Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  No, he was through with all that. Through with frequent flying, with romantic fantasies; those fickle gig-lights had lit his runway too long. Time to shut them off. And he would. Just as soon as he’d pulled off this one last flight. One final, fantastical flight, then he’d hang up his wings for good.

  It didn’t hurt that the rents upstate, after all these years in thronged, fantastical cities, were something of a revelation. Funky old Victorian houses, Sabine had told him, could be rented for a song, and that was an attraction, even if in the end she hadn’t rented a funky old Victorian, but a rather prosaic ground-floor flat in the town’s one successful subdivision. Anyway, so what? He’d done just what he said: gone up and won Sabine back. It hadn’t been so difficult. Shorn of her friends, burdened with academic duties, tumid with nostalgia for the city and what she’d taken to calling “the person formerly known as myself,” the poor thing looked, when she opened the door to claim him, as delicate and unguarded as a child. Her nose was swollen red; her front teeth, sallow and uneven, sought purchase on the slope of her lower lip. She stared at him dully, wordlessly. He could hear her breathing, or trying not to breathe, through her mouth. In her eyes the white jelly trembled. He saw hunger there, and perplexity, and something very like amnesia.

  “Honey,” he’d cooed, “I’m home.”

  She’d already taken a short step back, into the shadow of her rented hallway. “I’ve got a cold,” she said, putting up her hands like a traffic cop. “Better not get too close.”

  “Okay.” He nodded, all smiles. Admittedly on the list of reunion fantasies he’d compiled in his head on the Thruway, not getting too close ranked low. Still, it was higher than some of the others, like being screamed at or laughed at or finding her in bed with some thick-limbed, ponytailed country person who worked with his hands. “How about inside the house, though, instead of outside. Is that too close?”

  “We’ll see.”

  He dropped his duffel bag inside the door and followed her into the foyer, glancing around to see what Sabine had made of the Oren-free life. Not much, from the look of things. The walls were bare, and there was little furniture to speak of, let alone sit on. Indeed, the inside of the house did not seem noticeably more comfortable than the outside.

  “All right then,” he said, in the high-pitched, unattractive new voice he’d worked up specially, it seemed, for this occasion, “what now?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Look, you’re the one who drove up here,” she said, wiping her nose with a crumpled paper towel. “I’m figuring you must have some plan.”

  “That was the plan. The driving up. Honestly, that was as far as it went.”

  “Well, no one ever said you weren’t honest.”

  “I mean, it’s not like I had it all worked out in my head, like you’d just open the door and we’d jump into each other’s arms and it would all be that simple.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “Because that would really scare me.”

  With that she lapsed into thoughtful, conflicted silence, staring down at the fuzzy pink slippers she wore, more or less ironically, in cold weather. Oren was determined to bide his time, to respect her mood for as long as he could and meanwhile to think of something winning and persuasive to say that might liberate them from the drafty silence of the foyer. But he’d just driven two hundred miles without stopping, and a dark, cumulous headache had heaved into view, obscuring for the moment whatever that winning and persuasive thing might be. “A beer might hit the spot though.”

  “Sorry,” she said, “I’m on the wagon.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve been drinking alone for a while now. I’m getting used to it.”

  “What I mean is, there’s no alcohol in the house. Not a drop.”

  “I’ll settle for coffee then.”

  “Actually I’ve gone off that too.”

  “No problem. It’s just that I’ve been on the road all day and there’s this little invisible jackhammer pounding on my eyeballs all of a sudden from behind.”

  “How about some tea? I’ve got this great rose-hips tea from the co-op here. Totally organic. You should try it, you’ll love it.”

  “I probably would, if I didn’t hate tea so much. Remember?”

  “It’s really good with honey,” she went on blithely. What had they done to her up here? It was as if her brain matter, which was totally organic too, had begun to biodegrade. “They sell this fabulous honey at the farmers’ market. It’s made out of lavender.”

  “Wow, that does sound fabulous.”

  “Good old Oren. The commissar of sardonic remarks. It’s not my fault that you’re always so unhappy, you know.”

  Actually, he thought, it is. Anyway he was only teasing. “I was only teasing,” he said. “Lighten up.”

  “I have lightened up. You wouldn’t believe how much lightening up I’ve done lately. Ever since I left—”

  “Left me, you mean.”

  “I was going to say New York.”

  “But you didn’t mean New York. You meant me.”

  “You don’t know what I meant, Oren. How could you? You barely know what you mean half the time.”

  “Admit it. You meant me.”

  “Fine. You win, okay? I meant you. Does that make you feel better?”

  “You bet.” Indeed it did; it felt so good to be arguing with Sabine again, engaged in their old combat, that he almost felt he had won something. But what had he won? Bile in his throat. Congestion in his heart. Pain in his head. “Listen, I don’t suppose you’ve got any fabulous organic aspirin lying around?”

  “No. Honestly, Oren, all this heaviness and fucking around we specialize in, don’t you see? It wears down the system. I’m thirty-one years old: I don’t have time to fuck around. From now on I just want to live close to the ground and do my work.”

  “How do you live close to the ground, anyway? I’ve always wondered. What, you get down on all fours?”

  She shook her head with what appeared to be genuine sorrow. “And here I was feeling almost happy to see you again.”

  “Maybe if we sat down with a couple of really strong alcoholic drinks, we could recapture that feeling.”

  “I told you, I’m off all that stuff. No booze, no drugs, no caffeine, no sugar, no meat, no cheese. You’d be amazed how much energy it gives you, letting it all go.”

  “It’s funny, but it’s never given me energy to let things go. If anything it takes it away.”

  “Maybe you’ve been letting go of the wrong things,” she said.

  “What about the furniture? Did you let all that go too?”

  “Most of it.” She yawned contentedly. “Remember that ratty old plaid sleeper-sofa I inherited from my uncle? I thought, get real, do I actually want to keep sitting on this for another ten years? So I left it out on the lawn the day I moved in. The next day it was gone. Like a bad dream.”

  “Sometimes even ugly sofas come in handy though. Like when you’re really whipped, say, and you need to sit down.”

  “I may get another one eventually. I’ll have to see.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could get one tonight?”

  “Not likely,” she said. “C’mon, stop being so crabby. I’ll give you the ten-cent tour.”

  He allowed himself to be led, like any polite acquaintance, through the bare wood foyer to the back of the house. There wasn’t a lot to see and he was in no mood to look. But Sabine seemed delighted. “Don’t you love it? It’s so clean and impersonal; it’s like living in a motel. You have no idea how good it feels, coming back here at the end of a long, hard day.”

  “Yeah.” Her enthusiasm for this pared-down life of hers was no longer getting on his nerves; it was jumping on them with both feet.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I still have my down moods, like anyone else. But it’s like there are more hours in the day now. It’s liberating. Nobody calls to have coffee or lunc
h or drops by unannounced to ask for favors. Nobody criticizes me to make himself feel better, or tries to undermine me by making snide remarks, or rolls his eyes when I express perfectly valid sentiments…”

  Too late, Oren tried to rearrange his features into some approximation of a smile. Who could argue with liberation? It was only the thought of whom she had been liberated from that defeated him. He looked around the kitchen hopelessly. The linoleum was monstrous, and the cabinets were tilted at warped, perilous angles, like a German expressionist film. “I wouldn’t mind lying down,” he said. “I’m beat.”

  “Whoops.” She winced. “I don’t have a spare bed either. We’ll have to think about how to do this.”

  “Sure,” he said. “We’ll give it some thought.”

  “Just to warn you, I’ve been wheezing and hacking a lot at night. It’s this damned cold. Or it may be allergies. I’ve got this tight-ass dean who’s always on my case. You wouldn’t believe the stress I’m under. I’m not such pleasant company lately, is what I’m trying to say.”

  “I’m not such pleasant company lately either, believe me.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not.”

  She regarded him for a moment through the narrow gray-green area between her lids. “So, when were you going to tell me about that little eyesore on your wrist?”

  “I had the feeling you weren’t going to like it much.”

  “Poor Oren.” She frowned, touching the tattoo lightly with her index finger, as if wary of being impaled on its spikes. They would never get married to each other; he was certain of that now. “You didn’t go to those butchers on St. Mark’s, did you?”

  “Now she tells me.”

  “And you’re usually so cautious and uptight about your body. Repressed, even.”

  “Apparently I’ve made some progress in that area. I believe I’m what they call in the trade a real weeper.”

  She shook her head. “God, I can’t believe you’re here. It’s hard for me to digest.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’d hate to think this is just about not wanting to be alone. I really would.”

  “What do you mean, just?”

  “Come on, Oren. To drive all this way and spring this big surprise…it’s one thing if you really miss me. But what if this whole thing’s just because you feel all needy and horny and lost in your life?”

  “What do you mean, just?” he said.

  Nonetheless they did, later that night, enjoy a raucous and productive bout of sexual congress on the cold floor of Sabine’s bedroom. This was followed by a lively bipartisan caucus the next morning, before she pedaled off to class on her bike, and then a slower, more deliberate and contentious assembly upon her return. Sabine’s soft cry into the seam of the futon—half-surrender, half-misgiving—at 4:16 that afternoon marked the high point of their second term together, give or take. After that it was strictly a lame-duck session. They cooked, they cleaned, they went to crafts fairs and yard sales, attended lectures and movies, had dinner with Sabine’s new colleagues and then came home to gossip about them, like any young academic couple. But then in the mornings they’d avoid each other’s eyes in the bathroom mirror, the unpacked bags below the sockets, the forking red lines of antagonism that shot out from the pupils like lightning bolts. They were ex-ex-lovers: a double negative. Nothing had been settled; they were only waiting and seeing all over again, listening for some second shoe poised overhead to drop. If she could keep her job another year; if he could find a job; if they got along; if the graft of their transplanted affair would take, and grow…

  But if nothing was settled, they told themselves, then everything was still in the air, still possible, within reach. And indeed, everything was. Including the very worst things.

  The low point of their second term together was this: one frigid December weekend, Sabine took the train down to the city alone to consult with her allergist, then returned on Sunday evening to announce that though her allergist had gone home with the flu, which was the bad news, a tenure-track job had opened up at Wesleyan effective immediately—Jonno, remember Jonno? He’d been generous enough to recommend her for it—and her dean here, who’d actually turned out to not be such a tight-ass after all, had agreed to let her out of her present contract with a minimum of fuss, and to hire a friend she’d worked with at the New School to replace her. And wasn’t that amazing? Now everything was decided, everything was clear. Sabine would pack up her things at once—it wouldn’t take long—move back to the city, and commute to Wesleyan from there. And that was the good news. That was the big break. That was the new plan. The new plan was already in motion, executing itself and everything else in its path: that was what new plans did. Out with the old and in with the new. Yes, that was the good news, all right, and the low point, and the big break, and the new plan, and the second shoe, and the end, the end at last, of waiting and seeing.

  The next move, in Oren’s view, was a no-brainer: return to the city and lick his wounds. How could he stay in Carthage? What would he do up here, and why would he bother to do it, and with whom? No, it was time to admit defeat, time to crawl back to Alphabet City and relearn the basics, the remedial stuff, the ABCs.

  And yet, as the days passed in their weightless, uneventful fashion, an odd thing happened, or rather didn’t happen: he stayed right where he was. He’d already spent most of the previous summer licking his wounds down in the city—there was only so clean wounds, it occurred to him, could get. Besides, he sort of wanted to stay. This came as something of a surprise to him, and something of a disappointment as well. In town, the people continued to nod at him tolerantly as he slouched past, delivering unto him their stoic, good-fences-make-good-neighbors expressions, and he liked that. He liked these dispensations of casual goodwill, liked the way no one ever stopped to ask him what he did or had he seen that review in the Times or what did he think of that screening at the Angelika or that new Alsatian bistro in Red Hook, and all for the simple and miraculous reason that no one cared. Why should they? He was a flatlander, a visitor, a vacant circle on the census. Even he was tempted to overlook himself. He had no reason to be here, yet here he was. Striding down the sidewalk, he’d repeat the line to himself like a mantra, not in complaint but in progressive stages of wonder and defiance. No reason to be here, yet here he was! Here he was!

  And then his savings began to run out, and with them went some of that wonder and defiance, until at last he was forced to dust off one of his old résumés (there were a number of versions to choose from) and find himself a job. Okay, it wasn’t a particularly interesting job—filling in for a pregnant social studies teacher at the local middle school—but that was okay, he’d been interesting for years, he almost preferred to do something steady and boring and prosaic at this point, something mindless.

  Not that he’d put it in quite those words of course, interviewing in the principal’s office. What he’d said was “I’ve been on the student side of the desk for a long time. I’ve had some excellent teachers along the way. Now I’d like to try to give something back.”

  “A noble sentiment,” the principal, Teddy Hastings, said mildly, taking a quick look at his vita. “Like what for instance?”

  “Whatever I have, I guess.”

  “Ah.” Hastings fixed him with a penetrating stare. He was a broad, thorny, agitated-looking person. His eyebrows were wild. Hairs flew out like notes from the whirled horns of his ears. His cheeks were pitted and flushed; his nose a bright pink bulb in the middle of his face. His forearms were huge slabs of meat, knotty with veins. They strained against the buttons on his shirtsleeves. Fortunately Oren was here for a job interview and not a wrestling match. The guy would break him in two. “Well, I hope you’ve got a lot then.”

  “I hope so too.”

  Hastings’s tie, a hideous, mustard-colored thing, dangled askew as he flipped through the pages of Oren’s vita, the length and vagueness of which document appeared to perplex him. A
thick shock of hair, gingery white, plunged over the frames of his glasses. He brushed it away reflexively, like a horse swishing off flies.

  Oren looked around the office. The ceiling was discolored; the windows were frosted shut. BUILDING A FOUNDATION FOR EXCELLENCE, the school’s motto, was emblazoned on butcher paper on the wall. And yet nothing about Teddy Hastings’s office—the dented file cabinets, the congested in-box and out-box, the anarchic stacks of memos and letters shucking off the oppressions of their paperweights, the wayward constellations of stains, doodles, and coffee rings on the blotter, whimsically connected by fountain pen, the cheap bookshelves with their faded veneers, bowing under the weight of all those instructor’s manuals, state licensing handbooks, and yellowed, inked-up standards like The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and Call of the Wild—suggested the construction was complete. Off to one side of the desk sat the constituents of the principal’s lunch: a pint of milk, a tuna sandwich, a navel orange in a resealable Baggie, and a roll of Tums.

  “Well.”

  Hastings took out a handkerchief and blew his high, beaky nose like a trumpet. Oren fidgeted. A few minutes before, sauntering through the glass doors, webbed with shatterproof wire, and signing in with a flourish at the front desk, he’d have sworn he was the star of this particular movie. But now he wasn’t so sure. He smoothed the front of his shirt, which he’d neglected to iron properly that morning, and sat up straight, waiting for the lines on Hastings’s forehead, dipping and merging like indices on a chart, to come to a rest.