Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “That’s okay. It doesn’t hurt.”

  “I better take a look. This is no place for an infection.”

  Frowning, she brushed off the fragments of stone and then blew softly on the wound to dry it. Teddy shuddered. After a sharp sting, the pain receded, and a cool, vacant sensation spread down his leg. “Better?”

  “Yeah.” He looked down at her gratefully, a fairy-tale lion relieved of his thorn. “Much better, actually.”

  “You know, if you really want to throw your money away, why not throw it away here where it can do some good? I mean, look at this mess.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” Admittedly without his glasses everything was kind of softened and vague, a low-resolution affair. But he could see that the walls of the common room were painted a bright semolina yellow, like the petals of a sunflower, the bulletin boards dense with bashful smiling children in Alpine settings, the shelves so heavy with books and puzzles and Disney videos—Dumbo, Beauty and the Beast, The Jungle Book—they sagged in the middle, straining their brackets. “I like this place. I think it’s great.”

  “Really?” Her tone was not casual; it wasn’t his opinion about the place that she was soliciting. “You’re not just saying that to be nice?”

  “You know me. I never say anything to be nice.”

  “True.”

  “Of course I haven’t worked up the courage to check out the bathrooms yet—”

  She laughed. “Best not to, I think.”

  “But the kids seem happy, and that’s the main thing.”

  “I have to say, Daddy, you’re blowing my mind here a little. This wasn’t what I was expecting. I was sure you’d be all over me about this. I thought you’d say”—here she put on her pinched, derisive Teddy-voice—“‘Hey, listen, Sweetpea, you’re wasting your time here. Go home.’”

  “Well, the day’s still young,” he said. “Only I thought you said you were teaching English to these kids. I don’t see any classrooms.”

  “You’re sitting in one. This is where we do geography. It’s also where we eat, and watch videos, and do art projects, and sing songs. It’s got a lot of uses. The other classes meet out there.”

  “Where?” All he saw was a windowless metal trailer at the end of the courtyard. “That thing? Hell, it looks like a freight car.”

  “It is a freight car. But until we raise funds for a proper building, it has to do. Dr. Dave, he was just in the States. He has this PowerPoint thing he does in churches and synagogues. They eat it up. He says in nine or ten months we’ll have enough to break ground.”

  “Nine months!” It was a toss-up as to which unnerved him more at this moment—the children out in the freight car having to wait that long, or Danielle working here that long, or the thought of his lower back seizing up in spasms before Yohannes returned with the ibuprofen. Already he could feel a belt tightening invisibly at the base of his spine. “Tell you what. I’ll write your Dr. Dave a check. Speed things along.”

  “You’re writing a lot of checks all of a sudden.” She made it sound like an accusation.

  “So what? That’s my business.”

  “Isn’t it more like Mom’s? Shouldn’t you call her first?”

  “Don’t worry about Mom. Mom’ll be fine with this. She’s a great one for liberal guilt—half her work these days is pro bono.” What the other half was these days he didn’t know. But he was touched by the girl’s suggestion, her need to keep them in touch with each other, ongoing partners. For all her bravado and independence she was like any other child. Wishing for magic. Trying to coax a green shoot from the old sodden coffin.

  “I don’t get it. Since when are you such a soft touch?” She yanked up one of her droopy spaghetti straps and hooked it over her shoulder blade. “You’re like the cheapest person I’ve ever met in my life.”

  “Not anymore. Haven’t you heard? I’m a very important man from America. And now,” he said, “if you’ll excuse me, I think I better go lie down.”

  11

  Self-Inflicted

  It was one of those winters that wears down, flattens out, and slips away. Not toward anything in particular (the spring, like a girl getting ready for a prom date, was still primping upstairs and would condescend to arrive in her own sweet time) but just away, away from its own brown, twiggy vistas, its sparse dispensations of light, its fixed and frozen parameters. On the first day of March the temperature climbed into the forties and stayed there. The sky was like dishwater. The snow had long since stopped falling; even the rain couldn’t be bothered to get itself together. The ice around the lake receded incrementally, like an old person’s gums. Everywhere you walked there was slush and mud, the soft suck-and-wheeze of feet being inhaled by the very medium they counted on for support.

  Really unusual weather, said the good people of Carthage. It was, to be fair, what they said about all of their weather.

  Not that Oren had ever paid much attention to the good people of Carthage. Not that the things he didn’t pay much attention to their talking about—maple sugaring, the price of gas, the college basketball rankings—were any more interesting these days than whatever he hadn’t paid much attention to their talking about previously. But at least they were different, he thought. At least they were new.

  Newness: he was obsessed with it now. He had come upon the word in an essay by Emerson, and had not let it go. This newness he sought was not some abstract idea or formula you drew up in chalk on a blackboard, but a base, earthly element, something you quarried up with dirt from the ground. Something you discovered, not invented. Something already there. The design embedded in the carpet. The scrambled message in the acrostic. The tiny blue egg cradled in straw at the bottom of a nest. A newness that lay latent in its opposite, like oil in rock. All you had to do to get at it, he thought, was break through the crust. Break through the crust, and pump hard, and then the stuff of the future would come spurting out.

  Of course breaking through anything was bound to cause a little damage. That he might be the one damaged was a possibility Oren preferred not to dwell upon at the moment. If by trading away certain problem areas in his life (celibacy, loneliness, too much time alone), he’d only succeeded in exposing new ones (guilt, performance anxiety, not enough time alone), and if these problem areas too would in time have to be traded for others…no, he was in too good a mood this morning to dwell on such things. As he winged down the wooded lanes toward Carthage proper—a route now grown so familiar he could drive it, and often did, with his eyes half-closed—his window rolled down, the breeze fluffing out his still-thickly abundant, still-blondish hair, the head to which that hair was rooted felt far too dreamy and content, his tongue too fuzzy and thick, his belly too bloated, his penis too warm and webby from its nocturnal spelunk in Gail’s vaginal grottoes, to indulge in the usual top-down brooding and navel investigation for which he was, in the ever-receding circle of his acquaintances, mildly famous. No more brooding, Oren thought. He was an ex-brooder now. Indeed, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so unburdened by bad thoughts, and by bad thoughts’ clamorous retinue, the Four Horsemen of His Consciousness: Fear, Worry, Anxiety, Depression.

  This, it seemed, was what having regular sex did for people: swept the cobwebs and clutter from the mind’s garage. Left every tool hanging from its hook. Oren had almost forgotten how it felt, to be at once utterly spent and utterly relaxed, a vessel that emptied and filled and then emptied again, impersonally. No wonder he’d been at loose ends: he hadn’t enjoyed regular sex since he’d broken up with Sabine. And regular sex with Sabine had never been all that regular, and frankly not all that sexy or enjoyable either. No, with Sabine it was really the aftermath they savored: the quiet clinging, the soft, attenuating glow. Two high-strung people cuddling under blankets, taking refuge from a perplexing world. He was a bit like a girl in that sense, he supposed. His therapist used to say he had a lot of anima. It had to do with his mother apparently, but then what didn’t?

&
nbsp; Only here was the bewildering part, and the reason it didn’t pay to think too much about these things: it was only now that he’d begun to enjoy regular sex with Gail, that he began to miss, retroactively but intensely, the regular sex he’d long since stopped having with Sabine. He missed it more now, in truth, than he had during all those months of no regular sex, and very little irregular sex to speak of either. Why? Was everyone else as bad at living in the moment as he was? Were other people as subject to these same wayward and regressive fits of nostalgia? Was Sabine, for example, cabbing home at this moment from some Rivington Street rendezvous, thinking about how much she missed him?

  He looked out at the leaden mist that hung over, or clung to, the flattened fields. Soon the mist would burn off, and fresh patches of green would lie revealed in the snow, like vents for the earth, that underground man, to breathe through. He supposed the alarmists were right: the globe was warming up. The permafrost was not so perma these days, and not so frosty either. Even the baggy gray cushions of the clouds overhead seemed a function of thaw and seepage. He wished he were the sort of firebrand teacher he read about in the newspapers, the kind who inspired students to organize demonstrations and march on the state capital. Global time was so short, and double-bloc classes so long, and the curriculum so dull, and the culture so insular and attention-deficient…if the Orens of the world didn’t give these kids a crash course in the body politic, who would?

  But, no, political activism was generally fueled by rage, and the Orens of the world were not rage people. No, the Orens of the world, thanks he supposed to all this anima of theirs, tended to be conflict-avoiding, simmer-not-burn types, resilient, double-minded, highly adaptable to the prevailing climate. Even when that climate had gone catastrophically awry. Which, given how relaxed and well sexed he was feeling this morning, as he pulled up to the doughnut shop for his morning coffee, and given how despite all the persuasive new data and computer projections, the dissolving ice caps, the polar bears floundering for purchase on eroding shores, it was still cold enough in the Dodge to see clouds of breath huffing dismally out his mouth like steam from a grate, combined to make his outrage over global warming seem rather abstract and hypothetical at the moment, even to him, and in no way a deterrent from leaving the Dodge’s gluttonous, inefficient six-cylinder engine idling in the parking lot of the doughnut shop while he ran inside for a cup of their miserable coffee.

  “Hi, can I help you?”

  Naturally in this age of universal abundance, no place within thirty miles served a decent espresso. Oren had taken to getting a large container of premium artisan blend and hoping for the best. “Just the usual,” he said, as if apologizing for some obscure failure of imagination. “Large coffee.”

  “Mmm.”

  Mornings in a doughnut shop are romantic occasions. The scent of refined sugars wafting from the trays, the rack of crisply folded newspapers by the door, the workingmen reading the sports pages, filling in their pool brackets for March Madness…it gave an underdog hope. Perhaps that was why he always felt obliged to flirt with the pretty oval-faced waitress who worked behind the counter on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

  “Cool earrings today.” He smiled privately, like a poker player eyeing a flush. His clothes still reeked of last night’s sex, he was pretty certain of that. “What are they, jade?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She frowned; her left hand flew up to her lobe for reassurance. The lavender blouse she was wearing, with its foreshortened waist, lifted from her tiny, involuted navel, providing the usual soft-core exposure of flesh. “Black, no sugar, right?”

  He nodded. It was worth drinking bad coffee sometimes just to be recognized as a regular customer, with all the perks that went with it.

  She went over to the doughnut racks. “Glazed old-fashioned?”

  “No.”

  “No doughnut today?”

  “No.”

  Good as it felt to be recognized as a regular customer, it felt bad if not worse to be recognized as some other regular customer. Why did so many of his life’s transactions come under question? He must give off some vibe of hesitation, he thought, some failure of the acquiring will. “Actually,” he said, “I don’t eat doughnuts. They’re terrible for you.”

  “I don’t like them either.”

  “It’s not that. I do like them. I like them way too much. If I let myself I’d eat five doughnuts at a time. So I make a point of not letting myself, you know?”

  The girl behind the counter took this unsolicited confession in stride. She fitted a cardboard cup with a cardboard sleeve and held it carelessly under the percolator. “Coffee’s bad for you too,” she observed.

  “You’re right.” How nice to meet a kindred spirit, he thought, a fellow featherweight in this land of giants. He tried not to look down at the girl’s trim, bare waistline again, or to think about how she spent her Tuesdays and Thursdays; tried not to linger over her flaming-red hair, or the prodigious slope and swell of her body, the lean, elongated, small-breasted torso sweeping up like a stem from the round bulb of her rear. Though why, after two racking and voluble orgasms with Gail the night before, he’d even be looking at this girl’s body, let alone lusting after it—a girl he didn’t know, and who rarely remembered his regular order, and was in fact borderline rude to him pretty much every time he came in—was a mystery to Oren, even if it did not appear to be one to the cashier herself. She turned her back to him now, their business done; she zipped her face shut like someone putting away a cello. The way people do when they’re indifferent to your gaze, when you’re in no way sexually relevant to them.

  Then he saw his face reflected back at him in the glass counter, and he knew why. He was beginning to look his age. And his age was no longer young. His skin was no longer as smooth, his waist no longer as lean, his eyes no longer as bright as those of the guys a girl like this went out with. He was playing for the other team now. The losing team. A terrible thought took shape in his head: he’d never have sex with a girl like this again. The leaden gate was closing, squealing shut. Never again would a girl like this lead him by the hand to her one-bedroom apartment over someone’s garage, with the candles on the nightstand and the Indian bedspread and the Buddhistic texts; never again would a girl like this massage his bony shoulders with exotic lotions and oils her sister had sent her from Santa Fe, and undertake to reveal to him the slow, unfolding mysteries of the tantra. It was unfair and unjust, but it was the case. And now the case was closed. He could read it in her flat efficient movements as she fitted his cup with a plastic lid. Time to take his to-go cup and go.

  Except all of a sudden he really did want a doughnut. In fact he wanted two.

  “Hi, can I help you?” the girl said to the next fellow in line, a younger guy in torn jeans and a flannel shirt.

  “Hey there, Pammy.”

  Pammy. The door wheezed closed behind him. Pammy.

  It may have been the soft, cheery murmur of that name. It may have been the blast of cold wind that greeted him outside, or the tubercular rattle of the muffler, or the syrupy light dawn was pouring so stingily over the bare flat waffle-colored fields. Or it may have been the lousy coffee, at once weak and astringent, as if the beans’ overseas journey in a burlap sack had denuded them of whatever dispensations they’d been granted by their rich homeland soil. Whatever it was, it was giving Oren a headache. To teach for a living was to ensure you’d never outgrow that childhood anxiety dream, running late for school. He had thirty-five minutes until the first bell to shower and shave, eat his breakfast, and review his lesson plans for the day ahead. So he gunned the engine in reverse and got back on the road.

  A hawk soared overhead, turning straight lines into question marks. In his hurry to get grounded, it hadn’t occurred to Oren how much nostalgia he’d feel for the air, for those fine invisible currents that kept you aloft.

  Because the Dodge was a lean, pared-down machine that predated such bourgeois extravagances as cup holders, he was forc
ed to place his coffee delicately between his thighs and try to avoid all the fast turns and frost heaves and speed bumps. It would have been smarter to stop loading up on bad coffee, of course, on his way to work, but that would require him to get more sleep at night, and to drink less wine, and smoke less dope, and have less sex than he was having too. He hadn’t done quite so much drinking/dope-smoking/sex-having since college. But Gail Hastings had been a good girl back at college, had failed to get drunk and high and laid as often as she should have, and now she appeared to be making up for lost time.

  Below his jeans, tiny blisters were rising. The coffee spurted up in bubbles through the slotted lid.

  In bed these days he was no longer so reticent or withheld but giddy and licentious, like a teenager drunk on some absent parent’s booze. His throat was an uncorked bottle; the words poured out in glugs. The need to bare himself to her, confess his long history of false starts and premature conclusions, his whole bloated inventory of wishes, lies, and dreams, came tunneling up from his core. Nothing went unsaid. No bad relationship, no botched degree, no shameful act or nonact; not even the highly explicit fantasies to which he’d masturbate sometimes during A-Lunch behind the one stall door in the teachers’ lavatory that actually closed, while food was flung and spitballs spat in great wadded bursts a few short yards away…fantasies that revolved ecstatically and kaleidoscopically around Gail herself, her red, one-piece bathing suit that showed off her broad back and rippling hamstrings, her long, inquisitive nipples…even these fantasies, especially these fantasies, he refused to censor or sanitize or in any way repress. Because he wasn’t ashamed of who he was. And even if he was ashamed of who he was—and come to think of it, he probably should have been—that was okay too, because it meant he was changing, becoming a new man, a man capable of feeling (among other things) shame over the past. And a man capable of feeling shame over the past was not by definition shameful at all. At least Oren hoped he wasn’t. At least not in the same way.