Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  It was not the nakedness per se. He and Gail had made a point of exposing the girls to a certain amount of casual, good-humored nudity around the house, in the hopes that they would grow up free of shame and embarrassment about the human body. Of course that was back when the girls, and also he and Gail, were younger. Lately he supposed there was something shameful and embarrassing about their bodies, or his anyway—Gail’s was lean and sinewy as ever—which was why he rarely walked around naked anymore, and why he tried to avoid his own blobby, oversize image in the mirror these days as compulsively as once upon a time, when he was Mimi’s age, he’d sought it out. True, she often began her days with a shower of invective toward her “mouse-nest hair,” then feasted uncharitably over breakfast on the idiosyncrasies of her “fat, gross” body and her clothes that made her look like “a hideous troll,” but he’d never believed she was serious. To him she was a marvel: beautiful, full-figured, ripe like a plum.

  Nonetheless, his impulse to cover her with the towel was almost painful. He thought of all the leering boys in short pants riding by on mountain bikes. All the toxic spores and molds hitching rides on the afternoon breeze. All the potentially precancerous freckles she’d inherited from Gail’s side of the family on the pale, pinkening skin she’d inherited from his. Both sides had a history of cancer. You had to be wary of exposure. So he pulled one fringed side of the towel over her hip. Which made the other side, obeying the law of unintended consequences, slip that much farther off her thighs.

  Mimi didn’t stir. One eyelid fluttered like a hummingbird. The other remained in place. She breathed quietly through her mouth, her front teeth just visible through the part in her lips. Two years of braces, he thought, and still crooked.

  Even the smallest things have something in them, Meta had said, which remains unknown.

  He looked down at her feet. The toenails were painted a garish white; they curled into their sockets like a doll’s. Her arches were high, the soles puckered and grooved. He could smell the hemp and coconut oils, the jojoba, the shea butter, all the creamy tropical potions she used on her legs. She would be seventeen, he remembered, in a few weeks. She’d forbidden them to throw a party. Not even so much as a cake.

  Now, as if in accordance with this spirit of exclusion and defiance, she shifted her weight, effectively turning her back to her father. The gap in the towel widened. The slope of one budded breast could be seen, ascending into a terry-cloth cloud. Bees hummed in the grass. The locust trees were shedding bark. Dandelions lay spread over the lawn like a blanket of gold. Who was this lovely, distant stranger who’d wandered into his yard and fallen asleep in his hammock? He missed her intensely all of a sudden. Yet here she was in front of him. But the moment he reached for her, she’d disappear.

  He thought, as he screwed on the zoom lens, of the slides Meta had shown in class. The seashells that looked like nudes. The nudes that looked like landscapes. The landscapes that looked like clouds. The clouds that looked like dunes. The dunes that looked like shells, and like nudes, and like clouds. The closer you looked, the more similar they all became. As if everything really was fashioned from the same clay.

  But if Meta was right about some things, she was also wrong about others. Because the goal, in his view, was not to see things as if for the first time. It was to see as if for the last time. To capture the light of being in the shadow of its opposite. Touch the moment before it vanished. Because it would vanish. Because it would end.

  He folded up his glasses, stuck them in his shirt, and eyed his daughter through the viewfinder. Her face, under the canopy of the willows, was soft, unguarded. Every subtle sway of the hammock sent it oscillating through zones of light and darkness, memory and invention.

  The camera makes us a tourist in other people’s reality.

  By now he was used to the weight and feel of the equipment. The black strap like a ligament around his neck. The chassis bumping on his chest like a second heart. He watched the sun pour over the girl’s shoulders, preserving them in amber. A filament of saliva dangled from her lip; it glistened in the light like a wire.

  He lifted one trembling finger over the shutter, and waited.

  What happened next did not lend itself so well to explication. This became all too clear in both the oral testimony he’d delivered in court and his mandated follow-up letter to Judge Tierney. There was no motive, no conscious decision, no reasoned analysis. He was merely responding as he’d been trained to a set of singular and specific visual indicators—the sun dipping in the west; the girl glowing with backlight; the undulant sag of the hammock; the willows nodding mournfully overhead, weeping their long-shadowed tears. His assignment for class, so far as he understood it, was to record what was around him. That was his homework. To locate the image and follow it where it led.

  The proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain.

  He fretted about the light of course: it kept veering toward overexposure. So he bracketed around the meter and adjusted the f-stop to ensure consistent depth of field. Then he circled in close, like a boy playing Indian, like a hunter sneaking up on his prey.

  The first roll he focused on the lower extremities. The variegated ridge of the toes. The slung bows of the calves. The dimpled slopes of the knees. Then he went higher, toward the head.

  To photograph an object, have it look like an object, but be more than an object.

  The girl’s face from this angle was moonlike in its serenity, with plains of light and crevices of shadow, tiny acne craters around the nose. From her open mouth, slack and dark like a cave, dangled one silken stalactite of drool. He shot an entire roll on that alone. Then he switched lenses and swooped in closer.

  The privileged moment that passes with the ticking of a clock, never to be duplicated. So light, balance, expression must be seen—felt, as it were—in a flash.

  Mimi didn’t move. It was as if she were posing. As if they were collaborating, playing a game of hide-and-seek. Her upper arms, sunk into the hammock’s weave, had taken on its intricate inscription of diamond-shaped grooves. Like a creature caught in a spiderweb.

  Teddy moved closer. The Leica was like an extension of him; all he had to do was point and shoot. He was so absorbed in his work, he nearly failed to see the broad, hunchbacked shadow, like a creature in a horror movie, loom up out of nowhere and interpose himself between the girl and the light.

  He knew right away who it was. They’d logged some time together, the two of them, in this very yard. But by the time he’d lowered the camera, the creature was gone, vanished back into the woods.

  Mimi had in a sense vanished by this point too. Strictly speaking she was no longer his daughter, the toddler he used to cajole from tears by dropping her from his shoulders and catching her (and what was it about falling from a height that made them laugh? A return to vestigial origins? To hairy, half-evolved primates swooping through the forest canopy?); no longer the impressionable eight-year-old with neatly combed bangs who’d drape herself across the window seat, bare toes idling in Bruno’s golden fur, and read tales of beauties and beasts. No. She looked now, through the viewfinder’s frame, more like some exotic wind-stripped artifact he’d stumbled upon in the desert—a statue, an icon, a hieroglyph—than a sixteen-year-old girl whose genetic code roughly mirrored his own. It was the teenage dream come true: she’d been transported to another planet where they were no longer obligated to irritate each other. If she woke right now, he thought, she wouldn’t even see him. She’d see only the Leica’s big glass eye, and herself encased and upended in the lens.

  The sun was plunging in the trees, the sprinkler hissing over the sodden garden. Teddy circled the hammock like a thief. He heard a sickly crunch underfoot—his glasses. But there wasn’t time; this golden light wouldn’t last forever. Soon Mimi would wake up, and everything would change back to how it was. They would no longer be partners, innocents marooned in a lawless enchanted garden. Every unconscious flutter of her lids was an exte
nsion of his, every involuntary tremor of her skin a response to his, her mouth with its soft, flaking, corrugated lips lay on the far side of an invisible breathing tube that connected up with his, and through that tube the breath flowed back and forth, mingling with his; and so too the modulating breezes, and the conspiratorial light, and the dark perfume of the mulch, and the spindly branches of the locust trees, looming like undertakers, and the sprinkler tsking over the weed-strewn lawn, and the nodding daylilies, flaring like candles; and the tuneless frenetic warble of the cicadas, and the distant bellow of the 5:10 train bearing machine parts down from Canada, like the half-heard bass note in a minor chord. The whole world had gone liquid and musical, exultant. Teddy wielded the Leica before him like a conductor’s wand. Just blend and serve…

  All of which was a difficult sensation to put into words, of course, let alone use as the basis of a legal defense when you’re fighting two counts of child-endangerment charges from the Carthage County prosecutor. But for the moment all that hassle still lay ahead. For the moment he was content, ecstatic even, right here and right now, taking pictures of his daughter as she slept on in the hammock, dead to the world.

  Then she jerked awake.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.” She stretched, her hands shooting skyward toward some cloudlike apparition she’d been tracking in her dreams. She looked down at her nakedness and frowned. “Where’s Mom?” she asked, adjusting the towel.

  “Work.”

  “Mmm. There’s something new.”

  He wasn’t up for another gripe session about Gail, though of course he preferred it to another gripe session about himself. “I was just shooting some pictures. The light’s incredible right now.”

  “Oh yeah, how’s that photography class going? I keep meaning to ask. You like it?”

  “I like it a lot. Tuesday night was really interesting. Tonight should be good too.”

  “Mmm.” He could see her deliberating over whether to end the conversation right here, or out of simple politeness—or boredom—continue. But he wouldn’t push her. These soft moments were wispy, precarious; if you pressed too hard they collapsed. “So what do you guys talk about in there anyway?”

  “Oh, you know, technical stuff mostly. Compositional stuff. Nothing too glamorous.” He spoke slowly, matter-of-factly, not pushingly. “Meta keeps it pretty basic. She wants us to be birds, she says, not ornithologists.”

  “Wait, I don’t get it, she wants you to be birds?”

  “The idea is, find your moment, then act. Not get all muddled up thinking about it.” A panel of black flies had convened around his milk shakes, dipping their antennae in the foam, buzzing out commentaries and critiques. “It’s like when you go fishing, and there’s this lag time between when you see the bobber go under and when you react? That’s when things generally go wrong.”

  “Jeremy’s into photography,” Mimi informed him abruptly. She had her mother’s gift for listening in a way that wasn’t quite listening, but wasn’t quite not-listening either. Or maybe it was quite not-listening. “He’s like obsessed with it in fact.”

  “Jeremy Dunn?”

  “His parents gave him this camera for Christmas. He says it cost five hundred dollars. They’re going to build a darkroom for him down in the basement, while he’s away this summer.”

  “It must be nice to have parents with a lot of disposable income,” Teddy said.

  “He’s a pretty hopeless photographer though in my opinion. He’s got like no eye at all.” She looked at Teddy for a moment. “Where are your glasses? You look kind of mole-ish without them.”

  “They broke.” Suddenly he understood where this conversation was leading. “Listen, Mimi, if you’d like us to seriously consider buying you a camera, we could talk about it. Maybe not such a nice one as Jeremy’s, or even mine, but a good, sturdy starter’s model? That we could swing. Naturally,” he went on, “we’d have to work out who’d pay for all the film and development and stuff. But if you want us to seriously consider it—and by serious I mean not like the pony that time, or the electric-bass lessons, or the motorbike—it’s certainly something we could talk about. That is if you’re serious.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Why not?”

  “I hate it when people take pictures all the time.” She brushed away a fly. “It’s a power trip. They’re always hanging back, ordering people around. Like they’re all separate and superior from everybody else.”

  “Listen,” he said, exasperated, “anything you do seriously separates you from everybody else. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

  Mimi, in a show of either refutation or agreement or something else altogether, let loose a yawn. Her listless, honeyed apathy set him pacing around the hammock again.

  “Mimi, you’re an intelligent girl. A talented and wonderful person…”

  “So?”

  “So remember eighth-grade biology? You’ve got your nekton and you’ve got your plankton. The nekton are the swimmers. The plankton are the drifters, the passive types, the jellyfish—”

  “And in the end, they all get eaten by bigger fish anyway.”

  “I’m not talking about the end. I’m talking about the middle. That’s when things go wrong, see. People go to sleep, Mimi; they just do. They start out like gangbusters but they fall back. They can’t maintain the intensity. Can’t take being separate, as you put it.”

  “And you can? What, you’re some kind of role model now? Who does most of the sleeping around here anyway? Who’s spent the last three weeks shaving his head and not going to work and sneaking around the house taking pictures of Bruno?”

  “I told you,” he said calmly, “this photography thing, it’s a process. A discipline. It’s a whole new way of concentration.”

  She frowned. “You’re starting to sound like my friend Marcus. He speaks fortune cookie too.”

  “Which one’s Marcus? Is he the one with the dreads and tattoos and that little thimble of hair on his chin?”

  “Um, Dad? Half the guys I know fit that description.”

  “Can I just say I find that disturbing?”

  “Why? What’s wrong with it? They want to be birds too. All guys do. Anyway when it comes to personal grooming you’re no one to talk. Jesus, look at you.” Her eyes, as she followed her own instruction, went small, glossy. “What is it with you, anyway? You were always the rock around here. Is this about Uncle Phil? That’s what Mom’s saying.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Mom says we have to be extra nice to you, ’cause you’re all guilty and fucked-up and maybe having some sort of breakdown, she says.”

  “Listen, don’t get me wrong, Mom’s a very perceptive and intelligent woman. But in this case she happens to be just totally, totally full of shit.”

  “So we don’t have to be nice to you, is what you’re saying?”

  “It’s outrageous, the way people need to attach a label to things they don’t understand. You start to feel like Gulliver in Lilliput.”

  “Where?”

  “Forget it,” he said. He brooded for a moment while she picked at her navel. “You know, I may have been wrong, but I thought I saw the Ogre pop in while you were sleeping. Speaking of giants.”

  Mimi rolled her eyes and glanced over her shoulder toward the house, a bit wearily, he thought. The Ogre was a rough beast who used to come visit sometimes, when the girls and their friends were small. But he had not been seen in these parts in some years.

  “Well,” he said, “enough about him. How about you, Sweetpea? How are you? I feel like ever since that little incident at the lake, I never see you anymore.”

  Her expression, registering the note of complaint in his voice, closed down like a shade. “I’m fine, Dad.”

  “I know you’re fine. I’m not asking if you’re fine. What I’m asking is, how are you doing underneath?”

  “Underneath what?”

  “C’mon, Mimi, you know what I mean. How a
re you feeling about things, about school, and your life, and the future, and do you basically feel good or are you all confused or depressed or what?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Because we all go through rough patches from time to time, let’s face it. And you’re probably missing your big sister too, I imagine, God knows Mom and I do. And I probably didn’t help things with that whole cancer scare either.”

  “You were the one scared. We kept telling you it was nothing.”

  “Sometimes, kiddo, nothings can be somethings. Even when they’re nothing. Maybe especially then. You’ll understand that better when you’re my age.”

  “No offense, Pops, but I doubt it.”

  He hated it when she called him Pops. Hated too the artichoke quality of their conversations, the effort of stripping away the tough, ironic armor, getting down to the hairy heart.

  “I’m just saying,” he just said, “I know there’ve been a lot of distractions lately, and maybe we’re not quite as close right now as we usually are, which is something I feel bad about frankly. So if you’d like to maybe just, you know, talk about what’s going on, like say that night at the lake and what you guys were doing out there, not just drug-wise but in general, though drug-wise too, I’d be really interested in hearing about that. Or say about Jeremy and what’s going on with your whole, you know, relationship. That would be okay too.”

  “I knew it. You and Mom. It’s like all you can talk about, am I having sex with Jeremy or not.”

  “I didn’t say anything about that, did I? Though of course it’s a perfectly reasonable question for a parent t—”

  “Jeremy’s boring, okay? He’s like you, always hovering over me, keeping track of my stuff, trying to figure me out. I’m not so complicated, okay? I’m not some brilliant exotic woman of mystery. I got like 520s on my SATs.”

  “We told you, you can take them again. Some people are better test takers than oth—”

  “Danielle got 750s.”

  “Danielle has different academic strengths from you. We’ve discussed this, right? There are people who’re more naturally oriented to analytic thinking, and others more naturally oriented to intuitiv—”