A Taxonomy of Barnacles, page 25
Unfortunately, Blaine’s musings were disturbed by a low, angry growl. Charles lay resting on the bedroom floor, seemingly guarding Bridget while she slept and, from the look on his face, begrudged Blaine the interruption. At the sound of his growl, Bridget rustled slightly but then integrated the noise into her dream. Benita, however, already on alert, darted from her bedroom to her post in the hall, assuming position just in time to watch Blaine enter Bridget’s bedroom.
Over the years, Bell and Bridget’s room had been host to various neighborhood boys. Even so Bridget was startled by the sight of Blaine and totally disoriented. Fatigue and darkness colluded with Blaine’s insidious intent. And lacking the baseball cap as a crutch, Bridget mistook Blaine for Billy for the first time in her life.
“Billy,” she whispered.
Blaine stopped short, amazed by Bridget’s mistake.
“Billy,” she repeated, “I thought I told you to stop coming over uninvited.”
Blaine remained perfectly still, considering his options.
“Oh well,” said Bridget, “as long as you’re here, come over where I can see you. Stop lurking in the shadows.”
As he obliged and crossed the room, Blaine’s conscience flared up. His opportunity for honesty was running out. If he planned to set her straight, he had exactly one second. But, like all great criminals, he paired spontaneity with cold-blooded intent. It was irresistible to lie. If he could pull this off tonight, the possibilities were endless.
“Tie game, ’eighty-six World Series,” Blaine whispered, parroting Billy and Bridget’s game.
“Not now,” Bridget said, playing along. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Sweetheart,” Blaine pressed. He took a seat at the edge of Bridget’s bed, careful to position himself far from the patches in which the moon lit the room.
“After this inning.” Bridget sighed. “I need to see this pitch.”
“But darling,” Blaine begged, “I know you’re busy, but my question is urgent. I need to know right this instant. Which do you love more? Me or baseball?”
Bridget paused for a moment to give the issue serious thought then, offering a reluctant smile, she admitted, “You, I guess.”
Blaine took this concession to heart and nodded gratefully. Then, in efforts to keep up the momentum, upped the ante. “Okay, I’ve got a good one,” he announced. “One of the year’s ten best. In fact, this one is so good, I’m certain you’ll never beat it.”
Her interest piqued by the challenge, Bridget propped herself up in the bed, taking the opportunity to place a pillow behind her back.
“Crosstown bus,” Blaine began, “the Understatement of the Year. They haven’t been dating very long. Too soon to expect the commitment. They’re on their way back from the grocery store. Brown paper bags at their feet. The bus stops suddenly at a red light. ‘Sweetie,’ he says.”
“Yes,” Bridget replied.
“It doesn’t matter what we’re doing. Buying groceries, reading the paper, riding the crosstown bus. Life is exciting when you’re around. Sweetheart,” he said.
“Yes,” she whispered.
Then, something unexpected happened. Try as she might, there was no denying the physical sensation. Bridget’s stomach turned a full revolution. Her heart thumped madly. Her ears got hot. For one split second, the beating of her heart quite possibly stopped.
“Your turn,” Blaine said.
Bridget swallowed and looked away, embarrassed by her reaction. She turned to study the window frame with feigned interest. Suddenly, long-forgotten emotions flooded her heart. Why had all the weight in her body dropped from her head to her toes? Had Billy alone caused this response? Had he felt the same things himself? Finally, she had no choice but speak or betray herself. “Teenage Romeo,” she managed. “Two twins. Two sisters. One night, without discussing such a plan, both boys climb in the same window.”
“Ah,” Blaine said, nodding knowingly. “The notorious Double Proposal.”
“But, they’re not teenagers anymore. Now the stakes are much higher.”
“Is that right?” Blaine asked.
Bridget nodded solemnly. Suddenly, her instincts understood what her brain had yet to infer. Surely, this was the end of the line, the moment, the question.
But Blaine was so surprised by his success he suddenly lost his gumption. What in God’s name had he been thinking? He couldn’t propose to Bridget. “So, how about those Sox,” he said, changing the subject quickly. “I’m expecting a strong start from Cox. What’s your prediction?”
Bridget regarded Blaine strangely, forcing him to meet her gaze. Overwhelmed by the color of her eyes and the odd weight of the moment, Blaine ignored propriety and his conscience and took her hand in his. But this gesture marked a strange and unexpected turn. As she gave her hand, Bridget’s heart was suddenly devoid of all sensation. Her pulse did not race. Her palms did not sweat. Her toes did not tingle. Her heart beat as it normally did, no speed, no thrill, no thump. None of the other telltale signs accompanied Blaine’s romantic gesture. No flutter in the stomach, no weakness in the knees, nothing resembling excitement. In fact, if pressed, Bridget would have had no choice but admit she felt no more extraordinary than she did after a hearty breakfast. So it’s official, Bridget decided with some measure of relief. She was not in love with Billy Finch. If she were in love with Billy, she reasoned, she would have felt something. Charles raised his snout as though to confirm his agreement then glared at Blaine, sniffed the air, and issued a menacing growl. Blaine, who had always been scared of the dog, took this as his cue. He released Bridget’s hand, muttered an excuse, and promptly bolted.
16
Persistence
For a person who spends any amount of time doubting, loathing, or in some way engaged in the negative assessment of himself, disapproval from others often has an antithetical effect. Far from its feeling like an attack on the sensitive soul, a cool response from another person, whether an all-out assault or merely a subtle rejection, can provide an unexpected relief, offering a rare confirmation of the doubter’s worst fears. He may even experience a sort of detached satisfaction much like a pessimistic meteorologist on sight of a thundercloud. The moment of rejection, much like the forecasted storm, may present a momentary inconvenience but its discomfort is immediately overwhelmed by the thrill of corroboration. This rejection, therefore, while certainly sad, is arguably a happy event for it serves at once to justify and legitimize the preoccupations of the tormented mind.
For this very reason, Trot viewed Billy’s recent intrusion as a mixed blessing. Though it cost him the company of his girlfriend, it allowed him to sanction his usual pastime, thorough analysis of his own faults, followed by the faults of everyone else, and therefore avoiding a complete overhaul of his personality. While the absence of Bridget was, to be sure, a nuisance, Trot had not suffered a net loss. His worldview remained completely intact, in fact, it grew only more steadfast. His writing had hopefully found new fuel and his girlfriend, with any luck, would return to the apartment by the end of the week with a renewed appreciation for him. With these arrows in his quiver, Trot awoke rather later on Sunday but nonetheless with a general air of conviction as opposed to the sullen rage and recrimination one might expect. In fact, he was positively buoyant as he opened his eyes at half past four and patted the empty half of his bed in confused recollection of Bridget’s exit. Far from mourning her absence or lamenting her treatment, he was grateful for her mistake. He padded across the empty apartment to a patch of floor that was fully saturated with afternoon sunlight and, surveying the space, considered how best to fill his only full day off from the bakery that week.
Of course, Trot’s oddly chipper response begged an obvious question: Did his incongruous complacency result from the fact that disappointment fit into his perverse gestalt, or rather from the fact that he did not actually miss Bridget? From the start, Trot had repressed the notion that the two were incompatible, ignoring the abundant evidence that supported this fact. Bridget’s friends and family seemed to have the most convincing assessment of their union. Trot could see it in their eyes every time Bridget forced him to socialize. It was as though no matter what question he was asked—“How have you been?”, “How’s the bakery?”, “How’s your writing?”, or “Isn’t the weather unseasonably warm?”—the inquiry was not about the said topic. In fact, these people were asking a far more urgent question; “What on earth is a girl like Bridget doing with a guy like you?” Of course, Trot knew that paranoia made him prone to construe cruelty out of mere inquisitiveness. Still, he felt there was some merit to his suspicions. Perhaps, these objective parties could see something that Trot and Bridget could not.
Still, despite his compulsive pessimism, Trot was blessed with a healthy, even arrogant sense, of himself when he was alone and had no trouble answering the echoing question. It was perfectly clear what he offered Bridget: He provided an ongoing escape, much like an engrossing book, allowing her to uphold the delusion that she had strayed far from her family when in fact she had strayed not at all. By dating someone with such a different background, Bridget could comfort herself with the notion that she was admirably open-minded. She could delude herself into thinking she was the black sheep of the family. She could view their West Village apartment as a den of creativity, crowded by books and cigarette butts, an artist’s hovel in which dirty paintbrushes shared space with vats of red wine. Holed up with her bohemian boyfriend, writing poems, singing songs, rehearsing scenes, Bridget could uphold the myth that she was roughing it. She could think of herself as a struggling artist despite the obvious disconnect; her struggle was not to support herself with her art but rather to support the notion that she was an artist.
Precisely what Bridget offered Trot was a far more difficult thing to assess and one that required honest introspection of which Trot was not capable. Perhaps the whispers of friends and family could shed some light on the subject. Every boy of humble origins who dates a girl of such auspicious ones must ask himself to what extent he was seduced by the girl’s privilege. But it was not her money that tantalized Trot, nor her family’s opulence; it was Bridget’s brazen confidence, a direct result of her upbringing, to be sure, but not of money itself. But he felt he could not be blamed for falling for the sparkling confidence privilege affords. It was no different than falling for a girl with a beautiful face. Both girls were recipients of the favoritism of her environment and, as a result, of the sneaking suspicion that most of her wishes in life would inevitably be fulfilled, that her future would closely resemble the one she had dreamed up as a child. Could a boy from the middle of nowhere really be faulted for admiring this? He might as well be faulted for choosing the city over the country, his rural hometown. For Bridget was nothing if not a living personification of New York City; sophisticated yet sweet, daunting yet endearing, constant yet constantly changing.
To be sure, there were aspects of Bridget’s personality that made Trot yearn for the girls back home. He hated the way she waltzed through Manhattan with little regard for others, willfully crossing streets in spite of red lights, pushing in front of pedestrians whose pace was too slow, wandering boldly at all hours of the night through even the roughest neighborhoods, as though her movements were policed by a cadre of personal bodyguards. This wild, self-destructive self-absorption, this sense of immunity to hardship, this nearly offensive sense of herself as an all-entitled princess; all of these qualities Trot loved and loathed in equal part. And yet, there was no denying that the two shared a durable bond. The couple did not so much prove the adage that opposites attract but rather that something interesting occurs when two very dissimilar people spend so much time together. They had enjoyed their fair share of happy times, had even fostered some necessary mutual maturation, Trot softening Bridget’s rougher edges just as Bridget emboldened Trot. But perhaps, Trot now acknowledged, they had learned all they could from one another and they risked untold psychic damage by staying together any longer.
Amidst this, he thought, fruitful assessment of his relationship with Bridget, Trot had taken a seat at his desk and found himself faced with a new oppressive presence. Now only inches from his blank computer screen, he was accosted by all of his old self-doubt as though by an angry ghost. But rather than reconcile, he forced his imagination onto wayward paths. Surely, recounting Billy’s loathsome qualities could distract him for a while. Thus occupied, Trot managed to squander an entire precious hour of his day by mentally listing and then actually typing out Billy’s worst qualities. Having pinpointed Billy’s personality long before they met, Trot had little discerning to do by the time they were face-to-face. And yet, at the Barnacles’ Passover seder, Billy had surpassed all stereotype and suspicion, allowing Trot to find new reserves of venom.
Billy Finch was the living emblem of everything Trot hated. He was, in short, the perfect bull’s-eye, his ruddy face an easy target. It was self-proclaimed artists like Billy who made life difficult for Trot, crowding the annals of contemporary culture with mediocrity. They were not technically in direct competition, with Billy striving for legitimacy as a filmmaker while Trot slaved for simple relevance in the world of fiction. Still, the division between the two might as well have been a poet and a plumber. In Trot’s mind, categorization was simple enough; Billy was an aspiring screenwriter while Trot was a real writer. But even this simple distinction failed to give Trot comfort. He was plagued with a far more pressing problem. For though film and fiction seemed to exist on parallel, harmonious planes, the two forms were, in fact, engaged in a heated race, the winner of which would survive through the ages while the other died a slow death. In Trot’s opinion, real writing and screenwriting fought a frenzied, deadlocked battle, the winner of which would earn the prize of relevance and longevity. Trot feared this match was but a token formality, a means of assuaging the grief felt by writers as they watched their form fade out.
Like all writers, Trot was relieved to find a scapegoat for his own shortcomings and cursed Billy, while he should have thanked him for this valuable service. In addition to this Trot was armed with the unquestioning smugness of an underdog and firmly believed that it was better to produce nothing than something people had seen before. What service did Billy offer the world? At least Trot strove for originality. At least he strove for newness. Billy was one of a generation who failed to see art as the great privilege, who saw art as his birthright as opposed to a chance to contribute to history. In Trot’s opinion, the artist, unlike the doomed dodo or the miserable manatee, had one blessed shot at skirting extinction, the opportunity, though by no means the guarantee, to leave a legend for the next generation and thereby to become, in some way, exempt from evolution.
So, satisfied with both his moral and artistic supremacy, Trot stood up from his computer without having written a word. And without making the conscious decision to leave the house, he found himself walking up Eighth Avenue at a brisk, commanding pace, traversing, in reverse, the exact same route Billy had forged two nights earlier. Having not yet eaten a meal, Trot was somewhat overwhelmed by his consumption of coffee, an excessive amount that was further compounded by the only other substance in his stomach: two-day-old cupcakes. Thus fueled by a healthy dose of caffeine and frosting, Trot walked the fifty odd blocks uptown without pausing to catch his breath. As a result, even he was quite surprised by his rapid progress when he found himself, just before midnight, standing at the window of the Barnacle girls, performing an alarmingly accurate impersonation of Billy.
“Bridget, come down here now!” Trot bellowed.
Sadly, no one noticed.
Still undaunted, Trot stepped backward, veering closer to the curb, then tilted his head farther back to get a better look at the girls’ window.
“Bridget, come down here,” he said again, this time somewhat more forcefully, drawing the attention of Carlos, who shook his head despairingly, more amused than annoyed.
Now, faced with the added mortification of a spectator, Trot felt a rush of degradation and, acknowledging his sadness for the first time since Billy’s stunt, he took a seat on the sidewalk as though he were in a grassy field, preparing for a picnic. Fortunately, Carlos took pity on him soon enough, gesturing for Trot to enter the building and shuttling him to the thirteenth floor.
Trot stood still at the front door for several minutes then, tapping it, he found it open and entered the apartment. Now, alone in the large drafty room, he examined the walls with new interest. Solitude allowed him an attention to detail his tour with Benita had not. Now, the finer points of the room struck him with new precision: the intense color of the walls, the bowl of Jordan almonds on the coffee table, the fine George Washington molding, its dainty serrations cut to resemble the teeth of the esteemed president. Enjoying this moment of respite, he walked to the coffee table and, still unaware of Bell’s presence on the sofa, took a seat, indulged in a yawn and popped a few almonds into his mouth.
The Barnacles’ apartment looked better, Trot decided, in the middle of the night. What appeared in daylight to be chaotic, now looked almost tidy. The piano no longer hovered in the middle of the room like a benevolent whale, but rather seemed to have been parked for the night like a beloved sports car. Books that had been stuffed haphazardly seemed straighter on the shelves. Jigsaw puzzles had been solved, game pieces returned to their rightful boxes; sneakers, formerly strewn across the floor, now waited patiently in pairs, knotted at their laces. Indeed, nighttime afforded the house a decided air of calm. Without the constant commotion of arrivals and departures, the room seemed positively serene. Lulled by this strange tranquility, Trot let his guard down for a moment, leaned his head back on the sofa and finally dozed off. As a result, he failed to notice Bell who, rousing from sleep on the adjacent sofa, now stared at him head-on.
