Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “Some brandy too. And something really fancy for dessert, with poached pears and lychee nuts and balsamic reduction. And then maybe just stroll around for a while, look at the lights and shops, see what’s hanging in the windows. An hour or two of that would suit me just fine. I wouldn’t object to a little making out in the cab on the way back to the hotel, either.”

  “Should I get my car? What do you say? It’s right outside.”

  She was silent for a moment, examining the cuticle on her thumb. It looked pretty chewed up.

  “Other than my husband,” she announced, “I’ve slept with exactly two men in my life. There was Tom, my eleventh-grade boyfriend, who turned out to be bisexual, and there was this good-looking lifeguard at Lake George. We only did it once. He took me to the office behind the refreshment stand, and bango! I could hear the popcorn machine going the whole time.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “The thing is, Tom and I were still together. I never told him. I didn’t think he could take it.”

  “Look, wanting to have sex with someone new doesn’t make you a bad person.”

  “It’s not the wanting,” she said. “It’s the having. That’s different. It’s especially different when you’re married.”

  “You don’t need to keep reminding me you’re married.”

  “It’s not you I’m reminding.” She wriggled deeper into the mattress, getting more comfortable; she seemed in no particular hurry to get up. “So let’s move on. Tell me about your weekend. What did you do all day, other than call me on the cell phone that time and hang up?”

  At the sight of his expression she laughed. “Didn’t you know? You can’t get away with that sort of thing anymore. The technology’s too good. The phone keeps a record. You have to own up to everything you do now. Even the mistakes.”

  “It wasn’t a mistake,” he said.

  “What, did you miss me? Sit down and tell Mama all about it.”

  “I would, but there’s no room.”

  “There’s plenty of room.” She scooted over, making space for him on the bedspread. “Poor boy. You’re not very good at this, are you?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “You shouldn’t have asked me before if you should get your car. You should have just done it. But maybe you were afraid I was serious, hey? And then where would you be?”

  “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I thought you were serious.”

  “Really? Well for what it’s worth, I probably was.” She sighed; all this use of the past tense seemed to make her weary. “But then I’m not very good at this either. We’ve got that in common anyway.”

  “So that’s something.” He reached for the hand that was closest to him, her right one, the one without the ring. “Is it worth mentioning that the car’s still out there? With a full tank of gas?”

  She stiffened. “I’m not a frivolous person, Oren. I don’t like to flirt, and I’m generally afraid of new things. That’s probably why marriage suits me. You know what they call marriage, don’t you? The coward’s adventure.”

  He laughed. “I thought that was adultery.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That too.”

  8

  Missions

  Fiddling with his watch, Teddy tried to calculate the hours he’d gained, or lost, since taking off from Logan. The number escaped him. And he’d always been so good with numbers. But his watch, once gravity’s yoke was shed, had developed a will and metabolism of its own. The hands were running fast, wheeling around in fitful, frantic circles, like drunks on a patio, like the legs of the animals in that moronic cartoon. It was always the same story too. A pursuit, a lunge in midair, and then a fall…

  Once you left the ground, there was only one way to reattain it, he thought. The hard way.

  To relieve the congestion in his head he chewed a stick of gum. It didn’t help, but it gave his jaws a first-class workout. Unfortunately the rest of his musculature was stuck in coach. The narrow seats had been designed for third-world survivors of scarcity and drought, not thick-waisted Americans with capacious backsides. No matter how he folded or unfolded his limbs, he could not accommodate his lumpy, swollen frame or achieve any comfortable distance between his knees and his face.

  He picked up the in-flight magazine and flipped through the pages heedlessly, looking for the flight maps with their hubs and arcs, their arrowed paths radiating across the continents like an enormous web. The world was full of destinations. You could take off from anywhere and land anywhere: the web would bear your weight. For some reason this made Teddy fidget more, not less.

  He got to his feet.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled to the lady in the aisle seat. “I’ll try to make this the last time.”

  Without putting down her book, she retracted her legs, ceding just enough territory for him to pass. He didn’t blame her; it was his fourth trip in two hours.

  He padded shoeless down the aisle and wedged open the flimsy accordion door to the bathroom. People were burrowed in, reading or watching movies or nestled in sleep. He himself appeared to lack the constitution for long flights. His head thrummed like a tunnel; the membranes in his stomach fizzed and popped. He’d grown delicate over the years, it seemed, had lived a pampered and comfortable life. Now he had to toughen up for the long journey.

  Coming back from the lavatory, he felt compelled to apologize to his seatmate again for making her perform yet another tedious do-si-do in the aisle. “Pfft,” she said, with an absent wave. “Why should you apologize when clearly you are not well?”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine. Just getting my sea legs.”

  She eyed him worriedly for a moment—sea legs?—then went back to her book. She was not so old as he’d taken her for. In fact she looked roughly his own age, if not younger. Her hands were smooth. Her white hair, rising thickly from her temples, was knotted into a bun. As she read, she fingered a pendant that dangled at the base of her throat, on an all but invisible chain. With her ivory blouse and khaki pants and hoopy, silver, Santa Fe–ish earrings, she might have been one of Gail’s friends, one of those handsome, no-nonsense women she volunteered with at the food co-op, filling bins of free trade coffee and spraying mist over the organic vegetables. A serious and committed person. A woman of depth, substance, and discipline. In short, the very last person that he had any desire to converse with at this moment.

  Not that she seemed so terribly eager to converse with him. Deep in her book, with a pair of rimless half-glasses perched on her nose and a plaid airline blanket draped across her thighs, his seatmate had the settled, self-sufficient aura of a scholar in front of a fire. Meanwhile Teddy squirmed by the window, looking down at the rough, slate-colored sea, all heaving and senseless below.

  “Jesus,” he said, “will you get a load of this view. Unbelievable.”

  The vastness, and the transient insubstantiality of the plane’s shadow upon it, made him expansive. As did the peripheral sight of the flight attendant bearing trays of food in their direction.

  “I don’t understand why people complain so much about flying,” he went on. “I think it’s great, don’t you?”

  “Perhaps to be up in the air,” said his seatmate, “does not agree with some people.”

  “How about for you?”

  “For me?” She peered at him over her reading glasses. “For me it is the best part.”

  Her voice was reedy and low, with a dusting of some light, transitional accent. Teddy wondered if he sounded that way to her too, vaguely foreign, vaguely exotic. It seemed the best part of being a passenger, this shortcut to strangeness. You could be anyone to anyone.

  She received her food without thanking the stewardess, then left it there on the folding tray untouched. He was already halfway through his chicken breast. And what a parched, anorectic old hen she must have been, he thought.

  “Here,” she said, “take mine. You look very hungry, and I ate before.”

  “Thanks.” He picked up her ro
ll and gnawed off a hunk like a dog. “I ate before too, actually. Back in the airport. God knows why I’m so starved.”

  “You’re a large man I think. It must take a lot to fill you up.”

  “It does. Oh, it does.” He chewed the roll with relish. The texture was gluey; it wobbled the old fillings in his molars. But it was nice for a change to have his appetites understood and supported by a woman. “It’s nervous energy I guess. The happiest moments in life, they say, are starting on a journey to unknown lands.” He paused to swallow, before adding, “That’s Richard Burton by the way.”

  “Yes?”

  “The explorer I mean. Not the actor from Lion in Winter.”

  “But unknown to whom?” she asked. “They are not unknown to the people who live there.”

  “To me I mean. Unknown to me.”

  She made a joyless, patronizing nod, as if he’d just betrayed some moral flaw in himself, some selfish, racist, imperialistic attitude for which he should be ashamed. But he couldn’t help it if his own feelings were more real to him than other people’s. Weren’t everyone’s? And wasn’t it selfish, racist imperialists like Burton who’d mapped out the globe in the first place, for reasons they themselves did not fully understand? The devil drives…Okay, he thought, maybe the Burtons of the world were products of their time. Okay, maybe that time had passed, and a good thing too. But Teddy wasn’t going to apologize for showing up late. At least he was here. At least he was here now.

  “Please”—she proffered her tray—“go ahead, take the rest. Otherwise it will be thrown away.”

  “Well, waste is a sin, right?”

  “Yes. One of the worst.”

  Of course gluttony was a sin too, Teddy recalled, but too late, the damage was done: he’d already eaten everything on her tray but the toxic wedge of lemon cake with its pale gelatinous glaze. Now he ate that as well. His days of holding back were over: he was on his way.

  Only afterward, licking his fork clean, did it occur to him that he’d been wrong about Lion in Winter. Richard Burton the actor wasn’t in that film. That was Peter O’Toole. O’Toole was the lion—the great lithe, shaggy hero who roared and burned, who flew across the desert, blue eyes flashing, a pure bright creature of instinct. Burton was the introvert. The head case. Burton played the weak, tortured, vacillating types, the Hamlets, the Antonys, the spy quavering out in the cold, all those sulkers and brooders and tenured professors and defrocked priests.

  And Teddy Hastings? What type was he?

  He turned back to his seatmate. She had given him her meal; she seemed intent on either sustaining him or diverting him, he couldn’t tell which. “So what brings you to this part of the world?” he asked, as men of all types, he imagined, do. “Business or pleasure?”

  “Neither one of those quite describes my mission, I’m afraid.”

  “Mission?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.” She smiled abstractly. “First I must go to Alexandria for our meetings and training sessions. Then after a week we arrive in the Sudan.”

  “I knew it. You’re one of those Doctors Without Borders people.”

  “Something like this.”

  “Well, be careful. I hear they’re killing people down there.”

  “Yes, I hear this too. This is why we go.”

  “It would be just as good a good reason not to go too.”

  “But there are always good reasons not to go, yes? Always, when you add them up, more of those kind than the other. Surely there are good reasons for you not to go where you go?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” he said. “A long list.”

  “So you see.”

  Eventually she filled him in a bit on her own personal story. She was a retired nurse from Montreal, a widow with three grown children and a flat in Outremont. Nowadays she traveled a great deal. Gaza, Afghanistan, Chiapas. She spoke matter-of-factly of her travels, in a way that made him restless, gloomy. What was it about these people who moved so freely around the globe, while others could not find access to it at all?

  “You seem a little young to retire,” he commented, wiping his mouth with a heroically soiled napkin.

  “But I’m fifty-six. Is that young?”

  “Christ, it better be.”

  “Of course I miss my work at the hospital. But then they merged with another hospital, and I knew they wanted me to go, not bother them anymore with my boring appeals for more outreach to the poor. And then my husband died, pfft. So that was the end. I took the early option, and then I did the next thing you do when you retire and your husband dies after thirty years of marriage.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “I went on a cruise. To be honest, I thought I would never enjoy such a thing. I had no wish to be trapped on a boat with so many old people, trying to have fun. But I did. I read and swam, and I discovered many interesting cocktails. I even had a shipboard romance. A very nice lawyer from Minnesota. It was his twentieth anniversary with his wife. But he wished to practice his French, he said.”

  “That sounds like a joke.”

  “I assure you, it wasn’t. This man took me quite seriously, and I him. The trip had cost us both a great deal of money, you see. We felt entitled to the full menu.” She smoothed her hair back. Her eyes had a languid light. “One day we were in the Dominican Republic, my friend and I. We took a drive into the mountains. It was a pleasant day, but I must have eaten something not good. I became very ill. It was a small village. There was no doctor. Someone told my friend of two old nuns from Belgium who ran a mission in the next village, so he took me there. When I saw how primitive this place was, I confess I was afraid. I looked at the cross on the wall and I prayed to God, which I had not done since I was a child. I believed I would die there. I felt it so clearly. I thought to myself, ‘I will never get back.’”

  “Where was your boyfriend? He didn’t leave you there alone?”

  “His wife was on the ship. He had no choice. And I wasn’t alone—the nuns were with me all this time. I was there in bed with them for six days. Long enough to create the world.” She smiled sadly, as if this were somehow a joke at her own expense. “Perhaps I think it is still with me a little bit. In the stomach. I will be in my kitchen, slicing a tomato, and I suddenly remember that village with no doctor, how afraid I was.” She was silent for a moment. “Io non mori, e non rimasi vivo. You understand?”

  “Sure,” he said, though of course he spoke no Italian and hadn’t a clue. His thoughts were pounding ahead on their own tiny treadmill. “About your husband—can I ask what he died of?”

  “Why? Are you involved in cancer research? Why do you Americans always feel entitled to know such things?”

  “We’re optimists I guess. We like to think if we get the facts, we may be able to help somehow.”

  “Yes, but this help you provide is so often destructive. Perhaps you should try helping less.”

  “Okay, okay. Point taken.” Now that he was officially an American abroad, he would have to get used to this, Teddy thought: being hated and distrusted and called upon to apologize for every last thing—every offer of aid, every minor coup or limited incursion. Did you only become a real American when you left America? Exposed your innocence and privilege and your extra-large backside to the kicks and grievances of the world? “I didn’t mean any harm.”

  “He died of lymphoma, my husband. To answer your question. And he was fifty-four, if you are wondering about that.”

  Teddy grimaced: he had been wondering. He was tempted in the spirit of reciprocity to mention Philip, but what good would that do, laying down your dead like so many trumps. Piling up the sympathy points. As if there were any benefit to winning such a game.

  He pushed back his tray and stifled a groan. His belly was roiling and tight. Eating most of her meal on top of his own had turned out to be, like most of his ideas these days, a lousy one. When was he going to stop lunging around so clumsily, mistaking appetites for inspirations? His bitter memories, his clenched
intestinal tract, the very drift and sway of the plane—all channeled themselves now into one profound, unnameable emotion. He reached across the seat and took the poor woman’s fingers in his own big sweat-damp palm. “Is that why you travel so much? Because it’s too painful to stay home without him?”

  “I told you, I travel on missions. So that someday when my granddaughter asks me what did you do when so many people were dying, I should have an answer.” She smiled at him coolly and reclaimed her hand. “Why do you travel so much? To make passes at widows and eat all their food?”

  “Hey, I’m just being friendly. I’m a married man, for god’s sake.”

  “Yes, I know about married men.” She was, he saw from her face, only teasing; he’d not offended but amused her. He appeared to have lost the ability to give offense. And he used to be so good at it too. “A woman traveling alone meets many married gentlemen along the way. I see what they are like, when they are between destinations.”

  “What are they like?”

  “Vulnerable,” she said. “So many stories and confessions. Everyone shares their little heartbreaks.”

  “Want to hear some of mine? I’ve got enough for a whole book.”

  “Forgive me, but I think no one wants to read such a book, if I may be honest.”

  “Oh sure, go ahead. Be as honest as you like.”

  “Yes? Okay, then also,” she said, warming to the task, “that shirt you have? It should not be worn with those pants.”

  He laughed. Was this to be his new life? Being insulted by people he didn’t know on the way to places he hadn’t been?

  “Doesn’t your wife tell you these things? I would never let my husband on a plane in such clothes.”

  “My wife and I, we weren’t quite on the same, uh, wavelength when I left. Not that she disapproves of this trip,” he added quickly. “In fact on some level she’s probably all for it.”

  “Probably?”

  “She’s not the easiest person to read,” Teddy conceded. “I’m the transparent one in the family, or so they tell me.”