A Taxonomy of Barnacles, page 15
“We’re failing,” Bridget added. “We don’t work anymore. I can’t cope.”
Trot rolled over and, as though in assent, offered one forceful grunt.
As Trot snored, his mouth gradually opened wider. Trot’s mouth and snoring, Bridget feared, might combine to create a centrifugal force.
“Do you think we’ve become a two-headed monster?” Bridget asked.
Trot inhaled deeply and sniffed his response.
“We love the West Village but we hate the Corner Bistro. That place is always so crowded—you can’t talk. We love the Beatles but hate the Stones. We love New York but could see moving to the country. We don’t like going out. We like to stay in and cook. We don’t love each other anymore.”
Bridget looked to Trot, sincere in her confusion. Insomnia’s first blow is common sense.
“Trot and I are getting married,” Bridget told her empty room.
She was uncertain as to whether she was talking to herself or simply replaying a conversation she’d had with her mom. Her mother did not approve of their living together, not so much out of principle, but rather due to its threat to Bridget’s leverage in future negotiations. Why would anyone buy the cow, Bella asked, when he already lived with the milk? Bridget took offense on feminist grounds and also on the basis of being likened to a cow. In her relationship, she explained, she was definitely the bull. She had the money and the good job. Things had changed a lot, Bridget would point out, since her mother’s day.
A woman no longer had to trick a man into marrying her. Gone was the age-old and, Bridget thought, embarrassingly transparent pretense that a woman had religious objections to living together before being engaged. Furthermore, Bridget felt she did a disservice to all women by stowing her grandmother’s engagement ring in her Bottega Veneta bag as though the situation were of such dire urgency that Bella might be forced, if Trot didn’t pop the question, to hand him the implement of his advantage like a soldier, his reinforcement gun. Often Bridget played out the conversation in which she conceded that her mother had been right and had therefore accepted the first proposal made by a stranger off the street.
As Trot slept, Bridget marveled at the ability of the human face to change at night. Or was it the ability of hatred to change the human face? Oh, how she hated his little nose. It was not the nose of the man she would marry—so pointy and small. She wished his eyes were more widely paced. Maybe her mother was right; biology was destiny. Trot’s narrowed eyes caused an optical illusion, made the world look smaller than it really was. At least when he was sleeping, Trot’s eyes didn’t bulge as they did when he was making a point. His lips were adequate—not the lips she would want, but adequate—well-shaped, and, from the right angle, full. But why did he insist on licking them the moment before they kissed? This is why poets wrote sonnets, Bridget concluded. When you itemize the facets of beauty, you enhance its sum. She must stop focusing on Trot’s worst features. It was her fault. She was making him worse.
Without turning on her light, Bridget climbed out of bed, pulled on her bathrobe and took a seat at her desk. She intended, after alphabetizing her bills, to write a list of all of her friends’ birthdays. Luckily, Bridget was spared from this project by her ringing telephone. She was too delirious at this point to wonder who dared call so late.
“Bridge,” said the answering machine. “Under the balcony. Urban Romeo.” The speaker laughed, hiccupped, then added, “Wherefore are thou with that deadbeat when you could spend your life with me?”
Bridget lurched from her chair to turn down the volume on the answering machine. She returned to her desk, shaken. But before she recovered her normal pulse, something struck her windowpane. She rushed to the window and lifted it slowly. Billy, even from five flights above, looked wild and debonair.
“I know our families don’t really get along,” Billy shouted, “but what’s a silly feud in the face of love? I’ve been saving up for a long time now. Of course, I could only afford this rubber band, not that I didn’t consider giving you that chalice of hemlock…”
“Leave!” Bridget whispered severely though, in truth, she’d never been so happy to see him in her life.
“Bridge,” he said, “I’ve missed you so.”
Billy was always so melodramatic. “What are you doing here?” Bridget leaned over the railing. “How dare you come to my house?”
“Come downstairs and go for a walk with me. There’s something I need to ask you.”
“The answer,” Bridget hissed, “is still no.” She turned quickly to face the window so he wouldn’t see her smile.
Bridget peered quickly into the room to make sure Trot was still asleep. Comforted, she squeezed onto the fire escape and did her best to close the window from outside. Finding her fingertips lacked sufficient force to move the glass, she peered once more into the room and, comforted somewhat by Trot’s impenetrable sleep, resigned herself to leaving the window open.
“Billy,” Bridget whispered, shifting her weight in order to hush the metal grates, “you have to leave right now.”
“I can’t,” said Billy.
“Why not?” asked Bridget.
“Because I’m wild with love.”
“Come on,” Bridget hissed, “you’ll wake up Trot.”
“Good.” Billy flashed a diabolical smile.
“Billy,” Bridget said, more forcefully. But it was hard to sound authoritative while whispering from thirty feet above the ground.
“What? It’s true.” Billy shrugged.
“Billy,” Bridget repeated. She raised her eyebrows like a nursery school teacher. “My boyfriend is asleep inside.”
“Oh God! Don’t say that,” Billy squealed.
From five flights up, Bridget angrily noted, Billy’s eyes still demanded her full attention. As a child, she had often gazed into their endless green and wished she could trade him for her own boring blue.
“Don’t say what?” she hissed. “He’s fast asleep.”
“Don’t say ‘your boyfriend.’ Have mercy on me.”
Though she would never admit it, since she was fourteen Bridget had pictured Billy when she pictured her life. Billy had offered, along with all the obvious attributes of neighbors and twins and neighbors who were twins and also blond twins and, because there were twins, double everything they already were, complete and utter devotion. Billy, ever since he could remember, had been hopelessly in love with Bridget. Billy saw his own house as an airless garden to the Barnacles’ burgeoning hothouse, while the Barnacle girls wished, more than anything, that their mother would replicate the Finch apartment in their own. In the Barnacle house, one could enter at any time and find an adventure. In his house, Billy felt like he did at school assemblies, as though he were waiting for something very boring to end.
For Billy, each Barncle offered a different reward. But, Bridget, far and away, was simply the best one. Bell was too mean. She acted as though her year on the twins was actually a decade. She pinched their cheeks routinely and called them the Booby Twins until they were old enough to retaliate. Belinda was too frivolous. She lacked the brainy omniscient aura that surrounded the others like Saturn’s rings. Beth was too serious, Beryl was too odd, and Benita was too young. Bridget was the perfect combination of strange and normal, stoic and sassy, sexy and cynical and therefore always just out of reach.
For years, Bridget had handled Billy with the dubiousness of a lion trainer, circling him with a feigned apathy whose fervor betrayed a certain distinct concern. In high school, they were inseparable, confounding their teachers and parents with the threat of their union, Bridget always maintaining a distance motivated by what she could not tell. It’s not that she wasn’t attracted to Billy, but there was something that prevented her from loving him, some indescribable quality that made her suspicious of his valor and therefore averse to committing.
Accordingly, Bridget appointed Billy her “best friend,” and thereby tortured him with every last detail of her early romantic mishaps. Billy listened dutifully as Bridget sampled her high school’s store of stocky, insipid athletes, each time considering a bit more seriously if she and Billy should give it a shot. Billy finally seized an opportunity the summer before Bridget left for college. But those heady three months—though blessed with much kissing in the backseats of cars, sneaking into rooms, and one precariously close encounter with sex—were cursed to be a brief and distracted affair that the two would summarize with overblown professions of relief, with phrases like, “Thank God we didn’t go all the way” or “It’s good we got that out of our systems” or “Let’s never jeopardize our friendship again.”
But the brief affair did change their friendship. Every boy Bridget dated since, not excluding Trot, had, in some way, undergone comparison with Billy and each one had triggered Billy’s increasingly operatic professions of love. Early in these relationships, like clockwork, Billy appeared at a window, on the doorstep of a college dorm, and once, at a rock show to insist that Bridget was the love of his life and he hers, and that she leave whatever guy she was with at the time. Once, Billy was forcibly removed by campus police, when, after staking out her dorm, he tried to jump, piggyback-style, onto the boy who was leaving Bridget’s room. Throughout, his line of argument never changed. As he was carried off by campus cops, Billy shouted his call to arms. He could tell, he would say, by the look in the boy’s eyes that he didn’t love Bridget as much as Billy did. Incidentally, Billy injured himself twice: once, when he attempted to wriggle out of the grasp of campus security and had to be tackled to the ground, and once during the act of surveillance when, intent on watching the boy’s departure, he accidentally walked into a tree.
“It’s okay, Bridget.” Billy changed his tack. “I’ve seen you together and now I know.”
“How dare you,” Bridget said at a normal decibel, then lowering her voice, she added, “If you start with this again, I’ll do exactly the same thing.”
The same thing was, of course, to issue a restraining order. Bridget had done this more for the rhetorical fact than for her actual safety or for Billy’s rebuke. For having had to take out a restraining order was one of many status symbols coveted by a certain type of New York City girl, alongside her Hermès Birkin bag or her first Cartier watch.
“Bridge,” Billy said, his voice raising an octave, “you’re everything to me. Bridget, you’re my life.” And, as though the simple action would prove the veracity of his statement, Billy fell ceremoniously to his knees. He howled suddenly, surprised by the sharpness of debris digging into his kneecap. Bridget had to look away to keep from laughing. “Bridge,” Billy called from his kneeling position. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you. He doesn’t love you the way I do. And, more importantly, how could you love anyone named Trot?”
Bridget’s smile abruptly evaporated. “Will you please shut up?!” She rushed back to the window, thrust her head in. Then, calmed by the sight of Trot’s oblivious slumber, resumed her post on the fire escape and persisted at the effort of pretending to get Billy to leave. “Billy,” she said, affecting a stern tone, “this is not acceptable.” Then, softening, she tried a new tack, “Please, don’t make this any harder than it is. Will you please be rational and leave without making a scene?”
“No, I will not be rational,” Billy said. “Love is irrational. I am in love, therefore I will not leave.” He nodded to punctuate this deduction like an ancient philosopher completing a proof.
Bridget felt a nauseating wave of guilt. She had a perfectly adequate boyfriend. She was greedy, she decided, vain and selfish. No, she changed her mind again. It was Trot’s fault for depriving her of romance. Every girl in the world deserved to be courted.
“But I will if you come down and go for a walk.”
“Billy, this is extortion,” Bridget said, a certain coyness creeping into her voice.
“Good idea,” said Billy, “because if you don’t, I’ll simply stay here all night.”
Billy released his knees from the strain of kneeling by switching his position again. Something very pointy—a pebble, he hoped, not a shard of glass—jabbed horribly into his skin. First, he slid into a cross-legged position, then, finding this lacked a certain emphatic quality, he uncrossed his feet, extended his legs, put his hands behind his head and reclined luxuriously so that he was staring at the sky like a stargazer set to wait all night for a once-in-a-lifetime comet.
“Billy, you’re drunk,” Bridget said, noting Billy’s tie for the first time.
“How else do you expect me to get through a date with someone else? I have to numb myself to make it bearable, and then it’s more excusable when I accidentally call her Bridget.”
Bridget could feel her resolve weakening.
“It’s true,” Billy nodded, and by way of verification, he grabbed one flap of his tie and yanked it to the side of his neck. “Bridget, come down, or I’ll kill myself.”
From above, Billy looked truly absurd, like a traffic cop halting oncoming cars. Trot, on the contrary, never looked silly. He was always so damn serious.
Noting Bridget’s weakening resolve, Billy moved in for the kill. “Bridget,” he whispered, “I worship you.”
Bridget burst into hearty laughter. “Oh, Billy,” she said, “why must you be such a fool?”
“Because,” Billy said, “I’m a fool for love.” He allowed the menacing noose to fall back onto his lapel.
“Billy,” Bridget said, regaining her serious tone. “I don’t know what to tell you. Trot and I are very happy.”
“If you and Trot are so happy,” Billy shot back, “then why are you out here with me?”
Souring, Bridget turned away. She’d had enough of this game. “Sometimes,” she whispered, “things are more complicated than they seem.”
“So tell me some of those things,” Billy pressed.
“Why would I tell you?”
“Because you’re standing on your fire escape talking to me, not sleeping next to your boyfriend.”
Bridget refused to indulge Billy’s impudence. Still, his question struck a chord. She paused, considering whether or not Billy merited her trust. Though she decided that he did not, she confided anyway. “The problem with Trot is,” Bridget paused. “The problem is…” She looked guiltily at her window. “Oh God, there are so many.”
Billy assumed a pious look. “Why don’t you start with one.”
“Okay,” she said. “Just as an example, take what happened on Passover. I asked him to do one simple thing, to get a cake for my parents and, for reasons too boring to recount, he showed up empty-handed.”
“So, he’s incompetent,” Billy said. He managed, while supplying this suggestion, to sound interested as opposed to insidious.
“Well,” said Bridget, shifting uncomfortably, “I guess you could say that.”
“How hard can it be to produce a cake when you work in a bakery?”
“You wouldn’t know,” Bridget said, bristling. “You’ve never worked a day in your life. Besides, it really wasn’t his fault. I told him too late.”
“Still, I see what you mean,” Billy said with an ingratiating nod. He attempted to redirect the conversation. Forcing Bridget to come to Trot’s defense was certainly not his intention.
“It’s the same way with his writing,” Bridget went on. “Trot is incredibly talented, but that’s not enough to succeed. You have to be…”
“Assertive,” Billy suggested.
“Something like that,” Bridget sighed. The bile of treachery rose in her throat but she forced herself to ignore it.
“So he’s a coward,” said Billy.
“Watch it,” Bridget snapped. She eyed Billy, now with open misgiving. Clearly, this was the wrong place for a confession and Billy, the wrong confidant.
“Well,” said Billy, “there’s one thing I can tell you for sure: If you were my girlfriend, I would make sure you had all the cake in the world. If you were my girlfriend, you would eat cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
“Oh, Billy,” said Bridget. She shook her head and smiled in spite of herself.
“Come for a walk. I’ll do any … thing,” Billy slurred, pausing in the middle of the word to trip and fall back to the ground.
“Walk ten paces on your knees,” Bridget said.
Billy complied eagerly. He completed five steps on his knees then looked up pleadingly. “Bridget, it hurts. Will you come down now?”
And for some odd reason, Bridget agreed. She simply shook her head as a reminder to herself that she was giving in to a vice, gathered her bathrobe around her legs to form more suitable climbing attire, commanded Billy to close his eyes, and proceeded down the five creaky flights to the sidewalk. As she climbed, she muttered reprimands to herself and tried to avoid smiling. Unfortunately, chance had its own rebuke: The squeal of the fire escape’s metal grates succeeded where laughter and shouted proposals had failed at interrupting Trot’s sleep. And as luck, or rather, bad luck, would have it, declarations of love, shouted or laughed, made by suitors on answering machines, even when only made in jest and even when the proposal part is left out, are simply impossible to explain to one’s boyfriend and even more difficult to erase. This bad luck is, of course, all the more apparent when it compels one’s boyfriend to throw you out of your own apartment and forces you to return, ashamed and contrite to your own rapidly crowding childhood home.
9
Killer Instinct
Days after Barry’s strange announcement, the apartment was still abuzz. Each girl’s approach to the contest differed drastically, her stance on her father a precise function of her specific age. Bell felt the contest was to be ignored, treated as one of the many whims with which Barry expressed his changing moods and in which he eventually lost interest. Bridget, though she and her father enjoyed only the most cursory relationship, heeded the contest as a warning of sorts, but still took it literally. Wary of betraying her competitive nature, she calculated in private, consoled by the knowledge that she had a firm lead. Beth was in agreement with Bell. These were the ravings of a madman. The modern interpretation of Lear applied in which the king, possessed by lunacy, divested himself of his kingdom. In Beth’s mind, this diagnosis rendered the contest totally dismissible; such a mercurial man would surely change his mind again before the winner was named.
