Babylon and Other Stories

by Alix Ohlin

  At the end of July, before the inevitable happened, Phil proposed. I loved him then, as I do now, and I said yes. When Albert asked me out a few days later, I said, “I'm engaged,” and we stopped talking in the hallways.

  Ever since then, whenever I've fallen victim to these few passing crushes and summertime barbecue attractions, I've said jokingly to myself, I'm in trouble with the Dutchman, and remembering the romance of Phil's proposal, I've been able to shut it off with no problem, as easily as turning a faucet.

  This was not like that at all.

  We received a notice in the mail that a date had been set for the dangerous-dog trial. It was at city hall, with a judge and everything, and Phil offered to take a day off work to go with me, but I told him I was fine. Ever since the attack he'd been treating me like a delicate vase he was carrying from one room to another, something too decorative and valuable for everyday use, and it was driving me insane. I dressed with care, wearing loose pants that could be rolled up, if necessary, to show my ugly scar. I'd expected the trial to be in a regular courtroom, like on TV, but it was just a conference room full of tables, with the judge sitting behind one at the back of the room. She was a well-manicured woman in her late thirties, wearing a yellow wool suit. The animal-control officer was there, and Jean-Michel and his brother's wife and their daughter, and their lawyer. Jean-Michel's brown eyes flashed when he saw me, and I knew that whatever I was feeling, he was feeling it too.

  The animal-control officer acted as the prosecutor. Jean-Michel's family, the Chevaliers, had hired a cheap lawyer from the look of his suit; he slouched there with his fedora on the table in front of him, next to his briefcase. The little girl, Mireille, glowered at me. The judge explained to all of us that the hearing would be held in confidence, and that we would have to leave the room when other people were testifying. They began with Mrs. Chevalier, Jean-Michel's sister-in-law, and the rest of us filed outside. Mireille put her small hand in Jean-Michel's.

  The lobby was filled with prostitutes and petty criminals and drunk drivers in to pay their fines, still reeling and wasted from the look of it. Everybody's eyes were red and their clothing disheveled and too bright. It seemed natural that the three of us, being the only more or less normal people, would stick together. We sat together on a bench, and the girl looked at me and said evenly, “You are an ugly woman.”

  “Mireille, parles pas comme ça,” Jean-Michel said. He picked her up and sat her in his lap, his long fingers at her hips. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, revealing the fine dark hairs on his forearms, and I wanted to touch them, but didn't. “How is your leg?” he said.

  “It's okay.”

  “My sister-in-law, she is very angry.”

  “Yeah, she looked pretty angry in there,” I said.

  Jean-Michel shook his head. “She hires this lawyer. But he is not a trial lawyer. He is an immigrant lawyer who helped her and my brother come into this country. He does not know anything about dangerous dogs.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “She also hired an expert witness. She will be here shortly.”

  “What kind of expert witness?”

  “A dog psychologist.”

  “You're kidding,” I said.

  Jean-Michel laughed. “I wish, but no,” he said. “She is going to testify that Sweetpea is not really a dangerous dog, only bored, and that with more activities she will not bite anybody ever again. My sister-in-law is going to arrange these activities.”

  “Activities?” I said. “Like Scrabble?”

  He shrugged. “I don't know,” he said.

  In his lap, Mireille squirmed in my direction and scrunched up her face. “Is your dog dead?” she asked me.

  “Blister? No, he's doing fine.”

  “Too bad,” she said.

  Jean-Michel apologized for his niece's behavior, then scooped her up and walked over to the other side of the room. It looked like he was giving her a good talking-to, which she certainly deserved. The door to the trial room opened and his sister-in-law came out, looking as if she'd like to hang me upside down by my toenails. The bailiff called my name.

  I was put under oath and the animal-control officer asked me to explain, as simply as I could, what happened, which I did; then he asked me to show my leg to the court, and I did that, too. The scar was red and raised. “Ouch,” the judge said. Then the immigration lawyer stood up. He was a mournful, thin man, wearing a pink shirt and an ugly tie. It made me feel sorry for the Chevaliers, that this was the best lawyer they could find to protect their dog.

  “Ms. Grunwald, will you look at these two pictures for me?” he said. He held two color photographs in front of my face; one was of Sweetpea, the other of a dog I didn't know, around the same size and color. “Can you tell me which of these dogs attacked you?”

  I pointed at Sweetpea.

  “Is it possible you're confused? These dogs look quite alike, and one of them is Sweetpea, and the other dog lives two doors down.”

  I shook my head, and he looked disappointed. I saw that he'd hoped to stymie me with this line of questioning.

  “Give your responses out loud, please,” the judge said.

  “That's Sweetpea on the left.”

  The lawyer put his photographs back on the table, next to his fedora. He looked defeated. Was that his best hope, the trick with the dog photos? It was pathetic.

  “Ms. Grunwald, have the Chevaliers paid all your medical expenses and those of your dog?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you really think they deserve further punishment?”

  “Objection!” the animal-control officer said, and the judge rolled her eyes.

  I leaned forward and looked into his mournful face. “No,” I said.

  As I left the room I saw the dog psychologist, a portly middle-aged woman in a green dress. All her accessories were canine: dog-shaped earrings, dog-tag necklace, a brooch in the shape of a bone. She was consulting some notes in a nervous manner. I looked over at Jean-Michel and shrugged to indicate, I did the best I could. He smiled, and driving home I kept thinking about that smile.

  That evening, at work, I turned my thoughts over in my mind and scrutinized them, the same way I checked the chips for defects. Ellen Grunwald, I asked myself, can you love a man you don't even know? Do you think you could live with yourself if you had an affair? Would you ever leave Phil and go live with Jean-Michel in the house with the brother and sister-in-law and the horrible niece and the dog with jaws like a dinosaur's? To each of these questions the answer was no. And yet.

  At breakfast the next day, Phil asked how the trial had gone, and I said I didn't know because I'd left after giving my testimony. I told him about the dog psychologist, though, and he laughed, and for a second I forgot about Jean-Michel altogether and laughed with him. Then he stood up and took his cereal bowl to the sink and said, “Well, let's hope those people pay.”

  “They aren't really all that bad,” I said. “I mean, they're just people.”

  Phil just stared me for a second. “You're not serious,” he said, and straightened his tie. “Blister still has scabs.”

  “They're almost gone. He doesn't even remember it ever happened.”

  Phil put on his suit jacket and shook his head. “What are you talking about? Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “You're right,” I said quickly. “You're right.”

  But that afternoon, walking Blister, I went by Jean-Michel's house and he came outside right away, as if we'd planned it. Without speaking, we headed off in the direction of the park, our faces harassed by the cold spring wind. Blister licked Jean-Michel's gloved hand and nosed around his pants pockets for treats. Jean-Michel was wearing that same red Gore-Tex jacket, but the hood was down. His lips were chapped.

  At the park I took Blister off the leash, and he bounded off to say hello to Chekhov. “So, what happened at the trial?”

  “The judge said that she would waive the insurance requirement, s
ince we had done so much to rectify the situation,” he said. “But the dangerous-dog designation stays. She said, ‘the law is the law.’ ”

  “Well, that's true, isn't it?” I said.

  Jean-Michel just looked at me. “Let's talk about something else,” he suggested in his soft voice. “Tell me something about yourself that has nothing to do with dogs.”

  We sat down on a bench, watching the dogs wag their tails and sniff each other's butts and bark, and I told Jean-Michel about my job in the clean room: how the pink and blue geometry on the surface of chips reminded me of Navajo weavings; and about the sound of the air-filtration system in the middle of the night, how its mechanism was like the hushed breath of the sleeping world, which only I was awake to hear; and about how slowly I had to walk, like a person on the moon. He watched my face and nodded, and I felt everything I knew turn upside down. I didn't want time to pass but I couldn't stop it, and eventually I had to go to work. I called Blister and put him back on the leash. As I was leaving the park, Jean-Michel called out. I turned.

  “I said, thank you for being kind, Ellen,” he said. His voice made my name sound like two separate words.

  I got off work at four a.m. and there he was in the parking lot, leaning against his car, still wearing the red Gore-Tex. It really was a stupid-looking jacket. I was overjoyed to see him, and scared, too. I thought, This is really going to happen. I was surrendering to the inevitable. I walked right up to him, and he looked as if he wanted to take me in his arms but couldn't. I'd seen that look before, on the Dutchman, when I told him I was engaged.

  “You aren't wearing your suit,” he said, gesturing up and down.

  I laughed. “That's only in the clean room.”

  “I worry about you,” he said. I had the feeling he was stalling for time. “I wonder what is in those chips that you have to wear the suit. What you are being exposed to.”

  This made me laugh again, and my laughter had an edge to it. “Jean-Michel,” I said, “it's to protect the chips and keep them clean. It's not the chips that are dangerous. It's the humans. It's us.” In the rawness of the night my eyes were watering. I wanted to kiss him badly, as badly as I've ever wanted anything, even Phil.

  “Sweetpea is dead,” he said.

  “What?” I said, like an idiot.

  “Your husband killed our dog, and my niece is very upset.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Jean-Michel?”

  “I don't know so much how it started,” Jean-Michel said. “I guess he gets the call from the animal-control officer, and he is very upset or something, because you know the insurance requirement is waived, and he comes over to the house, saying that the dog is very dangerous and must be insured for the sake of others it could injure, and he has a baseball bat with him, and he starts to hit the dog, and then kick it, and it is attacking him back and howling, and my niece is screaming holy murder, and he hits the dog on the head over and over and kicks it in the stomach also, until it lies quiet and dies.”

  The night was dark except for the pale yellow glow of a streetlight. On the other side of the parking lot an early-shift worker clambered out of her car, slow and groggy, and waved. I could not reconcile the Phil of this story with the Phil of my life, yet I didn't doubt that it was true.

  “I thought maybe you already knew,” Jean-Michel said.

  I shook my head.

  “He hasn't been here?”

  I shook my head again.

  “I'm supposed to be out looking for him, but I came here to see you instead,” he said. “I wanted to see you.”

  “What will happen?” I asked him.

  “I don't know,” he said.

  I thought of Phil on the day he found Blister, how he rolled around with the dog in our backyard, for all the world like two children, and I thought of him on our wedding day, too, how he cradled my face between his two hands and kissed me gently, too gently, and I said, “I won't break,” and made him kiss me again, harder, in front of the minister and everybody. I thought that however much Phil loved Blister, which he did, he would not have exploded into violence over just the dog, and that this is what it means to live for six years with a person who loves you: if you take one step away from that person, even just one step, he knows. He can't stop it, but he knows. Another car pulled into the parking lot. Inside the building someone was stepping into the clean room and looking at the scanner, where the chips rose and presented themselves for inspection, each of them blue and pink and shining, containing in their beauty some remote, possible flaw.

  The Tennis Partner

  The first time my father played tennis with Frank McAllister, it was a cool, sunny, the-best-of-summer-is-yet-to-come afternoon in the middle of May. The McAllisters had moved to the neighborhood six months earlier, into a three-bedroom, split-level, single-car-garage ranch identical to ours, and joined the tennis club before it even got warm enough to play. As soon as my father saw Frank hitting practice balls in the frigid spring weather, he decided that he'd found a new and noteworthy opponent. Frank was a broad-chested man with short red hair, pale eyebrows and pale legs, and when he played his face turned as red and wide as a beefsteak tomato, the freckles standing out like seeds.

  “That guy looks all right,” my father told me, pointing at him unsubtlely with his racket. “Might even pose a challenge.” The thing about my father was that he had no perspective whatsoever on his own game. He thought he was a fair player who compensated for his less-than-stellar fitness with a strong intellectual grasp of the sport. None of this was true, but it took me years to figure it out.

  “Please don't ever play with that guy,” is what I said to my father at the time. I recognized Mr. McAllister from a drug and alcohol presentation he'd made at my high school earlier that year. He was a drug counselor and made us all yell slogans back at him—“We're not sheep! We don't sleep!” which had something to do with peer pressure—and showed slides. It was the kind of forty-five minutes that made me dread going to school.

  “I know what you're thinking,” Mr. McAllister had said about the slide that showed a joint. “Peace and love, right? If they'd just put this stuff in the water, there would be no more war.” We were supposed to laugh. Throughout the presentation I stared at his daughter, Ivy, who had enrolled at the start of the spring term. Like him she was redheaded, unlike him she was beautiful, and I had a furious crush on her.

  “What's the matter with you, son?” my father said. He only called me son when we were playing tennis. The game brought out the patriarch in him. I told him the “there would be no more war” line, and he laughed.

  “We'll have no rush to judgment,” he said. “On the court he might be all right.”

  He walked up to Frank, welcomed him to the club—where my father considered himself an elder, as at a church—and invited him to play the following Saturday. Frank pumped my father's hand in his enthusiastic, drug-counselor way, and said, “Hey, that sounds great! ” As the days wore on, my father kept mentioning the match and rubbing his hands in anticipation. His previous tennis partner had wrecked his left knee diving for a ball one day and, after an expensive operation, had elected to take up water aerobics instead, a phrase my father went around repeating, in a disgusted, wondering tone, for weeks after he heard the news. He'd been at loose ends ever since, with only me to play with; he just didn't have the heart, he said, to whip me.

  When the afternoon finally came, I went down to the club to watch. Mostly I was hoping that Ivy would be there, and we'd strike up a casual yet witty and flirtatious conversation about our fathers and their foibles, a conversation that would lead to a date, and then to another, and, eventually, though my vision here got cloudy, to sex. Of course she didn't show up. She was above watching her father play tennis on a Saturday afternoon. I, sadly, wasn't.

  But it was pretty interesting to watch. Frank McAllister had a strong serve and a pretty good backhand, and for a solidly built guy he could cross the court fast. My father, who was
neither fast nor solidly built, hung back, waiting for opportunities to show off his killer forehand, which was the centerpiece, and maybe the only piece, of his game. Frank kept coming up to the net, harassing my father with his backhand, and my father kept running back to the baseline as if it were home base and he'd be declared safe once he got there. It turned into a close contest. Both of them hit the ball with audible, satisfying thwacks, and it arced fast and clean across the net. The sound of the game was like music: their shoes made rhythmic, percussive sounds on the asphalt, and the ball hit and bounced in beats, the measured pace of a serve, the sustained pause of a lob, the staccato shock of an overhead smash. Soon they were sweating mightily, their foreheads dripping, their thinning middle-aged hair damp. By the time they were done their shirts were translucent. Frank beat my father in two sets, 6–4, 6–4.

  My father shook his hand. “Get you next time,” he said.

  They took to playing regularly, once or twice a week in the evenings, and a longer match on weekends. The tennis club wasn't fancy—just a set of private courts with a changing room attached—but my father talked as if it were. “Going down to the club, darling!” he'd announce to my mother as he left the house— the only time he ever used the word darling—and for years I pictured the place as a gentlemen's establishment, with leather armchairs and Oriental rugs and gin and tonics on the balcony. The first time I went there with my father, I couldn't believe what a letdown it was.

  My father played up his own game in much the same way. He claimed that tennis was a game of finesse, just like chess; that he could minimize, through strategy, the number of calories expended versus the number of points won; that a smart man with a solid return could beat all the fancy footwork in the world. Frank McAllister was his exact opposite, with a game like his personality: messy, overfriendly, bombastic. My father said it was like playing tennis with a Labrador retriever. Frank was always chasing the ball, fixated on it, always bounding up to the net, smashing his racket down like he was killing a fly. Sometimes he managed it and sometimes the maneuver failed him, but he never changed his style. He was a risk-taker, a hand-pumper, a winker at me as I watched on the sidelines. At the end of the match he'd jog up to the net and shake my father's hand. He won every time.