Other People's Love Affairs: Stories

by D. Wystan Owen

  “Do you find yourself lonely?”

  She didn’t know. “I think perhaps I’m not that kind of person.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m used to being alone.”

  “So am I.”

  “I’m sorry about the smell in the hallway.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. I’m grateful, in fact. We’ve had such oppressive sobriety here.” He took another toke from the grass. “And in any event, Mrs. Ridgewe stinks worse than you ever could. Those horrible fish every morning.”

  She laughed; she’d begun to feel rather stoned. “Now who’s the one being naughty,” she said.

  She passed the old man, on the street or the strand. From a distance, she would recognize him, but he never knew her until they were close. Saturdays, he was in line at the church; the baker offered him stale or burned rolls. Once she saw him trying to fish; twice she saw him eat from a bin. At home, thoughts of him preoccupied her, over dinner or when she was trying to sleep.

  She came upon him in front of the bank. People milled about, awaiting tables at Hyde Pantry. She scrawled a note and handed it to him.

  I can feed you on Wednesday at Mercy, it said, the day chosen because Beatrice had meetings at noon, and instinctively Eleanor knew Beatrice wouldn’t approve.

  And so he came to the courtyard where families gathered to visit their sick. She was waiting for him there with a tray. He took it. There was lunch enough only for one, and he did not ask her about that, perhaps having guessed that she was giving him hers. There was ice cream. He ate it and wiped his hands on his trousers, then peeled back the lid on a tin of fruit salad. One of his feet was touching the pram, his toe lifted up and propped on a wheel. In that posture he resembled a father out for an afternoon at the park, his foot there to hold a napping child in place, or to worry it gently if ever it fussed.

  “Have you found any treasures lately?” she said.

  “Once I found a diamond ring on the strand.”

  She told how she’d nearly been engaged in the city. He looked up from his tray at her, puzzled.

  “Aren’t you a Sister?” he said.

  She laughed and covered her face with a hand. A heat was rising into her ears, a strange sadness settling into her chest. She knew that she was hurting his feelings, so she gathered herself.

  “Have you still got it? The ring, I mean. The one from the strand.”

  “Turned it in. A person’d hate to lose that.” He seemed surprised at the question, surprised she would think he’d done anything else.

  “It was good of you.”

  “I got a reward. Two hundred. I was king for a day.”

  “Still, it was good.”

  “Ah, well.” His expression was pleased and embarrassed. He said, “The wine merchant, Ault, lets the Gillett boy steal. Did you know that? Wine, whiskey, cigarettes, beer. Hundreds worth he’ll have taken by now.”

  She nodded.

  “You don’t believe me? He told me. Ault did.”

  “I do believe you,” she said.

  “His own son used to bully the Gillett boy. That’s back when they were in school. It’s the sort of thing that will stay with a person. The Gillett boy had a difficult time.”

  His tuna sandwich was finished; his apple was chewed to the core.

  “Tell me about my mother,” she said.

  “She’s kind. Even though I’m a street person, she is. Mr. Whitaker, she calls me. Never Wen.”

  “She’s left, you know.”

  “Yes. I miss her,” he said.

  “How did you meet?”

  “She was sometimes unhappy. I’d see her walking in the reeds where I live. People don’t often come by that way. Many don’t even know it is there. But she did. She would walk there alone. Sometimes I came home and knew she’d been near. She left flowers she’d picked at my door.”

  “And you talked?”

  “Yes. About where she had been. How she’d dreamed of strange creatures, of flying, or music.”

  Eleanor tried to see them together: fellow travelers of a desolate road, speakers of a dead and beautiful language.

  “And do you dream of those things?”

  “Yes, of course. Don’t you?”

  “No. Never. I wish I did.”

  At the other end of the courtyard, a man in a wheelchair sat in the sun. He shivered a little, delicately, though his dressing gown was thick in the heat. A caretaker sat beside him, reading a book; Eleanor didn’t recognize her. Closer to them were a man and a woman: they spoke in whispers; the woman was crying.

  He went on. He told about Eleanor’s mother dancing ankle-deep in a stream. “Only she could hear the music,” he said. “The hem of her dress became heavy with mud.”

  She wished he’d say more, but his focus meandered; already she felt him drifting away. Soon he turned back to habitual subjects: the spate of weekly reductions at Star, the double feature on for Saturday night.

  “I’ve never been to the pictures myself,” he said. “Not for a long time, in any event. Only I like to look at the banners. They’re some of them really beautiful things, and some of them very funny as well. Sometimes after a film’s run is finished they let me take the banner home in my pram. I’m sure they’re as good as the pictures themselves. In many cases I’m certain of that.”

  At the greengrocer, they called her Miss Cartwright. She bought food for herself and for her father, knowing he’d otherwise eat TV dinners.

  “Good of you, Miss,” the greengrocer, Blake, said. “Has there been any word?”

  She shook her head.

  The fruit buyer was a small, gentle man who spoke little English, being late of Croatia. He showed her how to choose a good melon by pushing against the scar from the vine. Stone fruits he held very close to his face, smiling when she mimicked the act. He said, “Many fruits will soon be in season.” Sometimes she saw him at the rear of the market, smoking or chewing at a piece of dry fish. He waved if he saw her, sat up a bit straighter; about him lay empty and broken-down crates, a refuse bin spilling sacks of old food.

  “What do you do with turned fruit?” she asked Blake. He was placing her things in a bag.

  “Chuck it out if we can’t take it home. Or give it away if it isn’t too bad.”

  “Before you chuck it, would you leave it outside? Just on the ground there, next to the bin?”

  “I can’t be having rodents,” he said.

  “Only for an hour, I mean. There’s someone who’d take it away.”

  “Wen Whitaker.”

  “Yes. He eats from the refuse, only it would be nicer for him.”

  An infant who had seemed to be well on the mend took a sudden, sharp turn and died in the ward. A boy. All of it happened so fast; there was not even time to have him moved to the city, where the hospital offered more critical care. When his mother was told, she collapsed to the floor. Eleanor watched her fall in a daze. It seemed the very force of her life had gone out; she might have been a marionette whose strings had of a sudden been cut. She had not been present at the moment of death, and it was that fact she lamented now as she wailed. The father, of weak and youthful appearance, stood aside, struck dumb and fearful as well.

  The dead child was mournful and blue. In the last hours it had been too ill to touch.

  Only Beatrice remembered herself. She went to the floor beside the broken woman—herself little more than a girl—and touched her without hesitation, gripping her with arthritic hands as firmly as she’d touched the boy in his brief life.

  The next morning, Wen Whitaker came.

  “I’ve brought some of my best things to show you.”

  Eleanor nodded, abstracted and vague. All night she’d lain awake on the floor, Deegan Kirby on the sofa beside her. Sometimes they talked and sometimes he slept. She kept wondering what had been said in the car while that young couple made their way home alone. She’d seen them every day for a week, checked them into the ward, remembered their names, and yet she couldn’t begi
n to imagine. She didn’t know them at all.

  “I’d fed him,” she whispered in the darkness to Deegan. “All last week. With a bottle, I did. More times than his own mother was able.”

  “I’ve seen lots of people die,” Deegan said.

  She was quiet.

  “It’s strange. They were all of them grown, but they looked exactly the way you’ve described it. They all looked so dreadfully young.”

  Now, in the courtyard, Wen Whitaker spoke.

  “This is a hairbrush I found near the creek,” he said. “The backing is made of a shell. Now what do you suppose it was doing down there?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “And this is a ribbon I got. There used to be a shop here that sold them,” he said.

  She felt as if she might weep. It was time she was going back in. She said so, looking down at her watch, and then, without quite knowing why, she began to detail the work she performed, the smallest things: the changing of sheets, the rearrangement of files. She told about the ache in the arch of her foot, how Beatrice said to be firm with her touch.

  “We soothe them,” she said, describing the soft, translucent skin, the strained fingers, the way their bodies calmed in her arms.

  Wen Whitaker lifted his head. For the first time in their acquaintance, he looked directly into Eleanor’s eyes.

  “They’re born prematurely, you know. They ought still to be in the womb. Beatrice says it’s like they’re in pain. Every moment they aren’t touched, they’re in pain.”

  Summer came, and with it a trickle of tourists. Some weekend days she walked by the sea. Children ate candy or swam in the surf. Lovers held hands and made for the shadows, but she did not feel envious of them.

  With Deegan she sat, eating mussels in wine.

  “I’ve gotten quite good with the infants,” she said. “I’m not frightened to touch them these days.”

  He nodded but didn’t reply. Elsewhere, a clatter when something was dropped. He was drinking his second glass of Chablis. Behind him, the sun had dipped in the sky; the water resembled an orange’s peel.

  He’d been downcast of late; she didn’t know why. Sometimes, as if for no reason at all, a sadness seemed to descend over him. On the bus across town he’d mostly been quiet; through the marina on the way to the restaurant he had frowned at the beaches and parks: mothers photographing their babies, men and women sunning themselves. Her own moods were scarcely strong enough to be felt, a low hum of sorrow, or gladness, or fear.

  He covered his face with his hands. At the edges of his nails and the cracks of his cuticles, red and sometimes blue varnish remained.

  “Deegan,” she said.

  He parted his hands.

  “Only I wanted to ask: How would it be if I saw your revue?”

  He was silent a moment, closing his eyes. For the first time, she wondered how old he might be. Sixty, perhaps. It made her feel sad.

  “You don’t want to see it,” he said.

  “Why? I want to know what it’s like.”

  “Trust me. You don’t. It’s not any good.”

  “You’re only being modest,” she said. “I can hear you when you sing in the shower.”

  He gave a brief, wan smile. “Stop it,” he said.

  He had a way of leaving her chastened, aware of how little she’d gleaned of his life, of how little effort she’d made.

  “Oh, Eleanor. It’s a drag show in Croft. Why on earth would you think it was something to see?”

  There were not many people left at the tables. She didn’t know what to say. A pelican crossed the line of her vision. When she looked back at Deegan he was watching it, too.

  “We used to have great shows,” he said. “In the city. We used to have such beautiful shows.”

  In the courtyard, children were kicking a ball. A man told his wife he’d forgotten her name. Eleanor struck Wen Whitaker’s lighter, gold and engraved, then handed it back.

  “Tell me more about my mother,” she said.

  Always she asked this, and always he obliged. She had learned more about her own mother from him than she had in all the years of her childhood.

  He was spreading butter and jam onto crackers, eating them in large, single bites.

  “She had a wonderful voice. Still does, I imagine. Sometimes she sang while she walked in the reeds. Like a bird, all warbley and fragile,” he said.

  “Did she tell you she was going to leave?”

  “She talked all the time about flying away. We both did. It was something she dreamed of. Great, white, feathered wings, she described.”

  Eleanor thought of her mother again: the tangles of black hair twisting about her; the way she would sleep for days at a stretch. What world did she dream of? You couldn’t imagine. Perhaps one where Eleanor didn’t exist.

  Later, when Beatrice returned from her meeting, they set about putting fresh sheets onto cots. Methodically, they moved through the room. Beatrice talked of budget concerns.

  “Did you know about Ault?” Eleanor said. She hadn’t really been thinking about him. It was just something that had come to her mind. “Only I heard something strange about him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How he lets the Gillett boy steal. Lets him take what he wants from the shop.”

  Beatrice stopped. “Who told you that?”

  At once, Eleanor felt herself blush. She ran a hand over the top of the sheet, tightened a poorly made hospital fold. “Wen Whitaker told me. Just a dull bit of gossip.”

  “Whitaker told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Crazy bugger.”

  “I haven’t met Ault,” Eleanor said.

  “Ault? No, I mean Whitaker’s crazy. That Gillett stole from everybody. But he’s dead. He’s been dead for ten years. Killed himself with a rope in the closet.”

  Autumn. A chill returned to the air. Vendors packed up their goods on the strand. Children were sent, morose, back to school.

  No word arrived of Eleanor’s mother. Increasingly, thoughts of her were resigned, the past tense used if ever she was mentioned. She had, it seemed, slipped at last from the known world, the force of her drift overcoming its pull, and the greatest sadness in Eleanor’s heart was for the peace they would never now make.

  In Specialty Care, days remained busy. Beatrice hummed as she moved through the halls. Wednesdays, Wen Whitaker came, his manner increasing in its solicitude. She could see he had run a comb through his hair, that he’d made an effort at cleaning his hands.

  One afternoon, he accepted his food but did not right away begin eating. He sat silently, rather, moving his mouth, searching for the form of a word. Did she remember about the babies, he said. What she had explained about them.

  She scarcely did. “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “I wonder is it something I might attempt? Soothing the infants, that is. How you said about soothing the infants with touch.”

  His hands and his face were trembling, both, with the effort of having said what he had. She regarded the deep lines in his cheeks, the white stubble dotting his jaw and his throat. His eye was clouded just like her father’s. In his madness he had danced with her mother.

  “The thing is, I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “Ever since what you told. I think it’s a beautiful thing. You said a person might volunteer.”

  Her first thought was that she would have to convince Bea. He was a kind, gentle man when you knew him.

  The next instant, however, reason prevailed, and she saw that of course it couldn’t be done. It simply wouldn’t do. That was all. His odor was sour and warm. He shifted and shook whenever he moved. If he was seen about Specialty Care, his presence would cause alarm and distress.

  “Is it because of the rubbish?” he asked. “I wouldn’t pick it up anymore. I wouldn’t have any need of the rubbish if only I had a position.”

  “It isn’t the rubbish,” she said.

  “I’m not a vagrant, if that’s what you think
.”

  He spoke now with great agitation, his fingers striking invisible keys.

  “Before you decide, let me show you my house. It’s good. It has electrical lights.”

  Slowly, the hope faded out of his voice. He bent over, weeping now into his hands. All these many months they had spoken. Tell me about my mother, she’d said. Not once had she asked about his: the touch of her, the way she had been. Never would Eleanor visit his house near the marsh or see there the items of his meager inheritance: a pair of scissors, a spool of white thread, a book in which his mum had written her name. Blithely, she’d spoken of the pain of neglect, of being alone, untouched, unbelonging. As if he didn’t already know. As if he weren’t sitting right there, within reach.

  Then years passed. Eleanor turned thirty-five. Her life seemed to steady further about her. She took correspondence courses in nursing, enrolled in the night school, stood for exams; on the day she received her certification, Beatrice baked her a chocolate cake. Deegan Kirby stopped by of an evening, albeit somewhat less frequently now. He was getting older, she saw; increasingly, he fell asleep on the couch, and she was obliged to guide him back to his rooms. Mrs. Ridgewe, against all expectation, met a man and was married, moving to Payne.

  Her mother was spotted in Wexford, then Brill, heading north in each instance, hitching a ride. Her long, black hair had begun to turn white, chopped roughly short as if with a saw, but her eyes—pale and haunted—had matched the reports.

  “Let her go, button. It’s for the best,” Eleanor’s father said. The sound of his voice was vague, otherworldly, like filaments in a spent, shaken bulb. “Let her be. She wasn’t ever happy in Glass.”

  And so she carries on in the ward. Restraint and a pleasant, underwhelming contentment prevail, still, in the affairs of her life. It is something she has come to accept. Beatrice talks of retirement often, and the thought of staying on isn’t daunting to Eleanor. She is roiled only on those afternoons when, watching Wen Whitaker eat, an old longing rises up in her breast.