Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

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.

“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.