All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  “I’d love to.”

  “You call me Arthur, I’m going to call you Jeff.”

  “Certainly wish you would.”

  “Let’s have dinner, Jeff. At the Byzantium.”

  “I thought you’d never ask, Arthur.”

  “So let’s just get secretarial for a minute and let’s have your phone number,” and while he was writing down the number in his Gauguin in Ferrara notebook, Aneale said, “Remember now, we’ve got ourselves a date. By the way, where are you from?”

  “Where was I born?”

  “Right.”

  “A dowdy little down-at-the-heels town deep in the Ottawa Valley.”

  “Well, no wonder I couldn’t place your accent.”

  “My mother was part French,” said Trainer.

  “What do you do for a living? I mean, it’s so absolutely boring to ask, but how did you run into Trent?”

  “Me?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m the undertaker’s assistant.”

  “The undertaker?”

  “Yes,” he said with a soft, wry smile, waiting, as if he expected Aneale to be so uncomfortable that he might get up from the sofa, breaking their sudden intimacy. “You surprised?” he asked, touching Aneale’s wrist again.

  “No, I mean, well yes I am, a little bit. But after all, I mean, toujours le monde, there’s men who are dying who’ve never died before.”

  Trainer threw his head back and laughed, but then he said, “I can’t help myself. I look for that sour look, I’ve seen it before. Some kind of shudder.” He tugged at his white cuffs showing pearl links set in gold and then he shrugged, as if entirely at ease with himself, suffering only a vague sense of resignation, of half-hearted regret.

  “I was wondering,” Aneale said, wanting nothing to impinge on their easeful warmth, “how’d you get the job?”

  “I got it when I was fifteen.”

  “You mean you’ve been handling stiffs since you were a kid?”

  “I sort of grew up with the dead,” he said, smiling. He moved close to Aneale, telling him that there had been only one undertaker in his town when he was a boy, and often the undertaker had been so busy that he’d needed help. “Sometimes my father used to help him.” His father had owned a small convenience store. The store had gone broke. An insomniac, he’d then worked as security at an all-night Chicken Shack on the highway out of town. “He was tired pretty much all of the time.” Trainer sighed, perhaps a little too studied, Aneale thought, but nonetheless affecting.

  “One day when I was fourteen, my father sent me over to the undertaker. He was too tired to go himself,” he said. “After that, it worked out simple enough. When the undertaker couldn’t get my father, he took me.” While the other boys in town who had to work after school were delivering groceries or papers, he was busy embalming. “The whole thing really got going good when the undertaker said one afternoon that he needed a permanent assistant.”

  He chuckled, his eyes bright with the memory of that moment.

  “You wanted to dress up stiffs for the rest of your life?”

  “It’s real interesting,” he said simply.

  “Don’t you get tired of, like, touching the dead?”

  “Listen,” he said, eager to explain himself. “People don’t understand what’s got to be solved each time I go to work on a body. It’s serious. They’re persons. I don’t want to do just a job. There’s people who end up here in pretty bad shape, I mean, it’s terrible these days. I can’t tell you how bad some of the men look. Suppose I let them go out in their caskets looking awful? What’ll their people who love them feel?” Aneale stared at him in wonder. “I’ve got to try to get a clear picture in my mind of what people expect to see,” Trainer said. “I’ve got to find out what I can about the person I’m fixing. I’d never want to boast, but you might be awfully surprised by some of the results I’ve got while knowing almost nothing at all.” He had his hand on Aneale’s knee.

  “You’re absolutely out of this world,” Aneale said.

  “I’m glad you think so,” he said, delighted. “Take your friend, Trent, I mean, he’d been quite sick. Big-boned, but when I saw him dead, what I saw, well, it was skin and bone country, he weighed only about a hundred and twenty pounds. So supposing I hadn’t got a sense of him, hadn’t got him right, how would you have felt?” Getting up, he said in a calm, measured intimate tone, “Come on back to the casket. I’ll show you up close what I mean.”

  Aneale slipped his flask into his suitcoat inside pocket and followed Trainer back to the crowded front room. Several men were weeping. From others, a muffled laughter. And a couple of rough-trade youngsters were cruising the room, hoping to turn sorrow into a quick trick.

  Aneale and Trainer stood beside the mahogany casket. They leaned over the body as if in heartfelt contemplation of the dead man’s face.

  “I’ll bet he looks almost like you knew him,” Trainer said.

  “He took my breath away when I first saw him,” Aneale admitted, confused because he was sure that two angry-looking men he didn’t know who were in black suits and black shirts were pointing at him and whispering. He could feel their disapproval. He was sure of it. But then, maybe it was Trainer they disapproved of.

  “It’s not bad for the little I had to go on. Just a couple of snapshots. See how I’ve injected under the cheekbones. But if I had got close to him like you…”

  “Me?” Aneale asked as Trainer put his soft puffy forefinger under Trent’s chin and pushed the flesh up. “See,” he said, looking into Aneale’s eyes, his smile boyish, “there’s a trick…tricks of the trade.”

  Aneale tried to smile but he felt a chill and buttoned his suit coat. His ankles and feet were cold. He was suddenly sure that Trainer, ingratiating and polite, had only been looking at him so intimately because he wanted to get a feel for his face. Jesus Christ, he can’t help it, he’s been looking at me the whole time like I’m dead, like I’m already in one of his fucking boxes.

  “I think I should blow this pop stand,” Aneale said, trying desperately to make a joke as he eased away from Trainer, embarrassed that he had uttered such a lame quip. “I think I’d better go.”

  “Okay, as you wish,” Trainer said, checking his Mickey Mouse watch. “It’s only ten after ten but no worry, we’ll be in touch.”

  Aneale turned away abruptly, glad to say hello to one of Trent’s old lovers, a grim, unshaven, and paunchy man who went in for chrome studs and leather hats. Aneale didn’t like the man and felt only disgust when he said, “They’re piling up on the other side.” Nonetheless, he held close to him, keeping his back to the casket, and after a few minutes they agreed to step out of the “skank feel” of the funeral home, to stand on the sidewalk and smoke a Lucky Strike in the refreshing chill night air. Aneale, as his head cleared, felt rid of what had been a deeply disquieting unease in his bones. He was about to try an excuse that would allow him easily to say goodnight and go home alone when a man called from a car that had pulled up by the curb, “Mr. Aneale, Mr. Aneale.”

  Trainer was leaning out of the open window of the car, the neon funeral home sign lighting his face a lurid yellow. “Can I give you a lift, Arthur?” he called. “Go your way?”

  Aneale was shocked, even a little frightened, to see him sitting there, waiting, so available, holding out his puffy white hand. “No, thanks,” Aneale said curtly.

  “He a friend of yours?” Trent’s old lover asked.

  “No, we were just killing a bit of time back in there,” Aneale said.

  “Well, we’re all buddies…buddies in bad times. Talk helps.”

  In the morning, as the burial chapel bell tolled eleven, he stood at Trent’s grave ankle-deep in wet snow watching Trainer attach a small wreath of lilies to the grey steel waterproof box that encased the casket. Aneale hunched his shoulders against the wind, tight-lipped and stern, feeling even more cold and alone than ever. Trainer, cradling in his open, grey-gloved palm a small cruci
fix that he had removed from the lid of the casket so that he could give it to the grieving family, looked trim and elegant in his tailcoat and striped trousers. He stepped close to Aneale as he moved around the steel box and paused to look intently into Aneale’s eyes. Aneale, stamping his cold feet in the snow, lowered his head, refusing to look up. Touching Aneale’s arm with the small crucifix, Trainer looked as if he might be offering a word of consolation to Aneale’s ear when he whispered, “There’s men who are dying who’ve never died before. I liked that. Very good. Very funny.”

  AND SO TO BED

  All my friends call me Booker, not because I make book on the ponies or because I take after Booker T. Washington White, who was a slope-headed blues singer, but because I’m into books, not like a bookworm, but a dipper. I am a dipper. I walk up the beach of my mind looking for ashtrays in their wild state and POW. That’s what I want, a POW on the page. So I buy two or three books a week and put my boots up and read them in the morning beside the window in my waterfront flat, which I get cheap because it’s down by the warehouses where I’ve got a good view of the bay. Sometimes I go down to the docks and take a ferry to the island, just reading in the sun like there’s no tomorrow, which I know there is because really I’m optimistic. I always hope for the best, and I do believe you always make your own luck. So I sit on the upper deck, dipping into a page when I’ve got an empty moment free from thinking. It’s like picking a pocket, just like old Matthew Arnold, who was a kind of pickpocket, said it. The special moments when you see something real clear are everything, they’re the touchstones. Some people touch wood, I touch stone.

  But make no mistake. Old Booker is not touched in the head. Booker breaks loose in the evening. I mean, I try never to read at night ’cause reading is like the night air – there’s strange creatures on the wing. So I prance and play, Cool as the breeze on Lake Louise. That’s my song, and these days the song’s getting sung at this small tiny nightclub that’s got those plush velvet booths and an oval stage. Ovals always remind me of eggs. Big beginnings. And the new club singer, she’s got this great billboard name, Empress Angel Eyes, and a long, loping walk with great legs like she just came in off the veldt out of some movie starring Meryl Streep doing another accent instead of acting. I like that. Anyway, the Empress showed me the other night an old picture of herself from years back playing the mouth harp and wearing little granny glasses. “You want to get anywhere,” she says, “you got to look like whatever’s going on. Granny glasses one day, décolletage the next. And I tell you,” she said, sipping a double Scotch-on-the-rocks, “as singers go, Piaf had it lucky. Everybody wants to break your heart like Piaf except she breaks your heart better.”

  “Great God almighty,” I said, “you’re bang-on, you’re right. Piaf’s always been the touchstone.”

  “The what?”

  “Once you’ve heard Piaf sing, you’ve heard the song,” I said, and she says, “Yeah, I guess that’s true…but you haven’t heard me.” And I said, “No, no, I haven’t heard you,” except I had, standing at the back of the nightclub the night before and she was no Piaf, nor was meant to be, but she could break my heart anytime, so – “That’s a goddamn great insight,” I said, and I meant it. “You’re terrific, you know that?”

  “No,” she said, flat-out and deadpan like the thought had never crossed her mind. Which made me say, “Baby, you’ve got happenings going on, and happenings, in case you don’t know, are when the light shines in your eyes full of surprise.” She was wearing silver cowboy boots. She smoked Marlboros. Her corn-yellow hair had this great luminous glow in the lights from the stage. “You know what?” she asked. “When I was sixteen I slept with Janis Joplin the week before she died. I was just a kid, of course, looking for a little life. Action, you know.” She threw her head back and laughed. She had these great full breasts and right away I wanted to make love to her.

  “I got to be careful,” she said, smiling.

  “About what?”

  “I been hurt a lot, man, so don’t hurt me.”

  “You know,” I said, “little moments like this are wonderful.” I kissed her on the cheek, just this delicate little brush like she’s got no heavy-duty trouble coming down on her from me. “Sometimes,” I said, settling back so she could see she should relax herself, “I sit watching the water out my window – I live down by the waterfront – and all the little whitecaps are like special little moments, little moments like this.”

  Right then Eddie Burke, the owner of the club, who’s heavy-set with these hooded eyes and a real sour temper like he sucks lemons to start the day and swallows the seeds, he sat down and said, “Getting to know my little Empress, eh?” He laughed, because actually we get along okay. I know he likes to gaff with the goof butts behind the tympani, and like all potheads he’s possessive, which is why, when they get arrested, it’s for possession. I like that. So he folded his hand over hers. “Before you,” he said to her, “I had me an old black scat singer in here. I fired him in three nights. I found him fooling with one of the waitresses, man, and it wasn’t because the old fucker was black. It was because he was old. I couldn’t stand the idea of that old buzzard nosing around one of my tender tits.” I laughed pretty much because Eddie expected me to laugh. Angel Eyes stood up and went to change for her show, and I said, “The world is too much with us, man.” So me and Eddie locked hands across the table. After all, we’d been good casual friends for a few years, and good casual friends are hard to find. “I got a gut feeling for women,” Eddie said, “and I’d really like to bag that woman, but mostly I like young girls. I shag young girls because I got a gut feeling for life.” I saw that Eddie was a little looped, so I said: “Nothing can be sole or whole / That has not first been rent.” Eddie held my hand. He held it hard, with real feeling. “You’re right,” he said. “Don’t nothing work if you don’t pay the rent.”

  Eddie and I usually talked a lot upstairs in a small room where he had all these old Rock-Revolution posters on the walls, art deco mirrors and all kinds of love-shit stuff from the 1960s, like flowers and Mao doing his famous imitation of a dead moon with eyes, and this fantastic wrought-iron rack of scented votive candles in the shape of a heart. Eddie had stolen it from an old empty country church. “I don’t pray but I’m all heart,” he said, sitting there beaming at the lit candles. There were also two wide-assed easy chairs, some floor pillows, and a small brown rug.

  On the first night that she was up there alone with me after her show, Angel Eyes said that the rug looked like a trap door, and she sat cross-legged on it. “One day you watch, I’m gonna drop outta sight,” and I said, “Angel, you are outta sight.”

  So we sat drinking whisky, with me talking to her about old black blues singers I had met in bars, like Mississippi John Hurt and Otis Spann, both of them dead. She made me remember all my little stories about those guys and what I had read about them, and I told her these stories, like their deaths had really really touched me, which they had, they must have, because pretty soon I was sitting there as silent as a dog on a dead-end street, humming How long’s that old train been gone, staring blankly, I guess, until she said, “Don’t worry, man, someday the sun’s gonna shine.” I looked up and said nothing, but when she hunched forward in front of me on the prayer rug, I laid my hand on her shoulder like I was, in fact, the Book of Revelation, and I said, “Angel, you’re the apple of my eye,” and then I whispered: “God appears, and God is Light / To those poor souls who dwell in Night.” Angel Eyes got all restless and shivery and touched my hand. “Man, God is dead,” she said as serious as serious could be. “He’s dead, and you ain’t heard the real good news – we’re free. Poems like that don’t mean nothing.”

  “What they mean, if they don’t mean nothing, is that everything’s gone to hell, Angel,” and I got to own up that I was wounded because she didn’t seem surprised at all that I could quote so much poetry, like the woods are full of guys quoting poetry when there aren’t even any woods anymor
e.

  “You believe that?” she says.

  “Believe what?”

  “Hell ’n’ stuff like that. You believe in God ’n’ stuff like that?”

  “Angel Eyes,” and I tried to be reasonable, “that’s not the question.”

  “Oh yeah, then what’s the question on my mind?”

  “Angel,” I said, leaning close to her, “the question is, does God believe in me?”

  “Oh, wow,” she said, clapping her hands. “I like that, yeah, I can dig it.”

  “POW,” I said, because I knew I’d got her, and suddenly she kissed me on the mouth, so sweet, so delectable, so delicious that I kept coming back night after night, figuring we’d get down to a little bootie, not to say some serious sex, but she kept an aloof air, and I mean aloof, while in that bar she’s carrying on every night like she’s open to any man who speaks to her, always listening like she’s waiting for the right word to get said to her. Which drops the lead right out of my dick. I can tell you. Because I am nothing if not words. I know that for a damn natural fact. I am a wordsmith. My word is everything. If I give you my word, I give you my heart. So after all these nights of stalling I’ve got to wonder, I’ve got to wonder if this woman’s got any discretion. Is there any discretion in her ignition? I like that. Then, one night, I heard Eddie whisper to her, saying he really liked the way she spoke so softly, and she said, “Most women got voices that could cut glass.” Eddie put his hand on the small of her back like he was the only proprietor of all the impropriety in the world, but she took his hand away, and I liked that, her shoulders back so that her breasts, sitting there so free under her sweater, looked full. And as she walked away Eddie said to me, “That’s some tender tease trap I got singing for me, but she’s playing too hard to get. I think she must be a little dykey.” And I watched these other men like bird dogs hovering around her every night but I held to the shadows, trying to draw her eye to mine. Sometimes our looks did about meet and I smiled like I knew everything that there was to know, and one night I said, “I bet you got a dimple in the small of your back.”