Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  But later, back in his own kitchen, with the snow slanting against the windows and the radiator clanging like a bell, bucking and shuddering from its pent-up gases, it was difficult to settle down and concentrate on the Manifest Destiny essays to be graded, the lesson plans to be completed for the Civil War and Reconstruction units. Knowing he had plenty of time to accomplish these things, the whole three-day weekend in fact, did and did not help. He put down his red pen and stretched. He’d already discharged his duties at Don’s house. The two movies in town were conventional fluff; besides, he’d already seen them. He’d given away the television because it was useless without cable, and he’d canceled the cable because it was too expensive and he was too cheap. His shoulders ached from shoveling Don’s steps and walkway. Meanwhile his own steps and walkway needed shoveling. The coffee was tepid, he had hardly any food in the fridge, and—he rubbed his eyes with an ink-stained finger—the number on the answering machine read zero. Those were the facts. He remembered how over at Don’s house the machine had been too full of messages to pick up any more. Was his own too empty? He supposed they too had to be lubricated every so often; otherwise they froze up on you.

  There was no one he particularly wished to call, however, other than Gail Hastings, who for better or worse—probably the latter—seemed to have morphed these past weeks into his best friend. He punched out her number from memory. Then he remembered she was with her family all weekend, so he hung up, and called Sandy Krause instead.

  Sandy, his old friend from film school, taught screenwriting at a small college in Maryland. Five years before, he’d left his wife and two children and hooked up with Janet, a ceramist with three kids herself. Sandy had endured his share of the heart’s erratic mood swings all right. It was what made him such a wise, generous friend. Over the years, Sandy had burned Oren countless CDs for which he’d gone unthanked; had talked him through countless lesson plans for which he’d gone uncredited; had advised him on countless bleak nights in his dealings with Sabine for which he’d gone unheeded. So it was not entirely clear why the second the line was engaged, and a child’s voice came on, thick-tongued and pliant against the background noise of Sandy’s overpopulated kitchen, Oren hung up the phone at once.

  Immediately he felt suffused by shame. His eyes burned. The back of his head felt pulpy and swollen, as if he’d sprained it. To ensure that he would put an end to this irritating new habit of calling people and hanging up on them, Oren now set about tearing the phone from its jack. The cord was made of sturdy stuff however; it refused to tear free.

  Vengefully he gazed around his rented flat. Next to the ordered comfort of Don’s house, the place was an eyesore. He was tempted to take out his red pen again and give it the failing marks it deserved. Scribble unclear over the dingy wallpaper, and awk across the counter, and sloppy on every cheap, listing cabinet, and try again over the chocolate-colored drapes, and is this what you really intended? over the faded fake-Orientals scattered limply across the floor like so many used Band-Aids. The whole place cried out for a do-over, for some resourceful and industrious person to rebuild from scratch. Oren, God knew, was not that person. Home improvement had never been his style. Though maybe it should have been. He remembered Sabine telling him, back on Avenue B, “There’s nothing cool about living in a shithole where nothing works. It’s not a revolutionary statement or anything. It’s just laziness.”

  Okay, she was right. But then the absent were always right. Their every throwaway opinion lingered in the mind like a proverb, sonorous with truth. It wasn’t hard to turn yourself into an oracle of wisdom: all you had to do was leave.

  A thought sprang from his brain like from Zeus, fully formed. He too would leave. The day—no, the moment—the school year ended in June, he’d get in his car and go.

  He saw now, after his day at Don Blackburn’s—those cats! That bird! Those gaudy drooping plants that refused to die and refused to blossom!—how easy this would be. How inevitable. He felt the wind’s cold breath on his ankles, the hard, unforgiving nudge of the kitchen chair against his spine. To leave a place you’ve never fully occupied wasn’t hard. And he should know. He should know. Ninety minutes in a stranger’s house was all it took, it seemed, to estrange a man forever from his own.

  The next morning he went back to Obtuse Hill Drive and stayed all day. He did the same on Sunday, and again on Monday. There were just enough tasks to deal with at Chez Blackburn—a fresh layer of snow in the driveway, a leaky faucet in the upstairs bathroom, a rattling knob on the hallway closet—to make this seem less like loitering or trespassing than it did responsible house-sitting.

  It would have helped, of course, if he’d known the first thing about fixing faucets and doorknobs. As he poked through the mess in Don’s toolbox, the jagged screws, the rusty wrenches, the malevolent-looking pliers, he pictured his own father, that wizard of fixing, turning over and over in his grave like a rotisserie chicken. You see? All those evenings Oren had lingered outside the garage, fiddling with the automatic mechanism that opened and closed the sliding door (which was, thanks in part to his fiddling, forever getting jammed) while the old man labored at his workbench, peering through his goggles at some worn, recalcitrant hinge, his curly hair fringed white by the halo of the worklamp. Why had he never gone all the way in? It was as if he’d been waiting for some magic word, some mystical command to release or ensnare him for good. But Solomon Pierce was no word man. If you wanted to graph out your investment strategy or run interference with the IRS, okay; but for the intricacies of filial discourse you looked elsewhere. The bookshelves he sanded and stained, the chairs he refinished, the mahogany birdhouses like geometric puzzles—these were his discourse. He was a limited, melancholy person, Solomon Pierce, and Oren had vowed never to be like him, never settle for hobbies and small pastimes, the narrow compensations of the garage life. No, he’d hold out for something better. A visionary and extraordinary life doing something he loved, something he’d never seek to escape from…

  Just looking? the old man would ask, without glancing up. Or are you maybe interested in helping?

  I got to go and do some stuff.

  Ah.

  A tiny filament flicked on, or off, in his father’s eyes, registering the reluctance of his only son to pick up the wrench. The hammer. The screwdriver. The torch.

  Oh, he’d gone and done stuff, all right. Lots of stuff. And now here was the place all his going and doing had left him: back at the toolbox, square one. Even the small chores he undertook on Obtuse Hill Drive had a way of turning into big ones. Just changing a washer, a five-minute operation at most, took a half hour of intense concentration, and left him both sweaty and irritated and also bleeding gingerly from two knuckles as he went back to Don’s liquor cabinet, seeking a reward for his labors in that capacious closet.

  The well-aged Irish whiskey he found there, along with the muscle memory, pleasantly fading as the daylight waned, of his selfless expenditure of blood, sweat, and tears on the battlefield of home maintenance, provided a nice buzz. He pried his feet out of his boots and put on a pair of Don’s slippers. They were light, fleecy things with little bulges at the toes. They fit perfectly. The house was cozy and warm; the parakeet whistled airily in his cage. He chose a book of poetry from Don’s shelves and settled into the depths of the cool, plummy sofa, flipping the pages as he half-watched, in the background, a sitcom he’d never seen before on Don’s enormous TV. That it was so much more enjoyable to lie around wasting time at Don’s place than his own seemed only to confirm what he already knew: house-sitting agreed with him. Its rites and duties, its monastic discipline and sudden sanctifications…all this was what he’d been training for, this higher purpose; he would be inscribed in the book of life as a man who devoted himself to others.

  Indeed, he’d never felt quite so relaxed and at home as he did at Don’s that weekend—shoveling Don’s driveway, tending Don’s plants, sorting Don’s mail, drinking Don’s whiskey, watching Don’s c
able, skimming Don’s library (his own books were in storage somewhere; he hadn’t seen them in years); leafing through Don’s magazines, not all of which were pornographic, though of course he was grateful for those that were; absorbing himself in the various handpicked materials Don had surrounded himself with by way of consolation, Oren supposed, for his loneliness and fatness and loudness. He felt like the curator of the Don Blackburn Museum. With each passing hour, his attitude toward Don’s things grew increasingly watchful and proprietary. The interesting thing about the Don Blackburn Museum was that Don himself did not seem entirely essential to it. It was the man’s absence that lent these items of his meaning; his presence would only confuse the issue. No, Don’s place would just not have been Don’s place, in Oren’s opinion, if Don were there.

  Oren read until his eyes grew heavy, until the light went dull in the windows. The very vacancy of the house seemed full to him, immanent and indivisible, like an echo in a cave. He hoped Don never came home. He’d have liked to remain here forever. But if and when Don did come home, he hoped the two of them might become friends, might drink together and compare notes on their journeys away from and toward this same fine sofa. Yes, Don would understand better than most the art and practice, the higher calling, of the horizontal life.

  Come late Monday afternoon, he had the horizontal life going full swing—actually he was sort of dozing—when he heard the knob jiggle on the mudroom door. There was a soft, sucking pop, and then the door swung open on its jamb.

  “Honey?”

  Oren had napped just long enough, and drunk just enough of Don’s whiskey, to wonder if he was dreaming. Not moving seemed the right strategy in any case. Stealthily he sank a little lower in the sofa and drew the plaid comforter up over his head. In the dusk it might be possible to miss him.

  Meanwhile he wondered who Honey was.

  “Hey, are you here? Come on, baby, the door’s unlocked, I know you’ve got a key.”

  Oren said nothing. Not moving, and lying low, and remaining quiet: those were the orders from mission control. The footsteps went up the stairs, then across the ceiling over his head. Then they stopped.

  He heard a voice say, “Over at Don’s. Where are you? I thought—”

  And then: “When?”

  Unfortunately the next words were muffled by layers of plaster and wood, and by the dense, scratchy weave of the comforter on his face.

  “So what did they…Okay. Okay. But did you tell Dad?…Okay.”

  Muffled again.

  “But we’re going to need to tell him…. Yeah. When he gets in.”

  It was getting a little hard to breathe, down there under the comforter. He’d done his best to clean the place, but Don’s vacuum cleaner was an old machine; by now all the must and cat hair that had evaded him all weekend were insinuating themselves into his sinuses. It was tempting to just go ahead and stand up like a man and take what came. Only how did men go about standing up exactly? Even the best-case scenario was bound to be unpleasant, entailing a hasty defense of his presence in Don’s living room, and the uncapped bottle of Bushmills, as empty as it was full, an arm’s reach away.

  On the other hand he could always sneak out the back door. That was an option too.

  Upstairs the voice had now fallen silent. It might have been the silence of someone tracking a noise in another part of the house. The silence of someone placing a quick whispered call to the authorities. The silence of someone rummaging through a desk drawer for a small-caliber weapon….

  Definitely time to get up, Oren thought. Only, between the napping he’d done, the whiskey he’d consumed, the entanglements of the wool comforter, and below it his loosened belt and his pants’ current and increasingly habitual residence in the neighborhood of his ankles, getting up was complicated, with some effort and struggle involved. Which may have been why in the end he did not so much get up as get down, thudding face-first onto the floor instead.

  The breath whooshed from his lungs. He lay there waiting for it to come back. In an ideal world, of course, whoever was upstairs would not have heard him crash to the floor and would hence have no reason to come down at this moment and find him sprawled on the carpet, gasping like a flounder. And in fact no footsteps were forthcoming. Which meant possibly he hadn’t crashed to the floor as hard as he’d thought. In which case he failed to understand why his face hurt so much.

  A cell phone rang. It couldn’t have been his because he didn’t own one, and it couldn’t have been Don’s, because Don’s was in a drawer in the rehab unit, its battery long since gone dead.

  He got to his feet and zipped up his pants. He knew whose it was.

  He went to the bottom of the stairs and stood there trying to look blasé and preoccupied so that when Gail Hastings came down, she’d be disarmed right away by his nonchalance, his savoir faire, his je ne sais quoi, and not call the police or shoot him or do any of the other things one might well be inspired to do, catching a trespasser drinking and dozing and jerking off in your cousin’s house in the middle of a cold, cloudless Presidents’ Day afternoon. But Gail did not come down. Only the sun did, sinking gradually behind the mountains, turning down the heat, turning off the lights. The sun went to bed early in cold weather. Go with it, Oren told himself. Just go.

  He took one last look behind him, at the comforter still flung over the arm of the sofa, giving no comfort, and at the warm happy valley in the cushions where his body had lain, the impression of an invisible man.

  Then he went up to find her.

  She was lying on her back on the king-size bed in the master bedroom, staring calmly at the ceiling, or whatever she could see of it in the sepulchral haze. Her face was white. Her coat and shoes were still on.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey yourself.”

  “You okay?”

  “I was looking for Mimi. I asked her to drop by and check on things. But she wasn’t here.”

  So Mimi was Honey, he thought. Not him.

  “Then, I don’t know, I felt like putting my feet up all of a sudden. I’m kind of wiped out, to tell the truth.”

  “I thought you were out of town. I wasn’t expecting you to be back so soon.”

  “I know.” She turned to see him better. “What about you?”

  “Oh, I just came over to, you know, like, feed the cats and stuff.”

  “You sound like you’ve been spending, like, way too much time at the middle school.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said. “Anyway it’s nice to see you.”

  “It is?” She put a hand over her eyes, as if holding back a glare. But the little light that remained was watery and gray. “What is it about you easygoing men? You have this way of bringing out my aggressions.”

  “I’m not so easygoing. I wish I were. Anyway I don’t think you’re aggressive. I think you’re passionate.”

  “Passionate! Mother of God, I think I’m going to cry.” But she didn’t. “Listen,” she said, “you’re very sweet, but you don’t know the half of it. I’m incredibly vain. I was one of the pretty girls in high school, and I never got over it. I’m bitchy and ungenerous and narrow as the day is long. I complain all the time. Really, you’d be amazed. It just fills up the day.”

  “Maybe you have reason to complain.”

  “Everyone has reasons to complain. But not everyone does.”

  “Well, maybe everyone should.” Then he made his confession. “I heard you before. Talking on the phone.”

  “So I’m not crazy. I thought somebody was down there. I assumed it was Mimi or one of her friends.” She turned to face him. “Why didn’t you say something? Why did you hide?”

  “I wouldn’t call it hiding. It was more like not quite getting it together to announce myself.”

  “You’re a big one for subtle distinctions, aren’t you, Oren?”

  He shrugged.

  “Okay, then let me be subtle too. I think I’d maybe like to be alone for a while. I’m not feeling so well. Da
nny called,” she added gravely, as if that should mean something to him.

  “Danny?”

  “My daughter Danielle. The one who’s gone off backpacking around India and Nepal? Except it turns out she’s in Kenya now. Or, no, wait, where’s Addis Ababa? Is that Kenya or Ethiopia?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never been to Africa. I know it’s a hot destination these days.”

  “I thought Vietnam was hot. I thought Thailand was hot. I thought India and Nepal were hot.”

  “Oh, India’s always hot,” he said. “I was there back in the nineties.”

  “I thought college was hot too. Especially when you’ve got a merit scholarship you’ll lose if you don’t go back. But it seems she’s found her calling. She’s working in this AIDS orphanage, and she wants to stay. She was going to be a great environmental scientist. Now she’s Angelina Jolie.”

  “Sounds pretty admirable to me.”

  “It would be, if she was doing it for the right reasons. Reasons she came to herself. But all she’s doing is following that boyfriend of hers, Gabi. He says Africa, she goes to Africa.” Gail yawned and stretched. “See? I told you: bitchy and ungenerous. Probably I’m just jealous. I mean, how great, to just do what you feel like doing and not worry about the consequences. Go anywhere you want. Know that feeling, Oren?”

  “Yes. Very well.”

  “And is it great?”

  “I suppose for some people it must be.”

  “I wouldn’t mind trying it out, to tell you the truth. Like tonight. Maybe just shoot up to Montreal on a whim. Throw a few things in a bag, grab the passport, and go. How would that be? Eat someplace expensive by the water, where I can wear pearls and a good dress and speak French to the waiters, and order nothing but hors d’oeuvres. They always turn out to be the best part of the meal anyway, don’t you think?”

  “We probably go out to different kinds of places. Generally I just get the wings.”