This time there was no question about my age, nor was there later on that evening, in the cocktail lounge or anywhere else. I suppose it was the lipstick that made the difference, plus a certain increase in self-confidence; apparently I wasn’t too small to be an adult, provided I looked and acted like one.
The new room did not have a bathtub. There was a shower, which was fun, but not as much as the tub had been. Dressing was not fun, and when I was finished, the whole effect still didn’t look right, in terms of my own mental image of an Earth-woman dressed for a date.
It was the shoes, of course. This kind of dress wanted high heels. I had tried a pair in the store, and promptly rejected the whole notion. Now I wondered if I’d been too hasty, but I realized I could not conceivably have added that discomfort to the already-pressing difficulties of stockings and garter belt.
This last problem got so acute when I sat down and tried to drive the car, that I did some thinking about it, and decided to take them off. It seemed to me that I’d seen a lot of bare legs with flat heels. It was only with high heels that stockings were a real necessity. Anyhow, I pulled the car over to the side on an empty stretch of road, and wriggled out of things with a great deal of difficulty. I don’t believe it made much difference in my appearance. No one seemed to notice, and I do think the lack of heels was more important.
*
All of this has been easy to put down. The next part is harder: partly because it’s so important; partly because it’s personal; partly because I just don’t remember it all as clearly.
Larry was waiting for me when I got to the hotel. He stood up and walked over to me, looking at me as if I were the only person in the room besides himself, or as if he’d been waiting all his life, and only just that moment saw what it was he’d been waiting for. I don’t know how I looked at him, but I know how I felt all of a sudden, and I don’t think I can express it very well.
It was odd, because of the barriers to communication. The way he felt and the way I did are not things to put into words, and although I couldn’t help but feel the impact ofhis emotion, I had to remember that he was deaf-and-blind to mine. All I could get from him for that matter, was a sort of generalized noise, loud but confused, without any features or details.
He smiled, and I smiled, and he said, “I didn’t know if you’d really come . . . ” and I said, “Am I late?” and he said, “Not much. What do you want to drink?”
I knew he meant something with alcohol in it, and I didn’t dare, not till I’d experimented all alone first.
“Could I get some orange juice?” I asked.
He smiled again. “You can get anything you want. You don’t drink?” He took my arm, and walked me over to a booth in the back corner, and went on without giving me a chance to answer. “No, of course you don’t. Just orange juice and milk. Listen, Tina, I’ve been scared to ask you, but we might as well get it over with. How old are you anyhow?...” We sat down, but he still didn’t give me a chance to answer. “No, that’s not the right question. Who are you? What are you? What makes a girl like you exist at all? How come they let you run around on your own like this? Does your mother . . . . Never mind me, honey. I’ve got no business asking anything. Sufficient unto the moment, and all that. I’m just talking so much because I’m so nervous. I haven’t felt like this since . . . since I first went up for a solo in a Piper Cub. I didn’t think you’d come, and you did, and you’re still here in spite of me and my dumb yap. Orange juice for the lady, please,” he told the waiter, “and a beer for me. Draft.”
I just sat there. As long as he kept talking, I didn’t have to. He looked just as beautiful as he had in the diner, only maybe more so. His skin was smoother; I suppose he’d just shaved. And he was wearing a tan suit just a shade darker than his skin, which was just a shade darker than his hair, and there was absolutely nothing I could say out loud in his language that would mean anything at all, so I waited to see if he’d start talking again.
“You’re not mad at me, Tina?”
I smiled and shook my head.
“Well, say something then.”
“It’s more fun listening to you.”
“You say that just like you mean it . . . or do you mean funny?”
“No. I mean that it’s hard for me to talk much. I don’t know how to say a lot of the things I want to say. And most people don’t say anything when they talk, and I don’t like listening to their voices, but I do like yours, and . . . I can’t help liking what you say . . . it’s always so nice. About me, I mean. Complimentary. Flattering.”
“You were right the first time. And you seem to be able to say what you mean very clearly.”
Which was just the trouble. Not only able to, but unable not to. It didn’t take any special planning or remembering to say or act the necessary lies to other humans. But Larry was the least alien person I’d ever known. Dishonesty to him was like lying to myself. Playing a role for him was pure schizophrenia.
Right then, I knew it was a mistake. I should never have made that date, or at least not nearly so soon. But even as I thought that, I had no more intention of cutting it short or backing out than I did of going back to the ship the next day. I just tried not to talk too much, and trusted to the certain knowledge that I was as important to him as he was to me—so perhaps whatever mistakes I made, whatever I said that sounded wrong, he would either accept or ignore or forgive.
But of course you can’t just sit all night and say nothing. And the simplest things could trip me up. Like when he asked if I’d like to dance, and all I had to say was “No, thanks,” and instead, because I wanted to try it, I said, “I don’t know how.”
Or when he said something about going to a movie, and I agreed enthusiastically, and he gave me a choice of three different ones that he wanted to see . . . “Oh, anyone,” I told him. “You’re easy to please,” he said, but he insisted on my making a choice. There was something he called “an old-Astaire-Rogers,” and something else that was made in England, and one current American one with stars I’d seen on television. I wanted to see either of the others. I could have said so, or I could have named one, any one. Instead I heard myself blurting out that I’d never been to a movie.
At that point, of course, he began to ask questions in earnest. And at that point, schizoid or not, I had to lie. It was easier, though, because I’d been thoroughly briefed in my story, for just such emergencies as this—and because I could talk more or less uninterruptedly, with only pertinent questions thrown in, and without having to react so much to the emotional tensions between us.
I told him how my parents had died in an automobile accident when I was a baby; how my two uncles had claimed me at the hospital; about the old house up on the mountainside, and the convent school, and the two old men who hated the evils of the world; about the death of the first uncle, and at long last the death of the second, and the lawyers and the will and everything—the whole story, as we’d worked it out back on the ship.
It answered everything, explained everything—even the unexpected item of not being able to eat meat. My uncles were vegetarians, which was certainly a harmless eccentricity compared to most of the others I credited them with.
As a story, it was pretty far-fetched, but it hung together—and in certain ways, it wasn’t even too far removed from the truth. It was, anyhow, the closest thing to the truth that I could tell—and I therefore delivered it with a fair degree of conviction. Of course it wasn’t designed to stand