“I would like to call on you tomorrow evening, if I have your permission,” he says.
“Boy,” I say. “Do a lot of people have the wrong idea about spacemen. I thought you just grabbed somebody and beamed them up and that was it.” It was a stupid thing to say, I realize right away. I think Desi looks a little sad to hear this. The corners of his mouth sink. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“No,” he says. “This is how we are perceived, it is true. You speak only the truth. This is one reason I want to meet you, Edna. You seem always to say what is inside your head without any attempt to alter it.”
Now it’s my turn to look a little sad, I think. But that’s okay, because it gives me a chance to find out that Desi is more than courteous. His hands come out toward me at once, the little suckers on them primed to latch on to me, and I’m not even scared because I know it means he cares about me. And he’s too refined to touch me this quick. His hands just hang there between us and he says, “I speak this not as a researcher but as a male creature of a parallel species.”
“You mean as a man?”
His eyes blink again, real slow. “Yes. As a man. As a man I try to say that I like the way you speak.”
So I give him permission to call on me and he thanks me and he turns and glides away. I know his legs are moving but he glides, real smooth, across the parking lot and I can see now that poor Desi didn’t even find a pair of pants and some shoes to go with his trench coat. His legs and ankles are skinny like a frog’s and his feet look a lot like his hands. But all that is unclear on the first night. He has disappeared out into the darkness and I drive on home to my subspecies companion and I tell him all about what happened while he purrs in my lap and I have two thoughts.
First, if you’ve never seen a cat in your entire life or anything like one and then meet a cat in a Wal-Mart parking lot in the middle of the night all covered with fur and making this rumbling noise and maybe even smelling of mouse meat, you’d have to make some serious adjustments to what you think is pretty and sweet and something you can call your own. Second — and this hits me with a little shock — Desi says he’s been hearing how I talk to my friends and even to Eddie, and that sure wasn’t by hanging around in his trench coat and blending in with the furniture. Of course, if you’ve got a spaceship that can carry you to Earth from a distant galaxy, it’s not so surprising you’ve got some kind of radio or something that lets you listen to what everybody’s saying without being there.
And when I think of this, I start to sing for Desi. I just sit for a long while where I am, with Eddie in my lap, this odd little creature that doesn’t look like me at all but who I find cute as can be and who I love a lot, and I sing, because when I was a teenager I had a pretty good voice and I even thought I might be a singer of some kind, though there wasn’t much call for that in Bovary except in the church choir, which is where I sang mostly, but I loved to sing other kinds of songs too. And so I say real loud, “This is for you, Desi.” And then I sing every song I can think of. I sing “The Long and Winding Road” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Everything Is Beautiful in Its Own Way” and a bunch of others, some twice, like “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Then I do a Reba McIntire medley and I start with “Is There Life Out There” and then I do “Love Will Find Its Way to You” and “Up to Heaven” and “Long Distance Lover.” I sing my heart out to Desi and I have to say this surprises me a little but maybe it shouldn’t because already I’m hearing myself through his ears — though at that moment I can’t even say for sure if he has ears — and I realize that a lot of what I say, I say because it keeps me from feeling so lonely.
The next night there’s a knock on my door and I’m wearing my best dress, with a scoop neck, and it shows my cleavage pretty good and on the way to the door I suddenly doubt myself. I don’t know if spacemen are like Earth men in that way or not. Maybe they don’t appreciate a good set of knockers, especially if their women are as skinny as Desi. But I am who I am. So I put all that out of my mind and I open the door and there he is. He’s got his black felt hat on, pulled down low in case any of my neighbors are watching, I figure, and he’s wearing a gray pinstripe suit that’s way too big for him and a white shirt and a tie with a design that’s dozens of little Tabasco bottles floating around.
“Oh,” I say. “You like hot food?”
This makes him stop and try to translate.
“Your tie,” I say. “Don’t you know about your tie?”
He looks down and lifts the end of the tie and looks at it for a little while and he is so cute doing that and so innocent-like that my heart is doing flips and I kind of wiggle in my dress a bit to make him look at who it is he’s going out with. If the women on his planet are skinny, then he could be real real ready for a woman like me. That’s how I figure it as I’m waiting there for him to check out his tie and be done with it, though I know it’s my own fault for getting him off on that track, and me doing that is just another example of something or other.
Then Desi looks up at me, and he takes off his hat with one hand and I see that he doesn’t have anything that looks like ears, really, just sort of a little dip on each side where ears might be. But that doesn’t make him so odd. What’s an ear mean, really? Having an ear or not having an ear won’t get you to heaven, it seems to me. I look into Desi’s big dark eyes and he blinks slow and then his other hand comes out from behind his back and he’s got a flower for me that’s got a bloom on it the color of I don’t know what, a blue kind of, a red kind of, and I know this is a spaceflower of some sort and I take it from him and it weighs about as much as my Sunbeam steam iron, just this one flower.
He says, “I heard you sing for me,” and he holds out his hand. If you want to know an exact count, there’s eight fingers on each hand. I will end up counting them carefully later on our date, but for now there’s still just a lot of fingers and I realize I’m not afraid of them anymore and I reach out to him and the little suckers latch on all over my hand, top and bottom, and it’s like he’s kissing me in eight different places there, over and over, they hold on to me and they pulse in each spot they touch, maybe with the beat of his heart. It’s like that. And my eyes fill up with tears because this man’s very fingertips are in love with me, I know.
And then he leads me to his flying saucer, which is pretty big but not as big as I imagined, not as big as all of Wal-Mart, certainly, maybe just the pharmacy and housewares departments put together. It’s parked out in the empty field back of my trailer where they kept saying they’d put in a miniature golf course and they never did and you don’t even see the saucer till you’re right up against it, it blends in with the night, and you’d think if they can make this machine, they could get him a better suit. Then he says, “You are safe with me, Edna Bradshaw daughter of Joseph R. Bradshaw and granddaughter of William D. Bradshaw.”
It later turns out these family things are important where he’s from but I say to him, “William D. is dead, I only have his favorite fountain pen in a drawer somewhere, it’s very beautiful, it’s gold and it looks like that Chrysler Building in New York, and you should forget about Joseph R. for the time being because I’m afraid you and my daddy aren’t going to hit it off real well and I just as soon not think about that till I have to.”
Then Desi smiles at me and it’s because of all those words, and especially me talking so blunt about my daddy, and I guess also about my taking time to tell him about the beautiful fountain pen my granddaddy left for me, but there’s reasons I talk like this, I guess, and Desi says he came to like me from hearing me talk.