All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  We sat in an overheated room with the fire chief, several detectives and officers, a woman who said she was Lugosi’s girlfriend, a Vietnamese bricklayer who had come face-to-face with Costa as he hauled suitcases full of our things out the front door, hauled them out to be fenced and melted down by some scumbag uptown swine who fed off junkie break-and-enter kids…melting down our bindings of love…and the woman who had seen the smoke and turned in the alarm, a stout woman who was the desk clerk at the Waverly Hotel on Spa-dina Avenue where Lugosi had rented a room, another woman with confetti in her hair who sat beating a tin cup…

  As we went up the wide marble stairs to wait outside Courtroom H, a courtroom next to the marriage bureau, I was told several things by several people: that when looking for Costa, two officers had cornered a man in a cappuccino bar on College Street and the man had flattened them both, driving one cop into the street through a plate-glass window…the detectives confessed that they felt very sheepish about this; also, Lugosi had checked into the Waverly Hotel before breaking into the house and he had checked in under my name; the house had been cased by a man, a light-skinned black man, named Bo…and Bo – who was known to the cops – had probably been in the house at least once before it was hit; Bo apparently had his own business cards – “Surveyor and Estimator” – and would work for any “interests” who would hire him; Lugosi had come back into the hotel after leaving the house in the morning, waving a blowtorch, threatening to set fire to the hotel “just like he had torched a house on Sullivan Street;” several men were waiting in a blue car at the hotel and got into C. Jane”s car without Lugosi and drove off; Costa had made several trips to the fence who operated out of a Dunk-A-Donut shop on lower Spadina Avenue during the night using C. Jane’s car; Lugosi’s old girlfriend, saying he had done her grievous harm, not only wanted to testify to that harm but also said she could explain why he had savaged our house: it was all, she said, because of an incident in August when I was seen taking the ferry to the park on the island in the city harbour, and Lugosi, who worked with a punk rock band, had spoken to me and I had snubbed him: “He said he would get you for that.” The only problem was, I hadn’t been on the ferry to the island for four years and in August I had been writing poetry and handicapping under a monkey puzzle tree in Saratoga.

  As the afternoon passed, as we waited to be called into the courtroom to at last look into the faces of the two men, to say to them and to the court what we had been through, what we had lost inside ourselves, what music and private liturgies had been stilled, we listened dryly to the sullying confidences of the street while very young couples – most of them black and surprisingly alone, without friends or family – strutted by, beaming, untarnished and newly wed. The woman with the confetti in her hair beat on her tin cup. Then, after all the witnesses had been heard in the closed courtroom and the afternoon had waned, we sat alone on the bench, uncalled, in silence: the doors opened and Sergeant Hamel, looking pleased, explained that everything had worked out to his satisfaction. “The two of you are unnecessary. It’s being sent to trial.” Lugosi was led to the elevator; slender, head bowed, penitential; Costa, less shrewd, smirked with bravado and stared brazenly at C. Jane. The elevator doors closed, and so, with nothing left to do in the shadow light of the Old City Hall corridors, we went Christmas shopping.

  “This is all lunatic,” I said to C. Jane. “Everybody’s doing what they’re doing without ever asking why.”

  “Because Y is a crooked letter,” she said.

  On Christmas Eve, after we were told that the sanded hardwood floors in the house had been stained, we stood at midnight in the vestibule, pleased with the wet, dark sheen. “It’ll go beautifully with the piano,” C. Jane said.

  On Christmas Day, though there was no furniture in the house, we moved out of the hotel, leaving the waterfront behind. Two old Chinese women stood in the lane watching us unload books and papers and clothes. The women said nothing. One was wearing a T-shirt under her open jacket. There was lettering on the shirt:

  IN FREEDOM

  LUCK

  BIRD

  I realized that in our four years of living in Chinatown not one Chinese neighbour had ever spoken to me, not even the people who ran the corner Mom and Pop store, who sold me cream and detergent and paper towels. We had handed dimes and quarters back and forth, but I didn’t even know if they could speak English. I was angry at Lugosi and Costa but loathed the political culture that encouraged people like the two old women to close in on themselves in a language from another country. Getting to know such neighbours would be like climbing a monkey puzzle tree.

  LIMBO LIKE ME

  Separate trials took place in February. The Crown Attorney, a pert young woman, was eager: she had a solid case; break and enter, theft and arson, fingerprints and a witness. She thought she could get a substantial sentence. A plea bargain was struck: Lugosi would not contest his guilt if I would agree to five years. “Yes,” I said, “I suppose five years will do.” (But what, I wondered to C. Jane, did five years mean? – What did this curious attachment of penitential time to a crime mean?…Not the inflicting of corporal pain, but the religious notion of “serving time” in a monkish cell; and I recalled the idiotic notions of my childhood catechism and the confessional – two years off in the purgatorial fires for…five years off in purgatory for…we were pale souls smiling wanly, innocent but sullied by an eyeless firebug desert god who was always itching for a final conflagration.)

  We sat in an almost empty courtroom. Two men I’d seen around the Waverly Hotel sat beside me, and a lone woman, and a detective. Lugosi sat in a box, head down. I looked at Lugosi for a while and felt little or nothing: no witnesses were called before Judge David Humphrey. Police photographs of the house were entered as evidence of wilful havoc and the seven fires. At the court’s request, I had written a note about what it was like being a victim. It was for the judge to read. Time, I told the judge, was our punishment, too. Guilty of nothing, we were being punished. Time was the real bond between criminals and victims: “Having survived three months’ dislocation we realize how disruptive the devastation has been…the endless sorting through drawings, papers – charred, destroyed, these are the tissues of our life, our spirit. We have been robbed of time, it is a robbery that goes on and on…Creative time, insights – those fleeting moments of inspiration – they are gone forever…The dispiriting loss of time – and we cannot help each other – for C. Jane, as an artist, has suffered exactly the same loss as I have. We are doing time, and we get no time off for good behaviour. The terrible irony is that these two men may well do less time than we will. For us, the loss of time spirals…each week implies a month of lost writing, sculpting…every two months a half-year, a half-year two years, a year will become five. Together, we may do more dead time than they will. There is the real crime committed against us…” The judge expressed his stern dismay; C. Jane said nothing; Lugosi said nothing. He was sentenced to five years.

  A few weeks later, Costa was tried. His defence was hapless: he said that all the damage had been done by Lugosi after he’d left the house for the last time at nine o’clock in the morning. The fire alarm had been turned in at 9:03. That meant Lugosi had savaged the house and set seven fires on three floors in under three minutes. The judge shook his head, embarrassed by the ineptness of the argument. Costa was a young immigrant, a crack addict, a child of the moon plant, his life ruined, on his way to the brutality of prison. I wanted to say something but had nothing to say. The judge told Costa that he was sentenced to two years in a dark clock, the penitentiary.

  BETWEEN THE STRUCK KEY AND THE STRING

  “At last,” C. Jane said, “I feel safe.” She stopped looking for addicts in the windows at night where she’d see only her own reflection. We took no pleasure in the sentencing. It had to be: the arson demanded it; the police – for their own morale – needed it; as victims we were witnesses to it; but we took no pleasure. Vengeance, like jealousy, is a second-
rate emotion, which is why I told the Crown Attorney that I had always found the old Jewish tribal stories of bloodletting and sacrifice – “an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” – so twisted. “Esther was a murderous lunatic,” I said. “Esther who?” the Crown Attorney asked. I was no pacifist, but vengeance gave me no pleasure, no satisfaction. We felt only a hollow in the house, and the need to fill it with laughter, meditation and music. But every morning, all day, there was only repairing, hammering.

  Drilling.

  Waiting for workmen to show up.

  Waiting. Life as repair.

  Realizing the repairmen were padding their bills.

  “What d’you care, Mac, it’s all covered in the insurance.” Expediency. Grease for the wheels. Nothing done on time, time meaning nothing, till in the summer we went to Rob Lowrey’s to see the piano: it had become, in our imaginations, more than scorched fiddleback veneer and charred legs; after opening the lid on its inner parts, so scarred and warped and twisted by fire and supposedly beyond repair – it had become the embodiment of our own renewal. Mahogany could be turned and trimmed, as we had turned ourselves out for dinner every night at the waterfront hotel, but only we knew the ashes, the soot we could still feel on the covers of books, taste on our breaths. So the piano had to be cleansed and brought back to life. The stillness that lies between the struck key and the string, the stillness that contains the note, had to sound.

  Rob Lowrey, who had said in dismay that restoration would require a redeeming miracle, greeted us with a subdued eagerness, a caution that comes from dealing with damage. But he had a solid, rounded playfulness as he moved quickly and soundlessly into the aroma of varnish and glue in his workroom, standing in his white apron, obviously relishing his young workers’ bashful way of laying their hands on wood. There were men at several pianos, each striking a note, listening, head half-cocked, then malleting a tuning peg into a pin plank, threading thin wire through the peg…slowly tightening, tuning the treble and then the heavier bass strings…twenty-four tons of tension in those strings, all our anxiety struggling toward the inner harmony that is always the mystery of the piano, the piano in tune with itself.

  I stood staring into the hollow guts of our piano as if I were looking back through a jagged hole into the months that had passed, the veneer peeled down to the glue-stained frame and new wood held by vises, the bridges and ribs, the pin planks all laid out…and Lowrey, smiling, said, “September. We’ve had to send the legs to Cleveland. No one here can carve those old legs…”

  “September?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll play like a charm.”

  “I’ll have a party, then, open up the house.”

  “Why not?”

  We felt safe: the lane and the garden were floodlit at night, the garage door could be opened only from inside, the garage wall was rebuilt, all the glass doors had jamb-bars, the rooms had been wired to an alarm system of motion detectors, and we were now four: we had got a young, powerful golden retriever, and called him No Name Jive, and we’d got a regal Irish setter, C-Jam Blues. They slept with us and whimpered if they weren’t petted but snarled at any sound outside the door and chewed our shoes as we retrieved our losses.

  We had been fortunate to have a good man – fair and accomplished – as our insurance adjuster: a man with close-cropped hair and alert eyes, John Morris. His efficient cheerfulness puzzled us: more than for a priest, it seemed to me, disasters came like tumbleweed across Morris’s desk…an endless array of mishaps and malevolence that he had to adjust. Perhaps, I said to C. Jane, that is what a priest really is or should be: an adjuster. In his middle years, he had heard every slick story and dealt with every scam, yet, for all his rigour, he had been sympathetic, and the insurance company had accepted all his recommendations. We would never recover all our losses, but the company was going to honour their obligations without argument.

  TO EREWHON AND BACK

  But as we prepared to drive south again to Saratoga, to renew the ritual of daiquiris in the garden and the saddling of the horses in the walking ring, and the blind man, our insurance company, Trafalgar, announced it would not renew its coverage, shedding us, leaving us completely vulnerable. So be it, I thought. Our agent tried to make arrangements with other companies. To her astonishment, to our rage and sudden fear, no one would insure us. Not Trafalgar, not Wellington, not Guardian, not Laurentian, not any company approached. At the same time, the mortgage company wrote asking for confirmation of fire insurance, a condition of the mortgage. Without insurance the mortgage would be called. Never mind the blind man. We would be broken by debt, driven out of the house. “Because,” I was told, “you’re a controversial writer, even I remember what you said about the settlements on the West Bank, the bigots in Belfast.” This was worse than any street thuggery. Even our insurance adjuster, unbelieving, tried to get us insurance with his contacts: the answer was No. There was nothing to be done. Though I had paid house insurance into the industry for twenty-five years, as soon as I was hit – as soon as what I was insured against happened – those companies all closed down on me. Insurance men weren’t low-life junkies, strung out and hooked on crack; no, I raged at C. Jane, they were the blue suits, the actuaries money-crunching the odds on death, shrewd men who were kissing cousins to the California auto insurer for Budget Rent-a-Car – who still, a year after the Audi had been compacted to the sound of Sing, Sing, Sing, owed us $1,200, and still they refused to pay, stalling and stalling until time, the statute of limitations, the clock would run out. These men were bigger sharks than any dipso break-and-enter kid: these were men who had earned their pinstripes, men who intended to leave us twisting in the wind, defenceless. I knew where I was. I was in the land of Erewhon, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (Nowhere misspelled backwards), where “ill-luck of any kind, or even ill-treatment at the hands of others, is considered an offence against society, inasmuch as it makes people uncomfortable to hear of it. Loss of fortune, therefore…is punished hardly less severely than physical delinquency.” We had committed an offence by becoming victims. The insurers were going to punish us in ways harsher than any druggies had ever dreamed of…the motives behind their institutional malignancy were clear. “The insurance companies are protecting themselves,” a broker with pale, almost colourless eyes said with disarming openness. “If you weren’t who you are, there’d be no problem.”

  “If I wasn’t who I am,” I said to C. Jane as we drove past the monument to all the dead airmen, “I’d blow the bastards up.”

  Then our adjuster found us a sensible, elderly, experienced woman in the insurance business – who reminded me of the way good bank managers used to be: she did not have an MBA from a business college and she was unafraid of her own judgment – and the problem was solved.

  “What’s required is a blind eye,” she said.

  “Of course I understand…I’m a nobody,” I said, and we both laughed.

  She wrote on the form: “No known notoriety.” I let out a raw laugh, a loud Haw, down the snout.

  “How come you don’t think like these other gonzos around here?” I asked.

  “Actually,” she said, “I was not born around here. I was born outside Munich, on the edge of Dachau, but that’s an-other story.” The woman winked. “They make very good porcelain in Dachau, you know.”

  The house was insured by Chubb.

  BEYOND FIELDS OF ASPHODEL

  On a September Saturday afternoon, two men levered the legless and lidless body of our piano onto a sling and lowered it out of a truck onto a trolley and rolled the trolley into the house. They malleted the pins that hold the legs and set the piano in the bay window, all the light catching the grain, so that Rob Lowrey could tune the strings, and then in the early evening, Doug Richardson, a friend for more than thirty years, came in. I had known him back in the days when I’d hung out with a woman called EveLynne in a black dance hall close to Augusta Avenue, the Porter’s Hall, run by a gap-toothed man called Kennie
Holdup, and Doug had played his horn there, and now he played flute, too, and he had a pianist with him, Connie Maynard. “You get to christen the keys,” I said, as Connie sat down and worked through several chord progressions, and then stood up, beaming: “Very nice. Beautiful sound. Quiet touch.”

  “Quiet, I like quiet,” Doug, who had an impish wit, said. “I hate noise, noisy cars most of all. Expensive cars are noisy. Who’d want a Ferrari? How could you ever hold up a bank in a Ferrari?”

  The house was beginning to fill with friends carrying flowers and wine, crowding into conversation in all the rooms, friends who were writers and newshounds and gamblers, editors and the two carpenters who had meticulously trimmed the house, professors and maître d’s and film producers, and after C. Jane said, “This’ll be strange, being hosts at our own resurrection,” I drifted happily from room to room pouring wine, all the slashes on the walls healed, while hearing – I was sure – each note unlocked from the stillness between struck key and string. I introduced Sergeant Hamel to the crowd. He bowed in a courtly way from the waist. Doug, mischievous as ever, stopped honking on his sax and spread-eagled himself beside the door. “All niggers up against the wall,” he cried. Everyone laughed and the laughter was an acknowledgment that there is a little larceny in all of us, and in the cops, too. I had given Sergeant Hamel my new book of poems and he said he wanted to hear something said aloud because he didn’t know how to read poetry. “It’s not like reading a report,” he said. With Doug and Connie on the piano backing me up, I chanted in the voice of Sesephus the Crack King, a whacked-out hustler:

  Get down, get down,

  you got to get down

  on your hands and knees

  and keep your ear close to the ground.

  There are druggies

  who honey-dip around parking lots

  playing the clown

  instead of the clarinet, looking for

  peddlers of high renown