Other People's Love Affairs: Stories

by D. Wystan Owen

  Clifford Price had moved away after school, as others had and as, at the end of summer, Bethany would. Most young people did not stay in Glass.

  At half ten, Tim Garvey entered the chemist’s in search of an ointment to soothe a bad nail. He’d arrived in Glass some two days before, having bused in from Croft, and Reading before it. His own vehicle had been abandoned in Colby, its backseat strewn with chip shop receipts, pamphlets espousing the wisdom of term life insurance. “Peace of Mind” they said in large letters, a middle-aged couple holding hands on the front. He intended to stay no more than three days, after which time a town this small would take notice.

  He scanned the aisle for the ointment he needed: the one in the yellow tube, because that was the one that had proved helpful each time the condition recurred. The girl he’d seen yesterday was not in today, but that was only to have been expected. She was not what you would have called a good looker. You wouldn’t boast or show pictures to your friends at the pub. But she had the sort of milky complexion he liked; you could imagine lying next to her after, your head resting on that big, fleshy bosom, and her letting you do that, wanting you to.

  The baseball bit had been a risk, he reflected; the sort of thing that might be disproved. You’d be caught out, having no expertise. A mess then. He would never have said it except that he’d found himself drawn to the girl. The accent and the false name had been more considered, thought out and practiced well in advance. Archie Gates: trustworthy, vaguely exotic. In the next town he would be somebody else.

  At home, he would not yet be missed. Head office was mostly indifferent; his friends at the pub knew he traveled for work. His mother might fret when he failed to ring Sunday, though even that he sometimes forgot, or skipped doing, not having the heart. Just as likely it would be the discovery of his car that first brought his departure to light. The police department would contact his mother. Perhaps they would contact Lorna as well. “What are you telling me for?” she would say.

  A young man stood in back of the counter. “All right?” he said while Tim counted his money. “Nice day out.”

  “Summer’s come,” Tim agreed. “Say, you wouldn’t happen to know—” But he stopped short, thinking it might raise alarm, a stranger in town asking after a girl.

  Bethany was on again about Harold.

  “He likes you, Abbie. What’s the harm in a date? It would be fun. You could borrow a dress from the shop.”

  “I couldn’t do that. Mrs. L wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Of course she would,” Bethany said. “She lets me wear them out all the time.”

  Abigail found that irksome and would have liked to say so, but they fell silent because they could see through the window that Harold was passing on his way back from lunch.

  “What’s new, H?” Bethany said. She was fond of Harold, sensing him harmless, and perhaps also because he showed only polite interest in her. Even now as they spoke he kept glancing at Abigail, who stood at the back of the shop folding garments and, when she became aware of his gaze, thumbing through catalogs of new summer fashions.

  “I’m trying for Next Edison now,” he said, grinning in his usual way. He always had one scheme or another, mostly to do with appearing on TV. Talent contests had been one obsession, baking competitions another. “Have you seen it? It’s one of the best programs out.”

  He was Abigail’s age, had known her in school, and like her he lived at home with his parents. His was the broad, open face of a child: small, dark eyes shallowly set. A bit feebly he stood in the doorway, having eaten only a salad for lunch. He had lately been watching his weight, ordering scanty meals at Hyde Pantry, objecting when Debra tried to sneak him rashers of bacon. “I won’t see you starve,” she kept saying, her voice low and clotted with cigarette tar. She had known him since he was a boy. Today, he’d eaten half of the bacon, wrapped the rest in his napkin for later.

  Abigail watched him at the edge of her vision, thinking what a shame and how like her luck that Harold alone should fancy her over Bethany. She would have preferred it be anyone else. Perhaps Archie Gates would prove another exception. He had liked the look of her right off, he’d said. “The look of an actress” were the words he had used, and she’d wanted to ask him which one he meant but knew that that would have made her seem vain.

  “Of course, I would think so,” Harold was saying. “Being an inventor myself. Not everyone can see how their minds work. But I can. I’d say they’re interesting folk.”

  “It’s a good idea, Harold,” Bethany said. “My dad would buy it. Abbie, wouldn’t your parents buy something like that, for keeping all the various wires in order? My dad is always muttering about the wires, tripping over them and things.”

  “They’d buy anything if it had a good ad on telly,” Abigail said, recalling how her mother had asked for nothing more than a particularly absorbent mop for her birthday, and how, when it arrived, her father in his excitement had cleaned the floors for a month, the only times in twenty-five years of marriage he had done so.

  “I’ve got a clever idea for an ad,” Harold said. “It looks like the head of Medusa, but instead of snakes there’s all different wires and cords.” He said this with a smile and a tone of satisfaction, the image being clear and very pleasing to him.

  “That is clever, Harold,” Bethany said.

  Abigail turned the page in her catalog.

  “Doing well, Abbie?” Harold presently said, his voiced raised because he hadn’t moved from the entrance and she was still at the rear of the shop.

  “Well enough,” she said. “Bit bored today.”

  “No offense taken,” Bethany said.

  “That older bloke, yesterday, wouldn’t leave you alone? You’d remember. Had a funny American accent?” He pretended not to know what it was she had bought, though of course he had not forgotten the stockings. Her legs now were obscured by the counter, otherwise he would have looked to see if she had them on. He loved Abigail because there was a sadness about her. He wasn’t a proper chemist, hadn’t stood for exams, but still he knew about the pills she was given: a sleep aid, something for nerves; you found out about that sort of thing with his job. Harold did not take medication himself but felt it was something they shared nonetheless.

  “Archie,” she said, looking up for the first time with interest. “That’s his name. Archibald Gates. He was a baseball hurler, you know.”

  “He was back in again. In the chemist’s, I mean. Buying creams for a toenail fungus this time.”

  “That’s really hot stuff,” Bethany said. She laughed until she was red in the face. “What a dream boat, Abbie. What a catch that Archibald Gates would be.”

  “Just drop it, you two,” Abigail said.

  “It was probably only for his granny or someone,” Harold put forth, sensing her upset. A kindness, because he knew better, of course.

  Days passed, and Tim Garvey stayed on in Glass. He saw the girl again when she made change at the bank. She was wearing the stockings he’d seen her select. He had not gone to visit the shop where she worked, having faith that he would come upon her by chance and knowing that it would be better that way. Morning to night he wandered the village, the four blocks at its center, hills to the east, the headlands and boardwalk north by the shore. Meals he took at the Cavalry Inn, charged to a bill that would never be paid.

  He could not have said, if asked, what it was about her. He’d have put her at twenty or so, as Lorna had been when first they were married. In those days he’d been a security guard, ill paid and ill fed but deeply in love. Graveyard shifts under shopping mall light, he would sit by himself and think of his wife. She was given to chills and to frightening dreams, so she disliked his being gone through the night. It had seemed for a while at that early juncture that he might have been delivered from hardship. Days, young people would come to the mall. He liked to watch them interact with each other. His own childhood had been spoiled by the loss of his father, who’d fallen to his death from
a scaffold. His mother was never the same. The young people he encountered were as yet unblemished. Because nothing bad had happened to them, they seemed to feel certain that nothing ever would. It made him tenderhearted toward them, hopeful that they might not be mistaken.

  Sometimes now, when he was worn down with travel, he would find a girl who was on the game and take up for the night. He would buy her coffee, or dinner if she wanted it (some of them didn’t), and she would sit with him in the restaurant in full view of the world; later, in his rooms, it was just as if she were a part of his life. They were almost all of them kind. They always understood it was just that he was lonely. He reminded himself that it was different with the new girl, different because she was not on the game.

  When she came out of the bank he was waiting for her, slack against a light post, chewing a toothpick. She smiled when she lifted her head. It had been a long time since anyone had been happy to see him.

  “I thought that was you went into the bank.”

  “It was.”

  “I’d hoped I would see you again.”

  They walked the block and a half back to Laughlin’s Gown Shop. She told him about Bethany, making her out as a bore, overstating her beauty so that it would disappoint him in person.

  “You’ve moved to Glass?” she said.

  “Only doing a bit of business. There’s cheap birch to be had. But I’ll be back; I’ll arrange it that way. I’ve taken a liking to the place.”

  This seemed to please her.

  “A bit quiet, I’d have thought, for someone who has been an athlete.”

  “I like quiet places,” he said. “And quiet people.”

  “But I guess you’ve been all over. All the big cities.”

  “Ah, well the fact is the farm teams mostly play smaller towns. Memphis, Nebraska.”

  “But you’ve been in Mexico?”

  “Tried a comeback in Japan,” he said, thinking of a program he had watched about an ancient kind of archery. He had been taken with the slow manner in which the bows had been drawn. His mother preferred dramatic programs and sitcoms, but she would usually watch something else if he wanted.

  “Were you in Tokyo?” she said.

  “Yes, and then in the mountains.”

  In the years after the divorce he had wondered about things: when precisely Lorna had given up on him, when she had got used to sleeping alone. Later, when he began setting out on the road, she had not seemed to mind his absence at all.

  It was a pleasure now to walk down the street with the girl, and not only because he knew they were seen. Near the gown shop they paused to finish their chat, and he said he would like to see her again. She smiled, and over her shoulder he was able to catch a glimpse of the friend. It was true she seemed to be a prettier type, but that did not change things about Abbie. She had a bit of weight to her, Abigail did, but it was by no means unpleasant. Even though she was not on the game, you could tell by the way she had of looking at you that it would not have been the first go-round for her. He did not mind that, either. It was all right.

  They agreed to meet the following evening.

  In her dreams he was there, always waiting for her. Against another lamppost, reclining, he smoked; in an alley, steam rose from wet pavement.

  I’d hoped to see you, he said.

  I knew you’d be here.

  In clean sheets, and smelling of leather and soap, he was gentle. His hands when they touched her were coarse. He wore no rings; she’d noticed that as soon as she saw him. He was handsome—she had noticed that, too—age having lent him an elegance. He was a man, where Clifford Price was only a boy. They both agreed it didn’t matter about his being older.

  She woke trembling, the familiar terrain of her bedroom slowly reasserting itself in her mind. A thin sweat had broken out and she threw back the covers. She ran her fingers over the places he’d touched in her dream.

  “There’s a room where you can try on whatever you like,” the lady said in the secondhand shop. He’d been rummaging some time through the racks of old clothes.

  It was difficult, always, to find things that fit him, being slender with jangly limbs. It wouldn’t do to wear sleeves that came short of the wrist, any more than it would to have grimy stains at his collar. Whatever desperate point his life might have reached, he would have to maintain certain standards. Thus far he had found a brown woolen suit and a shirt checked in pink and pale blue with French cuffs.

  Inside his shoes he wiggled his toes. They slipped against each other, slickened with ointment.

  He’d left most of his own clothes behind. Not that they were any great shakes themselves, but it would have made things easier not to have had to. It had been necessary that his luggage be found with the car to create the impression of having left it in haste, or else intending to come back. He never carried valuables in his suitcase; if he had, he would have taken them out and strewn the rest of its contents about the trunk and the ground.

  In the fitting room he looked at himself in the mirror. It seemed to him that he ought to look older.

  Once again, he assured himself he’d done the right thing. He had not wanted to abandon his mother. Only he’d come to the end of his savings. The money from his policy would see her through to the end; she would never be thrown out into the streets, as she might have been if he had not left. He glanced at his wristwatch: a quarter past three. She’d be watching her hospital program. After that would be the one with the judge. She had been in hospital last year herself, but that had not lessened her interest in the program. When he was not on the road he would watch it with her, and sometimes she would take hold of his hand while she filled him in on what he had missed. “These two are having it off,” she would say. “About time. They were all lovey-dovey for years. And this one lost a patient last week. Prescribed the wrong dose of something or other. He was distracted because his daughter is pregnant by a negro.”

  Mr. Jessop would see that the policy paid. There would be red tape, to be sure. It was not the best one on offer, ornamental—to show that he, too, was a client of the firm—but, in a sense, that was all the more reason why it would pay.

  He counted the cash in his wallet, surprised to see how little remained. He ought to have left by now, on to the next place, a more distant town where odd jobs might be found. It was all being put into jeopardy. He would have been long gone, if not for the girl. Again he told himself that, though he feared something else: a kind of creeping paralysis, a slow failure of will.

  On the clothes hanger he replaced his own tattered shirt; he would wear the pink and blue one out of the shop. He did the same thing with a pair of brown leather oxfords, his own shoes discreetly returned to the rack. The suit was too expensive to buy and too fine to be swapped for without drawing notice, so he returned that as well to where he had found it. Unfortunate, because it was slim fitting and stylish. The shopkeeper had seen him come out of the room, had nodded when he held up the items in his hands, when he shrugged to indicate that they hadn’t fit. Now her back was turned and she whispered into the phone, saying that what she was being told beggared belief. He took a chance, a risk he knew he should not have, and let the suit fall from the hanger into his briefcase. It gave him no pleasure at all. But the woman did not turn around, not even when he rapped a good-bye on the counter, not even when the bell sounded his step through the door.

  She made her way to the place they’d arranged, walking quickly, afraid that he might not be there: half six was what they’d agreed, and the clock on the bank said six forty-two.

  All day she had been marking the time, scarcely saying a word in the shop. At home, there had been the usual fuss, her mother clucking like a hen through the kitchen.

  “Your father’s destroyed my best saucepan,” she said.

  The air was hazy with smoke.

  “High time he opened a tin around here, but didn’t he fall asleep with his soup on the stove? Old fool. Lucky thing he didn’t burn the place down.”
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  “He’s all right then?” Abigail said. She could not help the love she felt for her father. Married once before meeting Abigail’s mother, he was, at seventy, as she might have imagined a granddad: kind, only vaguely engaged. Sometimes, coming into a room, she would find him daydreaming, caught unawares. “Right, Abigail?” he would say, as if he were startled by her very existence. She liked to think he might once have been different—handsome, untimid—and that some vestige of that better self might still prove to be latent in her.

  “Oh, fine. Out the door before the fire was doused. He’ll be down the Green Man for a pint.”

  Her mother’s hands had gripped the edge of the counter.

  “As if I won’t be widowed soon enough as it is.”

  Now, along Douglass, her spirits recovered; all thoughts of home simply floated away. Milk bottles chimed in the bed of a truck. Holly blues flitted from flower to bush. He was there, just as he’d said he would be, a kept promise on the library steps. Her whole body might have been a pool of warm liquid into which a stone had been dropped. The brown suit he was wearing flattered his height; she would tell him it did when she got up the courage. She wore a pink blouse and pale yellow skirt. They were the best bits of clothing she owned; once, when she’d worn them, she’d heard Aubrey Gillingham say, “God’s truth, like she’s choking on tits.”

  “Am I late? I couldn’t get away from the house. My mum and dad were having a row.”

  She’d left her mother alone in the kitchen, bent over, frantically scrubbing the pan.

  He looked up. Blue sky persisted yet overhead, it being the height of the season. On the steps, all around them, seagulls had gathered. The sun was pleasant on the side of her face.