The Man Who Fell to Earth (7 page)

“Uh huh,” she said. “Too damn cold, in fact.” She took the bottle from the sack, and he heard it clink against other, still hidden, companions. She looked at it speculatively. “I didn’t buy it at Reichmann’s this time. Today was my day for the welfare check, and I just got it as I come out of the welfare building. There’s a little store there called Goldie’s Quickie. Gets a lot of the welfare business.” She took a tumbler from a row of them that sat on top of the ancient, red-painted bookshelf and set it on the window ledge. Then, with a kind of lazy abstraction that characterized her dealings with liquor, she pulled a bottle of gin from the bag, and stood now, a wine bottle in one hand, a bottle of gin in the other, as if undecided which to set down first. “They keep all the wine in a regular refrigerator, and it gets too cold. I should of bought it over at Reichmann’s.” She finally set the wine bottle down, and opened the gin.

“That’s all right,” he said. “It shouldn’t take long to warm up.”

“I’ll just set it here, and just any time you want some you ask me, hear?” She poured herself a half tumbler of the gin and then went into the little kitchen. He heard her clinking the sugar bowl, spooning in the sugar that she always put in her gin, and then she returned in a minute, drinking as she walked. “Damn, I like gin!” she said, in a self-satisfied tone.

“I don’t believe I’ll be able to go to church.”

She looked genuinely disappointed. She came over and sat awkwardly in the aged chintz-covered chair that faced his, pulling her print skirt over her knees with one hand while she held the glass with the other. “I’m sorry. Its a real good church, and high-class too. You wouldn’t be out of place at all.” He noticed for the first time that she was wearing a diamond ring. She had probably bought it with his money. He did not begrudge it to her; she had certainly earned it by the care she had taken of him. In spite of her habits and her talk, she was an excellent nurse. And she wasn’t curious about him.

Not wanting to talk further about the church, he remained silent while she settled herself comfortably in the chair and began working seriously on her gin. She was the sort of irregular and sentimental churchgoer whom television interviewers would call deeply religious—she claimed that her religion was a great source of strength. It consisted largely of attending Sunday afternoon lectures about personal magnetism and Wednesday evening lectures about men who became successful in business through prayer. Its faith was based on a belief that whatever happened, all would be well; its morality was that each must decide for himself what was right for him. Betty Jo apparently had decided on gin and relief, as had a great many others.

In a few weeks of living with this woman he had learned a great deal about one aspect of American society that television had not informed him of at all. He had known about the general prosperity that had bloomed continuously, like the flower of some giant and impossibly hardy weed, for the forty years since the end of World War II, and he had known how this wealth had been distributed among and spent by the nearly all-inclusive middle class that, as every year passed, put more time into less productive work and made more money for it. It was that overdressed and immensely comfortable middle class that almost all television shows dealt with, so that one could easily get the notion that all Americans were young, suntanned, clear-eyed and ambitious. In meeting Betty Jo he had learned that there was a large substratum of society that was totally unaffected by this middle-class prototype, that a huge and indifferent mass of persons had virtually no ambitions and no values whatever. He had read enough history to realize that people like Betty Jo would once have been the industrial poor; but they were now the industrial well-to-do, living comfortably in government-built housing—Betty Jo rented a three-room dwelling unit in a huge old brick housing project, now a semi-slum—on checks from a bewildering diversity of agencies; Federal Welfare, State Welfare, Emergency Relief, Country Poor Relief. This American society was so rich that it could support the eight or ten million members of Betty Jo’s class in a kind of shabby, gin-and-used-furniture luxury in the cities, while the bulk of the country tanned its healthy cheeks by its suburban swimming pools and followed the current fashions in clothes and child-rearing and mixed drinks and wives, playing endless games with religion and psychoanalysis and “creative leisure.” With the exception of Farnsworth, who belonged to still another, rarer class, that of the genuinely wealthy, all of the men whom Newton had met were of this middle class. All of them were very much alike and seeming, if you caught them off their guard, when the hand wasn’t extended in friendliness or the face composed in its usual mask of smug and boyish charm, a little haggard, a little lost. It seemed to Newton that Betty Jo, with her gin, her boredom, her cats, and her used furniture, was getting the better part of the social arrangement.

She had had a party once, with some “girl friends” from other units in the building. He had remained in the bedroom out of sight, but he had been able to hear them well enough, singing old hymns like
Rock of Ages
and
Faith of Our Fathers
, and getting drunk on gin and sentimentality, and it had seemed to him that they had found a better kind of satisfaction in this emotional debauch than the middle class derived from its Roman barbecue feasts, its drunken midnight swimming, and its quick sex. Yet even Betty Jo was false to those childish old hymns, for after the other women had gone drunkenly back to their own three-room cells, she had laid by him in bed and giggled about the silliness of the Baptist, hymn-singing, revivalist religion that her Kentucky family had brought her up in and how she had “outgrown all that, even though, sometimes, it was kind of cute to sing the songs.” Newton said nothing to this, yet he could not help but wonder. He had seen an “old-time revival hour” several times, on the old Anthean TV tapes, and he had seen a “modern” church hour which “made a creative use of God,” for which the music consisted solely of an electronic organ playing Strauss waltzes and parts of
The Poet and Peasant Overture
. He was not at all certain that these people had been entirely wise in their development of that strange manifestation of theirs, a thing Anthea was totally without—and yet which the Antheans, in their ancient visits to the planet, were probably to blame for—this peculiar set of premises and promises called religion. He did not understand it very well, however. Antheans believed, to be sure, that there probably were gods in the universe, or creatures that might be called gods, but this was not a thing of any great importance to them, any more than it really was to most humans, Yet the old human belief in sin and redemption was meaningful to him and, he, like all Antheans, was quite familiar with the sense of guilt and the need for its expiation. Yet now the humans seemed to be building loose constructions of half-belief and sentiment to replace their religions, and he did not know what to make of it; he could not really fathom why Betty Jo was so much concerned over the supposed strength she received in weekly doses from her synthetic church, a form of strength that seemed less certain and more troublesome than that she received from her gin.

After a while he asked her for a glass of wine, which she obligingly got for him, handing him the one little crystal wine glass that she had bought especially for him and then pouring expertly from the bottle. He drank it up rather quickly. He had learned to enjoy alcohol considerably, during his convalescence.

“Well.” he said, as she was pouring the second glass for him, “I expect I’ll be able to move from here next week.”

She hesitated a moment and then finished pouring the wine. Then she said, “What for, Tommy?” She called him Tommy sometimes when she was getting drunk. “There’s no call to hurry.”

8

Lord, he was peculiar. Tall and skinny and wide-eyed like a bird; but he could move around, even with a broken leg, like a cat. He look pills all the time and he never shaved. He didn’t seem to sleep either; she would get up sometimes at night, waking up with the dry throat and spinning head that the gin would give her when she hadn’t watched it too close, and there he’d be in the living room, his leg propped up, reading, or listening to that little gold record player that the fat man had brought him from New York, or just sitting in the chair with his hands under his chin, staring at the wall with his lips tight together and his mind God only could ever know where. She would try to move quietly at times like that, so as not to disturb him; but he always heard her no matter how quiet she was and she could tell he was startled. But he would always smile at her and sometimes say a word or two. Once, during the second week, he had seemed so lost and alone, sitting, staring at the wall as if he was trying to find something there that he could talk to; he looked, with his twisted leg, like some half-broken baby bird that had fallen from a nest. He was so pitiful that she felt like putting her arms around his head and stroking him, mothering him. But she hadn’t done it; she already knew about how he didn’t like to be touched. And he was such a light thing, she might hurt him. She would never forget how light he was when she carried him off that elevator the first time, with the blood on his shirt and his leg twisted like a bent wire.

She finished brushing her hair, and then began putting on lipstick. She used, for the first time, some of the silver lipstick and eye shadow that young girls wore; and when she had finished this she looked at herself in the mirror with some pleasure. For forty she wasn’t bad to look at, if you covered up the tiny-purplish places around her eyes that came from gin and sugar. She was covering them up tonight, with a makeup bought just for that.

After looking at her face for a while she began to dress, putting on the sheer gold panties and brassiere that she’d bought that afternoon, and then the crimson pants and the matching blouse. Garish earrings, and finally the silver flakes in her hair. She looked now like somebody else and, standing before the mirror, she at first felt self-conscious. What kind of foolishness was she up to, dressing like this? But, in the back of her mind, in that vague, seldom-examined registry where bottles of gin were mercilessly numbered and unpleasant recollections of a thankfully dead husband were filed, she knew perfectly well what she was doing this for. But she did not bring it to the surface of her mind to inspect it. She was expert at the technique. In a minute she felt more accustomed to this new, sexy-matron appearance, and, taking her tumbler of gin from the top of the dresser in one hand, smoothing the tight crimson pants with the other, she pushed open the door and walked into the room where Tommy was sitting.

He was on the phone, and she could see the face of that lawyer, Farnsworth, on the little screen. They usually talked three or four times a day, and once Farnsworth had come with a staff of earnest-looking young men, and they had spent the day discussing and arguing in her living room, ignoring her as if she d been a part of the furniture. Except for Tommy, that is, because he had been polite and nice and had thanked her gently when she had brought the men coffee and offered them gin.

She sat on the couch while he talked to Farnsworth and picked up an old comic book and lazily looked over some of the more sexy pages while she finished the drink. But this bored her, and Tommy was still talking about some kind of research project that they were doing in the southern part of the state and about selling shares of this and that. She set the comic book down, finished her drink, picked up one of his books that sat on the end table. He’d had hundreds of books sent to the house, and the room was getting crowded with them. The book turned out to be some kind of poetry and she put it back hastily, picking up another. It was called
Thermonuclear Engines
and was filled with lines and numbers. She began to feel silly again, dressed in these clothes. She got up and resolutely fixed two drinks of gin, leaving one on top of the television set and taking the other back to the couch with her. Yet, silly as she felt, she found herself automatically taking a seductive, movie-star pose on the couch, and stretching her heavy legs out lazily. She watched him over the top of her glass, saw the glow of the lamplight on his white hair and on his delicate, brownish, almost transparent skin, and then his graceful, womanish hand that lay casually, lightly on the desk. At that moment she began consciously to review what she was up to and, in the soft light, with the gin wanning her stomach, she began to feel a touch of wicked excitement in her from flirting at the edge of the idea of that strange, delicate body against hers. Looking at him and letting her imagination play with the thought, she knew that the particular thrill came from his strangeness—his strange, unmanlike, unsexual nature. Maybe she was like those women who like to make love with freaks and cripples. Well, he was both—and she did not care now, was not ashamed, with the tight pants on and the gin in her. If she could arouse him—if he could be aroused—she would be proud of herself. And if not—he was a dear man anyway and he wouldn’t be offended. She felt her heart go out to him then in quick, warm sentiment; as she finished her drink she felt, for the first time in years, an emotion resembling love, along with the desire that she had been working herself up to all day long—since this morning when she had gone out in her aged print dress and bought panties and earrings, makeup and tights, without admitting to herself the final meaning of the vague plan that had entered her mind.

She got still another drink, telling herself that she ought to go easy. But she was getting nervous, waiting. He was talking now about somebody named Bryce and Farnsworth was saying that this Bryce was trying to see him, wanted to come to work for them, but wanted to see Tommy first, and Tommy was saying it was impossible and Farnsworth was saying they needed all the men they could get with Bryce’s training. She began to be impatient. Who cared about this Bryce? But then, abruptly, Tommy ended the conversation, hung up the phone, and after remaining silent for a minute looked over at her, smiling thoughtfully. “My new place is ready, down in the southern part of the state. Would you like to go there with me? As my housekeeper?”