All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  So early one morning after the two a.m. show, when Angel Eyes asked me if I’d rather go upstairs to drink with Eddie or sit and talk, I decided to hang out with her in the dark bar. “I wanted to sit with you tonight,” she said. “I like your voice, you know that? Deep. I go by a man’s voice.” So we talked about this and that, keeping it light, but with my voice deep the way she liked it. When I got up to go home I touched her on the cheek and said, “You’re still the apple of my eye.”

  The next night I sat down beside her and whispered a little poem to her:

  The invisible worm

  That flies in the night

  In the howling storm,

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy:

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  She said she didn’t know what it meant but it sounded wonderful. Then I told her about all the little things I’d noticed around that afternoon, my little white moments I called them; white, because they were what they were until we made them into what we wanted them to be, like walking on a quiet street and seeing what I thought was a dressed-up fifteen-year-old boy. “He was wearing a little suit jacket with peaked lapels and a porkpie hat, and it turned out he was a man of about seventy or so, and he had this rod with a little black box on the end of it in his hand, a battery box. Under the rod, moving along the sidewalk by remote control, I guess, was this tin car the size of his shoe, and I said, ‘What’re you doing?’ and he said, ‘I’m walking my car,’ and he kept on going. He fucking well kept on going, walking his car.” She laughed quietly and touched my hand, like for the first time she really cared, and I wondered what it was about a guy walking his toy car that would make her care.

  “You’re nice,” she said. “I figure you talk just like those books you’re always reading.”

  “Well,” I said, “I try to be nice. Touch stone.”

  “Touch what?”

  “It’s just a little joke.”

  “You’re very nice,” she said and smiled.

  “You don’t know,” I said, “how nice I can be. I’ve got shunts and bunts little girls don’t know.”

  “Oh, I believe it,” she said. She squeezed my hand and then went on stage, singing like she was singing for me: “Never’s just the echo of forever, / Lonesome as a love that might have been.”

  I went upstairs and drank whisky for an hour with Eddie and when I came down Angel Eyes asked if we shouldn’t want to go together for Chinese food later on. The restaurant was a regular favourite all-night place for people who were in show business. The teapots were filled with cognac or champagne. Which is what show biz is. POW. Teapots of champagne. I like that. And there was this ventriloquist at the next table talking like Mortimer Snerd, “Snerd’s Words for the Birds,” – Still waters runs wet – and everyone laughed and got drunk. Eddie tried to tap dance, more tap than dance, because what he really liked to do was to dance on other people’s heads. As the dawn came, Angel Eyes said, “The Empress wants to go home.” Looking at me like there’s no tomorrow, she says, “You making it my way?”

  “Sure,” I said, so surprised and drunk I found myself shaking hands with her.

  Eddie scowled and I had this uneasy feeling that our friendship had just gone the way of a rat’s lunch. We were no longer going to be casual on the beach. As Angel Eyes and I stood in the street, a real chill in the air in the dawn light, I buried my face in her hair, as much to keep from falling down as anything else, and whispered: “The wan moon sets behind the white wave / And time is setting with me, Oh.”

  “Oh,” she said, and I nestled in her arms in the taxi, my eyes closed to keep off the glare of light.

  “It’s real weird that I should be a singer,” she said out of nowhere, “because my father was a mute.”

  “A mute?”

  “Yeah. I would sing to him and he would sit there smiling with his mouth open.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nope. Not a word. It’s weird, and I never told anyone that,” she whispered, “so I guess I feel real close to you. Every time you speak I have to close my knees.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You got that voice.”

  She lived in a small bachelor flat. I was tired and up to my eyeballs in booze and stood with my back to the wall as she unlocked the door. Inside, she got to undressing without a word and so I got undressed, too, saying, “Baby, this is gonna be the best. I told you we’d be the best and this is going to be it. Believe you me.” When we were naked I looked at her and said, “Beautiful, you got great breasts.” I felt like I’d been punched to kingdom come by drink and didn’t know where my dick was. I was limp all over. She touched my throat, which made me jump, and then she lay down on the white sheets. When I touched the inside of her thigh she began to sigh, this slow humming, like Amazing Grace, Ummmh she goes, ummmh, and my blood was all in my head, in my eyes, and I mean, man, I started talking a blue streak and the Empress just lay back and said, “Gimme some, man,” and I thought, Oh Jesus, where are you when what counts is dead? Then she was wanting me and I was trying to get hold of myself for all I was worth, which wasn’t much since I was so soft, stalling with little whispers and oodlie-koos, oodlie-koos. And then I heard a bell ringing. “What in the hell is that?”

  “Crown Life.”

  “What?”

  “The insurance company next door, they got recorded bells that play over a loudspeaker every hour on the hour.”

  “My God,” I sighed, playing for time, and so I sang out, “The bells are ringing, for me and my gal…” She opened her legs again and pulled me down and then she hooked her ankles over the small of my back and for a moment my mind went blank. I mean blank. No zip on the radar screen. And I had this strange feeling I was on a child’s rocking horse. She was whispering little love words, rocking me in her arms, kissing my neck, and I was on a wooden horse going nowhere. And those blades of light came through the slat blinds, cutting my eyes, cutting into me, and I felt a little thickening. A little rise, and she was reaching for me and I eased into her and told myself that I had to keep moving, that I had to think about something else, either nothing or the whole world, hoping I’d harden up. I opened my eyes and saw in the light of the slat blinds that the headboard was a bookshelf packed with paperbacks. I got this terrific rush of relief. “Oh God, I want you,” she sighed, and I thought if I could keep moving and remove my mind from my body, then maybe my body wouldn’t let me down. It’d just keep going like I was not there and she was. So I began reading the names of the books, all my concentration on the book titles as I read back and forth across the shelf, worried in my mind, my hips humping up and down and I heard her little moan. But there was nothing there, not a title I knew, not one book, and I slumped and stalled and came to a dead halt because what little I had was leaving me.

  I had nothing to say. There were tears in her eyes but she brushed them away. I stood up, feeling small. She lay staring at me. I shrugged like Sheepish was my middle name, like there was no way out of the silence. “So, say something,” she said, hunched forward, pinching the sheets, leaving puckers and creases.

  “Come on,” she said. “I been figuring all this time on us being together and I make the play and now you got nothing to say?”

  “What’s to say?”

  “You could say you’re sorry.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry,” I said, standing still, my eyes closed.

  “I hate men who say they’re sorry,” she cried, standing up so I could see how fine her long legs were. I stood there with my hands on my hips staring at the loose, rumpled sheets, each crease a little ripple, as if I was back beside my window looking down on the lake.

  “Anything but sorry,” she said, screwing up her mouth. “You could’ve said anything but sorry. That’s the pits.”

  She suddenly leapt around the bed and hustled all my clothes and shoes into her arms.

  “Come on, Angel,” I said and held out my hand, letting
her see how helpless I felt, like I’d lucked out and lost my touch. But she opened the door, so I tried laughing but she didn’t laugh back.

  “I told you not to hurt me,” she said. “I believed in you, so you get out of here.” And she threw my clothes and shoes into the hall.

  “Okay, I’m not sorry.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” I shouted like I was angry but I didn’t know what else to say.

  “You just sank like a stone,” she said, stepping aside so I could pass. And even though I was bald-ass naked, I took one step, and another, and then I was out in the hall, staring in at her. She slammed the door. I could feel a real head cold coming on. “I ain’t going to catch pneumonia for you,” I yelled as I circled around real quick, picking up my clothes. My socks were back beside the bed, I could see them clear as day, and I was going to have to go barefoot in my shoes. I hustled up, dressing fast, afraid someone would see me and call the cops and report there was a man exposing himself in the hall, and to save time, POW, I pulled on my trousers and put my jockey shorts in my pocket. Luckily, my tie was knotted and I slipped it over my head, tightening it at my throat, like no problem, man, and strode down the hall. If I’d only had my socks on, I’d have been as cool as the breeze on Lake Louise.

  ANYBODY HOME?

  Leonard Cholet was a lean old doctor in his late seventies who had dyed black hair and a domed forehead. He wore loose, double-breasted suits with padded shoulders. He unbuttoned my shirt, tapping my chest, listening to my heart. “To you,” he said, “a pounding heart is a problem. To me, a long time ago a heart murmur was more than I could hope for.” Unopened envelopes cluttered his desk. I could feel his breath on my cheek. He tapped again. “Anybody home?” and the doctor laughed, saying, “Don’t listen to me. I talk because there’s nothing else to do at my age. You should listen to your own heart, eh? How’s that for a little truth, except most people nowadays try to think with their head instead of their heart.”

  He had a perfectly pressed three-point white handkerchief in his breast pocket. The old floor creaked as he walked back and forth. I closed my eyes. For a moment there was silence. I lifted my hands. “What you got there?” he said. I opened my eyes and looked around. “Where?” He laughed. “Between your hands. You look like you’re holding something.” I shook my head. “Memories maybe?” he said. “I got memories. Memories are made of what you’re looking at. Me, what I hold onto.” He took a flat wooden stick and his stainless-steel pencil-light. “Open your mouth. I got to look inside. You’re tense, you know that. For a guy that looks so calm you’re very tense.” I closed my eyes again, listening to his creaking floor, creaking footsteps, my own footsteps last night as I crossed her parquet floors, the walls white and the floors loose from dampness and there was only a tubular table holding the TV in the room, “And say aah,” the old doctor said, dampness from it being in the basement, “Aah,” and the white plastic padded headboard, foam-filled pillows, and she sighed, lay back and sighed so luxuriously, slate eyes, breasts lolling to the side, hips narrow, and small delicate feet, discreet little cries like being half-ashamed, “Ahh,” and then blowing smoke, saying that at home around the house she liked to wear a Blue Jays ball cap when she hunkered up late at night doing her nails, hummed out of her skull, she said, by evangelical television shows, and she always slept till about ten, sleeping healthy, she said, “Look, no stress marks, that’s the selfsame pure skin I was a born baby with.”

  “But the only link,” Cholet said, “with those years after the war – you hear what I’m saying – is my son, who’s now like a big boot. With a hole in it. There’s nothing wrong with your throat, but with him and his heart, there’s something wrong. See, he likes to wear those yellow construction-worker boots with little steel clips on the toes. Me, I keep to my slippers with the sponge soles and my room with the lamplight like a small escape hole in the darkness. But for him, the way I look at it, it was a mistake my making a marriage, a man like me.” He put the stethoscope, which reminded me of the black gumdrops I loved as a boy, into a case and snapped it closed, saying, “A man like me should never have married, but anyway she pretty soon went away, leaving my son to do something big, to live.” The alarm clock went off, a toneless beeping, and Cholet hit the clock with the flat of his hand, and he turned away, making pencil notes in his little book. “You got a heart like a horse, so what’s to worry for you?” I looked up at an old pewter lamp hanging from the centre of the ceiling, six sockets empty. Cholet, standing with one hand in his suitcoat pocket, lean and severe in the shadow-light, put his notebook away, saying, “I give you more powerful pills, don’t worry. You want to calm down, you’ll calm down.” He lit a Gitanes, inhaling deeply, and for a moment, in that light, I thought, he’s got one blue eye and one green eye. “So now this son of mine,” he said, handing me my shirt, “he owns pigeons, some homing pigeons he tells me – cages up on top of the roof – and he says no matter what he does to them, doesn’t feed them, twists a wing, it doesn’t matter, they always come home to him, and others he’s got are called carriers. To me, it sounds like a disease. He sends messages to I don’t know who, maybe no one settling down in her underpants with little wing bows, sparrow wings if they could fly, bare-breasted at her table, polish-remover bottle open, and spread her fingers on the table, long nails, rubbing them clean, the cap pulled down over her eyes.

  “Sometimes I put in a case of beer and a guy comes by. You don’t mind me telling you, eh? I mean, we know what’s the score. A little girl’s got to be with a man every now and then but always they got that question, you know, moon-faced they look at you asking, Was it good? Was I the best? but never saying love, never a little love word, the last guy standing in the doorway on the way out, that’s what he wanted to know before he can go, so I says, ‘At least you got your dry-goods store, Henry, and at least you’re a good bowler,’ and his eyeballs popped like I poleaxed him. Anyway, what I worry about is my nails. If you ever been a typist, you know those big rooms all carpeted for quiet and a hundred girls plugged into headsets, the only thing breaking the rhythm is someone breaks a nail. But what you got to face is it’s always guys who are already lovers who got to ask that question, you know, Was I good? which they’ve been asking since they got off the tit and onto apron strings. Just losers, which we all are anyway. You play the game and you throw boxcars, you crap out, and maybe it’s wrong, but it comes up boxcars,” and standing by the window, Cholet, his coat rumpled from sitting all morning in his chair, hooked his forefinger into the ring on the dark green window blind and with a little tug he ran the blind up, letting in the late-afternoon light. He blinked and shied away from the light while I buttoned my shirt, standing in the shadows. “You’ve got a good heart, so look after it,” he said. “I’ll walk out with you.”

  Going down the stairs, a light scarf knotted at his throat because there was a chill in the air, he stopped on the bottom stair and took hold of my elbow, almost affectionately, and suddenly I felt a tenderness. He shook his head, saying, “The whole thing was a mistake, that’s the truth. The big thing is maybe life itself is a mistake. God made a mistake. He didn’t intend any of this, but somehow it works out in its own way, like my little table and desk, nice pine pieces. Twenty years ago I bought old chairs and things like that, secondhand, and one day a man who never paid a bill but just did odd jobs to look after his debts, he said, ‘While you’re away, Monsieur Cholet, I’ll fix the furniture and when you come back you won’t know where you live.’” There were bread crusts thrown on lawns and grey pigeons pecked at the crusts. Laundry had been hung on a front porch and two black women wearing bandanas were gathering fruit and tomatoes that had fallen out of a torn shopping bag. Cholet walked the inside line of the sidewalk, holding close to the walls. “I was going away, you see,” he said, “for two weeks to fish, because one thing I like about this country is the dark water, back in a cove where it’s calm like you can see the dust flo
ating. And this man, he said while I was away he’d clean off the thick old paint so I’d see how beautiful the wood was. For two weeks I sat in my boat in the rain and came back to the tables and chairs all waxed a honey colour, a room full of junk wood looking like a treasure, and he was right, I didn’t know where I was, and he said to me, beaming, happy, ‘Monsieur Cholet,’ he said, ‘now these are just like you had roots,’”

  her spread fingers, leaning on her elbows, working the little brush, cotton ball buffing her nails, very calm and half-naked, wearing the baseball cap, and high-heeled shoes lined up along the baseboard of the wall that had one window at lawn-level to the street – some shoes expensive and some fluorescent satin and rhinestone clusters on the toes. “I got the inside line on losers,” she said. “Every day I listen to twenty losers at the hairdresser’s, ladies under the hair dryers who like to gamble, you know, place a bet with the manicurist who’s a tout for some bookie, because it’s private, you know. Gambling is private like playing with yourself, get a tense little high with every bet, take a risk. I once knew a girl who could just cross her legs and squeeze hard and get a rush, the flush of the rush. You come down, go up, like in escalator land. I walked along with old Cholet because I had nothing to do. I had no one at home. “It beats boredom, I mean, what’s more boring than crossing your legs all day,” she said, blowing on her nails under the lamplight, hands almost a man’s but long, tapered and beautiful like clean bones in the light, and holding them out, palms up, spread fingers. “See, I’m clean, got nothing to hide,” and she laughed and clapped her hands, the whack sounding hollow in the white room. “You know those shoes,” she said, standing up, “I don’t wear them nowhere, not even when I’m dancing ’cause I just like trying them on. I put on some nylons, you know, expensive, and a garter belt, and slip them on like I was a man looking down at myself trying on ladies’ shoes, except I’m the lady so I get a double rush, action both ways, which is the gambler’s dream. A win-win situation, so I can’t lose.”