Aliens of Affection

by Padgett Powell

  “Hey, cawboy,” she said with a leer. “I been hearing you sing the blues up here all the livelong day.” This testiness was coming out of an otherwise happy, innocent-looking woman reminiscent of Dale Evans. She had on the red skirt that Mr. Albemarle had pictured when he was taking inventory regarding straight desire and twisted desire. The red skirt flared out wide and short and had a modest but sexy fringe on it. It allowed you to see where the leg of the wearer began to be the butt of the wearer, and it gave the onlooker pause and a kind of stillborn gulp.

  He was looking at this Dale Evans in her skirt saying this contradictory Mae West stuff to him, naked and in the arrested gulp and not now looking at the skirt or the legs or the legs grading into the butt, actually there was nothing gradual about it—

  “Cawboy,” Dale Mae was saying, “I want you to sing me some o’ them blues.”

  “I don’t sing,” Mr. Albemarle said.

  “Yesterday you sang:

  When the big bulldog in trouble

  Puppy-dog britches fit him fine.

  You sang this in a clear campfire voice that lulled the cows and woke me up. I been sleepin’ a long long long long long long time.”

  “That sounds like a long time,” Mr. Albemarle said, stupidly, desperately trying to calculate how she heard him, where she was or had been to hear him singing to the moat. In the moat?

  “Are you from the spoilbank of broken hearts?”

  “The what?”

  “The moat?”

  “The what?”

  “Is your heart broken?”

  Dale Mae looked at him as if she had noticed for the first time he was naked, or as if he had lost his mind, which was, he considered, the same look. “Why don’t you get dressed so we can dance,” Dale Mae said. “Put on some of that Soldier of Fortune shit in a pile over there.”

  “Sodier of Fortune,” Mr. Albemarle corrected, liking her. He fairly skipped over to the military paraphernalia and slapped on a quantity of it and stood almost breathless before Dale Mae in her flared red skirt and delicious fringe, ready to dance, or whatever.

  “I warn you,” he said. “I put you on notice right now. I have…The worm of my passion is twisted.”

  “It better be,” Dale Mae said.

  “By all assurance, it is badly twisted.”

  “When the big bulldog get in trouble, he should turn on some music and dance,” Dale Mae said. “Take this bitch in hand, sir, and fret not your twisted passion.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mr. Albemarle did as he was told. All along the watchtower, they danced. It was a stepless but not beat-less dance, hip to hip, pocket to bone, thrust to hollow. Gradually Dale Mae swatted away the annoying military hardware and left Mr. Albemarle as elegant as Fred Astaire, and gradually she herself softened and melted and fairly oozed into his arms, and they made in their heads plans to remain together and untwist Mr. Albemarle’s passion and to do to Dale Mae’s passion whatever in the way of no harm could yet be done to it. Dale Mae had a beauty mark on her cheek, which Mr. Albemarle admired until he touched it and it came off on his finger and appeared to be a piece of insect and he flicked it over the wall and thought no more of it and admired without impediment the dreamy, relaxed face of Dale Mae, who had come to him unbidden and unhesitant and unheeding of certain dangers. This gave him a good feeling and made his puppy-dog britches fit him a little less fine. He was bulldog big enough already to kiss this cowgirl on the neck.

  “Sugar,” Dale Mae said, “it’s the hardest thing to remember. All I can be is me, and all you can be is you.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I have no idea. Sing me some of them blues.”

  Mr. Albemarle sang:

  What I like about roses I like a lot—

  I like a smell, a thorn, that jungle rot.

  I like a red, a yeller, a vulvate pink.

  And a king bee going down the drink.

  Mr. Albemarle and Dale Mae got themselves some coffee and got naked and got squared away for some intimate quality time together in a small bungalow he’d found in the fog, which intimate quality time Mr. Albemarle kicked off by announcing to Dale Mae, sitting cross-legged on the bed with her coffee steaming her breasts and looking to Mr. Albemarle some deliciously beautiful, perfectly joined in her parts and the parts appearing to be cream and vanilla and cinnamon and cherry and chocolate, and some of her looked like bread, also, smooth tender bread like host wafers—he tore himself away and said, “I warn you, I’m a bad piece of work, emotionally.”

  “Well, bully for you,” Dale Mae said. “Do you know what to do with me?”

  “I believe I do,” Mr. Albemarle said, gently placing a knee on the bed and taking Dale Mae’s coffee and setting it safely on a night table so she did not get burned in the clapping straits of his desire. He clapped onto her like an honest man. She returned everything he gave her by time and a half. It knocked him silly and made him pat his own butt, looking for his wallet, when it was over. He did this when he wasn’t sure who he was. In the willing arms of an agreeable woman possessed of reason and courage, Mr. Albemarle had to doubt it could really be him she was holding and he wanted invariably at these moments to see his wallet.

  “Relax, you piece of work,” Dale Mae said.

  “Okay.”

  He did. It was difficult, to do that. Relaxing was hard, and dangerous, he did not trust it. That was why you had drunks. They had the most difficulty relaxing. They wanted it most, feared it most, claimed it most, almost never managed it.

  “I will break your heart,” he said to Dale Mae, breathing hard on her breast, a sugary warm air coming from it as if it were a lobe of a radiator.

  “Hmmm?” Dale Mae asked. “You go right ahead.”

  “Go ahead?”

  “Why not? Break break break.”

  Someday, maybe today, he was going to do a woman right. Dale Mae’s breast was next to his eye and looked like a cake with one of those high-speed-photo milk-drop crowns on it. He had a tear in his eye and was hungry for cake. It was thanklessness that plagued and dogged hard the heels of affection. Affection was that which, and the only thing on earth which, you should be eternally thankful for.

  When Mr. Albemarle got up from these his exertions upon Dale Mae, the warm giving stranger, he felt fresh and sweet as a large piece of peppermint candy. He told Dale Mae this and she told him he’d better take a shower, then, and get over it. He kissed her and she kissed back and he took the shower and she was still there when he got out. Her heart hadn’t been broken yet. It was progress. There was hope.

  “It’s not easy,” Mr. Albemarle said later when they were strolling all along the watchtower hand in hand and in love, “to work this particular bit of magic.”

  “What particular bit of magic?” Dale Mae asked.

  “Marriage.”

  “Indeed,” Dale Mae said, noticing a piece of shale on the walk and throwing it over the edge. Mr. Albemarle waited to hear it land, curious he had never tried a sounding in the mysterious moat before. He was still keening his ear when Dale Mae said, “This particular bit of magic? You deem us married?”

  “In a figure of—”

  “In a figure of nothing. Not speech, not nothing.”

  “Okay. Sheesh! What’s up your reconnaissance butt?”

  “My what?”

  “Nothing.”

  He held her hand, petulantly but not unhappily. Marriage was a tricky bit of magic. Holding hands was a tricky bit of magic. She needn’t be so hyper. There were—it occurred to him, now having been posted to the old verity that he was, whether holding hands or married or not, finally alone, always—there were people who had in their minds something called a “true marriage,” as opposed, Mr. Albemarle supposed, to a pro forma marriage. He had no idea what this true marriage purported to be. He was not speaking of it when he constructed his pithy impertinence about magic and a marriage being made to work. He meant the false land. It was a tricky bit of magic to stay tog
ether, was what he meant.

  “I meant, it’s a tricky bit of magic to stay together,” he now said to Dale Mae, who squeezed his hand and patted their held hands with her free one as if to say, “You’ll be all right.” This little gesture proved his point: it was condescending enough that he wanted to take his hand back.

  But she was, of course, right. Magic or not, tricky or not, it would bear no comment, it needed no more pressure upon it, the gratuitous happy union, than was naturally on it, the meeting and clinging together of two naturally repellent, irregular surfaces. They clung together out of desire but were aided, in his view, in their sticking together by a sap of hurt. This glue oozed from them despite themselves. For all Dale Mae’s tough lightness, she was holding hands, too. She was very tough and very soft. She was nougat.

  “You’re a nougat,” Mr. Albemarle said to her, announcing it at large all along the watchtower. Emboldened, he then said, a little less broadly, a little more conspiratorially, “True marriage schmoo schmarriage.”

  “What?”

  “Schmoo schmarriage,” he repeated.

  Dale Mae thumped him on the nose and held him by the back of the neck with one hand and at the small of the back with the other and pulled hard with both hands, scaring him with her strength.

  All along the watchtower, it was quiet. “I think songbirds are overrated,” Mr. Albemarle offered. “Really inflated. Not nowhere near what they’re cracked up to be.”

  Mr. Albemarle got them two buckets of range balls from a vending machine he’d never seen all along the watchtower before. As much as he had patrolled it, this caused him wonder. The machine itself was a wonder: a plastic fluorescent box dispensing not junk food or soda water but golf balls. What would come out of a vending machine next? Shoes? Pets? Beside the machine, incongruously to his mind, was a barrel full of clubs, for free use in ridding yourself of your buckets of balls. Mr. Albemarle got them each a driver, and he and Dale Mae slapped and topped and scuffed and hooked and sliced and shanked and chillied the balls into the moat of spoiled affection. Mr. Albemarle had the feeling that each ball contained a message of some sort to the brokenhearted from the not yet broken. They were like fortune cookies except that they were more like misfortune cookies. He could not imagine what one of these misfortunes might actually have said, and when he inspected a ball it read only “ProStaff” or “Titleist 4” or “The Golden Bear.” Yet he felt that each ball, whether it soared over or squibbed immediately down into the moat, carried a secret meaning from the players all along the watch-tower to the wrecked players beneath it.

  They had a good time. Each ball was a small celebration of their gratuitous, so far successful affection above the moat of moping: each ball said, “Here, you sad sacks, here.” They were probably, in their hand-holding glee and innocent kissing mirth, only minutes away from hurling themselves like badly hit balls down into their broken brethren, but for the moment they felt fine and superior, lucky and happy, the way a new couple is supposed to feel.

  Mr. Albemarle addressed each ball with a little wiggle of his butt and hands, a steadying sigh, arm straight, head down, slow uptake, pause, how long will it he before she and I are back to normal, at each other instead of on, whap! ball going God knows where, anywhere but straight. Mr. Albemarle could somehow induce a golf ball to wind up behind him. Dale Mae, in her red, fringed skirt, the fringes snapping like tiny whips when she cracked a ball into the ozone of ruined love before them, did better: her balls went forward.

  That’s how it is with women, Mr. Albemarle thought. They want forward, they get forward. Not so with me, which is where all the bluster obtains. Talk forward if you achieve backward. Bluster and cheer, the man’s ticket to the prom. Bluster and cheer take reason and balls to the dance of life, and it goes reasonably well as long as the corsage is fresh. Then reason divorces cheer, and balls beat bluster, and the long diurnal haul to mildew of the heart is on. Mr. Albemarle teed up an X-out and hit it, smiling, best he could.

  When they got back from the range, such as it was—the glowing ball dispenser, the ball baskets like Amazon brassieres, the clubs on the honor system—they prepared to frolic naked. Mr. Albemarle dropped his wallet on a chair beside the bed and out of the corner of his eye saw the wallet move. “Look,” Dale Mae said, “there’s a lizard.”

  There was a lizard coming out of Mr. Albemarle’s wallet. It was nearly the color of the dollar bills from which it emerged, its head made quick birdlike assessments of the situation, and it ran.

  “What was that?” Mr. Albemarle asked.

  “That was Elvis,” Dale Mae said, “in a green one-dollar cape. Get in the bed.”

  Mr. Albemarle did as he was told.

  There is much to be said for doing as one is told. Mr. Albemarle had come to see life as a parabola of sorts plotted over time against doing and not doing as one is told. Roughly, infancy and maturity were close to a base line of obeying what others expected of you, and puberty and its aftermath, which was a variable period, took you on the upward part of the bell-like curve away from the base line of doing what you were told. You soared on a roller-coaster hump of doing not what you were told and it felt good, but finally your stomach got a bit light and uneasy and you started, through natural forces and not reluctantly, to come back down toward agreeability. Having ridden around with your hands off the bar and screaming, you were now willing—it was even exhilarating—to do precisely as you were told. It was fun in fact to subvert the voice telling you what to do a little by being instantly agreeable, by even anticipating instructions. This was pulling the wool on the bourgeois.

  This was one reason Mr. Albemarle did not object to his current job, walking all along the watchtower. He still had no good idea what he was doing, despite the large assurances and hints supplied him by the aliens of affection, but he found doing it agreeable because he had apparently been, however mysteriously, told to do it. So he did it. Living well was not the best revenge; doing exactly what you are told is the best revenge. The blame or fault in your doing it, if any obtains, rests upon those telling you what to do. The masses of folk going over cliffs in the name of this or that religion were on to the beauty of this revenge, but Mr. Albemarle liked the less obvious vengeance of obeying the smallest whim, the fine print of commandments that were issuing like radio signals from everyone and everything around him, from the very fabric of civilized life. From utter strangers on the street to foreign governments, everyone had ideas about what you were supposed to do. Your job, as baseline parabola wire walker, was to divine their (sometimes tacit) wishes and appear to obey them. This is what civilized human life boiled down to.

  Animals, Mr. Albemarle had noticed, and it was not surprising, were immune. They could not hear the radio. They heard only their “instincts,” which excused all their nasty behavior. Periodically an animal would be trained—i.e., forced—to listen to the radio. Animal trainers were, ironically, those most wont on earth to speak of human freedom, iconoclasm, nonconformity as summa bona. And they were, appropriately, dirtier than most people, unruly, outspoken in hard-to-follow ways, united beyond these traits in their insistence that tuning in a horse or a bear or a dog to hear the radio of doing what it was told somehow increased its freedom. These notions gave Mr. Albemarle the idea of opening an obedience school for dogs all along the watchtower. He would train all the dogs all along the watchtower to leap into the moat and become brokenhearted-man’s best friend. He liked this idea very much. Training a dog to leap into space would be a test, probably, but it would be imminently possible if you weren’t soft-headed. The larger problem with the idea was that he hadn’t seen a dog in all his days all along the watchtower.

  When Dale Mae woke up, looking ravishing, he said to her, “Do you think we need a dog?” She said, “I don’t think we need a dog.”

  That was that.

  “I’m like one of those Iroquois steel workers,” Mr. Albemarle said. “I just naturally put one foot down in front of the other, straight, wit
hout looking down, all along the watchtower, whether there are dogs on it or not, and all along the parabola of doing what I’m told. I can walk that line as steady as Ricky Wallenda on a wire, but no leapfrog.”

  “No leapfrog?”

  “No leapfrog. Ricky Wallenda quit leapfrog. He fell doing leapfrog.”

  “I see.”

  “Just do what you’re told, but no leapfrog.” I see.

  The amazing thing about Dale Mae, about any tough woman who could still smile after enduring her own time on the parabola of doing and not doing as she was told, was that she did see. They could see right through a fog of nonsense to the rock or reef behind it. They’d abandoned radar in favor of a finger in the wind. This is why men liked them and were driven crazy by them. Men were content with a finger in the wind only when they were defeated or tired. Women used a finger in the wind cinching victory first thing in the morning. Without women, men would be giant raw quivering analytical anuses. Mr. Albemarle was comforted by this summation he had formulated and went to sleep on Dale Mae’s bosom.

  Mr. Albemarle found a writing desk all along the watchtower and stationery inside it so sat down to write a letter. “Take a letter,” he said to himself, and by way of sexual harassment palmed his own butt and sat down.

  Dear [blank; he couldn’t determine to whom to write],

  I know you think ill of me. That is because I am weak and mean. But keep in mind that…[here he faltered]…that…[he could think of nothing now in his behalf, in his defense, to say to the person or persons whom he could not think of either]…

  Love,

  Troy

  Troy was not his name, nor did he want to assume it. He looked the letter over and liked it. It summed up his position nicely. It was all you could say if the worm of your passion was twisted, your affections were all mismanaged and always would be. “Keep in mind that…that…” that nothing. Love, Troy. Did he mean the city, the myth of epic war over an impossibly beautiful woman? Who cared.