Other People's Love Affairs: Stories Read online

  Other People’s Love Affairs

  Stories

  D. Wystan Owen

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2018

  For my mother, Julie;

  for my father, Geoffrey.

  And, always, for Ellen Kamoe.

  Contents

  Lovers of a Kind

  At the Circus

  Virginia’s Birthday

  A Romance

  What Is Meant to Remain

  A Bit of Fun

  Housekeeper

  The Patroness

  Other People’s Love Affairs

  The Well Sister

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Lovers of a Kind

  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 figure, when one comes upon him, is stooped, his head moving gently 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 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 sometimes 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 provided 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 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 madness. 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 intention 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.

  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.

  “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 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, unsentimental; 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 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 maquillage 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.

  “That’s better. These dresses will chafe you to death. I’m slimming 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, shouting 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.

  She had occasion to speak to the man. It was evening, 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 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 yourself, 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 possessively 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 family 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.

  “I was friends with your mother,” he said.

  At work, Beatrice told her his name.

  “He’s missing a screw, but harmless,” she said.

  They were crossing the hallway to Specialty Care. The sound of their heavy clogs echoed about them.

  “That pram of his,” Eleanor said. “I thought it might be he’d taken a child.”

  “Oh, heavens. He’s nothing like that.”

  Beneath the lights of the bridge, he had asked her, “You like the Fairchild lady?”

  She’d started to ask him how he knew where she worked, then remembered that she was still wearing her badge.

  “Her husband paints houses, you know. Used to be wed to the Chamberlain woman.”

  She hadn’t said anything. She’d watched him replace the lid of his pram, testing it firmly to see it was shut. As he shuffled on, having spoken no further, his head had bobbed again through the night.

  At lunch, she and Bea carried cafeteria food back along the corridor to the ward. Eleanor only picked at her tray. It reminded her of school lunches in youth: foul-smelling things she’d been forced to consume. Precious they’d considered her there, swapping a tray of kidney pie for an apple.

  “What does your husband do, Bea?” she inquired.

  The older woman ate soup, cottage cheese. Her appetite was larger than Eleanor’s was.

  “You mean other than watching TV? Well, he drinks beer. He eats crisps. From time to time he still paints a house.” She laughed. “Oh, he’s all right. If he made more I mightn’t have got into nursing. So at least I can thank him for our being poor.”

  Months passed. The sea, dark gray through the winter, grew paler blue and was still on its surface. Eleanor’s eyes ran with salt mist and pollen; she bought herself short dresses in town.

  In time, she stopped regarding the phone. She did not wait with dread for bad news of her mother, or with hope of hearing that she had returned.

  One evening, at home, she was smoking the last few crumbs of her grass rolled up in paper when she heard a hollow knock at the door.

  “Who is it?” she said, standing at once, waving a hand through the smoke in the air.

  “The tooth fairy,” came a voice through the door. She heard a body shift in
the frame. “It’s Deegan. Kirb-acious. Open up, Ellie, would you?”

  She did so, relieved to see Deegan Kirby awaiting her with good-natured impatience.

  “Paranoia?” he said.

  He’d grown a mustache, which suited his face. He was dressed demurely in a T-shirt and short pants, the latter stained with flecks of blue paint.

  “I thought you might be Mr. Brevik,” she said.

  “And you, my dear, have been a little bit naughty.” He made a show of sniffing the air. “He wouldn’t evict you, but open a window: it positively reeks in the hall.”

  Beside the table, he picked up what was left of the grass, lit it, and helped himself to a toke.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, catching her face. “I promise, I can get you some more.”

  Eleanor blushed. “Sit down,” she said. “Would you like anything?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of imposing.” He took a seat on the sofa. “Unless you have beer. Or whiskey. Or gin.”

  “I don’t drink, I’m afraid.”

  He shrugged. “Then I’ll have what you’re having.”

  She filled a glass at the tap.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t got a telly,” she said.

  “I haven’t either. I listen to Ridgewe’s.”

  They talked about his dull work, his love of the stage. He made jokes. Once or twice, she nearly mentioned her mother but dreaded the somber mood that would follow.

  Obliquely, he referred to his own past, the distant place he’d grown up. He told about the unending flatiron landscape, the storms that rolled through with violence and speed.

  “They were quaint, churchy people. They tried to be kind. They treated me rather like the kid with the clubfoot, or the deaf mute who lived on my road.” He laughed.

  “I was born here,” she said. “But I grew up at school. My parents were almost strangers to me.”

  He frowned and regarded her flat. “You keep it tidy,” he said.

  It was the first time she’d had a visitor there. She told him that and then looked away. In the room were a small shelf of books, a cassette deck, her desk, the photograph of her mother. On the wall beside the door to the toilet hung a calendar depicting a horse.