Babylon and Other Stories (22 page)

“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 passed 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. Corazón is a wonderful cook.”

All three of them sat around a yellow Formica table in the kitchen. Corazón 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. Corazón 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 glass 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 sexy 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 exactitude. 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, Mitchell—the constant, vaguely sexualized 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 space 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 sexy 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 stitch 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 glass houses, she thought, shouldn't walk around naked.

When she pulled her briefcase out of the car, her hand was shaking. Corazón 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 button-down shirt and khaki pants.

He smiled a perfunctory, vacant smile. On his desk was a single file folder, and he motioned her to a chair beside it. “So, Karin,” he said in his stagey baritone, “lovely to see you. Tell me, how
is
everything going with you? How is your family?”

“My son is a freshman at Penn,” Karin said, sitting down. The
folder was open, and she could see that the manuscript inside started with chapter six, her first chapter. She knew the opening by heart.
Rumors flew wildly among the nurses about the custodian, Jack. Some said he was an orphan who had grown up on the grounds of the hospital. Others said he'd been to jail for killing a man in a barroom brawl. Still others thought that he was brain-damaged as a result of a drug overdose. One thing they could all agree on: Jack couldn't be trusted.

“Penn, really?” St. John said. His heartiness couldn't have been more forced. “Excellent school. I'm a Yale man myself.”

She was unable to stop picturing him naked, which made conversation difficult. “Are you married?” she said.

“God, no,” he said. “I'm a lone wolf. Marriage would be hell for me.”

“It's hell for a lot of people,” Karin said, “but they do it anyway.”

“Indeed,” he said, nodding sagely, “you're quite right.” Then he cleared his throat and wheeled his chair over to the manuscript. “Well, about your work.”

Her stomach seized. She crossed her legs and waited.

“Let's take a look, shall we?” He read the first paragraph out loud, paused, then sighed, rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand, and looked up at the ceiling as he spoke. “The problem, you see, is that it's not well written at all. It's awkward and blocky. It is simply not publishable.”

“I see,” she said. The blood rushing in her ears made it hard to hear what he said next.

“I'm not saying you can't get there,” he said. “It's just that you have a ways to go. It's like—how can I explain this? Do you like baseball? It's like the difference between the major leagues and the minors. What you've done with my book is not
wrong,
but it's
minor-league. I suppose it's not surprising for a novice. I knew I was taking a chance. On Sid's word, of course. He's a big fan of yours. I understand you and your husband have been friends with Sid for many years, children going to school together, that sort of thing. These sorts of connections are epidemic in our little area, I've found.”

Finally he stopped talking. Karin knew she could never speak the thought in her mind: that she'd had to make the writing awkward and blocky so it would match his own. That he was a terrible writer. That, if anything, the problem with her contribution was that it wasn't bad
enough.
St. John was looking down at the manuscript, his brow furrowed pensively, and she realized he wanted her to beg for a second chance. She stood up. “I'm sorry you were disappointed. I'll send your check back.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Life is disappointment. If nothing else, the two of us have learned that much by our age, haven't we? Why don't you try again? Just pitch it a little higher this time.” Now he stood as well. “Corazón will see you out.”

Driving back, Karin cursed St. John and all his terrible, terrible books. It couldn't be true that she had done such a bad job. She refused to believe it. At home she took the dog out, jerking her along by the leash at a breakneck pace until she dug her paws into the ground and refused to go farther, begging her with soulful eyes to be reasonable.

For days, instead of looking at what she'd written, she plotted revenge and vowed to expose him as a hack. She could write her own best-selling mystery series, whose very first villain would be an aging writer living in a glass house; she would accept accolades at the launch party, and when St. John approached her with his pitiful congratulations she would pretend not to remember his name.

Over time, she let this idea go. The problem was that the hospital and the town of St. Lucent and Rusty and Rose and even the custodian had somehow lodged themselves in her brain, and she wasn't prepared or able to let them ago. She didn't want to write another series; she wanted to write this one. The book, she felt, had become hers.

She couldn't concentrate on anything else. When Marcus called, she was evasive about her work and asked him so many questions about school, his grades so far, that he got angry and said, “God, Mom, get your own life and stop bugging me about mine.” That night she couldn't even sleep. All she could think about was
The Hospital Was Haunted.

Finally she stopped resisting and started writing again where she'd left off. From here on out, she would write without lowering herself to St. John's level. Refusing to think of it in baseball terms, she'd finish the book and polish it until it shone.