Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

The dock was not ten yards from the store. She threw a tarp over the mail and, gunning the engine, glanced back at it. She never opened his mail, although he sometimes asked her to, and anyway he opened it in front of her, showed or told her everything — he had no secrets, he always said. But these were her scruples. The boat skittered a little as she maneuvered around driftwood. On the other side of the lake a motorboat roared and circled. Underneath it and closer in, a smaller sound almost evaporated as it reached her: the hoot of a loon.

Carson came into the kitchen, where she was snapping beans. He dipped his hand into the bowl and sat down at the table with a handful. “She wants to come here,” he said.

“Here? Why?”

“Because she knows I won't go to the city.”

She turned. His legs under the table stretched the length of it: he was over six feet tall, strong-shouldered, rangy. Long fingers with thick knuckles, like knots on wood. To relax he built furniture, including this table.

“To work on the book,” he said.

“I thought she already did.” Claire set the bowl in the sink and ran water over the beans. “Isn't that what came today, the edits?”

“She says we have a lot more to do. That the book isn't quite coming across. She thinks a few days of hammering it out in person could do it. So, can she come?”

“You're asking me?”

“It's your place,” he said.

She looked at him. She loosed a clove of garlic from its paper and set it, along with an onion, on the table for him to chop.

Carson studied entropy. Claire didn't understand his work and had given up trying. It was entirely theoretical, divorced from the data sets and experimental designs on which he had built his early career in chemistry. He produced it, as far as she could tell, whole and unprecedented, a rabbit from the black hat of his mind. Sitting in his office at the back of the cottage, he wrote page after page of thoughts with a blue marker on lined yellow pads. What she knew of entropy came from a college textbook that she'd bought, in a vain effort to educate herself, after they met. Entropy is a thermodynamic function measuring the disorder of a system. The greater the disorder of a system, the higher its entropy. Disorder equals randomness.

Or it used to, until Carson came along. He developed a new way of looking at entropy, of evaluating the whole idea of order and equilibrium. He charted the paths of molecules through systems and began to wonder if entropy veered toward simplicity, if there was order within disorder, whether disorder had a quality of inevitability to it and was, in fact, the lawful tendency of a non-equilibrial universe. Possibly, Claire thought, entropy was a scientific term for fate. But she never said so to Carson, who would tell her gently that science was science, not metaphor.

At the beginning, in the city, he'd tried to explain the model to her, defining its basic elements, then moving on and almost immediately losing her, his logic twisting along a corridor she could not follow. He drew outlines, equations, the universe in boxes and arrows. The blanker she looked, the faster he talked, reaching into his brain for examples to teach her by, striving to share his clarity. He stretched his hands wide, carving the air: his words a map to show her where he was. Claire was no scientist at all — simply a freelance designer who'd failed math in high school. Instead of listening to his words she became distracted by the passion in his voice, the shaking timbre of it, by how he peered under the surface of things to discover some elusive knowledge of the world. She forgot to pay attention, and attraction overruled. Eventually, they both gave up on explanations.

She had known Carson for a year when he published the first diagram of his model in Science and was suddenly acclaimed in the nonscientific press. Scientists made pilgrimages to his office at the university, besieged him with letters, never stopped calling. Some of the letters and calls came from Jocelyn Gates, who acquired manuscripts for a popular publisher. She wanted him to write an account of his work for the general reader, which she said could be the biggest scientific best-seller since the Origin of Species.

The other members of his department assumed that he signed this contract for the usual reasons, the temptations of money and self-inflation. But he had been seduced, Claire thought, by different riches, the only treasure he really craved: time away from the university, from grant writing and the company of difficult colleagues, from the obligations to students and administrators. Time to think. He could take leave from the university, write the manuscript, and meanwhile chase the magnets of his own ideas. In interviews he always said, “There is so much left to be done.”

When he decided to write the book, Claire offered him her cottage on the lake, and her presence with it. They had been here two years.

Even in May, the nights were cold. Under the blankets she moved closer to Carson, whose body gave off heat constantly, no matter the season, as if it were electric. She turned her back to him and brought his arm around her. From where she was lying she could see out the window to a clutch of birches on a rise behind the house, the bark silver in the light from stars.

“How old is this woman?” she asked.

“Claire,” he said, his tone a reminder that he hated any sign of insecurity. Carson was generally even-tempered, but frustration sometimes sparked from him in angry fits. What he liked best about her, she knew, was the idea he had of her strength. He liked being indebted to her for the favor of this house, and it was important for him to think she didn't need him.

“Old?” she said. “Or young?”

“She's not much younger than you are. Twenty-nine.”

“How do you know? I mean so specifically.”

“She told me. She took one of my classes at one point, apparently, and mentioned what year she graduated.” His hand twining hers began to sweat, and he unclasped and moved it to her shoulder. His cheek scratched her face. “Don't be jealous,” he said in her ear. “I hate it.”

She flipped onto her back and looked at him. His eyes were open, colorlessly glinting in the darkness. “All right,” she said.

Jocelyn Gates arrived on the noon bus. She wasn't what Claire was expecting, although she hadn't realized she'd been expecting anything at all. Her long, wavy hair had been dyed an unnatural brownish red that looked like dried blood. Behind thick brown frames her eyes were blue. When she stepped off the bus she flung her backpack over her shoulder, like a student, and her eyes found Claire's immediately.

“Are you Claire Tremble?” she said. “I'm Jocelyn.”

Claire stepped forward and shook her hand. “Is that all you have?” she said, nodding at the backpack.

“Dear God, no,” Jocelyn said as the bus driver lugged a large suitcase in their direction.

Claire looked at it.

“It's mostly manuscripts, I swear,” Jocelyn said. “Carson said there'd be a boat. There is a boat, isn't there?”

“That's the boat,” Claire said, pointing.

“Oh. Should I—”

“It's fine. But you might have to sit on it, that's all.”

“I can do that,” Jocelyn said.

Claire reached for the suitcase, but Jocelyn shook her head firmly, hefted it up, and gestured for Claire to walk on ahead. When they reached the boat, Jocelyn lowered the case down on its side then got in and straddled it. With the extra weight they sat heavily in the water, but Claire judged it would be all right. Jocelyn sat precariously, her white hands clutching the gunwale, spray from the lake misting her glasses. After a minute or so the boat seemed to adjust itself and moved slowly but smoothly through the branches of spruce trees clearly mirrored in the water.