The Man Who Fell to Earth

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.