Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  More tedium, Oren thought. No one got away free. It was just a matter of exchanging one mess for another. He tried to take some consolation from this thought as he holed up in his office in the evenings, raiding the secretaries’ ramen soups and candy bars for nourishment.

  During the day of course he rarely thought at all, busy as he was hurtling like a pinball through the school’s noisy, lit-up maze, stepping in where needed. It seemed he was needed everywhere. From seventh-grade Social Studies in South Wing, he went directly to Supervised Study in East Wing, to eighth-grade Social Studies in North Wing, to Lunch A in the Cafeteria, Student Council in West Wing, Lunch B back in the Cafeteria, a half hour of administrative duty in the Inner Office, and finally one last detour to North Wing, where he’d pound his head both figuratively and, on one particularly dismal afternoon, literally against the blackboard, trying to encourage Don’s defiantly untranscendental Language Arts class to invest themselves in the great works of nineteenth-century American literature.

  And mind you that was during school. After school he was really busy.

  On Monday afternoons, filling in for Don, he supervised the yearbook staff, who appeared to be composed of the same cohort of bright, can-do, civic-minded kids Oren had avoided like the plague—or had they avoided him?—in his own school days. On Tuesdays he filled in for Jack Russo, the ponytailed, droopy-eyed music instructor, with his Introductory Guitar group, so Jack could attend couples counseling with Melanie, his soon-to-be third ex-wife. Thursdays he filled in for Teddy Hastings with the chess club, all three of whose members, Oren was gratified to discover, he still had the chops to destroy at will and send home in tears. And on Wednesdays of course he filled in for God. That is, drove to the hospital’s sparkling new rehab unit to spend an hour or so in Don’s semiprivate room, reading aloud choice excerpts from Times op-eds and reporting, to no perceivable purpose and with no perceivable encouragement from Don, any new and/or interesting developments at school. After which—and he assumed his path and God’s diverged at this point—he’d head off to the Carthage Y, where he and Gail Hastings would swim laps, then drink coffee and, in a low-key, indirect way, tend to the maintenance and growth of their own small plot of sexual tension.

  And Fridays? On Fridays, instead of shooting over to the Lyons’ Den after school as on Fridays of yore, to join Jack, Zoe, Renee Daley, Sue Harper, and the other single members of the faculty in their weekly rituals of gossip and exorcism, he now—thanks to Gail, or rather to his own mystifying compulsion to impress or confound her, he wasn’t sure which, perhaps both—found himself driving twenty-odd miles of unpaved road to the far reaches of the Carthage valley. Where, in exchange for exactly zero remuneration, he’d pass the week’s final hours in a trailer behind the milking barn at the Duquette dairy farm, instructing Emanuel, Carlos, and Demetrio, three Mexican workers of dubious legal status, in the arbitrary workings of his native tongue.

  And that wasn’t even the noteworthy thing about Fridays. The noteworthy thing was he enjoyed it. Enjoyed it immensely. Which perplexed him. Because so modest were Oren’s talents in the ESL area, and so rudimentary were the exercises he’d unearthed from a workbook in the Carthage library, and so vapid and peppy did he sound to his own ears, cheering the three young men on as they worked away at their makeshift desks, that when each session ended and they stood at the door of their drab double-wide and shyly, solemnly, with eyes half-averted, took turns shaking his hand, it was all their new teacher could do not to break into giggles or sobs. What on earth was happening to him? And when would it stop? By what strange alchemy had he been transmuted from the person who receives instruction to the person who gives it? What a joke that was! And yet the Mexican fellows weren’t laughing. They appeared to take their teacher rather seriously, a good deal more seriously, in truth, than he took himself. Surely his manic pacing around the trailer, commenting on everything he saw, as if he’d never set foot on a working farm before; surely his way of hesitating in the doorway at the hour’s end, saying his own shy, formal, almost apologetic good-byes, as if he were no more certain than they of the rules governing his silly and capricious language; surely the haste with which he jumped into his car afterward and backed it down the rutted, ice-slickened road, as if someone were chasing him…surely for Emanuel, Carlos, and Demetrio, all this must have fallen, on their own maps of civilized behavior, somewhere to the left of strange.

  It seemed that way to Oren, in any case, as he skidded down the driveway in reverse, trying to put it all behind him in the rearview. The frigid trailer; the shitty rabbit-eared television; the two-burner hot plate; the mud-spattered bikes they rode to work in the barns. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. For the twenty minutes it took to drive home, even the smallest, most predictable comforts that waited there—a hot shower, a working phone, a comfortable bed—came to seem fantastical, otherworldly. That was the good side of his little foray into volunteer social work. That and the pleasure of the men’s company, their eagerness to learn, their warm, teasing humor. The bad side of course was everything else. Knowing, in a way he had managed not to know before, that the trailer was there all the time, even when he wasn’t, which was why people like him could zip over to the store whenever they liked and pay $1.89 for a half gallon of milk. Knowing they had relatives and friends at other farms but no car to go see them, and besides, it was better not to attract attention. We must be shadows always, they told him. But the pay was good, and every other Sunday the church brought them dinner, and Senora Hastings had arranged for a dentist to come fix their teeth, and now thanks to Oren, the golden one, they were learning better English, so they would not complain about the small things.

  Four thousand miles they’d come to milk other people’s cows in the freezing dark, and they would not complain about the small things. Some system.

  He wondered, driving away, whether Emanuel, Carlos, and Demetrio thought of him as part of that system or an exception to it, or if they thought of him at all. Did they mention their new teacher in their letters home? Did they make fun of him when he left, for his blond, uncombed hair, his nervous laugh, his loco driving, his habit of blushing and apologizing when he corrected their grammar, as if he felt sorry for them? How absurd. They had come to this place voluntarily; they knew what they were doing, and for whom, and for how long. It was him, their teacher, this educated gringo, this native son with his university degrees: he was the one who seemed not to know things. All he had were borrowings. He spent his time with another man’s wife, did another man’s job, took care of another man’s house. He was no more at home in this world, no less a shadow, than they were. At least they had a home somewhere else, where they could be themselves. Did the golden one have that?

  But the golden one was gone.

  And so went the days. If it was Oren’s nature to hold himself back, to remain exempt from the suck and swoosh of quotidian life; and if the ground on which he’d planted his feet was now revealed to be sand, hissing away in some tidal undertow he sensed but could not see; and if his resistance was now crumbling, bit by bit, into the fogbank of exhaustion…well, too bad. He would not stand watch over himself like a lighthouse, sweeping his beam around. He had neither the time nor the energy. And that was good. That was great. Not having the time or the energy to think seemed the most wondrous new accomplishment of all. Or would have, if he’d had the time, and also the energy, to think about it. But he didn’t. No, the news came to him only glancingly, in odd, unbidden moments…stepping out of the shower stiff-legged in the morning, or driving home through the dusk, the headlights scooping out their small, grudging portions of road…that this was it, the very thing he’d been seeking all these years, what other people called, with no apparent irony or loathing, real life.

  And yet nothing had ever felt quite so unreal. The days peeling off, light and flimsy and blurrily similar, like copies off a mimeograph machine. Then another, then another. How strange it was, how novel and extraordinary, being ordinary
. Working hard all day on small, achievable tasks, then spacing out at night in front of the television, then waking the next morning to another set of small, achievable tasks…he’d never felt so weighed down by commitments and yet at the same time so weightless, so blank. If this was normality, then he couldn’t say he liked it much. On the other hand he didn’t dislike it either. He didn’t know if it was the numbness of indifference or the serenity of acceptance, but the most he could say about his life that winter was also approximately the least he could say: it was something new.

  And then there were the weekends.

  On Saturday mornings, like failed rabbis everywhere, he slept late. Or rather tried to. Sleeping late was hardly a new regimen for Oren—he’d slept late for years, even at times he may have passed for awake—yet now that sleeping late was no longer an elective but a requirement, now that he needed to catch up on weekends for the rest that had evaded him all week, it began to evade him on weekends too. A cramp in his bladder. A stray branch banging against the window. The leaden rumble of the snowplow, scraping away night’s fluffy insulation, baring the raw, gray morning that waited below. An enormous effort was required to ignore all this and go on sleeping, precisely the sort of effort Oren was way too tired these days to pull off.

  The latest he managed to sleep anymore was nine thirty, a far cry from the epic slumbers of his youth. Still, nine thirty wasn’t so bad. If you were married, say, married with kids, as virtually everyone he knew at this point was, sleeping to nine thirty would be an enchanted dream. No wonder married people with kids complained so much and looked so haggard, so bereft. Though if you were married with kids, there would be other compensations too, he imagined, such as engaging in sexual contact with a more tender and resourceful companion than your own right hand.

  Not that he was belittling the pleasure his hand still brought him, with admirable regularity. Not that he was complaining about that.

  Anyway by the time he’d extricated himself from bed, had showered and shaved and dressed, and downed three or four mugs of coffee while listening to the radio and reading every word of the newspaper, it would be close to eleven, and eleven was within hailing distance of lunch. At which point, between the food to be cooked and the dishes to be cleaned afterward, he was well on his way into afternoon. As for the rest of the day, it was a piece of cake, really, something to be nibbled away with chores and errands, and grading papers, and, when he was feeling particularly outdoorsy, trekking through the woods on a pair of snowshoes Gail Hastings had lent him, either solo or in the company of Gail and her large, clumsy, unintelligent dog. The snowshoes, possibly because they belonged to her husband (he had gone off on a long trip, though she was reluctant to share the details), didn’t fit. The bindings were loose, fixed for a wider sole and higher arch; they tended to snap under stress and fall off. But it was good exercise, slogging through the crusty snow, following the tracks of the deer and the birds, and however slowly the hours passed, they did pass, and then they were gone.

  But then the Presidents’ Day holiday rolled around, and on Friday afternoon Gail and her daughter were headed off to visit relatives, and Zoe and Jack and Renee and his other single friends on the faculty would be off to Boston or Montreal or New York on their hopeful marathon quest to no longer be single, and the radio was forecasting an enormous stalled front of sleeting rain, and he knew that no matter how late he slept and how many errands and movies and cups of coffee he pumped into the fuel tank he’d never get to the end of the vacant seventy-two-hour highway that stretched before him. So he went ahead and volunteered to take over care of Don’s house for the weekend, and Gail went ahead and let him.

  Don Blackburn lived on Obtuse Hill Drive, a dirt road four miles south of Carthage village. Because the house stood so far back from the road, and the road was such a thin, meandering tributary of another dirt road, Oren might have passed it by were it not for the map Zoe Bender had given him, which was fanatically detailed. Pulling into the ice-slickened driveway, he parked at the low end so as not to get stuck. He looked up at the house, a disheveled-looking Victorian with drooping eaves. It too could use some rehab, he thought. Shutters were falling off their hinges. The chimneys needed pointing; slate tiles had sheared off the roof. The gutters, clotted with frozen leaves, bent and zagged like drinking straws.

  Zoe had, in addition to her map with its neat hand-drawn arrows that left nothing to chance, also handed him a set of keys, each one labeled with its own little lime-green Post-it, and a bullet-pointed checklist of tasks to be attended to both inside and outside the house, and in what order. No one would ever accuse Zoe of being inattentive to detail, only of being boring and exasperating and maybe breaking your heart. She was like Jenny Saunders from his eighth-period class, the kind of girl who candy-stripes at the hospital and organizes outings for the youth group at church, and who in the evenings, after the dishes have been cleared and the homework done, the piano scales practiced to perfection, snuggles under the covers and falls asleep under the watchful gaze of a whole menagerie of stuffed animals. But then the world was full of nice, competent girls like Zoe and Jenny; in fact it depended upon them. So why make fun? It wouldn’t kill him to be a little more like Zoe and Jenny, Oren thought, and a little less like himself.

  Besides, it did make things easier, having Zoe’s thorough checklist to guide him as he let himself in through the garage and heard the door wheeze shut behind him.

  Immediately he set about executing his instructions. He brought in the mail and sorted it into piles on the dining room table. He watered the plants, fed the fish and the parakeet, measured out the cat food, and filled the water bowls to the decreed level. He went down to the basement to examine the insulation around the water heater for slippage. He ran the taps in the sink for ten minutes so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. He checked the oven’s pilot light so the house didn’t surreptitiously fill with gas fumes and explode. He tested the furnace. He turned off the upstairs-hallway light and then turned on the downstairs-hallway light to confuse any potential burglars. He shoveled and de-iced the steps to provide traction for the postal carriers and Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to the front door. Finally, he ran the engine on Don’s car to keep the battery alive and the engine lubricated. The old Volvo sedan was a classic of sorts. Oren wouldn’t have minded taking it for a little spin himself.

  He felt that way about a lot of Don’s things, actually. The planky antique farm table. The comfortable leather sofa, the handsome rugs and funky lamps. Don’s stereo was first-rate; his shelves were full of nice hardcover books. The burgundy wingbacks that framed the fireplace, the round oak coffee table with its whorls and scars, and the hutch that held the dishes, and the weathered but solid-looking lowboy—all were in surprisingly good taste. A game of chess was under way on the ottoman. No one appeared to be winning, on the other hand no one appeared to be losing either. Even the plants Oren had watered so patiently (maybe too patiently: pools were rising in their ceramic undersitters), the coleus and jades, the spider plants and avocado and lemon trees, had a shiny, prosperous air.

  He withdrew a bottle of Bushmills from Don’s liquor cabinet and took a quick pull. Then another. Then he wandered around the house for a while. Finally he wound up, as he knew all along he would, in Don’s bedroom. Among the magazines on Don’s night table were the usual Blackburnian suspects: TLS, The Nation, Harper’s, and so on. None of these would do.

  It took a little searching, but in time he found what he was looking for, on the floor below the bed. He lay atop the duvet for a while, reviewing the table of contents. There would doubtless be some important articles he wouldn’t want to miss.

  When the phone rang, he didn’t answer. The machine, however, appeared to be full from all the previous messages it had absorbed—forty-six, according to the digital indicator—and had no appetite left. So at last he was forced to pick up. “Is this the man of the house I’m speaking to?” asked some solicitor or other.

  “Actually t
hat’s kind of a gray area at the moment.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Miss July was a patriot of sorts, a flag-draped brunette with a smoldering gaze and a taste for cherry pie. She was lying across a picnic table on her stomach, her lips, glazed and shiny, pursed into an o. Meanwhile the fingers of her right hand, like some shiny and purposeful centipede, busied themselves in the depths of her red-white-and-blue thong. “You’d better call back,” Oren said.

  All the glib, nasty little judgments he’d directed Don’s way over the years darted like mice through the baseboards of his mind. Clearly Don, no less than this house he was the man of, had his doubled facets, his quirks and complexities, his incongruous interiors. Don too presented one face to the world and kept another, more complicated one to himself. Maybe everyone did. Maybe you always wound up choosing where you wore your particular mess, inside or out, like a coat with a reversible lining.

  In any case Oren was inside and out of there in an hour and a half, give or take. If you discounted those two sips—okay, slugs—of whiskey, and his interrupted pleasures with Miss July, he didn’t even steal anything this time.