by Douglas Lain
“I’m sorry,” Virginia says. “You don’t have to,” she says. And she backs away, somehow avoiding me as she goes, and leaves the room. I’m left there with my pants around my ankles, there is nothing but empty air where a moment ago there had been a destination, and when I look to Asket she’s pulling her kimono back into place.
“You should go after her,” she tells me.
I’m sitting across from where Virginia’s lying, corpse-like on top of the sheets, and examining the pattern on the coverlet, a black and white pattern that, as I stare, becomes more and more Escher-like, trying to work out how to begin. I’ve got the leather chair shoved up next to, but not against, the radiator and I glance out the window at the flying saucer hovering nearby.
“Are you okay?” I ask without looking in her direction.
Virginia tells the ceiling that the problem was that she suddenly realized what she really looked like, what she must seem like, from Asket’s point of view. Meeting this alien was wonderful at first, it seemed to confirm something that Virginia had always hoped for but had also known was impossible, but then it had turned around on her and she’d felt sick.
“Not really sick, but sickening. I realized that I was sickening, this sort of disgusting bit of nothing. Not all together there really, but there just enough to be unpleasant.”
The problem was ultimately the same one that Harold had had after the saucers landed. Now that Virginia has met her fantasy self there is nothing left to support her, nothing left for Virginia to want to be. What Virginia wants to be is waiting patiently at the kitchen table. Virginia put her tongue inside the mouth of what she wanted to be and while it had been good, it had tasted just right, felt right, it had made her realize that she herself was all wrong.
The problem was that Virginia was a nobody. She was past thirty and had no children. She was a professor, but hadn’t had a significant impact on her field, on criticism. She was married but not to anyone important, not to anyone who wasn’t just as small and insignificant as she was. Asket, on the other hand, was from another dimension. Asket was her, was Virginia, as she wanted to be, as she imagined herself being when she was drifting off to sleep. This was how Virginia would be if she hadn’t had to settle into being anybody, hadn’t had to settle.
“She’s so beautiful. It’s like she’s living in this liminal space, with perfect light, and I’m this obscure and obscurantist tenured tacky nobody with expensive furniture and an overweight husband who wants to be Samuel Beckett,” she said.
“Sorry to be so mediocre,” I said. But she wasn’t bothering me really. In fact, I only wished that I had a pen and paper so I could take notes. This reversal, this turn around from seeing Asket as the fulfillment of a fantasy to seeing herself as a disappointment for Asket, it probably meant something. It was the kind of thing Harold would be interested in.
“It’s not you. It’s not you,” she said. And I expected her to sit up on the bed, maybe to offer me some sort of assurance. Instead she just repeated herself. “It’s not you,” she said again. “Not you. Not you.”
To be honest it wasn’t clear if she was talking to me at all. Wasn’t clear whether she was responding to my complaint or just continuing on with her own.
“Virginia, I’m sorry. All this is beyond the usual level of weirdness, I know. And probably what we started in there, trying to sleep with her, that was...” I pause. Trying to sleep with her was definitely a mistake. It could compromise the book, for one thing. It’s exactly the kind of thing Harold might do, of course, but that kind of thing is to be avoided. This book isn’t going to play at the fringes, that’s not the aim. The idea is to get real exposure, maybe go on Carson. No, not Carson, it’s Leno now. “Well, as I said before I’m hoping to convince Harold to write about her, to write about them. And if that happens maybe it’ll change things.”
“How will it change things?” she asks. And while she’s still gazing straight up at the ceiling at least I can be sure she’s talking to me.
“This one will sell. I’m sure of it. People will take it seriously now. People have to take us seriously now.”
“Brian?”
“Yes?”
“What people?” she asked. She finally turns over. She flips over onto her stomach, stretches across the black and white comforter, and finally looks at me. “The only people who really matter now are them.”
“You don’t mean that,” I say. And she doesn’t. If she really meant it she wouldn’t be worried about what this one Pleidien, the one that happens to look like her, thinks. She’d have surrendered already. She’d have converted to the New Religion and be up there on a saucer ready to lead a reading group or a tour, ready to help get new recruits. She has to believe that the saucers represent an opportunity for us beyond this opportunity to join this junk food religion they’re advertising on the evening news and through flashing light shows over the highways, suburbs and malls.
“This is an opportunity,” I say. “Not for some cosmic consciousness, not for enlightenment, but for me. For both of us.”
Virginia sits up straight on the side of the bed. She glances out at the light show on our front yard, watches the saucer go by, and then smacks and leans in close.
“Okay, Brian,” she says. “You’re right. You’re right.”
I nod, but I’m not convinced.
“Just don’t tell her what I told you,” she says. “Don’t tell her why I…Tell her that it’s not her fault. Please. Convince her.”
“Convince her of what?”
“Convince her to stay.”
5
the gap
Back in my ’83 Volvo station wagon with Asket I find she’s smiling at me.
Virginia didn’t say goodbye this morning. She hasn’t faced Asket since last night, but we all agreed, if separately, that she should continue staying with us for at least a little while longer and this trip into Manhattan is part of that plan. Taking her to the Gap so she can pick out her own wardrobe seemed like a sensible move last night, but now that we’re alone together in the car I’m thinking it’s not the best idea I’ve ever had, although it’s still a better option than the two of them sharing. Dressing Asket up in the same silk blouses and navy skirts that are the mainstay of Virginia’s wardrobe would likely just make Virginia even less confident, and even if it didn’t, living with a slightly off-kilter set of wives would confuse me. She should get her own clothes, her own human identity if she’s going to stay. And we both want her to stay. At the moment Asket is back in her wool sweater only now she’s wearing purple tights as well, and she’s holding her left hand up to her smile and staring at me.
“Why don’t you run away with me?” she asks. “We could go somewhere where there aren’t any.”
“Aren’t any what?”
“Saucers.”
I turn on the radio, twist the dial to the oldies station, listen to Elvis Presley sing about the summer sun, and watch a saucer glide over the East River instead of responding, but when we turn onto Adams Street and Sam Cooke comes on I give in and state the obvious.
“There is nowhere to go and I won’t leave Virginia.”
“But I am Virginia,” Asket says.
This time I don’t stay anything but just let Sam Cooke sing on.
“Sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Where would we go?” I ask. “Where were you thinking we could go to get away from all this?”
We’re on the Brooklyn Bridge and I gesture at the windshield indicating the silver disc that’s rotating and blinking on the other side. Traffic is slow as some of the cars are pulling off and parking on FDR, their drivers apparently tempted by the promise of redemption.
“We’d have to go somewhere that isn’t on the map,” Asket says. She isn’t smiling now, but just staring out the passenger side window. Glancing over at her as she sulks and then past her at the water, at a light blue motorboat that is pushing a barge filled with aluminum and wires, I’m reminded of Harold
’s anecdote. I think of Jesus and a Pepsi bottle, or a Pepsi machine. This is all too mundane. There is nothing otherworldly about her at all.
“What did you do before you came to Earth?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer but just keeps staring out her window.
“If we wanted to get away from the saucers we’d have to go off the map? Is that something like, what’s it called, that Third Space? Isn’t Ralph always talking about a Third Space? Is that what you mean?”
We’re across the river now, and while I cross FDR Drive the DJ on WCBS says the Dixie Cups are coming next but when the sound of drumsticks keeping a beat starts I turn off the radio and try again.
“Where would we go?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Asket says. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember if I’ve ever been to the Pleides, or what I did before I came to Earth, or anything like that. What I remember is Durango. I remember that my Tuesday class didn’t do the reading last week and I had to keep talking into their dumb silence for two hours.”
What I remember is that she was going to help me convince Harold, that she would help me get some saucer money. That’s why I brought her to Harold to begin with.
“What about that, do you remember that?”
“Why?” she asks. “Why do you want that? What is it about you that’s different from Harold? Why aren’t you disappointed?”
“Harold and I are different. We’ve always been different. He started his career by rebelling against it, trying to destroy it even, while all I’ve ever wanted was in. It’s not that I’m a total careerist though. I have my own small ambitions artistically. I understand the necessity to do things differently, to go beyond what’s already been done, to develop a vision.
“Actually that’s it. That’s the difference. Harold is always trying to break the frame, to shatter preconceptions, but I’m still interested in seeing, in understanding. He wants to break every perspective and assumption, while I’m just trying to find the right ones.”
Asket looks my way again. She shifts in her seat, looks at me, monitoring my expression maybe. Then she looks forward, watches where we’re going for a minute.
“That doesn’t sound that different to me,” she says.
“What doesn’t?”
“Breaking old assumptions and finding new ones. Seems to me that those two activities go together.”
“They’re different,” I say.
“I don’t think they are.”
Asket is smiling again. She asks me to tell her about him, about Harold. She wants me to explain him to her.
“I’ve always thought of Fluxus as basically a precursor of post-structuralism,” she says.
“You’ve thought no such thing.”
“Well, anyhow, listening to you talk now I think I was wrong about that. Because, if you’re going to break with a structure, an assumption, or an idea, you can’t be a post-structuralist. You have to believe that there is a structure if you’re going to break with it.”
I shrug.
“Is this where your wife shops?” she asks.
Asket seems genuinely frightened by the choices on offer. She walks down the aisle, between the racks of khaki trousers, and skeptically examines the cotton blends in all their different varieties of beige.
“Is this where your wife shops?” She might be stuck.
I don’t really know where Virginia gets her clothes. The idea behind taking Asket here, to the Manhattan Mall, was to find something innocuous. I thought that if I could buy her some comfortable and attractive clothes, clothes that were just normal and didn’t require any thought, it would mean that I’d bottomed out the strangeness, but this attempt to choose without choosing is maybe pushing Asket into an identity crisis.
She settles on a pair of Levis, a red and black plaid buttonup shirt, a pair of penny loafers, black socks, and a black leather belt. She takes the clothes in her arms and heads toward the back of the store and around the corner to the dressing rooms and I linger at the front counter and consider the copy on a promotional poster by the suit jackets.
“We do more than sell clothes, we sell lifestyles.” Above the slogan there is a photograph of a pretty young woman wearing khaki pants and a white button-up shirt that is all the way unbuttoned. The background of the picture is completely blank. This woman’s lifestyle involves spending a lot of time in very clean, well-lit rooms with white walls.
I think of making some wry comment, turn to the salesgirl to give it a try, but she’s too busy putting things in drawers and stacking receipts to notice me.
“Do you think that’s true?” I ask anyways. I point to the poster behind her. “Lifestyles not clothes?”
She stops hurrying around and gives me a quick glance, but then she looks at her watch and at the clock on the wall, the one next to the poster of the half-naked lifestyle.
“My shift is over,” she tells me. “I’m just waiting for my replacement. Sally will help you,” she says.
At that moment Sally, her colleague, turns the corner in the back of the store, around the same corner Asket had disappeared around on her way to the dressing rooms. Sally is hustling. She’s clearly late. She’s a pretty girl, maybe twentyfour years old, looks something like the model in the poster, only with darker hair and her shirt is buttoned. But she’s in uniform. She’s wearing Gap jeans, a plaid cotton shirt, and a lanyard with company nametag dangling down. Sally’s sandy blond hair is pulled up into a half bun and she is apologizing even before she reaches us at the counter.
The two salesgirls exchange a few words, something about when Brad will be in, and how much cash is in the drawer, and then the first of the Gap girls is gone and it’s just me and Sally at the front counter. She leans across it, puts her chin on her hand, and I feel a little awkward. I’m standing there with nothing to buy.
“Can I help you?” Sally asks me as she notices my uneasiness.
“I’m just waiting,” I say.
“Oh,” she says.
I shift my attention to the perfume bottles on the front counter, clink them around a bit, accidentally spray a little rose smelling liquid onto the counter, and then try to wipe it up with my sleeve.
“Are you interested in perfume?” Sally asks me.
“Ah, no. I’m just waiting,” I say again. And then I realize I might need to explain further. “My wife…actually, she’s not my wife really, but…”
“You’re shopping for your girlfriend?” Sally asks, really jumping to conclusions I think.
“No, no. She’s here, shopping for herself. Only she’s not my girlfriend either. She’s closer to my wife than my girlfriend. She’s neither of those,” I say. “I’ll go check on her actually. She’s in the back in one of the dressing rooms,” I explain.
“I don’t think anybody is back there,” she says. Sally is a pretty girl, looks good in cotton, but she’s a bit caustic I think.
“Be serious,” I say. “I really do have a girlfriend. Or a wife,” I say. “I mean, I’m here with this woman and she’s back there trying on clothes.”
“I didn’t see anyone back there,” Sally says. “The dressing rooms were all empty.”
I head to the back of the store, past the poster of the nearly topless model in khakis, past some soft olive green sweaters, past the headless mannequin in a dark yellow turtleneck, and around the corner to the dressing rooms. The cubicles in this row are all open, the orange curtains pushed to the left side. I shout out to Asket.
“Virginia?” I ask the air. “I mean, Asket! Is everything okay?”
I walk slowly past the dressing rooms, glancing in each one as I go by and find they’re all empty, all of them except for the last one. In the last dressing room I find a pair of purple tights and a beige wool sweater.
Back at the front of the store, by the cash register, I take a good long look at Sally. She’s taking an inventory, making check marks on a clipboard, but I try to ignore this, to look past the red lanyard she’s got around her nec
k, to forget her nametag. I want to get a good look at her eyes. I get closer to her so that I’m standing directly in front of her, just across from her at the counter, and it dawns on me that she is wearing the clothes Asket took to the dressing room. I lean in closer, try to look at the back of her neck, and I’m confirmed. I can see the price tag sticking out over her collar.
“Excuse me?” She moves back and I see that there is an antishoplifting RFID tag clipped to her left sleeve, but when I point this out to her she merely taps it against the magnetic detacher and tosses the tag into the waste basket behind her.
“Asket?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer me but puts the clipboard down and then turns to the register and opens the drawer as if to make change.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
Asket looks a decade younger than she’d looked when we walked into the store, she’s twenty-two or twenty-three at the moment. She’s got her hair up in a bun and her eyes look different somehow. She seems to be looking past everything. Nothing is sinking in for her and she answers my question noncommittally. She is opening and closing drawers behind the counter, shifting about uncomfortably.
“I don’t think we know each other,” she says. She looks around the store now, hoping to find some excuse, some other customer that needs assistance, but there is nobody else around.
I try a different tact.
“Virginia,” I say.
“Sally,” she says back.
“Virginia, we came here together, remember? I was going to buy you some new clothes, some clothes that were different from my wife’s clothes?”
“From your wife’s clothes?” she asks.
“That’s right,” I say.
“And who is your wife?”
“Her name is Virginia,” I say. “You’ve met her.”
“Virginia. That’s the name you just called me. You think I have the same name as your wife?”
I tell her that she doesn’t really have the same name as my wife, but that she used to think that she had the same name.
