Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “I don’t even care, okay? I wasn’t even talking about that. You’re the one so hung up on my scores. You and Jeremy. It’s all you can talk about.”

  “I wouldn’t say I was hung up, exactly—”

  “Jeremy, he thinks he’s cool, but he’s not. He tries too hard. He’s always burning me these CDs from his dad’s collection and then getting mad if I don’t play them. Like I give a shit about Sarah Vaughan or Chet Baker.”

  “Can I have them? I love those g—”

  “It’s like he has this picture of how his life is going to be, and it has to look just that way, and you either fit into that or you don’t. It’s really tiresome. And it’s never about me, either, all this concern he’s always expressing. It’s about him. He just wants me to be happy so he can feel good about himself.”

  “So I take it then that you haven’t yet gone ahead and actually had interco—”

  “Jesus,” she said, looking around wildly, “what’s that smell? It’s like, ugh, spoiled milk. Did you leave something out?”

  Because he was still learning the photographic arts and lacked the time and expertise to set up a darkroom of his own, Teddy was forced to rely upon the town’s only decent photo lab, Sudden Exposures, to get his film developed. Because he’d taken so many pictures so quickly and was worried about the light meter, the workings of which confounded him, he made a point of asking the clerk when he dropped off his armful of film canisters at 5:15 p.m. to push the film in development. Because the clerk, a weedy, sandy-haired boy of twenty, stared back at him sullenly as if he were on downers, which he probably was, and as if he’d had an unrewarding secondary-school experience, which he probably had, and held Teddy in his capacity as principal accountable for it, which he probably did—Teddy’s entirely reasonable request may have come off sounding a bit strident, even harsh. In any case the boy, who appeared to have no idea what pushing the film even meant, stared at him resentfully, his hooded, lizardlike gaze all slitty and dark. “I’ll tell Kevin about it,” he mumbled, “when he gets back.”

  “Thanks. Will they be done by tonight though? I’ve got class in a couple of hours. What time do you guys close?”

  “Just write your last name down on the slip.” The clerk spoke with the low-grade apathy of a toll taker on the Thruway. “Kevin’ll call you when they’re ready.”

  “Later today, you mean? Because I’m anxious to get them back for tonight.”

  “Whenever they’re done, Chief.”

  “I’ve got class at seven, see. So there’s a certain amount of time pressure on these.”

  “Okay, Chief.”

  “Okay, great. So just to be clear. You’ll write this down. You’re going to make a point of asking Kevin, whoever the hell Kevin is, to push the film in development and have it ready before seven. Okay, Chief?”

  The boy nodded, his mouth puckered with hate, as boys of all ages do when you have just browbeaten them into submission.

  On his way home, Teddy reviewed his conversation with Mimi about the importance of separating yourself from other people—even occasionally hating other people. Not your parents, of course, but other other people, people like the clerk at Sudden Exposures, for example, who were genuinely hateful. Because if you couldn’t rouse yourself to hate hateful people, Teddy thought, whom would you ever rouse yourself to hate? And if you couldn’t rouse yourself to hate, how would you ever rouse yourself to love?

  Naturally when he arrived at the house he found it empty—Mimi off with friends, Gail nowhere in sight—so any further clarification he might offer on this or any subject was moot. That was one disappointment. A bachelor’s dinner of eggs and toast: that was another. And when, promptly at 6:45, he stopped in at the photo lab on his way to class and the film wasn’t ready either, that was a disappointment too. Or maybe it was ready. It was difficult to tell with the shutters drawn, the lights off, the doors bolted shut.

  He read the hours posted on the window: 11–7:30. Apparently the clerk had mastered the art of hating other people too.

  And so, without a single contact sheet to show for his labors, Teddy was forced to just sit there through the entire class, listening to Meta McVay answer the stupid, trivial questions of his classmates and make highly detailed critiques of everyone else’s work but his. Even tiresome old Mrs. Landgren and her Polaroid butterflies—which, if he was honest with himself, were actually rather pretty—came in for praise. Meanwhile he sat glaring vengefully at the wall clock, whose hands for some reason had stopped moving.

  The moment class was over, he marched directly to the lectern and blurted out an apology. “For what?” Meta McVay asked.

  “For not being prepared tonight. I ran into some technical difficulties.”

  He went on to catalog at some length the precise nature of those difficulties. Meta McVay nodded vaguely as he talked, her hands busy on her desk, compiling her notes into a stack, then shoveling them into her briefcase. Why wasn’t she listening? The difficulty of executing one’s intentions in a recalcitrant world: surely this was a subject that should engage her sympathies. To keep the conversation going, he offered to help her carry her slides and equipment out to her car. “That’s very kind of you, thank you.”

  “Bah,” Teddy said. Bah was not a word he’d ever before used—not a word, in fact, at all—but it would have to do. They went down the corridor, through the back door, and down the concrete ramp. In the moonlight, the arcing parabolas of the intracampus walking paths looked like silver filaments of a net, weaving the stone buildings together. He watched Meta search the parking lot for her car. “Do you have a long drive home?”

  “Quite long, I’m afraid. I live in Brooklyn.”

  “Oh.” He stumbled on the curb; the slides rattled in their plastic partitions.

  “I drive up on Tuesdays and stay over two nights in a faculty apartment. Then on Thursdays I drive home.”

  “Well, anything beats being stuck in one place.”

  “Does it?” They were approaching her car now, an old Jetta with obscure stickers on the windshield. “I’m beginning to think there’s a lot to be said for staying in one place.”

  “Don’t be too sure. Me, I’ve lived here thirty-two years and counting,” he informed her with a vehemence that surprised them both. “I came for college. After that I just stayed.”

  “I see.” She rummaged in her pocket for her keys.

  “I mean I had plans, believe me. Irons in the fire. I almost did that whole Rimbaud thing myself. I was going to head off to Africa, build a school maybe, help some poor kids. But you know how it is. Life gets its hands on you.”

  Meta nodded but said nothing. Still, he could see what she was thinking: it was there on her face.

  “Oh, it’s not that bad, I guess. Living up here. I mean sure, there’s nothing to do, and the weather’s terrible, and you have to find a way to get through winter and all. But at least there’s no traffic. People are friendly. It’s a nice place to raise kids. At least until they get to be teenagers. After that it’s a nightmare of course, but by then it’s too late, you’re sort of comfortably stuck, for better and for worse. Hey—” Suddenly Meta McVay’s features were all in commotion. “What’s the matter?”

  She shook her head, waving her hand before her face like a fan.

  “I’m talking way too much, aren’t I? I’m boring you with my whole life story, and here you’re in a hurry to get on the road.”

  Meta was still shaking her head. Was she about to cry? Was she crying already? Why? He didn’t even mean half of what he was saying. He was just talking, running off at the mouth, feeling both manic and sheepish—Bah! he thought, Bah!—the way people do taking leave of each other in parking lots. He remembered Vera Blackburn three years back. Another strange encounter with a moody, wayward woman. For a man who prided himself on his fidelity to his wife, Teddy seemed to be accumulating a lot of such moments.

  “…but I do like it,” Meta was stammering.

  “What? Like w
hat?”

  “This little town of yours. It’s…it’s rather like a dream, isn’t it?” He examined her face for irony but found none. “Your quiet evenings. Your little shops. Everyone out on a warm night, buying those soft ice creams that come twirling out of that machine.”

  “Creemees.”

  “Creemees, yes. I love them. They’re so, I don’t know the word…”

  “Bland?”

  “Smooth. I must’ve gained five pounds since I began teaching up here. And I’m usually very strict about these things. But I can’t help it, I love them, and I feel better when I eat one, and what’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with that,” Teddy said, though he wasn’t sure at this point what that even was. Meta McVay was beginning to irritate him a little, honestly, with this condescending fantasy of hers. What did she know of the rural life? She was only a commuter, a tourist. He should bring her down to the middle school sometime and open up the lockers. Let her see the knives, the pills, the little plastic Baggies full of dope. Maybe if she stopped commuting back and forth and actually lived in one place for a change, she would see that place more clearly. But no one saw things clearly, he thought. No one even wanted to.

  “Sometimes I wonder if my own children will ever have this experience. This rustic simplicity. This coherence. Presuming I ever have—”

  And now she went silent again, the lines of her face screwy and crosshatched, as she wrestled with what appeared to be a number of personal issues that were none of Teddy’s business. He wouldn’t have minded continuing this conversation some other time—over a beer, say, or a cup of coffee—though he was beginning to mind continuing it now. All he wanted was for her to find the right key and open up the trunk of her rusting dysfunctional-looking Jetta, so they could both get on home.

  Still, he felt obligated out of courtesy to go ahead and offer to buy her a drink. It seemed under the circumstances the courtly, gentlemanly thing to do, provided of course she didn’t take it the wrong way and make it seem the seedy, scumbaggy thing to do. Anyway he fully expected her to say no. She had a whole life down there in some hip and enviable quadrant of Brooklyn; why would she go out for drinks with a man who wore the wrong clothes and read the wrong books and could not even manage to bring in his lousy, overexposed contact sheets on time?

  “How kind of you Mr. Hastings, thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “We could go down to the Lyons’ Den,” he heard himself proposing hopelessly. “You know that place over on Exchange Street? It’s a little on the dingy side, but they’ve got some decent microbrews on tap.”

  “That sounds like just the thing, actually.”

  She was only demurring gracefully, of course, as a matter of form, just as he’d only offered the drink as a matter of form. And yet the thing about matters of form was they always seemed to morph sooner or later into matters of content. All at once Teddy did want a beer. In fact he wanted a pitcher. He wanted to take Meta McVay down to the Lyons’ Den, order cold, frothing mugs of the darkest imaginable ale, and unburden himself of his every longing and fear, his every stifled roar—

  “…afraid I can’t tonight, however,” his instructor was mumbling, as she lifted open her trunk. “Must head back to the Thruway, the bane of my existence. I’m terribly grateful for the offer, though, Mr. Hastings.”

  “Teddy. Call me Teddy.”

  “And just for your general gallantry, both in class and outside it. You have no idea how helpful that’s been.”

  “You’re terribly welcome,” Teddy said, settling the slide trays into the black cavity of the trunk, and slamming it shut.

  He wound up going to the Lyons’ Den anyway, all by himself. There he engaged in the usual barroom multitasking—drinking dark beer, watching a ball game, eating far too many stale, heart-shaped pretzels, and having a coarse and often borderline offensive conversation with Steve Lyons, the proprietor, about upcoming bond and budget issues for the fall. It was a dull way to pass what had promised to be an interesting evening. He stared at the stuffed jungle cat mounted over the bar. The great shaggy beast remained aloof, his gaze fixed on some long-dormant memory of prey. What had he been thinking, inviting a woman like Meta to a hole like this? She lived in Brooklyn. With a partner. Which meant, if Teddy understood the linguistics, she was either gay, or cohabiting with an attorney, or simply too urbane for such hackneyed and pedestrian labels as boyfriend or husband. Anyway he’d been to Brooklyn, four or five times, to visit Danielle. They always wound up in some pencil-thin bar with deplorable acoustics, where people in black clothes sat around drinking mojitos and eating tiny plates of marinated shellfish. Nothing like the Lyons’ Den, its shag carpet like a terrarium for mold spores and dust mites, its pretzels that carbon-dated back to the previous century, its antique air conditioner clanking like a convict against its rickety, ill-fitting frame. The jukebox didn’t work. The eggs on the counter were yellow. The restrooms were neither roomy nor restful. Thank God Meta had turned him down. Thank God Teddy had the place to himself, to do as he wished. And what he wished to do now was drink a whole lot of beer.

  The first pint, though it went down with gratifying speed and efficiency, could hardly have been called satisfying. The same was true of the second. With the third he grew canny, nursing it along with miserly little sips for as long as he could, trying to make it last. But it didn’t. So he ordered a fourth. Four pints was approximately one over his limit; nonetheless he drank it down with a minimum of fuss. Then he ordered another. Conceivably his sense of his own limits was wrong, Teddy thought, was outgrown and outdated. Conceivably he had no limits. It was something to think about as he ambled toward the men’s room to take a leak.

  Swaying at the urinal, under the penitential light of the overhead bulb, he let fly with a thick rope of piss. The very force of it cheered him. This was no leak; this was a torrent. First he carved his initials in the pale round icelike cake of soap; then he shattered the rest into pieces; then he hosed down the dregs of a cigarette butt; and still enough was left in reserve to splash back against the enamel and onto his trousers.

  Well, such was life in the men’s room: messy but vital. If a little indignity was the price one paid for vigor, then he was willing to pay it, he thought.

  He zipped his trousers and began washing his hands in the dismal blue-veined sink. Glancing up, he had the bad luck to encounter his face in the mirror. His eyes were sunken and red; his scalp gleamed wanly under its pale corona. Mimi was right: he should never have shaved his head, never exposed this bone-plated ugliness to the world. His ears, with no hair or sideburns to obscure them, were now revealed to be a pair of enormous winged creatures—half-angel, half-dragon—affixed like twin succubi to the sides of his skull. An invading army of rust-red stubble crept up his neck; another streaked raggedly across his cheeks; a third patchy, rearguard unit traversed his scalp. Taken together they occupied a territory that now ran the length and breadth of his head. He looked as if he’d lost a fight with an Etch A Sketch, as if his big, moony face had been doodled over with lead shavings by some hyperactive child. Whatever the relation between his prior self and this demented cartoon character he now glimpsed in the mirror was a riddle that would require, Teddy thought, a great many more microbrews to solve. So he returned to the bar to get started.

  Back on his stool, he was treated to a number of Steve Lyons’s voluble opinions on property taxes, and the need for fresh paving on Exchange Street, and the encroachments of chain restaurants just south of town, subjects that might, to be fair, have engaged Teddy in the past, even if in the present they failed to distract him from his own preoccupations, and from the acrid scent of his own urine rising off his trousers. He popped a Tums and crunched it between his molars. The chalky blandness coated his tongue like a salve. The exultation he’d felt that day, shooting those portraits of Mimi, had gone soggy and shapeless as the napkin under his glass. And it was his own fault. He was the one who’d pushed too hard about Jeremy
Dunn. He was the one who’d lost his temper with the clerk at Sudden Exposures. He was the one who’d put a busy visiting lecturer in the awkward, compromising position of having to turn down a student’s offer of a drink. He was the one who’d foolishly descended into the Lyons’ Den, alone, among the boors and the stuffed cats, without an exit strategy, and had gorged himself on five, or wait, seven pints of beer. Somehow he’d allowed himself to become that man in the mirror, that bald, bloated fellow who needed his family to be extra sweet to him, instead of some leaner, finer, self-sufficient creature.

  By the time he finally pulled into his own driveway, Teddy’s bladder was so full and his level of self-discomfort so profound on so many levels both figurative and literal that he almost crashed into the black sedan someone had thoughtlessly left running there in the darkness. He swerved just in time, neatly avoiding the collision. But now, wait, here came the headlights of another car, bearing down fast from the other direction, and this time he wound up swerving not so neatly and plowed into something hard—the garage door—with a thud.

  For a moment he sat there in the freakish darkness. The car roared in idle. His palms were clammy; his pulse skittered in his wrist. Through the ragged, Tennessee-shaped gouge he’d made in the door, he could see the old sleds and skates on which they skimmed through the winters, the mountain bikes, hanging upside down from ceiling hooks, they pedaled in fall and spring, the Toro mower he rode like a knight in summer. The only form of transport missing from the garage was his car. There wasn’t room. Though now that he’d bashed in the door, there might be room for it after all.

  As for whom the black mystery sedan purring in his driveway, its radio muttering peaceably, belonged to, and why on closer inspection it bore such an uncanny resemblance to a sheriff’s cruiser, that was anyone’s guess. And the second car he’d swerved away from? Gone. Fled the scene. Unless of course (the idea welled up in his belly like a sea monster) his was the second car. Which would mean the headlights bearing down on him had been his own low beams, reflected in the garage windows. Which would mean that homicidal maniac who’d just tried to run him over in his own driveway would only be the usual suspect: himself.