Other People's Love Affairs: Stories

by D. Wystan Owen

  “Thanks for breakfast,” Virginia says.

  And May is gripped with affection, watching her leave.

  In the Blue Parrot, Walter fills pink balloons. Without helium, they make a dull picture, blown by the ceiling fans into the corners. Ham arrives early, too, in a black suit and tie. He doesn’t own a piano—like the other musicians, he lives in the city, his flat too small for even an upright—so he likes to practice sometimes at the club. He waves to Walter as he pulls out the bench, plays a few chords and stops, looking around.

  “Virginia’s birthday?” he asks, and Walter says that it is. Ham taps out the traditional song, then plays it as a rollicking New Orleans rag. He knows, of course, as everyone does.

  Walter listens as he goes about tidying up. In the dressing room, he puts the gin bottle away. He wants Virginia, when she arrives, to see her mother’s place of work as clean and respectable. She has not been to visit since this day last year and in the interim might have grown discerning that way.

  At five o’clock, Richter’s delivers the cake; Walter sets it on the counter with the gift in the greenroom. Five thirty, May traipses in. “You oughtn’t,” she says when she sees the balloons. By six, it seems it will be a good night: a few older couples, well dressed, order drinks; a group of students affects a bohemian look. The band plays “Nuages,” then “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” which May slows and phrases as a funeral dirge. Her dark mood of the past weeks hasn’t lifted; he is glad that Virginia has not yet arrived. When May sits the next number out, the band launches into “Epistrophy.” Hearing them, it occurs to Walter for the first time that perhaps they have not so much adopted May’s style as been slowly worn down, depleted of vigor. They play now as if they have been freed of shackles.

  In her dressing room, she looks for her bottle of gin.

  “Oughtn’t we liven things up?” Walter says.

  “I think they enjoyed it.” She moves objects about on the counter. “You want Doris Day? I’m sure you can find that. Or better yet, a rock ’n’ roll band. I’ve told you, you should.”

  “It’s in the third drawer.”

  “You hid it?”

  “Virginia’s coming tonight.”

  She unscrews the cap but cannot find her glass. She takes a small sip from the bottle.

  “I never liked this number,” she says.

  “Will no one rid me of this Thelonious Monk?”

  She smiles, sips longer, replaces the cap.

  “I’d better get back on. I’ll liven things up. A bit of gin always livens things up.”

  “Do you think she’ll come, May?”

  “Virginia?” she says. “Seemed like she would when I saw her this morning. But I told you, I don’t know where her head is these days.”

  Briefly she wants to mention the pills. She is looking at his reflection (how old he has grown!), and she wants to say, “I’m worried about her.” That is what she would have done if Agnes were here, and Agnes would have put an arm over her shoulder, said, “Hush, lady. I’ll speak to the girl.” But the moment passes, and her wanting that fades; she retrieves the bottle again.

  “I tried to warn you. Now I’ve got to go on.”

  With day falling, Virginia hurries from school, having lingered for a time on the grounds. She will stop in at home, deposit her books, then catch the evening bus into Glass. She takes the new route, avoiding Muldoon, because sometimes she sees Fergie Davidson there.

  At school, no pomp attended her birthday. When she was younger, the teachers always remembered. In year four there was a crown that you wore, and you got to decide which games would be played. Her mother considers her too old for such things, too old to eat cake and have a gift from Mr. Chapman. But she looks forward to her party tonight: it is a chance to feel like a child again.

  The pill she took at lunchtime has mostly worn off. The edges are returning to things. On the east side, trees do not line the streets as elsewhere in the city they do. Gaining distance from school she traverses Old Pike, a broad street of brick warehouses, empty, abandoned. Here, you’d never know the seaside was near. The air is dusty and eerily still; she dislikes this section of town. She would not have to cross it if she rode on the bus, but lately what little money she has she spends on her lunch or gives to Jeanene.

  With Agnes gone, she is often alone. For that reason, too, she is glad of the party. Agnes never came to the club, not approving of the music or drink, but she would wait up and sit with Virginia after, listening while she recounted the night. She has wondered today whether Agnes remembers, if she has marked the occasion, wherever she is. Perhaps there is a picture she’s kept: All three of them after they’d been to Swan Lake, or standing in front of the secondary school; or the one of only Virginia and Agnes, taken at the seaside in Glass. The sun shining, Virginia holding red Brighton rock, Agnes’s head wrapped in a blue and white cloth. In all the photos they took through the years, Agnes never looked at the camera. There was something almost ghostly in that, her presence strong but elusive, unfixed. As if she wished her face would be forgotten, as in truth it is beginning to be. If you looked now, you’d long for her large, clumsy teeth, a dark eye, but instead would see only her jaw, the thick cords of her neck as they twisted away.

  It is someplace nearby that Jeanene buys the pills. Virginia still has two in her pocket. The man who sells them stands outside a garage. She saw him once, shifting about on his heels. He lives with his mother on Roosevelt Street, something he will tell to anybody who asks. His training shoes were battered and scuffed. Jeanene says he is not the full shilling.

  She turns up James and, rounding the corner, finds herself face-to-face with Fergie Davidson, smoking one of his scented cigarettes. He has appeared as if from thin air, his ungainly body leaned up on a wall.

  “Little Miss,” he says, exhaling smoke. “I never see you walking home anymore.”

  His hands are broad, indelicate things. Nobody else is about. She mutters something, his name, and tries to keep walking, but he reaches and takes a hold of her dress.

  “What’s the hurry?” he says. He stamps out his cigarette. “Always rushing. Little Miss A-Level. I see you taking those pills from Jeanene.”

  “Leave me alone, Fergie,” she says. “I’ve got to get to the club.”

  His father clears rubbish at the primary school. His mother used to deliver the post but can no longer work because of her leg. Virginia remembers seeing him as a boy, grasping his mother’s hand before crossing the street, letting go again as soon as he stepped onto the curb. Father and son didn’t speak on the schoolyard. Carelessly, Fergie threw his trash on the ground.

  “Jazz club. Right.”

  He moves his fingers in the air as if keying a horn.

  “You could stand to be a few minutes late. Place like that, they’d lose track of the time. I won’t keep you long, I promise.” He laughs.

  “It’s my birthday,” Virginia says, and then wishes she hadn’t.

  “Ah, how old? All grown by the look of it. Daddy gonna throw you a party?”

  Surely, he has said the same thing before. Often he is on about her mother and Mr. Chapman. A white man would have a taste for that sort of thing, he has said. Owning a jazz club and all. But somehow it is different this time, different because of the birthday, perhaps.

  “You know I never had a daddy,” she says.

  “Don’t act stupid, Little Miss A-Level.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Who d’you think paid for those shoes?”

  She looks down at her black Mary Janes, a gift from her mother for no reason at all. She remembers opening the large paper box, the silver buckles shining on top.

  “Who d’you think bought that dress, Lemonade?”

  Behind her glasses, her vision has blurred. Fergie smiles, but he doesn’t seem to be happy. She feels suddenly very ashamed. She thinks of her mother saying she needn’t come to the club, of Agnes saying, “There was wickedness here.” Of Fergie, as well, how it’s
said that he fancies her. The cruel ease of harming a person you love.

  Two blocks on she stops running. Fergie has not been following her. In the din of a nearby construction site, she cannot hear the sound of her breath. She is choking; she wipes tears from her nose and her lips. Her hand shaking, she puts the last pills on her tongue.

  She enters while the band plays “Embraceable You.”

  From the stage, May sees her move past the bar, face obscured by the lights but recognizable still. Normally she would find Mr. Chapman, sit with him for a number or two, but instead she wanders on in the direction of the greenroom, scarcely lifting her feet from the ground.

  Walter sees Virginia as well. She passes very near to his seat, not taking any notice of him or of the balloons. There is a dreaminess to her, a slowness. The last year has indeed seen her a beauty.

  The song ends, and amid the applause he stands and follows Virginia. He knocks twice, lightly, on the door to the greenroom, as he does always before he enters her mother’s dressing room. She is seated at the far end of the sofa, holding her eyeglasses as if to examine them. She does not look up when he enters the room. On her face remains salt where her tears ran and dried.

  “Right, Virginia?” he says.

  Now she looks to the door. Her hands, still holding the glasses, have fallen into her lap. He knows that she cannot see him clearly, her vision being abnormal without them.

  It is when she looks back down at her glasses that he becomes certain something is wrong. That dreaminess is a barbituric haze. You come to know it through the years in a club. She is motionless, not making a sound. He approaches and puts a hand on her shoulder. “Your birthday,” he says, but she doesn’t respond.

  “You’re sixteen. I can hardly believe it. It seems no time ago we used to play jacks.”

  Still she makes no reply. At the table, it is all he can manage to cut her a small piece of the cake. “It’s the kind with the apricot jam,” he says. “The kind that was always your favorite.”

  Sitting beside her now on the sofa, he puts a bit of cake on a fork. She accepts it, chewing with her mouth untidily open.

  “It’s a Viennese type, Virginia,” he says. “They are famous for their sweets in Vienna.”

  With her tongue she tries to wipe the crumbs from her mouth but succeeds only in pushing them out of reach. He cleans them away for her with a napkin. Then, softly, almost inaudibly, words begin to form on her lips.

  “My mother’s a liar,” she says; her voice is quavering, hoarse. “Did you know my mother’s a liar?”

  He puts the cake aside, smooths the hair from her face. He has tried not to wonder whether she knows, though of course, at times, he has entertained hope.

  “She’s a good woman, Virginia. Don’t say she’s a liar.”

  “Even Fergie Davidson knew. He isn’t kind, but he tells me the truth. People say he likes me, but I’m frightened of him. That’s the first boy who has fancied me, ever. He doesn’t lie. He tells me the truth.”

  She looks as if she might begin crying again. How many times has he regarded Virginia, looking for something of himself in her face?

  “She said Agnes was my aunt, but that wasn’t true. In the end, Agnes wasn’t right in the head. She wouldn’t have been, to say what she did. A holy fool. She never looked at the camera. Why, do you think? I felt sorry for her. She braided my hair. She was sacked from a pawn shop. Why would Ma say she was my aunt when she wasn’t?”

  An image: the woman put forth as a sister. Strange that he shouldn’t have known. On the bus he once saw her, retrieving Virginia. A hard woman, thin, head wrapped in a cloth.

  A voice, Virginia’s, from long in the past, a new set of stamps pasted into her book: “My auntie says it’s good I collect. She likes to take colored glass from the sea.”

  Through the years, he has scarcely given thought to this woman, but he mourns her departure now; truly he does.

  “Agnes is gone. I don’t know where she went.”

  She has indeed begun to weep now, the tears slipping easily from the corners of her eyes, erasing the salt stains on her cheeks. He places an arm about her thin shoulders and sways there, the way one would do with a child.

  “Agnes made fish for dinner. Agnes made soup. Not the full shilling, but I didn’t mind.”

  His embrace is something warming for her. She has never before been held by a man.

  “Your mother loved Agnes, Virginia. She did.”

  “She never tells me the truth. She said I never had a daddy, you know. But Fergie knew. He says don’t be stupid, A-Level. But I wasn’t being stupid, I swear.”

  Another melody turns around and resolves; May’s voice fades away just before Posey’s horn. There is the sound of applause, half-hearted at first, then louder because they have reached intermission.

  Virginia is weeping, her face to his collar.

  “You do have a father, Virginia,” he says.

  Through the door of the greenroom, May hears the sobs. “There, there now, Virginia,” Mr. Chapman is saying. “You do have a father. You do.” It is painful for May, hearing that said; briefly, there rises a dizzying rage. But she is tired; there is also relief. And perhaps he does after all have the right.

  The weeping subsides. Walter holds fast to the girl. She is sleeping, or in a similar state, not fitful; her breath is even and slow. She will perhaps have forgotten all this by morning, but even so things will not be the same.

  Without having heard her open the door, he discovers that May is standing beside him. She places a hand on his shoulder. For a moment he imagines there is love in the gesture, then as quickly allows the illusion to fade.

  “I told the boys to go back on without me,” she says. “I saw her come in.”

  It was only many years after the fact that he was able to see things as May must have done: the door left ajar, the late-night invitation. Only then did he think of all the clubs she had left, the things that might have been done to her there, and know that she would have left the Blue Parrot, too, if it hadn’t been for the birth of Virginia. Where he had seen love, she had seen coercion. It is a gift to be allowed this birthday tradition: the cakes and balloons, the extra money for shoes. His was an accidental trespass: harm done without malice but done nonetheless. An ancient crime, without beginning or end; the eviction she imposed was his due. Now she touches him as he comforts the girl. Now she says, “Walter, what on earth will we do?” and he knows that it is not a gesture of love but of a fragile, uncertain forgiveness for which she has had to dredge the depths of her heart.

  It is another gift, and one he accepts.

  In his arms, he rocks the damaged child they made.

  A Romance

  Beneath the green canvas awning of the chemist on Lynn Street, shaded from a warm July sun, Abigail spoke with the American man. He was telling her about the years he’d spent playing ball. A display in the window was being arranged, diabetic socks having been placed on reduction, but Abigail scarcely took notice. His name, he said, was Archibald Gates. Employed now in the restoration of homes—mending old timber beams and thatched roofs—he had, in another life, been a pitcher, noted for his slow-bending left-handed curve.

  “Wrecked my elbow in Scranton. August the fourth.” His accent was like you would hear in a film. “Felt a pop, and that was the end of the dream. Finished the inning, though I couldn’t say how.”

  “Brave of you. It must have been a heartbreak.”

  “It was.”

  Abigail had never seen a baseball match in her life, did not in fact care for sport of any description, but what the man said impressed her nevertheless. The job would have allowed him to travel. Across the United States and, in winter, abroad.

  “My dad was a military man,” he explained. “That’s how I came to live over there.” He lit a cigarette and exhaled. There was a trick he could do with his lighter. “You live nearby?”

  “Yes,” Abigail said. “I work across the street, at the gown shop
.”

  In the showroom she told her friend Bethany about him. “I’ve met a man,” she said. “From the States. A southpaw. That’s a hurler in baseball.”

  Bethany was busy sorting incoming dresses. She was younger by two years, seventeen, and prettier than Abigail was, blessed with the long waist and modest, round bust that were flattered by the dresses sold in the shop. Sometimes Mrs. Laughlin asked that she wear them—at work, or at night to the Gem and the boardwalk. Abigail would have liked to be asked. Now Bethany wore one with an old-fashioned cut, blue with polka dots, her hair done up in tight curls.

  “A pitcher,” she said. “Baseball? Oh, Abbie. You really ought to find someone plain. I think a girl could do worse than Harold. Athletes are known for philandering, you know.”

  Abigail rolled her eyes. There was no reason Bethany should say such a thing. No reason to discourage an interest in Archie when she didn’t know the first thing about him. Harold from the chemist’s was a dullard, and stout.

  “He doesn’t play ball anymore. He buys lumber for fixing up houses.”

  “All the same, I think you’d be better off with poor Harold.”

  “I don’t like him. I’ve told you. Why don’t you go with him yourself.” She did not say how she’d been buying stockings for work, how she had regarded the stranger for some time before their eyes met, the cool nylon moving across the backs of her fingers, how he’d said she had the look of an actress about her.

  “Be nice, Abbie,” Bethany said. “Anyway, it isn’t me Harold fancies. It’s you.”

  Bethany was the worst kind of pretty girl: either oblivious to her own easy beauty and charm or, worse, pretending to be. In addition to that, she was a bit of a priss. She would never guess some of the things Abigail had done. Nobody would; not her parents, not even Archibald Gates. It would never be suspected, for instance, that she’d once let Clifford Price have a go behind the gymnasium. That would never be dreamed, though she had done it and had not been afraid. There had been no risk of its getting out, because Clifford knew it would not be believed, and anyway he might not have wanted it known. She had been glad of that then but now wished that he had spread the rumor a bit, if only as proof that he wasn’t ashamed.