The Mutual UFO Network

by Lee Martin

  “I want to go home now,” he said, and he could hear his wife saying that to whoever had taken her, because he was convinced now this is what had happened. “Please,” he said to Big Boy. “Take me home.”

  That night, for the first time since his wife had vanished, he opened her closet, and when he did, the memory of her overwhelmed him. She wasn’t like other women who bought on impulse—he had seen plenty of those women’s closets—but she had trouble getting rid of clothing, so he had let her have the walk-in while he used the closet in the guest bedroom.

  He pressed his face into the collar of a broadcloth shirt and unashamedly breathed in the faint scent of her cologne. It was the same cologne she had worn since they had met in college, a clean, light smell of fresh flowers and baby powder. She hadn’t changed it once in all the years they had been married; the bolder, more alluring fragrances had never appealed to her. Frank realized he had married her because of her predictability. She had seemed such a safe, stable woman, someone who would never break his heart or abandon him. He ran his hand over the skirt of a long denim jumper and thought of how he would sometimes come home and find his wife ironing, the air warmed with steam and pleasant with the healthy scent of fresh laundry. “We’ll have to be quick,” she would say to him. “My husband will be home any minute.” He would make his voice go hard with menace. “Then maybe we should take a ride,” he would say. “How about it, toots? Maybe you should come with me.” Her eyes would go wide with feigned terror, and she would beg him not to hurt her. “Please,” she would say. “Please.” Their playfulness seemed so arrogant now, so certain that they would stay outside harm’s reach. They wouldn’t go dead, she had promised, like so many other couples they knew who had never had children. “It won’t be so bad growing old together,” she had told him. “You’ll see.”

  The decision not to have children had been hers—the idea of giving birth terrified her—and though he sensed they were both missing some vital experience, he had no choice but to accept her will. Now he wished for some child—a daughter, he thought—who would look like his wife and would be there to remind him what love was so he wouldn’t fall in with someone like Big Boy and the bitter disdain he had let poison him.

  The closet was in order: summer clothes hanging toward the front, his wife’s winter wardrobe stored away toward the rear. She had snugged her sweaters into boxes on the shelves and aligned her shoes along the floor. Frank sorted through the hangers, wanting as much of his wife as he could get; he wanted the feel of denim and twill and chambray and linen. He let his fingers linger over pleats, buttons, hems.

  And then, in the middle of the closet, sheathed in plastic, he found something that astounded him. It was a marbled silk jacket, royal blue, with handspun mohair sleeves. He had spotted it at The Ozone when he had taken his wife there to pick out something jazzy. It was an original, he had pointed out to her, reading from a card that explained how the designer, a local woman, “marbled” the silk. The process, as he remembered it, involved mixing powdered seaweed with water until it thickened, then pouring inks on top of the gel where they floated. The designer then created patterns in the inks and laid the silk on the surface to absorb them. “How about this?” he said to his wife. “It’s chic.” She laughed. “Oh, Frank. You can’t be serious. Those fuzzy sleeves. They look prehistoric, and I bet they itch like crazy.” Then a sad look had come into her eyes, and she had said to him, “This isn’t me. Really, Frank. I’d think you’d know that.”

  She had obviously gone back to the boutique and bought the jacket and then hung it in her closet, and she had never said a word about it. Frank ran his hand up under the plastic. He stroked one of the mohair sleeves, which wasn’t scratchy at all, but soft, the way his wife’s hair had been when, in bed, it would sweep across his face. And the silk of the jacket, so thin, reminded him of the translucent skin, blue-veined, along the inside of her thighs.

  She had wanted to please him; he saw that now. She had always so desperately wanted to please him. Standing in her closet, the evidence at his fingertips, he saw how truly terrified she had been that one day she might lose him. That knowledge filled him with a guilt deeper than any he had ever known. Suddenly, he felt like an intruder in her closet, someone come there uninvited. All these years, his very presence had threatened some basic part of her, the modest and sensible woman she was. Without him, that woman would have always seemed familiar to her and safe.

  It was then that he decided to call Big Boy.

  “What have we done?” he said when Big Boy answered his phone.

  “We did what you wanted,” Big Boy said. “We gave the schmuck the news. I wouldn’t want to be Kane, Frank, would you?”

  “No, but still…”

  “Count your lucky stars, Frank.”

  Frank didn’t feel lucky. He felt all used up, tired, as if there were nothing left of him, and he sensed that he was beginning to come to the end of his grief, or maybe, he would think later, he was only falling into a darker grief, indelible, one that would never leave him. He was standing in the dark at his bedroom window looking up at the sky, and suddenly a thought came to him. “This missing mass,” he said. “How do we know they’re there—dead stars and the like—if we can’t see them?”

  “It’s all gravity.” Big Boy’s voice hushed, the way it did whenever he tried to guide Frank through the constellations. “An invisible object—a dead star, say—passes directly in front of another star, one we can see, and that star, the bright one, gets brighter. The gravitational field of the dead star bends the light rays of the visible star and makes it more brilliant.”

  “That’s all very complicated, isn’t it?” Frank said.

  He was having a hard time following Big Boy because he was working through a new thought, one about him and his wife and how somehow she had sensed that they had been moving in different directions, that the force of unspoken desires had brought some unidentified presence into her life on Route 71 on a Saturday in June when she had been thinking of strawberries and perhaps the silk jacket she had bought, not knowing in a few moments she would be gone, not knowing that Frank would find the jacket in her closet and would understand that from then on he would always be ashamed in the company of women.

  “Think of it this way,” said Big Boy. “We can see what’s not there by its effect on what is. That’s all you need to know.”

  It would be a few months more—months of no leads, no clues—before Frank would start to pack his wife’s clothes into boxes and cart them away to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. For a while, in public, he would find himself trying to catch a glimpse of someone wearing one of his wife’s broadcloth shirts, one of her denim jumpers, but that would never happen.

  He liked to imagine the marbled jacket with the handspun mohair sleeves and the woman who would buy it. She would be his wife’s size, he knew, and because it pleased him, he decided she would have his wife’s hair, her skin, her eyes. He liked to think that he and this woman might pass someday on the street, and he would stand there, amazed, unable to tell her how thankful he was that out of all the possible junctions in the universe they had ended up there, the two of them, moving for just that instant, at last, through the same space.

  REAL TIME

  THE TROUBLE STARTED FOR DEL AND LIZ WHEN HE INVESTED MONEY in an oil well that pumped nothing but saltwater. After that, it was a cattle breeding operation that produced diseased calves, a Florida orange grove that disappeared into a sinkhole. Finally, he lost so much money she had to sell the jewelry she had inherited from her mother—the brooches, necklaces, and rings Liz liked to call her “pretties.”

  “Ah, my pretty,” she said the last time she wore any of her jewelry. She sat at her vanity table and lifted a strand of pearls from its velvet-lined case. She held the strand to her throat and asked Del to fasten it. He kneeled behind her and worked the delicate clasp with his clumsy fingers. Then he kissed her neck, and she drew away in mock annoyance. “Cool it, buster,�
� she said. “Dinner first and then dessert.”

  Each Saturday, for years, they had gone to the Top Hat Supper Club and maybe later to Peg’s Piano Bar before driving home, Liz sliding over to sit close to Del, letting her hand come up to stroke the back of his neck.

  “Imagine,” she had said one night. “I’m the age my mother was when she died, fifty-one. I’ve outlived my looks. Oh, don’t try to tell me it isn’t so. I need all the help I can get to make myself attractive. Thank God I’ve got my pretties.”

  There were diamonds and sapphires and emeralds and amethysts. When she finally had to sell them, she told Del not to worry. Just a string of rotten luck, that was all. Couldn’t be helped. Chin up. But from time to time, he caught her staring at him, and he saw the heat in her eyes, and he had to look away.

  One night, he left a window open. It was a window on the front porch near the door, and sometime in the night he woke and remembered the window and went downstairs to close it. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, the front door opened, and a man stepped inside.

  Del’s first move was toward him, and the man stumbled backward, turned, and fled. “Get out,” Del thought he was shouting at the man, but later, with a laugh, Liz told him the only sound from his mouth had been a goofy, guttural lowing—one of the funniest things she had ever heard. “Like a demented cow,” she said. “I didn’t know what was going on. I thought, what in the world.”

  She hadn’t heard the sound of the door unsticking from its rubber seal, or smelled the reek of cigar smoke clinging to the intruder, or seen his shadowy form fill the doorframe as suddenly as a nightmare. Del wanted to share all of those details with her, but the two of them were able to manage such a pleasant, what-the-hell mood as they waited for the police, he didn’t dare disturb it.

  So he went along with her kidding that he had left himself “open” to criminals because of all those letters he wrote to prisoners in New York, Alabama, California, even there in Illinois to Vandalia and Marion and Menard. He got the convicts’ names from pen pal ads in a magazine called Real Time, a tabloid he had discovered when he still worked at the post office. Now he carried on regular correspondence with men named Clifford, Michael, Donald, even though Liz told him it was nutso to think anything he had to say to those jailbirds could possibly matter. She liked to give the convicts nicknames: “Dago,” “Honey-Boy,” “Chop.” She decided to call the man who had broken into their house “Sneaky Pete.”

  “That’s not very intimidating,” Del said. “He deserves a scarier name than that.”

  “You were the scary one,” she said. “You should have heard yourself. Mooing your head off. What a scream.”

  She told the story again and again, to their friends, even to strangers in restaurants and grocery stores. And when she reached the part about the noise Del had made, she put her hand on his shoulder or his wrist, and she said in a coaxing voice he loved, “Go on, sweetie. Show them how you did it.”

  He threw himself into it, thankful that Liz was being good-humored about the fact that he had left the window open. He made the garbled noise deep in his throat, revised it each time, and turned it into the bellow that would bring the most laughs from those who heard it.

  “That’s it,” Liz would say, hugging him. “Oh, sweetie. That’s rich.”

  Late one afternoon, on the steps outside the post office, he found a set of keys. His first thought was to pass on by. He was carrying a stack of envelopes he had to mail before the post office closed, and since the break-in and his own complicity in it, he could barely imagine becoming a witness now to someone else’s careless mistake.

  Then he noticed a tarnished whistle on the key ring, the kind a woman might carry for safety, and he got the picture of this woman, frantic, afraid that some lunatic might find her keys and somehow, though the chances were nearly impossible, figure out where she lived.

  There were no women inside the post office. In fact, there were no customers at all, only the postmaster—“The Ogre,” Liz called him, because after Del had hurt his knee, the postmaster had taken him off his route and put him on the night shift, where he sorted mail under the watchful eye of a supervisor.

  Del had missed being out on his route, where he could make his own decisions. If he wanted to duck into the Uptown Café for a cold drink, he could, and if someone on his route wanted to make small talk, he was glad to oblige. Sometimes the elderly residents asked him to help them with some chore, and he would go inside their houses and change furnace filters, open jars, raise storm windows. But then one day he stepped off a curb, landed on a pebble, and twisted his knee. He tried to explain to Liz what the night work did to him. He told her about the frenetic pace of the sorting machines, their loud clackety-clack, and the odd feeling of working under the fluorescent lights, the windows dark all around him. It made him feel like he had left the living and would never return.

  “No one talks,” he told her. “Everything’s happening so fast, and there’s all that noise. We walk around like zombies.”

  “Give it a chance,” she said. “Don’t jump the gun.”

  But soon he decided to opt for early retirement, and then, too much time on his hands, he started risking cash on dicey business schemes.

  The postmaster was counting money. He had a handful of fives, and he gave each bill a tug that made it pop before he slapped it down on the counter.

  “These keys,” Del said, but then the postmaster held up his hand and furrowed his brow, making it clear he was engaged in important business and that Del should wait.

  The postmaster wore mutton-chop sideburns and a thick-banded Masonic ring that clanked against the counter every time his hand came down. He smelled too strongly of cologne, an alpine scent Del supposed would be described as “rugged.” He watched the postmaster wrap the stack of fives with thick rubber bands, stretching each one back and snapping it to make sure it could be trusted.

  “So, Del,” the postmaster finally said. “Liz says you had some excitement over at your place the other night.” He snugged the stack of fives away in a cash bag. “You should have closed the window. I check all my windows and doors every night before I turn in. Regular as clockwork.”

  Del closed his hand around the keys he had found, and thought how small he would feel now if he had to turn them over to the postmaster. So he put the keys in his pants pocket and asked for a roll of stamps.

  “Plenty of time for letter writing now, hey Del?” the postmaster said. “You’re living the life of Riley.”

  Before he left the post office, Del took a spiral notepad from his shirt pocket, and with the Cross ballpoint he had always carried with him on his route, he printed, in his neat script, FOUND. KEYS. TO CLAIM: CALL 595-0819. He tacked the note to the bulletin board in the entryway, knowing it wasn’t the best way of handling the situation, but the only one that suited him at the time.

  There were two keys on the ring, and Del could see from the pattern of the teeth that they were identical though one of them was newer, a duplicate of shiny gold. The other, its nickel plating dull and scratched, had a slight bend in its shaft, and Del imagined someone had been careless with it. He ran his finger along the crooked shaft and found himself suddenly undone with regret, overcome with remorse for all the times he had disappointed Liz. He meant to go home that instant and tell her how sorry he was that he had become the kind of man, unwise and ineffectual, she could turn into a piece of gossip, the boob in an anecdote told to someone like the postmaster.

  But when he got there, she was gone, and standing alone in the quiet house, he thought again of the woman who had lost the keys and how upset she must be. He wished he’d had the courage to leave them with the postmaster in case the owner returned—perhaps even that afternoon, though the post office had been open only a few minutes more. Now it was too late.

  Del hated being alone in the house. He hated the beeps and codes of the alarm system they had had installed after the break-in. He hated the wrought-iron grates ov
er the windows and the way they darkened the rooms. He had insisted on the alarm and the grates and an answering machine so they could screen their calls, anything he could think of to make him feel safe. But still the slightest noise could spook him: a knock at the door, the phone ringing, a tree branch scraping across the roof.

  Liz had told him to relax, but he believed she secretly enjoyed his anxiety, contributed to it, even, by opening windows and setting off the security alarm, or picking up the phone on the first ring, or answering the door without first looking through the peephole to see who was on the other side. He imagined she was glad, after he had squandered so much money on foolhardy investments, that he was finally being cautious, finally afraid to take a chance.

  It was late when she came home, long past the hour when they would have normally eaten their dinner. She was carrying a cardboard pizza box from Caesar’s, and the security alarm was beeping, the signal that they had thirty seconds to punch in their code and disarm it.

  “Beep, beep, beep,” Liz called out on her way to the kitchen with the pizza. “Beep, beep, beep.”

  “The code,” Del said, but she was already opening cabinets and drawers, rattling dishes and silverware, and trying to tell him something about a trip she had made to a Super 8 motel.

  He punched in their code, 1964, the year they had gotten married, but his fingers were too fast, and it didn’t take. He had to start again, and all the while he imagined time was almost out, and the alarm, its blaring siren, was about to sound. But it didn’t. Finally, the system accepted the cancellation code. The beeping stopped in time for him to hear Liz say, “Oh, it might have been risky, but I did it anyway.”

  “Did what?” Del walked up to the breakfast counter and sat down on one of the rattan stools.

  Liz tossed two saucers onto the counter. “You haven’t been listening to me,” she said. “Not a word.”

  She raised her head to look at him, and he noticed, then, the flames of rouge scoring her cheekbones, and the scarlet lipstick, and the lavender eye shadow. Her hair had been fixed in some way that made it look like the wild hair he saw on young girls, a tangled mop of ropy strands, shiny with gel.