Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

The Chinese woman had unwrapped a cloth roll of needles and showed the college-teacher boy to a chair. The last thing the college-teacher boy managed to say, warily eyeing the roll of needles and allowing the Chinese woman to rather roughly push him into the chair, was “I need a doctor.” This elicited another thumbs-up from the bad-eyeball boy, who opened neither eye.

The Chinese woman firmly held both the college-teacher boy’s shoulders against the back of the straight chair and then released him with a slow, cautionary withdrawing, as if instructing a dog to stay. He stayed. She put one of the needles in her mouth and sat on his lap. He glanced at the bad-eyeball boy, who was apparently asleep. With the needle still in her mouth, the Chinese woman began to trace the contours of the college-teacher boy’s face. The needle was so sharp that despite the woman’s fine touch the college-teacher boy was certain he would have hairline cuts from the tracing and look like an old china doll when this was over, and this idea, coupled with a sexual nervousness that the woman’s sitting on his lap engendered, made him giggle, which he thought would evoke a reproof from the woman, but it did not. She smiled, holding the needle with her teeth to do so, and said, “Git.” The college-teacher boy took this to mean “Good.”

With the point of the needle the Chinese woman worked his face with such attention to surface that the college-teacher boy, already in a transport of erotic tenderness, could only think of the way he’d once seen overbred beagles work rough terrain for rabbits in a field trial. The dogs were so meticulous, sniffing every pad print of the rabbits, that they made virtually no forward progress. The “best” dog in this venture was the one necessarily the farthest behind his prey. This kind of field trial, in which the game was forsaken for a process itself, was happening on his face.

His face felt sweetly and wonderfully on fire, as if he were bleeding tears. She went on and on. She walked the needle in a crenellation between and around his very eyelashes with such dexterity that he did not even squint. She departed for an ear and he stole a glance at the bad-eyeball boy, who was looking at him with one eye, then the other. He could not recall which of the bad-eyeball boy’s eyes was bad, and neither of them looked worse than the other, and there was a tired smile on the bad-eyeball boy’s face that suggested he didn’t know which eye was bad, or care, either. They had come to a fort with a weird woman in it, and it had worked. The Chinese woman detailed the needle from pore to pore in a way that stung now so badly and agreeably that the college-teacher boy began to wave, in a vision, to his wife. He began to look at the skin of the Chinese woman. He was excited where she was sitting on him, but she acknowledged nothing in this respect. She slowly pulled back and away with the same dog-stay order as before and put the needle back in its roll carefully. The college-teacher boy sat breathing easily, upright, alive, bleeding and weeping without bleeding or weeping, waving happily to his dimming, diminishing wife — it was the way things went. His wife had said of her unforgettable time with her Turk, “It was light, delightful, without promises.” But the Turk had kissed her, and there was promise inherent in a kiss, and the Turk would break it, as he, the college-teacher boy, had. He was going to get out of the way of the bull and let the bull break his promise. Without any means of applying those long, colorful barbed darts he could never remember the name of, or of otherwise bleeding the full hump of the bull’s exotic lust, there was nothing to do but quit the arena. Capework was silly.

The Chinese woman shifted and was suddenly at his ear with warm breath. She nipped one lobe and crossed before him, brushing him with her hair, which looked fine and black but felt as coarse as broom straw on his face, and nipped the other lobe. She exhaled a long, hot, slow breath in his ear. The college-teacher boy had begun to hold her, to hug her, with what little purchase he had, sitting back as he was. She made no protest or adjustment. He held her still, aware now that he was holding her. She let another hot breath into his ear. Then she said, “You fine.”

And he was.

Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood and You & Me. His novel Edisto was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Little Star , and the Paris Review , and he is the recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.