Babylon and Other Stories (21 page)

“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 Saturday 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 assistant 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.”

“Fuck you,” Robert said. “What did you do to her?”

Henglund raised one white eyebrow behind his glasses. 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 button 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 glass of water. The sheets smelled like her. He lay there in the dark, waiting for his love to come back.

When Marcus left home for college, he took his books, his clothes, his porn 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 crap 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, puberty, 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 basement for sexual 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 résumé in a briefcase in the passenger 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 reassurance. 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, petite and Hispanic, wearing a fuchsia turtleneck and a white apron over black pants. She smiled at Karin passively.

“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.