Babylon and Other Stories Part 14

At home that night, when he asked Astrid about it, she said that she'd been there as someone's date, a guy she didn't know well and never saw again. "As soon as I saw you," she said, "I knew."

A week later his secretary told him a woman was there to see him, and for a moment his heart lifted. (This was another fantasy he had, about Astrid surprising him at work, wearing a trench-coat with nothing underneath it.) But it was Barbara Henglund, who stood for a minute examining his office-the picture of him and Astrid on the desk, the black-and-white photograph of Central Park she'd given him on the wall-and then sat down with her purse in her lap. "I got the invitation," she said.

"Oh," he said, smiling at her, but she didn't smile back. "I hope you'll be at the wedding," he tried.

"Astrid hasn't had a lot of boyfriends," she said.

He didn't know what to say to this. "And?"

"I don't think you know her very well," she went on.

Robert sighed. He didn't know what was wrong with these people and didn't much care, except that he was glad Astrid had gotten away from them. "I know everything I need to know," he said. "Astrid works in a clinic, she's from California, we've been together almost every day for a year, and we'll be together for the rest of our lives. I'm sorry if you find it hard to accept, but that's how it is."

Barbara Henglund nodded several times, quickly, as if in agreement. "Astrid is troubled," she said slowly. "She's been alone a great deal."

"She isn't alone now."

"She also isn't from California. She's from Babylon. She grew up in that house. We've lived here for thirty years. And she doesn't work in a clinic. She's a paralegal. Her office is only ten blocks from here."

He stared at her for a long moment, and finally shook his head. "That makes no sense," he said.

For the first time, Mrs. Henglund's expression seemed to soften. "She used to only lie about small things. Whether or not she'd cleaned her room. Where she was going with her friends. Then she went off to Barnard. We liked the idea that she was close by. Her transcript came after the first semester. All Fs. We found out she'd been going to NYU, lying about being enrolled there. In all those cla.s.ses she had straight As."

"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," he said.

"She was in therapy for years," Mrs. Henglund said. "I thought it was over."

When she stopped talking the world was soundless. He looked over her shoulder at the clear gla.s.s wall of his office. In the corridor people were strolling past, papers in hand, chatting. None of it was possible.

"I thought you should know," Barbara Henglund said, then stood up and turned to go.

"I don't believe you," he said.

She looked at him, pity distending her lips into an expression that was almost, but not quite, a smile. "Dustin, Rawlings & Livermore," she said. "Forty-seventh Street."

At five o'clock that afternoon he was waiting outside the building. It really was only ten blocks away. He told himself this was crazy, that he'd go home and never tell her about the vicious lies told by her crazy mother, that they'd sever all contact with her family and never go to Babylon again. Crowds of office workers streamed past toward the subway. The day was rainy and gray.

Then he saw her unmistakable blond hair. As if in a dream he reached out and grabbed her arm. In movies, he thought, a guy searches for the girl he loves in a crowd, runs after her, and when she turns around it's never really her.

But Astrid turned around. "What are you doing here?" she said.

He looked at her. "What is this? What are you doing here? What are you?"

Her expression didn't change. "How funny to run into you," she said. "I was just doing an errand."

He dragged her to a nearby bench, people on the sidewalk frowning at them, wondering if they ought to intervene. "Love," he said, "your mother came to see me. She says you work here as a paralegal, that you're from Babylon, not California. Just tell me she's crazy, okay? Tell me who the guy was that you went with to Brian and Marcy's wedding."

Astrid was wearing gray trousers, and when she crossed her legs on the bench she looked, for a moment, as composed as ever. Then her eyes met his, and he saw the tears and knew his life was over. "I used to like to go to weddings," she said. "I was ... lonely. There are weddings every Sat.u.r.day at that hall."

He put his head in his hands, felt her arm wrap around his shoulder, then stood up and shook off her touch, feeling like he was choking. Her hair was in the corner of his sight as he walked away, not knowing where he was going.

It turned out everything was a lie. Her job, her background, even her name-which was Sophia, though she preferred to call herself Astrid after a favorite aunt. That evening in her apartment, relentlessly questioning her, he stripped away lie after lie, and Astrid, sitting on the couch where she'd first lied to him about the dinner she hadn't cooked, admitted to all of them, tears always trembling in her eyes without ever seeming to fall: yes, she'd lied about her job; no, she couldn't explain why. There were lies upon lies, lies without sense, lies without end. There was no reason why being a physician's a.s.sistant was better, worth lying about, than being a paralegal. There was no reason why California was preferable to Babylon. He kept asking her what the point was, and she kept shrugging. He grabbed the model of the breast from her bookcase and shook it at her, its rubbery flesh cold in his hand. "What about this?"

"I can't explain it," she said.

For the first time in months he slept in his own apartment. In the morning-from work, where he was calmer-he called his parents. His mother made arrangements to fly in immediately from Chicago, and when she arrived she set about canceling all the plans that had been made for the wedding. He didn't call Astrid and didn't hear from her. He thought she must be too ashamed, and that she deserved it, for the magnitude of her be trayal.

It was over.

A week went by. His mother called everybody who'd been invited and explained that the wedding was off. He worked all day, and at night his mother gave him some Valium, which he took obediently, just as he'd taken antibiotics from her as a child, and he'd be asleep before eight.

Then one evening he came home and his mother told him she thought he needed help. She'd made an appointment with a therapist for the next morning, without asking, and he was too tired, or sedated, or will-less, to protest. In the office he explained what had happened mechanically, as if it were somebody else's story. The therapist, a scholarly looking man in a green cardigan, listened to him and nodded slowly. "Recovering from this shock will take you some time," he said.

"Thanks for the tip," Robert said sharply. The therapist nodded again, and Robert sighed and rubbed his forehead, where there seemed to be a permanent pain. "What gets me is why. Why would she make these things up? They were such useless lies."

"Often this kind of behavior is related to a childhood trauma or abuse," the therapist said. "Although of course I can't say for sure, not without seeing her myself."

Abuse. Into Robert's mind came the vision of Dr. Henglund, the podiatrist, the coldest man in the world. He'd sensed evil in him as soon as they had met. He thought of Astrid fingering the rubber breast, pocketing the speculum that probed the female body. How far they go into the body, how much they know, she'd said. It was the invasion she found fascinating, Robert thought, a vulnerability of the body that must have spoken to her of her own.

He thanked the therapist and, that afternoon, drove out to Long Island, to Henglund's office.

On the wall in the waiting room was a poster showing crippled and deformed feet, hammer-toed, misshapen, archless. On the opposite wall, another poster displayed happy feet, unconfined and lacking bunions, romping in a field as if they'd never once needed shoes. He ignored the nurse and walked right into the examining room, where Henglund was crouched before a woman's foot, holding it like a prince with a slipper. Seeing Robert, he straightened up and excused himself to the patient, a middle-aged woman with red lipstick and enormous hair, then led him into an office and sat down behind the desk.

"Astrid is home with us now," he said solemnly, leaning forward with his hands clasped, his flesh sallow against his white coat. "We are taking care of her." His air of menace was even stronger now.

"I can't prove it," Robert said, "but I believe this is all your fault."

"Indeed," Dr. Henglund said. "Your response is understandable, I suppose. One always looks for others to blame when confronted with a difficult situation."

"f.u.c.k you," Robert said. "What did you do to her?"

Henglund raised one white eyebrow behind his gla.s.ses. His eyes were blue and eerily pale. "This is no longer your concern," he said.

"If she stays with you, it's the end of her," Robert said. "You made her what she is."

Henglund touched the tips of his long fingers together. "It's been my experience," he said, "that we make ourselves."

Robert left the office in disgust and drove to the Henglunds' house, parked on the street, and walked up the driveway. Through the front window he could see Astrid sitting on the living-room couch reading The New York Times. Her expression was calm. When she lifted her head, he thought she'd heard his approach; but then she said something in the direction of the kitchen, and he knew she must be talking to her mother. As he watched her he felt himself disintegrating, dissolving. He understood then why people with broken hearts killed themselves. It wasn't the pain so much as the nothingness, the formlessness of the days and months and years to come, that was unbearable.

Without her there was nothing. Yet he had no idea who she was.

As he stood there watching her through the window she turned and saw him, fixing him with eyes that were, he now realized, the same as her father's. Her hair hung limply to her shoulders, unwashed for days. He saw how tired she looked, how miserable, how bereft. Then she smiled sadly, tightly-a smile that said she knew she'd betrayed him, that in so doing she'd betrayed herself.

Without thinking, he beckoned to her, and she put down the newspaper and came outside. He didn't even know what to call her.

"Will you take me home?" she said.

He nodded. In the car, driving back, she put her hand on his knee, and he let her. After a while she moved her hand up to his thigh, and he let her do that too. He walked with her upstairs to her apartment, and in the living room she thanked him for taking her away from Babylon. Without thinking, the same as the first time, he kissed her, and she kissed him back, pushing her tongue into his mouth, running her hands up his back. He grabbed her and took off her shirt. A b.u.t.ton popped and landed on the floor. She pulled him down on the couch, and he pulled down her pants and then his own and thrust inside her, one foot braced on the floor. "Robert," she said.

Afterwards they took off the rest of their clothes and moved to the bedroom, where they slept for a little while, his arms around her. The room was dark when he woke up, alone in bed. He could hear her moving softly around in the kitchen, opening the fridge door, it sounded like, pouring a gla.s.s of water. The sheets smelled like her. He lay there in the dark, waiting for his love to come back.

Ghostwriting.

When Marcus left home for college, he took his books, his clothes, his p.o.r.n magazines (she checked), and the decrepit couch in the back room. He tried to take the dog, too, claiming the resident advisor had approved it, but Karin wouldn't let him. He said she'd never even walked the dog-which was true- and she said she'd have to start, and when he voiced some skepticism she was affronted, and they were hardly speaking by the time his father showed up to drive him to school the next morning. Fighting helped both of them get through the moment. Karin was able to hold off until it got dark that night, when she found herself sobbing in his bedroom. She felt bankrupt. She'd been cleaned out.

The dog crept hesitantly into the room. Karin lay down on Marcus's bed and tried to get her to climb up, to join her in her sorrow. Cynical about her motives, the dog refused. Instead she whined and stamped her paw until Karin let her out the back. In the kitchen she dried her tears and watched the dog standing in the yard, yellow light from the back porch glinting obliquely in her eyes.

The next morning she started a journal, having read in magazines about the cathartic powers of self-expression. Who am I? she wrote on a piece of lined paper. An ex-wife, a part-time copy editor, a mother in an empty nest. A new stage of my life is about to begin. After staring at these lines for a few minutes, she added, If I write any more of this c.r.a.p I will kill myself. Then she took the dog for a walk.

Nonetheless, change was in order. She'd spent a long time taking care of Marcus, feeding and clothing and watching him through the divorce, p.u.b.erty, his college application essays, and now that he wasn't around she had an unbearable amount of free time. Not time, exactly, but focus. What to look at, what to think about? She walked around carrying her grief inside her, private, growing, fed by her own energy, just as she'd once carried him. In the end she turned to work. When she was young she'd lived in New York and edited full-time, mostly cookbooks and travel guides; then she got married, moved to the suburbs, and went freelance, following the money into corporate and medical newsletters. Now she began inching her way back, wanting something more interesting than investor portfolios and trends in drug research. What she got was work for a local magazine, feature articles about neighborhood chefs and do-gooders and hometown stars with small parts in Broadway plays and TV shows. One day the managing editor told her about a local author he knew who was looking for editing help on a mystery.

Karin had never worked on fiction before, and the idea attracted her. The managing editor gave her the writer's phone number and address, and she set up an interview for the following day. On the phone the author, whose name was Donald St. John, was professional and cool, seeming to reserve judgment. Karin had never heard of him, but spent the evening before the interview at the bookstore. His books were historical mysteries, small paperbacks with lurid covers-busty maids in tight corsets discovering bodies with knives in their backs. She opened the first page of the most recent one. Annalise Gilbert had long suspected that the master of the house had a secret. As it turned out-she flipped to the back-the master of the house had a woman chained in the bas.e.m.e.nt for s.e.xual purposes, and had murdered the maid who'd discovered this secret. The master of the house had issues with women, Karin thought, and decided to wear pants to the interview.

Donald St. John lived in the strangest house she'd ever seen. Though the first floor was a standard Dutch colonial with brick walls and black shutters, the second floor had been renovated with floor-to-ceiling windows all around, and must have cost a fortune to heat. Parked in her car outside, her samples and resume in a briefcase in the pa.s.senger seat, Karin checked her hair and makeup, which was so understated as to be invisible. Since her hair had gone gray it had gotten even curlier and she had trouble containing it in an elastic band or a barrette, so she just let it hang around her head in an ugly, effusive triangle. She'd hated the way she looked for so long that the glance in the rearview mirror confirming it felt like rea.s.surance. She walked to the front door feeling like she was being observed through those enormous windows, though she couldn't see anyone. The door was opened by a woman around her own age, pet.i.te and Hispanic, wearing a fuchsia turtleneck and a white ap.r.o.n over black pants. She smiled at Karin pa.s.sively.

"I'm here to see Mr. St. John."

The woman nodded and silently led Karin into the living room, where she sat down on a sofa. Arranged on the coffee table were copies of upscale travel magazines. The maid, if that's who she was, smiled again and disappeared. For a few minutes Karin heard not a single sound, then Donald St. John strode into the room. He was tall and lean, with brilliant blue eyes and long white hair, wearing a plaid flannel shirt and blue jeans.

"Thank you for coming," he said in a rich baritone. His wrinkles were handsome.

It was as if men got an entirely different kind of aging, Karin thought, as if they were ordering from a different catalog. Quickly she ran through the compensating factors-prostate trouble, erectile dysfunction, undignified chasing after young girls and sports cars-but they didn't seem like enough. "It's nice to meet you," she said.

"Please, this way."

She followed him upstairs to his office, where his floor-to-ceiling view was of trees, a creek, and, beyond that, a broad swatch of cookie-cutter homes in a new subdivision that ruined his horizon. Motioning her to a chair, St. John sat down behind his desk and wheeled from spot to spot looking for something in his stacks of papers. As he did so he said he'd heard wonderful things about her from Sid, the managing editor, and was prepared to hire her on the spot. Karin sat there with her briefcase still on the floor beside her, wondering exactly what she'd gotten herself into.

Finally he said, "Aha! Here we are," pulled out a manila folder, and handed it to her.

She opened it and read, The Hospital Is Haunted: Chapter One. People in the quaint mountain town of St. Lucent had known the hospital was haunted for many years.

When she looked up, Donald St. John finished writing out a check, and pa.s.sed it over to her. It was for fifteen hundred dollars. "I'll just give you that now, and you can tell me when I need to give you more," he said. "How soon can you start?"

"I can start now," she said.

"Good." He scooted closer on his wheeled chair. "Now, listen. I've gotten up to chapter five, and I'd like you to take a gander at chapter six. There's an outline at the back with the basic story. When you've got a draft, call me up and we'll take a look."

She looked into his blue eyes, wondering if he was entirely sober. "I'm a copy editor, mainly," she said.

"You work with language, though, yes? And you have wonderful references. Just try it," he said heartily. "If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. No harm done. You've read mysteries, right?"

She nodded.

"Then you know that to those of us behind the scenes, they aren't mysterious at all."

She nodded again.

"Stay to lunch," he said.

Unable to stop the momentum, she kept nodding.

"Excellent. Corazon is a wonderful cook."

All three of them sat around a yellow Formica table in the kitchen. Corazon remained silent while Donald St. John spoke at great length about a trip he'd recently taken to the south of France, photographing the landscape and eating local stews. Their own lunch was a Mexican soup so spicy that Karin ruined her cloth napkin by having to wipe her nose so often. Corazon evidently spoke no English. As soon as she politely could, Karin refused coffee and left, carrying the mystery in her briefcase.

At home that evening, a gla.s.s of wine in hand, she read the first five chapters in one sitting. Ages ago, in college, she'd written poetry, but she had long since stopped thinking of herself as a creative person. She had become a competent person instead. In the first fifty pages of the book, a male doctor was killed and a female doctor was raped by a ghost, the latter act described with loving, brutal specificity. The female doctor's best friend, Rose, a s.e.xy but hard-nosed hospital administrator, was determined to put a stop to these crimes and didn't believe in ghosts. Rather, she suspected the hospital's new doctor, a testy, handsome, brilliantly accomplished brain surgeon named Rusty McGovern. In the outline, the evidence piled up against Rusty, as did Rose's attraction to him, until he turned up at just the right moment to save her from the raping ghost.

The writing varied from mechanical and simplistic to outright awful. Rose had shiny auburn hair that cascaded down her back like a brown waterfall, Rusty was part Irish, part Cherokee, and all man. Karin's first thought was that of course she could write this stuff-much better, in fact. St. John was right, it wasn't that mysterious at all, and she went to sleep that night looking forward to the next day's work just as, when a child, she'd looked forward to a new year at school.

Chapter Six, she typed in the morning. In this chapter Rusty stepped outside of the hospital one gloomy, rainy night-all the nights in the quaint mountain town of St. Lucent seemed to be gloomy and rainy-and discovered a dead dog lying by the entrance to the emergency room in a pool of blood. He was bent over the canine corpse when Rose happened to exit the hospital, and of course she believed he'd killed the dog. Rusty arrogantly refused to try to persuade her that it was only a coincidence, and they argued until Rose, convinced of his guilt, drove away into the night (though, according to the outline, she would later discover that Rusty had thoughtfully arranged for the dog's burial in St. Lucent's quaint pet cemetery). While Marcus's dog snored beside her, her legs twitching in dreams, Karin felt she was able to describe the corpse with some exact.i.tude. If not creative, she was certainly accurate, and there was satisfaction in that.

That weekend, when Marcus called, she told him about her new job.

"Who is this guy, anyway?" he said. "You just went over to his house without knowing anything about him?" For years now they'd played these roles-him protecting her, both of them acting as if she were the vulnerable one.

"He's a successful writer, and Sid knows him," she told him. "Don't worry about me."

"There's a lot of creeps out there, Mom. You can't be too careful."

"I'll be fine. You worry too much."

He sighed and asked after the dog.

"She misses you. She sleeps by your bed sometimes."

"It's weird not having a dog," her son said. "I wake up in the night thinking I forgot to feed her. It's like I have a phantom limb, but instead it's a phantom pet."

"I know," she said.

The next week she wrote another chapter, following the outline- the raping ghost continued to maraud, with increasing frequency and violence, throughout the hospital-but adding her own touches. She grew more confident as the writing went on. Deciding the plot was too simple, she introduced some other potential suspects: a cranky, balding internist who had wanted to be promoted to Rose's job; a lesbian nurse who'd once made advances that were spurned. Other characters she simply fleshed out. To the mentally disturbed custodian, for example, she gave every annoying mannerism she remembered from her ex-husband, Mitch.e.l.l-the constant, vaguely s.e.xualized jiggling of change in his pockets, the refusal to clip his nose hairs, the tendency to eat or drink something and then say, "Oh, this tastes terrible, try it"-while keeping the physical description of him very different, as she was mindful of the legal dangers. Writing became more fun every day. The characters were garish and crude, but this was the whole style of the book. She didn't think St. John would mind the liberties she was taking. He seemed to her like a man at the end of his rope, a burnt-out case. Why else hire a ghost writer?

Indeed, as she wrote, the question of St. John began to occupy s.p.a.ce at the back of her mind. How did a person become a mystery writer in the first place, she wondered. And now that she was writing his book, what did he do all day? Karin had other work to do, other deadlines, but this was somehow always the file that remained open on her monitor. She was even enjoying the almost mathematical progression of the book's formulaic plot. Each chapter set up clues that would come to fruition later in a tidy, satisfying sequence; even the dead dog turned out to have a role, as it had been killed just when it was about to bark at the ghost.

Before she knew it, almost, she'd written four chapters. Not wanting St. John to know how much time she was devoting to the book, she waited a few days before e-mailing him the work she'd done. She expected him to write back immediately-at least to acknowledge receipt-but after three days she'd still heard nothing. Not knowing what else to do, she began writing chapter eight, in which the custodian and the lesbian nurse were now in cahoots, though she wasn't quite sure about what. No word yet from St. John. She was too distracted to concentrate on her other work, the medical journals and newsletters. All she thought about was The Hospital Was Haunted. At night she even dreamed of its creepy linoleum floors and Gothic shadows, waking not afraid but feverish, itching to get back to writing.

Finally an e-mail arrived: Come for lunch tomorrow.

This time she dressed up, in a dark purple dress, a black blazer, and boots. She put on lipstick and corralled her hair into a bun-not a librarian's but a s.e.xy one, at least she hoped, with a few fetching loose strands. She wasn't out to seduce Donald St. John; she just wanted to dress like someone who had taken command of the situation. As she sat in the car checking her makeup, she glanced up at the second floor, mentally preparing herself for the conversation to come, and was stunned by what she saw. St. John was walking around the room without a st.i.tch of clothing on. Clearing a stack of files from his desk, tapping a book's spine into place on a shelf, he roamed around his office and then stood at the window surveying his spoiled view. His body was pale, vaguely muscled, bulging at the hips above legs that were thin, delicate, practically feminine. At his crotch was an enormous spray of dark hair, thickly streaked with gray. Karin looked down at her lap, blushing, finding it impossible to fathom. Was this show being put on for her? Or was it his daily habit to inspect his kingdom like this? Was she imagining the whole thing?

People in gla.s.s houses, she thought, shouldn't walk around naked.

When she pulled her briefcase out of the car, her hand was shaking. Corazon met her at the door in her usual smiling silence, then led her upstairs. By the time she entered the office, St. John was dressed in a white b.u.t.ton-down shirt and khaki pants.