Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

For all the honesty Desi said he admired in me, I sure know it wasn’t anything to do with my answers to a Gallup Poll that was bothering me, but there I was, bogged down talking about all of that, and that’s a land of dishonesty, it seems to me now.

But he knew what I was worried about. “No, Edna,” he says. “There are many on my planet who would be critical of me. They would say this is why we should have no contact at all with your world. Things like this might happen.”

He pauses right there and as far as I know he doesn’t have anything to translate and I swallow hard at the knot in my throat and I say, “Things like what?”

Then both his hands take both my hands and when you’ve got sixteen cute little suckers going at you, it’s hard to make any real tough self-denying kind of decisions and that’s when I end up with a bona fide spaceman lover. And enough said, as we like to end touchy conversations around the hair-dressing parlor, except I will tell you that he was bald all over and it’s true what they say about bald men.

Then he takes me to the place where he picked the flower. A moon of some planet or other and there’s only these flowers growing as far as the eye can see in all directions and there are clouds in the sky and they are the color of Eddie’s turds after a can of Nine Lives Crab and Tuna, which just goes to show that even in some far place in another solar system you can’t have everything. But maybe Desi likes those clouds and maybe I’d see it that way too sometime, except I may not have that chance now, though I could’ve, it’s my own damn fault, and if I’ve been sounding a little bit hit-and-miss and here-and-there in the way I’ve been telling all this, it’s now you find out why.

Desi and I stand in that field of flowers for a long while, his little suckers going up and down my arm and all over my throat and chest, too, because I can tell you that a spaceman does too appreciate a woman who has some flesh on her, especially in the right places, but he also appreciates a woman who will speak her mind. And I was standing there wondering if I should tell him about those clouds or if I should just keep my eyes on the flowers and my mouth shut. Then he says, “Edna, it is time to go.”

So he takes my hand and we go back into his spaceship and he’s real quiet all the sudden and so am I because I know the night is coming to an end. Then before you know it, there’s Earth right in front of me and it’s looking, even out there, pretty good, pretty much like where I should be, like my own flower box and my own propane tank and my own front Dutch door look when I drive home at night from work.

Then we are in the field behind the house and it seems awful early in the evening for as much as we’ve done, and later on I discover it’s like two weeks later and Desi had some other spaceman come and feed Eddie while we were gone, though he should have told me because I might’ve been in trouble at the hairdressing salon, except they believed me pretty quick when I said a spaceman had taken me off, because that’s what they’d sort of come around to thinking themselves after my being gone without a trace for two weeks and they wanted me to tell the newspaper about it because I might get some money for it, though I’m not into anything for the money, though my daddy says it’s only American to make money any way you can, but I’m not that American, it seems to me, especially if my daddy is right about what American is, which I suspect he’s not.

What I’m trying to say is that Desi stopped in this other field with me, this planet-Earth field with plowed-up ground and witchgrass all around and the smell of early summer in Alabama, which is pretty nice, and the sound of cicadas sawing away in the trees and something like a kind of hum out on the horizon, a nighttime sound I listen to once in a while and it makes me feel like a train whistle in the distance makes me feel, which I also listen for, especially when I’m lying awake with my insomnia and Eddie is sleeping near me, and that hum out there in the distance is all the wide world going about its business and that’s good but it makes me glad I’m in my little trailer in Bovary, Alabama, and I’ll know every face I see on the street the next morning.

And in the middle of a field full of all that, what was I to say when Desi took my hand and asked me to go away with him? He said, “I have to return to my home planet now and after that go off to other worlds. I am being transferred and I will not be back here. But Edna, we feel love on my planet just like you do here. That is why I know it is right that we learn to speak to each other, your people and mine. And in conclusion, I love you, Edna Bradshaw. I want you to come away with me and be with me forever.”

How many chances do you have to be happy? I didn’t even want to go to Mobile, though I wasn’t asked, that’s true enough, and I wouldn’t have been happy there anyway. So that doesn’t count as a blown chance. But this one was different. How could I love a spaceman? How could I be happy in a distant galaxy? These were questions that I had to answer right away, out in the smell of an Alabama summer with my cat waiting for me, though I’m sure he could’ve gone with us, that wasn’t the issue, and with my daddy living just on the other side of town, though, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t miss him much, the good Lord forgive me for that sentiment, and I did love my spaceman, I knew that, and I still do, I love his wiggly hairless shy courteous smart-as-a-whip self. But there’s only so many new things a person can take in at once and I’d about reached my limit on that night.

So I heard myself say, “I love you too, Desi. But I can’t leave the planet Earth. I can’t even leave Bovary.”

That’s about all I could say. And Desi didn’t put up a fuss about it, didn’t try to talk me out of it, though now I wish to God he’d tried, at least tried, and maybe he could’ve done it, cause I could hear myself saying these words like it wasn’t me speaking, like I was standing off a ways just listening in. But my spaceman was shy from the first time I saw him. And I guess he just didn’t have it in him to argue with me, once he felt I’d rejected him.

That’s the way the girls at the hairdressing salon see it.

I guess they’re right. I guess they’re right, too, about telling the newspaper my story. Maybe some other spaceman would read it, somebody from Desi’s planet, and maybe Desi’s been talking about me and maybe he’ll hear about how miserable I am now and maybe I can find him or he can find me.

Because I am miserable. I haven’t even gone near my daddy for a few months now. I look around at the people in the streets of Bovary and I get real angry at them, for some reason. Still, I stay right where I am. I guess now it’s because it’s the only place he could ever find me, if he wanted to. I go out into the field back of my trailer at night and I walk all around it, over and over, each night, I walk around and around under the stars because a spaceship only comes in the night and you can’t even see it until you get right up next to it.

When we turned onto Seventy-second Street and saw what awaited us, my handler flinched, and he tightened his grip on the wheel. I suspect he wanted to accelerate on by and abort the whole plan. But he knew the Director had okayed it and he looked at me.

“Are you sure, Mr. President?” he said.

The only thing you could see of Sotheby’s was a white awning. The front of the building had completely disappeared behind television trucks and satellite dishes. It was a risk, of course. But things that Jackie and I had lived with were disappearing into the hands of strangers, and it made me feel as if I were dead. The CIA could get me in only on this third day, and I knew well enough already that the four thousand dollars I’d been able to scrape together from my ration of pocket money probably wouldn’t allow me to buy back even a tie clip. But there were other things working on me. I had to go.