Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

“You’re okay, sure you’re okay—”

“No, I mean. Well. I’ve been…”

This scared Wayne again. “You’ve been…what?”

“Dry.”

“What?”

“I’ve been, well, dry .”

There they were in a brightly lit living room waiting for a nineteen-year-old son to avenge his mother, who said things like bone in bone out, gobbled you, was dry. Wayne was about to lose it. Why did pussy have to be this way? Why could it not be like in a magazine? Like in a book? Like at least in a story, something that went smooth and worked.

But Pamela Forktine was not giving up. She gobbled, she got Wayne into the bedroom, she got on Wayne, and Wayne had a passing fancy that her hair felt like hemp rope and her skin like party balloons three days after the party. But this felt good, this harsh rope and loose satin, and made its opposite number, fine hair and young tight flesh, seem like tomatoes and eggplants, and Wayne began if not gobbling back at least nibbling this satiny crinkly Pamela Forktine, and Pamela Forktine, when that didn’t tickle too much, seemed to like it and kept saying “Oh, sweetie” and was not dry. It worked. Wayne gasped up on her like a shipwrecked man on his found island. “Oh, sweetie, sweetie, sweetie,” Pamela Forktine said, patting his head in rhythm.

This was a very sad and silly business, Wayne thought, this woman calling him this for not doing any more than not losing his desire and spooing in her in five minutes, but she was calling him this sweetie nonsense without any joke, she was serious, and that made Wayne feel, despite himself, good. She could by God call him whatever she wanted to. What had she ever done to him? She had fucked him, that’s what, and that was what he’d asked for. He was going to be man enough to take what he got if he was man enough to ask for it.

And he was asking for it, man or not. Man. God, or whoever, put you here, and you have to ask for it. He puts water here and it has to run downhill. You get up there in fucking 120-degree heat and have to stop its running. You fix the fucking leak.

“I sprung a leak in you, Pamela Forktine,” Wayne said.

“You sure did.”

“Was it too soon?”

“No, sweetie. It was just fine.”

Just fine, Wayne knew, meant too soon. So what? Was that his fault? No, it was not. Water runs downhill. It has to.

It was not a new beginning, but it was, Wayne thought, new enough. He was half asleep and inadvertently said, aloud, “New enough,” and Pamela Forktine said, “Hmm? Did you say nude enough?”

“Sounds like a wiener,” Wayne said.

They nestled and snuggled together. Pamela Forktine said, “Do you like cereal? Rafe likes cereal. You can stay. There’s enough.”

“There’s nude enough?”

“Nude enough.”

It was their first joke together. Wayne said, “I had a twin brother no one knows about. Sparky. Sparky died and Wayne lived.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie. How old was he?”

“Sparky was three. Minutes.”

“Mmmm.”

“Nude enough.”

“I’m nude enough, Wayne.”

“What? More?”

“Sounds like a wiener, sweetie.”

Wayne liked women who said what they wanted. Up to a point. This was the point. This was precisely the point. He liked Pamela Forktine.

Wayne took, as he puts it, a dump. This came out of him loose and burning. It made him step more highly than usual for a few minutes afterward and wish for some kind of soothing salve. “Is there any beer?” he asked Pamela Forktine. This was probably a mistake, at nine in the morning with a new woman with a teenage son possibly already in the kitchen eating cereal. Next he would be watching cartoons. Wayne gave this some thought. Maybe this was not the place to be.

Pamela Forktine had not heard him, apparently, and he heard no noise in the kitchen, so he tiptoed in there and looked, and there was no beer. He went back in the bathroom and closed the door and looked at himself in the mirror. His hair was dirty and it had the kind of control to it that suggested someone had jerked large chunks of it out. Except it was so greasy how could anyone get a grip on it? Wayne did this himself — grabbed a chunk of hair — and felt it slipping in his hand well before it hurt to pull it. He thought about a shower. That might constitute a moving-in gesture — he did not want that. And he did not want this Rafe character, convict or cartoon-watcher cereal-eater, to find him in the shower the first time they met.

He looked at himself again. His face was, as all faces are to their owners, inscrutable. It was “normal” up to a point. It had high, glossy, rather boyish cheeks and a freckled nose, not too veined, and the always slightly burned forehead was plain. Then the trouble started. That wild skyline of hair and, when he smiled, something that gave Wayne the willies, like mold on cheese gave him the willies, because you never knew, once you got away from outright yellow cheese into cheese that was white, or nearly white, it could be bluish or greenish, and soft, you never knew how soft until you touched it — once you got away from yellow cheese you did not know if the mold was mold or part of the cheese itself. That was the feeling he had, looking at his teeth in Pamela Forktine’s mirror, on a Saturday morning. He looked around the bathroom: it was good old tile, black and white, and she had knickknack shelves everywhere and all the towels and face towels neatly hung, and the toilet was covered in carpet that matched the rug on the floor. He smiled at himself quickly and got the blue-cheese willies and got in the shower anyway.

He soaped up very, very well and took two or three kinds of shampoo from a rack of them, whether they said Conditioner or not, or Oily or Dry or Normal, and washed everything hard and got a boner. All right. He was back. The killer was back.

Wayne has set out an aluminum-framed plastic-webbed chaise lounge in the large gravel beside Lake Travis. He gets in the lounge, has him a Coors in one hand and a cigarette in the other, takes a drag and a drink, says, “Ahhhhh…The only thing I need now is for some broad to give me a knobber.” He grins seedily, seedily the only way you can grin if your teeth appear to have small black-and-green flies on them. “A blonde,” he adds.

Another drag on the cigarette and a long pull on the Coors. It does not pay to drink a beer slowly in this heat.

Wayne is pleased with himself. A knobber indeed. Why should Wayne not get a knobber? Why should he? The first question is the one Wayne would entertain if he were to entertain one of them. He won’t. He will entertain only the positive if slight prospect of reclining in the sun beside his rod and reel baited for catfish, drinking a cold beer, not working on a roof, smoking a cigarette, and having a woman, preferably blond, give him a knobber, as he puts it.

Why should he? is the question that only others entertain at this juncture. If he indeed induced a woman to oblige his need, and should a fish manifest, you can see him leaping out of the chair, and out of her mouth, to tend his rod. Should his fiberglass rod, propped on a forked stick driven into the lake gravel, but twitch, Wayne would be there. Missing the fish, as he would, despite his three-time hook-set philosophy, which he is willing to articulate and demonstrate even while losing fish, Wayne would resume his position on the lounge with a fresh beer and say, addressing the blonde still on her knees in the gravel, “Missed him. Okay.”

Thus the question: Can Wayne expect a knobber from a beautiful blonde in the rightful world? And the world’s answer is no.

But Wayne has an advantage over the rightful world. Wayne is certain that he is himself. It is a weak, quivering self, afraid of nearly everything on earth, but Wayne knows it.