Amateur Barbarians Read online

“Let’s call it a king.”

  “Really? To me it feels more like a queen.”

  “Fine,” he said, “call it a queen.” But it wasn’t that either. The planks of untreated oak, left too long in the dank garage, had warped over time, thereby throwing off his measurements, altering angles that had possibly, he conceded, been drawn a bit too hastily to begin with; and so the platform had turned out to be not exactly a king and not exactly a queen, but some odd transgendered size of its own. Gail for her part wasn’t listening. Already she’d commenced the long glide toward sleep, her soft arms folded like wings, her white legs with their dark, cilialike hairs tucked in behind her rump, cushioning her fall. Teddy stood there watching over her, flushed with tenderness and pride. Okay, it wasn’t perfect, but he had built her this enormous, solid, unclassifiable thing with his own hands. And it would last. He came from strong New Hampshire stock, from hale, red-faced men with roping arteries who worked outdoors all winter in the construction trades; for all his mistakes the workmanship was sound. Even now, a quarter century later, he was impressed by how well the bed had contained them, and how long.

  Still, there were nights he lay in that bed, tracing a finger over the spines of the books on the nightstand as one might a lover who has turned her back, and wonder about the cost of that containment. Where was the book with his name on the binding? Some report was expected of him, of his life on this earth; but where and how to begin, and to whom he should submit this report, and in what format and what length and what language, he didn’t know. His adulthood had thus far yielded few adventures. Marriage, children, ten years teaching math at the local middle school and another fourteen trying, as principal, to elevate it from a third-rate institution to a second-rate one. Make a book out of that! He’d never been to the Horn of Africa. Never wandered the deserts or savannas, never lunched on gazelle meat and camel piss under the acacia trees. He’d never even completed his application to the Peace Corps, though it had arrived the week he graduated college, the product of a sudden access of enthusiasm at an informational meeting in the student union. What had held him back? Why had he let that first restless storm pass, and why had it never returned? In the end it had been Philip who’d gone off after college, Philip who’d flamed out, somewhere in the jungles of Sierra Leone, of the very Peace Corps Teddy had wanted to flame into, Philip who’d then gone backpacking across Europe for two or three stoned, meandering years before finally settling, more by accident than design, into grad school in psychology at BU. Well, that was Philip’s way. The roundabout way. The passive way. The feckless way. All those incompletes, those borrowed tuitions, those pliant, tragic-looking girlfriends, those abysmal studio apartments in the Combat Zone and the far ungentrified reaches of Jamaica Plain. Meanwhile Teddy the Elder, Teddy the Constant, Teddy the Builder, had stayed put in Carthage to—do what? Attain a secondary credential in mathematics? Buy and fix up this old house? Sit on town council, umpire Little League games at the recreation park, dig up stones in the yard on weekends and compile them into walls? Spend half his life reading about things he’d never do, and the other half doing things he’d never read about? Why? He was not the dead person, lying in a hole in the dirt. He could climb out whenever he liked. He was healthy and strong and cunning as an animal. He’d made principal at thirty-nine, the second youngest in the state. He’d put money away in tech stocks at just the right time. He could go, if he chose, anywhere in the world.

  He’d gone somewhere, all right. He’d gone down to the basement. He’d eased from the covers, pulled on his sweats, grabbed his running shoes in one hand and his T-shirt with the other, and slipped out the door like a thief. Gail didn’t stir. She was a long, luxurious sleeper; her face, hazy and white, floated in the dark like a lunar nimbus. Envy of her oblivion, and maybe fear of it, sent him off to the basement, through the door, down the twelve wooden steps—he knew each one’s whiny, croaking country song by heart—and around the washer and dryer to the back room, where he flicked on the wan, solitary bulb that illumined his little gym.

  True, the carpet was ragged, the walls smelled of mildew, and the windows were festooned with enormous drooping cobwebs to which insect husks clung upside down, trembling from invisible drafts. He should have swept them away a long time ago. But if his time in jail had taught Teddy anything, it was that freedom comes in paradoxical forms. One man’s arbor was another man’s cage.

  He stepped on the treadmill and, with the usual mixed feelings of boredom and relief, began to run. The second hand on his watch progressed in jerks. The house was quiet and tense, like the skin of a drum. Hot air swelled his temples; old fillings and tarnished crowns rattled in his jaw. He felt like a zeppelin taking leave of its moorings. The ropes that bound him were brittle and frayed; someday soon he’d snap free. No doubt this was obvious to everyone, Teddy thought, not just the people he knew and loved but other people he didn’t know, didn’t love, and who did not in all likelihood love him. People such as Judge Tierney, and Zoe Bender, and his many enemies on the school board. Together they had not so much permitted him to take a year’s leave—his existing contract was ambiguous on the subject—as insisted in the end that he take it. For the best good of all concerned. An admirable phrase, Teddy thought. He’d have liked to know how to distinguish between the best good and all the lesser kinds.

  Meanwhile he kept running. It was important to make the most of it, this down time, this underground hour in his underground lair. Because it would not last forever. Soon he’d have to engineer a return. Ascend the stairs, take his place at the family table, and pretend, as all dreamers do, that he wasn’t dreaming, that sleep was wakefulness and wakefulness sleep.

  But say it didn’t end, Teddy thought. Say he remained down here, amid the cobwebs and the radon, the dull, gurgling pipes. Say the family man removed himself from the family. Let the noisy model trains of domestic life sit idle, unattended. Lost the check register. Forgot how to separate the whites from the darks. Ignored the crumbly masonry poking through the plaster; the water stains spreading like rain clouds across the perforated ceiling; the recalcitrant furnace; the leaky sump pump; the asbestos sifting from the pipe joints like so much rancid flour. But then ignoring such things wasn’t his strength. No wonder he was all in knots. Gail was right: he could let nothing go.

  “Look at your hands,” she’d told him that morning. “They’re all knuckles and fists like a boxer. At night you grind your teeth so loud I hear it in my sleep.”

  “I’ve always ground my teeth at night. My old man did too. It’s a genetic legacy.”

  “And then there’s that other thing people do at night,” she said. “I’ve almost forgotten what it’s called.”

  Teddy stared at the kitchen window, awash in his own reflection. They were doing the dishes at the time. Her remark hung like steam in the air above the sink. “I thought we agreed,” he said. “A transitional period, we decided to call it.”

  “Not to be a stickler or anything, but when I hear the words transitional period, I think of something that ends sooner or later.”

  “That’s my point.”

  “Sometimes they end badly though, Bear. That’s all I’m saying.”

  He nodded. His breath was short. It was as if he were back downstairs in his little gym, loading one more weight on the bar. Truth too was an exercise, he thought.

  “Look,” he said, “the cardinals are gone.”

  “Don’t take it personally. They vanish around this time every year. Sunnier climes.” She sipped her tea, eyeing him over the steam, then set it in the sink and reached for her yoga bag, a flame-colored thing bedecked with dragons. “What are you doing later? Any plans?”

  “None.”

  She frowned, displeased but unsurprised. It was the expression she fell into every morning, it seemed, when Mimi came down, wearing the sort of thing Mimi wore. “Come with me to class,” she said. “It’ll do you good. Cleanse the mind.”

  Teddy nodded and paced, hot-eyed, like
a caged panther. He didn’t want to cleanse his mind. He preferred it in its natural state: messy, congested. How galling it was to be observed from a wary distance and found guilty of hunger by the very beings he looked to for nourishment. “Maybe next time,” he said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  He watched her bustle down the foyer and out the door, the iron knocker bouncing crazily in her wake, like the hand of an unseen visitor. But no one was there. She was always heading off these days, always leaving home early and arriving late. At dinner she’d condescend to sit for half an hour at the table with an expression of preoccupied forbearance, glancing over the mail as she picked at one of his overspiced, labor-intensive meals. Then out the door again: a meeting, a yoga class, a book group, a friend. On weekends she’d pop out of bed, wriggle into one of her sports bras, and go off biking or swimming or running along the side of the road in her orange vest. As if leisure too were an extreme sport. Her limbs had grown sleek and hard. Even their lovemaking of late, on those occasions love was still made, seemed only another workout, a cardiovascular shortcut on the long road to sleep. What was happening to them? It had something to do with time, Teddy thought, time and space: the shrinkage of one and the expansion of the other. Something to do with all these leave-takings and disappearances, with empty rooms, silent phones. If only he didn’t hate yoga so much! But the one class he’d attended had not gone well. It was held in the basement of the Unitarian church, the same dingy, blue-carpeted space to which he used to drag his daughters to Sunday school against their wills. Now he too submitted to the larger, impersonal force. Women in leotards were poised on their mats, practicing their breathing. Teddy tried his best to attain the positions, the trembling Triangle, the ungainly Warrior, the flaccid Bow from which no arrow would ever be launched, and then those postures that came naturally it seemed to animals alone—the Lion, the Cobra, the Camel, the Upward Facing Dog, the Downward Facing Dog. But he could not hold still. He was left feeling very downward and doglike indeed, and hardly inclined to attend another yoga class should Gail ever happen to invite him again, which now of course she never would.

  Earlier that week they’d gone out for his birthday to the Carthage Inn, the place one went for these things. Helplessly Teddy had looked over the menu. It was the same as last time. Nonetheless he’d managed over the course of the evening to consume a salad, a cup of gluey bisque, two sesame rolls, a humongous, fat-marbled shank of lamb, the mashed potatoes and asparagus it came with, and about nine-tenths of the crème brûlée he and Gail had agreed to split in half. His lone act of restraint came at the end, with the pale, bluish nonfat milk he poured stingily into his coffee like a rhetorical gesture. The rest he’d devoured like an animal—sopping up the juices, sucking greedily on the shank bone, furrowing out the marrow with his tongue—while Gail grazed numbly at the top leaves of her spinach salad, then consigned the rest to sleep moldering in the Dumpster. What waste. Maybe if they lived in the city there would be more to do at night and less need to indulge in these enormous, sedentary dinners that dulled the senses. But Gail’s law practice was here in Carthage, and she was happy here, or if not happy then at least more or less content with her present level of not-happiness, as opposed to the potential not-happiness of moving somewhere else, which he did not think they ever would. They’d talked about moving for years but had in fact gone nowhere. Arguably the talk itself had become a form of movement, Teddy thought, or else a substitute for it, providing just enough current to keep the raft of the possible afloat. It was hard to know.

  And now it was too late. He was fifty-two. Fifty-three. The raft had become rickety, precarious; they’d flirted with the possible too long; their credibility was gone. At some point you have to stop thinking about moving, Teddy thought, sliding his gold card out of his wallet, and just live where you are. You ate your meal and drank your wine and tried to wring some enjoyment out of it before the bill came.

  “Shoot,” Gail said on their way to the car, “I meant to put it on my card.”

  “It’s a joint account. What difference does it make?”

  “It makes a difference to me. I wanted to be the one taking you out for a change.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  But in fact it did seem to matter, on some level, and his insistence that it didn’t made it matter more, not less. And now, down in the basement, running on his treadmill, he regretted his half of that conversation, and his half of the meal too, which had been more like four-fifths. The lamb was still with him. He could feel it, the carbs and proteins, the sugars and fats, settling sluggishly, like ocean sediment, in the linings of his heart. He’d be working it off for days. Both of his daughters were vegetarians; he was beginning to understand why.

  He decided to keep running for another few miles and then see how he felt. The phrase came to him often these days: see how he felt. Right now as it happened he felt more or less okay, but he would take care of that.

  He programmed the treadmill to its maximum verticality, so that for all intents and purposes he was running straight uphill, climbing a slope he couldn’t see toward a summit he couldn’t reach. His heart, that petulant child, pounded sullenly at his eardrums. The lungs in his chest rattled like toys. This inner hullabaloo, though alarming, was also the source of a tenuous satisfaction. He had after all bought this machine of his own free will, submitted himself voluntarily to its tedious and complicated punishments. And for what? Good health. The two words were conjoined in his mind like an arranged marriage—sturdy, dutiful, surprisingly effective. Good health, Teddy knew, was an absolute good. Not many things were. He knew this because he’d recently been forced to confront its evil twin, bad health—an incredibly clarifying experience he was eager not to repeat.

  Well, he thought, get used to it. From here on life was a numbers game, an actuarial box score. Weight, body fat, heart rate, cholesterol, PSA. Fortunately he had a gift for numbers. But of course there were limits to what the numbers could tell you. Look at Philip: his numbers had been okay too. So had Don Blackburn’s, and look at him: a stroke like a bolt from the blue.

  Of course in Don’s case factors of nature and nurture had to be considered. The man was fifty pounds overweight and did not own so much as a pair of sneakers. Clearly he’d made few of the compromises with age that Teddy himself had made. Don was still a smoker, a drinker, a gorger, a glutton. On bad days he’d blow through his classroom like a nor’easter, bushy-browed, all hot wind and pendulous rumbling, clogging up the aisles with his great mounded belly, his arms tossing around like tree limbs, squalls of saliva issuing from the corners of his mouth. That was what happened to English teachers. They grew indulgent as they aged, arch and capricious and mean. Don had long since lost interest in his lesson plans. He’d stand at the board making jokes the kids didn’t understand, improvising fey little couplets of dactylic verse—

  Silly Miss Peters has forgotten her binder

  If only Miss Cobden had thought to remind her.

  He might have been auditioning for one of those fat, burdened fools—Falstaff, Lear, Willy Loman—he was always requisitioning buses and handing out permission slips to take his students to see. Don too was a mess. His face a checkerboard of distress, at once pallid and overripe; his eyes like dry wells sunk deep in his cheeks. He had never seemed all that healthy in the best of times, and it had not been the best of times for Don Blackburn, not in a long while. Now he was into the other times, the worst of times. Now you could feel the furnace of his loneliness roaring in his belly, steaming up the storm windows, pouring through the vents.

  Think in terms of forgiving me everything, Don would say in his cups. God knows I do.

  And Teddy had. Selflessly and tolerantly he’d endured Don’s eruptions over the years—the drunken phone calls, the retributive rants, the mawkish apologies—not because selfless, tolerant endurance of other people’s moods was one of Teddy’s specialties, though it was; not because he and Don were vaguely related by ma
rriage, though they were; not because they’d successfully worked together at the middle school for twenty years now, though they had; or because, like most people, Teddy found both instruction and entertainment in other people’s tragedies, though he did—no, he endured them because he genuinely liked Don, and feared him, and pitied him, and felt vaguely protective of him, and, though he did not like to dwell on this, vaguely guilty toward him as well. Three years before, after a successful production of Guys and Dolls, he’d walked petite, unsmiling Vera Blackburn out to her car and wound up kissing her smack on the mouth. Right there in the parking lot, under the fizzy halo of the sodium lights! Christ alone knew why; he’d only intended to buss her on the cheek. But Vera was so short, and Teddy was so tall, and his big, lumbering weight kept moving downward as if of its own volition, the white lines of the parking grid blurring at his feet, and suddenly Vera’s fine dark hair was slipping its braid, her split ends whisking like feathers against his cheek, and it was as if they’d begun to sleepwalk their way through some strange, weightless twilight where everything was permissible and nothing quite mattered. Or was it vice versa? Of course the kiss itself lasted only a moment. And if later Teddy came to regret that kiss for ethical reasons almost as much as he’d enjoyed it at the time for aesthetic ones, on balance he was grateful for it, for the wealth of that deposit in his memory, and for the warm, tangeriney taste of Vera’s lips, which remained with him as he sailed home that night in his purring Accord. All the lights were with him. Signs bowed in the wind; mica chips glittered in the sidewalks; the shops and their awnings fell away behind him, folding up like stage flats. As if this social world with its painted signs were only another amateurish set, waiting to be struck. When he got home that night he drank a little bourbon and let Bruno out to do his business, to approach and avoid the invisible fence that ringed the yard; and then he turned off the porch light, put his glass in the sink, and went upstairs to have his way with his own lawful sleeping wife. And that was that. Not long after, Vera Blackburn moved to San Francisco and opened a maternity boutique, ripping a small tear in the social fabric through which the weather poured in on them all.