Read Online Babylon and Other Stories by Alix Ohlin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Alix Ohlin
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Barbie.
After the ballerina's operation, Ken and Barbie came to visit, sighing condolences, but then rapidly stole away to squirm and bash their plastic bodies against each other. They only ever had one thing on their plastic minds. While Wade spoke to Iz, she decided to work on a series of paintings in which Ken and Barbie reenacted the romances of Greek mythology. She would tell the class,
I call thees one “Ken Appears to Barbie in the Form of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup.”
That night it turned out that Wade, too, only had one thing on his plastic mind. Back at the studio, they looked at some of his canvases, which were enormous, geometric and monochromatic. Izabel had no idea what they were supposed to be about.
“It's a post-Rothko thing,” Wade said, and put his hand on her breast. His eyes were hazel, his expression as intense as a sideshow hypnotist's. Izabel couldn't help laughing, but to her surprise this didn't make him stop or even blush. He kept his hand there and started moving it around, and then she quit laughing, and they stayed together in a dark corner of the studio, behind a stack of stretched-out canvases.
Oh, Ken. Oh, Barbie.
In class they were studying eroticism in art. Everyone was working on being mature about it. They were looking at fairy tales and oil paintings, woodcuts, each detail laced with meaning, the importance of flowers and the angles of wrists. Professor Edelman was isolating the elements of the erotic, cataloging them with his plummy voice and his red laser. He had a dry wit and parchment skin to match it, and Izabel wondered if he could even imagine the physical realities, as opposed to their artistic representations:herself and Wade each night in the studio after everyone else had left, the messiness of their fluids and sounds. The professor pointed in the dark at women facing sideways, huge breasts projecting outward like crescent moons, their nipples like rocks. These breasts weren't just breasts, they represented the fertility of the earth. This was art, where layers of meaning were contained beneath the obvious. It was its own language, just like Wade said.
Zee language of love.
By October, Wade would not leave her alone. He stood behind her and talked to her while she painted. She was trying to find the exact fake-flesh color for Barbie's breasts. Barbie was trapped in a prison, locked inside, but the prison was the regular kitchen of a suburban American home, with a red-checkered tablecloth on the table. Ken's head was vaporously visible in the steam rising from her bowl of chicken noodle soup. Her breasts leaned toward him precipitously, and tiny chunks of chicken hung from the non-separated strands of his hair. Barbie was looking at him with a complex swirl of emotions—shock, confusion, a terrified desire—that Izabel was trying to convey within the limited range of expression afforded by the trademark Barbie smile.
Shirelle had moved down the hall and was now rooming with a girl named Kelly. When Izabel went back to the dorm, to change clothes, she sometimes saw them in Kelly's room, the door open, watching movies under a poster of a Georgia O'Keeffe flower, eating microwave popcorn and giggling. Wade was following her back to the room by now. Professor Edelman had come to regard them as a couple and had given them to understand that he approved. A favored pair, they'd been over to his house for dinner and called him by his first name, Marius. After class, they'd routinely have coffee or a drink in his office, the two of them slouching in front of his desk he sat behind, surrounded by shelves ofpapers and books and incunabula, pictures tacked up everywhere, a scholarly collage. He and Wade would discuss personalities of the art world while she stared at a pornographic Mesopotamian piece directly behind Marius's head. It had dawned on her that Wade and Marius were the same person, just a few years apart: Wade was what Marius had been as a young man, and Marius was
After the ballerina's operation, Ken and Barbie came to visit, sighing condolences, but then rapidly stole away to squirm and bash their plastic bodies against each other. They only ever had one thing on their plastic minds. While Wade spoke to Iz, she decided to work on a series of paintings in which Ken and Barbie reenacted the romances of Greek mythology. She would tell the class,
I call thees one “Ken Appears to Barbie in the Form of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup.”
That night it turned out that Wade, too, only had one thing on his plastic mind. Back at the studio, they looked at some of his canvases, which were enormous, geometric and monochromatic. Izabel had no idea what they were supposed to be about.
“It's a post-Rothko thing,” Wade said, and put his hand on her breast. His eyes were hazel, his expression as intense as a sideshow hypnotist's. Izabel couldn't help laughing, but to her surprise this didn't make him stop or even blush. He kept his hand there and started moving it around, and then she quit laughing, and they stayed together in a dark corner of the studio, behind a stack of stretched-out canvases.
Oh, Ken. Oh, Barbie.
In class they were studying eroticism in art. Everyone was working on being mature about it. They were looking at fairy tales and oil paintings, woodcuts, each detail laced with meaning, the importance of flowers and the angles of wrists. Professor Edelman was isolating the elements of the erotic, cataloging them with his plummy voice and his red laser. He had a dry wit and parchment skin to match it, and Izabel wondered if he could even imagine the physical realities, as opposed to their artistic representations:herself and Wade each night in the studio after everyone else had left, the messiness of their fluids and sounds. The professor pointed in the dark at women facing sideways, huge breasts projecting outward like crescent moons, their nipples like rocks. These breasts weren't just breasts, they represented the fertility of the earth. This was art, where layers of meaning were contained beneath the obvious. It was its own language, just like Wade said.
Zee language of love.
By October, Wade would not leave her alone. He stood behind her and talked to her while she painted. She was trying to find the exact fake-flesh color for Barbie's breasts. Barbie was trapped in a prison, locked inside, but the prison was the regular kitchen of a suburban American home, with a red-checkered tablecloth on the table. Ken's head was vaporously visible in the steam rising from her bowl of chicken noodle soup. Her breasts leaned toward him precipitously, and tiny chunks of chicken hung from the non-separated strands of his hair. Barbie was looking at him with a complex swirl of emotions—shock, confusion, a terrified desire—that Izabel was trying to convey within the limited range of expression afforded by the trademark Barbie smile.
Shirelle had moved down the hall and was now rooming with a girl named Kelly. When Izabel went back to the dorm, to change clothes, she sometimes saw them in Kelly's room, the door open, watching movies under a poster of a Georgia O'Keeffe flower, eating microwave popcorn and giggling. Wade was following her back to the room by now. Professor Edelman had come to regard them as a couple and had given them to understand that he approved. A favored pair, they'd been over to his house for dinner and called him by his first name, Marius. After class, they'd routinely have coffee or a drink in his office, the two of them slouching in front of his desk he sat behind, surrounded by shelves ofpapers and books and incunabula, pictures tacked up everywhere, a scholarly collage. He and Wade would discuss personalities of the art world while she stared at a pornographic Mesopotamian piece directly behind Marius's head. It had dawned on her that Wade and Marius were the same person, just a few years apart: Wade was what Marius had been as a young man, and Marius was
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