Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  Two Wednesdays after they’d crossed paths in the parking lot, he arrived in Don’s room to discover Gail Hastings occupying her old chair. He was reasonably certain she’d arranged it that way.

  They nodded at each other like strangers, then sat awkwardly on opposite sides of the bed. A misting sleet glazed the windows. It was a few weeks before Christmas; the mournful drone of “The Little Drummer Boy” echoed down the corridor. Don, his condition stabilized but unpromising, lay sunk in a fogged-in, aphasic Santa Land all his own.

  Finally Oren cleared his throat. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  Gail frowned. “And here I was hoping you’d find a way not to say that.”

  “Someone had to.”

  “Did they? Why?”

  He shrugged. So far this was not going at all well. On the other hand, what was this anyway? What did he expect this to be?

  “I realize,” he said, “this must seem like pretty bizarre behavior to you. My being here. You’d be totally within your rights to be wondering why.”

  “But I’m not wondering why.”

  “Well, I sure as hell would. I’d be wondering why like crazy.” He seemed incapable of lying to this woman for some reason. And he was good at lying to women; it was something of a trademark in fact. “I’d find it very strange and disturbing.”

  “Not to burst your bubble, rabbi, but I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment. I wasn’t thinking about you at all.”

  He nodded, stung.

  “I’m assuming though, if you’re here,” she went on more kindly, “you must have your reasons. Vaguely spiritual reasons. I seem to remember that’s your forte, isn’t it? Spirituality? The relief of existential distress?”

  “Okay, wait, isn’t this where we left off last time?”

  “Or maybe you were hoping to get another look at me, is that it? The poor disgraced wife in her time of need. Maybe you wanted to save me, hey?”

  “Actually,” he said, truly irritated now, “I’m just here to drop off some Christmas cards from the kids in Don’s homeroom.”

  “Let me see.”

  Obediently he handed her a thick manila folder stuffed with cards and watched her leaf through them. “There’s a nice one from Zoe in there too. She must have worked on it for days. And a jazzy seasonal number from the gals in the outer office.”

  “Nothing from you?” she said, glancing up from her reading.

  “Me?” Reflexively he showed her his palms, then turned them over to admire their emptiness himself. “I’m just the mailman. Here to spread some holiday cheer.”

  “The lonesome courier.”

  “Something like that,” he said. “Merry Christmas to you by the way.”

  “Thanks. Is it still Hanukkah, or is that over now? Should I wish you something for that?”

  “Don’t bother. My feeling is, people should enjoy the privileges of being in the oppressive hegemonic majority culture without having to apologize for it.”

  “I wasn’t apologizing.”

  “Anyway I’m not particularly observant. It’s not my mode.”

  “What is your mode, exactly?” She leveled her gaze at him across the bed. “I’m having trouble getting it straight.”

  “Right now I guess my mode is visiting sick people in the hospital, and not knowing why.”

  “Then maybe you’re more observant than you think.”

  He gave this idea a moment’s consideration. It seemed to him rather fanciful and charming.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I’m grateful to you for coming. I was grateful the first time too. I’m not too proud of how I treated you that day. You went out of your way for a man you hardly knew. That’s more than most people do.”

  “I guess most people are pretty busy. You know, with their lives and all.”

  “I don’t care about most people. I only care about the people I know. And for some reason they’re always the ones who behave the worst.”

  “Well, now you know me too,” he said.

  She gave a little laugh. “You’re pretty self-confident, aren’t you, for a guy who has no idea what he’s doing here.”

  “I didn’t say I had no idea what I was doing. I said I had no idea why.”

  “I’m not sure I see the distinction. But whatever. I’ll reserve judgment.” She took a sip from her travel mug. He could tell from the arch of her neck that she was down to the dregs of whatever liquid was in there. “You’re kind of a piece of work though, aren’t you, Oren?”

  “How so?”

  “Well, on the one hand you like to make an impression. You come on like such a good boy, all nice and attentive. But there’s this hovering, vampire thing going on too. I can’t help but feel there’s something you want, only I can’t figure out what. I don’t think you can figure out what.”

  “This you call reserving judgment?”

  “I also think you were flirting with me a second ago and you didn’t even mean it. I find that frankly disturbing.”

  “Would it be less disturbing if I did mean it?”

  She frowned, picking at a nail on her left hand. She had that intelligent way of coping with hypothetical questions: by ignoring them.

  “Maybe you’re not used to people being attentive,” he offered. “Maybe that’s why you don’t trust it.”

  “Well, and that’s the other hand. Maybe you’re right, and I’m just a cranky, dried-up old bag who wants to be left alone. There are worse things than being left alone, I’m beginning to think.”

  “Are there?” He tried to conceive of what these worse things might be. But obviously he was in a different phase of his life than she was. He supposed this had been evident to her from the first. “Anyway you’re not so dried up.”

  She frowned and looked away. How stupid and transparent he was, what a vain, foolish, predictable person, imposing himself on this overburdened woman, when all she wanted was the thing he had too much of.

  The silence between them having now conclusively been restored, she squeezed out some white hand lotion and rubbed it over her fingers. A boy trudged down the corridor, trailing an IV stand with rattling wheels. The oncology unit was just down the hall.

  “Okay then.” He rose and reached for his peacoat. He’d bought it on Canal Street some years back, marveling at its heft when he’d tried it on, its substantiality. But it took forever to get the thing buttoned. Everything he did took much too long. He looked down at Don Blackburn’s droopy, insensate form. He felt, as he always did visiting Don, a vague but powerful attraction, if not to Don then to the bed in which he lay.

  “Boy,” Gail Hastings said, watching him pull up his collar, “you do give up easily, don’t you.”

  “Okay, I’m confused. I thought you wanted to be left alone.”

  She shrugged. “Well, are you going to keep coming back, or not? We should get that straight don’t you think? Before you go running off?”

  “I’m not running off. But sure. Fine.”

  “Who am I to discourage you from doing something nice, if that’s what you want to do. Maybe you should stick around for a while, I’m thinking, until we figure it out.”

  “Fine.”

  “You’re fine either way, aren’t you?” She watched as he sat down again on the edge of the chair, his coat half-buttoned. “How refreshing, a man who likes being told what to do. You’ll make a good second husband for somebody. Maybe not such a good first husband though.”

  “Yeah, so I’ve heard,” he said. “Unfortunately, I was proposing to the person who said it at the time.”

  When she laughed, as she did now, the whole shape of her face changed, became more open and heart-shaped, more recklessly discomposed. “Poor baby. And that was when?”

  “A couple years ago. Back in New York. New York was kind of Fiasco Central there for a while.”

  “And before New York?”

  “How much time do you have? I’d need to draw you a whole map.”

  She laugh
ed again. He was beginning almost to require this of her, this grudging bemusement. The effort it cost her felt like an accomplishment. “It must be great to live life so lightly. Go anywhere you want, whenever you want. Just pick a place and go.”

  “Yeah, it’s a real riot.” He ran a hand through his hair; was it less thick than he remembered? “And just for the record, I’m thirty-three.”

  “Really? I’d have said younger.”

  He tried, and failed, to receive this as a compliment.

  “Hey, don’t look so glum,” she said. “At least you’ve been out there extending yourself. I find that appealing in a person. Just so long as they don’t extend themselves, you know, too far.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was playing with him, or flattering him, or whether she was thinking about him at all. The hand cream she’d rubbed on her fingers smelled milky and sweet. He could not recall the last time he’d noticed the smell of a woman’s fingers. “And what about your husband?” he said abruptly. “Did he go too far?”

  The window of her face went dark. “Ask him yourself,” she said.

  If he were still in therapy—and, boy, Oren was thinking, could he use some—he’d have been forced to confront the possibility that he’d invoked her husband on purpose. First to punish her for her interest in him, such as it was, and then to punish himself for his interest in her, such as it was. But his therapy days were over. His therapist was back on West Ninety-first Street, treating the next generation of overeducated neurotics, while Oren made his own way unguided through the wilds. Or was his own way making him? If so it was doing a deplorable job—he could tell from the firm, efficient way Gail now turned her back to him, to say nothing of her arms and legs and feet, and began reading the holiday cards aloud to Don, which Oren should by now have long done himself. Her voice was lucid, patient, and expressive: a mother’s voice. The very mother, he reminded himself, of these two sly, watchful-looking girls in the doubled frame, whose eyes he felt upon him even now, waiting for him to slip up somehow, to pilfer one too many sweets.

  Don for his part lay breathing noisily through his mouth. His face was red; his eyes raked the ceiling. The more Gail read, the more trapped and distraught he looked, like a toddler stuck too long in his crib.

  “Why bother?” Oren said. “He isn’t listening.”

  “He might be. He’s not deaf, you know. They say most of his faculties are intact even now. He’s still in there somewhere.”

  “If so, he’s pretty well hidden.”

  “Give him time,” she said. “Sometimes it takes a year, the doctor said. For all we know he could be on his way right now to a full recovery. Isn’t that right, Don?”

  Don blinked up at her helplessly.

  “They’ll be moving him to rehab later this week. It’s an impressive facility. He’ll get speech and movement therapy and a lot of other stuff too. One thing about our generation, we know how to mobilize our resources. We’re not going gently into that good night, no sir.”

  “To have to start over again from scratch though,” Oren said. “At his age.”

  “Oh, I imagine it’s not so bad, starting over.” She ran her palm over Don’s limp white hair, smoothing it back from his forehead; she did so tenderly, and with cool insistence, as if channeling all her energies into dominion over this one narrow, lawless area. “You’d get the chance to relearn so many things you’ve taken for granted. How to walk, how to talk, how to eat…it’s like being a baby again, I should think. Or having one. You get to rediscover the world.”

  “To me it sounds pretty tedious.”

  “Anyway there’s no choice,” she said. “So that’s that.”

  That’s that. He thought of all the caretaking that must go into being a mature woman, the sick children to be attended, the medicines and compresses to be administered, the worried phone calls to be made, the bowls of soup, the cups of tea. How sexist and unfair it was. Though the narcissist in him, which generally had the run of things, hoped for a grown daughter of his own someday to tend to him when he was old and failing, the moralist in him was outraged in advance on the poor girl’s behalf.

  Fortunately this daughter of his was, like so much of his life, still hypothetical. “So how can I help?”

  “Help?” Gail looked amused.

  “Why not? It’s my job, you know. He’s a member of the faculty. I’m not just being polite.” Of course he was just being polite, but what the hell—that was what politeness was for. To make you seem better behaved than you were, on the chance that at some point it stopped being a pretense and became the truth. “Try me. Give me something to do.”

  “Well, if you really want to do something, just keep doing what you’re doing. Come visit him in rehab. That would help. Even if he doesn’t show it, the human contact does him good.”

  “It does me good too.” Outside it had begun to snow, hard. The sight of it was satisfying somehow.

  “And maybe bring more of those chocolates with you next time. They keep disappearing. The orderlies I guess. They’re like pirates around here.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  “Also, and this may really be more than you want to take on, but sometime in the future I might ask you to stop by Don’s house once or twice. There’s not a lot to do. Take in the mail, water the plants, feed the cats and goldfish, that sort of thing. Shovel the walk. Zoe and I’ve been taking turns, but sometimes it gets away from us.”

  “Sure thing.” Nothing could have come as less of a surprise than Don Blackburn having cats in his house. “Happy to do it.”

  “Don’t be too quick to commit yourself. This might go on for several more weeks. Longer even.”

  “Honestly, committing myself too quickly has never been a problem.” The snow was coming down in ropes, burying the grilles and hoods of the cars below. “How much longer though?”

  “You tell me. There’s a lot they don’t understand about aphasia. I’ve done some reading, and I don’t understand it either. It seems we all carry around this inner world and this outer world, and then something breaks, and they stop linking up.”

  “Story of my life.”

  She regarded him coldly. “It’s so easy to be glib about other people’s problems.”

  “Actually, if you want to know, I was being glib about my own.”

  “Ah, right, I forgot. Poor baby. How stressful it must be, so young and beautiful, with all this time on your hands you don’t know what to do with.”

  “I think he’s still waiting for you to finish.” Oren nodded toward the get-well cards in her hands. Had she really said he was beautiful? “I left the best ones for last. Some of the girls in his homeroom went a little wild.”

  “I’ll bet.” She shuffled through the cards, her mouth turned down wryly at the corners. Oren was sufficiently proud of the effort that had gone into them—even if that effort wasn’t voluntary, but a required project in Renee Daley’s art class, which had devoted two periods to it—to overlook all the cross-outs and spelling mistakes. But was Gail? “I bet they like you over there, don’t they? Girls that age, they go for the cool withholding types.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You’re Mr. Mellow, hey, Oren? Is that the secret of your popularity?”

  “I’m not that popular. I just have one advantage over the others, that’s all.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, congratulations, Mr. Pierce. You’ve attained a state to which I aspire.”

  “Oh?”

  “Nonattachment. You’re traveling light. It’s a rare thing. Maybe I should stop going to yoga, and let you give me lessons in your kind of purity instead.”

  “Maybe you should,” he said. “Maybe I will.”

  For Oren, after so many years as an underachiever, it was almost as gratifying as it was enervating to be called upon so often and so relentlessly as he was that winter. No longer did he meander his way through the long, aimless afternoons, peering
listlessly in classroom windows, like a tourist in some placid landlocked country—Switzerland, say—with a favorable rate of exchange. Whatever principality he inhabited now was more like India, a messy, anarchic place full of traffic noise, bad smells, and strange gods, with a wobbly infrastructure and a maddening bureaucracy and an array of highly dubious and provisional public services. It was not the sort of place Oren would have chosen to visit at this particular moment in his life, but then he had no choice. With Ted Hastings gone, and Don Blackburn in rehab, and a virulent Asian-flu bug mowing down the other faculty; with the snow piling up in the parking lot, the ice glazing over the sidewalks, the mercury loitering in the teens, the buses lurching and sliding in the circular driveway, he couldn’t just do what came naturally—that is, go home after school and leave Zoe Bender to deal with it all herself—even if everyone, Zoe included, might have preferred it that way; even if nothing made her happier than sitting alone at a desk deep into the night, sipping burnt coffee and nibbling on whatever strands of her hair had strayed, in the tumult of the day, from the strict confinement of their elasticized band. That was how Zoe got her kicks.

  “Off somewhere interesting?” she’d call blithely from her office as Oren struggled into his coat.

  “Nah. Just going home.”

  “Home.” From the fond and reverent sigh that followed, she might have been Judy Garland in Oz. “Well, have fun then.”

  It was difficult for Oren to have fun, however, when he’d been directed to do so, and when he was wrestling with (and losing to) that undersize weakling, his conscience. In the end it was easier not even to try. Easier to be the good boy who stays after school and helps out. The teacher’s pet. Wasn’t that how he’d got to be acting vice principal in the first place? And how did acting vice principals act? They acted busy, very busy. They solicited substitutes, they called back parents, they rescheduled canceled hockey games and organizational meetings, they ordered up materials for the next in-service day, they ran off copy after copy of bureaucratic and unreadable memos on the sluggish photocopier in the outer office. Above all, they worked late, gazing out wistfully at the smudged and darkening sky, the empty, sleet-slickened parking lot, watching their fellow faculty members struggle into their coats, get into their cars—their exhaust trails vanishing into the gloom—and leave the tedium of their jobs behind. At home they had families waiting, hasty dinners, noisy arguments, children to haul back and forth to pottery or basketball or tae kwon do.