Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

“For what?”

  “You know,” Oren said, “life. The misery, the mediocrity, the humiliation—all that stuff that comes later.”

  Her hand shot out as if to slap him. But she was only smoothing back a stray curl loitering over his forehead. The gesture was at least as maternal as it was romantic. “You don’t have much faith in people, do you?” she said. “We don’t all leave you know.”

  Why not? he wondered, following her into the house, as he had followed her over the bridge earlier and into the bookshop, as he’d been following her into rehab facilities and swimming pools and other people’s bedrooms for weeks, for months. Everywhere they went was Gail’s domain; he was only a visitor, a passenger.

  In the kitchen, she kicked off her boots, slung her purse and bag over a chair, took note of and ignored the blinking light on the phone machine, and commandeered the stove. A calendar of painted Mexican doorways was thumbtacked to the wall. The white grid of days was thick with penciled-in appointments. There were photos on the fridge, laughing friends in colorful ski clothes, laid out every which way like a puzzle. “Who are all these people?”

  “Those are mine,” she said, pointing out two of the girls, “and that’s my niece Olivia. That tall woman with the big boobs? That’s Sonya, her mother. And that’s her new boyfriend, Jack, with his kids from his first marriage. Evan and Emily.”

  “Nice.” How would he ever learn all these names, Oren was thinking, let alone their gossipy little backstories, the idiosyncratic vectors and tangents that bound them together?

  “We only have herbal…. Oh, wait, that’s right, you prefercoffee, don’t you?”

  How do you like that? he thought. Finally someone remembers.

  Roused by their voices, the family dog got up from his bed in the laundry room and sauntered sleepily and dutifully toward the visitor, his nails clicking across the floorboards.

  “He’s starting to like me,” Oren said. “Check it out, he didn’t even bark this time when I came in.”

  “Poor old Bruno. He’s not much of a guard dog these days. No bark, no bite. Getting towards the end, aren’t you, baby?” Gail crouched on her heels, scruffing the old dog’s belly. “He’s only got three teeth left. At least he’s not in pain. There’s nothing worse than an animal in pain. I’d kill him first.”

  “You mean have him put to sleep.”

  “Of course.” She stood, brushing off her hands. “What did you think I meant?”

  She yanked open the freezer. Her face fell. Any illusions of order she may have harbored for herself lay impacted, it seemed, in that cave of glacial frost. Gamely she rummaged around amid the broken burritos and petrified pizzas, her head wreathed by vapor clouds, her fingers scrabbling at the stippled ice.

  “Voilà.” She brandished a lumpy paper bag, wrested from the depths. “Success. Danielle sent us these Ethiopian beans. The best in the world, she says.”

  She held down the lid of the grinder with the flat of her hand, like a shield. He could hear the beans jumping around, decimating into shards. “I never know how long to do this,” she complained.

  “I tend to just go by ear.”

  “Quelle surprise.” She poured the grounds into a cone-shaped filter, shaking her head. “Honestly, I don’t understand this whole fetish with coffee and food. The best this, the best that. Where it comes from. Who grows it. What it does in its spare time. Who cares?”

  For a moment she seemed almost angry; then that moment passed. She turned on the radio and hummed mindlessly along to the classical station, content to be back at the counter of her messy, lived-in kitchen, with the hanging pots and pans, the unpaid bills in their jumble on the counter, the tendrils of the spider plants aspiring toward the window, the golden tufts of dog hair blowing across the floor. Her feet were bare. Lemons ripened on the counter, avocados dangled from the ceiling in an aluminum cage. From a shelf in the pantry she took down a box of cookies and laid them out in a fan-shaped pattern on a ceramic plate. Her expression was languid. The crisp skin of efficiency, of minor surface tension, had peeled back from her face. What lay below was some quality Oren hadn’t seen before, something runny and mutable and sweet. Could it be she was content with him? He remembered how she’d hovered over him in bed earlier, sightless as a statue, concentrating on some private image she had conjured or imposed. He’d almost come to prefer it that way, to be unseen on the bottom, solid and supporting, like the base of a fulcrum, a hinge. His fingers on her hips, tracing the braille hieroglyphs imprinted there by her panties. The breeze puffing out the curtains, then drawing them back in to rub indolently against the screens. Her breasts bobbing against his face like apples in a bucket. And then her legs had begun to jerk. He’d looked up at her, bound up in a chain of her own combustions. He had to work like hell just to hold on.

  “Oh, maybe I do love you,” she’d said.

  It had come out all in one breath, like a balloon collapsing. She sounded, he thought, a little vexed. As if she’d just lost an argument.

  “That’s it?” She’d gone up on one elbow to examine him. “That’s your response? I bare my heart and you lie there and say nothing?”

  “I love you too.”

  “Bronnk, sorry. Time has expired. Thanks for playing though.” She punched him on the arm, hard enough to hurt. “Couldn’t you at least be gallant enough to pretend you’re surprised? I’m surprised. Why aren’t you?”

  “The only surprising part is the stuff about me. The rest I know.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “It means you love. That’s who you are. You’re the kind of person who loves.”

  “Bullshit. Everyone’s that kind of person.” She trailed a finger over his wrist, the veins and bones, the barbed fence of his tattoo. “Even you.”

  “I’m not sure what kind I am.”

  “Hey, show a little class. You’d think someone getting laid as much as you are would spend a little less time feeling sorry for himself. But it works for you, doesn’t it, Oren? It gets you off the hook.”

  He was about to ask, what hook? But she was already reaching for her panties.

  “We should go,” she said. “You want to see that movie, remember? And I’d like a glass of wine on the porch first. Maybe two. I’m feeling kind of daring tonight. Kind of wild.”

  “Two glasses. That is wild.”

  “I know. Let’s make tonight the night we do whatever we feel like, how’s that sound? Tonight’s the night where everybody gets what they want.”

  And indeed, after they’d showered and dressed and driven into town, her mood remained so tranquil, so affectionate, it was easy to believe that he was what she wanted. Because ultimately there was only one way to love, Oren thought. And Gail still had the capacity for it, he could see that; nothing had been lost or used up in her marriage. If anything marriage had preserved it, kept it alive and intact, floating in its amber. He had sensed it there in her all evening, that vastness. It was there in the aftermath of their lovemaking, in their quiet little happy hour on the porch; there in the car as they’d whooshed up and down the shadowed streets; in the tender solicitude of her gaze when they parked downtown and lingered for a while, smoking a joint in the front seat of the Dodge. Just before they got out, she’d cradled his head in her palms, like a blind person committing him to memory. The heart was just a muscle like any other, he thought. You had to use it and use it and use it.

  “Poor thing,” she’d said. “And you’re losing your hair too.”

  He was still puzzling over that too hours later, as Gail took down the mugs and arranged the spoons with all the care and deliberation of a girl playing house. “I’ve had some news from Danny,” she said.

  “Oh?” For weeks the name of her older daughter, so musical and boyish, had floated in the margins of his attention, unaffixed. But now it settled heavily at the center. “What kind of news?”

  “It seems she might be coming home soon after all.”

  “I thought she’d decided
to stay in Africa through the summer.”

  “Well, her plans have changed. She’s flying in Monday actually. She gets into Logan at six.”

  “Wait, this Monday?”

  “Mmm.” She opened up the refrigerator, her back to him. “You take milk, right? I’m afraid we only have skim.”

  She poured the milk into a tiny enamel pitcher shaped like a cow and brought it over to the table. As if the kitsch quotient weren’t high enough, she now wore over her shoulders a cardigan sweater. What a fine mess he’d got himself into, up here in the pastures of plenty. All this mediocre clutter, the scarred breakfast table, the threadbare seat cushions, the smelly doggy bed in the corner. Even the cookies she’d put out looked doughy and dense, the kind you bought in a health-food store and kept around for months, not eating.

  “Are you all right?” Gail’s mouth was twist-tied at the corners. “You look a bit shell-shocked.”

  “Not at all. I’m just trying to wrap my mind around what this will mean.”

  “It means I’ll have my baby home, that’s what it means. It means for the first time in months I won’t lie awake half the night worrying and feeling lonely.”

  Actually he’d been wondering what this would mean for him. But he supposed that went without saying. “And her father?”

  “Her father.” Gail blew away some steam. “Apparently her father’s on the road at the moment and can’t be reached. At least not by me.” Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing her tone did nothing to clarify. “It seems he’s made a new friend over there.”

  “Oh?”

  “Some American doctor, Danny says. An Albert Schweitzer type. The two of them are thick as thieves, apparently. They’re traveling out in the countryside together. There’s some talk of them building a school.” She set down the mug again. “For heaven’s sake, stop gawking at the cookies and go ahead and have one already. That’s why I put them out.”

  “I’d think that would be quite a commitment, building a school. Wouldn’t that take some time?”

  “What can you do? The guy likes to build things. It’s how he gets his kicks.” Her expression grew almost fond. “You should have seen him when he took over the middle school. What a project that was. This young, headstrong guy who’d shot up through the ranks—he figured he could do anything he wanted. Did you know, the first year he got rid of about a quarter of the faculty, all the deadweight, in one swoop? The union went batshit. He hadn’t even finished setting up his office and they were already trying to fire him. Then once he pushed through that bond for the new wing, he couldn’t find an architect he liked, so he wound up drawing the plans himself. And then redrawing them, and redrawing them, until we were all batshit. I’ve never seen the guy so happy. Honestly, I don’t think he wanted to finish the building. I think he wanted to keep hanging out at the construction site in his hard hat, bossing people around.” She expelled a little air through her nose—part laugh, part sigh. “So you see, it’s not like I didn’t see this coming. He’s been wanting to break out of here for a long time. That little photography escapade was just the nail in the coffin.”

  “Going to jail must be a real downer, though.”

  “Oh, he enjoyed that. It wasn’t jail that bothered him. It was coming home.” She waved her hand around the kitchen, at the toaster, the dish rack, the fruit bowl, the fat, dog-eared cookbooks with their multiply broken spines. “If you want to know, I’m glad he’s gone. Really, I feel like I can finally breathe. No more worrying, is Teddy in a mood? Is he fighting with people? Which of our friends has he alienated now? Let him get out his yah-yahs over there, on safari with that doctor. He needs a doctor. Somebody to tell him he’s not about to die, and that that’s okay, that’s just fine. I can’t do it anymore. I have my own stuff to deal with. My daughter’s coming home—that’s plenty for me to deal with right there.”

  “What about that Israeli guy she was traveling with?”

  “The Great Gabi? He’s gone too, thank God. Though he left his mark it seems. His own little slime trail…” She shivered under her sweater. “However, I can’t think about that right now. I’ve got to focus on Monday. Getting Danny. It’s a miracle she got a ticket—her father bullied the airline into giving her his return. If you’re forceful enough they give in, you know. And Teddy can be very forceful.”

  “I know.”

  “He told them it was a health emergency. ‘Life in the balance’—that was the phrase he used.”

  “I’ll have to remember that one.” He would too. He’d been forced to change a lot of tickets in his life. He’d thought he was through changing tickets, but it was beginning to look as if maybe he wasn’t.

  “Yes, well, the thing is, it’s true. She’s pregnant, poor thing.”

  The news affected Oren strangely. He’d slept with the mother and now the daughter was pregnant. By some weird trick of logic he felt almost responsible, complicit.

  “And you’ve known about this how long?” he said.

  “Not long.”

  “How long is not long? Just out of curiosity.”

  “You know, Oren, you sound a little aggressive all of a sudden. I wonder what that’s about.”

  “I’m just trying to wrap my mind around the chronology here. Sometimes when people say ‘not long’ they mean a couple of days, sometimes they mean a week or a month. So how long is ‘not long’ for you?”

  “Not long.” She shrugged. “A few days.”

  He allowed this admission to hang in the air a moment unmolested, though he’d have liked to bash it like a shuttlecock with some hard retort. If he did that, however, he would lose the moral advantage. And it was important to hold on to the moral advantage when all the other, better advantages lay on the far side of the net.

  “You were going to tell me though, right? You weren’t going to just spring it on me.”

  “Hello? Do we have a bad connection here? I just did tell you.”

  “You waited though. Until the last minute. You were afraid I’d react badly.”

  “I wasn’t afraid of that at all.” She was beginning to react pretty badly herself now, her eyes flashing darkly, her jaw setting tight. “I’ve been busy making calls and faxing people all week. I haven’t had a minute to myself. You and your precious little reaction have been way down the list.”

  “How far down? Just out of curiosity. Did I make, say, the top twenty?”

  “Why are you being like this, Oren? It has nothing to do with you, so there’s nothing to be done, is there? Anyway I thought you liked keeping things loose. I thought that was the Oren Pierce style. Well, consider me a convert. I’m about as loose these days as they come.”

  “No you’re not. I don’t mean that as an insult, mind you. But you’re not.”

  “Please,” she said, taking his hand between hers, “it’s been so nice with you this last week. So relaxed. Like the end of a really great vacation. The truth is I didn’t want to spoil it. Can you understand that?”

  “It hasn’t been a vacation for me. It’s been just the opposite in fact.”

  “Poor Oren.” She searched his eyes a moment; apparently she expected to find something there. “I’m not trying to hurt you. But it’s so sweet to see you this way.”

  What way did she mean? The presence of her hand on his cheek, which was mysteriously hot, made everything worse. How bizarre: Gail seemed to be laboring under the misapprehension that he was on the verge of tears. Him! Oren Pierce! Who hadn’t cried for any reason, other than intense physical pain of course, since he was eleven years old, when his guinea pig, Miss Whiskers, escaped from her cage for no reason and vanished into the woods across the street. And he hadn’t cried then either, not really. Okay, a little heat behind the eyes. A little mist, a little throb. “I’m just taken by surprise, that’s all.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “I thought you were feeling good about us tonight. But obviously your mind was somewhere else the whole time.”

  “Oh,
grow up,” she said. “You and your tender feelings. You think you’re the only one who’s tattooed for life? Try having a child someday. You may not think about them all the time, you may not like them all the time, but they’re there in your skin and they don’t go away. Can’t you see that?”

  In Oren’s experience, when a woman told you to grow up, she rarely intended or expected you to grow up right then and there. She meant do it somewhere else, sometime else. So he rose, put his cup in the sink, and began the long march to the foyer.

  A car door slammed outside. The dreaded neighbors, probably.

  “And they’re off,” she called after him. “Go. It’s what you’re good at, right? Flying away. I swear, you’ve got the constitution of a hummingbird. What is it with you? You hover and hover, but when do you ever land?”

  “I’m giving you space. I thought that was what you wanted.” Now the dog was whining too, his tail slapping the floor. “You’ve got all those calls and arrangements to make, remember?”

  “Tell me, why is it that when a man runs away, he always makes it sound like he’s being extra-considerate? You come on all cocky, then at the first sign of a problem, it’s ‘I’ll stay out of your way, I’ll give you some space.’ Well, I’ve got news for you, buddy: Things are messy around here. People get sick. People get pregnant. People freak out and calm down and then freak out again. It’s a busy and confusing little world, and it would probably behoove you to learn to deal with it. What do you think? Can you wrap your mind around that?”

  At which point, as if to illustrate her theory, the door swung open, effectively blocking his exit before he could achieve it, and Mimi Hastings walked in.

  She wore torn jeans and a belly-baring tank top; her hair was all over her face. She dumped her backpack by the door like a soldier on leave and cruised past the counter. “Hey, Mr. P.,” she said, as if his presence in her kitchen on a Saturday night were only to be expected. “How’s it going?”

  “I was just leaving,” he said more or less automatically.

  “Mr. Pierce came over to pick our brains a little.” Gail’s voice was bright. She was no actress herself, but she happened to be talking to a sullen, self-absorbed teenager, so not much acting was required. “He’s subbing in for Dad this year at school.”