Other People's Love Affairs: Stories

by D. Wystan Owen

  He’d seemed to smile when she mentioned the row, and she wondered if it amused him that she lived with her parents.

  “Not late at all,” he said. “Not at all. I’d have waited a good deal longer than this.”

  She chewed at the nail of her thumb.

  “I thought we’d see a film. You like movies, Abbie?”

  “I like them, sure.”

  “There’s a film at the Gem.”

  “Maybe we’d walk a bit first?”

  She did not mind being bold in this way. She knew that he would do what she liked, because he was the sort of person who would. With another sort of person—one her own age, for instance—she would have gone to the film without taking a walk. Boys her age couldn’t wait for an hour. He would pay for the movie: he was that sort as well.

  “Sure. That’s a fine idea. Good we should talk. By the sea, maybe? Not so many people around.”

  They walked west until they reached the marina, through cobbled streets in the old part of town. The sounds there were of boats in the dock, masts whipped by rigging moved in the wind. On the footpaths between small parks they went on. He was relieved she hadn’t spoken of dinner and hoped she might have eaten at home.

  “You look nice in your sweater,” he said.

  She looked at his eyes, which seemed to linger over her body, but not indecently, before rising again to meet hers.

  “I knew we’d get on as soon as we met.”

  “I thought it strange at first, your looking at me. I was told to stay away from men who hang about like you were.”

  “And do you still think it strange?”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  “I’d taken a fancy to you.”

  On a bench at the crest of a hill, two women were sitting and sharing ice cream. Abigail looked at them, puzzled somehow. They were silhouetted against the sky, backlit by residual glow from the sun, which had a few moments earlier dipped into the sea. In the farther distance someone was flying a kite.

  “Come off it,” she said.

  “You were a sight for sore eyes.”

  It was far too early in the encounter for crying. She looked away from him because she did not trust herself. It happened this way: somebody would say something kind, and instead of gratitude, she would be overcome with this sadness.

  “Was it a laugh for you when I said about living at home? I mean to move out as soon as I can.”

  He touched her arm at the underside of the wrist. He touched it there and lifted it, so that her forearm fell along the length of his own.

  “Not a laugh,” he said. “No, not at all. When I’m home I take care of my mother, in fact. I’ve had to since my old dad died in a fall.”

  It was the first bit of truth he had spoken to her, and with it the accent he’d been affecting began to fall away and diminish. She did not seem to take any notice, but in his own ear it sounded alien, strange.

  “My dad’s old,” she said. “But I like him.”

  “I’ll bet he’s nice.”

  “I’ll be moved out any time now,” she said.

  “Do you like it, working in the gown shop, Abbie?”

  “Not very much. Mrs. L favors Bethany as a matter of fact. Anyone would. Well, you saw her, I guess.”

  “She doesn’t measure to you.”

  “Stop it,” she said, really wanting him to.

  “Is your skirt from the shop? It suits you,” he said.

  She pulled her arm away, not completely but a little, so that her hand rested nearer his elbow. She knew he would understand from the gesture that she’d prefer to talk about anything else.

  “When you’ve moved out will you go away from here, Abbie?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “Is there a dream you’ve got? You could do anything you wanted, I’ll bet.”

  She blushed. “When I was little I wanted to be a veterinarian. For horses and things. But I don’t really want to be one anymore. Now I only want a chance to travel, like you’ve got.”

  “You get to where you’re missing a home.”

  It was becoming difficult to see on the path. In the distance their view opened onto the sea, which was opalescent in the last of the light. The beach itself was visible only where it had been washed with the water, and there it was opalescent as well. A dog was fetching a stick in the surf.

  “I don’t think I would miss it,” she said.

  They turned around and this time when they walked past the bench the two women who had earlier been there were gone.

  “We could sit a while.” A breeze had sharpened, and she moved so that she was closer to him.

  “You’ve given up on a film?” He wondered if she was feeling afraid. For his part, he was, inexplicably so. It was as if, with the one true statement about the death of his father, he had pulled a single stone from the base of a tower. All the many lies he had told, most of all the ones he had told to himself, fell and clattered, an empty ruin inside him.

  “The cinema’s where the kids go to be alone. We could find someplace a bit quieter, Archie.”

  She had led him to the bench, and they sat in the dark.

  “It’s quiet in the cinema,” he said.

  “I’m not a child. It wouldn’t be my first time.”

  She was kissing his neck. Her mouth was warm and searching. He was accustomed to the expert movements of whores with whom he spent nights in unfamiliar cities; now his heart was breaking for her, the desperate and curious way that she kissed him, her mouth opening and closing like something just born.

  “My name is Tim Garvey,” he said, the voice and the accent now wholly his own.

  He felt her pause almost imperceptibly, a single tremor, a single missed beat of the heart. Then she pressed herself further against him and brushed a lock of hair from his face.

  “I’ve run away from my life.”

  She was on top of him. Their faces were touching, but she would not open her eyes.

  “Abbie, I never played ball. I’m a salesman.”

  “Please stop it,” she said. “I wish you would stop.”

  He put his arms, which had hung at his sides, around her. He held her there, arrested, her chin on his shoulder. Her body was plump, but he could sense it was fragile. Her breath seemed to rattle the cage of her ribs. Lorna had been like that when afraid in the night.

  After the fall, his father lived seventeen days. He had not woken up. In bed he’d lain all the time without moving, a burbling sound escaping his lips. His mother, having no place else to go, had spent those last nights in bed with Tim.

  Her breath, too, had been rather like this.

  From the bus stop in Colby he walked to his car. In an unpaved lot near the roadway it sat, canted where one of its tires was low. It seemed absurd now. The whole plan seemed absurd: the bags left behind, the checking account emptied and the cards thrown away. An absurdity, too, falling in love with the girl, but even before that there had been no real hope of success. He simply did not have courage enough; his mother would die poor because of his fear.

  He had left almost no fuel in the tank, that being part of the foolish plan, too, but had bought a can and a funnel at the garage in Glass. He poured this in; it took longer than he had expected. In the sun he felt himself terribly wearied.

  It had been midnight before they were parted.

  In Wexford, he stopped for more fuel and a bite. He ordered soup and a sandwich but didn’t eat very much. From a box he telephoned to his mother.

  “Where had you got?” she said. “I’d about given up.”

  He leaned against the glass wall of the box. In the background he could hear the white noise of the TV.

  “I’ve got a mystery on, but it doesn’t matter. I already know it’s the daughter. Give me two secs, I’ll turn off the sound. It’s always the one you think couldn’t have done it.”

  He could see her there, leaning forward a bit in her chair. She wore the same pale blue night dress as she had for years. She ha
rdly ever wore anything else. Every Christmas he bought her another to replace what invariably had grown soiled or torn.

  “All right, Ma?”

  “I’m out of milk. I can’t drink my coffee without it.”

  “I’ll be back by the end of the week. We can watch your hospital show.”

  “Ah, good,” she said. “I’ll have to tell you about it. There’s a lot that’s gone on since the last time you saw.”

  Abigail folded and refolded the clothes. She had not slept; her eyes were swollen and red. Bethany looked at her from time to time, intently, searching her face.

  “It didn’t go well, Abbie?” she said at last, because the silence had festered between them.

  “It was grand.”

  “I’m glad. What did you wear? I think you would have looked nice in this.” She held up a green muslin frock.

  “I wore a skirt and a blouse, as a matter of fact. Not that it’s your business and not that it matters. He was more interested in what I had on underneath.”

  Bethany blushed. “Abbie! I told you to watch out for an athlete. Did he have only one thing on his mind?”

  “I had only one thing on mine. He’s a grown man, and I’m a grown woman. He wasn’t at all like the other boys I’ve been with. He wasn’t at all like Clifford Price, if you wanted to know.”

  “It’s better not to, Abbie,” Garvey had said when she pleaded with him to bring her back to his rooms, and again when she suggested they run off together. She did not care that things he had said were untrue, did not care that his life had been perfectly plain. When he told her about the man falling from a scaffold, about how he had died on the seventeenth day, she knew that this time he was telling the truth. That he had lied before only heightened her affection; he had done that because he thought he was not grand enough for her, but in fact she loved him more for not being grand. “It’s better we should imagine what it would have been like. You can live a great deal longer on something imagined.”

  On her lunch break she walked the short block to the chemist. Her strength was coming back by degrees. Harold looked up as she stepped through the door. She ignored him and stood by the tall rack of stockings, touching them with the backs of her hands.

  At the counter he asked her how she was faring.

  “Fine, Harold,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”

  She could not bring herself to look at his face, so full, always, of ludicrous hope.

  “I’ll have a box of those,” she said with a gesture.

  She was pointing to the small shelf behind the till. Harold glanced briefly over his shoulder. When he turned back, his expression was blank.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Which ones did you say?”

  “In the blue box, Harold. The blue condoms, I said.”

  He turned again, his whole body this time, and was turned for rather longer than was needed to retrieve them.

  Harold knew well what people said about him: that he was simple, that he hadn’t been a promising student. It was why he took pride in his job at the chemist, why he dreamed also of a turn on the screen: because each small accomplishment of that kind gave the lie to what talk there had been all his life. In fact, he perceived more than people imagined. He had known at once, for instance, when she walked in today, that things with the pitcher had come to an end. He had known and had been sympathetic; even now he was still sympathetic. While she paid, despite everything and beneath all the pain, there remained a vague thrill at the thought of the condoms. That couldn’t be helped, though he knew it was shameful, pathetic, to be thrilled by such a small thing.

  “Thank you, Harold,” Abigail said.

  Under a moonless sky they had stopped near her house. Tim said the street she lived on was pretty. Looking up and down it, she supposed he was right. Chestnut trees formed a leafy promenade; old sodium lights caught wisps of a fog that had descended after dark without their having noticed.

  “I hope you won’t hate me when you look back,” he said.

  “Oh, you’ve got it wrong if you think that. Quite wrong.”

  They were silent a minute more, and then she let go of his hand. She was nearly home, and she turned once more toward him. He had not moved, was framed in the light of a lamp.

  “Archie?” she said. “Tim?” She remained at a distance, standing with one leg crossed over the other. “Only I was wondering something. When you said I had the look of an actress, was it one in particular you had in mind? Only I was wondering that.”

  “You’ve got a look to beat them all,” he had said.

  Outside, she took the condoms from the bag she’d been given and threw the brown paper into the rubbish. Tim Garvey would be on the road again now. The condoms were of no use at all. When she reached the gown shop she would put them on the counter for Bethany to see, perhaps afterward she would take them home for her mother to see also. But in the end they, too, would be consigned to the rubbish.

  In later years there would be fondness in the memory of youth’s urgency, gratitude for a passion, however short-lived. For now, though, as she walked about Glass, there was nothing of that, only bitter, premature resignation. Beneath the awning of Hyde Pantry, Debra sat smoking; at the Gem, the marquee’s red letters announced the film he had spoken of going to see. The vision in which she was married to Harold, having first visited her in the night, seemed more plausible now than finer things ever had. What was easy for others was not easy for her. She moved in a medium denser than air. Bethany would be at the wedding, a bridesmaid; she would say that a girl could do worse. Mrs. L, present also, would remark on the gown while Abigail’s mother complained of the heat; and down the aisle her father would shamble, distracted even as he gave her away.

  Harold’s ambition would come to nothing, of course, and she envisioned the charade of tender disappointment with which they would meet its failure together. He would be good to her, surely, but hopelessly dull, and she would have to try her best to be good in return. She would not hold against him what he never was and could not be, or the natural impermanence of a summer’s romance. She would not speak the name of Archibald Gates or give voice to the dreams in which he remained. There would be between them no cruelty after today’s, but the memory of it would surely persist. Regret about that would come later, too, on nights when, lifting her head in the dark, she would find that he’d gone out walking again. “Couldn’t sleep,” he might say, returning later to bed, and unspeaking she would move herself near, allow the chill of her body to say what was true: that she had, until only moments ago, stood at the window gazing privately out; that while no love had welled in her chest as, at last, his distant figure appeared, it had made nonetheless a welcome sight in approach: slow-moving, blue against the black, rutted road, and beyond it the moon a broken dish on the sea.

  What Is Meant to Remain

  On the morning of Alma’s examination and cleaning, Kenneth Rivers woke early, restless and tired, aware that he owed her an RSVP. He didn’t linger in bed; he showered and dressed, not allowing himself to take extra care. There was to be, in some weeks, an anniversary party, given at her home overlooking the bluffs. Cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, a view of the sea. Again, he thought about it with dread, making toast for his breakfast, lacing his shoes. Outside, morning was slow to emerge, a dense fog laying itself over Glass. Sleepily, the village was stirring; seabirds, unseen, called to each other. He had long ago discarded the invitation, resentful of its presumption and pomp. The gaudiness of it: formal script on the address. Naturally, she’d used her married name, Alma Newhouse. He’d forgotten the precise date of the party, though of course he remembered the wedding itself, as well as the date of his own wedding to Alma and the date they had finalized the divorce.

  She had secured the day’s first appointment, as she always did and had done since he’d known her: the two years of courtship, ten years of marriage, and, now, seventeen of divorce. They’d agreed to the split one night after dinner, speaking quietly, the televisio
n muted in their bedroom, mindful of their daughter sleeping just down the hall. Neither had wept or cast blame on the other. It was only they weren’t in love. Later, with the lights turned out in the room and uncertain if she was still awake or not, Kenneth had said, “You’ll need a new dentist.” They were lying there together in the still, moony night, and Alma had taken some time to respond before saying, unfeelingly, “I don’t see why.”

  The office was in what had once been a house, semidetached with a pink-washed facade, a periodontist’s next door. At the rear of the building were the office and surgery, gutted and rebuilt in medical fashion, but the reception still resembled a Victorian cottage: dark, exposed wood with wainscoted walls. Thirty years he had worked in that space; every part of it held a memory now.

  Ruby arrived just after eight, lurching with exaggerated fatigue. Kenneth was seated at the desk in his office, and she slumped down in the chair opposite him, arms dangling at her sides like a catatonic’s. She was the practice’s only hygienist; not yet thirty-five, already she’d been with him nearly a decade. Sometimes, passing the surgery door, he’d hear her tell a client, “That’s enough out of you!” She liked to flirt with him, always had, a habit that had made him uneasy at first but that now had become a familiar comfort. He knew she never meant anything by it. She was married to a doctor at Mercy, handsome, easy mannered, a man Kenneth liked. Ruby was the same way with him. My Swede-heart, she called him, for his height and blond hair. Ruby’s own parents were both from Raipur.

  Kenneth asked how her weekend had been.

  “Short,” she said. “You’re bleeding me dry. I told Luke it’s high time he got me with child, that’s how bad I need a day off. Kenny, I’m telling you, I’m considering bringing a life into this cruel world just to get the maternity leave.”

  She swiveled back and forth in the chair.

  “You get holiday.” He held up his hands. “Take a day off, Rube. Take a week if you want.”

  “I always feel so bad for the temps. They don’t know what they’re walking into: the old biddies of Glass, the absentminded dentist. No, this job is my own cross to bear.” She winked. “A strong cup of coffee would do.”