Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

“The handmaiden?” Jocelyn started to laugh, shaking her head, then clamped her hand over her mouth. “I'm sorry. I'm not making fun of you. I've just never heard anybody use that word in conversation before.”

“Oh, God,” Claire said, “you're right.” Her tension cracked and she could feel laughter breaking the surface of her skin, bubbling up through it as if it were water. “I don't know where that came from.”

At the store Bob handed her the mail.

“Got a visitor with you, eh?” he said, looking at Jocelyn, who stood at the pay phone frowning at an open engagement book and making notes in it.

“That's summer for you,” Claire said, and shrugged. She bought a chicken and some bread, then crossed the street to the vegetable stand. When she came back Jocelyn was still standing next to the phone, no longer talking, just standing, her face tilted to the sky. She had removed her glasses, and her pale skin, exposed to the sun, seemed doubly naked.

As if she'd recognized Claire's steps, she opened her eyes with a smile already present in them. “Ready to go, handmaiden?” she said.

“You stop,” said Claire.

They took the boat back in silence. It was late afternoon, the sky changing to gray, and the water they passed through was planed in shadow, alternately clear and opaque, plants rising up from the deep into occasional visibility. As she docked, Claire looked up and saw Carson moving past a window, his silhouette dark in the light, the line of his neck, the curve of his shoulders. For one instant she didn't recognize him, didn't feel the familiar jolt of his presence. A blankness swept inside her. When she met him she memorized those outlines, raptured by the shape of him, a desire she could not ignore. Now she stood on the dock and looked at him and some emotion drained from her in a trickle like grains of sand marking the passage of time. Jocelyn walked up the hill in front of her, and Claire thought of the woman's questions and her own answers. Whatever she'd said to Jocelyn, she had changed her life because of him, her drastic desire for him. It wasn't possible — or was it? — that after making such a change, the feeling could dissipate, could disappear.

It made her wonder if she knew just what that feeling was. From the moment she met Carson she knew there was a part of him that she could never reach, the part devoted to an abstraction she would never touch. And then the move to the cottage, the distance and isolation and cold. She hadn't been coerced into anything. But what she had chosen was difficult, in fact was chosen for its difficulty. If she'd made a mistake, it was to believe that things struggled for — the cottage, Carson, their life here — had to contain more value than things fallen into with the simple force of the inevitable. A belief engineered by pride.

That night she lay awake, Carson breathing heavily beside her, Jocelyn inaudible in the guest room. She tried to remember as much as she could about his work, her thoughts circulating in a dull frenzy, as they would the night before an exam. All she could think of were the examples from the textbook. Dye dissolving into a glass of water; a dense red drop issuing a cloud of pink. Picture a truck crashing into a wall, she remembered. This is the world in spontaneous action, growing in disorder. Picture a mirror shattering on the floor.

They were almost finished, Jocelyn and Carson, with the final chapter, framing the conclusion. Claire could feel their exhilaration. She made a pot of coffee and joined them at the table with a cup.

“I think that we have an opportunity to extrapolate here,” Jocelyn said. “From the level of chemical processes, the ones you've established, to larger ones.”

Carson shuffled the papers of the manuscript on the table, then ran his hands over his face up to his forehead. From repetition of this gesture his eyebrows had risen into unruly tufts, adding to his look of worry. “I'd like to resist leaping to unwarranted conclusions,” he said.

Jocelyn exchanged a smile with Claire. “I appreciate your caution,” she said, “but this isn't a scientific paper. You don't have to worry about peer review. This is the time for you to make wild claims about the potential of your model to explain biology, economic and social phenomena, the very nature of human existence. Say that the second law of thermodynamics has been forever broken. You can be speculative. Be sexy.”

“Listen,” he said. “You must know by now that physical laws can't be broken. I only uncovered them a little further. They were always there.”

“Come on, Carson,” Claire urged. “Have a little fun with it.”

“Claire.”

“What?”

“I'm a scientist, not a comedian,” he said, sounding stricken. This made both women laugh, and Jocelyn wiped a tear from her eye. Carson shook his head. “You two,” he said. “Ganging up on me.”

She remembered when, in a bar near the university, a colleague of Carson's, an older man, wheezy and red-faced and drunk, rambled on about great discoveries in science, the leaps and bounds of thought. This was a popular subject among scientists, Claire had noticed, as if by discussing the personality of genius they could associate themselves more closely with it. This man said there were two kinds of thinkers, those who led — who thought the new, the fully original — and those who followed in the existing tracks. The searchers and the followers, he called them.

Carson had snapped, “It's true there are two types of thinkers: people stupid enough to believe there are two types of anything, then everybody else.”

“Sore subject, Carson?” his colleague said.

They finished the final edit at seven o'clock, so Claire fixed a late dinner. She lit candles and set a bouquet of wildflowers in a jelly jar on the table.

Carson lifted his wineglass and declared a toast. “As Claire and many undergraduates can attest, I've never been successful in spreading my ideas outside of a narrow group of scientists,” he said to Jocelyn. “I know it's been like pulling teeth to get this book out of me, and I thank you for it. And I'm very glad it's over.”

Though he was smiling, Claire sensed how strongly his relief tugged him: that tomorrow Jocelyn would leave, silence would return, and he would retire to his office with three months left of his leave from school. Three months completely devoted to real work. He lapsed into quiet, and a general exhaustion seemed to spread from him across the table. By nine the candles had burned low and the talk had dribbled to nothing.

At midnight, rising to go to the washroom, Claire passed the guest room, saw light through the door, and, without thinking, knocked. Jocelyn sat up in bed surrounded by sheets of paper, one pencil stuck in her hair, another in her hand.

“Don't you ever stop working?”

“I couldn't sleep.” She waved for Claire to come in.

Claire sat down at the foot of the bed, on a folded quilt her mother had made. She traced the line of a square with her thumb. The pieces came from blankets, rags, and old clothes that her mother had stitched together on rainy summer days, having collected the scraps through the year in a box in the kitchen. Something to pass the time, she called it.

“What are you working on?”

“Paleontology,” Jocelyn said. She put down her pencil and stretched, her neck's tendons visible and strong. When she reached up, the sleeves of her T-shirt fell back, showing the very smooth skin at the underside of her arms. “It's a new theory of dinosaur life. Dinosaurs are very big sellers.”

“I don't know how you do it,” Claire said. “Understand all these things.”

Jocelyn rubbed her eye. “Well,” she said, and smiled, “they're still dinosaurs, right? They still disappeared.”