Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  And here she was. His honor girl, his A student, his lead singer. She gave him one last squeeze, then broke their embrace for good. “Wait,” she said, “why are you here?”

  “You called, didn’t you? It’s been so long. Your mother and I were concerned.”

  “I didn’t say you should come though.”

  “Listen, I needed the trip. Christ but it’s wonderful to see you, Danny. I can’t tell you how much.”

  “Well,” she said warily, “it’s nice to see you too. Let’s go get your bag.”

  Down at the baggage claim, they stood side by side as the first massive suitcases tumbled onto the revolving belt. Danielle, with her mussed hair, peasant blouse, and thin, balloony cargo pants, looked like what she was—a college kid rousted half-willingly from bed. The toes that poked out from her flip-flops were long-nailed, discolored. A smell leaked from her armpits, musky and warm, not entirely pleasant. From the sideways look she kept giving him, she did not seem too impressed by his appearance either. “What?” he said. “What are you looking at?”

  “Wow.” She rose on tiptoe, cupping his ears in her hands to inspect his shorn scalp. “Mimi wrote me about this. I thought she was kidding.”

  “The new me. What do you think?”

  “You look like a decrepit monk. That’s what I think. Plus it’s coming in all gray. What on earth were you thinking?”

  “It’s hard to explain. It’s like one day you wake up and you’re in a box, and the only way to get out is to punch a hole in yourself. Go to war with yourself. Does that make any sense?”

  “No,” she said. “But let’s face it, you were never big on impulse control, were you?”

  She was speaking of him elegiacally, he thought, as if he were dead, a casualty of the oedipal wars, her long struggle to emerge from his shadow. Maybe he was. If so, it would explain this weightless, limbo-like sensation he’d been experiencing since he’d stepped off the plane.

  Suitcases came wobbling by. None of them were his. Danielle stood beside him, radiating intermittent warmth. He had to restrain himself from pushing the hair off her cheek, an old habit, and curling it around her ear. He knew she’d flinch and move away. That was an old habit too.

  “Well, it’ll grow back.” He made a point of looking in the direction of the luggage belt when he added, “I’m glad to hear you and Mimi have been writing each other. I didn’t know.”

  “You weren’t supposed to. It’s none of your business.”

  “I guess not.”

  “What’s with this fugitive-from-justice stuff? What kind of trouble are you in back there anyway? Mimi says you’re the big buzz around town.”

  “You know what small towns are like. People always gossip. It releases tension. Otherwise they’d get bored and have to become fugitives themselves.” He scanned the belt for his luggage. “You should hear how they talk about you.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “You dropped out of college. You’re on drugs in Ladakh. You’re pregnant in Burma. You’re getting a sex change in Bangkok. You had a psychotic episode on the streets of Mumbai and had to be institutionalized against your will. And those are just the rumors I’ve spread about you personally.”

  “I’m not coming back, Daddy,” she said, unamused. “Let’s get that straight right off.”

  “Fine, fine. We’ll talk about it later.”

  “No, I want to be clear right now, so there’s no misunderstanding. I’m staying. You can’t make me go back.”

  “Settle down, Danny. No one’s making anybody do anything.”

  “You’re here, aren’t you? It’s obvious what you and Mom are thinking.”

  “Don’t be too quick to decide what Mom and I are thinking. We think all kinds of things we never act on.”

  “Well, not me,” she said, pulling herself up straight. “I try to act on the things I believe. Maybe if you guys acted on what you believe, you’d be happier people.”

  “Spare me the nineteen-year-old profundity, okay? I had a long flight.”

  “Look, no offense, but no one told you to come. And I’m not nineteen, I’m twenty, remember? I turned twenty this year.”

  “See, this is what I’m talking about,” he said, though in fact he was not sure he’d been talking about this at all. Nor could he have said with any certainty what this was. “A tree falls in the forest, and no one hears.”

  “Plenty of people heard, believe me. We were in Annapurna. We threw this big rave for everyone at the teahouse, and Gabi made this incredible lemon cake with coconut frosting. His mom e-mailed him the recipe. You use rice flour, see, instead of regular.”

  “The famous Gabi. Where is he, by the way? I’m eager to meet him.”

  “That must be yours.” She pointed to his enormous potbellied suitcase, teetering drunkenly toward them on the revolving belt. She swooped it up before he could stop her. “Oof. How long are you planning on staying?”

  “You were the one who said go to Costco. I got a hundred and fifty bucks’ worth of eyedrops and chewable vitamins in there. I could hardly fit them in the suitcase.”

  “You should have let Mom deal with it. She’d have known how to pack.”

  “Yeah, well, Mom was busy. She’s famously busy, as you know.”

  In response to which Danielle’s brow crinkled up like foil. The radar of filial loyalty kept sweeping in circles. She may have been his favorite but he was not altogether certain he was hers.

  “Here,” he said, grabbing at the suitcase, “I’ll take that.”

  “I have it.” He marked the first sandpaper rasp of annoyance in her voice. First he’d presumed to appear in her life; now he was trying to take charge. Her dark eyes flashed; her plump lips pouted. Sometimes you had to go to war against your family too, wrestle with your fate like Jacob and the angel. And Danielle was a formidable adversary. She had her parents’ height, her mother’s shrewd, assertive gaze, and her father’s beakish and implausible nose. The rest of her was a combat zone in which his genes and Gail’s had skirmished to a draw. All the bone baskets of their ancestors lay sunken in her flesh. He stared at her now as if communing with their spirits, the living and the dead.

  “God, Daddy, you’re not going to cry again, are you?”

  “It’s just that you’re so skinny,” he complained. “Where in the world have you gone?”

  “Hey, I’m right here.” Her voice was gentle but firm; she might have been talking to a child, or a blind man, or an imbecile. “I’m right here, and you’re right here with me. So let’s get going, what do you say?”

  “I’ve got going. I’ve been going for a while now.”

  “Mmm.” She patted the suitcase between them. “So I’ve heard.”

  Outside the terminal he sniffed the air like a dog, reading it for news. So this was Africa, he thought. He’d readied himself for adverse weather, for blazing sunlight and tropical heat—looked forward to it even—but the sun had gone down hours before, and the air was cool and dry. A mild scent, like the smell of cough drops, floated down from the foothills. He followed Danielle to the curb, where a dumpy blue car waited in idle, belching out smoke.

  “Look who I found,” she said.

  A young man in a windbreaker sat behind the driver’s seat, talking on his cell phone. He gave Teddy a cursory glance, then shouldered open the door and got out. He was tall and lean, severe-looking, with a sparse mustache and an even sparser soul patch at the bottom of his jaw. Above his indrawn cheeks the eyes sloped and spread, like the eyes you saw painted on sarcophagi in museums. The phone in his long hand looked like a toy.

  Now he snapped it closed and said agreeably to Danielle, “Hello, my mother.”

  “Dad, Yohannes. Yohannes, Dad.”

  “Excuse me,” Yohannes said, “but I hear of you many times. Mr. Teddy. The schoolmaster.”

  “Ex-schoolmaster,” Teddy said, shaking hands.

  “Ex?” Danielle looked at him skeptically.

  “Long story.” He reached
for the passenger-side door. “Should we get going?”

  “No, no, please,” Yohannes said, “you must sit in the back, Mr. Teddy. You are very old.”

  “The hell I am.” Irritated, he ducked into the backseat. He may have been old, but he felt like a child, sitting back there with his legs folded, his knees up close to his face. “Listen, go ahead and call me Teddy, will you? Or Ted. Or Mr. Hastings. That’s fine too.”

  “Yes, of course, I will call you what you wish,” Yohannes said, gunning the engine into drive. “So not to disturb your mind.”

  “Too late for that,” Danielle muttered. They careened around the rotary and onto the main road. She turned back to look at her father. “Bravo, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “He’s doing us both a favor, picking you up at the airport. And it took you, what, twenty seconds to insult the man three different ways?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. He likes me, I can tell.”

  “Correction. He respects you. Because of your age. All he meant was the backseat’s more comfortable. But now that you’ve chewed his head off for no reason, being respected won’t be much of a problem.”

  “Why does everyone keep talking about how old I am? I’m not that old.”

  “For Africa you are. They don’t live as long around here as we do.”

  “I’m not surprised. Look at this road. Look at this car. A Lada!”

  “So?”

  “So you know how they make these things? They take the worst parts from a Fiat and stick them in the body of a Yugo.”

  “Please stop shouting, Daddy. You’re making everybody nervous.”

  “Just trying to be heard above the engine noise.” Chastened, he looked out the window. Here he’d only just arrived, and already he was getting on her nerves. Family, he thought: what a project. “Why does he call you ‘my mother’?”

  “Yohannes? Who knows? I guess it’s from my work with the babies. He’s concluded I have a maternal temperament.” She tilted the rearview mirror so she could watch herself fix back her hair with a scrunchie. “Shocked?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Well, I am. The more time I spend here, the more I keep surprising myself. It turns out there are all these sides of me nobody’s ever seen. Not even me.”

  Teddy nodded. He was a little bored by this self-absorption of hers, this new fascination with the twists and turns of her own intrepid consciousness. How tiresome young people were when they started analyzing themselves. How much reassurance they required. Thrilled as he’d been to see her at the airport, he’d almost have preferred to be alone right now, learning his own lessons, making his own mistakes.

  The buildings whizzed by. Danielle, giving Yohannes directions, draped her left arm proprietarily over his headrest. She had been a loner in high school, studious, self-propelled, but now she appeared to be accumulating friendships at a prodigious rate. Teddy himself was going the other way. Traveling light. His life was all he had. He was so tired of it, he could hardly keep his eyes open. Through a haze of woodsmoke he looked out at the palm trees, the billboards, the tin-roofed shanties, the unlit signs with obscure messages. It was as if they were moving and he were standing still. Those few streetlights that worked did so dimly; in their pale glow, the mounds of trash heaped on the sidewalks looked shadowy, menacing. Only later, settling into bed at the hotel, would it occur to him that they were human beings.

  Meanwhile the car rocked along the cratered streets, its shocks jostling and squealing like accordion tones. “Babies?” he asked dreamily after a while. “What babies?”

  “Never mind,” Danielle said. “You’ll meet them tomorrow. Here’s your hotel.”

  “I’m not staying with you?”

  “Oh, God, no.” She laughed so immediately and with such bitter amusement it almost spared him from injury. Almost. “Besides, you’ll be more comfortable here. It’s not the best in the city—that would be the Sheraton—but I thought you might like to stay in an African establishment. Go native, right?”

  “Sure,” he said without enthusiasm. “Why not?”

  “Also it’s really cheap. I figured you’d like that too. With your reduced income these days and all.”

  “Very considerate.”

  They turned into the narrow alley that led to the hotel. Some boys who’d been lounging invisibly on the sidewalk now sprang to their feet, shouting and running alongside the car, pounding on the hood. Yohannes ignored them. He shot up the driveway and pulled to the curb. “What’s that they were yelling?” Teddy asked.

  “Farenji,” Danielle said. “Basically it means ‘white person.’”

  “And is that a compliment or an insult?”

  “A little of both. Better get used to it, you’ll hear it a lot around here.”

  She paused, waiting for Yohannes to ease himself out of the driver’s seat and go around to release the trunk. “I’ll walk you in.”

  “What about the bags? Will Yohannes get them?”

  “He’s not a servant, Daddy. He’s my friend. They’ll send a porter for your bags.”

  The lobby of the hotel was simple and clean. Polished wood, mirrored walls, slate floors. Teddy handed over his gold card and waited for the receipt. Danielle said something in Amharic to the desk clerk; both of them laughed. She’d been living in this country for what, two or three months, and here she was talking the language. But the young were like that, it seemed, freakishly proficient. Their inexperience only emboldened them. Stumbling into a strange room, they entered like lords and made themselves at home. The old of course were another story.

  Suddenly, weary as he was, he was reluctant to let the girl go. “Stay with me,” he said, “just for tonight. They can bring in a cot.”

  “No thanks. You snore, and I need my sleep. I’ll be back in the morning. We’ll have breakfast.” She hugged him again, briefly this time, with more air between them. “Night, Dads.”

  “Night.”

  “Tomorrow you’ll come to my place for dinner. I’ve turned into a good cook, you know. Mom’ll be, like, shocked. Hey, let’s call her tomorrow, okay? I haven’t talked to her in a long time. She’s probably pissed, huh?”

  “She’ll get over it. She’s pretty forgiving as a rule. So am I.”

  “I know.”

  Oh, he was ready to forgive her everything, he thought, even this silly, transparent need of hers to shock her parents. Let the shocks come. They’d been taking shocks for years. Soon they might deliver a shock or two of their own. “I tried to call her from London, you know. When I changed planes. But no one was home.”

  “She probably turned the phone off when she went to sleep. Doesn’t she do that when you’re not around?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’m usually around.”

  But of course Danielle usually wasn’t. Not anymore. As if to underscore the point, she was already skipping away, out to the curb, where the car was idling, and where Yohannes was talking on his cell phone again to some insomniac or other, waiting to get home.

  9

  The Changing Room

  “So what do you think?” Oren said. “Getting tired of this yet?”

  They sat by the YMCA pool, dangling their legs in the tepid water. Children were splashing nearby; their voices echoed through the vast domed room. Gail’s hair was bunched into a swim cap. Between that and her clouded goggles, she looked like an alien. Her feet waved around peaceably, creating their own circular currents. “But I love swimming,” she said. “It keeps me sane.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “I meant hanging out this way. With me.” The chlorine was up in his sinuses; his voice had taken a brief detour through his nose. “What’s the appeal?”

  “But I’m not the one hanging out with you,” she said lightly. “You’re the one hanging out with me.”

  “Okay, now who’s into subtle distinctions?”

  “Anyway, strange as
it may sound, I don’t subject myself to such questions. I’m not like you, Oren. I don’t examine my own motives all the time before or after I do things.”

  “Well, maybe you should,” he said. “Maybe it would be healthy to do that. I bet they’re examining us.” He nodded toward the other swimmers, doing their laps, each in his or her own narrow lane. “I bet they’re talking about us too.”

  Gail smiled tightly, a muscle in her jaw puffing out like a blister. “Do I look like someone who needs the approval of other people? Or lessons in how to think about things in a healthy way?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So what’s your point then? I don’t understand.”

  Suddenly they were on the verge of a real argument. Why? Over what? “All I’m saying,” he said, “is a little introspection and self-analysis never hurt anyone.”

  “Now there’s a naïve remark.”

  “Look, all I’m saying is—”

  “What? What are you saying? Why don’t you just come out and say what you mean? You’re the one who’s tired of it.”

  “That’s not what I mean at all,” he said, though just saying it made him a little tired, to tell the truth. “You’re leaping to conclusions.”

  “Not that anyone would blame you, an urbane young man like yourself. I’m sure, even in a hick town like this one, there are more interesting ways to pass the time than hanging out with sick people and poor people and the occasional abandoned wife.”

  “Actually I’ve checked into that, and there aren’t.”

  She sighed, as if she’d been expecting him to say something along these lines. Her suit was biting into her thighs; the flesh looked goosey and raw. Why she was so angry with him, he didn’t know. Why he too was angry, whether for the same reason or some other, or else simply because she was angry with him, he didn’t know that either. Oh, he was tired of it, Oren thought. Meanwhile the children in the pool went on splashing each other cruelly in the face. They treaded water with their bright, inflatable wings, churning things up.