A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “This here, this is Joyce,” Don said.

  Joyce and Miss Phoebe held each other’s eyes for a long moment, tense at first, gradually softening. At last Miss Phoebe made a tremulous smile.

  “I’d better make some tea,” she said, gathering her feet under her.

  “I’ll help,” said Joyce. She turned her face to the tea tray, which lifted into the air and floated to the kitchenette. She smiled at Miss Phoebe. “You tell me what to do.”

  The Wages of Synergy

  IT WAS THE WAY THEY WERE BREATHING, she thought in despair and disgust, that was making her mind run on like this. The breathing was open throated in the darkness, consciously quiet though its intensity was almost beyond control. It was quiet because of the thin walls in this awful place, quiet to hide what should have been open and joyful. And as the blind compulsion for openness and joy rose, so rose the necessity for more control, more quiet. And then it was impossible to let her mind rest and ride, to bring in that rare ecstatic sunburst. The walls were growing thinner and thinner, surely—and outside people clustered, listening. More and more people, her mind told her madly. People with more and more ears, until she and Karl were trying to be quiet and secret in the center of a hollow sphere of great attentive ears, a mosaic of lobes and folds and inky orifices, all set together like fish scales.…

  Then the catch in his breath, the feeling of welcome, of gratitude … the wrong gratitude, the wrong relief, for it was based only on the fact that now it was over—but oh, be quiet.

  The heaviness now, the stillness … quiet. Real quiet, this now, and no pretense. She waited.

  Anger flicked at her. Enough is enough. This weight, this stillness.…

  Too much weight. Too much stillness.…

  “Karl.” She moved.

  “Karl!” She struggled, but quietly.

  Then she knew why he was so quiet and so still. She looked numbly at the simple fact, and for a long moment she breathed no more than he did, and that was not at all, for he was dead. And then the horror. And then the humiliation.

  Her impulse to scream died as abruptly as he had died, but the sheer muscular spasm of it flung her away from him and out into the room. She stood cowering away from the cold, the rhythmic flare of an illuminated sign somewhere outside, and again she opened her throat so her gulping breath would be silent.

  She had to escape, and every living cell in her cried for shrieking flight. But no; somehow she had to get dressed. Somehow she had to let herself out, travel through corridors where the slightest glimpse of her would cause an alarm. There were lights, and a great glaring acreage of lobby to be crossed.…

  And somehow she did all these things, and got away into the blessed, noisy, uncaring city streets.

  Killilea sat at yet another bar, holding still another gin and water, wondering if this were going to be another of those nights.

  Probably. When you’re looking for someone, and you won’t go to the police, and you know it’s no use to advertise in the papers because she never reads the papers, and you don’t know anyone who might know where she is, but you do know that if she is upset enough, unhappy enough, she drinks in bars—why then, you go to bars. You go to good ones and dirty ones, empty and bright and dusty and dark ones, night after night, never knowing if she’s going to pieces in the one you went to last night, or if she’ll be here tomorrow when you are somewhere else.

  Someone sneezed explosively, and Killilea, whose nerves had always been good and who was, besides, about as detached from his immediate surroundings as a man can get, astonished himself by leaping off the bar stool. His drink went pleup and shot a little tongue of gin upwards, to lick the side of his neck coldly. He swore and wiped it with the back of his hand, and turned to look at the source of that monstrous human explosion.

  He saw a tall young man with bright red ears and what had doubtless been a display handkerchief, with which he was scrubbing at the camel’s hair sleeve of a girl in the booth opposite. Killilea’s nostrils distended in mild disgust, while his lips spread in amusement just as mild. Sort of thing that might happen to anybody, he thought, but my God, that fellow must feel like a goon. And look at the guy in the booth with the girl. Doesn’t know what to say. So what do you say? Don’t spit on my chick? Too late. I’m going to punch you in the mouth? That wouldn’t help. But if he doesn’t do something he can’t expect his lady-friend to be happy about it.

  Killilea ordered another drink and glanced back to the booth. The tall young man was backing off in a veritable cloud of apologies; the girl was dabbing at her sleeve with a paper napkin, and her friend still sat speechless. He pulled his own handkerchief out, then put it back. He leaned forward to speak, said nothing, straightened up again, miserably.

  “Fine Sir Galahad you turned out to be,” said the girl.

  “I don’t think Galahad was ever faced with just this situation,” her escort replied reasonably. “I’m sorry.…”

  “You’re sorry,” said the girl. “That helps a lot, don’t it?”

  “I’m sorry,” the man said again. Then slightly annoyed, “What did you expect me to do? Sneeze right back at him?”

  She curled her lip. “That would’ve been better than just doing nothing. Nothing, that’s you—nothing.”

  “Look,” he said, half rising.

  “Going someplace?” she asked nastily. “Go on then. I can get along. Beat it.”

  “I’ll take you home,” he said.

  “Not me you won’t.”

  “Okay,” he said. He got out of the booth and looked at her, licking his lips unhappily. “Okay, then,” he said. He dropped a dollar bill on the table and walked toward the door. She looked after him, her lower lip protruding wet and sulky. “Thanks for the neighborhood movie,” she yelled at him, in a voice that carried all over the room. His shoulders gave a tight, embarrassed shrug. He grasped his lapels and gave his jacket a pathetic, angry little tug downward and left without looking back.

  Killilea swung back to the bar and found he could see the booth in the mirror. “Big deal,” said the girl, speaking into her open compact as if it were a telephone.

  The tall young man who had sneezed approached cautiously. “Miss—”

  She looked up at him calculatingly.

  “Miss, I couldn’t help hearing, and it was really my fault.”

  “No it wasn’t,” she said. “Forget it! He didn’t mean nothing to me anyway.”

  “You’re real nice about it anyway,” said the young man. “I wish I could do something.”

  She looked at his face, his clothes. “Sit down,” she said.

  “Waiter!” he said, and sat down.

  Now Killilea looked into his drink and smiled. Smiles didn’t come easily these days and he welcomed them. He thought about the couple behind him. Suppose they had a great romance now. Suppose they got married and lived for years and years until they were old, and held hands on their golden wedding anniversary, and thought back to this night, this meeting: “First time you saw me, you spit on me.…” First time he saw Prue, she’d barged in on him in a men’s room. Crazy, crazy, the way things happen.

  “The way things happen,” said a voice. “Crazy.”

  “What?” Killilea demanded, startled. He turned to look at the man next to him. He was a small man with pugnacious eyebrows and mild eyes, which became troubled and shy at Killilea’s barking tone. He thumbed over his shoulder and said placatingly, “Them.”

  “Yeah,” said Killilea. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  The mild eyes looked comforted. The man said, “Crazy.”

  The door opened. Someone came in. It wasn’t Prue. Killilea turned back to the bar.

  “Waitin’ for somebody?” said his neighbor.

  “Yes,” said Killilea.

  “I’ll beat it if your company gets here,” said the man with the mild eyes. He breathed deeply, as if about to perform something brave. “Okay if I talk to you in the meantime?”

  “Oh
hell yes,” said Killilea.

  “Man needs somebody to talk to,” said his neighbor. There was a taut silence as they both strove to find something to talk about, now that the amenities had been satisfied. Suddenly the man said, “Hartog.”

  “What?” said Killilea. “Oh. Killilea.” They shook hands gravely. Killilea grunted, looked down at his hand. It was bleeding from a small cut in the palm. “Now how the hell did I do that?”

  “Let me see,” said the man called Hartog. “Oh, I say … I don’t know what to … I think it was my fault.” He showed his right hand, on the middle finger of which was a huge, gaudily designed ring with the gold plate wearing off the corners of the mounting. The stone was gone, and one of the mounting claws pointed up, sharp and gleaming. “I lost the stone yesterday,” said Hartog. “I shouldn’t have worn it. Turned it around inside my hand like always when I come to a place like this. But what can I do?” He looked as if he were about to cry. He worried at the ring until he could get it off, and dropped it into his pocket. “I just don’t know what to say!”

  “Hey, you didn’t cut my arm off, you know,” Killilea said good-naturedly. “Don’t say anything. Not to me.” Killilea pointed at the bartender. “Tell him what you’re drinking.”

  They sipped companionably while the couple behind them laughed and murmured, while the jukebox unwound identical sentiments in assorted keys. “I fix refrigerators,” said Hartog.

  “Chemist,” said Killilea.

  “You don’t say. Mix prescriptions, and all?”

  “That’s a pharmacist,” said Killilea. He was going to say more, but decided against it. He was going to say that he was a biological chemist specializing in partial synthesis, and that he’d developed one he wished he could forget about, and that it had been so fascinating that Prue had left him, and that that had made him leave chemistry to look for her. But it would have been tiring to go through it all, and he was not used to unburdening himself to people. Even so, as Hartog had said, a man needs someone to talk to. I need Prue to talk to, he thought. I need Prue, oh God, but I do. He said, abruptly, “You’re English.”

  “I was once,” said Hartog. “How’d you know?”

  “They call a drug store a chemist shop.”

  “I forgot,” said Hartog; and this time, strangely, he seemed to be talking to himself, chidingly. Without understanding, Killilea said, “That’s all right.”

  Hartog said, “I wonder if I spit on some girl she’ll pick me up.”

  “It takes all kinds,” said Killilea.

  “All kinds,” said Hartog, and nodded sagely. “All want the same thing. Each one wants to get it a different way. Hell of a thing to know what one wants, not know how she wants it.”

  “Keeps it interesting,” said Killilea.

  Hartog fumbled a cigarette out of a pack without removing the pack from his pocket. “One been hanging out at Roby’s, where I just was. You just know it about her, way she looks at everyone, way she watches.” Killilea gave him matches. Hartog used one, blew it out with smoke from his nostrils, and stared for a long time at the charred end. Funny little thing. Skinny. Everything wrong—bony here, flat there, and she got a big nose. Looks hungry. When you look at her you feel hungry too.” He looked at Killilea swiftly, as if Killilea might be laughing at him. Killilea was not. “You feel hungry, not for food, see what I mean?”

  Killilea nodded.

  Hartog said, “I couldn’t make it with her. Everything fine until you make this much—” he held a thumb and forefinger perhaps a sixteenth of an inch apart—“of a pass. Then she cares.”

  “A come-on.”

  “Nup,” said Hartog. He closed his eyes to look at something behind them, and shook his head positively. “I mean scared—real scared. Show her a snake, shoot off a gun, she wouldn’t scare like that.” He shrugged. He picked up his glass, saw it was empty, and put it down again. Killilea was aware that it was Hartog’s turn to buy. Then he noticed how carefully Hartog was keeping his eyes off Killilea’s glass, which was also empty, and he remembered the way the single cigarette had come out. He beckoned the bartender, and Hartog thanked him. “Get up a parade,” said Hartog. “Guys with ways to get a woman. Send ’em in one at a time to this funny little thing I’m telling you about. One brings sweet talk. One brings beads ’n’ bracelets. One brings troubles to get sympathy. One brings sympathy for her troubles. One brings a fishtail Cadillac an’ a four-carat blinker. One brings a hairy chest. All they going to do, all the specialists, they going to scare her, they won’t get next to her a-tall.”

  “She doesn’t want it then.”

  “You wouldn’t say that, you see her,” said Hartog, shaking his head. “Must be some way, some one way. I got a theory, there’s a way to get to anything, you can only think of it.”

  Killilea swirled his drink. Bars are full of philosophers. But just now he wasn’t collecting philosophers. “You selling something?” he asked nastily.

  “I’m in the refrigerator repair business,” said Hartog, apparently unaware of the insult. His ash dropped on his coat, whereupon he tapped his cigarette uselessly on the rim of an ashtray. “And why I keep talking about her, I don’t know. Skinny, like I said. Her nose is big.”

  “All right, you’re not selling,” said Killilea contritely.

  “Got only one ear lobe,” said Hartog. “Saw when she pushed her hair back to scratch her neck. What’s the matter, Mr. Killdeer?”

  “Killilea,” said Killilea hoarsely. “Which ear?”

  Hartog closed his eyes. “Right one.”

  “The right one has a lobe, or the right one hasn’t?”

  “Taken in parts,” said Hartog, “that’s a real homely woman. Taken altogether, I don’t know why she makes a man feel like that, but damn if she—”

  Should I explain to this disyllabic solon, thought Killilea, that the day I met Prue in the men’s room she charged out and went face-first through the frosted-glass door and lost an earlobe? And that therefore I would like very much to know if this … what had the idiot said? He’d just come from … Roark’s …? Rory’s? Roby’s!

  Killilea turned and bucketed out.

  The bartender blinked as the door crashed open, and then his cold professional gaze swung to Hartog. He advanced. Hartog sipped, licked his lips, sipped again, and put the empty glass down. He met the bartender’s eye.

  “Your friend forget something?”

  Hartog pulled a roll of bills from a jacket pocket, separated a twenty, and dropped it on the bar. “Not a thing. Take it out of this. Build me another. Have one yourself and keep the change.” He leaned forward suddenly, and for the first time spoke in a broad Oxford accent. “You know, old chap, I’m extraordinarily pleased with myself.”

  She didn’t see him when he came into Roby’s, which wasn’t surprising. He remembered how she used to lean close to see his expression when they held hands. The only reason she had been in the men’s room the day they met—what was it, four years ago? Five?—was that LADIES is a longer word than MEN, but the sign on this particular one said GENTLEMEN, and since it seemed to have more letters, she headed for it. She had glasses, good ones, but she wouldn’t wear them, not without drawing the blinds first.

  He moved to a table fifteen feet from hers and sat down. She was facing him almost directly, wearing the old, impenetrable, inturning expression he used to call her fogbound look. He had seen that face that way in happiness and in fright, in calm rumination and in moments of confusion; it was an expression to be read only in context. So he looked at the hands he knew so well, and saw that the left was flat on the table and the right palm upon it, pressing it from wrist to knuckles, over and over in a forceful sliding motion that would leave the back of the right hand hot and red and tender.

  That’s all I need to know, he said to himself, and rose and went to her. He put his big hand gently down on hers and said “It’s going to be all right, Prue.”

  He pulled a chair close to her and silently patted her shou
lder while she cried. When a waiter came near he waved the man away. In due time, he said, “Come home, Prue.”

  Her strange face whipped up, close to his. It was flogged, flayed, scored with the cicatrices of sheer terror. He had her hands and gripped them tightly as she started to rise. She sank down limply, and again she had the fogbound face. “Oh no, Killy; no. Never. Hear me, Killy? Never.”

  There was only one thing to say “—why?”—and since he knew that if he said nothing, she must answer the question, he was quiet, waiting.

  Prue, Prue … in his mind he paraphrased the odd fantasy of Hartog, the barfly he had met this evening: Get up a parade. Ask the specialists, one by one, what do you think of a girl like Prue? (Correction: what do you think of Prue? There were no girls like Prue.) Send in a permanent secretary of the Ladies Auxiliary: Sniff! Send in a social worker: Tsk! A Broadwayite: Mmm … A roué: Ah …! The definition for Prue, like beauty, could be found only in the eye of the beholder. Killilea had one, a good one. For Killilea—perhaps because he was a steroid chemist and familiar with complex and subtle matters—saw things from altitudes and in directions which were not usual. Prue lived in ways which, in aggregate, are called sophistication; but Killilea had learned that the only true sophistication lies in exemplary and orthodox behavior. It takes a wise, careful and deeply schooled gait to pace out the complicated and shifting patterns of civilized behavior. It takes a nimble and fleet hypocrisy to step from conflict to paradox among the rules of decency. A moral code is an obstinate anagram indeed. So Prue, thought Killilea, is an innocent.

  And never to be with him again? Never? Why?

  “It would kill you,” she explained finally.

  He laughed suddenly. “We understand each other better than that, Prue. What awful thing has happened to me, then? Or what wonderful thing has happened to you?”

  Then she told him about Karl. She told him all about it. “The men’s floor of that silly hotel,” she finished. “It seemed a sort of—different thing to do. We conspired … and it was funny.”

  “Getting out of there wasn’t funny,” he conjectured.