it took to bring the neighborhood pigeons bliss. I have known two very specific insanities in my time: the crazy man who needed to kill pigeons, and the crazy man who needed to feed them. Now I knew which one I was.

  No doubt my profession—a lifelong high school English teacher—made my next approach inevitable. Frank Barlow was alert and keenly self-interested; the problem was simply that his self-interest lay in safety, apartness, privacy. He would never stand still for talk, yet might he not accept written communications? Read them at his leisure and respond in kind? It might in fact amuse him very much to do so!

  My first note was brief and to the point. “Would you care to correspond?” I wrote, and I took it to him at the bench in Trapelo Park where he often drank his coffee. I never even broke stride: dropped the envelope beside him (his name in red letters as clear as his blood on the snow that December day) then watched him from a distance. But it was like watching the Red Sox bat in a critical situation, it had that awful combination of caring and helplessness. Get a hit! Read the note! No such luck.

  If he had any human curiosity in him, his was a monk-like discipline. Was it possible he hadn’t seen it? Or saw it but took it for a leaf, or a shoe, or a dead moose? The man did have his own reality, after all. But I had mine too, and gave him the note twice more (“Would you care to correspond?”), once outside Winnie’s and once by the railroad tracks at dusk. Each time he allowed the communiqué to fall from his hand, or from the space between my hand and his, really. Let it flutter to earth like the discount coupons dealt out by shills at an indoor mall.

  “Please, Frank,” my wife advised, “this is starting to upset you more than you know.” But I was pretty much convinced anyway—Frank Barlow did not care to correspond. It is to receive mail, after all, that we undertake to write and send it. If he had no interest in the incoming, what incentive could he have for writing back?

  “Write back! Oh you poor dear, you’ve really lost it, haven’t you,” Rachel said. “You thought he’d write back? I thought you just wanted him to eat your cookies. My cookies, I should say.”

  Maybe because I really was ready to stop trying, he finally did respond, albeit in a dream. I say “a dream” and yet I wish you to understand the occasion could not have been more substantial, more real, had you been filming it live and in color on the street where you live. This was so vivid that I knew he had actually said it, or thought it—that it truly was his response being transmitted to me. Magically, telepathically, whatever. I do not believe in much (New Age, old age, nothing really), I am ye of little faith personified, but this was not something to believe or disbelieve, this was almost tangible.

  We met on a bridge, or on a huge split tree arched over a fast stream, like the one where Robin Hood jousted so merrily with Little John and Friar Tuck. There at the midspan, as if by assignation, Frank looked me squarely in the eye at last (the tangled hair and sodden beard, the sad hollow eyes, but organized and forthright) and spoke two words: “Why me?”

  I turned and left. Clearly I had come for his answer, as a courier, and could now return with that answer to my encampment, my superiors. Why me? That was the message.

  But what did it mean to him? Here one saw some ambiguity, for the obvious interpretation—why had God singled him out for suffering—was so out of keeping with his mien, as a man who asked nothing and took the world’s best shots every day. So perhaps he was addressing the question to me, asking why I had singled him out, assailed him. What did I hope to accomplish? And this possibility necessitated a second brief note, sent care of Chasen, in which I could offer up only the most tattered of bleeding-heart clichés: “Because you could use a friend, as who couldn’t. Someone with whom to speak, even when it is difficult …”

  Oh I know I’m probably wrong. I have been pretty consistent in that regard. Frank probably does not need a friend. I have few enough myself, true friends, and my truest, Rachel, has been giving me the strangest looks lately, as if she fears I may have caught the disease, and might prove a danger to the children. She has complained of my appearance, the beard, even though when I wore one years back she begged me to keep it. “I was used to it,” she says. “All right I liked it.” Not this time she doesn’t.

  You can live without friends, I suppose, and without communication for that matter. As for Frank, he treats me the same way as before, the same way he treats everyone; as if we had never stood together above the rushing water that late spring evening. Does he remember speaking out? Who knows? Who knows if he recognizes a face, or realizes I am the man who handed him mail, who spoke to him, who saved him. Who knows whether he sees a face as a face; one is only ninety percent certain he can see at all.

  Well, I tried. Had I never tried with the man, I might have felt guilty, especially after fate assigned me to pu
ll him from the frozen snow. So there may be no satisfaction, no resolution, but neither is there guilt. I am innocent. I may not even feel innocent, yet it can still be a comfort knowing that I am. Not guilty. I too could say, Why me, why was I singled out. Rachel has said it (“Why did it have to be you obsessing over that poor sick man?”) as though the suffering were mine, or hers.

  She talks to me, she’d answer any mail I sent her, but even after sixteen years of married life communication can sometimes be a real thornbush. Let’s face it, we have our different ways of seeing the world, different names and weights to assign its objects and ideas. Why should she be so surprised by that? Why should I?

  Catherine

  It was May in New Orleans, but on a Tuesday night the jazz was soft, all the party girls seemed sleepy. Dean was just walking the streets when he paused in the alcove entry to a place called The 10-Spot. Inside, not twenty feet away, was a naked lady in a hammock above the bar.

  An angled mirror duplicated her by parts—two heads of curly black hair, four white mounds of her backside, two of her four sandalled feet touching at the toe—the idea of which imagery was to make you stop and think, more or less. Even without the mirror, though, Dean might have stepped inside.

  There were a number of girls (10 OF ’EM * EACH ONE A 10!) and they took turns, first in the hammock and then dancing on the leather tabletops. The first one was his, not for how she was or where she was so much as who she was. He even managed to catch her name from the barman and it seemed to him a small hoard of magic that he possessed it as she went about her business feeling anonymous and free. Dean tipped her five dollars after her first dance and she roughed his hair in thanks; now, he thought, she was aware of him too, they had a sort of relationship.

  “Would you care for something to drink, sir?” she said, when she got to him. She had the look of a devilish child, dark-haired and lean-figured, with a playful southern rasp in her voice.

  “Not just yet.”

  “You have to,” she confided, leaning so close he could smell her body. “I mean they won’t let you stay if you don’t buy one.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll bring you a beer, how about, and then you can just hold hands with it as long as you like, see? If you aren’t yet thirsty, I mean.”

  “Sure.” Her breath, riding on the lovely catch in her voice, was sweet like grass.

  She took other orders, and other tips that were a lot larger. A tall shambling man in a baggy suit gave her twenty dollars and placed his two palms right on her bare hips. Catherine laughed and moved his hands away absently, as though she were taking a pan off the burner while tending the children. Waiting at the bar, she dropped sliced fruit in one drink while the barman drew beers, then delivered the round and disappeared into a back room. A willowy black woman rolled down from the hammock to dance, in bright red shoes and matching pasties. The man in the baggy yellow suit offered her fifty dollars for the pasties if he could personally remove them. She winked and pulled back at the last second, but it only made him clap and shout.

  Dean was just waiting for Catherine to come back, hoping there weren’t really ten of them, feeling anxious she might be done for the night, gone out the back. There was a redhead in the hammock now, her hair bleached the color of brick, and the clock showed five of eleven. The black dancer looked mad when Dean gave her a dollar.

  Finally, at twelve, Catherine came back out and climbed into the hammock, where Dean thought she might be falling asleep. Then suddenly she vaulted down, and stood at the jukebox punching in her personal tunes. She might not be the prettiest in a glamour way, but there was a quality in Catherine that made everyone quiet. She looked as though she had just gotten out of bed with no time to brush her hair and the electricity of the sheets still clinging to her. She didn’t smell at all like soap or deodorant or perfume. She moved with unthought grace, like an athlete practicing casually in the sun with no one watching.

  As her second number came shuffling up from the jukebox, she unstrapped her sandals and slid them right to Dean for safekeeping and if that didn’t prove it she finished with a split that was all for him, her front leg sliding straight at his chin. Her eyes had a dark shine to them, like the surface of a lake at night. He locked eyes with her and hooked a sandal onto her big toe, as if he were part of the act. This time she came around to him last:

  “You’re not going to tip me again,” she said.

  “I am, though. Have to. You’re the whole show.”

  “Damn it’s hot in this place,” she replied, taking the bills. “I feel like running through the streets instead.”

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  Unthinkingly he touched her, a come-along gesture, and felt the thin sweat on her back. His palm slid down to the swell of her buttocks and rested there. She had his other hand, and the money, in both of hers, but he could tell that her hands were about to pull free. “That would be good,” she said. “The two of us bare bum on Bourbon? But you see, sugar cookie, I’m on the ole time clock here.”

  “I forgot that. Forgot you were working, I mean. You seem so much at home, you know.”

  “I do like to dance.”

  “Dance with me later, then. After.”

  “After, darlin’, is four in the morning. That’s when they roll up the street and carry it inside.”

  “Tell you what, then,” he said with a gentle proprietary pat on the shoulder. “I’ll be back for you at four. It’s a date.”

  Back on the streets of the district, Dean had a chance to be amazed at himself. He had known himself a long time and the Dean he knew was reliable, shy, dull—the last man to speak his mind directly to any girl, much less a naked showgirl. When he returned to The 10-Spot at four, the alcove was dark; one fluorescent deck burned over the bar, and two black men sat under it sipping gin. There was a six-pack of Dixie Beer in the hammock now, another in the mirror above it. A lean fellow with a long pocky neck, the hound from outside, told Dean to forget it, they were closed, but then Dean mentioned Catherine’s name: “Why didn’t you say so? She’d be back there getting changed.”

  He went through the door but it was just a wide hallway and all the dancers were half dressed, so he turned. She came chasing straight after him, cussing mildly as she buttoned her shirt.

  “What are you doing here, you damn lunatic?” She rushed him out onto Bourbon Street, where the jazz was still winding faintly through the night, clarinets and trombones twining together like vines around the trumpet. “I can’t believe you showed up here.”

  “You didn’t want me to?”

  “Never gave it the ghost of a thought, hotshot. I figured we were joking around.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean why? What in hell ever made you think a person could waltz in here and pick me up like that? Not to say at four in the morning.”

  “I never picked you up, Catherine. I asked you out.”

  “And I never said I’d go out. Anyway, how come you know my name?”

  “Dancing in your bare feet is part of it—why you are so sexy and the rest not, I mean. I thought about that. It’s like you’re someone at a party, you know, just enjoying yourself. There’s nothing phony.”

  “How in hell’s name is a person going to be phony,” she suddenly laughed, “in the total nude?”

  “That’s when it’s easiest, I think. Just look at those other girls—”

  “And what in hell’s name am I doing standing here and arguing with you about it? How do you know my name?”

  “I heard it in there,” he shrugged. “Come on, I want to look at the river with you.”

  “Oh now I know you’re certified. It’s spooky as anything down there—dangerous too. And I still haven’t said yes to a single word of this.”

  “Come on, Catherine, I didn’t ask you to marry me or anything. You could say yes to a moonlight stroll.”

  The wharves were completely deserted and the vast, wild Mississippi seemed to command the whole
city. Even in the sheltered locks, it was miles wide, brown and foreboding. The moon sat low and round above the opposite bank, highlighting a thousand contrary tides and swirling eddies. Wind flew back and forth among the warehouses, bouncing in the cold shadows between gigantic containers and stacks of pallets.

  “It is spooky down here.”

  “Like I said.”

  “Cold, too.”

  “I’m frozen solid,” she said and he took her hand. She gave it, then took it back. “I sure hope you aren’t a murderer, cutie pie.”

  “Not nearly, Catherine. I love you.”

  “That is awfully stupid. You are either the saddest con man ever or your elevator stops two floors from the top, I honestly can’t tell which.”

  “You can’t tell how much I like you?”

  “Oh golly, lots of folks do. That’s what happens when a girl takes her clothes off. Men like you.”

  “Are you really cold?”

  “Is a Frenchman really French? Bone tired too, if you can believe such a thing.”

  “Well let’s go, then.”

  She led the way, through streets Dean had not seen before, but he had the odd sensation of being in charge, of leading in the other sense. To Dean this whole night had the quality of fate: that explained how it could still be happening. He held her tenderly around the shoulder to try and warm her. Eventually they stood at a locked iron gate, not far from where they had started walking, in the district.

  “Could I stay the night with you?” he said.

  “Oh and what’ll you tip me for that?” she said, surprising him with her emotion. She’d been playful, tired, distant, maybe amused; now she looked angry and tearful just under the surface of her face. Dean had not been sure exactly what he was asking, but he had been sincere and could make no sense of her sudden touchiness.