Other People's Love Affairs: Stories

by D. Wystan Owen

  She regards herself in the mirror, not appraisingly but with resignation, with boredom. The pins have already been removed from her hair.

  “It was a good show. You sounded good, May.”

  “If only someone had been there to see it.” She pours a drink: gin, kept among her perfumes.

  “Sunday night,” Walter says. He watches her swallow. Her lips leave another red stain on the glass.

  “I’m glad you liked the show, Mr. Chapman.”

  She does not invite him to sit, does not offer to pour him a drink. When she speaks, she addresses his reflection in the mirror. She closes her eyes and with the pads of her fingers massages the skin about her temples and jaw.

  “Birthday’s coming up,” he says. “She excited?”

  “Virginia? I imagine she is.”

  Each year at the club there is a small celebration: gifts and a cake. The band plays something special.

  “Sweet sixteen.”

  “That’s right.” She plucks a stray hair from her brow. “Thursday. And every bit of it, too. Just last week she failed an exam. Algebra. Chemistry, maybe. It used to be she was top of the class.”

  “She’s a good girl,” he says. “She’ll do well on the next one. Seems no time ago she would come round the club.”

  May used to be apologetic about it, but he never minded the girl. He enjoyed bringing her soft drinks and pretzels, playing jacks or pinochle while her mother performed. He gave her crayons and pens to draw pictures with, stamps that she pasted into a book.

  “Doesn’t it?” May says now, abstracted. “I rather think it does seem a long time. Some days it feels like a million years.”

  May arrives home after two in the morning, having stayed for a drink with Al at the bar and then hitched a ride with him back to the city. Virginia is asleep on the sofa, the TV left on with the test pattern showing. She does not stir when the screen is shut off, as she didn’t either when May had to fuss with the door. May knows that Virginia takes drugs. The kids at school must have gotten her on to them. Pills, maybe: she hasn’t smelled drink or reefer. It worries her to think about that, and because it does she brings over a blanket. It is spring, but the nights are still cold, and the window in the bathroom doesn’t properly close. In the darkness, Virginia looks peaceful. May would like to sit for a while—a girl needs her mother, she knows—but it is so late, and she makes her way instead to the bedroom, from beneath the door of which there comes no trace of light.

  She undresses and slides herself under the covers. “Move over, old lady,” she almost says in a whisper, as if she’d forgotten that Agnes is gone.

  She runs a hand along the sheet where once a warm body slept. Agnes always took more than her share of the bed, but May never minded that very much. If she were here now, Agnes might reach out to touch her, she might pull her into a folded embrace.

  “Did you sing nice tonight?” May hears her say. Agnes used to ask her that every night.

  “Yes. We did ‘The Nearness of You.’”

  Sometimes she still finds traces of Agnes: small hairs in a comb, her scent in a scarf. After three months that is all that remains. Soon, she thinks, there will be nothing at all.

  “Of course, there was hardly a soul in the place.”

  They met in a tea shop. Outside was a hailstorm; Agnes had come seeking shelter. She was dressed far too lightly for winter, a trench coat over a thin cotton dress. The first woman May had seen with natural hair. It was cropped short. Her face was angular, stern, a strength in it that was somehow recalled in the extreme narrowness of her wrists and her hands. Later, May would wonder at that, the power contained in that willowy frame. When Agnes reached for her in the night, her grip was sometimes overwhelmingly strong.

  “I’m a singer,” May said, when they spoke in the shop. “A jazz singer as a matter of fact.”

  Agnes said, “I’m keen on church music, myself.”

  The hail abated and gave way to hard rain, which ran down the windows behind them in sheets. Headlamps from cars could be seen from the street, washed out, indistinct, like jewels glimpsed in water.

  “Do you believe in God?” Agnes said, and May admitted she didn’t. “That’s all right. Sometimes love can take time.”

  They lived together eight years.

  In the darkness, May says, “He’s sure to go under. I don’t know how he’s managed this long.”

  There is comfort in speaking aloud.

  “Did Virginia finish her homework tonight? Agnes, do you think she takes drugs?”

  In the living room, Virginia lifts her head from the pillow. Like a strange, ghostly detail from a dream, she recalls her mother having been in the room. The keys in the lock, the television switched off: these sounds register after the fact. The pills she took are stronger than the previous ones. Jeanene has warned her of that. She doesn’t know what is in them; Jeanene doesn’t either. They make you feel like you are taking a bath. Whatever the color, that’s the name of the pill: red, blue, yellow, or pink.

  Another sound emerges, more immediate now. It is her mother’s voice, a murmur from under the door. She is talking to Agnes again; knowing that, Virginia feels sorry for her. These months they have suffered apart, not able in their grief to comfort each other. Fly-by-night is what May called the man Agnes left with. Virginia could not recall having seen him. There had been people who came and went through the years, new congregants and preachers who guided her spirit. She was the sort of person always searching for something; a holy fool, May sometimes said. But nights, when they were alone, she would tenderly braid Virginia’s hair. They would laugh at stories of childhood mischief, old jobs from which Agnes had got herself sacked. When first she’d come to live in their flat May had called her Virginia’s aunt. But Agnes never made any mention of that. Standing over steaming pots in the kitchen, she explained the proper way to make curry, or soup, having been taught in just the same way as a girl.

  It would not have changed anything, the truth being spoken. Things would have been better, in fact. She does not mind that her mother is that way. It doesn’t matter at all. She only wishes there had been no pretense, that she might have loved Agnes unfettered by lies. Sometimes Fergie Davidson says things about it, and about Mr. Chapman as well. At school, people say Fergie fancies Virginia. That’s why he hurts her feelings so much. Four Eyes he used to call her. Lemonade because her complexion was pale. Lately he has begun to say other things, things that make her scalp itch with discomfort: “What’s two and six buy me? Three? Have a heart. I’ll starve. You drive a hard bargain, Missy.”

  “There was wickedness here,” Agnes said when she left, and Virginia knows that was painful for May. She wouldn’t have been in her right mind to say that. It would have been a madness, speaking that way.

  She turns over, frightened all of a sudden. The voice from the next room continues to drone.

  “How will I manage?” May says in the dark, sleep, like warm limbs, bearing her up.

  In the small flat he owns above the Blue Parrot, Walter puts on a record and smokes by the window.

  It is true that the nightclub is failing, that it has, in fact, been failing for years, a slow death the inevitability of which has been so total as to have escaped notice till now. Lately, small and simple expenses—renewals of licenses, lights for the stage—have presented an unaccountable burden. He has never been adept with the books—in school he always did poorly in maths—but in the past they have balanced nearly enough.

  The band, above all, is sinking the place. There is simply no audience left for the music. Once, the Blue Parrot was a closely held secret: the stiff pours, the singer’s ethereal tone. Touring bands would come and play after hours, having sold out the large concert hall in the city. Briefly then, emerging from the dark years of war, tourists had flocked to places like Glass. The coastline had boomed with factory work. There had been a black and white middle class in those days.

  Now paint peels from the window and door frames; i
n winter the radiator smells of leaked fuel. Piles of records line the walls and the corners: ragtime, big band, bebop, and blues. His phonograph is of the old-fashioned kind, its large brass speaker like a bell, or a flower. It is one of many aged things in the flat, Walter being keen on antiques as well. Never, even when there was money to spare, did he feel in any need of more space. He spends most of his spare time at the club. Only this morning he was there to wash down the floors, to place liquor orders, to tidy the stage. Monday nights are the loneliest time, because he has not seen her all day and won’t see her the next.

  The record pops with each revolution, the needle riding an uneven groove. The song is “Do Nothing till You Hear from Me.” In 1944 that one was recorded. He recalls an alleyway off Rue Gabrielle in Montmartre where, in spring 1945, he drank white wine with strangers. Paris, then, was not the jewel of his dreams but was ragged and beaten, gripped by a primal and desperate euphoria that could not disguise the weight of its heart. It suited him, wearied as he was himself. He remembers the gypsy guitar on a rooftop, the high hat, the slender woman singing in French.

  As light falls, he smokes a third cigarette. There was a time when he allowed himself to imagine that May might one day live in the flat, that she might like to leave the city behind. In Glass they’d have had a quiet existence: drinks on the boardwalk, books on the strand. He imagined her speaking of any old thing, harmonizing with the buskers they passed, softly, for his and her pleasure alone. It would have raised a few eyebrows, he knew, but in his dreams they were safe in their love. That was before Virginia was born, when May was still new at the club.

  “A fine place,” she said the night she was here. She stood by the window, looking out at the sea. On the boardwalk, the lamps had not yet been extinguished; a man passed beneath one, pushing a pram. He had invited her up for a drink, a casual thing. “Any time, if you’d like.” In the weeks since first she’d sung “Stardust,” she had taken to stopping by his office each night. Peering in, she would smile, pause for a chat. Still he can hear the welcome creak of the hinges, the tap on the door that was quickly dispensed with, since, by habit, he left it ajar.

  On the record, a song ends; another commences. Cootie’s horn is like an animal’s cry, like a peacock’s, which is said to be like a man’s.

  At the window, that night, he brought her a highball.

  “Do you like singing here, Miss Valentine? May?”

  He drank, having poured out a measure for himself.

  “You must know what I think about you.”

  Was it she who initiated their touch, or has he only imagined that since? There was surely something in the nearness of her, in her eye, that seemed for all the world like permission. When he thinks back, he tries to dwell in that moment, when the space around them trembled with promise, that moment at the threshold between two different lives, just before she smiled and said why didn’t he tell her, just before he felt her lips upon his.

  Tomorrow, having nothing to do at the club, he will buy a gift for Virginia’s birthday. It isn’t easy knowing what to give her at this age. Toys won’t do; neither would a ring or a necklace. She has probably grown to be beautiful now and wouldn’t know what to make of a gift of that kind from a man who these days is little more than a stranger.

  Her stamp book remains on a shelf in his office, the small squares pasted in haphazard rows.

  Perhaps a record. It needn’t be jazz. She might like rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, and he smiles, since that would give them something in common.

  Wednesday morning a notice arrives: a check to the chamber of commerce has bounced. A telephone call reveals the bank’s error, a series of transactions processed out of sequence. The situation otherwise isn’t dire, but still there is consternation about it.

  “Things all right, chief?” Alvin asks from the bar. It was he who found the notice when he brought in the post.

  Walter only mumbles a bit. He is thinking of the gift he bought for Virginia: two records, a secondhand suitcase gramophone.

  “Only fair you should warn us if we ought to be looking.”

  “I’ve told you, Al. It was a clerical error.”

  There will be a cake, as there is every year. He will telephone Richter’s soon with the order. They’ll remember when he tells them the birthday has come. Virginia’s favorite: chocolate with apricot jam.

  Later, when he knocks at May’s dressing room door, she appears in red, stilling the heart in his chest. Her beauty has been undiminished by time, only altered, made more enduring somehow; she looks, to him, very much as she sings, exquisite beneath the weight of her life, though he knows she wouldn’t wish to be so in his eyes.

  “I’m a half hour late,” she says. “Not that it matters. Why rehearse if nobody comes? And, anyway, I hear we might not get paid.”

  “Are you late?” he says. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  She gives him a look and turns back to the room. She leaves the door open, so he follows her in.

  “Honest, I hadn’t.”

  In her chair she sets about with her face, seeming pleased to have spoken so sharply to him. “What do you need then?”

  “Just to see if we’re on for tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Virginia’s birthday, of course.”

  Last night, Virginia watched Hawaii Five-0 while May cleared the meager remains of their supper. Unblinking, she looked at the screen. Agnes would have disapproved of the program; often she disapproved of such things. In all the years they were together, she never came to the club, saying only that it wasn’t her kind of music. Last night she’d have said, “Is your homework done, girlie?” and Virginia would have told her the truth. As it was May didn’t manage the question, only asked, “What’s on at school for this week?”

  “I don’t know where she’ll be from one minute to the next,” she says now. “I hope you haven’t gone to much trouble. It’s kind, but she’s not a little girl anymore. She’s liable not to show up at all.”

  “Surely she’ll remember,” he says.

  “I’ll ask her. But I can’t say it’ll help.”

  “I’ve got a present for her. And a cake.”

  “A better gift would be keeping her mother employed.”

  “It was only a clerical error.”

  May can scarcely hide her disgust. Lately she has been this way with him, an end to many years of what seemed a détente. It was disgust she felt, also, that night in the flat. Something had changed from the moment it ended. In silence, she gathered her things from the floor, her earrings and bangles, the comb from her hair. She straightened her dress, which, in haste, had not been removed. That is something that has stayed in his mind: the dress not having been fully removed. It fills him with shame, remembering that. With shame and with yearning as well, for he never saw the bare silhouette of her body.

  Now she says: “Only don’t go to more trouble.”

  Nine thirty, the band performs “Love Me or Leave Me.” She was right: they didn’t need to rehearse. They scarcely interact anymore, except when they are performing onstage: a glance or a smile, a holler from Ham, and a chorus is turned around or repeated. It makes Walter think of how whole worlds of meaning can pass between two people, unspoken, or of the wordless way love can be made. The feeling is one of great intimacy: her voice mediates the distance between them. And though at bottom a sadness remains, he isn’t really lonely when he listens to May.

  “I’m sweet sixteen,” Virginia says in the morning. The house is warm and smells of hot breakfast, which makes her think about Agnes.

  “That’s right, lady,” May says. She puts a plate of scrambled eggs on the table, having woken early to make something special. “Will they do anything for you in school?”

  “Sometimes on a girl’s birthday she gets covered in sweets. By her friends, like. They put whipped cream in her hair.”

  In her purple dress, May thinks, she looks young; she has not yet become interested in appearin
g grown up. Her shoulders are small with sharp bones at the top, a light, copper color that shines in the heat.

  “Who ever would do that? What kind of friend?”

  “Oh, I don’t think they’ll do it to me. It’s for popular girls. Dancers and them.”

  Again, May wonders who gives her the pills. Despite her prettiness, she has long been thought strange. As far back as her nursery school there was concern, the way an insect or a bird might distract her attention, or the way she might continue to work on a drawing long after other children lost interest.

  “You can come to the club after school if you like,” May says. “Mr. Chapman insisted on cake.”

  Virginia nods, pleased but trying not to let on. She likes the way the band plays “Happy Birthday.”

  “I understand if you don’t want to come. I think he forgets you’re not a kid anymore.”

  “I don’t mind,” Virginia says. She thinks of Mr. Chapman in line at the baker’s. “He’s a sad case, isn’t he, Ma?”

  “Yes,” May says, irritated somehow.

  He asked only once, when first she was pregnant. Just two words­, “Is it . . . ?” to which she said, “No.” And though she could tell he didn’t believe her, she held firm, and he did not press again.

  At the Scat Club, things had been required of her. Mr. Aubrey had expected her at least once a week. Mr. Parr at the Hot House had called her crude names, refusing to look directly into her eyes. She can still see him chewing his long, green cigars: “More slut than Saint Valentine, aren’t you, May?”

  Mr. Chapman was different: he wasn’t unpleasant. He’d loved her from the first lines of “Stardust,” he said. When, afterward, she didn’t return to his office, he said nothing, only started closing the door. It was that that made possible the subsequent years: the knowledge that the child’s father was kind. Still, she didn’t want him any nearer her life. She never did, and does not want him still. She can’t help but recoil at the thought of his touch: the thin fingers, sweat beading on the edge of his scalp. That feeling has grown worse without Agnes, worse because she might need him again.