Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  Why ease up, he thought, when easing up was not in his nature? He too had spent the day outdoors, astride his roaring Toro like a general. He’d buzzed down the weeds, pulverized the stalks, decapitated the dandelions. Gail had no idea. Gail was a liberal pacifist; if it were up to her, they’d all just have their way out there, the slugs and the bugs, the deer and woodchucks and rabbits, nibbling down the produce and bounding off to the woods to excrete it. But the garden was no place for pacifism. In the garden it was death first, and then the new life. You had to be a bit of a fascist, had to be vigilant and aggressive: wage war, declare martial law, ban free assembly, deploy chemical weapons, put up fences along the border, and deport the intruders—whatever short-term damage you might cause (he thought of all the harmless spruces he’d dug up, mistaking them for sumacs) along the way. Because nature was capricious; what it gave one day it took back the next. And Teddy should know. Already he’d landed his occupying force. He’d turned over the earth, ripped out the weeds, and flung away the stones. He’d heaped on the manure in huge loamy clods. True, the seeds he’d laid down did not conform exactly to their lines, you could glimpse the occasional veer and swoop. But so what? Soon the first crops would come up regardless—lettuces, herbs, heirloom tomatoes—in the same casual and miraculous way they always did. The Early Girls. To see their green shoots poking greedily, irresistibly through the earth’s crust gave him an unnameable pleasure. He felt like a force of nature. A man who plunged his thick, hairy arms into the soil and brought forth the goods.

  The stereo was playing old favorites. Talking Heads. The Stones.

  “Nobody’s eating,” he heard Alex complain, across the room.

  He turned. His wife was gone. Beside him, in the gurgling depths of the Dunns’ aquarium, a solitary fish bumped blindly along the glass, waving his gaudy rainbow-colored fins. Some life, Teddy thought. Swimming circles through your own feces. He himself had always been partial to the bottom dwellers, the pale, bulbous types, the corys and caddises, who didn’t mind a little darkness, who carried their houses on their backs to protect them from predators. You couldn’t evict a caddis from his house. No way. You had to swallow them both whole.

  “I love this cheese,” Fiona said. “It’s made from sheep’s milk. And these spelt crackers. Try some.”

  Rising on tiptoe, she laid the cracker on his tongue like a Communion wafer. You had to hand it to Fiona: the cheese was superb. So were the olives: puckered, herb-coated, bitter and dark as tea. And the prosciutto shaved so thin it was almost translucent. It would have been easy to make fun of her—Philip would have—but Fiona was so stylish and smart, so immune on so many levels to the criticism of mere mortals (her waist, after three children, still slim as a teenager’s), all he could do was admire her. And maybe every so often, right now for instance, fantasize idly about sleeping with her. Even as he acknowledged to himself that she and Alex made a winning pair. They were good at giving parties, at the soft arts of hospitality, the food, the music, the flicker and glow. True, Alex had failed to get tenure at Columbia, the great wound of his life. But at Carthage College he had the whole package: easy schedule, summers and sabbaticals, a wood-floored Victorian with a wraparound porch. And if, like Alex, you rarely used that porch, if you instead made something of a fetish of shooting down to the city as often as possible, and referred to your colleagues as criminally dull, and to your neighbors as those weird thick-necked people on the other side of the yard, and to that big house you’d bought and furnished so admirably as the velvet coop… well, this too seemed part of the package.

  Meanwhile in Teddy’s view it was a hell of a nice house. The living room with its Tunisian rugs and leather reading chairs seemed more ample and artfully arranged, more lived in, than his. Something about other people’s living rooms reminded you how little time you spent in your own. But maybe that was the point of living rooms, he thought: to remind you to live.

  Around him his friends spoke of the usual subjects, their children’s lives, their parents’ deaths. You couldn’t blame them. It was an in-between phase.

  Of course if Philip were here, Teddy knew what he would say. To Philip, the shining Steinway, the plummy Bokhara, the Mexican weavings, the Balinese puppets, the aboriginal masks, all the primitive tchotchkes brought home from summer travels, would reek of desperation and entitlement, the death throes of a second-rate empire. Hoarding of objects, Philip would say: a classic symptom of depression. Expecting the world to surrender its goods and lie belly-up at your feet like a dog—this was not just arrogance, Philip would say, but pathology. Yes, Philip would say that too. Even the music they were playing would be suspect to Philip. It was one thing, he’d say, to listen to these songs back when they were written; but an entirely other thing now, decades later, the warps, hisses, and cracks of the original vinyl stamped flat by the digital heel, processed and perfected into a small, shining disc. The problem with people like Philip was that they said way too much and did way too little. They were watchers, commentators; they couldn’t just relax and enjoy nice stuff for its own sake.

  Not that Teddy was so relaxed either, mind you. He was still holding the olive pits in his hand. A bowl should have been set out, but there was no bowl. But there should have been. But there wasn’t. Suddenly he was furious. It had to do with the taste of the olives, and the feel of the cold pits in his hand.

  “Looking for someone?”

  Will Dennis, another member of the Wild Bunch, was examining him thoughtfully, trailing two fingers through his formidable mustache. He was a tall, high-domed pediatrician who worked half days in good weather and spent the other half out on his boat, roaring across the lake. He was going to talk sports, Teddy thought. It was one of their few subjects in common. “How’s the thumb? Still jammed?”

  “Always.”

  “Someday it’ll heal, you know. Then you’ll need a new excuse for that set shot of yours.”

  “One of these days,” Teddy said, “I’ll try a new sport. Racquetball maybe.”

  “What’s the point, Ted? You’ll wind up playing at the same level eventually. We all do.”

  Christ, he was surrounded by cynics.

  “You should wipe your face, Will. The gazelle’s out in the garden. Time to go hunting.”

  “Say what?”

  “It’s how the bedouins talk. It means you’ve got crumbs in your beard. Or mustache in this case.”

  “Thanks for the tip.” Will dabbed his upper lip with a napkin and inspected the results impassively. “And how do the bedouins say people who aren’t bedouins shouldn’t try to talk like they are?”

  “Actually I don’t think they have a phrase for that.”

  “Too bad.” Will smiled amiably. On the court too he was unflappable, a solid ball-handler and rebounder, a deadly shot from beyond the arc. Teddy was more of an up-and-downer, a player of droughts and streaks, erratic moves. Of course at their age the goal was just to fling yourself around and sweat out the toxins for a couple of hours without winding up in the hospital, ensnared by rubber tubes. Still, all things being equal, he’d have preferred to be calm and steady on the court, like Will, who wore his two first names easily, like an entitlement to boyishness. “I’m fine by the way, thank you for asking.”

  Teddy nodded. “Work going well?”

  “Booming. Just the asthma and allergy cases alone. It’s the environment.”

  “Yeah, all that filth.”

  “On the contrary,” Will said, “all that cleanliness. All that good plumbing and sanitation and hypoallergenic soap. It’s killing us. Immunologically speaking, we’ve cleaned up the environment way too well. We’d be better off out in the wild, living like barbarians. Out there with the mold and the germs and the animal feces. Our native state.”

  “Come check out Mimi’s room sometime. It might change your mind.”

  “People don’t realize. The body needs mess. That’s how it keeps itself strong. Otherwise you get all these systemic overreactions to piddl
y little irritants like pollen. Speaking of which, what’s the word from Danny?”

  “She’s fine.” Teddy jiggled the olive pits in his palm, like dice. “Touring around Asia at the moment. She’ll be home soon. She has that summer internship, you know, down in the city.”

  “That’ll be nice for you. To have her back.”

  “Yeah.”

  Danielle had gone over to China on her junior year abroad. They’d expected her back in April, but she’d changed her return ticket, had needed, she said, a little more time over there to unwind. Unwinding appeared to agree with Danielle—one more Eastern discipline, like tae kwon do or meditation, to be practiced and mastered with her usual bravura intensity. But fine. The girl worked hard; she’d earned some time off. She was a type A, like him; it was her style, her fate, to throw herself into things. This the same plump, curly-haired girl who read Mr. Popper’s Penguins at age four, who starred in South Pacific at age twelve, who brought the house down singing Billie Holiday at the ninth-grade cabaret. “God Bless the Child.” So what if “unwinding,” from what little information he’d wormed out of Gail, appeared to consist of hanging out on some beach called Haad Yuan, drinking and tanning and sleeping with pretty much any able-bodied boy who flip-flopped past regardless of nationality or religion? That was the energy of globalism: everyone smushed together in the same tent. Haad Yuan! What did it mean—mean about him—that he envied her as much as he did? What did it mean that he’d spend half an hour in his office poring over his antique globe, his finger tracing the extremities of the Pacific Rim, trying to locate the source of those two magic words he could not even pronounce?

  Teddy too had had his wild times back in college—well, a couple of wild times anyway—but now those times were behind him, back in their day. Now he was that familiar, uninspired thing: a middle-aged man. His eyes in cold weather turned brittle and dry. The hair was vanishing from his calves; dark moles, bumpy and irregular, were spreading across his back. He felt weirdly hardened in some places and tender in others. He’d sleep badly, awake to small confusions of time and space, and stumble into the bathroom to piss, only to find his father’s face, pouchy and peevish, glaring back at him in the mirror above the sink. The house needed paint. The cows stood frozen in the fields. Soon they would all sit down to dinner, he and his friends, and enjoy an evening of small, modest rewards. A good meal in your belly. A new joke. The name of a reliable handyman. Somewhere out there, in the gathering dark, he had two comely daughters—lean, long-necked, soft-armed—and just across the room, a beautiful and intelligent wife. A wife with tact and heart and strong values, who read substantial books and made note of their friends’ birthdays in her crowded organizer, and whose busy schedule did not prevent her from undertaking pro bono work on behalf of the local Bosnian and Sudanese refugees, and the Mexican campesinos tucked illegally away on dairy farms, and the Jamaican pickers shipped in to work the orchards, and all the other needy, powerless people who’d arrived in their narrow green valley in recent years like messengers from that distant world beyond the mountains; a wife who after all this asked no greater reward for herself than to begin her day by climbing atop her husband and, in the throes of pleasure, arching her back like a pole dancer. Was this not a good enough life? Nice food, comfortable chairs, a snoring dog at the foot of the bed. Fresh flowers laid out in spacious rooms. The level blue heat of marital sex. Around him good friends talking about their children and houses, books they had and hadn’t read, and while maybe nothing so brilliant or memorable was being said there would be occasional winning, perceptive remarks, and these were important to register, the smarts and goodwill of unexceptional people living as fully and honorably as their circumstances allowed, cooking meals, making plans, attending meetings, paying taxes, and continuing to love each other despite the fact that soon enough they’d all be dead.

  “Are you still out here hogging the olives?” Fiona said, lifting her eyebrows. “Come, you beast. It’s time for dinner.”

  Teddy watched them move away into the other room. No one waited for him. Why should they? He was not a child, even if he’d begun to feel like one, and, okay, to act like one too. He stood brooding by the unlit fireplace. Photos of the Dunns’ handsome, soccer-playing children, whom he’d always liked, were displayed along the mantel. Danielle had never liked the Dunn kids; she had run with a different crowd. Athletics were not her thing. Not Mimi’s either. He could compile a long list of things that were not his daughters’ things, and an alarmingly short list of things that were their things. As a rule they’d always tended toward evasiveness on the whole thing question. But then so did he, he supposed. So did their mother. It was what made them tolerant and forgiving of each other. Even if it also made them the opposite of tolerant, the opposite of forgiving.

  Suddenly tears were in his eyes. He felt stretched out and brittle, an elastic band that’d lost its shape. Lately it seemed no matter how sunny and serpentine the course of his thoughts, this was where they wound up. This finish line. This shuttered terminal.

  Get a grip, he thought. Just because you’re dying doesn’t mean nothing matters; it means everything does. But he felt as if under a beam; he could not pull away.

  They’d stuck Philip in the ground the last day of September. A cold clear morning, the leaves tipped with frost. Teddy had clutched his daughters’ hands, watching the jets crisscross over Logan, their vapor trails hanging up there, puffy and white, like a frayed net. “In the midst of life we are in death,” the minister had intoned. What the hell, the guy had done his best. Teddy knew what it was like, having to speak on landmark occasions, to preside over the crowd, dress up little threadbare platitudes in togas and garlands. So he admired the minister’s professionalism, plugging away at the absolutes while the wind threw around everyone’s hair and the stiff dewy grass, recently cut, adhered to their dress shoes, on a day better suited to football or hockey than to the burial of a forty-four-year-old clinical psychologist from Wayland, Massachusetts.

  Then of course the others began to step forward to do their best. Philip’s best friend from college. Philip’s mentor from grad school. Philip’s neighbor, tennis partner, supervisor, his former patients and protégés…all came up to deliver their own special tributes and anecdotes. Teddy’s face stiffened like a mask. It seemed the final indignity in a long line of indignities: even now, with the last hour up, the last client gone through the door, poor Philip had to lie there and listen while the parade of moist-eyed narcissists droned on. Now they had the answers, and he was the one lying down and taking it. The shrink being shrunk. The cool, tough-minded ironist, sentimentalized to mush.

  Oh, if only he’d had an ax! He’d have hacked open that pine box, thrown the corpse over his shoulder, and run. But he had no ax. Nothing to smash, nothing to smash with.

  “And now perhaps Philip’s brother would like to say a few final words?”

  Teddy looked around expectantly, waiting like everyone else for the brother in question to step forward. But no one moved.

  “Houston,” Danielle whispered, “we have a problem.”

  His mind was an unmarked blackboard; there was no chalk. Worms were writhing in the dirt at his feet. Everything he had was going to be taken from him, he thought.

  “Classic,” Mimi hissed. “Absolutely classic.”

  Gail squeezed his hand. Jets roared across the vast, pitiless sky.

  “There are of course feelings that resist expression,” the minister acknowledged, “just as there are moments in our lives when it does us good to try. For the sake of our loved ones perhaps. If not for ourselves.”

  “Hear that?” Mimi whispered. “He’s talking about you.”

  “Hush.” Gail squeezed his hand.

  He did love his wife. He did love his wife so.

  “Nothing?” The minister’s voice, beneath the FM glaze, took on a cloying pitch. He was pretty pushy for an Episcopalian. “Nothing at all?”

  Teddy studied the ground bitterly,
waiting to be released. The wind tunneled in his ears. Nothing’s something too, he thought. He had a terrible impulse to look at his watch. Christ he hated Boston traffic. Hated the whole city—the lousy parking, the overpriced food, the squares that weren’t square, all those think tanks and tech labs tucked away smugly on their symmetrical campuses like an alternate universe for PhDs. He remembered his last trip, back in May, stewing in ball-game gridlock on a Sunday afternoon, trying to drive Philip to the cancer center at Dana-Farber. The stuff was in his bones by then. There was only one other patient, a skinny young woman in a flowered scarf, taking chemo in a reclining chair. Her eyes were closed. He’d never seen such stillness, such aloneness. He’d vowed to himself never to forget that young woman, her lunar pallor in that windowless room. But of course he had. He’d forgotten and forgotten and forgotten. He had no idea now if she was alive or dead.

  “Well then.” The minister beamed decisively, as if in some way relieved. “May God bless you all.”

  And that was that. The crane whirred and clanked, lowering the coffin by incremental jerks into the hole in the earth. His wife and daughters wept. Big cars swished down the silent lanes. Teddy stood gaping like a child at the excavated space. Only at the last instant, when the box was about to touch bottom, did he turn away.

  He went and wandered out among the enormous elms, their dry leaves dropping over him one by one. What was there to say? A man wakes up one day with a spot on his knee, a lesion roughly the size of a penny; a year later he’s gone. No amount of Gemzar or Navilbene could deter the cells from growing; no amount of Dilaudid or morphine could relieve the pain. It was tragic of course, but such tragedies were common, inescapable, the rules of a club so inclusive it was hardly a club. And now he had joined this nonclub, or rather Philip had. Teddy remained outside with the others, behind the velvet ropes, gawking and complaining. To what end? One might as well complain about the falling leaves, and the frosted ground, and the snow that would inevitably follow.