After the Saucers Landed

by Douglas Lain

Harold steps aside as she heads for the aisle, as she heads for the exit, but he grabs my arm as I follow her.

  “There was a gap,” he says, “between when we saw her at Harold’s art studio at the University and when we sat down with her for dinner. We went from A to C without stopping at B. There is a gap.”

  “She’s clearly not feeling well,” I say.

  Harold has something else to tell me, he holds fast to my arm as the Pleidien saucers return and the holographic exhibit restarts. He seems to soften a bit, like he has some concern in there with his anger.

  “When you get home, when you see Virginia again, call me,” he says.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Harold lets go of my arm and nods. “Just call me when you get to your condo and we’ll figure it out together.”

  The déjà vu makes me nod an okay to him and it continues on as I walk between the lights, as I enter the more well-lit front lobby of the saucer. And I’m okay with it when she takes my hand. I’m okay with her as we walk down the ramp into the parking lot, as we talk it over and decide to take a cab back to our condo.

  “Are you cold?” I ask as she shivers next to the phone booth. And, on cue, I finally offer her my tweed jacket. I’ve been holding onto it, the leather patch wrinkled in my clenched fist, all along. She covers herself with it as I step into the booth to call a cab.

  4

  two wives

  The difference between Harold Flint and the rest of the UFO community is the difference between connotation and denotation. Harold wanted to know what flying saucers meant and not what they were. A couple of chapters from now I’ll try to explain his methods a bit more and tell you the story of a trip Harold and I will take to Coney Island. We’ll be under the old parachute jump when Harold gives me instruction on how to understand the connotation of having two wives, but I’ll get to that later. For now I just want to explain this other thing, this difference between denoting something and connoting something. For Flint this was this difference that mattered.

  Let’s take a pair of words as an example. Let’s take the words “bare legs” and look at the difference between what the words denote and what they connote. If I were to report to you that I found myself staring at Virginia’s bare legs as we were driven back to Brooklyn in a yellow cab or that she leaned against the backseat window and curled up, putting her bare legs on the back seat and letting her sweater dress ride up past her waist, you would be making a mistake if you understood me on the level of denotation alone. That is, the meaning of those words strung together in that sentence can’t be fully grasped if we just read them as isolated units of meaning with straightforward positive significance. Instead, to get the full meaning of what I’d be reporting we’d have to understand the connotations, the implications, of words like “bare” and “legs” and even take a close look at words like “ride” and “curled.”

  “I found myself staring at Virginia’s bare legs as we were driven back to Brooklyn in a yellow cab.”

  “The UFO skipped across the sky like a saucer across water.”

  Harold would think that the connotations in the second sentence above were as important to consider as the connotations in the first, and later on, when he’ll tell me to write this book, when he’ll set me the task of reporting our, his and my, abduction, he’ll ask me to collect all the connotations. He’ll want me to go beyond figuring out what actually happened or how things are, and to consider what they mean.

  Really though, I don’t need to be reminded to do this because this way of thinking is de rigueur in literature departments and at New York cocktail parties, and it’s this approach to interpretation that was responsible for my marriage. Virginia deployed an analysis of connotations during the lit department social where we met back in 1987. It was how she seduced me.

  “Why do they call it Secret?” she asked. She was talking about the deodorant Procter & Gamble developed in the 1950s. The deodorant called Secret is Procter & Gamble’s only product designed exclusively for, and marketed directly to, women.

  We were at a department social held at Japas on East 38th Street. We went there to eat sushi and sing karaoke on a Friday night before finals.

  I’d never tried either before and was out of my element. I fumbled with the chopsticks, put a hand over one ear to block out the sound of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Village People sung off key by women, mostly women, drunk on Heineken or Corona, and all in all I was determined to have a bad time. That’s what Virginia was up against when she started the conversation that would bring us together. She had to work to keep me talking.

  “Why do they call it Secret?” she asked.

  “Because it’s a terrible secret that women sweat,” I said.

  In 1987 Virginia had permed and dyed blond hair and, for an adjunct, was intimidating. We both of us taught composition and the American short story, were both adjuncts, but while I was ruining my reputation with Flint, co-writing books sold from New Age shelves and at MUFON conventions, her story in Granta had been reprinted in The Year’s Best Short Fiction of 1985. She was nice to me, always saying hello in the halls or in the University teachers’ lounge, she’d even said that she thought it was unfair that everyone was judging me, the whole department was mocking me, for these books that nobody had even bothered to read, but that news wasn’t exactly welcome and I hadn’t wanted pity. She was nice to me, but it was only when she got up to sing “Too Drunk to Fuck” by the Dead Kennedys, only when she kept her eyes on mine from the stage, that I figured she wasn’t only being nice.

  “Let me show you,” she said. She put her hand on mine to help with the chopsticks. She took over, showing me the proper grip and how to be more precise with my fingers.

  Looking at Virginia now, as the light from street lamps and neon signs illuminate the back seat of the cab, watching as her face is lit green then red and then blue as the cab moves, looking at her bare legs change color too, I remember what her touch felt like, how surprising it was to have her hand on mine.

  It turned out that she was interested in saucers. Before the saucers landed but after the sushi I often thought that she should be the one working with Harold, helping him with his research, because while I was enamored of Flint’s work and especially the work he did back in 1962 with Ray Walker, Virginia was the one who really liked the stories of contact, outer space, and Kenneth Arnold. She was the one who subscribed to Fate magazine while I read the Paris Review. UFOs were her guilty pleasure before the landing, and I was lucky for that.

  “You see?” Virginia asked me. “Hold your fingers like that.”

  I made my best effort but I used too much pressure and one of the chopsticks flew out my hand, over the counter, and out of view. I stood up from my stool and leaned across as far as I could without lying down on my plate of raw fish.

  “I can’t believe the whole season was just a dream,” one of the other professors, I think her name was Wilkins or Watson, said. An overly tall woman with curly red hair and big glasses with brown speckled plastic frames was determined to talk to everyone. Making her way down the counter she ended my chopstick lesson so that she, a professor of Medieval poetry, could give her opinion about the television show Dallas.

  While they talked I stared at the reproduction of a Patrick Nagel painting over the bar. It was a poster version of Nagel’s cover art for the Duran Duran album Rio. Nagel had created a woman’s face out of negative space and simple lines. Nagel’s designer paintings borrowed just as much from Lautrec and the Parisian cafés of the nineteenth century as it did from Battlestar Galactica. Orange and green diagonal lines broke this particular Nagel beauty into four sections and placed her out of reach, behind color bars.

  This ideal woman of the 1980s stared down on me. She was confident, beautiful, and remote. Looking at her I felt I was both entirely too fleshy, a schlub, and oddly superior. I might be eating sushi, but I didn’t belong in the ’80s. I was either ahead of my time or stuck in a nobler age.
I leaned forward to look for my missing chopstick and, with my belly pressed against the counter, I confirmed that it was still nowhere. Sitting back down I sank back into my determination to have a wretched time.

  In my defense, it had been a rough couple years. The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, Saucers and Reincarnation sold abysmally, and I didn’t get accepted for a tenure track position at the University. It was, all of it, getting me down, and when you add in the fact that people were laughing at my books, that I was a joke in the department, I think you can understand why I didn’t respond much to Virginia. Not at first.

  “We’re all such cynics,” she said. Wilkins had moved on down the counter. “That’s why people in the department aren’t reading your books. Flying saucers, space travel, the future, that stuff seems naive, right?” She picked up a bit of raw fish with her chopsticks, dipped it into her soy sauce, and then tipped her head back and dropped the fish into her open mouth. “Did you watch how I did that?” she asked. “Now you try.”

  I ended up spreading rice across the black marble countertop. “I think I’ll use my fingers,” I said.

  “Good idea,” she said.

  Virginia was encouraging. This all happened before the landing but a long time after John Cage appeared on Ed Sullivan to make music with a bathtub and ten transistor radios, but Virginia went along with it when I brought Cage up. I described Cage’s television appearance for her, told her how jealous Flint had been when his friend Cage got on national television, and she told me about Durango, Colorado, and escaping a religious family.

  “Commercial artists like Patrick Nagel and the Memphis Milano group are the worst kind of nihilists,” I told her. “It’s a very cold work,” I said and gestured at the Duran Duran cover.

  She agreed with my non-sequitur judgment. “An ice queen,” she said. “How is that sexy?”

  Soon enough Wilkins was back with another interruption. “Are you going to sing, Brian?” she asked.

  We had to pick a pop hit but the karaoke company’s catalog was like a phone book. It was in an oversized three-ring binder and the pages were falling out. Both of us spent some time flipping through it and writing down serial numbers on cocktail napkins, only Virginia spent more time than I did. She kept crossing out her choices. She’d settle in on a choice, find a better, more ironic choice, and then she’d put her hand on the back of her neck and point to a title with her other one. I’d look, read the title, and pretend to know the song and why it was noteworthy.

  “That’s absurd,” I said. “Why do they have that one?” I asked.

  “Your turn,” she said and slid the catalog over to me, pushing my plate out of the way.

  I spent about three minutes on the list and then, after considering Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes” briefly, held up my hands in protest, my palms facing out.

  “I’m not going to sing,” I said.

  “Everybody has to sing,” Wilkins told me. She came from across the room, and left her plate of rice and raw fish behind, in order to confront me on this point.

  “Not me.”

  “Everybody.”

  “But I can’t pick a song,” I said.

  “If you don’t pick I’ll pick for you,” she said. “You probably want to pick.”

  “Nope.”

  “You’ll be sorry,” Wilkins said.

  And she was right. The terrible thing about the song they picked was that I knew the backstory. “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” was performed by the Carpenters in 1978, but it had originally been written by another band in an homage to World Contact Day. Charles Rain and a few other contactee gurus had organized World Contact Day back in 1953 and the song, originally performed and written by a band called Klaatu, was a tribute and send up of their effort at psychic communication between we Earthlings and our orbiting Space Brothers.

  “It seems ridiculous now. But World Contact Day wasn’t that different from Hands Across America,” I said as the song started. I spoke into the karaoke microphone, explaining the context of the song, lecturing to my colleagues at the bar as if they were undergraduates. “Think of it this way, both Hands Across America and World Contact Day were pseudo events, yeah? They were both aimed at media and not people, both aimed to create a story but not a real tangible or material result. Did anyone actually believe that if enough people sent a mental message to the stars, to the Space Brothers, that they’d hear us and come to visit? Of course not, but did we really believe that if enough people held hands, if we could form a human chain across the country, we could end hunger and homelessness?”

  The music continued and my audience grew restless, belligerent. Even Virginia was shouting at me. I wasn’t supposed to talk or explain, I was supposed to sing. I was meant to sing and the song was based on the message Charles Rain had written for psychic transmission. Charles Rain’s message back in 1953 was this:

  “Calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet EARTH. We of IFSB wish to make contact with you. We are your friends, and would like you to make an appearance here on EARTH. Your presence before us will be welcomed with the utmost friendship. We will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of EARTH. Please come in peace and help us in our EARTHLY problems. Give us some sign that you have received our message. Be responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality. Let us hear from you. We are your friends.”

  When I got to the end of the song, after doing my best Karen Carpenter impression, the department was experiencing real joy. Everything had gone so well, much better than planned. I was known as a serious type, sort of hated for my relationship with Flint even if it was predicated on this flying saucer ridiculousness, and watching me recite ’70s cheese was, apparently, the best thing ever.

  “It’s not so ridiculous,” I said. “No more ridiculous than Hands Across America,” I repeated.

  But they weren’t having any of it.

  “What do you think they’ll look like, when they land?” Wilkins asked me.

  “They might look like us, some of them look like us. Or they might look a bit reptilian.”

  “Like ET?” another professor, this one a balding New Englander with a grey beard and a pronounced effeminate slur, asked. I wanted to grab him by the collar of his plaid shirt and punch him right in his sardonic smile.

  “Look, I didn’t write that song and Flint had nothing to do with World Contact Day. I was barely born then.”

  “Sing it again! Sing it again!” they chanted at me. I tried to get another drink but the waitress refused my order. She told me that I could have another beer if I sang the whole thing over again, it would be on the house even, but I couldn’t have a drink unless I sang it all the way through from the beginning.

  And that’s when Virginia saved me. She stepped up onto the stage and blew into the microphone.

  “I think it’s my turn,” she said. “I’ve picked my own song.”

  Virginia smiled down at me from the stage and I tried again to order another beer. The waitress relented.

  “When I was a little girl,” Virginia sang.

  I nibbled at raw octopus that tasted like rubber and thought about Virginia’s Year’s Best Short Fiction story. I hadn’t read it but she’d told me it was written in the epistolary form, written as a series of letters between a father and son in nineteenth century Ireland apparently. I wondered how this evening, how the experience of watching her sing and sway through this fog of sake and beer, might be told as a series of letters.

  “‘Dear Virginia,’” I started. “‘I hope you won’t think me too forward but when you saved me from having to repeat the message to the Space Brothers I realized how beautiful your hair looks in the neon light, how beautiful your skin is even after several rounds of sake and beer.’”

  “Is that all there is to a fire?” Virginia sang.

  And her voice cut through the crowd and shifted
the tone of the evening. Instead of laughing at me, people listened to her.

  On stage and singing the words the karaoke machine was feeding her a bit off key, she made us listen. The lyrics flashed across the otherwise blank screen as the taped music, the piano and trumpet and harp, sounded, but she transformed karaoke into something else. She sang Peggy Lee’s hit so that it was received by the literature department as a challenge.

  “Is that all there is?” Virginia asked. “Is that all there is?”

  Arriving at my brownstone Virginia is already here. That is, there are two Virginias on Fulton Street, two wives in my loft at the old Eagle warehouse. One of them, who I figure is probably the real one, is grading papers in our designer kitchen when we arrive. This one is sitting at the kitchen island, this too-narrow worktable with a rack for dishes on the bottom and a charcoal marble tabletop, and she has her papers spread out next to this potted lemon tree we purchased from the Indoor/Outdoor Gardner on 83rd maybe a year ago. The tree looks like it isn’t growing at all I guess.

  Anyhow, Virginia’s still wearing the country tweed jacket with buttons on the right side that she almost always wears to the University, and doesn’t look up at first but just keeps marking the page in front of her, and when she does glance up at us her first look is one of mild annoyance, I’m interrupting her train of thought, but on a second look this expression gives way to one of surprised recognition. And the other Virginia, the one next to me in a not quite long enough sweater dress, is also surprised. She apparently didn’t know, didn’t expect, this doubling.

  We enter the kitchen and Virginia in the sweater dress walks over to her duplicate at the narrow table and puts her hands palms down on top of the papers.

  “Virginia?” I ask the one in the sweater. “Virginia?” I ask the one in the jacket.

  “Brian?” the one in tweed asks. “Who is…” But she stops herself. Virginia already knows who this woman in the sweater is, or who she is supposed to be.

  The two of them don’t really look alike. When the one in the tweed jacket stands up I see that she’s maybe two or three inches shorter than the one in the sweater dress. And this taller wife has slightly lighter hair than the other one, and her hair is a bit longer, down past the ears. But, despite these differences, they are nonetheless the same.