Babylon and Other Stories

by Alix Ohlin

  Wade drove around the ivy-walled campus in an old Toyota that had been crumpled in some accident and was missing all the windows on the left side. The whole left side of the car, in fact, was wrapped up in plastic and taped together. It looked like somebody's refrigerated leftovers. He asked Izabel to a movie and drove there talking the entire time, his thin fingers jerking and pointing. The art world was like the Roman Empire near the end, he told her, in that it had stopped responding to the world and responded only to itself, speaking its own decadent language. When he asked her if the situation was different in France, Izabel shrugged.

  “I get it. I get it,” said Wade, grinning, and tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. “The true artist cannot be moved by these considerations. Okay, I see, the artist creates outside of the institutions that sponsor him—or her, as the case may be. Well, okay, fair enough. I mean, I understand there's a certain legitimacy to that point of view, but personally I think it's sort of naïve in this day and age. I mean after the eighties you can't really think the art world exists outside of a context of politics and commerce, can you? I don't think anybody can, not even you.”

  “Not even me?” Izabel couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic. Feeling out of her depth, she turned to look out through the cloudy plastic. “Don't people in America fix their cars?”

  After the movie they drank coffee while Wade continued to talk. He held passionate views on many subjects, and Izabel was amazed by the sheer number of things he found to say. As he spoke he leaned very far over at the table and pressed his hand against his forehead, as if trying to contain all the furious activity inside his brain. After a while she became convinced that this was, in fact, what he was doing. Whenever he asked for her opinion, which wasn't often, she shrugged. The shrug, she decided, was her best weapon. She couldn't really follow all that he was saying, not because it was necessarily so difficult, but mostly because it was so rapid and exhausting. Her mind wandered. She looked at Wade's hand pressed up against his head and started thinking about one of the Barbie dolls she'd had as a child. Ballerina Barbie came with a crown sticking out of her blond hair like a tumorous silver growth. It looked all right when she was dancing, but when she was just hanging out it seemed ridiculous. Izabel had once tried to remove the crown with a pocket knife, but it wouldn't come off and eventually the doll was hospitalized in a shoebox. She never recovered. She had a hard life compared to regular Barbie and Ken, whom Iz kept together in another shoebox and who engaged constantly in passionate, violent lovemaking. They did nothing else, had no other hobbies or jobs. Oh, Ken. Oh, Barbie. After the ballerina's operation, Ken and Barbie came to visit, sighing condolences, but then rapidly stole away to squirm and bash their plastic bodies against each other. They only ever had one thing on their plastic minds. While Wade spoke to Iz, she decided to work on a series of paintings in which Ken and Barbie reenacted the romances of Greek mythology. She would tell the class, I call thees one “Ken Appears to Barbie in the Form of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup.”

  That night it turned out that Wade, too, only had one thing on his plastic mind. Back at the studio, they looked at some of his canvases, which were enormous, geometric and monochromatic. Izabel had no idea what they were supposed to be about.

  “It's a post-Rothko thing,” Wade said, and put his hand on her breast. His eyes were hazel, his expression as intense as a sideshow hypnotist's. Izabel couldn't help laughing, but to her surprise this didn't make him stop or even blush. He kept his hand there and started moving it around, and then she quit laughing, and they stayed together in a dark corner of the studio, behind a stack of stretched-out canvases. Oh, Ken. Oh, Barbie.

  In class they were studying eroticism in art. Everyone was working on being mature about it. They were looking at fairy tales and oil paintings, woodcuts, each detail laced with meaning, the importance of flowers and the angles of wrists. Professor Edelman was isolating the elements of the erotic, cataloging them with his plummy voice and his red laser. He had a dry wit and parchment skin to match it, and Izabel wondered if he could even imagine the physical realities, as opposed to their artistic representations: herself and Wade each night in the studio after everyone else had left, the messiness of their fluids and sounds. The professor pointed in the dark at women facing sideways, huge breasts projecting outward like crescent moons, their nipples like rocks. These breasts weren't just breasts, they represented the fertility of the earth. This was art, where layers of meaning were contained beneath the obvious. It was its own language, just like Wade said. Zee language of love.

  By October, Wade would not leave her alone. He stood behind her and talked to her while she painted. She was trying to find the exact fake-flesh color for Barbie's breasts. Barbie was trapped in a prison, locked inside, but the prison was the regular kitchen of a suburban American home, with a red-checkered tablecloth on the table. Ken's head was vaporously visible in the steam rising from her bowl of chicken noodle soup. Her breasts leaned toward him precipitously, and tiny chunks of chicken hung from the non-separated strands of his hair. Barbie was looking at him with a complex swirl of emotions—shock, confusion, a terrified desire—that Izabel was trying to convey within the limited range of expression afforded by the trademark Barbie smile.

  Shirelle had moved down the hall and was now rooming with a girl named Kelly. When Izabel went back to the dorm, to change clothes, she sometimes saw them in Kelly's room, the door open, watching movies under a poster of a Georgia O'Keeffe flower, eating microwave popcorn and giggling. Wade was following her back to the room by now. Professor Edelman had come to regard them as a couple and had given them to understand that he approved. A favored pair, they'd been over to his house for dinner and called him by his first name, Marius. After class, they'd routinely have coffee or a drink in his office, the two of them slouching in front of his desk he sat behind, surrounded by shelves of papers and books and incunabula, pictures tacked up everywhere, a scholarly collage. He and Wade would discuss personalities of the art world while she stared at a pornographic Mesopotamian piece directly behind Marius's head. It had dawned on her that Wade and Marius were the same person, just a few years apart: Wade was what Marius had been as a young man, and Marius was what Wade would become. In either case they were equivalent; it was a transitive property of men. She could see Wade at forty and at sixty, still intense and thin and profusely hairy, though his hair would turn salt-and-peppery and start sprouting out of his nose; he would still gesture with thin fingers in support of his many points.

  While she painted, Wade would put his hands on her shoulders, or his arms would encircle her from behind. His body temperature was always high, as if to match his mental energy. He was in love with Izabel, he said, and he brought her gifts, including paints, books, cups of coffee. She didn't know when he found the time to paint, but his canvases grew daily, a huge seven-by-ten wall of color. Her paintings looked like watercolors by comparison, little washed-out sagas of women and men. While she painted, he whispered a stream of plans for their future together and memories of their past, to him already richly detailed. Their relationship was like a painting he was building on canvas, blocking it out section by section, adding layers and color; it had its own internal references and symbols, flowers and the angles of wrists, an iconography of past and future, things that stood for love.

  On the phone Iz's mother wanted to know when she was coming home, her voice plaintive and distant. She was preparing a turkey for Thanksgiving, and making a special dressing. In the background Iz's father growled about the rising costs of college tuition. Iz imagined the clean, silent house, where all her old toys lay trapped in liquor boxes stored in the basement, Ken and Barbie forever silent and entwined, like Baucus and Philemon, who grew into a tree. Ken and Barbie could never become a tree, except maybe a plastic one, and perhaps this could be another painting in the series: Ken and Barbie Grow Together into a Fake Potted Plant.

  Iz's mother said, “Your father wants to know if you'r
e taking any accounting classes.”

  “Mom, I'm not taking accounting. I'm taking English, math, history, and Visions of the Erotic in Art. Do you remember me, Izzy, I'm an art major? Does he? Does he even remember who I am?”

  Her mother sighed into the receiver, low and loose, a sound like flatulence: self-flatulating. Her father's voice rumbled darkly in the background. He had been like this all her life, a shadowy, angry figure, rarely present, issuing proxy commands, whose wrath must be avoided at all costs.

  “Your father,” translated her mother, “wants me to tell you that you should take economics or computer science. Otherwise he won't pay for next semester. It's a practical thing, Izzy. It's about your future.”

  Iz said, “Well, since this is my last semester of school, I might as well stay here for Thanksgiving. I guess I'd better get the most of it while I can.”

  Her mother sighed again and said, “Your father and I only want the best for you.”

  In France we do not celebrate Thanksgiving, said Izabel. Please, what ees sweet potato pie? Out of loyalty to her and her foreignness—“An exile in your own country,” he said, “but aren't artists always exiles?”—Wade decided to stay on campus, too. The college saved on heating costs over the long weekend and the two of them shuffled morosely around the studio in winter coats, breathing clouds of smoke. Feeling like an orphan, Izabel caught cold and began to sniffle and cough. She did not paint. The canvas around Ken and Barbie was murky and indistinct, featureless and gloomy, like the November weather. This, she decided, was the landscape of the suburbs, so she kept it that way. Wade brought her chicken noodle soup and covered her with blankets on the mattress they kept in the corner.

  Remote with fever, Izabel slept. She slipped into a dream that felt like church, floating under stained-glass lights; men murmured, first a drone and then a hum. Wade was on top of her, a solid, hairy weight, and she couldn't breathe. This was not a dream. She pushed him away, but this didn't stop him, any more than her laughter had stopped him the first time. Oh, Izabel. To him it was ecstasy, it was a frenzy of joining. She didn't need to see his face to know this. He was unstoppable as Zeus, but didn't need any disguise. The pain was the color red, and the sheets were red, and the sounds he was making were also red. The world was a canvas splotched with red, and she was the paint; she thinned and spread.

  When she woke up, Wade was gone. She sat up and then, pain shooting, lay down again.

  Wade came back and lay beside her, stroking her hair. “Are you all right? Do you feel okay?”

  “Oui, ça va.”

  “Do you want any more soup?” The hair on his chin hurt her skin.

  He held her in his arms. He still did not stop talking; he was incapable of silence. She closed her eyes and dreamt of men: young gods who spoke little, yet eloquently, in heavily accented English. A French trapeze artist, wearing tights, beckoned to her. Come away with me, Isabelle. I beg it of you. They would join le cirque and perform gravity-defying feats together, catching each other without fail midair. Or perhaps she'd had enough of French, and instead would meet a German, a nobleman, and they would leave America together, travel to the Old Country, and live in the Black Forest, eating Black Forest cake. Dreaming again, she was now her own mother, walking through a church that was also a shopping mall but still beautiful, like a shopping mall in France or ancient Greece. In its high, domed ceilings, angels hung from the rafters singing songs of purchase, sweet hymns of sales reductions on ladies' wear and pantyhose, the sun shafting through the skylights down to the foodcourt and the altar. It was so beautiful, so warm and light, that she wanted to get closer, but she couldn't figure out how to. She couldn't move at all. She was in a world so beautiful that it didn't require signs or maps. All she needed was a red dot with an arrow labeled You are here. The angels swooped down toward her, singing You are here, holding red sheets open between them like a banner. Where is here? she asked, but the angels wouldn't stop to answer the question. They flew off, these pale, singing cherubs, toward a shoe store where everything was 40% Off.

  After Thanksgiving, Izabel was sick for a long time. She moved back into her dorm room and stayed in her bed, sickness a haven she didn't want to leave. Shirelle came back to take care of her, clucking in a gratified, motherly way, and making her tea with molasses, which in Shirelle's family counted as a special treat. As Izabel moved in and out of fever, Shirelle sent Wade away every time he came to the door. Izabel had papers and tests, but did none of them, Shirelle writing notes for her and forging doctors' signatures. The college granted her extensions on everything: everything, they said, could wait. They were so kind that Izabel didn't have the heart to tell them she wouldn't be back. She was going to freeze in her bed and waste away like Echo, disappearing into sound. Shirelle wouldn't hear of this and brought her Rocky Road ice cream to eat in bed. Wade left a twenty-five-page letter in a manila envelope outside her door; it looked like a term paper, double-spaced, in a ten-point font, complete with footnotes and an index of lists. In it various issues of importance to their relationship were exhaustively explained, all the scholarly evidence marshaled in favor of Wade's argument. Dear Izabel, I have been doing a lot of thinking and have come to certain conclusions, which are elaborated in the following pages. We can be friends, can't we? We have so much in common. For example … he wrote, and then gave five pages of examples. He reproduced entire conversations. In conclusion, even if you don't love me anymore, we can be friends. Please be my friend. Be my best friend.

  “No,” said Iz out loud, sitting in bed. “No.”

  Shirelle said, “You should call the police.”

  “He loves me.”

  “So fucking what,” said Shirelle, in her Texan accent.

  Izabel looked at her with new appreciation.

  “Please come home for Christmas, Izzy,” said her mother on the phone, silence in the background.

  Iz could picture it, the snowdrifts on roofs and swing sets, the lights spiraling around trees. Christmas in the suburbs. In the mall children climbed reluctantly onto the hot polyester fabric of Santa's lap, doubtful, afraid, but willing to risk it for the reward of presents. She remembered what that was like.

  On a Wednesday afternoon in the second week of December, when Shirelle was taking her math final, Wade came in. Shirelle had left the door unlocked and he just walked right in and stood there, breathing a little heavily, as if he'd crashed through some immense barrier instead of simply turning a doorknob. Izabel was sitting in bed with a child's coloring book. This was as much art as she could handle these days; she was happy to stay inside of the big black lines. He was wearing a ski sweater and no jacket, and his cheeks were red from the cold. The rest of his face was wan, though, and there were dark circles under his eyes. Izabel was not afraid of him; in fact she felt nothing, and was vaguely surprised. She'd heard that love and hate were two sides of the same coin, that people could feel both at the same time, that this was how they came to kill those they loved the most. But she hadn't known it was possible to feel love, hate, and indifference simultaneously, with the last overlaying everything else, like new paint on a twice-used canvas.

  “Bonjour, Izabel,” said Wade.

  “What?” she said. “I mean, pardonnez-moi ?”

  “I've been learning French in the language lab,” he said, his breath still labored. “I thought that it would be great if we could communicate in French, you know, so we could be closer. I mean, I know sometimes I talk a lot, and sort of dominate the conversation a little. My parents are always telling me to slow down and listen instead of talking so much, they've been telling me that ever since I was a little kid, but you know me, Izabel, I get so wound up. I mean, nobody knows me as well as you do, Izabel.”

  “Wade,” said Iz.

  “I was thinking maybe you and I could go to France this summer—wait, hold on. ‘On peut aller à la France ensemble.’ What do you think? You could show me some places where you grew up, maybe, wouldn't that be great? And we co
uld both paint, and talk, and—”

  “Wade, I'm not French. I've never even been to France. I'm from Newton, Mass.”

  He stood frozen in the center of the room. Izabel watched from the bed and waited for him to grow into a monster, a thunderbolt or a bull, but he just threw back his head and laughed.

  “Well, that's pretty goddamn clever, I have to say. Pretty goddamn hilarious, Izabel, if that is your real name. That is your real name, isn't it?”

  She nodded.

  He came and sat down next to her on the bed and stroked her hand, which she pulled away. His voice softened and thickened, like Shirelle's molasses dissolving in tea. “It's so great you shared that with me,” he whispered. “Now we're in this together. Izabel, je t'aime.”

  “Wade, it's over.”

  “No! Non. Seriously, I mean it.” He began to work a corner of her bedspread, folding it and refolding it. “You love me,” he said, “and I love you. If we love each other, that's all that matters, right? And nothing can come between us.” He bent over and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  She leaned back and hit her head against the wall. It made an inanimate-sounding clunk, like the head of a Barbie doll. She scrunched up her legs to try to get away from him, but he was strong. His hand twisted up the fabric of her shirt, but he was weirdly clumsy and didn't seem to know exactly what he wanted to do. Pushing against him, Izabel felt incredibly dizzy, as if the blood were flowing from her head. All the blood was flowing away. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled.

  “Ow!” Wade sat back, rubbing his head and looking puzzled. “You hurt me. What are you, crazy?”

  Izabel, gulping air, began to laugh.

  “I'm leaving,” he said. “I can't handle this. I love you, Izabel, but you're crazy, I mean, seriously, I don't want to sit in judgment of you or anything, that's the last thing I'd want to do, and I know some people think there's a correlation between artistic genius and mental illness. But seriously, you might want to consider getting some help.”