Babylon and Other Stories

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 basic 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 smile. 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.

“I'm not saying you can't get there,” he said. “It's just that you have a ways to go. It's like — how can I explain this? Do you like baseball? It's like the difference between the major leagues and the minors. What you've done with my book is not wrong, but it's minor-league. I suppose it's not surprising for a novice. I knew I was taking a chance. On Sid's word, of course. He's a big fan of yours. I understand you and your husband have been friends with Sid for many years, children going to school together, that sort of thing. These sorts of connections are epidemic in our little area, I've found.”

Finally he stopped talking. Karin knew she could never speak the thought in her mind: that she'd had to make the writing awkward and blocky so it would match his own. That he was a terrible writer. That, if anything, the problem with her contribution was that it wasn't bad enough. St. John was looking down at the manuscript, his brow furrowed pensively, and she realized he wanted her to beg for a second chance. She stood up. “I'm sorry you were disappointed. I'll send your check back.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Life is disappointment. If nothing else, the two of us have learned that much by our age, haven't we? Why don't you try again? Just pitch it a little higher this time.” Now he stood as well. “Corazón will see you out.”

Driving back, Karin cursed St. John and all his terrible, terrible books. It couldn't be true that she had done such a bad job. She refused to believe it. At home she took the dog out, jerking her along by the leash at a breakneck pace until she dug her paws into the ground and refused to go farther, begging her with soulful eyes to be reasonable.

For days, instead of looking at what she'd written, she plotted revenge and vowed to expose him as a hack. She could write her own best-selling mystery series, whose very first villain would be an aging writer living in a glass house; she would accept accolades at the launch party, and when St. John approached her with his pitiful congratulations she would pretend not to remember his name.

Over time, she let this idea go. The problem was that the hospital and the town of St. Lucent and Rusty and Rose and even the custodian had somehow lodged themselves in her brain, and she wasn't prepared or able to let them ago. She didn't want to write another series; she wanted to write this one. The book, she felt, had become hers.

She couldn't concentrate on anything else. When Marcus called, she was evasive about her work and asked him so many questions about school, his grades so far, that he got angry and said, “God, Mom, get your own life and stop bugging me about mine.” That night she couldn't even sleep. All she could think about was The Hospital Was Haunted.

Finally she stopped resisting and started writing again where she'd left off. From here on out, she would write without lowering herself to St. John's level. Refusing to think of it in baseball terms, she'd finish the book and polish it until it shone.

She reached the end in three weeks, writing fast and easily, not even looking back as she went. She worked in two extra murders and a romantic but steamy sex scene between Rose and Rusty, who, with those skilled hands, was as brilliantly accomplished in bed as he was in the operating room. But while they were in bed, someone else died, and Rose, tormented by guilt, vowed not to have anything to do with Rusty until the murders were solved. The streets of St. Lucent ran with blood. But at least this murder exonerated him, freeing the two of them to pursue the raping ghost together. This unity went against St. John's original outline — which kept the reader convinced of Rusty's guilt until the very end — but Karin no longer cared. In her version, all fingers pointed to the custodian until the penultimate chapter, when — surprise, surprise, and she hoped Mitchell understood how magnanimous she was being — he was cleared of suspicion. The actual murderer was the lesbian nurse. Karin felt a little bit bad about this, not wanting to marginalize the gay character, but she endeavored to make clear that there was no connection between lesbianism and homicide. The nurse was a frustrated lover, that was all; the knowledge that she couldn't have Rose had driven her insane. It was the perfect ending, because you wouldn't suspect a lesbian nurse of being a raping ghost.

In the final pages, Rusty and Rose vowed to leave St. Lucent together and establish a clinic in Tucson, Arizona, where the sun always shone. Every last plot strand was sewn up.

For a week or so after finishing, she was on a high. Food tasted better, and she slept long, satisfied hours. She baked cookies and sent them off in a care package to Marcus. She finally completed some of the other work that had been piling up and sent that off. She even cooked for herself, dishes with gourmet ingredients accompanied by a glass of wine.

When she was ready, she e-mailed the entire thing to Donald St. John. Then she moved on with her life, not waiting to hear back.

It took him three weeks to reply. One day she came home from the grocery store and found an envelope from him in the mail. Dear Karin, I'm terribly sorry to say that I don't think that it's going to work out. Enclosed is an additional payment in recognition of all your efforts. Best wishes, Donald St. John. A check fluttered to the ground.

Without even pausing, she got back in the car and drove to his half-glass house. She almost expected him to be standing naked on the second floor, waiting for her, but he wasn't. When she rang the doorbell, Corazón took a long time coming to the door, and her hair was disheveled, her cheeks flushed.

Karin looked at her. “Is the master of the house home?” she said.

Corazón nodded and let her in. Standing in the living room, Karin heard her go upstairs and then come back down, evidently alone. Minutes passed. He couldn't just ignore her by hiding upstairs. She looked at the art on the walls, bad oils of strangely colored fruit in misshapen bowls, the kind of thing you saw in suburban coffee shops. Glancing at her watch, she saw that fifteen minutes had gone by. It was ridiculous.

“St. John, I'm coming upstairs,” she called. “I'm coming to your office and I don't care what you're wearing.” There was no answer. She started up the stairs. The door to the office was closed. There was no sign of Corazón. She pushed through the door without knocking, and St. John was sitting at his desk, wearing a gray V-neck sweater over a white shirt, with his hands poised over the keyboard, like a photograph on a book jacket.

“Karin,” he said, “I'm sorry. I just wanted to finish this one section before we spoke. Forgive me — you know how it is when you get in the groove and don't want to lose it.”

She sat down across from him at the desk.

“I'll just be a moment, I promise,” he said. His white hair was standing up all over.

Her own hair, she realized, was a mess, too — she'd left the house in sweatpants, without giving her appearance any thought at all — but she didn't care. She only wanted to know what he was writing, if he was redoing The Hospital Was Haunted to suit his own horrendous taste. She darted around behind him, and before he swiveled in his chair and stood up to block her view of the monitor, she read: Dear Mother, I hope you are recovering well from the operation on your hip.

“What on earth are you doing?” St. John said. His voice had risen, in perplexity or anger, and practically squeaked at the end of the question.

“Where's the manuscript?” Karin said, and started searching the office, opening and closing folders and filing cabinets. She thought surely he would have printed it out, as he had the last time, but she didn't see it anywhere. Perhaps it was already gone, already sent off, under his own name, to his agent or editor or whoever he sent these things to. He had taken it away from her. He'd seduced her with the project and then robbed her of its satisfactions.

“Corazón?” he called. “Can you come up here, please?”

Corazón ran up the stairs and stood there watching the two of them, unsure of what to do.

The master of the house, Karin thought, with a woman at his beck and call. What a life he had, this Donald St. John. “You,” she said, “are a raping ghost.”

“And you are a very disturbed woman,” St. John said. “I think you'd better leave my house before I call the police.”

“I want my book,” she said.

“Karin, my dear, it was never your book. It was my book and always will be. I realize that you became very invested in it. But surely you've understood all along that this is my work. You can't simply step in and take over, my dear.”

“Stop calling me my dear,” she said, shaking her head. She saw the movement reflected in the glass behind her, her crazy halo of graying hair, her desperate and ghostly eyes. Donald. St. John made a beckoning gesture with his hand and Corazón came and stood beside him, frowning, for the first time, at Karin. She saw that he was genuinely afraid of her. He thought she was going to attack him, and Corazón, this silent little woman, was the only protection he had. “Did you even read it?” she asked him.

“I began to,” he said slowly. “I'm afraid I didn't quite finish.”

You couldn't afford to, could you? she thought. You knew it would be better than anything you've ever done. She took a deep breath and something slowed inside her, a quiet tectonic settle marking the ebb of her rage. She felt a great wave of pity for him, for the gigantic emptiness of his life. “I'm going to leave now,” she said. “I'm going to leave you to think about what you've done.”

In the car she was tempted to turn back — to go to his computer, find the copy of her book on his computer, delete it, wrest it from him — but she fought the urge. Whatever he did with it, she thought, whether he published what she'd written or did it over himself, she would be there in its pages. Some shade of her would remain.

The dog greeted her happily when she got home, licking her hand, and she stroked her head and led her into Marcus's room. She lay down on his bed and the dog curled up on the rug beside her, no sound but their breathing, measured, rhythmic, ever calmer. On the wall was a poster of a rock band whose music she'd yelled at him not to play so loud. On a shelf stood his cross-country running trophies and a collection of marbles in a glass jar. She closed her eyes and thought of Rose and Rusty, their work at the clinic in Tucson, the adobe house they lived in behind it. They were happy together in the desert sun. Still, Rose sometimes woke in the night, listening to the sounds of the darkness. Of course, after everything that had happened in St. Lucent, she knew that ghosts didn't exist. But another part of her understood that every house was haunted.