A Calling for Charlie Barnes Page 22

  Then Chippin’ In took off. Charlie was busy doing his own thing by that point and sought Jerry’s help. Jerry seemed to slot right back into the filing cabinet and office chair. He had tried resistance, renunciation, life on the margins. Working just felt better. There was more to the morning. But for him to realize this, the gatekeepers—headhunters, HR reps—had to bar entry first. You want out of corporate America, pal? Fine, but be forewarned. We are a self-selecting group. You will not be welcomed back. And sure enough, they proceeded to deprive him not only of the paychecks and benefits necessary to survival but also of capitalism’s foremost appeal: membership. When Jerry rejected it … no big deal. When it rejected Jerry, it continued to reject Jerry, indefinitely. The things he took for granted, like usefulness, personal fulfillment, collective purpose, went away, and he wondered, briefly, why not put a bullet in my head? I think Chippin’ In saved Jerry Barnes’s life. He was relieved to have been rescued, to be partaking of company pride again, to be part of a team, in the human fold once more. Now he ran a staff of twelve in a South Loop office.

  “Sure, Jerry. For shits and giggles, give me the number.”

  Jerry told his father the number. Charlie went quiet.

  “That is a large sum,” the old man admitted.

  “Does it change your mind?”

  There was a long pause.

  “It does not,” he said. “Look, Jerry, do what you want with the company after I’m dead and gone. But truth of the matter is, son, I don’t like Facebook. I sure as hell don’t like what it’s done to newspapers. I love my newspaper, Jerry. I still have it delivered. I read it under the pergola with a glass of wine.”

  “I know you do, Pop.”

  “And I think Facebook would like to do away with my newspaper and every other newspaper and bank the subscription fees. That can’t be good for anybody. And who knows? They just might succeed. Well, in that case, they can’t have my brainchild, too. Screw those wolves in sheep’s clothing, Jerry. They’re not half the messiahs they think they are. Matter of fact, they might just be the devil itself.”

  “I didn’t know you felt so strongly.”

  “They’ll run their metrics, they’ll squeeze the margins. They’ll monetize everything. Fuck it, no way.”

  “All right, all right, I hear you.”

  “Screw venture capital, son, and screw Big Tech, too. When I’m dead, do what you want. But not until then.”

  “Not for many years, then, Pop,” Jerry said.

  51

  Let us return briefly to 2009, just prior to Charlie’s first round of chemo. He had a consultation with his oncologist, a Dr. Baruch Clement of First Baptist. Barbara was present, of course, and didn’t hesitate to make her opinion known: she did not like the anticancer agent gemcitabine on its own. She urged Clement to be more aggressive. Of course, there was always a risk that a multiagent therapy would increase Charlie’s toxicity and bring on neutropenia, a dangerously low count of a type of white blood cell crucial to fighting infection, but consistent blood tests revealed that he had near-normal bilirubin levels and a good performance status overall. It was her belief that either a GTX regimen or a gemcitabine with a platinum and a daily oral dose of Tarceva would give him the best chance of long-term survival. As she spoke, an all-consuming concern Charlie had for himself was momentarily overtaken by the growing awe he felt for his wife.

  “How do you know all this stuff?” he asked.

  Clement, too, looked impressed. “No kidding,” he said. “When you’re done helping this guy out, how about you come and be my nurse?”

  As they resumed their technical talk, Charlie’s awe turned back to dread. Every option they debated sounded, in the end, totally fucking terrible. Then he arrived at the chemo center, took a seat in one of the many luxurious leather recliners positioned around the room, and had the poisons they discussed that day pumped into him—and wondered if they hadn’t been conspiring to murder him. He promptly hated life. Brain fog, of the kind his mother complained about, moved in and parked. Other lugubrious, agonizing morning-after side effects, which he dubbed his chemover, hit him methodically on the second day. His mouth broke out in open sores. By some miracle of misfortune, he managed both to lose his hair and retain just enough of it to go around with bedhead for three months running. A fanatic comber in a past life, he would no longer even glance in a mirror. As one does with mudslides, avalanches, and other breaches, I looked on in horror from a distance as his vanity gave way, then his hygiene, then deodorizing of any kind. He camped out on his recliner, where he made it known he would just as soon die—and where I believed him to be fast asleep when, on a Tuesday morning, he entered the living room from the direction of the dining room (an irregular entry point in that house) and stood facing me just to the left of the muted television. I had been half asleep, sprawled out on the sofa per usual.

  “What is it, Chuck?” I asked, sitting up.

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “Of?”

  “Chemo,” he said, and he raised a little pistol to his temple. I recall thinking, Lordy, that’s one small gun, a saloon gal’s gun, and unlikely to do anyone any harm. Sure enough, when he pulled the trigger, there was only the sudden sizzling zap of the television turning off, according to some metaphysical connection between the two. As shocked as anyone, he turned to behold the blank screen. His shoulders began to roll with sitcom laughter. Mine, too—or at least one of them did, and I opened my eyes and found Charlie standing over me, eager to wake me from my dream of suicide and sitcoms. It was not Tuesday morning but a late Friday afternoon.

  “Look at this, Jake!”

  I sat up in the front room in the house on Rust Road. In a daze I accepted the letter being thrust at me. It took a moment, but eventually I understood it was a transcript from Michigan State University.

  “I thought you graduated from Michigan State,” I said, running my eyes over so many incompletes.

  “That’s just a story I tell,” he said. “But don’t you see? That’s the point. This is it, Jake!” he cried. “This is my calling!”

  He had, by then, wisely dismissed the idea of becoming a divorce mediator or one of the other pie-in-the-sky professions he had landed on in conversation with Barbara. They were fine as individual choices go, but his general approach fit an old pattern: Steady Boy dreaming big again without reason, going for broke when he had no right to. He’d spent a lifetime lurching from thing to thing. This time had to be different.

  Returning to school sounded right because it would require hard work and real sacrifice with no guarantee of personal gain, as Jerry and the Gita claimed a true calling demanded. He had to tell Barbara the good news and raced upstairs for his car keys.

  He clomped down a minute later wearing the red corduroys by Brunello Cucinelli that he bought for a song on the day of his diagnosis. He’d been saving them for the right occasion.

  “Hey, Chuck,” I said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  He was removing a hat from the hat rack when he turned to me.

  “You asked me to find your teeth after surgery,” I said, “but I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Barbara had them. She’s the one who put them back in your mouth.”

  “That wasn’t you?”

  “That was Barbara,” I said.

  “Barbara had them?”

  I nodded. There was a long pause during which he stood very still, as if to steady himself amid such disorienting and devastating news. It did not make him happy.

  I wish he could have owned it, I mean really owned it. Imagine him removing those fuckers on a whim for the comic shock or harmonizing with the harelips, walleyes, and stutters in a collective little song of sorrow. He could have done anything had he just owned it. I wanted that not for my sake, to confirm that he knew he was loved (accepted, embraced), but for his own, to know that he loved himself. There was the difference, in Shakespeare’s formula, of man and man. Had
Charlie the power to take out his teeth in a crowd, the power the crowd had over him would have vanished. The success that eluded him was always within his grasp but impossible to seize because of his stupid pride, the only justification for which was its own overcoming.

  But wasn’t I one to talk? I could hardly bear to imagine whom I came from or why I was left to die in the Fair Oaks housing project. My mother’s taste for drink? My stupid birth defect? And while I attack Jerry’s and Marcy’s monumental scorn for their humble roots, regarding them as ingrates for wanting to put a little distance between them and Steady Boy, I go around pretending we share a common inheritance, when nothing could be further from the truth. I have seen my birth certificate. The stranger named as my father means nothing to me; I’d sooner call Dickie Dickerdick Dad. I, too, wanted to be a self-made man in my own humble way and was more than happy, as Charlie had been, to brush off reality and embrace the dream. My foster family, the Barnes clan, squanderers of riches they took for granted, didn’t need me. They probably didn’t want me. They might not have even liked me. Charlie Barnes was always bowing out because he didn’t care to abide by the rules. I didn’t care for the rules, either, but not because I wanted to bow out. I wanted to be let in.

  “Thanks for letting me know,” he said. “You’re a good man, Jake Barnes.”

  Then he was off: opening the garage door, firing up the engine, and stealing away to First Baptist in a broken-down Saab. Or was it the Porsche that, these many months later, he still hadn’t returned to Rabineau? Pesky little Porsche. Perhaps it was a third car altogether.

  “It sounds perfect to me,” Barbara declared the minute he announced his intentions in the cafeteria of First Baptist.

  “It won’t be easy, young lady.”

  “Nothing worthwhile ever is.”

  “We’ll be pinched. We’re pinched now. It’ll only get worse.”

  “You have to do it, Charlie. It’s more important than money or anything else. I’ll pick up a shift here and there. We’ll take out a few credit cards. We’ll get by. And then you’ll have your degree. Do you know what you’d like to study?”

  He had learned his lesson: do not delve. He had done so in the past and it hadn’t worked out. But move in the direction of love and life always gets harder. He was married to Barbara this time, not Charley Proffit. It was Barbara Ledeux who saw the big picture. He tapped his teeth.

  “You know about these,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “And you don’t mind?”

  “Of course I don’t mind.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You love me.”

  “Of course I love you, young man.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I don’t.”

  She reached across the table and touched the brim of his touring cap. “Because you can wear a hat,” she said.

  He had identified his calling in life, had secured his wife’s support and departed the hospital in good spirits. Those spirits began to dim even before he reached the highway. If completing the nightly reading had been hard as a young man of twenty-seven, how much more difficult would it be at sixty-nine, recently cut open, fried with chemo, and prone to fall asleep before the rigor of Friends? Then there were more practical considerations. Was there a college that would take him? A financial institution that would loan him money? By the time he arrived home, he was running a fever of a hundred and two.

  In an event like that, the instructions were clear: any fever in an immune system compromised by chemo could be fatal. He had to return to First Baptist immediately. He spent the next forty-eight hours under observation by Dr. Clement, who did not hesitate to run a battery of tests.

  While in the hospital, Chuck begged me to check out a bunch of books from the library so that he could begin his course of study. Ah, I thought, so this silly occupation of mine isn’t so silly after all. Who else could curate for him a college reading list? I did so happily. He didn’t think he had another moment to spare. I saw real panic in his eyes, the dread that awaits anyone who feels the clock running down on him. A day later, he hadn’t touched a single one of my selection of classics. I walked in on him still having a go at the Gita, the book on his chest, the man fast asleep.

  “Hey, Chuck,” I whispered. “Hey … Dad.”

  He sat up slowly and registered having fallen asleep.

  “Oh, goddamn it,” he said. “Who am I fooling? I’m no goddamn student!”

  “Go easy on yourself,” I said. “You’re sick.”

  “No, it’s more than that, Jake. I hate to read. What’s the point of going back to school if I can’t read anything but the goddamn newspaper?”

  “Don’t give up so easily, Chuck.”

  “No, it’s not in me, son. Goddamn it, it’s just not in me.”

  He was upset with himself, demoralized. He believed he had found it. And it did sound pretty good, at least on paper. But it was true: he couldn’t stay awake. He gazed out the window in complete despair. “Hold on,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  He got out of bed, went to the window. Then he did something more curious still: he turned in his hospital gown, sat directly on the floor and crossed his legs.

  “What are you doing down there, Chuck? Is that … are you in a yoga pose?”

  “Jake,” he said. He gazed off. “It can’t be about me this time.”

  “What’s it got to be about?” I asked.

  He loved her. No one could explain why. She lionized him all out of proportion. She understood that failure did not define him or curb his need to be loved. She called him her silver fox. She found it heroic that he railed against the likes of Jimmy Cayne and started a business that specialized in retirees. And when we looked up, she was standing in the doorway, a honeypot in scrubs and buzz cut.

  “What on earth are you doing sitting on the floor?” she asked him. “And why are the two of you looking at me like that?”

  52

  Dr. Clement studied the numbers and scratched his head: Charlie’s heme-8 was fine, as was his CBC. There had been no discernible drop in platelet count. He discharged him with a dose of Tylenol, which resolved the fever … only to have it return a week later, right on time and high as ever. The doctor threw up his hands.

  “There is one possible answer,” Barbara suggested.

  “Please,” the doctor said, “enlighten me.”

  “Someone’s forgetting his prednisone.”

  Sure enough, the order for infused steroids to be administered simultaneously with the anticancer cocktail had gone missing two weeks running at the chemo center, an unaccountable clerical error. And it might have remained a mystery had it not been for a passing observation from the nurse at First Baptist.

  “How did you know about that prednisone business?” he asked her on the drive home.

  “Lucky guess.”

  “But how’d you know enough to guess?”

  She was an ER nurse—“the nurse at First Baptist”—not a doctor. Her degree, from a dinky DuPage college no longer in existence, dated back thirty years, to 1981. In her graduation photo she wore starched whites and a nurse’s cap as if mentored by Florence Nightingale.

  “I am a nurse, Charlie.”

  “And most nurses,” he said. “Would they have made that same guess?”

  She just shrugged.

  She had the next three days off work. She drove everyone from the living room, silenced the television, started the laundry and went through the mail, restoring the house to her liking. I returned to my rental, Jerry retreated to Troy’s room, and Charlie battled malaise in the master bedroom. By the late afternoon, however, he was feeling well enough to accompany her to the bookstore, and on their way home, to no one’s surprise more than his own, he suggested they stop for a pizza.

  “Are you sure you’re up for it?” she asked.

  “Honey,” he said, “what’s it all been for if I can’t do a
slice of pizza?”

  He would pay for it the next day, but it was also more fun than a couple of hours at a pizza joint in the suburbs had any right to be. He had a beer, then a glass of wine. She shared a few of the idiot things that had brought people into the ER of late, like the woman who sewed two fingers together with a hacked sewing machine and the teenager who swallowed a bouncy ball on a dare.

  He had done some thinking by then. Her ability to interpret those numbers on that little white napkin … her opinion on “gemcitabine with a platinum” … his “near-normal bilirubin levels,” words right out of her own mouth … solving the mystery of his fever: his wife knew more about the particulars of cancer than he ever would have suspected had he simply dropped dead of a heart attack. After the waitress brought them dessert, he said, “Can we go back to the prednisone thing?”

  “What about it?”

  “You knew more than the doctor. How did you know more than the doctor?”

  “I read up.”

  “You ‘read up’? Barbara, I don’t even know what prednisone is. Even now! Honey,” he said. “You could be a doctor.”

  She quickly dismissed that.

  “No interest?”

  There was a long pause.

  “I wanted to be a doctor, but then I met Bob”—her first husband, a plumber in Gurnee—“we had the kids, and … well, like we had the time or money to send me to medical school.”

  “And what about now?”

  She cocked her head across the remains of their crème brûlée.

  “Like we have the time or money to send me to medical school.”

  On her final day off, he walked into the kitchen after a rough night’s sleep to find her in reading glasses tackling the book she’d purchased only a few days earlier. She was responsible for holding down a full-time job, for keeping his spirits up and his doctors on their toes, and for running the house and paying the bills while he was out of commission. How did she also have time to read a book? Called The Emperor of All Maladies, it was subtitled: A Biography of Cancer, and it was one big mother … yet she was practically done with it. She turned another page. Hovering over her, he tapped the thick mound of pages already consumed.