Babylon and Other Stories Part 13

"What do you mean? You can't stay with him if you aren't happy together," I said, and I believed this to be simple and true.

She looked at me with pity. "When I met him I had no life. I was pregnant, I had no money. He helped me. So you see?"

I didn't. "I still think you have a choice."

"If I ever left Bob I'd be in trouble again in a second. I just know it. In a second. He knows it, too. That's the thing about me and Bob, he's crazier than I am. It keeps me steady, you know what I mean?"

I looked out the window. Snow was falling thickly, but a fire burned tall and strong in the valley, and I could see two shadowy figures around it-a weird scene, magical and sinister, like a page from a fairy tale.

"I guess I'll fix dinner," Miriam said. She didn't seem upset anymore.

I walked downstairs and went out the back. Snow piled on my hair and my shoulders. I found Spike and Uncle Bob each with a bottle in hand. On top of the mattress they'd piled boxes, broken chairs, some twisted pieces of metal I couldn't identify. Wind whipped the flames around loudly.

"Housecleaning!" yelled Uncle Bob when he saw me. "I decided to get rid of some things. I know the traditional time for this is spring, but you know what Spike says."

"What does Spike say?" I said, looking at Spike.

"Spike says Uncle Bob is not a traditional man," said Uncle Bob.

"Want some whiskey?" Spike asked me. "Is everything okay? Are you okay?"

I nodded. It was blazing hot next to the fire and freezing a couple of steps away. The two of them seemed not to notice, standing so close to it, their faces flushed. Outside the rim of fire the world danced into darkness. Miriam emerged from that darkness, her red lips even redder in the firelight. When Bob saw her he dropped to his knees. She laughed.

"Forgive me, forgive me," he said. He stood up and put his arms around her, and they kissed. He looked at Spike and me, triumphantly, and said, "The love of a good woman. That's all I need."

Spike gestured for me to come close to him. I shook my head and he gave me a questioning look. He walked toward me and stumbled as he took a step. When he reached for my arm I moved away and walked past the fire, picking my steps over rocks, going as quickly as I could. The hill was steep and tangled with roots I could feel even under the snow, until I reached the clearing.

It was peaceful there. The smell of the fire carried, though neither the sound nor the shadows of the flames. An early star had come out and the sky was a dark, smoky blue. I kept walking fast through the snow. I could hear Spike following me, his steps crashing messily. Hurry to me. I wanted him to have to run, possibly trip, fall, bruise himself somewhere: anything to get to me. He was closer, was almost upon me, and then he stopped. I heard him retching. I turned around and saw him bent over, vomiting into the snow.

"Jesus, Spike."

"I'm sorry."

When he finished he took my elbow and steered me away from the steaming snow. He walked me over to a pine tree at the far edge of the clearing. With his back to me he washed his mouth out with snow. I leaned against the trunk of the tree and looked back down the hillside, toward the fire, my heart beating fast in my chest.

"Marry me," he said.

His cheeks were shiny with melted snow and his eyes were bright. I felt like no one would ever see straight through to the heart of me like he did. Years pa.s.sed, we divorced, I got myself sober, strong, everything a normal person is supposed to be, yet some nights I still feel this. I remember-the world was cold and white all around me and, like a bride, I lifted my face to his.

Babylon.

Robert fell in love for the first time when he was twenty-nine, and he was vastly relieved. He'd started to think that he wasn't capable of it, that in his soul-or heart, or brain chemistry, or wherever the center of a person was located-something essential was lacking. Over the years he'd dated enough women to know he was straight, and he'd cared for some of them a lot; in college, he and his girlfriend Marisa had even tossed around names for potential children. But when Marisa suddenly got sulky their senior year, stopped laughing at his jokes, and eventually announced she'd been nursing "a thing" for his roommate for almost a year and had recently found out he had "a thing" for her, too, that she was therefore breaking up with him and would love to still be friends although she'd understand if he couldn't handle it, he wasn't shattered. Pained and irritated-especially when forced to listen to them having loud, panting s.e.x at all hours of the day and night on the other side of his dorm-room wall-but not shattered. This, he thought, was where he failed. He never felt himself split open like a melon, offering all his vulnerable fruit to the world.

Then he met Astrid at a wedding in Babylon, Long Island. He'd worked with the groom, a financial a.n.a.lyst, for years-the bride was an a.n.a.lyst, too, as were many of the guests, and the reception was full of tedious jokes about the marriage being productive and cost-beneficial-but they rarely saw each other outside the office, so he sat at a table in the corner, dateless, making small talk about global markets with a woman from Morgan Stanley while she picked at her Chilean sea ba.s.s. The main thought on his mind was that once dinner was over he could go home. In the back of the room he saw a thin blond woman lingering uncertainly, as if she, too, were anxious to leave. She had the bad posture common to many taller women, and kept scanning the room vaguely, as if she'd lost whomever she came with. But after watching her for a few minutes, nodding and grunting through the conversation at his table, he decided she wasn't looking for anybody at all; she was just looking. Lying about needing to visit the men's room, he excused himself and walked over. Up close she had wide, clear blue eyes and delicate wrinkles that sprayed out from them. Even her nose had three little wrinkles on either side.

"Are you tired of all the market jokes, too?" he said.

She jumped as if he'd touched her, and when she glanced over her shoulder, he realized that she'd felt invisible. For a second he considered going back to his table but then saw the Morgan Stanley woman glowering in his direction, having figured out that he'd lied to her in order to go talk to a blonde. Men, he could practically see her thinking.

And then she smiled. "You're not into...markets?" she said.

"Well, I'm a computer guy, so I shouldn't complain. Our weddings are much, much worse," he said. "When we have them, anyway." He told himself to stop talking. Her blue eyes were fixed on him. Her skin was very pale, almost translucent, blue veins visible at her temple. Her smile broadened even further, and he understood that he was staring. He felt very warm.

"I'm Astrid," she said. "I have to leave now, but would you like to have dinner sometime?"

"G.o.d, yes," he said.

The band began to play. She wrote down her phone number, a Manhattan exchange, and walked out of the room as the happy couple began their first married dance together. All my life, he thought, I'll remember this day.

He waited two days to call, not wanting to appear too eager, also not wanting her to forget who he was. As he was dialing he realized she didn't know his name, and almost hung up, but she answered just as he was about to put down the receiver, catching him off-guard. "h.e.l.lo?" she said, her voice cool and placid.

"This is Robert?" he said squeakily. "We met at Marcy and Brian's wedding last week in Babylon. The really boring one with all the financial humor, if that's not an oxymoron. Financial humor, that is." To all this she said nothing, and he wasn't even sure she was still there. He closed his eyes. "I was wondering if you still wanted to have dinner."

"Oh, of course," she said. "Why don't you come over here?"

The immediacy of this response violated every precept of dating in New York. He pictured her blue eyes, her white skin. She wasn't beautiful but there was something about her, some dim, pale radiance, that made her looks extraordinary.

"That sounds great. I don't want to put you to any trouble, though."

"I like to cook," she said. "Can you come tomorrow?"

"Oh, of course," he said. On the other side of the phone he could hear her exhale in a smile that echoed his. After she told him where she lived, they got off the phone. The easiness of it made him all the more nervous; made him want her all the more.

At the appointed time he showed up at the apartment with flowers, wine, and chocolate. This was overkill, he knew, but she didn't seem the type who'd read too much into it, although he hardly knew what type she was at all. She opened the door wearing a white b.u.t.ton-down shirt and jeans, an outfit that on another woman might have looked studiedly casual, yet on her looked simple and relaxed. Her blond hair, which had been swept up at the wedding, fell loose and straight to her shoulders. He kissed her on the cheek, and she blushed, pink seeping into her white skin like a watercolor.

"Come in," she said.

Entering, he smelled food cooking and another smell beneath it, maybe of flowers. Her apartment was feminine without being fussy: a blue couch, a matching armchair and a brown jute rug, a bookcase with a stereo, framed black-and-white nature photographs on the walls. The living room was, if anything, a bit abstract, like a picture in a catalog. Then again, she'd probably cleaned up before he got there.

There was an awkward flurry of gift-giving and putting the flowers in a vase and drink offering, and then they were sitting next to each other on the couch, winegla.s.ses in hand.

"What are you making that smells so good?" he said.

"Chicken Mirabella," she said. "My mother always used to make it for guests. Do you mind having chicken? I know it's not very exciting."

"Of course I don't mind. Do you want any help?"

"There isn't room for more than one person in the kitchen, but thanks anyway."

"Thank you," he said, blushing, "for cooking."

"It relaxes me," she said.

And she did look relaxed, sitting there on the blue couch in her white shirt, her long fingers cupping the base of her gla.s.s. She made him feel as though ordinary rules didn't apply. So he leaned over and kissed her, once, on the lips. When he sat back he was trembling a little.

"Thank you," she said. "I'd better go check on the food now."

While she was in the kitchen he walked around the room. Her apartment faced a courtyard where a small tree grew wizened and stunted in the permanent shade. He could see a man on the other side watering the plants in his window. He wandered over to her stereo, thinking to put on some music, but she seemed to have only cla.s.sical, and he decided against it. Then, on a bookshelf below the stereo, he saw a sculpture of a woman's breast- just the breast, and so lifelike that for a second he was afraid to touch it. It had pale brown flesh and a darker brown nipple, which was erect. Picking it up, he discovered it was floppy and cool to the touch. He stood there frowning, holding it carefully in both hands, wondering why on earth such a thing was in this blue, abstract apartment.

"It's from my work," Astrid said beside him, and he turned guiltily, not having heard her come back into the room.

She held out her left hand, palm up, and he placed the breast on it like a child surrendering chewing gum to a teacher. But she took his right hand in hers and guided his index and middle fingers to the surface of the breast. "I'm a physician's a.s.sistant in a women's clinic," she said. "This is to teach women how to look for lumps." Her hand was warm, and the breast was cool. She moved his fingers around the breast in a circle from the outside to the center, pressing inch by inch, stopping to make sure he could feel the lumps, little pits as hard as seeds. Rather than looking at him, she was gazing down at the breast, concentrating. When they got to the nipple she said, "You have to pull on it to see if there's any discharge." Then she dropped his hand and put the breast back on the shelf, and it dawned on him that he'd been holding his breath. He exhaled. "Let's eat," she said.

They ate in the living room, and over dinner she told him more about her work. Originally she'd thought she might want to be a doctor, but had decided against giving up that much of her life to medical school and residency. In her current job she felt like she was helping people and could still get home in time for dinner every day. She asked about his work, and he made self-deprecating jokes about how boring it was, and she laughed at them. The food was excellent, he told her, and she blushed. After dessert, a homemade apple pie, he stood up, his head swimming a little from the wine, and insisted on doing the dishes. When she wanted to help, he said, "There's only room for one in the kitchen, right? Go sit down and relax."

She smiled, and from the kitchen he could hear her moving through the small apartment to the bathroom. He washed all the dishes and placed them in the drying rack. Like everything else, the kitchen was small but well organized. He was whistling. Sc.r.a.ping the last few sc.r.a.ps of chicken out of the pan, he saw the garbage can was full, so he tied the bag and pulled it out, then looked in the pantry for a replacement. Instead he found a stack of empty containers from Dean & DeLuca, all the courses of their dinner matched by the labels: the chicken Mirabella, the mesclun salad, the apple pie. She must have transferred the food into pots and pans to look as if she'd cooked it. He stood there staring at the containers, amazed that she'd lie about cooking; but then, suddenly, it made her more human to him, more endearing. Didn't he want to seem perfect to her, too?

He started seeing her every weekend, then every few days, and before long he was sleeping over at her apartment almost every night. Most of the time they ate out, or he cooked; she never did, and he never mentioned the containers from Dean & DeLuca. Every night she fell asleep at ten o'clock, exactly; even if they were at a movie, out with friends, or in a restaurant, he would see her eyelids drooping like a child's, and she'd lean her head on his shoulder. In sleep her body grew even more attractive to him. She slept on her back, one arm flung over her head, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s flattened against her chest like the model he'd handled that first night. Her breathing was regular and deep. Often he willed himself to stay awake and watch her, feeling how deeply in love he was.

When they had s.e.x she wrapped one leg around him, one arm around his back, so he was half-captured and half-free. Her skin grew hot to his touch, her hips rocking violently against his. They had s.e.x in her apartment, in his, in a restaurant bathroom, in Central Park under a blanket. When she came she said his name over and over, in a low, throaty murmur he found unbelievably s.e.xy.

During the day they never spoke. She said the clinic was a women-only s.p.a.ce ("Even the phone?" he said, and she nodded), and that she was usually too busy to talk on the phone anyway ("Even at lunch?" he said, and she nodded). If he had something urgent to tell her, he left a message on her cell phone, which she'd check while eating lunch at her desk or before leaving. At first this annoyed him, but after a while he came to like it: at dinner they each had a full day's worth of anecdotes and gripes to share. She complained about the arrogance of some of the doctors and said women were harder to work for than men, since they were threatened by things she said or by patients who liked her. Sometimes, as with the breast, she brought items home from work: a medical smock, a pamphlet about ovarian cancer. Once, in a Chinese restaurant, when he asked if she had change for a tip, she fished around in her purse and emptied the contents onto the table-keys, lipstick, tissues, her wallet, a long thin silver object he picked up and examined. "What's this?" he said.

Astrid opened her wallet and took out some ones. "It's a speculum," she said calmly.

"A what?"

"They use it to take tissue samples."

He stared at her for a second, the instrument cold in his hand. "Why do you have it?" he said. "Are you planning on doing something once I fall asleep?"

She shrugged and started loading things back into her purse. "I don't know. There's something about it that fascinates me, I guess. Not so much the equipment but what they do with it. How far they go into your body, how much they know."

"Maybe you should go to medical school."

"No way," she said, sliding the speculum into her purse. "I couldn't handle it."

This was the one thing about Astrid that frustrated him: she put herself down all the time. No matter how much he tried to talk her out of it, she always said she could never be anything other than an a.s.sistant in an office. She, on the other hand, encouraged his vague plan to quit his computer job and go to graduate school in public administration. He had an idea about working in a hospital, streamlining care, and in his most elaborate fantasies Astrid worked in the same hospital and they commuted to work together and ate lunch together in the cafeteria, and he always knew where she was, every second of the day.

She loved him too. He could feel it glowing out from her, in the warmth of her skin, in the way her voice changed when she spoke to him. It was like the first time he did c.o.ke, in college. He closed one nostril, inhaled, and, within seconds, thought, So this is what everybody's talking about.

A year after they met, he proposed to her in Central Park, and she said yes.

"I guess it's about time you met my family," Robert said that night in bed. "Let's fly to Chicago. For the weekend. And we can go to San Francisco whenever you want. Thanksgiving, maybe?" She'd grown up in Oakland, an only child, in a two-bedroom house he'd seen pictures of.

"We won't have to," she said calmly. She was in her sleeping pose, eyes closed, arm flung up, about to drift off. It was a quarter to ten. "They're here now."

"What do you mean, they're here?"

"In Babylon."

"Your parents live on Long Island? How come you never told me?"

"We aren't close."

"Astrid, this is very weird."

"Look," she said, an uncharacteristic edge in her voice. "Not everybody comes from a perfect family. I'm not even sure I'll want them at the wedding."

He put his arm around her. "Okay," he said. "Okay."

The next weekend, at his insistence, they went to Babylon to meet her father, Dr. Henglund, a podiatrist, and her mother, Barbara. Driving out, he tried to get her to talk about them, but she just shrugged and looked out the window. Looking back, he could hardly remember her mentioning them at all.

Dr. Henglund was very tall and very thin. He wore a white b.u.t.ton-down shirt and light brown slacks and exuded an air of distant, medically enhanced menace, like Laurence Olivier in The Marathon Man. His white hair was cropped very close to his balding head. Barbara was a slightly wrinkled version of Astrid, with the same placid blue eyes, the same very pale skin. Her hair was also cut short and fitted her head like a sleek, gray-blond hat. Unlike Astrid she had no stoop, and she greeted Robert with formal politeness, shaking his hand. They all sat down in the living room, on separate chairs, and Barbara served white-wine spritzers without offering any other choices.

"This is a beautiful house," Robert said, although in fact it was plain, st.u.r.dy, and underfurnished, with very little on the walls. "Astrid and I met out here in Babylon. At a wedding. I'm sure she told you."

"Indeed," Dr. Henglund said.

Astrid said nothing. Since stepping into the house she'd adopted the posture of a young girl: sitting straight in her seat, knees together, hands clasped in her lap. She looked around ten years old. Whenever her father spoke, she fixed her gaze on the floor.

Everybody was quiet. He couldn't smell anything cooking. When Astrid told him they were expected at five o'clock, he'd a.s.sumed there would be dinner, but now he wasn't sure. He felt a sharp pang for Astrid, for having to grow up with these people, and he felt a great heat too, knowing that his family would enfold and enclose her, that together they would have a life completely unlike this one, whatever the h.e.l.l it was.

"Do you miss California?" he asked Barbara.

She looked at him and frowned, seemingly almost puzzled. "Well, no," she said.

"Astrid tells me you're in computers," Dr. Henglund said.

"Yes, though maybe not for long," Robert said. When he was nervous he talked too much and too fast. "I might go back to school. Astrid's really supportive, and I'm trying to convince her to go back to school, too. She's too smart to be just a physician's a.s.sistant, but she just tells me not to be so pushy."

Again Barbara gave him a puzzled look. It was like he was speaking a different language. He turned to Astrid for help, but she was gazing out the window at the yard, where a row of rhododendrons burst with loose, open flowers.

There was no dinner. After another ten minutes of minimal conversation, Astrid stood up and said they'd better be going. They drove through suburban streets back toward the highway, and she asked him to stop by a park.

"Now you know why I don't see them very much," she said. "They're cold. They're the coldest people on earth, I think."

In the warm interior of the car he turned and held her, and she lifted her pale face and kissed him hard, smashing her mouth against his, her hand groping his pants. She climbed on top of him awkwardly, pulling his shirt loose, her nails sc.r.a.ping against his chest. Things got out of hand and they had s.e.x in the car, and then he drove home with Astrid leaning back in the pa.s.senger seat, her eyes closed.

The visit to Chicago went much better. His parents and sisters, as relieved as he was that he'd finally found someone, loved Astrid. His sisters teased him that she was out of his league, and the family took up this joke and kept insisting that he'd better schedule the wedding as soon as possible, before she wised up and changed her mind. Once they got back to New York his mother was calling twice a week-not to speak to him but to Astrid, conferring over every detail of the wedding. If Astrid regretted not having these conversations with her own mother, she never said so. A hall was reserved; invitations were engraved and addressed. He took one in to work to give to Brian, wanting to tell him personally. They hadn't socialized any more regularly since Brian's wedding than they had before, so Brian hugged him and said, "I didn't even know you were with someone, man! Congratulations!"

"Thanks," Robert said. "I owe it all to you, in a way."

"How's that?"

"Astrid. I met her at your wedding."

"You did? Astrid who?"

"Henglund."

Brian frowned. "Must be a friend of Marcy's," he said.