Babylon and Other Stories (8 page)

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're 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 could 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.”

“Okay,” she said. “Maybe you should go.”

“Maybe I should. I'm sorry, Izabel. I really am.” His hand reached up to stroke her hair gently, twice, then he got up and left, closing the door behind him with a quiet, considerate click.

Shirelle invited Izabel home for Christmas. Her family lived in the country on a ranch, and she promised hay rides and dances. She had four older brothers and made life at her house sound like an episode of
The Waltons.

“It'll be a nice, traditional American Christmas,” she said. “We leave milk and cookies out for Santa.”

“Really?” said Izabel in her French accent. “Are zey not wasted? Santa does not eat zem, does he?”

“Izabel,” Shirelle said patiently, “Santa is my dad.”

“
Ah, mais non
! Zen you are very lucky. You must get zee most presents of anyone in zee world.”

“Girl,” said Shirelle, “sometimes I think you're putting me on.”

But Izabel did not go to Texas for Christmas. Her mother called, her voice trembling with the accomplishment, to say that she had brokered a peace with Iz's father, who had agreed to a double major of economics and art, so Iz could continue her classes. She
didn't mention to her mother that she hadn't yet finished the first semester. There were presents waiting for her under the tree, if she would only come home to claim them.

“I went to the mall, Izzy,” said her mother, “and it was so beautiful!” Her voice was firm and happy. “All the decorations and the music, you just have to see it.”

Izabel could see it. She could see her mother moving alone through their house like some sad, ancient heroine, Demeter in Newton, decorating the tree, wrapping gifts. She could see her calling her daughter on the phone, picking out a tie for her husband at the mall, each day an act of small bravery. Izabel could see everything. She could see it because it was all inside her, hanging on to her like snow dissolving over their roof into a border of icicles. She could see it as clearly as she could see the children of the neighborhood bringing their toboggans to the park, where Iz would paint them over the holidays, watching from her bedroom window as they climbed through the snow, spots of color bundled thickly by their mothers into snowsuits, dragging their heavy loads behind them.