The precipitous sinking in Claudette’s chest felt like her heart had stopped beating, and perhaps it had. She would have believed then that a person’s heart could stop beating because a few words had broken it, just as, an instant later, when it thudded back to life and her ears burned with its overheated flow, she would have believed that her heart had shut down in order to stanch her embarrassment. Claudette could feel the muscles in her body already moving steps ahead of her, leaping up to her feet, walking away. But she remained on the sand, seated, as Eileen kept telling her about the Vision and the people from another world who traveled in gleaming spacecrafts and the perfect society they would create here on Earth thanks to the message, or Message, that woman named Sophie Rhodes had received nearly five years ago, around the same time her brother got his own message as well. It was all so confusing, really confusing, and to top it off, Eileen told her that all the hubbub around flying saucers was because they were coming from their distant planet to change our lives. One day they would land and speak to us. Or by magnetic force take us into the sky with them. Who were they? That part didn’t seem to matter. Just saucer people, like anyone else but from another part of the Milky Way.
Oh, how foolish of her to believe that Eileen would be the one, how stupid to spend all that time dreaming of the two of them together, fingers intertwined, facing life inseparable, how outlandishly dumb of her to think of Eileen in her bed, to think of her body, the warmth of her there on a chilly night. Because now all she wanted was to be away from this strange woman, away from her intense eyes and the words falling from her ill mouth. “You’re pulling my leg,” she said, interrupting.
Eileen’s chin tucked toward a shoulder. “Not at all.”
“Maybe you could tell me more about this tomorrow,” she said. She was so embarrassed at her own words, felt so rude for not taking Eileen seriously. But she needed to get away. “I’m just so tired, it’s not making sense.”
“I’ve upset you,” said Eileen.
“No, I’m not upset. I’m only tired.” And then, seeing that Eileen didn’t believe this at all, she added, “I’m sorry. It’s been a long day. Tell me more about it tomorrow, will you?”
At home half an hour later with all the lightbulbs on and the radio playing Rosemary Clooney’s “Half as Much,” she realized there might be no tomorrow, at least as far as Eileen was concerned. Over the last month, she’d let herself imagine Eileen as a sort of savior, a romantic dream brought here by unseen forces to change her life forever, to deliver to her that partner she’d thought she’d never find. She had never dared, had convinced herself she wouldn’t dare. And then these weeks had shown her she could. She’d grown comfortable with her, making small talk at the restaurant and walking along the beach on Tuesday afternoons. Her very presence in Del Mar felt to Claudette like a breathless escape from some other person’s story, some plan outlined by a stranger. She’d let herself believe her days as a waitress at Phil’s Roadside Café were numbered. They would live together, she’d imagined; they would sit on a sofa before a big picture window with Beethoven playing on the hi-fi, their legs folded on the cushions, knees pointed at each other, the world aglow. Together without anyone paying them any mind, just like the women she’d seen last autumn. But then Eileen had told her about this Vision nonsense, and it was like she’d been sitting there on the beach making up a story meant to wreck everything, a gag set to make a mockery of their future.
And what future? Really, she thought, pacing as the radio announcer began the night’s sign-off, the national anthem playing faintly behind him, what future? She had no idea if Eileen felt anything of what she felt for her. Hair brushing against her neck? A few smiles? Her eyes lingering? That sense of heat in the air when she was around? The woman could be like this with everyone. She could, being mad for some UFO gibberish, simply be walking around in a constant euphoric state, practically foaming at the mouth. And Claudette, knowing nothing about romance, never having acted on what she’d always felt to be true, had misread a madwoman’s attention as an extended, slow-moving pickup.
She’d made something of the same mistake before, with Philippa, in another life. To Claudette’s eyes, she was the only beautiful girl at St. Anne’s, with her Parmigianino neck and her long white face, her wide eyes and pointed chin, her broad shoulders and slim form. It was a wonder to Claudette that Philippa could be so incredibly smart as well. She was always at the head of the class, always getting the sisters’ attention, always saying just the right thing when a question sailed through the room. And such grace. Compared to Claudette’s short, uncurved frame, to her flat-footed walk, Philippa moved about like a ballet dancer skittering over a canvas of pure silk. How painfully her heart lurched when Philippa’s eyes fell on her own. How terrified were her unstill hands. In the cramped dark library with its single window she had appeared in the dust-glistened beam of sunlight with her eyes ablaze, looking back at Claudette as if she were measuring her up. After a year of her looks and all the dreams she’d dreamed alone and awake of Philippa touching her, now she did, now her hand reached out and grazed her cheek. A thunderstorm might as well have struck over their heads. But then she said, “Your face. It looks just like a boy’s. Like my brother’s.” And she’d never spoken to her again.
This old rejection, not even rejection, this old embarrassment, this old wound, surfaced like a fish in opaque water. She hadn’t seen it coming until the light of her mind struck its glistening flesh, and its sudden presence emptied her out cold. She threw herself onto her bed and sighed, yes, sighed, like a foolish girl in the movies, because that’s what she was now, a foolish girl, and there was no denying—
Except that another idea surfaced just as quickly and sent her upright, and then all the way onto her feet. She didn’t have to be a foolish girl. She could go to her. If she loved Eileen, which in truth she’d known now since the beginning, known the way one knows an oven is hot to the touch, then she didn’t have to stay herself, she didn’t have to have doubts, she didn’t have to hold on to all her notions about what can and can’t be true. If she loved Eileen, then this message, or Vision, was all secondary. Wasn’t it? Don’t people sacrifice things, after all, don’t they sacrifice all they have, when it comes to this unmistakable need, this desperation? Isn’t that love? Isn’t that the idea? She’d seen it a hundred times in the movies. It had to be.
But wait. Hold on. So she would throw out Claudette? All of the old Claudette? And be who? She pictured herself as St. Bartholomew holding his old skin in Michelangelo’s painting, something she’d seen in one of those books in the library at St. Anne’s. Yes, who would she be? Could she simply fake it, tell Eileen she believed in the Vision, if it meant being near her? Could she live with herself? And would anyone buy it? She wasn’t, after all, a very good actress. Even for being named after one. But that didn’t matter, no, it didn’t matter at all anymore, because she was already wrapping a shawl over her shoulders and grabbing her purse. She was already out the door.
Walking down Ocean Avenue past midnight, without a soul around, in the dark with only streetlamps and the moon and the stars and that endless hush-hush of water from down at the beach, she felt prickly and goosefleshed, chillier than she should, and as the muffled sound of voices neared, as the outline of Phil’s Roadside Café took form and color and then was upon her, next to her, nearly behind her, it became clear that a song had been raised in Eileen’s church, a plaintive, rhythmic song, a dirge. From the high windows of the metal building, once some plank of war manufacturing, light sprayed out like the beams of a dozen lighthouses. How had she not seen such a glow? It seemed to her impossible that this could happen, that something could be made manifest before your eyes as if you weren’t already looking where it would have been. But there it was. Light shining out onto the street and the slope and then the beach, light on the gray-seeming water. Light, nearer, on the form of a man standing on the slope between the restaurant and Eileen’s church, a stout and tall man with his arms crossed, a man she thought at first was facing the church but who in fact was glaring right at her and suddenly near, though he couldn’t have moved a foot. “Phil,” she said, almost without breath in her throat. “What are you doing out so late?”