Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

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.

She reached the end in three weeks, writing fast and easily, not even looking back as she went. She worked in two extra murders and a romantic but steamy sex scene between Rose and Rusty, who, with those skilled hands, was as brilliantly accomplished in bed as he was in the operating room. But while they were in bed, someone else died, and Rose, tormented by guilt, vowed not to have anything to do with Rusty until the murders were solved. The streets of St. Lucent ran with blood. But at least this murder exonerated him, freeing the two of them to pursue the raping ghost together. This unity went against St. John's original outline — which kept the reader convinced of Rusty's guilt until the very end — but Karin no longer cared. In her version, all fingers pointed to the custodian until the penultimate chapter, when — surprise, surprise, and she hoped Mitchell understood how magnanimous she was being — he was cleared of suspicion. The actual murderer was the lesbian nurse. Karin felt a little bit bad about this, not wanting to marginalize the gay character, but she endeavored to make clear that there was no connection between lesbianism and homicide. The nurse was a frustrated lover, that was all; the knowledge that she couldn't have Rose had driven her insane. It was the perfect ending, because you wouldn't suspect a lesbian nurse of being a raping ghost.

In the final pages, Rusty and Rose vowed to leave St. Lucent together and establish a clinic in Tucson, Arizona, where the sun always shone. Every last plot strand was sewn up.

For a week or so after finishing, she was on a high. Food tasted better, and she slept long, satisfied hours. She baked cookies and sent them off in a care package to Marcus. She finally completed some of the other work that had been piling up and sent that off. She even cooked for herself, dishes with gourmet ingredients accompanied by a glass of wine.

When she was ready, she e-mailed the entire thing to Donald St. John. Then she moved on with her life, not waiting to hear back.

It took him three weeks to reply. One day she came home from the grocery store and found an envelope from him in the mail. Dear Karin, I'm terribly sorry to say that I don't think that it's going to work out. Enclosed is an additional payment in recognition of all your efforts. Best wishes, Donald St. John. A check fluttered to the ground.

Without even pausing, she got back in the car and drove to his half-glass house. She almost expected him to be standing naked on the second floor, waiting for her, but he wasn't. When she rang the doorbell, Corazón took a long time coming to the door, and her hair was disheveled, her cheeks flushed.