Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  Oren had stood there nodding both yes and no without ever quite being aware he was nodding at all. Meanwhile he couldn’t help but notice that the kimono she’d put on—a glittery purple silk, frantic with doves—was his least favorite article of her clothing, hanging as it did in a weirdly unflattering way, and clashing as it did with her wide hazel eyes, and coming as it did from her previous lover, Jonno, a mixed-media artist who lived next to the matzo factory on Rivington Street. “I vote you stay,” he’d said. “That would get my vote.”

  “I don’t know what I’d do if I stayed. I mean, for a living. I’ve got no gigs lined up for fall.”

  “What about the New School? They love you there.”

  “Night courses for lawyers, dilettantes, and lost souls? I’ve done that, thank you. They pay about, what, a month and a half’s rent?”

  “Look, I understand,” he’d said, putting aside for the moment that they had met at one of those night courses for lawyers, dilettantes, and lost souls. And a truly inspiring class it had been too. He’d hated to drop it; though he had, of course, halfway through the semester, not because he was sleeping with the dark, gangly, underfed-looking instructor—that came later—but to better concentrate on finishing up his law courses and beginning what were conceivably in retrospect his somewhat dilettantish film studies at NYU. He was a big one for higher education, all right. “You’re overqualified for that, I agree. But there’ll be other jobs. Real jobs. In the city.”

  “I’m not qualified for other jobs. I’m barely qualified for this replacement thing. You know how tight the job market is here. Even Jonno says—”

  “Wait, even Jonno says what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Even Jonno says what?”

  “Nothing, okay? Nothing.”

  “I don’t understand how Jonno even talks. How can he talk if you don’t see him anymore? There’s a philosophical level on which I’m pretty sure that can’t take place.”

  “There are other levels too,” Sabine said mildly.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we can’t all be as philosophical as you are. You have to start somewhere, that’s the reality. You can’t go from being a part-time flunky to a tenured professor at Yale. There are stages in between.”

  “Wait, since when do you want to be a tenured professor at Yale?”

  “Look, I’m sick of flinching every time the Visa bill comes, okay? I’m not like you, Oren. All this freelancing and insecurity…it’s not a game for me. I was born insecure, okay? I can’t do it anymore. I need health benefits. And don’t tell me it won’t help to apply for jobs and grants on a nice piece of stationery with the Carthage College logo. Don’t tell me that won’t help.”

  It was, of course, eminently and practically true: it would help. So persuasive was she on this subject that Oren, by nature something of a dreamer, turned practical himself. That is, he begged. He was thirty years old, and Sabine had been his fourth and most serious romance; how many was a man given that he should surrender now without a battle? No, a fossil fuel like love, quarried from whatever deep, turbulent, and mysterious inner source, was not endlessly renewable: you had to fight to keep it. You had to tough it out, put some troops on the ground, conduct a Gulf War of your own. So Oren drew himself up to his full height and flung wide his arms, as if to show off a fresh new pair of invisible stigmata, and began to repeat more or less every argument his therapist had advanced so expensively over the past two years—about getting on with things, about the slow, winding road to maturity and growth, and the need to take shelter there with another person, and the hard, persistent labor required to build and maintain that shelter, and so on and so forth. Sabine frowned as he spoke. Her expression, which he tried not to observe too closely, was affectionate but distant, even nostalgic, as if she were already on the Hudson train headed north, time’s black wheels pounding away, flattening all that was present into the past. So he talked faster.

  “Wait,” she said, when he was through. “Are you, like, proposing? Is that what’s going on here?”

  “Am I like proposing what?”

  “Because you make it all sound so joyless. And if you’re talking about the whole marriage-and-children thing here, if that’s what this is about…” She paused. “Is that what this is about? Honestly, with you it’s hard to tell sometimes.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Oren that he was proposing marriage and children, exactly, but now that the idea had been introduced, it seemed possible he was. What was that line from Kafka he’d copied down so assiduously in his college journal? There are questions we would never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operations of nature. He remembered puzzling over the words in his dorm room, sensing in them, at nineteen, some obscure, only vaguely proximate application to his life. Meanwhile his girlfriend at the time, Ravenna Fox, had just gone off to Capitola with Steve Auerbach, her TA in Marxist Theory, a class she’d only taken in the first place because Oren had bullied her into “joining the struggle.” Ten minutes in he was tired of the struggle and ready to shop around for another course. But not Ravenna. Not the Emma Goldman of Woodland Hills. “I thought you were so committed,” she whispered hotly. In her voice he’d heard a new, merciless sibilance, the hiss of a deflating tire. So long, see you later. Why were women always taking him up with so much fervor, Oren wondered, and then leaving him with so little? Where were the operations of nature that could deliver him from that?

  Anyway he doubted Kafka could provide much help in these matters. That doomed, dreamy bachelor, what questions was he talking about anyway? Marriage, or death? Did he—did anyone—even know the difference?

  “Listen,” he said now, “here’s the thing—”

  “Just answer the question, please.”

  “I’m trying to, Sabine.”

  “Well, stop trying.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to stop trying.”

  She stared at him, or rather through him, watching the tinny, creaking gerbil wheel turn and turn in his head, the poor animal, for all his exertions, never quite reaching a destination.

  “Okay, well, look, what if I was? Do you even want the whole marriage-and-children thing?”

  And now despite herself Sabine’s eyes went moist, the dewy green in them ascendant, the hard, nutlike brown crumbling away. She was not so tough as she thought. Who was? At that moment she looked rather frail and drawn, hollow-socketed, chewing on her plump lower lip as was her habit in moments of intensity, whether shuddering in sexual transport or lost in skeptical deliberations. Regretfully, this appeared to be the latter. He watched her recede into herself, her gaze wandering, her arms crossed over her chest like a shield, weighing the package of her doubts at that moment—her parcels of romantic melancholy, her freight of fear regarding aloneness—against a lifetime of disappointments and betrayals. Her parents had met in a deportation camp; her mother had died when she was six. What could he possibly add to the stores of her knowledge when it came to getting on with things?

  “Let’s wait and see,” she’d finally announced, in a tone he recognized from a thousand previous deferrals. “You’ve got your orals to concentrate on anyway. Let’s just wait and see.”

  So that’s what they did. They waited and saw. He waited while Sabine packed up her studio and shipped it north via UPS; he waited while she stalked lower Broadway in search of a down coat and some good thick leather boots; and while she handed the keys to her apartment and her still-valid Metrocard to a twenty-one-year-old Cooper Union student who could not believe her luck; and then, when no time was left for waiting any longer, no time for waiting at all, he saw her go. As she broke their embrace and elbowed open the door of his car, she sobbed, and her eyes filmed over. He saw that too, and God help him, took comfort from it, even as he acknowledged to himself that Sabine cried easily and often, at both life and the movies—sometimes at TV commercials—and so her sobbing now, in what was beginning to feel like a
very bad movie indeed, or a hideously extended advertisement for Zoloft or Wellbutrin or Maker’s Mark premium whiskey (he imagined the bottle he’d buy, the pleasure it would give him to violate its waxy, blood-red seal), did not seem as meaningful as it might have, nor prevent her from waving for a redcap and vanishing a moment later, swallowed up by the dragon’s mouth of Penn Station, the breath of which was flavored as always with a rich, sulfurous scent of hell.

  The truth is he was glad she’d gone. He was. Among all the other liberating new developments her absence made possible, he was now free to go ahead and fail his orals in peace. He didn’t even try to pass; he merely stared at the feet of the committee members, the droopy socks, the sensible thick-soled shoes, waiting for them to take as much pity on him as he was taking on himself, to release him from the company of high-achieving academics and send him on his way. Surely they recognized a fuckup when they saw one; the condition, especially in grad school, was hardly rare. But no, there was the theater of communal disappointment to be performed first, the leave of absence to be nominally requested and then nominally granted, before he was let out to trudge back across town, under the throbbing gaze of a motionless sun, in search of the by-now-highly-mandatory bottle of Maker’s Mark.

  Along the way he brooded and sulked. As brooding and sulking was going to be his new vocation for a while, it seemed best to go ahead and get started. Shirtless drunks nodded gravely from the doorway, welcoming him to his new, losing team. The streets, having baked on high all morning, gave off a yeasty summer aroma of old trash, crystallized urine, and scorched turds. The sidewalks were strewn with remaindered books and old LPs and other discarded objects of obsession. He tried to collect a coherent impression of himself from the shards of reflection he glimpsed in other people’s sunglasses. The pieces did not come together. His life was a two-legged table with nothing on it. He should never have let her go. He should never have proposed marriage. He should never have waited so long to propose marriage. He should never have moved to New York, or Prague, or Seattle, or Paris. He decided to go on walking and cataloging all the things he should never have done in his life but did anyway, then all the things he should have done in his life and failed to do anyway, until he came to the river. Then, what the hell, maybe he’d throw himself in.

  The dust of demolition, sickly and gray, rose from the piers. A few ships were going out but none, Oren could not help but notice, were in any sense coming in. He stood at the rail and looked across the river at the dull geometries of New Jersey. The squat refinery domes and low, hazy cliffs, the tall, spindly condo towers advertising expensive vacancies. Yep: still there.

  It seemed more or less redundant to kill himself. So he turned around and trudged home.

  A train screamed underground, rattling the grates, belching heat. A limo swished past, carrying off his reflection in the black windows. He watched it sail up the Avenue of the Americas and out of sight.

  In Washington Square the dealers with their fine radar approached him hopefully, but he waved them away. He had plenty of drugs at home, and that was fortunate; he had every intention of taking them all.

  At the corner of St. Mark’s he stopped to buy a soda and drank it down fast, watching people younger than himself go in and out of the tattoo parlor. It was the same cramped and grungy little establishment he’d been walking by twice a day for years, without ever being remotely tempted to go in. He wasn’t tempted to go in now either. What was the point? He hated tattoos, hated needles, hated pains and punctures of all kinds. So no, he wasn’t even tempted to go in.

  That he went in anyway, and his motives for doing so, and the actual story of what transpired in that place over the next forty-five minutes…this would come to be shelved, in the branch library of Oren’s memory, among the mysteries. All he knew was that when he reemerged, he felt like another person, a person perspiring heavily, a person with dilated pupils and a lighter wallet. As for his left wrist, it appeared to have fallen victim to some nasty, barbarous accident. It quivered down there at the end of his arm, encircled by a lurid tangle of what might have been thorns. The ink was still wet, but then why shouldn’t it be? An enormous quantity of blood was mixed in.

  Great, he thought: another biblical injunction bites the dust. How many were left to break?

  For the next few weeks he lay low, virtually underground in fact, spending long days and nights on the sofa, waiting for the pulpy bruises in his wrist and his heart to recede. Sitting there in his Jockey shorts before the overtaxed air conditioner, watching the dust motes, briefly distinct in the failing light, take the last slow turns of their weary arabesques—his eyes, like his manhood, reddened and chafed, drooped sulkily at half-mast—he tried his best to lose himself in the usual self-pitying diversions, namely smoking pot, drinking whiskey, and watching tragic, meandering movies. It was a kind of depressive trifecta. The nice thing about smoking pot and drinking whiskey and watching tragic, meandering movies, Oren decided, was how well they got along together, how amiably they made room for each other on misery’s moldering sofa. It was like being on the receiving end of a really good blow job, say, while also listening to jazz, and also watching a ball game you sort of but didn’t particularly care about—and most ball games fell into this category for Oren—in the background. Each strand of the helix enriched your appreciation of the others; moreover, and here was the really crucial point, none of them demanded much from you, or for that matter anything at all, in the way of decisive action. You didn’t even have to stand up. Simple reception was enough.

  Yes, looking back, he had been on the receiving end of some really good blow jobs in his life, Oren reflected warmly, and some really good whiskey, and some really good pot, and some really good movies and ball games, and that was important to keep in mind, all the modest but palpable pleasures he’d been granted in the past, distant though they might feel to him now…but perhaps in retrospect there had been something a bit passive and unhealthy about them, he thought, something he should consider changing radically about himself, provided of course that change did not preclude any future reception of jazz or whiskey or blow jobs or ball games or movies or pot.

  The movie-ish thing to do, obviously, was to go up to Carthage and win the girl back. On the other hand, the reality-ish thing to do was to remain where he was, hanging out in his apartment feeling sorry for himself. The consensus among his friends was that any plans of action he concocted vis-à-vis winning back Sabine would come off as transparently foolish and pathetic, and perhaps legally actionable, in execution. To say nothing of how humiliated he would be if she refused him. Not that there was any shortage of humiliation now.

  When she finally called, however, on a wan, cool night in September, her voice on the phone fairly pulsed with sadness. He could feel the effort it cost her, holding back. The quivering pizzicato of the heart’s taut strings. Why? He had known she would call. Of course she would call. The lines of possibility could not avoid each other forever—they yearned like all things to converge, to be located, to bend and fold.

  “I’m thinking I might come see you sometime,” he said, laying down his cards, such as they were, right away. “That is if you’re up for it.”

  He had ample time, in the lengthy and demoralizing silence that followed, to count all the qualifiers in this proposal. Sabine appeared to be counting them too.

  “Here’s the deal,” he announced. “If you don’t tell me no, I’m going to go ahead and take that for a yes.”

  “And if I tell you no?”

  “It’ll depend on how you say it. I’ll have to decide then.”

  “You’re always deciding then,” Sabine observed mildly. “Always then, and never now.”

  “That’s not a bad thing. That’s actually a good thing. It comes from a very prudent and reasonable aversion to making mistakes.” By way of illustration he held up his wrist, brandishing the dark tattoo, a mistake if there ever was one. But of course Sabine could not see his wrist.

&nbs
p; “Not making mistakes,” she said, “can be a mistake too.”

  “That’s an interesting theory. Can I just say this though? I have no idea what it means.”

  “I know you don’t.” She sighed. “It is amazingly beautiful up here,” she conceded airily, apropos of nothing.

  “I know. I was there once, remember? That pretentious little gem I shot with Roger?”

  “Roger?” His life and that of his friends, it was fading, fading, from her mind.

  “I’m coming up there,” he’d said. “I really am.”

  “How’d the orals go? You never told me.”

  “They went.”

  “Oh, well, I’ve never been able to see you as a therapist. Is that a bad thing to say? I mean, you’ve got good intentions, don’t get me wrong. But you’re not all that much of a listener, and you’re not much into supporting other people, either.”

  “Well, neither are you.”

  “Exactly. Don’t you think one of us should be better at it, if we’re ever going to be together?”

  “If?”

  Oren reminded himself that if was just a word, and a short word at that; it was important not to make too much of it. No sooner did he get off the phone, however, than he proceeded to make too much of it. He clutched it to his chest, petted and pampered it like a kitten. True, it was a tiny thing, but how much purring, hopeful vitality rested on its paws. How that lean, vulnerable i and that sturdy, overhanging f, just by getting into bed together, generated a home for themselves at the center of a life.

  And that was enough, in the end. That one word. That was all it took to cut him loose, propel him off all the sofas he’d been occupying in recent weeks—his therapist’s, his friend Sandy’s, his own—sublet his apartment, say his good-byes, and soar up the Thruway to Carthage.

  Carthage was of course a very pretty New England college town as pretty New England college towns go. Not that Oren had much experience with pretty New England college towns, or for that matter had ever wanted to have it. He’d never fantasized about moving to a pretty New England college town the way he had about such cities as Paris or Prague or Seattle or New York—fantasies that actually moving to those cities, living in them awhile, then ditching them for the next, had left oddly unaffected. But that was the point. This tendency of his to yo-yo from one place to another, his gaze forever trolling backward, through nostalgia’s beaded curtain, to yet another place he’d just left…this failure to live completely in the present, or even partly in the present, was the very thing he must change about himself from this moment forward. And he would. Time to stop running around the globe, he thought, chasing a whisper he no longer heard. You’d have thought the only intensity in life came from pursuit, from the space between what was desired and what was attained. And what had he attained at this point? He’d attained nothing.