The Secret Lives of People in Love

by Simon Van Booy

  I wade through purple sea daffodils and poppies. There are clusters of cyclamen, nodding—urging me to the highest point of land. I once told Samantha how the ancient Greeks referred to cyclamen as chelonion, because their tubers are shaped like turtles. She had kissed me and said, “The world laughs in flowers.”

  As I reach the pinnacle, the skin on my neck and arms begins to blister. I am as close to the sun as the island will allow, and flowers give way to dry and hollow stems of yellow. The soil has turned to bloodred dust.

  As I buckle to my knees and then lay on my stomach with my chin embedded in the crimson earth, I can see a carpet of flowers lining the hillside, a gradual descent in color.

  And then, as I close my eyes, the wind—after skimming along the sea, peeling its salty freshness—races up between the wildflowers, slowing as it gathers the weight of their bouquet. When the wind finally comes upon me and inhabits my shirt like ice, I inhale the memory of Samantha.

  If I were to fly home without seeing Samantha, by the time my plane arrived in Los Angeles she would be married. Diane, in the wedding dress, would have boarded her bus, and the homeless man would have sold his cans.

  Up here on this forgotten elbow of land, I have nothing to lose, and though I am more afraid now than I have ever been, I am relieved, I am unburdened, I am ascending.

  SOME BLOOM IN DARKNESS

  for Eugène Atget and Erik Satie

  Since witnessing a violent incident at the railway station some months earlier, Saboné had not sketched a thing. He had not sketched the pigeons that dripped from the ledges of the Museum, nor had he shuffled through the Museum, where he liked to sit and watch people rather than paintings. Since bearing witness to the violent incident some months earlier, Saboné often became breathless with anxiety, as though he were the perpetrator of a terrible crime that he could not recall.

  Saboné found a genuine pleasure in small things. He had lived with his mother in an unpretentious suburb of Paris until one day she died, and Saboné thought it best to move and make a fresh start. Since then, he had regressed into a shadow existence of adult life that seemed without beginning or end.

  Over the years, he had become quite skilled at sketching things. And as he aged, Saboné realized that he was like his sketches—that it was possible to be alive and not exist at the very same moment.

  The small apartment Saboné found after his mother’s death overlooked a fountain. Water bubbled through the mouth of a child. Saboné’s evenings were quiet, but for the crackle of a fire in winter and the sound of his fingers turning the pages of books. However, not long after his mother died, a wild and ungovernable desire grew inside him.

  He hoped that by accident—perhaps on one of his long walks—he might meet a young lady of similar circumstance with whom he could spend Sunday afternoons and meet after work for large cold-platter suppers on the noisy rue du Docteur Blanche.

  But this desire to meet a young lady—this sentiment, which drew him out to the cafés on the avenues—was accompanied by such an equally powerful feeling of utter insincerity that these desires, which brought welcome respite from his shadow existence, slowly migrated like a flock of rare birds.

  His life went back to normal until one day after almost ten years he witnessed a violent incident at the railway station where he worked as a simple clerk. Those desires suddenly returned, and soon enough, Saboné’s eyes burned for the girl who stood in a shopwindow on his walk to work. She was very pretty, and Saboné assumed he had passed her many times before on his early morning walk to the railway station, but for some reason, he had never noticed her.

  In addition to this new passion for a girl, Saboné caught himself doing odd things, like talking to birds and removing his hat whenever he passed statues in the gardens.

  For days, he held the image of this shopgirl in his mind, carrying it around like an egg until he could get home and escape into sleep where it hatched into a fantasy.

  Without constant vigilance, Saboné slipped into daydreams. After his mother died, his daydreams began to include voices, which Saboné concluded were just overheard conversations being replayed by a decadent subconscious.

  Some daydreams seemed to want to swallow him up for good. Like wild horses, they would follow him in the day and then wander the plains of his dream life, but always upon him—until he would barely remember his own name.

  In his top dresser drawer, Saboné kept the sketches he thought were acceptable. He possessed two in total: one of a door with elaborate rusting hinges, and the other of a cat he had once seen peering up into the street from under a drain.

  Every Friday, the girl in the shopwindow would have a new outfit and be standing in a different way.

  Saboné often daydreamed while perched in his ticket box at the railway station.

  “Monsieur!” the customers would cry, and Saboné would suddenly realize that it was a rainy afternoon and that he was not an Egyptian king, nor had he been sold into slavery by mistake.

  The girl in the shopwindow who so preoccupied Saboné’s thoughts was not really a girl because she lacked a human heart. She was made of wood. From a distance, however, she may well have been mistaken for one. And from the way she peered into the street through her glass eyes, Saboné decided that she might as well be a girl, because he believed that girls peered longingly and had secrets.

  Saboné’s small apartment room, where he would return each night after dispensing tickets at the station, was not big enough for two, but if she were able to come home with him, he supposed that there was certainly enough room for her to sit down quietly (if she wished to).

  Saboné’s face was a gray tower with a child peering from the two black windows for eyes. His was the sort of man who would suddenly stop walking and poke objects with his walking stick.

  Before he began to notice the girl in the shopwindow, Saboné experienced a violent incident at the station. He had been up all night dreaming and had awakened exhausted.

  All morning, through the cold glass of his ticket window at the station, Saboné was so drowsy that he had barely been able to read the schedule, to which several minor adjustments were to be made owing to expected bad weather. Instead, with dreamy irreverence, the overtired Saboné began to sketch a woman who since buying her ticket had been sitting still not very far from his booth.

  Saboné’s hand glided across the paper, making the tiniest lines. Soon, they began to resemble a person, and with only a few strokes more the image began to tremble before him, as though he had tricked some part of her soul into inhabiting the picture. He admired it and then folded it several times before dropping it into the wastepaper basket as if it were the wax wrapper from some tasteless baguette.

  When an arm of sunlight stretched through the glass roof of the station and engulfed her, Saboné smiled, but his mouth showed no trace of it.

  At several minutes to twelve, a short, well-dressed man approached the woman, but he did not sit down. They began to chat, and Saboné wondered what the man wanted, or whether he was an old acquaintance relaying some story that had filled the void between their last meeting.

  In the same way a sudden noise outside his room would release Saboné momentarily from his dreams, the short man clenched a fist and struck the woman squarely on the nose. He straightened his tie and looked as though he wanted to say something, but people were suddenly standing up, so he walked away quickly and quietly. The woman did not make a sound, but fought to control the stream of blood with a lacy handkerchief, which was soon crimson. People stared. An old man called for a gendarme.

  Saboné began to shake. If he left the ticket office, the door was fixed so that he would not be able to get back in. If he asked her into the ticket box, there was a danger that someone would see and he would be dismissed—and Saboné had never been dismissed from anything, nor had he ever spoken in anger or raised his voice.

  When the bleeding stopped, her eyes were swollen from crying and her nose was the color of a plum.r />
  At fifteen minutes to one, with the handkerchief still pressed to her face, she stood up and left the station. Saboné strained to catch every last glimpse of her before she turned a corner and was gone. From the bundle she carried, she appeared to be a common girl, and Saboné wondered if she were even able to read.

  Despite the demands of an old woman with an ear trumpet who wanted to know if she could leave Paris for a month but come back at the same time, Saboné reached under his desk and fished the sketch of the woman from the wastepaper basket. Without any flicker of emotion, he slipped it into his pocket as though it were evidence of the crime he had committed but had no memory of.

  He explained to the old woman that she could leave on a train that departed Paris at eight minutes to two, but that it was impossible to return at the same time.

  “Impossible!” she affirmed to the queue of people behind her, as though she had always suspected it.

  By the time the girl in the shopwindow occupied a place in most of Saboné’s daydreams, it had been two weeks since the violent incident, and the memory of it was like the memory of a dream—but it was heavier than a dream and had somehow anchored itself to Saboné. He would often think he saw her at the station. Perhaps by drawing her he had bound their shadows together—like two nights without a day between them.

  When passing the girl in the shopwindow on the rue du Docteur Blanche became something Saboné looked forward to—even more so than sketching pigeons or eating supper beside the fountain—he grew afraid and found an alternative walk to the station through the city gardens. He didn’t want to lose himself completely. Without her staring down at him from the window every morning and night, he could get some time to decide what to do. But Saboné began to wake at irregular hours of the night and think of her, like certain flowers in the park, flowers that will only bloom in darkness.

  Saboné had one friend—a man who lived in the apartment below. His name was Oncle, and he was so large that he barely fit through the double doors of his own apartment. Saboné had never seen him venture beyond the fountain. Oncle would sob bitterly in the night as though his girth hid a swirling ocean of shame.

  Saboné and Oncle exchanged cards at Christmas and often left notes for one another to acknowledge changes in the weather.

  Oncle wore loose, shiny gowns and velvet carpet slippers with a gold “O” stitched on to each one. His only request in the friendship was that Saboné bring home any spare or used train tickets, which Oncle liked to arrange very prettily in cloth-covered books.

  Oncle knew the train timetables by heart, and it often occurred to Saboné that Oncle would have been a far superior ticket dispenser than he if his friend were able to leave the apartment.

  One wet Sunday afternoon, after a lunch of cold meat and beer, Oncle puffed on a cigar and mulled over Saboné’s predicament regarding the girl in the shop. Finally, with rain upon the window like a thousand eyes, Oncle said sensibly, “Go into the shop, Saboné, and politely enquire.”

  The thought of entering the shop filled Saboné with such fear that, following lunch with Oncle, he immediately went to bed and was carried away by dreams, like a leaf falling from a branch into a slow river.

  He awoke in the early hours of the morning, and although it was still dark, his room glowed with the soul of the snow that lay outside upon the streets and smoky roofs.

  Saboné slid into his robe and crept to the window.

  The courtyard and the fountain below were in a deep sleep. Saboné imagined bringing her back to his apartment. He imagined carrying her across the wedding cake snow of Paris and then her face when she saw the fountain.

  The gray city was completely smothered by snow the next morning. The shop bell rang loudly as Saboné entered, kicking snow off his shoes as he went.

  There were racks of dresses. There were feathered hats upon the walls like exotic birds. Inside the shop, there was no sound.

  As Saboné made his way over to the window to see the girl, something appeared from between a dark rack of furs.

  Saboné was not sure if it was a woman or a painted doll, but a small trembling creature suddenly appeared before him. The woman’s lips were bloodred, and her skin was very white.

  “Yes,” the woman stated as though answering a question. She raised her cane at Saboné. “You have come to see the furs, have you?”

  Coffee was brewing in the back of the shop.

  “Well,” she said, “do you see anything that pleases you?”

  A thick paste of makeup moved when her mouth did.

  “I’ve been noticing the girl in the window on my way to work every morning, Madame,” Saboné remarked.

  “I’ll bet you have,” the woman barked, “and you’re not the first young man to politely enquire.” Then breathlessly, “Reminds you of someone, does she?”

  The floor of his soul creaked, as though in the silence that followed Saboné’s quivering lips imparted the secrets of his loneliness, which even he did not understand.

  “Who, the girl?” he said in a high-pitched voice.

  They both turned to the window and watched the snow as it soundlessly found its place upon the earth.

  “What is one to do?” the woman remarked. “The city gardens are quite impassable at this time of year.”

  “Did you know there are flowers there that bloom in darkness?” Saboné asked.

  “But who goes to the gardens at night?” She snorted.

  Saboné felt anger spread through his body like fire but said quietly, “I don’t suppose anyone does.”

  As he stepped into the street, he lost his footing and jarred his head against the ledge of the shopwindow. A few spots of blood appeared in the snow. Saboné bent down in awe. His very own blood lay before him. It had been inside him for almost four decades. It had passed through his body and lubricated his dreams. The object of his desires peered coldly from the window at the few drops. He knelt down as more drops collected in the snow, and then he fingered the soft gash in his head. His forehead turned numb from the pain, and every few steps Saboné looked back at the red dots—at the eyes of his soul in the snow of the street.

  When he arrived at the ticket office—late for the first time in thirteen years—the head ticket dispenser inspected him from above his spectacles. Saboné felt a line of blood warm his cheek.

  “My dear boy—you’ve had a spill.”

  By evening, the station was almost deserted, and nearing suppertime a man approached Saboné’s window and asked for a ticket to “anywhere.”

  “Where is that exactly?” Saboné asked.

  “I can’t say,” the man said, without any flicker of emotion.

  Saboné thought of it that night in bed.

  At approximately four o’clock in the morning, Saboné sat up and went to the window. The moon was bright but expressionless. He dressed and went outside. Then he walked to the city gardens.

  In moonlight, the statues moved their eyes and glowed. Saboné was not fully convinced that he was awake but wondered why he had never before swum through snow and moonlight—and why, after so many years of awkwardness, he suddenly felt as though he had found his home—and that perhaps he was a character in the dream of Paris.

  Most of the plants in the garden balanced tiny burdens of snow on their tops. Although Saboné knew that it was winter and he would not see any in bloom, he realized that he had been mistaken, that it was not in darkness in which some flowers bloomed, but in moonlight.

  He scooped up some of the unbroken snow and chewed it. Then he laughed. How silly he had been to fall in love with a mannequin. Silly, he thought, but understandable, considering his circumstances.

  As the path widened, Saboné noticed someone sitting on a bench, and he stopped walking.

  Then he recognized her and recalled the image of her bloodied handkerchief, and the spots of blood that followed her across the station to the platform—the eyes of her soul.

  Her presence convinced Saboné that he must be dr
eaming, because she was so very white. When he got close, her eyes, which were wide open, did not follow his movement.

  At last he reached out for her, but she did not move. He stroked her face with his fingers, including the nose, which, although white and free from any storm beneath, was completely frozen. Crumbs of snow that had collected in her hair were still intact.

  He knelt down in the snow at her feet and remembered the sight of his very own blood outside of the shop.

  He pulled himself up onto the bench. He reached around her with his arm and moved her closer. He squeezed her until he felt the bones beneath. Then he settled down and became quite still. He found the drawing of her in his jacket pocket and unfolded it. Then he put his arm around her again and wished that everyone he had ever met was somehow able to see him. It was some time before they were moved.

  DISTANT SHIPS

  I think of Leo very often these days. I think of him tonight as I sort packages for a truck that’s headed for London. It is so cold in the warehouse that we wear our breath like beards. The office sent down a box of gloves last week, but I enjoy the feel of cardboard against my old cracked hands. I have worked for the Royal Mail for almost three decades now. I thought they would let me go when I stopped speaking twenty years ago, but they’ve been good to me, and when I retire in ten years I’ll be given a state pension and a humble send-off. I enjoy my work. It’s the only reason I leave the house, except for my walks on the beach.

  Each package has somewhere to go and the contents remain a mystery. Occasionally I’ll find a box where the address has been written by a child. I used to put these boxes to the side until the end of my shift so I could study the penmanship and compare it to Leo’s. In a child’s handwriting, language is exposed as the pained and crooked medium it really is. Since losing Leo, these packages are like shards of glass.