Babylon and Other Stories

by Alix Ohlin

  When they had sex she wrapped one leg around him, one arm around his back, so he was half-captured and half-free. Her skin grew hot to his touch, her hips rocking violently against his. They had sex in her apartment, in his, in a restaurant bathroom, in Central Park under a blanket. When she came she said his name over and over, in a low, throaty murmur he found unbelievably sexy.

  During the day they never spoke. She said the clinic was a women-only space (“Even the phone?” he said, and she nodded), and that she was usually too busy to talk on the phone anyway (“Even at lunch?” he said, and she nodded). If he had something urgent to tell her, he left a message on her cell phone, which she'd check while eating lunch at her desk or before leaving. At first this annoyed him, but after a while he came to like it: at dinner they each had a full day's worth of anecdotes and gripes to share. She complained about the arrogance of some of the doctors and said women were harder to work for than men, since they were threatened by things she said or by patients who liked her. Sometimes, as with the breast, she brought items home from work: a medical smock, a pamphlet about ovarian cancer. Once, in a Chinese restaurant, when he asked if she had change for a tip, she fished around in her purse and emptied the contents onto the table—keys, lipstick, tissues, her wallet, a long thin silver object he picked up and examined. “What's this?” he said.

  Astrid opened her wallet and took out some ones. “It's a speculum,” she said calmly.

  “A what?”

  “They use it to take tissue samples.”

  He stared at her for a second, the instrument cold in his hand. “Why do you have it?” he said. “Are you planning on doing something once I fall asleep?”

  She shrugged and started loading things back into her purse. “I don't know. There's something about it that fascinates me, I guess. Not so much the equipment but what they do with it. How far they go into your body, how much they know.”

  “Maybe you should go to medical school.”

  “No way,” she said, sliding the speculum into her purse. “I couldn't handle it.”

  This was the one thing about Astrid that frustrated him: she put herself down all the time. No matter how much he tried to talk her out of it, she always said she could never be anything other than an assistant in an office. She, on the other hand, encouraged his vague plan to quit his computer job and go to graduate school in public administration. He had an idea about working in a hospital, streamlining care, and in his most elaborate fantasies Astrid worked in the same hospital and they commuted to work together and ate lunch together in the cafeteria, and he always knew where she was, every second of the day.

  She loved him too. He could feel it glowing out from her, in the warmth of her skin, in the way her voice changed when she spoke to him. It was like the first time he did coke, in college. He closed one nostril, inhaled, and, within seconds, thought, So this is what everybody's talking about.

  A year after they met, he proposed to her in Central Park, and she said yes.

  “I guess it's about time you met my family,” Robert said that night in bed. “Let's fly to Chicago. For the weekend. And we can go to San Francisco whenever you want. Thanksgiving, maybe?” She'd grown up in Oakland, an only child, in a two-bedroom house he'd seen pictures of.

  “We won't have to,” she said calmly. She was in her sleeping pose, eyes closed, arm flung up, about to drift off. It was a quarter to ten. “They're here now.”

  “What do you mean, they're here?”

  “In Babylon.”

  “Your parents live on Long Island? How come you never told me?”

  “We aren't close.”

  “Astrid, this is very weird.”

  “Look,” she said, an uncharacteristic edge in her voice. “Not everybody comes from a perfect family. I'm not even sure I'll want them at the wedding.”

  He put his arm around her. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

  The next weekend, at his insistence, they went to Babylon to meet her father, Dr. Henglund, a podiatrist, and her mother, Barbara. Driving out, he tried to get her to talk about them, but she just shrugged and looked out the window. Looking back, he could hardly remember her mentioning them at all.

  Dr. Henglund was very tall and very thin. He wore a white button-down shirt and light brown slacks and exuded an air of distant, medically enhanced menace, like Laurence Olivier in The Marathon Man. His white hair was cropped very close to his balding head. Barbara was a slightly wrinkled version of Astrid, with the same placid blue eyes, the same very pale skin. Her hair was also cut short and fitted her head like a sleek, gray-blond hat. Unlike Astrid she had no stoop, and she greeted Robert with formal politeness, shaking his hand. They all sat down in the living room, on separate chairs, and Barbara served white-wine spritzers without offering any other choices.

  “This is a beautiful house,” Robert said, although in fact it was plain, sturdy, and underfurnished, with very little on the walls. “Astrid and I met out here in Babylon. At a wedding. I'm sure she told you.”

  “Indeed,” Dr. Henglund said.

  Astrid said nothing. Since stepping into the house she'd adopted the posture of a young girl: sitting straight in her seat, knees together, hands clasped in her lap. She looked around ten years old. Whenever her father spoke, she fixed her gaze on the floor.

  Everybody was quiet. He couldn't smell anything cooking. When Astrid told him they were expected at five o'clock, he'd assumed there would be dinner, but now he wasn't sure. He felt a sharp pang for Astrid, for having to grow up with these people, and he felt a great heat too, knowing that his family would enfold and enclose her, that together they would have a life completely unlike this one, whatever the hell it was.

  “Do you miss California?” he asked Barbara.

  She looked at him and frowned, seemingly almost puzzled. “Well, no,” she said.

  “Astrid tells me you're in computers,” Dr. Henglund said.

  “Yes, though maybe not for long,” Robert said. When he was nervous he talked too much and too fast. “I might go back to school. Astrid's really supportive, and I'm trying to convince her to go back to school, too. She's too smart to be just a physician's assistant, but she just tells me not to be so pushy.”

  Again Barbara gave him a puzzled look. It was like he was speaking a different language. He turned to Astrid for help, but she was gazing out the window at the yard, where a row of rhododendrons burst with loose, open flowers.

  There was no dinner. After another ten minutes of minimal conversation, Astrid stood up and said they'd better be going. They drove through suburban streets back toward the highway, and she asked him to stop by a park.

  “Now you know why I don't see them very much,” she said. “They're cold. They're the coldest people on earth, I think.”

  In the warm interior of the car he turned and held her, and she lifted her pale face and kissed him hard, smashing her mouth against his, her hand groping his pants. She climbed on top of him awkwardly, pulling his shirt loose, her nails scraping against his chest. Things got out of hand and they had sex in the car, and then he drove home with Astrid leaning back in the passenger seat, her eyes closed.

  The visit to Chicago went much better. His parents and sisters, as relieved as he was that he'd finally found someone, loved Astrid. His sisters teased him that she was out of his league, and the family took up this joke and kept insisting that he'd better schedule the wedding as soon as possible, before she wised up and changed her mind. Once they got back to New York his mother was calling twice a week—not to speak to him but to Astrid, conferring over every detail of the wedding. If Astrid regretted not having these conversations with her own mother, she never said so. A hall was reserved; invitations were engraved and addressed. He took one in to work to give to Brian, wanting to tell him personally. They hadn't socialized any more regularly since Brian's wedding than they had before, so Brian hugged him and said, “I didn't even know you were with someone, man! Congratulations!”

  “Th
anks,” Robert said. “I owe it all to you, in a way.”

  “How's that?”

  “Astrid. I met her at your wedding.”

  “You did? Astrid who?”

  “Henglund.”

  Brian frowned. “Must be a friend of Marcy's,” he said.

  At home that night, when he asked Astrid about it, she said that she'd been there as someone's date, a guy she didn't know well and never saw again. “As soon as I saw you,” she said, “I knew.”

  A week later his secretary told him a woman was there to see him, and for a moment his heart lifted. (This was another fantasy he had, about Astrid surprising him at work, wearing a trench-coat with nothing underneath it.) But it was Barbara Henglund, who stood for a minute examining his office—the picture of him and Astrid on the desk, the black-and-white photograph of Central Park she'd given him on the wall—and then sat down with her purse in her lap. “I got the invitation,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, smiling at her, but she didn't smile back. “I hope you'll be at the wedding,” he tried.

  “Astrid hasn't had a lot of boyfriends,” she said.

  He didn't know what to say to this. “And?”

  “I don't think you know her very well,” she went on.

  Robert sighed. He didn't know what was wrong with these people and didn't much care, except that he was glad Astrid had gotten away from them. “I know everything I need to know,” he said. “Astrid works in a clinic, she's from California, we've been together almost every day for a year, and we'll be together for the rest of our lives. I'm sorry if you find it hard to accept, but that's how it is.”

  Barbara Henglund nodded several times, quickly, as if in agreement. “Astrid is troubled,” she said slowly. “She's been alone a great deal.”

  “She isn't alone now.”

  “She also isn't from California. She's from Babylon. She grew up in that house. We've lived here for thirty years. And she doesn't work in a clinic. She's a paralegal. Her office is only ten blocks from here.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, and finally shook his head. “That makes no sense,” he said.

  For the first time, Mrs. Henglund's expression seemed to soften. “She used to only lie about small things. Whether or not she'd cleaned her room. Where she was going with her friends. Then she went off to Barnard. We liked the idea that she was close by. Her transcript came after the first semester. All Fs. We found out she'd been going to NYU, lying about being enrolled there. In all those classes she had straight As.”

  “That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard,” he said.

  “She was in therapy for years,” Mrs. Henglund said. “I thought it was over.”

  When she stopped talking the world was soundless. He looked over her shoulder at the clear glass wall of his office. In the corridor people were strolling past, papers in hand, chatting. None of it was possible.

  “I thought you should know,” Barbara Henglund said, then stood up and turned to go.

  “I don't believe you,” he said.

  She looked at him, pity distending her lips into an expression that was almost, but not quite, a smile. “Dustin, Rawlings & Livermore,” she said. “Forty-seventh Street.”

  At five o'clock that afternoon he was waiting outside the building. It really was only ten blocks away. He told himself this was crazy, that he'd go home and never tell her about the vicious lies told by her crazy mother, that they'd sever all contact with her family and never go to Babylon again. Crowds of office workers streamed past toward the subway. The day was rainy and gray.

  Then he saw her unmistakable blond hair. As if in a dream he reached out and grabbed her arm. In movies, he thought, a guy searches for the girl he loves in a crowd, runs after her, and when she turns around it's never really her.

  But Astrid turned around. “What are you doing here?” she said.

  He looked at her. “What is this? What are you doing here? What are you?”

  Her expression didn't change. “How funny to run into you,” she said. “I was just doing an errand.”

  He dragged her to a nearby bench, people on the sidewalk frowning at them, wondering if they ought to intervene. “Love,” he said, “your mother came to see me. She says you work here as a paralegal, that you're from Babylon, not California. Just tell me she's crazy, okay? Tell me who the guy was that you went with to Brian and Marcy's wedding.”

  Astrid was wearing gray trousers, and when she crossed her legs on the bench she looked, for a moment, as composed as ever. Then her eyes met his, and he saw the tears and knew his life was over. “I used to like to go to weddings,” she said. “I was … lonely. There are weddings every Saturday at that hall.”

  He put his head in his hands, felt her arm wrap around his shoulder, then stood up and shook off her touch, feeling like he was choking. Her hair was in the corner of his sight as he walked away, not knowing where he was going.

  It turned out everything was a lie. Her job, her background, even her name—which was Sophia, though she preferred to call herself Astrid after a favorite aunt. That evening in her apartment, relentlessly questioning her, he stripped away lie after lie, and Astrid, sitting on the couch where she'd first lied to him about the dinner she hadn't cooked, admitted to all of them, tears always trembling in her eyes without ever seeming to fall: yes, she'd lied about her job; no, she couldn't explain why. There were lies upon lies, lies without sense, lies without end. There was no reason why being a physician's assistant was better, worth lying about, than being a paralegal. There was no reason why California was preferable to Babylon. He kept asking her what the point was, and she kept shrugging. He grabbed the model of the breast from her bookcase and shook it at her, its rubbery flesh cold in his hand. “What about this?”

  “I can't explain it,” she said.

  For the first time in months he slept in his own apartment. In the morning—from work, where he was calmer—he called his parents. His mother made arrangements to fly in immediately from Chicago, and when she arrived she set about canceling all the plans that had been made for the wedding. He didn't call Astrid and didn't hear from her. He thought she must be too ashamed, and that she deserved it, for the magnitude of her be trayal.

  It was over.

  A week went by. His mother called everybody who'd been invited and explained that the wedding was off. He worked all day, and at night his mother gave him some Valium, which he took obediently, just as he'd taken antibiotics from her as a child, and he'd be asleep before eight.

  Then one evening he came home and his mother told him she thought he needed help. She'd made an appointment with a therapist for the next morning, without asking, and he was too tired, or sedated, or will-less, to protest. In the office he explained what had happened mechanically, as if it were somebody else's story. The therapist, a scholarly looking man in a green cardigan, listened to him and nodded slowly. “Recovering from this shock will take you some time,” he said.

  “Thanks for the tip,” Robert said sharply. The therapist nodded again, and Robert sighed and rubbed his forehead, where there seemed to be a permanent pain. “What gets me is why. Why would she make these things up? They were such useless lies.”

  “Often this kind of behavior is related to a childhood trauma or abuse,” the therapist said. “Although of course I can't say for sure, not without seeing her myself.”

  Abuse. Into Robert's mind came the vision of Dr. Henglund, the podiatrist, the coldest man in the world. He'd sensed evil in him as soon as they had met. He thought of Astrid fingering the rubber breast, pocketing the speculum that probed the female body. How far they go into the body, how much they know, she'd said. It was the invasion she found fascinating, Robert thought, a vulnerability of the body that must have spoken to her of her own.

  He thanked the therapist and, that afternoon, drove out to Long Island, to Henglund's office.

  On the wall in the waiting room was a poster showing crippled and deformed feet, hammer-toed, missha
pen, archless. On the opposite wall, another poster displayed happy feet, unconfined and lacking bunions, romping in a field as if they'd never once needed shoes. He ignored the nurse and walked right into the examining room, where Henglund was crouched before a woman's foot, holding it like a prince with a slipper. Seeing Robert, he straightened up and excused himself to the patient, a middle-aged woman with red lipstick and enormous hair, then led him into an office and sat down behind the desk.

  “Astrid is home with us now,” he said solemnly, leaning forward with his hands clasped, his flesh sallow against his white coat. “We are taking care of her.” His air of menace was even stronger now.

  “I can't prove it,” Robert said, “but I believe this is all your fault.”

  “Indeed,” Dr. Henglund said. “Your response is understandable, I suppose. One always looks for others to blame when confronted with a difficult situation.”

  “Fuck you,” Robert said. “What did you do to her?”

  Henglund raised one white eyebrow behind his glasses. His eyes were blue and eerily pale. “This is no longer your concern,” he said.

  “If she stays with you, it's the end of her,” Robert said. “You made her what she is.”

  Henglund touched the tips of his long fingers together. “It's been my experience,” he said, “that we make ourselves.”

  Robert left the office in disgust and drove to the Henglunds' house, parked on the street, and walked up the driveway. Through the front window he could see Astrid sitting on the living-room couch reading The New York Times. Her expression was calm. When she lifted her head, he thought she'd heard his approach; but then she said something in the direction of the kitchen, and he knew she must be talking to her mother. As he watched her he felt himself disintegrating, dissolving. He understood then why people with broken hearts killed themselves. It wasn't the pain so much as the nothingness, the formlessness of the days and months and years to come, that was unbearable.