Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

We ate spaghetti and drank red wine.

“So how's Michael?” Spike said.

“Who the hell knows,” Uncle Bob answered glumly. He turned to me. “My son's a graduate student in East Asian languages. He's learning how to forget English. He only speaks Mandarin now.”

“I know,” I said. Michael had come to see Spike once. We took him to a Chinese restaurant, where he drank plum wine and refused to eat the food.

“I call him on the phone and he quacks like a duck,” Uncle Bob went on. “I'm supposed to learn goddamn Chinese to speak to my own son?” He kept looking at me. “I'm not an unreasonable man.”

Miriam leaned across the table and whispered loudly, “Michael has issues. Since his mother left.”

“He's sensitive,” Spike said.

“I'm sensitive, too,” said Uncle Bob. “I'm so sensitive I can hardly stand myself. As a matter of fact, everybody in this family is sensitive.”

“That's true,” Spike said.

Uncle Bob smiled broadly. “Take my wife,” he said, “please.” He laughed and I laughed, too, just to be polite. Miriam didn't. “She was so sensitive she had to move to California.” He spoke the word California in a mincing, high-pitched tone, and he put his hands up in the air, as if he were doing a little dance in celebration of the state. Miriam put her hand on his shoulder and he took it and touched it to his cheek, a sweet gesture, I thought. “Sunny California,” he said. “Going to California in my mind.”

“That's Carolina,” Spike said gently. Uncle Bob went into the kitchen and brought a large jug of wine to the table. Miriam— I assumed it was her — had made a little centerpiece of pine branches and there wasn't space for both, so Uncle Bob threw the centerpiece into the fireplace, where the needles melted and snapped, and set the jug down instead.

“Jesus Christ, Bob,” she said.

“Oh, lighten up,” he said. He poured us all more wine. “It's a wise man who buys in bulk,” he pronounced. “Ancient Chinese proverb.”

“Ancient Irish drinking,” said Miriam.

“Shut up, Miriam,” he said.

“So anyway, Miriam,” Spike said, dropping his cigarette ash into the remains of sauce on his plate, “how did you two meet?”

Miriam shrugged. “It's a small town. Everybody meets everybody else. And you? How did you and Lucy meet?”

Spike and I looked at each other. At the beginning our relationship had been a secret, and we had discovered that's how we like it, the world it made for the two of us. He had been my TA in “The Bible as Literature” the spring before. In class he said the Bible contained the greatest and most basic stories of our culture, then asked us to put our notes aside and retell stories from our reading to the class. Tell whatever you remember, he said. He walked around the room, pacing and talking, and I thought he was sweet and fierce and slightly terrifying, like a raccoon trapped in your basement. My friend Stephanie and I used to mock him outside of class. Spike? What the hell kind of name is Spike? We imagined some foolish woman having sex with him and moaning, Oh, Spike, give it to me, Spike. Then, all of a sudden, that woman was me.

“It's a small school,” I said to Miriam. “Everybody meets everybody else.”

Halfway through the semester I came upon Spike in the quad. It was early spring and the campus bloomed sedately with the first flowers. He sat under a tree with a bottle of wine in a paper bag, smoking a cigarette.

“Ruth, right?” he said when he saw me.

“Lucy,” I told him. “My name's Lucy.”

“I know.” I realized he was referring to the story I'd chosen to tell in class, Ruth and Naomi. Ruth said to Naomi, Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. I liked that story, the devotion in it, Ruth making that permanent promise.

“Are you allowed to do that — at school?” I said, looking down at the bottle.

“School,” Spike said. “Do you want a sip?”

“Okay,” I said. “But aren't you, you know, religious?”

Spike laughed. He passed the paper bag over to me, and I sat down next to him.

“It's just a divinity degree,” he said. “Not the seminary or anything.”

I took a swig from the bag and swished it around like mouthwash and winced. It was pretty bad wine. Spike laughed and told me I was funny. We spent all that summer together. Every night we sat on Spike's porch, drinking beer and talking in the dark. I never talked so much in my life: three o'clock in the morning, sometimes four o'clock. We'd fall asleep holding hands. More than once, after we had sex I cried, from the closeness of it.

“Must have been fate,” Uncle Bob said now, “because you are such a beautiful couple.” He refilled the wineglasses and toasted us silently.

“I don't believe in fate,” said Spike. “Or God. That's why I'm leaving school.”

“Shit, Spike,” said his uncle. “Nobody believes in God anymore. That doesn't mean it's not interesting.”

“Some people do,” said Miriam. Her red lipstick had worn off, except at the outlines of her mouth, and the real color of her lips was pale. “I do.”

“Sure,” Spike said, putting his elbows on the table in an irritated jerk. He ran his hands through his hair. “And fanatics and terrorists and people who wage wars.”

“That's not true,” Miriam said.

“People who prevent women from having abortions. Isn't that right, Uncle Bob?”

“Not everyone here is Catholic, you know,” Miriam said. “Not everyone here has to rebel against the pope.”

“What are you, Lucy?” Uncle Bob said, turning to me. I was smoking a cigarette and trying to stay out of it.

“I wasn't raised any particular way,” I said. “I'm not anything.”

“Everybody's something,” he said, kindly.

“I for one am Jewish,” Miriam went on.

“Well, congratulations,” Spike said.

Spike and I climbed the stairs to the guest room. As I went, I steadied myself against the walls with the palms of my hands. I was drunk, a lazy, liquid kind of drunk, not a loud and talking kind. I was learning to like this about drinking, that there were so many moods to it; in this it was like sex, one physical situation that could go in a million possible directions. Spike pulled his clothes off and dropped them in a pile on the floor. I lay down on the bed and watched him.

“Are you okay?” he said. I said I was. He stood looking out the window, in only his long underwear.

“How old do you think Miriam is?” he said. “I mean, she's got to be younger than I am.”

“So?”

“So I'm worried about Uncle Bob. Ever since Aunt Mary left, he's been meeting these crazy women. He's always got these crazy women up here.”

“She didn't seem that crazy to me.”

“The last one was a Jehovah's Witness,” Spike said. “She left Uncle Bob because he wanted to celebrate Christmas, for crying out loud.”

“I don't think Miriam celebrates Christmas, either,” I said, and closed my eyes.

Spike climbed on top of me and stroked my hair and kissed my forehead. I kissed him back but then stopped. I liked to drink with Spike in general and I liked to have sex drunk, too — it made everything velvet, blurred edges, smoothed time. But I was spinning.

“Sorry,” I said. “Can't.”

“Let's get married,” he said. I looked for his eyes in the darkness, hoping they would stop the spinning, but they didn't. He touched my nose, which was very cold, and then traced my lips with his fingertip.

“I don't know,” I said.

“You love me. But?”

“I love you but I wasn't thinking about getting married. I mean, not right now.”

“I love you but,” Spike said. He put the palm of his hand on my neck, moved it to my breast. I arched my back to press against it. He stuck his fingers into my armpit, and I laughed and clamped down my arm.