Babylon and Other Stories (20 page)

“It's from my work,” Astrid said beside him, and he turned guiltily, not having heard her come back into the room.

She held out her left hand, palm up, and he placed the breast on it like a child surrendering chewing gum to a teacher. But she took his right hand in hers and guided his index and middle fingers to the surface of the breast. “I'm a physician's assistant in a women's clinic,” she said. “This is to teach women how to look for lumps.” Her hand was warm, and the breast was cool. She moved his fingers around the breast in a circle from the outside to the center, pressing inch by inch, stopping to make sure he could feel the lumps, little pits as hard as seeds. Rather than looking at him, she was gazing down at the breast, concentrating. When they got to the nipple she said, “You have to
pull on it to see if there's any discharge.” Then she dropped his hand and put the breast back on the shelf, and it dawned on him that he'd been holding his breath. He exhaled. “Let's eat,” she said.

They ate in the living room, and over dinner she told him more about her work. Originally she'd thought she might want to be a doctor, but had decided against giving up that much of her life to medical school and residency. In her current job she felt like she was helping people and could still get home in time for dinner every day. She asked about his work, and he made self-deprecating jokes about how boring it was, and she laughed at them. The food was excellent, he told her, and she blushed. After dessert, a homemade apple pie, he stood up, his head swimming a little from the wine, and insisted on doing the dishes. When she wanted to help, he said, “There's only room for one in the kitchen, right? Go sit down and relax.”

She smiled, and from the kitchen he could hear her moving through the small apartment to the bathroom. He washed all the dishes and placed them in the drying rack. Like everything else, the kitchen was small but well organized. He was whistling. Scraping the last few scraps of chicken out of the pan, he saw the garbage can was full, so he tied the bag and pulled it out, then looked in the pantry for a replacement. Instead he found a stack of empty containers from Dean & DeLuca, all the courses of their dinner matched by the labels: the chicken Mirabella, the mesclun salad, the apple pie. She must have transferred the food into pots and pans to look as if she'd cooked it. He stood there staring at the containers, amazed that she'd lie about cooking; but then, suddenly, it made her more human to him, more endearing. Didn't he want to seem perfect to her, too?

He started seeing her every weekend, then every few days, and before long he was sleeping over at her apartment almost every night. Most of the time they ate out, or he cooked; she never did, and he never mentioned the containers from Dean & DeLuca. Every night she fell asleep at ten o'clock, exactly; even if they were at a movie, out with friends, or in a restaurant, he would see her eyelids drooping like a child's, and she'd lean her head on his shoulder. In sleep her body grew even more attractive to him. She slept on her back, one arm flung over her head, her breasts flattened against her chest like the model he'd handled that first night. Her breathing was regular and deep. Often he willed himself to stay awake and watch her, feeling how deeply in love he was.

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!”

“Thanks,” 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.