Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

The Queen of the Apocalypse SCOTT BRADFIELD

HARRIET OWEN SPENT HER youth making love to other women’s husbands. She spotted them in supermarkets and shopping plazas, and trapped them with her formidably blue eye-contact. While they solemnly pretended to inspect frozen food and sports equipment, Harriet provided them quick opportunities to introduce themselves, and redetermine who they were while their wives weren’t around. Eventually there occurred brief lapses into soft words, too many margaritas and cigarettes, crying over telephones, sex in elevators. Then, as abruptly as recognition, the harried men went away again. Disconnected their office telephones and sent Harriet personal checks in the mail. For Harriet, affairs with married men were a sort of clock. Whirr, tock, tick. As a result, Harriet always knew what was happening in her life, and what would happen next.

Hardness was no stranger to Harriet, and neither was remorse. “You are not a good girl,” her mother used to remind her. “You are not loving, or compassionate, or true. You never help with the housework, or care how I’m feeling. You never prepare meals for me unless I ask.” Sometimes Harriet’s mother would disappear for days and weeks at a time, returning with an ostentatious clatter of keys in the middle of the night, a bag of groceries under one arm, a six-pack of beer under the other. And it was always Harriet’s turn to cook breakfast.

Harriet’s mother liked to say that she had been an Abstract Expressionist long before being an Abstract Expressionist became popular. All day long she smoked marijuana out of a corncob pipe and wore a loose-fitting terry cloth bathrobe, gazing blurrily at her uncompleted canvases as if she couldn’t tell them apart. Their large studio contained two mattresses, three splintering wooden benches, large enormous rolls of medium-grain canvas, knock-kneed stepladders, framing boards, and countless rusting splattered paint tins stacked everywhere in weird configurations—pyramids, crosses, triangles, and ellipses—as if someone, somewhere, secretly intended them to mean something.

Harriet left home when she was seventeen, moved to North Hollywood, and spent every night sitting on the floor of her unfurnished apartment gazing at the palms of her hands as if they were paintings on a wall. She wanted to know the things her mother never thought her capable of knowing, those things they hadn’t taught her in school. She didn’t want to be just plain old know-nothing Harriet anymore, because she wanted to be better, and wiser, and filled with more meaning than herself. “You can’t see beyond the world you live in, which is why you will always be sad,” her mother used to tell her. “Now stop crying and go to sleep.”

Some nights Harriet clipped at the blue veins in her wrist with a pair of pale, dull scissors until the blood came. She did things to her toenails with matches and cauterized sewing needles. She gripped metal table knives and inserted them into the sudden frisson of bulbless lamps and open sockets. This, Harriet wanted to remind herself, was pain and attention. This was what happened when you were bad. A remote bright sensation of inflexibility and heat. A sort of visceral information. When Harriet felt pain, she didn’t feel lost, she knew where she was. She realized there was a world outside, a world that wanted her, a world that would hold her in its arms.

Every night before she fell asleep, Harriet tried to imagine the total destruction of her own body. Flames would work, missiles or bombs. Stroke, angina, renal failure, poison in the bloodstream, plutonium in the water. Suns and planets might explode and take civilizations with them, or the dollar collapse so Americans couldn’t buy bread. Comets might arrive just like prophecies, and then the entire world would know. Harriet tried to imagine herself shot in the head by hasty addicts, or run over by blundering buses in the street. When the body died, the mind went someplace else, escaped this embrace of skin and politics and metal. Continents grew infirm, galaxies milky, teeth loose, philosophies abstract. If you were lucky and didn’t struggle, you might learn the pain that really mattered. You might even learn to be good. You might finally understand.

Sometimes the bleeding wouldn’t stop and Harriet visited the doctor.

“Do you do this to yourself?” he asked. He stood over her during the examination, exerting force and profession. “Or was it some boyfriend? Is it something you ask them to do or do they just go ahead and do it anyway?”

“I’m clumsy,” Harriet said, closing her eyes, seeing the white starry impact she saw whenever she contemplated herself. “It happens when I’m cooking at the stove, or chopping vegetables at the sink.”

Sometimes the doctors sat behind their desks and watched her from far away. They stopped looking at her body. They tried to look into another part of her.

“Why do you do it?”

“I don’t really do it.”

“Is it because you don’t like yourself?”

“I like myself fine.”

“Have you ever been on medication? Have you ever visited a therapist?”

“I’ve consulted therapists,” Harriet said. “But I’ve never taken any prescribed medication.”

Then one day a man came along and tried to save her, a man Harriet consequently neither forgave nor forgot. Boyd Thomas left his wife and children, changed his job, and moved into Harriet’s apartment on a Superbowl Sunday, setting up a sort of provisional base camp on the living room sofa. Every day he went out for groceries and supplies from the local market. He did the chores, washed the dishes, and emptied the trash. Every evening he prepared large, nutritious dinner salads and vegetarian pastas in Harriet’s underequipped kitchen, and never even made a fuss when Harriet refused to eat. It was a type of cruelty Harriet had never known before. A man who wanted to take care of her. A man who wouldn’t go away.

Boyd assembled his dense, secret ministry of affection in Harriet’s life while Harriet wasn’t looking: new dishes, silverware, appliances, furniture, vitamins, consolation, and advice. Some mornings Harriet awoke to discover new curtains in the kitchen, tools and workbench in the basement, roses in a vase beside the stove, Boyd’s shoes under the sofa. “You need to get out more,” Boyd told her, arranging the dull clatter of tea things on an aluminum tray. “You need to stop feeling so sorry for yourself. Reenroll in school for chrissakes. Career Management—that’s what I was thinking. And look at me when I’m talking, why can’t you ever look at me? All I ever do is give, give, give, and all you ever do is take.”

Boyd could endure even more abuse than Harriet, and that’s why she couldn’t make him go away. He intercepted flying plates and glasses with ease, replacing them patiently on the shelves where Harriet could reach for them again. He entertained crude slurs about his manhood with an attitude of benign and sinister avowal. He took all the sharp objects from Harriet’s apartment and destroyed all the matches, and refused to slap her whenever she slapped him. There didn’t seem to be anything Harriet could do about it. Wherever she turned, there was Boyd trying to love her. Boyd with a cold washcloth to wipe her brow, and two strong arms to hold her.

In bed at night Boyd stroked her white back with his rasped, knuckly fingers. He whispered endearments at her as if he were pushing bulbs and garden implements into the dark earth. “I love you,” he whispered, over and over again, a litany as inextricable as his embrace, his voice reaching into places even Harriet couldn’t go. “You’re a really great woman who deserves the best life has to offer. You shouldn’t hate yourself so much; you shouldn’t feel so insecure. You’re a really strong, special, caring sort of person, and that’s why I really, really love and respect you.”

After a while Harriet would let Boyd make love to her, because it gave her distance and dimension back. Boyd and Harriet, him and her, man and woman, hammer and earth. She would close her eyes and go away into the wash of galaxies that wouldn’t last, into the casual obliteration of planets that never mattered. The man would climb off her; he would insist on holding her in his arms. Then Harriet would fall asleep and dream of catastrophes. It was the only real submission she could make anymore.

He took her to meet his family—Wanda, Phil, Jane, and Eddy. Wanda and Phil were his parents, Jane and Eddy his father’s children by a previous marriage. “You seem like a terrific young girl,” Phil said, “and Boyd has told us so many wonderful things about you. He never gave us any idea, though, exactly how pretty you were.” They sat on the splintery veranda, drinking sun tea spiced with licorice, watching the sunset expand over Hermosa Beach. Phil turned to Wanda. “But she really is pretty, don’t you think? Especially her hair.”

Boyd’s family usually talked about Harriet in the third person.

“Not only that,” Wanda said, “But just look at her teeth. I wish I had teeth like that. Then I could eat anything I wanted.”

“And such a nice figure,” Phil said, looking her up and down. Phil was a jeweler in Santa Monica. “Boyd must be the envy of all his friends at the office.” Phil winked at Harriet and blushed, holding his bony knees together.

“We sure like her better than Marjorie,” Jane and Eddy called out from the living room, where they basked in the pale, unearthly light of the RCA. “No matter how nice she pretended to be, Marjorie was always a big fat drag.”

Wanda distributed more tea and packaged cookies. She leaned toward Harriet and stage-whispered: “Boyd’s last wife was a very nice woman, and provided Boyd’s children with a wonderful role model and all that. But she was never a very sexual sort of person. And Boyd, as you must know by now, likes to exchange a lot of good healthy pleasure with his women. Much like his father.” Wanda showed Harriet lumpy sugar in a white ceramic bowl. “I forget already—do you take sugar?”

“No,” Harriet said. “I never take sugar in my tea.”

“She’s watching her figure,” Phil said. His flushed, vein-burst face winked inconstantly at Harriet, like a broken signal at a railway crossing. “She doesn’t want to lose her gorgeous figure—and neither do we, hey, son? Neither do we.”

Boyd married her and bought a house. That was the end, really. There was nowhere left for her to go.

“It’s got a basement and an attic,” Boyd said proudly. “Two bedrooms and a den. The kitchen needs work, but there’s no problem with the heating. And the yard is enormous. Like ten normal-sized yards, really. A big, I mean a really big yard. We could have twelve kids running around in that yard and they wouldn’t see each other for weeks.”

The house was wide, complicated and dense, poured into the earth with concrete, hammered together with wood and nails. Harriet couldn’t cry and couldn’t sleep, lying in bed all day until Boyd returned home from his new subcontractor’s job at the mall. She heard the power lines in the street, pigeons on the rooftop, the aluminum rustle of gas in the stove. Every morning cartons of fresh milk and butter appeared on the doorstep. Newspapers, shopping coupons, stray cats howling at the wind.

She bound her feet with twine in order to cut off the circulation. She plucked hairs from her face and secretly bit her tongue. She ate too many grapefruit, and rinsed the cold sores in her mouth with vinegar, salt, and lime concentrate. She explored those regions of her body where sewing needles didn’t leave marks. It might be Boyd’s house, but it was still her body. I, Harriet told herself, am completely my decision.

Boyd began exhibiting a strange and unhealthy concern for Harriet’s menses, circling dates on the Val’s Used Autos calendar with a black felt laundry marker. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,” Boyd told himself out loud, and circled the final date with a proud little flourish, as if he were endorsing a particularly generous check. Then he took the thermometer from the kitchen cabinet, swabbed it with alcohol, and called out Harriet’s name.

There was something implacable about the way Boyd made love to her now, as if he were straining against the skin of a bubble, trying to tell her something language could not convey. “I’ve reinsulated the attic,” Boyd told her in bed, rocking gently against her, as cautious as if he were caressing helium. “I’ve discussed the basement plumbing with a regional contractor. This spring, I’ll paint the place. I’ll put down new carpets and a new yard. Depreciation, baby. That’s what finally buries you. By the way, did I tell you I love you, Harriet? Did I tell you you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life?”

There were books on the bureau beside the thermometer. The Home Pregnancy Handbook, Fertility and Nutrition, Conception and the Stars. Harriet, however, was wary of books. She was afraid they might not keep their words to themselves.

“I don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl,” Boyd said later. “I just hope it’s a Gemini.”

By now, Harriet felt so estranged from her own body she couldn’t believe any of it was happening to her. Nurses, obstetricians, waxed fluorescent corridors, hurrying orderlies, and drugged, dozing patients on gurneys. From the moment the doctor told her, Harriet pretended to play along.

“Get plenty of rest,” the doctor told her. “And exercise. A nice long walk every morning should do it. Don’t drink to excess, but a little wine in the evening won’t hurt anything.”

“Okay,” Harriet said. She was looking at a dietary chart the doctor had presented her. The chart was printed on an embossed sheet of plastic and depicted colorful pie graphs, statistical charts, and a brief illustrated history of gestation. “I can do that.”

“She looks like a madonna,” Boyd’s mother said. “She looks like the most beautiful mother-to-be in the entire world.” Wanda and Phil arrived every Saturday afternoon bearing homemade soups, casseroles, Tupperware-clad fruit salads, and bright packaged gifts Harriet was expected to open. Blankets, diaper bags, Nerf toys, music boxes, Pooh books, illustrated nursery rhymes. Harriet would smile and try to look nonplussed.

“She seems so peaceful. So content with herself.”

“Her body’s generating this drug that helps her relax—I read about it once in a magazine.”

“She used to be so edgy and insecure. Boyd’s been really good for her. He knew all along she just needed someone to care for. It’s a woman’s biological role. Even when women aren’t having babies, they dream about having them all the time.”

“That’s the full flush of motherhood, all right,” Phil said wisely, and showed Boyd the roll of floral-patterned linoleum he had purchased for the family room. “And we know it’ll be a beautiful baby, because all Boyd’s women have beautiful babies.”

Now at night it was Harriet who wanted to make love, and Harriet who wanted Boyd to hold her. Boyd was always reading now—You and Your Baby, Dr. Spock’s Guide to Infant Growth and Development, Owning Your Second Home, Building Your Own Bomb Shelter. He ate Butterfinger candy bars, drank warm beer from aluminum cans, and watched war movies on late-night TV.

“Tell me,” Harriet insisted, “tell me, tell me.” Straining against Boyd’s density, his steel and concrete and brick.

“We have to be careful,” Boyd whispered, overturning his paperback on the end table, lowering himself under the blankets as if he were immersing himself in a cold tub. “Your condition. This trimester. For all concerned. You know I love you.”

“Tell me,” Harriet said, pushing, reaching, clenching his callused hands against her breasts, demanding his skin, his impact, his intestinal flux and hiss.

“You’re going to hurt yourself, honey. Now please, let me, let me…”

“Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Harriet said, over and over again, trying to engage the secret harmony of it, trying to make her own words matter.

“Tell you what, Harriet? What do you need to know, honey? Tell me what it is you want me to say.”

Boyd was always mending, reupholstering, abrading, polishing, trying to hide things from her. Nicks and imperfections, textures, conspiracies of pipe and cable. He painted things, and applied wallpaper, and hung new doors, working late into the night while Harriet slept. Sawing, hammering, painting. New bolts on the windows, new drapes in the living room. The scraping of metal against metal. The screak of vises. The shuddering of lathes.

“After we have the baby, Boyd, then what? What happens to us then?”

She lay beside him in bed. Boyd was sketching things on a clipboard.

“Hmm,” Boyd said. He was consulting the latest issue of Home Design Management that lay open in his lap.

“You’re not listening to me, Boyd.”

“Of course I’m listening.” He held a glimmering metric ruler up to the light. “Once we have the baby, we’ll be happy. Then everything will be okay.”

One night in early March Harriet awoke and discovered herself suddenly enormous. The sheets and blankets were soaking wet, wrapped around her sore, swollen thighs like the leaves of a cabbage. She felt surfeited and overindulged, washed up drunk on a beach somewhere, entangled with rubbery brown polyps and plankton. She reached for the bedside lamp and knocked aluminum cake tins onto the floor, ice-cream containers, extinguished cookie packets. She tried to sit up and failed. Then, again, on the count of three. She peeled the damp sheets from her legs. Suddenly, she was sitting up. She was sitting on the edge of the bed.

Silver shapes glided around the bedroom, as if the moon were riding a carousel. She looked through the gauzy drapes at the freeway, headlights skirling past, an entire universe filled with history and blind intention. She knew it before she heard it, like the shape of an extracted tooth, intimate and strange.

Somewhere deep inside the house the voice said:

This is it. Here we go. It’s time.

“I know,” Harriet said. “You don’t have to tell me. I already know.”

Boyd was getting out of bed. He was already wearing his Levi’s and pulling on a blue T-shirt.

“Just relax and stay calm,” Boyd said, guiding her down the front stairs, dispensing an aroma of Old Spice and Vaseline. Their car was idling in the driveway, a ’55 Chevy Custom Chief with whitewall tires and padded dash. It was filled with animal patience, like something slumbering in a cave.

Then Harriet was in the car. Boyd adjusted her seat and pulled a small perforated wool blanket across her knees. She watched her fat, freckled hands in her lap.

The voice said, We’ll be there in a few minutes, so try to relax. This is what you’ve been waiting for. Pretty soon, you’ll have everything you’ve ever wanted. And then it’ll all be yours.

“Is it really?” Harriet asked. Boyd was slamming the trunk and wiping the rear windshield with a soggy paper towel. “Is this what I’ve been waiting for? I knew I was waiting for something, but I guess I never knew what it was.”

Boyd climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed shut his door. The automobile was intact now, enclosing a perfect bubble of space and heat. The automobile started to move.

“I’ve been through this before,” Boyd assured her. Mist thickened on the windshield and Boyd activated the wipers. “A piece of cake, really. It’s all in the breathing. My first wife Betty, she panicked, couldn’t breathe. Then they injected her with a sedative and bang. As soon as she stopped thinking, she breathed perfectly.”

They were passing through streets lined with overturned garbage cans. City lights were everywhere. They just didn’t seem to reveal anything.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Harriet asked. “Why did I have to wait so long?”

“I’m sorry, babe.” Boyd was gazing abstractly out the window, computing logistical distances, road conditions, those soft rear tires that needed replacing. “Why didn’t I tell you what?”

“Can I ask questions?” Harriet asked the smooth white lights wheeling through the car. “Or am I just supposed to listen?”

The hospital was surrounded by brightly illuminated gray parking lots, like some neglected outdoor cinema. The doors to the emergency room opened automatically, and Boyd helped Harriet into a wheelchair. “I called ahead,” Boyd told her, “and alerted Dr. Wilde. Don’t be frightened. If you need anything, all you have to do is ask.”

There was something in the silence behind Boyd’s voice Harriet wanted to hear.

And then, with a long sustained gasp, Harriet felt her body start to breathe.

“Je-sus,” Harriet said. “Je-sus.”

Everything speeded up. Harriet was being conveyed down long corridors, and then transferred to a tissue-lined examination table. She reached out. She was holding someone. She pulled the hands closer, closer.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me, tell me.”

“It’s okay, baby. They’ve gone for the doctor. Looks like you’re not going to make anybody wait around, are you? I’ve told them to give you something for the pain—”

The entire room clenched around her, and she felt the deepness of her body exerting pressure back. “No,” Harriet told him, “no, don’t, no, no,” without even listening, without trying to decipher what Boyd’s words meant.

Then she felt two enormous hands come down, grip her by the waist and lift her up off the table.

“Je-sus,” she said. “Je-sus.”

Her body seemed very far away. She was connected to her own sensations by a long, microscopic filament of light.

”Tell me,” she said. “Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me.”

“Tell you what, honey? You keep asking that. Tell you what? I’m listening, honey.”

“Don’t,” Harriet told his hands. She was trying to reach into the light’s white canvas, the pure white soundless texture that once filled her mother’s apartment with everything Harriet couldn’t be. She thought she saw Boyd, but it wasn’t, wasn’t him, because Boyd didn’t matter, Boyd had never really been. Then she saw him, the man with the voice looking down at her, understanding how she felt and what she needed, loving her for all the right reasons. She could see him but she couldn’t see him. He was there and he wasn’t there.

It doesn’t make things any easier, the voice told her. Even when you know, it doesn’t make you happy.

“I understand,” Harriet said, “it doesn’t matter, I don’t need to be happy, tell me, tell me, I really will understand.” Harriet was crying. Exultation filled her with heat and oxygen and light. “This,” Harriet cried, “is just perfect,” and then the hands came swinging down again and struck iron through her stomach, her pelvis, and spine and lifted, lifted her off the table, up through the wide bright air and soft, impactless white glare of the ceiling. Nobody ever told her but now she knew, she knew. She was hurtling through the white air, the bellows of her lungs beating and swallowing at the rough pale atmosphere like an engine, and nobody had to tell her anything ever again because finally she knew, she knew, she knew, she knew.