Other Aliens Read online

  the fouled mouth

  the hard heart or

  the litter of coins

  dropped out like a

  birth in the stream

  running loud down

  god’s mountain’s

  improvident thigh

  *

  When the train

  comes at last

  bearing humans

  the woman still

  eating her husband’s face

  looks up

  flesh burning

  the dry white sheet of the past: I can almost

  see the new

  season from here

  Bromley Hall

  Valerie Martin

  They had quarreled. As she took up the phone receiver and punched in the numbers, that thought came to her. It wasn’t an important argument; she didn’t care what it had been about. She only knew that they had quarreled—oh, it was unbearable to think of now.

  But that morning, when she closed the hotel-room door perhaps too forcefully and flounced down the heavily carpeted steps to the lobby, she knew she was within her rights and he was being obstinate. “I don’t want to look at rich people’s houses in a crowd,” he’d said, which was absurd, he’d drooled all over the paintings at the castle. Was it only that these rich people weren’t royalty? Or was it that the most interesting thing about Bromley Hall was the gardens? Gardens bored Frank.

  The real reason he’d refused to come with her was to punish her for insisting on changing rooms. But the first room was impossible. The window gave on to the street just over the hotel bar, and the bathtub, a claw-footed steep-sided behemoth from two centuries back, wasn’t off by itself as a proper bathtub should be but smack in the middle of the carpet a few steps from the bed. “If it was just for a night or two,” Janet protested, “we could put up with it, but we’re here for a week.”

  “I hate this hotel,” Frank replied.

  So she’d gone down to the desk and asked the sullen young woman with the tattoos of crossed swords on the insides of her wrists if they might possibly have an interior room, as her husband was a light sleeper and the noise from the street would be hard for him.

  To her surprise, to her relief, the young woman furrowed her brow with sympathy and turned on her swivel chair to face a computer screen. “Let me just see,” she said. “Do you mind a short flight of stairs?”

  “Not at all,” Janet said hopefully, but she wondered, why stairs? There was an elevator the size of a telephone booth in the hall.

  The clerk stood up and took down a heavy key from the old-fashioned board of hooks on the wall. “It’s number seventeen,” she said. “It’s at the top, looks out on the garden. You go to the third floor on the elevator, down the hall, and you’ll see a few steps. Have a look and see if it suits you.”

  Faces the garden, Janet thought, grasping the key in the elevator. How bad could it be?

  The hall was short, the carpeted steps, five in all, led to a narrow landing and a white door, like all the other doors, with the number seventeen in polished brass digits screwed in at eye level. Always that little thrill of hesitation, opening the door of yet another hotel room. Janet turned the key in the lock and the door shifted in its frame, then drifted open. She was looking at an open window with a fresh linen curtain fluttering in a soft breeze. The room was twice the size of the impossible room, now clearly the worst room in the hotel, reserved for Americans and probably Germans who had never visited before. There was a writing desk, a tall wardrobe with drawers down one side, and a comfortable chintz-covered reading chair next to the ubiquitous 20-watt standing lamp. She peeked into the bathroom. No scary deep tub, but a roomy, glassed-in shower with one of those round, flat rain showerheads Frank liked. The sink had a wide rim and a cupboard alongside, beneath another long window.

  Janet smiled, crossed to the window, and looked down. Idyllic walled garden, late summer blooms, manicured hedges, a brick walk leading to a bench, a trickle of water slithering off the edge of a flat rock into a stone basin. She turned from the window. “This is perfect,” she said softly. “Frank will be so relieved.”

  He wasn’t relieved. In fact, when she arrived at the bad room brandishing the key to the new one, he tossed the sweater he was unpacking back into the suitcase and said, “Oh, for God’s sake.” His view of travel was that you took things as you found them. He particularly disliked wheedling desk staff at a hotel. She knew he felt this way, of course, and for the most part she agreed. But in this case she stood her ground. “I’m not spending a solid week with a bathtub in the bedroom and a window over a bar,” she vowed. At this point a trio of arriving bar patrons obligingly burst into uproarious laughter in the street. One shouted at the other, “You loony cunt. You have no fuckin’ idea.”

  Janet pulled the corners of her mouth down, raised her eyebrows, opened her hands, and said “QED.”

  This only made Frank gloomier and he trudged along the hall, pulling his suitcase behind him with the air of a man consigned to a prison sentence. They had to go up separately in the narrow elevator then reconvene in the hall and drag the cases to the odd half flight that led to room seventeen. Janet watched Frank’s face as she pushed open the door; yes, there was a flicker of pleased surprise, quickly reined in. She took her small case and stepped into the bathroom, where she began laying out her cosmetics on a convenient shelf over the radiator. Through the open window she could hear the cheerful chatter of birds, the burbling of water in the fountain. Just let him calm down and unpack, she thought. And then he’ll be grateful.

  And when she came out his suitcase was open on the bed and he was hanging his jacket in the wardrobe. His shoes were already neatly arranged under the bedside table. “I can’t believe this room costs the same as the other one,” he said pleasantly.

  “Sometimes you just have to ask,” she said. She lifted her suitcase onto a luggage rack next to the wardrobe and took out a neat stack of blouses. “Let’s unpack and go have dinner at that place the Bangalls recommended.”

  “Is it far from here?”

  “No. We can walk.”

  “That’s good,” Frank said. “I’m hungry.” He pulled out his light travel raincoat and looked around for a place to hang it. “As usual,” he said, “not enough hangers.” Then, spotting three iron hooks jutting from a wooden bar just inside the door, he edged past his wife to make use of one.

  Janet stowed her underwear in the drawer of the bedside table, her spirits lifting at the success of her effort to improve the arrangements of the trip. When she looked up, Frank was standing very still, clutching his raincoat but making no move to hang it on the hook. Instead he was staring at the plasticized sign affixed to the room door. “Fuck,” he said. Janet joined him and read the information card, which listed, among other things, the price of the room. It was half again as much as the first room. Frank draped the coat on the hook and stalked back to his suitcase, radiating fury. “Sometimes,” he said, perfectly imitating her chirpy, overconfident tone, “you just have to ask.”

  These things happen on trips, Janet thought. You have to be flexible when traveling, and really, even at the higher price, the room was a bargain; they would have a quiet, comfortable week to end their vacation. She communicated all this to Frank over the excellent, pricey dinner at the charming restaurant, clearly popular with the locals, and after a few glasses of wine he stopped fuming and opined that it would be nice to sleep with the window open.

  And he did sleep; they both did, the deep, companionable sleep of travelers with no particular plan for the next day. They barely made it to the breakfast room before closing time, and the buffet was somewhat picked over. But when the server, an indulgent and amusing young gay man, saw Janet gazing sadly at the two bits of discolored melon left in the serving bowl, he insisted on getting her a bowl of fresh fruit from the kitchen.

  “The coffee’s good,” Frank admitted, still mildly befuddled from the bottomless sleep.

  “Let’s go to Bromley H
all this afternoon,” Janet suggested. “Betsy said they have some very good pictures and there’s a luncheon place on the grounds with a terrace.”

  Frank took a long swallow of coffee, and set the cup down carefully in the saucer. “I don’t care what Betsy said,” he said.

  That was how the argument began. It wasn’t a big argument; really, it was just a spat. Frank maintained that he didn’t want to reproduce the Bangalls’ trip in every detail, that he wasn’t interested in looking at rich people’s houses, and if he was going to pay a fortune for a big hotel room, he intended to make use of it. His plan was to stay in, catch up on e-mail, and read a novel.

  Janet had no counterarguments, just her usual range of defensive maneuvers and her reiterated desire to see Bromley Hall, which was only open on weekends, and this was Sunday. She was torn between her pleasure in the fact that Frank clearly liked the expensive room very much, and her sense that his decision to skip the visit to Bromley Hall was a species of punishment for her insistence on changing rooms.

  They returned to room seventeen, where Frank set up his computer on the desk and Janet plopped in the plush chair, consulting her guidebook and the bus schedules. The bus stop, she’d noted on their arrival, was only a block from the hotel. The sky was blue, the air was fresh, warm with a light breeze lifting the curtain on the window overlooking the garden. Bromley Hall was on the outskirts of the city, a longish ride that appealed to her because one could see so much from a bus, especially if it was a double-decker. Actually, she mused, as she turned the page to the history of the house—sixteenth century, wing added eighteenth century, aristocrats rising and falling with the vicissitudes of power at court, internecine rivalries, revolution, and war—it might be a good break for them both to split up for a day. They’d been together for two weeks, never apart for more than a few minutes, and moving around a lot. Frank had slept poorly, and the bulk of the luggage hauling fell to him. Perhaps he was just tired, and a rest in this pleasant room would put him in good spirits. He was muttering at the computer screen, trying to connect to the hotel Wi-Fi, an operation that always aggravated him. Janet fell to thinking about her shoes—the rubber-soled sneakers or the comfortable waterproof loafers? This country was famous for its changeable weather. The travel umbrella definitely; maybe the cotton sweater.

  Janet wasn’t an adventuresome soul but she tried to make up for that with obsessive planning. She had thrilled to read of the great explorer Richard Burton’s perennial charge to his wife: “Pay, pack, and follow.” With the right budget, she thought, I could have managed that. She imagined herself arriving at whatever godforsaken outpost he had chosen, comfortably ensconced on the lead camel with a canopy over her head and a thermos of tea at the ready, while behind her for half a mile stretched a caravan of lumbering beasts loaded with chairs and tables, tents and cushions, teapots and saucepans, flatware and table linens, toilet kits, cologne, five hundred bottles of wine, a hundred or so of gin, six cases of orange marmalade, a thousand books. Richard Burton, played by Frank in this scenario, stood on an outcropping of rock, legs apart, peering through his binoculars with a wide grin on his sand-parched lips. “Here she comes,” he observes to his keffiyehed companion. “What a woman!”

  And then, that night, lounging on the embroidered cushions in the spacious, airy tent, after the dinner of sardines, paté, crusty bread, pudding, two bottles of champagne and another of port, the lamp light flickering, the black night ablaze with glittering stars, what a scene of scintillating passion!

  The bus, when it came, was a disappointment, a rattletrap affair with no upper deck, worn hard-plastic benches, and smeary windows. The driver was wearing a white turban. A Sikh, Janet reminded herself as she dropped her fare into the coin slot. Doubtless named Singh. But what did Sikhs believe? “Could you let me know when we come to the stop for Bromley Hall?” she inquired pleasantly.

  Without raising his eyes, the man pointed to a sign affixed to the base of the coin machine. PLEASE DO NOT ENGAGE THE DRIVER IN CONVERSATION.

  “I beg your pardon,” Janet said, turning toward the chilly regard of her fellow passengers. These were few and all appeared to be foreigners, but not, like her, on the bus for touristic purposes. A scattering of dark-eyed men, working men, she thought, slumped on the seats, broody and silent. Two middle-aged women, both overweight, dressed in patterned blouses, long black skirts, and identical caps of curly, dyed-blonde hair, bowed their heads toward each other as they spoke urgently in a language Janet didn’t recognize. Slavic, was it? Russian? Polish? The seats across the aisle from them were empty, and she hastened to take the one nearest the window. The engine groaned as the driver changed gears and the bus lumbered out into the road.

  It would all be fine once she got to the hall, she counseled herself. A dull sheen of anxiety clouded her vision. Through the smudgy window she could see the long vista of fine stone houses, the carefully tended front gardens that lined the wide central avenue of the town. A Roman road, she knew that from the guidebook. They’d marched through this chilly, windswept country in legions, in their short skirts and sandals, taking orders in Latin, donning togas off duty and building baths, building bridges, civilizing everything in sight. In a few generations Romans would have blond children. What was the Roman name for this city? Unconsciously Janet pulled her travel purse into her lap and unfastened the theft-proof latch. As she did, a clear and startling image flashed across her brain, as sudden and disconcerting as a fox dashing across a road. It was her cell phone gleaming darkly on the bedside table in the comfortable hotel room.

  An important oversight, sadly due to bad temper, but how important exactly? She still had the compact guidebook with its comforting section on getting around, including bus and tram maps and the phone numbers of taxis and emergency services. In the old days, not so long ago, they had managed foreign cities perfectly well with nothing but a street map. She pulled out the book: a bright photo of the castle with an inset of a dog working a clutch of sheep emblazoned the cover. As she turned to the map section, the bus brakes groaned and the chassis creaked. It was, she recalled, four stops to Bromley Hall. This would be the first one: Crompton Road.

  The bus pulled up to a low stone wall. Janet spotted a metal sign attached to a pole driven into the sidewalk. With a hydraulic thwack the doors folded open. Two more dark-eyed young men, yapping angrily at each other in a language Janet couldn’t even get close to—was it Arabic? Hebrew?—took the steps at a leap and tossed their coins contemptuously into the machine. Janet studied the sign on the pole, which read BUS. She looked past it for a street sign but there was nothing. The young men pushed past her without a glance, intent on their escalating quarrel, which, to her relief, they took to the very back of the bus. Again she scanned the street as the doors snapped closed and the bus jolted back into the road. There was only a stop sign at the first corner. Why not put a street sign on a street? she thought testily. The stone wall continued past the corner and at last she spotted a white metal placard affixed to it; this would be the name of the road they were on. Then she could read it: MOREHOUSE CRESCENT.

  The driver steered the bus into the center lane and picked up speed. There was more traffic suddenly, the wall ended, the sidewalk disappeared, and a riot of shabby modern shops and rundown row houses crowded the perimeter of the road. Janet fought a swell of panic as she studied the bus-route map, searching vainly for Morehouse Crescent. At a traffic signal the bus took a right turn, launching into a roiling four-lane highway, lined with industrial warehouses, car dealerships, and furniture stores that reminded Janet of suburban New Jersey. She scanned the road for any identifying signage, but there was none. Could this possibly be the road to bucolic Bromley Hall? And when was this rattling torpedo of a bus going to make the second of the four stops?

  She glanced at her fellow passengers, the Polish (Russian?) housewives, still talking excitedly, the profile of an older Arabic-looking man dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans, his long fingers deftl
y working a cellular device, two seats up and across the aisle. The unmoving back of the Sikh driver. The Arabic man might speak English; he might hate Americans.

  Another turn, leaving the highway for a two-lane road that climbed a long hill of gradually thinning urbanization that gave way to agriculture. This was more like it. Ere long they would see sheep or cows, and then, in the distance, rising in the mist, the noble tower of Bromley Hall. She tried to judge the distance they had come, perhaps five kilometers. The hall was about twelve from the hotel. No need to panic. The traffic abated, the road deteriorated, and the bus racketed along; really a new set of shocks was in order. At a slight concrete indentation in a field of what Janet took to be oats, the bus brakes squealed and the quivering beast came to an abrupt halt, its front wheel raised up over the curb. No sign, either of demarcation or of life. In the distance Janet spotted a baling machine suctioning hay into a long bright-green plastic sleeve. Oh, let’s just wrap the entire world in plastic, she thought bitterly. That will really help. As she contemplated the remote possibility that hay bales sealed in plastic might have any ecological advantages, the bus doors wheezed open, and every one of the dark and sullen men rose from their seats and clambered down the steps, filing silently across the road in front of the bus to the field on the other side. Janet watched in amazement: what could they possibly have to do out here in the middle of nowhere? They didn’t appear to be agricultural workers; some of them were wearing sandals. She leaned out into the aisle to keep them in her sight as the bus doors closed and the driver wrenched the wheel so that the tires came off the concrete pad with a bump. The men had gathered in a loose gang at the side of the road, a few engaged in rapid-fire conversations, others looking with gloomy expectation down the empty road in the direction the bus was heading. Janet watched them until she could see them no longer, experiencing a combination of bewilderment and relief. Obviously the men were waiting to be picked up, probably by a truck, but as the bus forged along, no vehicle of any kind passed and Janet thought the men were in for a long wait. She would tell Frank about this mystery. It was the sort of inexplicable data they enjoyed puzzling over when they traveled. One of the pleasures of their adventures was encountering unexpected ways, manners, situations. Once, toiling up yet another winding hill-town road in Italy, Frank expertly steering the rental Clio around a vertiginous bend, they had both shouted in terror and wonder at the sight of a wine barrel rolling, leaping, careening, plummeting toward them down the steep incline, followed closely by two handsome, shirtless young men shouting joyfully as they chased the escapee. The barrel missed the car by inches in its crazed descent. Frank jammed on the brakes, casting Janet a look of wild surmise. In a moment the young men and the barrel were gone and the two Americans sat weak-kneed, buckled over the seats with laughter in their still-trembling rental car.