by Alix Ohlin
Without her there was nothing. Yet he had no idea who she was.
As he stood there watching her through the window she turned and saw him, fixing him with eyes that were, he now realized, the same as her father's. Her hair hung limply to her shoulders, unwashed for days. He saw how tired she looked, how miserable, how bereft. Then she smiled sadly, tightly—a smile that said she knew she'd betrayed him, that in so doing she'd betrayed herself.
Without thinking, he beckoned to her, and she put down the newspaper and came outside. He didn't even know what to call her.
“Will you take me home?” she said.
He nodded. In the car, driving back, she put her hand on his knee, and he let her. After a while she moved her hand up to his thigh, and he let her do that too. He walked with her upstairs to her apartment, and in the living room she thanked him for taking her away from Babylon. Without thinking, the same as the first time, he kissed her, and she kissed him back, pushing her tongue into his mouth, running her hands up his back. He grabbed her and took off her shirt. A button popped and landed on the floor. She pulled him down on the couch, and he pulled down her pants and then his own and thrust inside her, one foot braced on the floor. “Robert,” she said.
Afterwards they took off the rest of their clothes and moved to the bedroom, where they slept for a little while, his arms around her. The room was dark when he woke up, alone in bed. He could hear her moving softly around in the kitchen, opening the fridge door, it sounded like, pouring a glass of water. The sheets smelled like her. He lay there in the dark, waiting for his love to come back.
Ghostwriting
When Marcus left home for college, he took his books, his clothes, his porn magazines (she checked), and the decrepit couch in the back room. He tried to take the dog, too, claiming the resident advisor had approved it, but Karin wouldn't let him. He said she'd never even walked the dog—which was true— and she said she'd have to start, and when he voiced some skepticism she was affronted, and they were hardly speaking by the time his father showed up to drive him to school the next morning. Fighting helped both of them get through the moment. Karin was able to hold off until it got dark that night, when she found herself sobbing in his bedroom. She felt bankrupt. She'd been cleaned out.
The dog crept hesitantly into the room. Karin lay down on Marcus's bed and tried to get her to climb up, to join her in her sorrow. Cynical about her motives, the dog refused. Instead she whined and stamped her paw until Karin let her out the back. In the kitchen she dried her tears and watched the dog standing in the yard, yellow light from the back porch glinting obliquely in her eyes.
The next morning she started a journal, having read in magazines about the cathartic powers of self-expression. Who am I? she wrote on a piece of lined paper. An ex-wife, a part-time copy editor, a mother in an empty nest. A new stage of my life is about to begin. After staring at these lines for a few minutes, she added, If I write any more of this crap I will kill myself. Then she took the dog for a walk.
Nonetheless, change was in order. She'd spent a long time taking care of Marcus, feeding and clothing and watching him through the divorce, puberty, his college application essays, and now that he wasn't around she had an unbearable amount of free time. Not time, exactly, but focus. What to look at, what to think about? She walked around carrying her grief inside her, private, growing, fed by her own energy, just as she'd once carried him. In the end she turned to work. When she was young she'd lived in New York and edited full-time, mostly cookbooks and travel guides; then she got married, moved to the suburbs, and went freelance, following the money into corporate and medical newsletters. Now she began inching her way back, wanting something more interesting than investor portfolios and trends in drug research. What she got was work for a local magazine, feature articles about neighborhood chefs and do-gooders and hometown stars with small parts in Broadway plays and TV shows. One day the managing editor told her about a local author he knew who was looking for editing help on a mystery.
Karin had never worked on fiction before, and the idea attracted her. The managing editor gave her the writer's phone number and address, and she set up an interview for the following day. On the phone the author, whose name was Donald St. John, was professional and cool, seeming to reserve judgment. Karin had never heard of him, but spent the evening before the interview at the bookstore. His books were historical mysteries, small paperbacks with lurid covers—busty maids in tight corsets discovering bodies with knives in their backs. She opened the first page of the most recent one. Annalise Gilbert had long suspected that the master of the house had a secret. As it turned out—she flipped to the back—the master of the house had a woman chained in the basement for sexual purposes, and had murdered the maid who'd discovered this secret. The master of the house had issues with women, Karin thought, and decided to wear pants to the interview.
Donald St. John lived in the strangest house she'd ever seen. Though the first floor was a standard Dutch colonial with brick walls and black shutters, the second floor had been renovated with floor-to-ceiling windows all around, and must have cost a fortune to heat. Parked in her car outside, her samples and résumé in a briefcase in the passenger seat, Karin checked her hair and makeup, which was so understated as to be invisible. Since her hair had gone gray it had gotten even curlier and she had trouble containing it in an elastic band or a barrette, so she just let it hang around her head in an ugly, effusive triangle. She'd hated the way she looked for so long that the glance in the rearview mirror confirming it felt like reassurance. She walked to the front door feeling like she was being observed through those enormous windows, though she couldn't see anyone. The door was opened by a woman around her own age, petite and Hispanic, wearing a fuchsia turtleneck and a white apron over black pants. She smiled at Karin passively.
“I'm here to see Mr. St. John.”
The woman nodded and silently led Karin into the living room, where she sat down on a sofa. Arranged on the coffee table were copies of upscale travel magazines. The maid, if that's who she was, smiled again and disappeared. For a few minutes Karin heard not a single sound, then Donald St. John strode into the room. He was tall and lean, with brilliant blue eyes and long white hair, wearing a plaid flannel shirt and blue jeans.
“Thank you for coming,” he said in a rich baritone. His wrinkles were handsome.
It was as if men got an entirely different kind of aging, Karin thought, as if they were ordering from a different catalog. Quickly she ran through the compensating factors—prostate trouble, erectile dysfunction, undignified chasing after young girls and sports cars—but they didn't seem like enough. “It's nice to meet you,” she said.
“Please, this way.”
She followed him upstairs to his office, where his floor-to-ceiling view was of trees, a creek, and, beyond that, a broad swatch of cookie-cutter homes in a new subdivision that ruined his horizon. Motioning her to a chair, St. John sat down behind his desk and wheeled from spot to spot looking for something in his stacks of papers. As he did so he said he'd heard wonderful things about her from Sid, the managing editor, and was prepared to hire her on the spot. Karin sat there with her briefcase still on the floor beside her, wondering exactly what she'd gotten herself into.
Finally he said, “Aha! Here we are,” pulled out a manila folder, and handed it to her.
She opened it and read, The Hospital Is Haunted: Chapter One. People in the quaint mountain town of St. Lucent had known the hospital was haunted for many years.
When she looked up, Donald St. John finished writing out a check, and passed it over to her. It was for fifteen hundred dollars. “I'll just give you that now, and you can tell me when I need to give you more,” he said. “How soon can you start?”
“I can start now,” she said.
“Good.” He scooted closer on his wheeled chair. “Now, listen. I've gotten up to chapter five, and I'd like you to take a gander at chapter six. There's an outline at the back with the bas
ic story. When you've got a draft, call me up and we'll take a look.”
She looked into his blue eyes, wondering if he was entirely sober. “I'm a copy editor, mainly,” she said.
“You work with language, though, yes? And you have wonderful references. Just try it,” he said heartily. “If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. No harm done. You've read mysteries, right?”
She nodded.
“Then you know that to those of us behind the scenes, they aren't mysterious at all.”
She nodded again.
“Stay to lunch,” he said.
Unable to stop the momentum, she kept nodding.
“Excellent. Corazón is a wonderful cook.”
All three of them sat around a yellow Formica table in the kitchen. Corazón remained silent while Donald St. John spoke at great length about a trip he'd recently taken to the south of France, photographing the landscape and eating local stews. Their own lunch was a Mexican soup so spicy that Karin ruined her cloth napkin by having to wipe her nose so often. Corazón evidently spoke no English. As soon as she politely could, Karin refused coffee and left, carrying the mystery in her briefcase.
At home that evening, a glass of wine in hand, she read the first five chapters in one sitting. Ages ago, in college, she'd written poetry, but she had long since stopped thinking of herself as a creative person. She had become a competent person instead. In the first fifty pages of the book, a male doctor was killed and a female doctor was raped by a ghost, the latter act described with loving, brutal specificity. The female doctor's best friend, Rose, a sexy but hard-nosed hospital administrator, was determined to put a stop to these crimes and didn't believe in ghosts. Rather, she suspected the hospital's new doctor, a testy, handsome, brilliantly accomplished brain surgeon named Rusty McGovern. In the outline, the evidence piled up against Rusty, as did Rose's attraction to him, until he turned up at just the right moment to save her from the raping ghost.
The writing varied from mechanical and simplistic to outright awful. Rose had shiny auburn hair that cascaded down her back like a brown waterfall, Rusty was part Irish, part Cherokee, and all man. Karin's first thought was that of course she could write this stuff—much better, in fact. St. John was right, it wasn't that mysterious at all, and she went to sleep that night looking forward to the next day's work just as, when a child, she'd looked forward to a new year at school.
Chapter Six, she typed in the morning. In this chapter Rusty stepped outside of the hospital one gloomy, rainy night—all the nights in the quaint mountain town of St. Lucent seemed to be gloomy and rainy—and discovered a dead dog lying by the entrance to the emergency room in a pool of blood. He was bent over the canine corpse when Rose happened to exit the hospital, and of course she believed he'd killed the dog. Rusty arrogantly refused to try to persuade her that it was only a coincidence, and they argued until Rose, convinced of his guilt, drove away into the night (though, according to the outline, she would later discover that Rusty had thoughtfully arranged for the dog's burial in St. Lucent's quaint pet cemetery). While Marcus's dog snored beside her, her legs twitching in dreams, Karin felt she was able to describe the corpse with some exactitude. If not creative, she was certainly accurate, and there was satisfaction in that.
That weekend, when Marcus called, she told him about her new job.
“Who is this guy, anyway?” he said. “You just went over to his house without knowing anything about him?” For years now they'd played these roles—him protecting her, both of them acting as if she were the vulnerable one.
“He's a successful writer, and Sid knows him,” she told him. “Don't worry about me.”
“There's a lot of creeps out there, Mom. You can't be too careful.”
“I'll be fine. You worry too much.”
He sighed and asked after the dog.
“She misses you. She sleeps by your bed sometimes.”
“It's weird not having a dog,” her son said. “I wake up in the night thinking I forgot to feed her. It's like I have a phantom limb, but instead it's a phantom pet.”
“I know,” she said.
The next week she wrote another chapter, following the outline— the raping ghost continued to maraud, with increasing frequency and violence, throughout the hospital—but adding her own touches. She grew more confident as the writing went on. Deciding the plot was too simple, she introduced some other potential suspects: a cranky, balding internist who had wanted to be promoted to Rose's job; a lesbian nurse who'd once made advances that were spurned. Other characters she simply fleshed out. To the mentally disturbed custodian, for example, she gave every annoying mannerism she remembered from her ex-husband, Mitchell—the constant, vaguely sexualized jiggling of change in his pockets, the refusal to clip his nose hairs, the tendency to eat or drink something and then say, “Oh, this tastes terrible, try it”—while keeping the physical description of him very different, as she was mindful of the legal dangers. Writing became more fun every day. The characters were garish and crude, but this was the whole style of the book. She didn't think St. John would mind the liberties she was taking. He seemed to her like a man at the end of his rope, a burnt-out case. Why else hire a ghost writer?
Indeed, as she wrote, the question of St. John began to occupy space at the back of her mind. How did a person become a mystery writer in the first place, she wondered. And now that she was writing his book, what did he do all day? Karin had other work to do, other deadlines, but this was somehow always the file that remained open on her monitor. She was even enjoying the almost mathematical progression of the book's formulaic plot. Each chapter set up clues that would come to fruition later in a tidy, satisfying sequence; even the dead dog turned out to have a role, as it had been killed just when it was about to bark at the ghost.
Before she knew it, almost, she'd written four chapters. Not wanting St. John to know how much time she was devoting to the book, she waited a few days before e-mailing him the work she'd done. She expected him to write back immediately—at least to acknowledge receipt—but after three days she'd still heard nothing. Not knowing what else to do, she began writing chapter eight, in which the custodian and the lesbian nurse were now in cahoots, though she wasn't quite sure about what. No word yet from St. John. She was too distracted to concentrate on her other work, the medical journals and newsletters. All she thought about was The Hospital Was Haunted. At night she even dreamed of its creepy linoleum floors and Gothic shadows, waking not afraid but feverish, itching to get back to writing.
Finally an e-mail arrived: Come for lunch tomorrow.
This time she dressed up, in a dark purple dress, a black blazer, and boots. She put on lipstick and corralled her hair into a bun—not a librarian's but a sexy one, at least she hoped, with a few fetching loose strands. She wasn't out to seduce Donald St. John; she just wanted to dress like someone who had taken command of the situation. As she sat in the car checking her makeup, she glanced up at the second floor, mentally preparing herself for the conversation to come, and was stunned by what she saw. St. John was walking around the room without a stitch of clothing on. Clearing a stack of files from his desk, tapping a book's spine into place on a shelf, he roamed around his office and then stood at the window surveying his spoiled view. His body was pale, vaguely muscled, bulging at the hips above legs that were thin, delicate, practically feminine. At his crotch was an enormous spray of dark hair, thickly streaked with gray. Karin looked down at her lap, blushing, finding it impossible to fathom. Was this show being put on for her? Or was it his daily habit to inspect his kingdom like this? Was she imagining the whole thing?
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 smil
e. 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.