At Douglass, Mel was crossing the street, and Kenneth quickened his own pace to catch up.
“Mel,” he said. “Do you walk home every day?”
The periodontist had his hands in his pockets, his head tipped back and bathed in the light. With his long hair and round eyeglasses, he was plainly himself: an old burnout made perfectly good.
“Often,” he said. “When the weather permits. It’s good for you, Kenny.”
“It’s a beautiful day.”
“I’m of quite the same opinion,” Mel said. “Speaking in my capacity as a doctor, of course.”
An old joke.
They walked together some blocks. Kenneth said, “I was thinking today. About the dinners we used to have in the office.”
Mel looked up without recognition.
“You remember. Alma would show up with dinner and three bottles of wine, and we would sit around in the examination chairs or up on the counters. We just couldn’t get over owning the place.”
“Are you sure I was there for that?”
“Of course. I’m certain. You used to use my scalers as forks and tease Alma with the mirrors, like you were looking up her skirt.”
Mel laughed. “I admit, that sounds like something I’d have done.”
It was strange that he shouldn’t remember. In Kenneth’s mind it seemed there had been countless such dinners, but perhaps there had only been two or three. It happened that way with memory now; time warped, the same as it had with Miranda, the same as it had with the years of his marriage.
“I was doing a lot of nitrous in those days,” Mel said, still chuckling. “But I know we had fun.”
They parted ways, and Kenneth walked on. Gulls passed overhead; something larger, a swan. In gardens along the road, honeybees gathered, humming in bushes of rosemary, bluebeard. Across Birch the old vagrant, Whitaker, passed. One man jump-started another man’s car. A pair of boys kicked a ball against a battered garage door. A woman walked an old and timorous dog.
In their respective homes, Alma and Ruby would be preparing to sit down with their husbands to dinner. Miranda would perhaps already have finished hers. He would eat his meal alone at his crafts table, surrounded by his models, as he did every night, a practice that, by now, could only be counted among the choices he’d made. At the anniversary party he would be the one hovering at the edges of other people’s lives, unconnected but by the diminishing pull of memories either shared or disputed. What he had been offered was a place on the periphery, a chance to play at something that was not quite his: like a plain, unmarried girl asked to hold the train of her younger sister’s wedding gown, or an infirm boy sent onto the field with a bandage or water for the winger to drink. The thought of such a role had always saddened him, but as he turned for home it seemed that perhaps it would be enough, that he might manage eventually to supplement his solitary pleasures with new vicarious and borrowed ones, as he had come through the years to enjoy hearing stories of his patients’ successes and good fortune, to take them, in small measure, for his own.
A Bit of Fun
From the main road, heading west with the sun, slowly, Gerald Malden withdrew. Beyond him, a narrow country lane twisted south, descending as it drew nearer the coast. It was a long way for an afternoon’s entertainment—two hours’ drive in either direction—but the mid-August weather was fine and in the end he couldn’t see any harm. There was a cinema called the Princess he fancied a look at, an old fashioned one he knew was still there. He knew because he had looked it up on the web. The facade had been painted, the marquee restored. He remembered the titles of movies displayed: Date with Disaster, The Imperfect Crime.
The buildings were brick and cob, near to the road; on one an ad was painted over the whitewash—Fulton’s Sweet Cream—letters chipping away. He recognized everything, the advertisement, too. He recognized the trees, chestnut and birch, and the soft, verdant weeds that followed a rain.
Seeing the photographs on the web, he’d been gripped at once with the need to return. It surprised him, rather: the intensity of it. Nearly sixty years it had been. Tickets had cost half a crown in those days. A sixpence for crisps, and soft drink as well.
There would be plenty of time to see a picture, he thought. It was midafternoon; he had nowhere to be. Peter had rung Sunday morning again, a routine that seemed subtly to forbid further contact. Leslie’s youngest had been down with the croup but was better now. They had their own lives.
“My husband isn’t any good to me, Gerald.”
The words, spoken in a whisper, returned. In his small car, nearing the theater, they did. A summer night when she said them, with autumn approaching.
He had been working for his father’s delivery firm, driving an ancient Morris Z into town, fruit for the greengrocer, cloth for the gown shop, sometimes even whiskey brought to the pub. Sixteen, he would spend his summer that way. “You’ll know a day’s work by autumn,” his father had said.
He let the window down, turning the knob, taking in the salt dampness of air from the sea. He and Elsie had sometimes visited Glass, even after his mother and father were gone. With the children they’d picnicked overlooking the pier; at the adventure playground Peter had got a splinter and cried. Already then, the flower shop had become a café.
The Princess wasn’t really in Glass. There was a different picture house there, called the Gem. The Princess was some miles away in a repurposed barn beside the Payne Road. A novelty now in its resurrection, it had once been a gathering place for the residents of smaller villages and farms in the days when Glass was considered too far. They’d arrived on bicycles, on foot, or in cars. Beneath the marquee, they’d stood and chatted or smoked, men and women who had saved for an evening of pleasure. You wore a suit to the pictures back then; ladies wore dresses, false jewels in their hair.
All of this Malden recalled, and his own suit: heavy tweed too warm for the season. “Handsome,” Mrs. Trilby had said.
You couldn’t miss the cinema, so alien on the hillside. With its new paint it was almost the same. The marquee was said to come from a Hollywood theater, art deco, not matching the plain stone facade. He could see that it had indeed been restored, its steel lines brightly catching the sun. In a small lot beside it other cars had been parked.
Ribbons he’d brought her, and paper and string. The flowers came daily on a separate truck. “A new boy,” she said the first day he arrived. “What have you brought me? What treasures? What gifts?”
“Ribbon,” he said.
“Yes, but what sort?” She laughed aloud. In the next months he would learn to discern all the types: taffeta, grosgrain, jacquard, and chiffon.
She had red hair; auburn, she called it. At work she wore it up in a bun. Her eyes were green but with a darkness about them, serenely set. She wore summer dresses.
At the Princess, when they went there together, she would never allow him to smoke. “It will age you,” she’d say, “the way it’s done me.” There wasn’t any point in contradicting her claim, though she could not have been much beyond twenty-five. She would kiss his forehead or his cheek when she said it and then drag slowly on her thin cigarette, exhaling a narrow white line, like a ribbon.
The film on today was And Then There Was One, a B picture.
“One senior,” he said, the money passed through a gap in the box-office glass, as it had been, too, in earlier days.
“Two adults” was what she’d always said then, glancing to catch the flush in his cheeks.
Trilby’s was the name of the shop, a single window between the bank and the butcher. When he stepped through the door a bell was set ringing, and she would look up to see him, pretty and alarmed. Above the flowers and the branches of willow and birch, fairy lights were haphazardly strung. She might equally have called the business Loraine’s, but she said she had never been fond of her name.
After a week there was something almost daily for her, small orders: jute twine, a bag of glass beads.
&nbs
p; “Bring mine last,” she had said. “There’s never a hurry. Then you can stay for a while and chat.”
He paid for his ticket and was given a stub. The doors were old-fashioned, deco as well: wide swinging glass with piping around.
“I have always liked flowers,” she said. “Ever since I was a girl. I suppose I have a fondness for beautiful things.”
They were seated in the small space behind the counter, at opposite ends of a sofa. The day’s delivery had been signed for and put away. She liked to sit there and invited him, too. The wireless played at low volume. She said she was wild about Patti Page. Her hands were busy, always turning small objects; you’d want a cigarette near the end of the day, but the smoke would spoil the flowers, she said. She talked of anything that came to her mind, and he listened, liking her to. He sipped the lemonade she had given him: fresh squeezed from a tree grown in a pot.
“They’ll cheer you, I find. When you’re in need of cheering. Don’t you think so? Do you like beautiful things?”
He did not have the courage to say, I like you. He said, “I like books. Treasure Island and those.”
“It keeps me busy, owning the shop. We can’t have children, as it turns out. I haven’t told anybody before, but I felt I could tell you. I felt you were kind. It’s the reason Mr. Trilby bought me the shop.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He could not imagine why she should have chosen him to confide in. It made him feel special, and burdened as well. He looked at all the many bunches of flowers, arranged in pails along the walls of the room.
“That’s a disappointment in a woman’s life, Gerald.”
“Yes.”
She was glum all that day. She carried pain, he thought, the way an animal might: calmly, her body protecting itself, as if the deep, silent ache were precious to her.
Other days she was playful with him.
“Do you like music?” she said.
She adjusted the knob on the wireless set.
“I played the trombone for a while in school.”
“Not dance music? Have you danced with a girl?”
He said he had, but she laughed, catching his lie.
“It was a lucky thing, the first day you came in. I said it myself: I’m lucky with this one. He’ll be a friend. I could tell.”
When he was late getting home, his father grumbled about it.
“They want to talk,” he said in defense. “Some of them you can’t get away.”
“You’ve got work to do, boy,” his father replied, not looking up from the crates he was sorting. It didn’t really matter, he knew. A plate had been set aside for his dinner.
Evenings, he imagined where she might be. Closing up, the door to the shop locked behind her, sign turned in the window, Sorry, We’re Closed. He imagined her cooking dinner at home, a small kitchen, wallpaper patterned with bees. There was the garden with the lemon tree in a pot. Over dinner she would tell about the flowers she’d sold, and Mr. Trilby would say he was tired from work. Business she’d said was her husband’s profession. He wondered, would they talk about the lack of a child? It might be that that was something they didn’t discuss.
In the grand foyer of the Princess, the carpets were new, a blue where before they were purple or red. He bought Milk Duds because the film hadn’t begun. They tasted of the paper box they were in, but he ate them anyway, the sweetness being welcome just then. Elsie had never cared much for sweets. She preferred a bit of cheese at the end of a meal, a cup of coffee sometimes if it wasn’t past ten.
The foyer was a long room, like a corridor, high and open up to the rafters. The walls were covered with old posters from films. A few young people milled about and sipped beers, beer being sold now with the other concessions.
“See we don’t have to carry you out again, Freddie,” one of the youths said, nudging his friend. “You remember last week? All right, what was the film?”
High on the walls, signs made to resemble the marquee pointed the way to the theater, the lounge. The toilets were at opposite ends of the hall; where before they’d been marked merely Ladies and Gents, now they said Femmes Fatales and Private Dicks.
He found a seat near the back of the theater, which was where he had always sat in the past. It was a large room, still oddly resembling a barn; a false ceiling sloped down to salvage acoustics. The screen was very large, and there were not many seats; half were empty, half taken up with couples and friends. When the lights dimmed, he placed his hands on his knees. The projector lit a stream of dust in the air.
She had died, Elsie had, on the third day of March. Winter hadn’t yet broken. Since then, he’d moved through the house in a dream, meals taken and as quickly forgotten, the garden half-heartedly raised. You got used to a person, in addition to love, used to the way they acted and spoke, to the sound of their laughter from the next room when something funny occurred on TV. For years she had taught piano lessons at home; now the instrument sat unused and ill tuned. At night in bed, she had liked to sleep very near, an arm or a leg draped over his person. “So you won’t float away,” she had said. “So you won’t float up and out the window from me.”
In the film, a policeman suspected a fraud. He said, “There’s a dame at the bottom of this.”
When Peter had got a splinter at the playground in Glass, it was Gerald who had had to remove it. There was pain, sometimes, removing a splinter, and Elsie couldn’t bear to cause pain.
He looked down at the sweets and back at the screen. Widowerhood had so far been this way: you thought a memory might bring some comfort, then found that it caused only guilt or regret.
The curtains were different now, too, he had noticed. Purple velvet, where the old ones had been patterned in gold. He remembered Mrs. Trilby pointing to them, touching his arm with the bare skin of her own. “They’re jacquard, you see, Gerald. You recognize that? Same as the ribbons you brought me today.”
What a thrill it had been to hear her say it like that: the ribbons you brought me today.
Perhaps things would be different if he hadn’t retired. If his mind weren’t free to run any which way. He might have stayed on after selling the tearoom; one or two days a week would have done.
On the morning of Elsie’s death he had thought to himself, It is happening. It is actually here. For years, the thought of their separation had been merely abstract; time had seemed renewable then. You didn’t know the end of something until it arrived. It was the same way when his mother and father had died, his sister, Janet, too: as if he hadn’t quite believed in the permanence of it. That night, while people spoke to fill in the silence, he had merely looked down at his hands, thinking the world had only one secret left to reveal.
“Would you want to see a picture with me, Gerald?” she’d said. She spoke as shyly as if she were the child. It was July, a gray day, not warm for the season, so she’d made them tea in beautiful china. The flowers painted on were magnolia kobus. You’d know them by the thin white petals, she’d said.
“In the evening? I don’t think I could.”
“It would only be a bit of fun for us, Gerald. Mr. Trilby doesn’t care for the pictures. It would be a relief to him if you went.”
There was varnish on her nails he had noticed. She wore lipstick, which matched the red of her dress.
“They’d have an adventure film. I wouldn’t mind that. They might have a pirate adventure,” she said.
On the wireless, a program was ending. She turned the knob to shut it off and they were left in the silence. She smiled.
“I’m lonely as a matter of fact. That’s the truth of it.” She glanced out the window. “Mr. Trilby isn’t home very much.”
He said maybe he could come into town on his bike. His mother and father would allow that if he wasn’t too late.
“It isn’t the Gem I had in mind,” she said. “Only there’d be talk if we went to the Gem. People are so cruel about that. Always looking to take the wrong end of the stick.”
He f
elt himself blush deeply at the suggestion.
“Not Mr. Trilby, of course. He would know it was only a bit of fun. I wouldn’t care what people thought, either, only it might not be good for the shop. People wouldn’t like to buy flowers from a woman if they thought badly of her. There’s a different picture house called the Princess. Two or three miles along the Payne Road. It’s more private. If you could manage. If you came into town we could go in my car.”
The bell sounded and she put down her cup. A man asked about making up a bouquet. Gerald watched her move about, choosing the flowers: red and purple stocks, lily grasses, and ferns. She had told him the names and he had remembered. The same as had happened with the ribbons he brought.
He wondered how it would be, sitting beside her in a cinema, how it would be with the lights going down. Watching a picture and knowing all the time she was there, breathing and blinking only inches away. She gave cheek to the man who was buying the flowers, asked him what he’d done to wind up in the doghouse. A smile, a wink; they liked that, she’d said.
In his mind, he said, I am falling in love.
He left before the end of the film, being homesick in the dark and ill from the sweets. Outside, he shielded his eyes from the brightness. It wasn’t really much of a film; there had indeed been a dame at the bottom of things.
He had nowhere to go; the thought returned with its usual weight. He would drive into Glass since it was close and since, he knew, that was part of his plan all along. He would look in on the old town: the pub where he’d unloaded whiskey and beer, the butcher, and the bank. Perhaps he would drive himself into the hills.
In truth, there was some anger he felt. That it should have been he who took the splinter from Peter’s palm, he who performed all such duties through the years: applying iodine or alcohol to skinned knees, meting out punishment when punishment was needed. Perhaps that was why Peter called only on Sunday, Leslie only when something was wrong. It was shameful to envy Elsie the love of her children, but there it was.
Other People's Love Affairs: Stories Page 10