All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  At the end of the week he took her to Puerto Rico. It was the off-season and too humid and hot, but she had been so morose around the apartment, staying out later and later at night, that he had decided to get out of town. On their first morning in San Juan, he woke up and found her staring into the mirror as if they were still at home.

  “Jesus, Lou. Six thousand miles and the sun’s out and you’re sitting inside in the room in the dark.”

  She was watching him in the mirror. He was taken aback by the mournful, almost pitying look in her eyes. He brushed his hair back with the flat of his palms. “What are you doing, eh?” he asked as calmly as he could.

  “I was thinking about my father.”

  “And what?”

  “He was a good man.”

  “So he was a good man. That got him a cup of coffee.”

  “Aw, Poodles, don’t you ever think about your dad? Don’t you ever think about anyone?”

  “I think, baby,” he replied, alarmed because she sounded as if she felt sorry for him. “All the time I think about you. I got you on my mind like a brick. The question ain’t what I’m thinking but how come you’re thinking what you’re thinking, which I don’t know about although I’m the guy you live with, and all of a sudden I’m the guy you don’t talk to.”

  “That’s funny,” she said. “My father didn’t talk to me either. Hardly ever.”

  “So maybe he had nothing to say.”

  She threw her shoulders back and smiled. He felt a little chill, the short hairs bristling on his neck. She stroked her throat and said, “All my childhood my father gave me dolls, Punch and Judy dolls, and puppet dolls on strings, and he’d dance the dolls in the air inside a box. They had big glass eyes, staring eyes like insane flowers that followed me all around my bedroom. Years later, you know, some nights when we used to go dancing with the spotlights in the mirror behind us, the lights looked like big flower eyes and sometimes I felt high, like I’d done some dope and felt filled with petals spinning there in the eyes of all the faces watching me.”

  The wistful longing in her voice made him reach out, surprised at his open extended hand, the puffy flesh, surprised at his sudden arousal, and he whispered, “I want you, Lou.”

  “Yeah, but do you want my mother?”

  “Who’s talking about your mother?” he said sourly.

  “That’s the point. My father would not talk about my mother. She went off when I was just a kid and he refused to ever talk about her. Said such talk would only hurt us.”

  “So?”

  “So, the more and more I look in the mirror, the more it’s like I’m finding my mother.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he said, wanting to shake her by the shoulders. Yet what he really wanted was to let her make love to him, so he stood behind her, seeing himself naked in the mirror, pudgy and white and vulnerable, but she looked up at him and said, “It’s like someone’s moving in on me, another face, and I’m sure it’s her face. I mean, I’m nearly forty and when I’m forty I’ll look in the mirror and know who my mother was.”

  That afternoon she sat near the pool and out of the sun. She was silent and wore big black sunglasses. He couldn’t tell what she was looking at. He was wounded and said, “You know what you look like? One of them women in movies whose husband’s just been killed, sitting in church, you know, funeral wop, eh!” He laughed but she only touched her throat and he stared at the empty swimming pool. It was an acid green, a polished shining surface with a glare that hurt his eyes, and he said, “Goddamn, this is crazy. There’s no one swimming.” He leapt in awkwardly, and when he bobbed back to the surface he called out, “You do what you do, baby, but don’t do it to me. Don’t do what you’re doing to yourself to me.”

  That evening in the casino, when he lost money at the crap tables, he said nothing but blamed her. She had killed his good feeling, his glow like I knew when I walked in the door the glow was gone and the man in the monkey-suit smiled at me like I had “loser” written all over my kisser, and he’d thrown the dice with no confidence. He’d had no luck and lay awake in bed beside her, angry as the whirring air conditioner drowned out the sound of the sea, and then she blurted out, “I always wanted to try hang gliding, that’s what I wanted to do. Just like you see in the movies, that’s the way I wanted it. It must be perfect, drifting on the air currents like that, all alone up above everything, totally silent in the sun, just hanging there, the whole world clear. I read somewhere that that’s what it’s like if you die, and then you don’t die but come back.”

  Poodles lay in the dark with his hands folded on his chest. “Yeah, and me,” he said, “I wanted to be a winner, in a big way. I wanted to be a winner and instead I take a beating for two thousand and end up in bed with an out-of-work hang glider.”

  “You know what, Poodles?” she said, leaning over him so that her long hair brushed his bare chest. “You and the dog are a real team, you know that? You’re going to end up with Benny in a basket. How about that?”

  “So what?” he cried, leaping up and away from the frightening touch of hair moving across his body. “Who gets laid around here anyway?”

  He turned off the air conditioner and went out to the balcony, saying, “So sweat! Take a little heat. You can stand to shed some weight.”

  “You bastard,” she cried. “You’ll be sorry.”

  He was sorry yet he said nothing more because he’d already said too much, and he sat in the plastic deck chair listening to the roll of the sea. The next day they went home.

  As weeks went by, he spent more time in the store, needling his clerks and running his game and his girls and hustling cheap suits off the rack. He left ties, shirts, cuff links, and socks to the clerks. “That’s what clerks are for,” he said. “The extras, and always they should remember they’re also the extras.” Cradling the little dog, he referred to himself as an outfitter. “What you call yourself is what you are, at least as far as I’m concerned,” he said to the clerks. He didn’t let his clerks get close to him, but he was avuncular with his hookers, thinking he had a special touch with women and that he knew how to handle them. He called the girls, who were lean and young, his ladies of the evening. “And ladies,” he said sternly, “there’s always a fat man trying to get into a thin woman and we want some fat for ourselves.”

  He met the girls once each week in the Mercury Club on Victoria Street. It was a bar with a small dance floor and a jukebox, owned by an ex-boxer who was now a referee, who wrote angry letters supporting capital punishment to the newspapers. It was a bar popular among men in their late thirties and early forties, and he gathered the girls in the early evening when the bar was almost empty. Moxie Mensler, the boxer, would sit down for a moment, take his brown envelope of edge money for letting the ladies operate out of the bar, and then a waiter brought raw hamburger on a saucer. Poodles fed meat pinched between his forefinger and thumb to Benny as the girls came in. They smiled at the dog and one girl, who liked to wear a man’s tie and suitcoat during the day, surprised them because she had knitted little wool pouches for the dog’s paws, like little mittens for the winter. Poodles was so pleased with the pretty mittens that he put them on the dog’s paws, whatever the weather. Now the girls all brought ribbons or little strings of bells to their meetings. Poodles liked the tone of these early evenings and he felt like a solid businessman because I’m my own fucking man with collateral and collateral makes the man in other men’s eyes, which is why the bank manager in the branch he had banked in for a decade had suddenly come through the gate the other day and taken his hand, wishing him well. At first, Poodles had been afraid that something was wrong, but then he was pleased that he had kept control of himself, suddenly feeling that the man’s hand coming out to him was like a confirmation, a blessing. He later told Luella that a bank manager is the one man who really knows how things add up. Poodles, standing there in the hush of the small bank branch, had decided to open up a new store.

  Luella had little to say
. He thought she was in a sleepwalking state. She would suddenly tell him strange stories about her father and how he had always calculated his life according to magic numbers: 5…8…17…28… “Who told him they were magic?” she said sternly. “And why would he believe it when the only magic he ever made was making my mother disappear out of his life?” Poodles thought for a moment, then said, “Every sucker’s got a system. I got smarts.” She stared at him sullenly and smiled, as if she had seen him in a new light. “That’s right,” she said, “you’re too smart to get sucked in by anybody’s magic, Poodles.” She went out, as she did nearly every afternoon, to a private ballroom-dancing class where she said she was spun around elegantly by a young, slightly effeminate man who sometimes kissed her hard on the neck as he folded her back in his arms, and she’s got the nerve to tell me the only time she’s treated elegant is by some lousy fag hustling in a dancing school. It’s so corny it’s disgusting.

  “Boys,” he said to the clerks one day, “let me give you a little piece of Poodles’ advice. The only way to handle women is leave ’em alone. Let ’em make up their own minds and then you don’t get blamed for nothing, ’cause that’s what most people get off on, is blame, to make you feel smaller than they feel small.” The clerks shuffled uncertainly in front of Poodles, who was slumped in his chrome chair, lost in his own thoughts until a man came in wearing thick glasses and worn shoes. Poodles smiled, flattening his wide tie on his stomach. Suddenly at ease with himself, he took the man warmly by the elbow to the rack of charcoal-grey suits, and then moved him into the corner mirrors, tapped him on the bottom, and tucked him under the armpits. “Touch, touch till they’re on their toes,” he had told his clerks. “It’s the privates, they’re all worried about their privacy, but you got ’em up against the wall until you let ’em down real slow into $299.50, letting on like you believe in good grooming, until it’s ‘$290 flat, wear it home, put what you got on in a box.’”

  A little flushed and relieved to step away from the mirror and Poodles’ soft touch, the man put on the suit and said, “Yes, yes, it’s wonderful.” His old clothes were under his arm in a box. As he went out, he paused to look at a more expensive sharkskin suit on one of the window dummies, then walked off into the afternoon light. Poodles sat back in his chrome chair, satisfied, sure once again that he knew how to size up a man, and said, smiling, “You watch. The first fucking rain and that suit’ll go up like a window blind.”

  The clerks laughed appreciatively as Poodles sat with his hands crossed on his chest, basking in their admiring laughter. Then he reached down and picked up little Benny and stroked the dog’s small nose with his forefinger. “See,” he said, “how good old poppa Poodles is when he’s going good?”

  In the late afternoon he drove home slowly, satisfied that he was right to think well about himself. The dog was in a basket-woven hamper in the front seat. It was a misty, humid evening and the sun was a brilliant red. He shielded his eyes and drove a little faster.

  Luella had laid out cold cuts covered with Saran Wrap on the table in the alcove dining room. She was buttoning a black chiffon blouse and looked slim and tailored in a black skirt and black alligator pumps.

  “So,” he said, “who’s the funeral for?”

  She shrugged and said, “I’m going out.”

  “Out, out,” and he put down the dog. “What’s out? Always these days you’re on your way out, and every day you’re got up more and more like a Turkish delight. What the hell’s going on?”

  “I’m getting my life together.”

  “You got a life? You and me is your life.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Who said funny? You call what you been doing an act? A bad actor okay, but take it on the road and you can forget it.”

  “I’m going out.”

  Outraged and afraid that if he threw her out to save his own pride she would never come back, he touched her shoulder, trying to surprise her with concern, but instead he scowled and said, “Calm down.”

  “I’m calm,” she said.

  “Yeah, but calm down.”

  “What is this? How calm can I get?”

  “What do you want to do to us?” he asked. “What do you want to do to yourself?”

  “What you don’t do,” she said.

  “So, what’s to do?”

  “I want to feel fresh, all right?”

  “Fresh. Fresh is for fruits, which is what you’re maybe hanging around with too much.”

  “Inside, Poodles. I want to feel fresh inside.”

  “So feel, who’s stopping you?”

  “Nobody, Poodles. Nobody’s going to stop me, that’s the point. So lemme by, okay.”

  “To where?”

  “Out.”

  “Ten years we live together and now it’s like I don’t get no rights.”

  “I’m going to Gimlet’s.”

  “Gimlet’s! What are you, crazy?”

  “Sure I’m crazy. Old crazy legs is stepping out.”

  “A goddamn dog’d go in that joint with his nose in the air.”

  She slammed the door and he cried out, “You cheat on me and I’ll break your legs. I’ll take a baseball bat to your legs.” He could hear her step fading on the stairs. “Stick crépe on your nose,” he yelled again, picking up a piece of salami. “Your brains are dead.”

  Poodles settled into his easy chair feeling sour. The phone rang and he took a bet on a baseball game in Cleveland. Then he sat alone in the silence, suddenly aware of the hum of the air conditioner. He was reminded of Puerto Rico, and wished that it had all gone differently, and maybe he should have talked to her about his mother, too. Maybe that would have cheered her up. He ate very little and poured himself a drink. He cradled the dog and stroked the back of its head. “It’s like she don’t expect me to be angry,” he said to Benny. “What the fuck’s that all about?” Benny licked the palm of his hand. He poured himself another drink and went out on the porch and sat on the small love seat they’d bought for summer nights. The sun was going down behind the garage roofs.

  He tried to imagine Luella sitting at the cramped tables of the 24-hour strip bar, because the night he’d gone there he’d stared at a long-legged girl who had a flat belly, narrow hips, and small hard breasts. He had been filled with a lust that left him surprised. Her small behind with the little bush of black hair when she bent over had seemed so vulnerable that he’d said to himself, “Jesus, I’d kiss that.” Afraid that he’d spoken out loud, he’d got up and hurried home, remembering how he’d always admired Luella’s aloof air, the way she held her head as if nothing in the world could startle her. Suddenly feeling desolate he leaned forward on the love seat, seeing her as a seductive woman who knew exactly what she wanted and how she was going to get it. “Goddamn,” he said, and he wondered if she really had gone to Gimlet’s. Maybe she had gone to the Twenty-Two, which was possible, because she had mentioned models and something about a young film producer. He’d only half-listened to her, thinking she was talking about dancing classes, but the Twenty-Two was the place these days for film hacks. My God, for all I know she’s into flicks. Realizing that he had no idea where she was or what she was doing, he felt betrayed, and then helpless. “You got to always sleep with one eye open,” he said bitterly. He poured anther drink, closed his eyes. We had the world by the short hairs.

  He saw a woman sitting alone on a back porch on the other side of the garages. She was dressed in a white halter and white slacks. She seemed to be watching him, too, so he waved the bottle of rye and she waved back. He pointed, suggesting he should come over, and she waved again. He got up, a little excited, saying to himself, “Goddamn, I’m gonna steal me some pussy.” He picked up the dog and went down the wooden back stairs into the darkening cinder alley between the garages. Then he was out in the narrow laneway, sure that if he counted four or five garage doors to the left he would find the right walkway into the woman’s yard. But each opening was so shadowed he couldn’t be sure,
and he was in almost total darkness as he half-trotted from opening to opening, staring up at empty porches.

  He took a drink from the bottle and decided to go home. Benny was whimpering. He hunched over and began to walk very fast. Someone yelled, “Hold it right there!” A sudden blinding light in his eyes, and slowly the light was lowered. He saw two cops standing back in the shadows of an open garage door and one said, “A little early for peeping, eh, fat fella?”

  “What the hell you talking about?”

  “We’re talking about you.”

  “The hell you are. I’m no damned peeper.”

  “Sure, sure,” the cop said. “You’re just sneaking around behind houses with a bottle of cheap whisky because you and your dog got nothing better to do.”

  “It’s goddamn expensive whisky,” he said, full of resentment. For some reason he found himself remembering his mother sitting beside her radio, listening every Sunday to a man named Mournful Smith who whistled songs while playing the piano. He could see the polished black toecaps of the cops’ boots. Wary, backing away from the light, he said, “I ain’t up to nothing.”