Other People's Love Affairs
Page 1
O T H E R P E O P L E ’ S
L O V E A F FA I R S
z
Other People’s
Love Affairs
z
S T O R I E S
D. W Y S TA N OW E N
A LG O N QU I N B O O K S
O F C H A P E L H I L L 2 0 1 8
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2018 by D. Wystan Owen.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Steve Godwin.
“What Is Meant to Remain” appeared in A Public Space no. 11 (2010) as
“The Dentist’s Chair”; “Housekeeper” appeared in The Threepenny Review no. 124
(Winter 2011); “Other People’s Love Affairs” appeared in
The American Scholar (Summer 2012).
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Owen, D. Wystan, author.
Title: Other people’s love affairs : stories / D. Wystan Owen.
Description: First edition. | Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018011884 | ISBN 9781616207052 (trade pbk. original : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Small cities—England—Fiction. | Man-woman
relationships—Fiction. | England—Social life and customs—Fiction. |
LCGFT: Psychological fiction. | Short stories.
Classification: LCC PS3615.W35 A6 2018 | DDC 813.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011884
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
For my mother, Julie;
for my father, Geoffrey.
And, always, for Ellen Kamoe.
CONTENTS
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Lovers of a Kind 1
At the Circus 26
Virginia’s Birthday 48
A Romance 71
What Is Meant to Remain 95
A Bit of Fun 112
Housekeeper 131
The Patroness 150
Other People’s Love Affairs 175
The Well Sister 193
Acknowledgments 211
O T H E R P E O P L E ’ S
L O V E A F FA I R S
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Lovers of a Kind
z z z
In Glass, along the boardwalk overlooking the sea, near
the old village shops or the park’s promenades, where in
winter great bulbs will be hung from tree boughs and
snow fine as dust will settle beneath them, Wen Whitaker can be
seen of a morning, collecting rubbish to put in his pram. His fig-
ure, when one comes upon him, is stooped, his head moving gen-
tly as if in suspension. It does not cause alarm, the frank vagrancy of him. He is known and remembered; he has always been here.
His hair is stark white, a blown bit of cotton; the backs of his
hands are like dark, weathered wood. Some speculate that Wen is
a gypsy, others that his father was a sailor from Crete. For his own
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OTHER PEOPLE’S LOVE AFFAIRS
part, he is unconcerned with such questions, content so long as
he isn’t harassed. He wants only to gather his rubbish, observe the movement of other lives by the sea. In times past he had further
desires, but those days of wanting are many years gone.
Past the gown shop he walks, past the bank, past the Green
Man; he moves slowly where the surface is cobbled, pauses some-
times at the post office window to admire new editions of stamps
on display. Everywhere he is pushing his pram. Locals ask him what is on at the Gem, knowing he will have taken note in his rounds.
His home is a small hut near the sea, where the beaches and cliffs lining most of the shore give way to salt marsh, then woods of live oak. Made of stone, it was built as a fisherman’s shelter. He knows that he is assumed to be homeless but is proud of this building in which he was born. On the mantel over the disused coke stove, he
keeps the treasures he has found through the years: a brass fishing lure, a length of white ribbon, a cigarette lighter engraved TLG.
On the floor is a mattress with sheets he tucks up, two blankets for when the evening is cold. With his government check he keeps the
water and light on. He sells his rubbish by the pound to the city.
Saturdays he takes a meal at St. Simon, Sundays at Temple
Beth Elohim. Hot dinners there, soup or spaghetti, sometimes
cocoa or tea at the end. Wednesdays at the hospital a meal is pro-
vided also, a small tray brought to the courtyard for him.
From a window overlooking the hospital grounds, Eleanor
Cartwright watches him eat. He sits on a bench with his back to
the wall, hunched over, trying not to disturb. Always, he begins
with his pot of ice cream, anxious in case such a rare thing should melt. He thanks her when she hands him his meal, but there is a
Lovers of a Kind
3
distant formality to it: he doesn’t smile, their eyes seldom meet.
It saddens her, that, for they used to be friends. Briefly they were.
Lovers of a kind. The sort of thing you only recognized after. That has been the way of love in her life: a feeling understood only after it leaves, discernible in the hollow space of its absence, known
only as a haunting, a ghost.
It began around the time her mother went missing, a
disappearance not in itself out of character but that seemed in its persistence to mark the ultimate severance of a long-fraying bond
with the world. Through the years, there had been occasional mad-
ness. A hospitalization when, just after Eleanor’s birth, her father had opened the door to the bathroom to find his wife attempting
to drown their new daughter. In Eleanor’s own memory there had
been signs of it, too: maternal affection overwhelming, assaultive, given and withdrawn with equal caprice. She remembered her
mother leaving—sometimes for days—and returning unwashed,
unspeaking, exhausted. Afterward, there would be stretches of
normalcy, an uneasy equilibrium struck. But lately, her father
had said, the spells had grown more frequent and lasting, discrete clouds merging, blotting the sun.
“It’s good of you to have visited, button.” At the kitchen table
he spoke. With his hands, he wiped away tears from his face.
“Oh, Daddy,” Eleanor said.
She had come back to see about him, not revealing her inten-
tion to stay. She had boarded all through her grammar school
years, glumly accepting the necessity of it, and now had lived for years at a distance, persisting in a spoiled affair.
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OTHER PEOPLE’S LOVE AFFAIRS
The police had been alerted already. They’d stood about, not
urgent in manner. A
grown woman could not be compelled to
come home.
“She’s unwell,” Mr. Cartwright had said.
“But you say she’s done this before? And she’s taken money
and clothes?”
They would merely keep out an eye. The standard reports
would be filed.
“I’ll be all right, button. I will. It’s all right,” he assured her.
“Go on with your life.”
But she found she scarcely knew what that meant. She hadn’t
left much behind in the city—a few friends, her erstwhile lover.
Cheaply, she took a small flat in Glass, on the outskirts where
dwellings stood in meek rows and a B-picture house had fallen
to ruin. In the damp, dingy space of her rooms, she tried to
arrange the details of a life: On her desk, a book where she kept
her accounts, a typewriter, a photograph of her mother taken in
one happy stretch between spells. In the pantry, just enough food
for the week, fruits and vegetables rationed with care. Her bed
was pushed far into a corner, a sensible twin with a wrought-iron
frame. And in the dresser, a small bag of grass: the remains of what had been an eighth of an ounce.
She applied to Mercy’s maternity ward, having worked in
reception at a clinic in town. The woman there said there wasn’t a place, but she might need assistance in Specialty Care.
“Neonatal, that is,” she said, lifting her eyes. Beatrice, it said on her breast.
Eleanor nodded and said that was fine.
Lovers of a Kind
5
“Reception, a few other menial things. That’s if we don’t have
enough volunteers.”
Days, she would move from one room to the next, regard
infants like sea creatures washed onto shore, writhing in a vain
effort to swim. Their fingers strained against something unseen;
their skin was as pale and thin as wet cloth. She watched as they
moved in that way, at times overwhelmed by tenderness for them:
the unlikeliness, the accident of their lives.
She hadn’t been loved by the man in the city, nor by the men
who had come before him. Traveling to and from Mercy, she knew
this. She rode a blue bike, bought secondhand. At night, fog settled onto the road. She’d been thought beautiful, that was all. Lovely, her pale eyes had often been called, her black hair, the childish
turn of her mouth. Perhaps it was the dull practicality of her, the way she wasn’t given to dream. In every affair she’d been trying it on, a weak effort at madness, romance. She considered this, too,
riding about, how she’d only thought to run as far as the sea.
From her first days back, she would see him in town:
the old vagrant picking trash from the road. Often she noticed
people like him. One day he was near the marina; the next he
was outside the chemist on Lynn. She didn’t know why his image
remained, only that it was insistently there: his curiosity when he lifted an item, his pleasure when he turned it about in his hand.
Specialty Care was a small, well-lit ward, managed by Beatrice
during the day shift and visited by a number of doctors in what
seemed a haphazard rotation. Only seldom were any volunteers
to be found—teenagers or pairs of old ladies—and so she began
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OTHER PEOPLE’S LOVE AFFAIRS
to handle the infants, rocking them slowly back and forth in her
arms. She did not touch those who had tubes in their bodies, fed
only those deemed healthy enough. It was far more than she’d
been asked to do in her previous job, but she dared not demur for
need of the work.
“Only we’re doing the best we know how,” she would whisper,
touching a minuscule hand. “Only we are making our way.”
The weak bodies had a curious warmth.
Beatrice showed her how to massage them, applying pressure
along the length of their arms. She was firm with them, unsenti-
mental; she cursed when her arthritic knuckles seized up.
“You aren’t going to hurt them,” she said. “Trust me. They’re
dying to feel something, Ellie.”
It was another sort of love, watching Beatrice work. The
unthinking competence of her.
“Being born,” she said, “is a terrible thing. Everyone living has
suffered that loss.”
“She hasn’t accessed any funds from the bank,”
Eleanor’s father said on the phone. “Though I don’t think I should have expected her to.”
Eleanor lay on the floor of her room, her back to the carpet,
the phone to her ear. On the ceiling, a large stain resembled Japan.
“You’re well then, button?”
“Oh, well enough.”
“These cataracts are a nuisance.”
Things sometimes were not easy between them. His had always
been a kind, gentle presence, but mild almost to the point of
Lovers of a Kind
7
detachment; in the reigning atmosphere of volatile passion, his
steadiness had often seemed an indifference. That in adulthood
she had grown to be like him only increased the resentment she
held. My darling, the man in the city had called her. Nothing I offered was ever enough.
“I shall have to have the surgery, after all,” her father said now.
“It’s awful, the thought of cutting an eye.”
From above, she could hear Mrs. Ridgewe’s TV, the laugh track
from a comedy show. The laughter was constant, night after night,
but never belonged to Mrs. Ridgewe herself. She was a middle-
aged woman, well dressed in old clothes, the elaborate maquil-
lage of her face suggesting a lifelong dissatisfaction. Her step on the landing was sharp. In the shared kitchen she ate kippers for
breakfast.
At length, Eleanor rang off with her father and smoked a little
bit of the grass. She liked to have a bit now and then while she
tidied or reviewed lists of chores to be done. Her second neighbor was a man: Deegan Kirby. She liked him more than she did Mrs.
Ridgewe. He could be seen some nights on the landing, dressed
outrageously, coming or going: as a pirate, or in high heels and
a gown. He ran a burlesque show on weekends in Croft; days,
he kept books for a grocery chain. The first time she’d seen him
dressed as a woman, she’d looked down, afraid to have caught him
at something.
“Eleanor, darling. Come,” he had said. “Be a dear and hold my
martini a moment.”
She had done so, blushing while he straightened his dress. He
hadn’t shaved the backs of his hands.
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OTHER PEOPLE’S LOVE AFFAIRS
“That’s better. These dresses will chafe you to death. I’m slim-
ming to get myself down to a twenty.”
She’d wondered later if he might be embarrassed. He had
about him an air of performance, a way of too much protesting
his ease. Sometimes she heard his voice through the walls, shout-
ing hoarsely into the phone.
Another joke inspired laughter upstairs.
“Of course I want to know she’s all right,” her father had said
as they prepared to ring off. “But I won’t say there isn’t relief,” and though Eleanor understood what he meant, indeed had entertained the same thought herself, she’d been angry, feeling he hadn’t the right.
the last of the light going down.
A spring rain had halted her under a bridge, where the road
ran beside a creek feeding the sea. She leaned her bike against the side of the bridge and paused to pull up the hood of her mack.
On the surface of the water, ripples expanded, as if schools of fish were rising to feed. At a distance she could see him approaching,
his head bobbing up and down in the rain.
As he drew near, he squinted, trying to place her. For a
moment, she felt the hand of fear on her heart. He stopped then
and stood before her under the bridge. He opened the canvas top
of his pram.
“Clever, this,” he said, gesturing to it.
She looked. Nobody else was about.
“Some things’d be all right in the rain: metal and glass. It’s
Lovers of a Kind
9
paper that spoils.” He unfurled a banner from a juggling show.
“All dry and good as new. See?” he said.
The season was changing. She didn’t feel chilled, despite the
deluge. Along the strand, vendors, absent all winter, had returned; only that morning she’d passed them, each staring, untrusting, up
at the sky. Books, they sold; pinwheels, T-shirts, and candy.
“All right, then?” Eleanor said. “You’ve had a bit of a soak your-
self, sir.”
His white hair had become matted and wet. The wool of his
coat was heavy about him.
“Right as rain.” He laughed to himself. “It’s All of a Piece at the Gem tonight, dear.”
The rain, already, had slowed to a drizzle. In the silence, she
was aware of her breathing.
“That’s how the cinema’s called. Did you know that?”
She nodded.
“Of course. My apologies, dear. Silly, thinking you’d not be
aware.”
“You weren’t to know.”
“Ah, but I was. Aren’t you Eleanor Cartwright?”
He didn’t look at her when he spoke. His eyes moved posses-
sively over his rubbish. She wondered if he had been following
her. Surely, she’d been the subject of talk—she was still known
sometimes in shops and cafés, oblique reference made to her fam-
ily crisis—but she could not imagine that sort of gossip finding its way to an old vagrant’s ears.
Thunder sounded a good distance off.