All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  And I want you to know bookies don’t lose unless something is really wrong ’cause betting is the way I see things hanging together in a framework, and when I used to bet myself I was always looking for the sign when I couldn’t do nothing wrong no matter how I played it, like the hand of God was with me, and lots of times I got the sign, but even when you believe you’re so right you win big, you know you always got to end up losing, like no matter how successful we are we know we all got to die. One day I can see the only winner is whoever’s collecting the bets ’cause the world’s full of losers, so I got into being a bookie and right away I’m on the side of the angels and getting rich. Except now I’m sleeping on the sofa and every putz in town is picking winners and I’m going broke, and I figure it’s all ’cause of that tree. So I’m driving home in a snowstorm the day before Christmas and there’s this lot full of scruffy trees for fifteen bucks each, which is outrageous, but I buy one anyway ’cause I’m suddenly so excited like I haven’t been for a long time. I can’t wait to see my wife’s face light up like I flicked her Bic when she sees this tree.

  What I see as soon as I say hello is my wife standing with her arms crossed in the living room in front of a great big tree. It’s all dripping with tinsel and tiny lights and there’s a lopsided star up on top and my kids are sitting cross-legged in the corner looking scared but she’s staring at my tree and I’m staring at her tree and all of a sudden we both start laughing ourselves to death, thank God, ’cause maybe I would’ve killed her for doing that to me if I hadn’t done it to myself. After we stop laughing she says I can’t just throw my tree away so maybe I should call the cathedral but I say what do I know about cathedrals, and she says that’s exactly their business, looking after poor people who need a tree. I think I’m losing my mind when I call the cathedral and this priest is talking very softly to me saying yes, and what a blessing and don’t I know there’s plenty of families who not only don’t have trees but they don’t have turkeys either, and like I’m going crazy I whisper back to him, How about I buy them a nice big ham. He laughs real quiet like we’re sharing some secret and says a turkey’ll do just fine and he’s very touched, and I tell him no, I’m the one who’s touched, right in the head, and he gives me this little chuckle again, saying the Lord really does work in wondrous ways.

  The only way I feel is like I’m bleeding to death when two guys from the church show up all smiles, and when I give them the cheque for the turkey the guy with the peak cap says it’s a fine tree you have for yourself there, Mr. Cowan, and a fine Christian thing you’re doing, and I’m smiling like my face is falling apart at the seams. Suddenly I want to yell Cohen, you creep, I’m Cohen, but my wife’s giving me her little flutter touch on the small of my back and I get this loose feeling like everything’s okay and pretty soon me and my wife are standing in the doorway like a couple of loonies saying Merry Christmas to these two guys carrying the tree to their pickup truck. Later we lie around with the kids gone to bed, listening for reindeer, and I say maybe I should come down the chimney and my wife says chimneys are a very bad joke for a Jew but I tell her for Christsake cut it out ’cause I’m already feeling a little lost like it is, lying there looking out the window at the really shining stars I never really saw like that before.

  In the morning I can’t believe it ’cause I’m lying there in this terrific sleep when the phone rings beside the bed, and I hear giggling downstairs that makes me think of summer and the water sprinkler on the lawn, but this voice is saying in my ear he wants to thank me especially, Mr. Cowan, for my kindness, and I don’t know who the hell he is so I say he’s very welcome but then I realize he’s talking about how tickled he is by my tree and my turkey. He says he took a chance looking up my name in the book because there’s got to be only one Adrian H. Cowan, which I tell him is true, and he says he can believe it and sounds so warm and pleased I’m suddenly sitting up smiling, asking him how it all looks and he’s talking terrific, until he says so why not drop over, Mr. Cowan, and take a look ’cause it’d be a real pleasure to meet a man like me, which I say likewise I’m sure and I will and I hang up and think, Oh my God, I’m gonna hang myself, ’cause I can’t believe how I’ve done this to myself, telling this poor guy I’m gonna come around and stand in his kitchen and stare at his turkey and tree, which is really my tree, and so I go downstairs and this I can’t believe either. The whole room is littered up with paper and my little girls are laughing and yelling Daddy! Daddy! giving me gifts, and I can’t stand it ’cause for them I got no gifts, but my wife says the whole day is this wonderful gift from me and what a wonderful man I am, and like she’s at last telling me the biggest secret of her life she says she’s already made a plum pudding.

  Which is what happens when you give a little you get a lot and I’ve gone all the way from pork to plum pudding, so all of a sudden I feel like I’m sitting in a corner with my thumb in someone else’s life and I really pulled out a plum, except this is no plum, this is painful, ’cause she says she’s got Irish coffees and plum pudding at eleven o’clock in the morning for neighbours who don’t care about Jewish, and why, I want to know, is this happening to me in my own house, that everybody is so happy when all I want is nothing except a little piece of the action and no talking to smooth-talking priests? I say thank you very much, I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but I’m going to the Y while it’s still early and play a little B-ball by myself. My wife, she taps me on the cheek like it’s my tuchis and says she understands, smiling, when I know she don’t understand at all, and I tell her for the last time that this is the way I am, which is nothing, and kiss her hard ’cause I’m holding her so hard I feel I’m gonna cry. And even when I’m in my big black car I feel I’m gonna cry, driving like I got nothing but time through the streets that are so empty.

  All I can think of is going to see this guy with my tree, which is his fault ’cause I didn’t call him, he called me, and actually he lives down close to where my father lived, which is not such a bad place except I haven’t been there for years, and when I’m driving down the street I feel a little weird, like I’m moving back into my father’s life which is my life, and suddenly I wish I had a son looking for himself in me the way I could look for me in my father if I wanted to, even though my father is dead twenty years, but still I got his old gabardine coat somewhere in a box with his long underwear that he died in when he fell down in the slush in the street and some cop said to me like I was someone else’s son, the old sheeny’s dead, which made me want to kill him when I was a young boy. Instead I grew up and got smart and changed my name to Cowan so my kids don’t get that kinda crap in case I die in the street. Then before I know it I’m getting out of my car facing this number 48 like the guy on the phone said, and I mean this house is so bad it’s nothing like my father ever knew, ’cause the veranda’s slipping left while the house is leaning right, and I’m standing there in the street in my own very terrific suede coat with the fox-fur collar and BAM, it hits me like I can see this guy’s face go out like a light. No matter how much he says he wants to thank me personally there’s no way he’d like me looking down at his family beaming up at me and all of a sudden I feel this terrific sadness like I just lost my whole childhood, ’cause I hear myself humming, I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal. I know if I go in there, then there’s no way I can come out clean, so I feel kinda left out like I’m trapped between what I done and what I can’t do. So almost without thinking I lift my hand like I’m saying goodbye, and it’s only when I’m back driving in the car that I see my hand in the air like it’s a blessing the way my father used to bless me.

  And I want you to know that it’s not a question of counting blessings, but I can’t remember blessing anybody, not even my own kids, which makes me feel even a little more sad. When I’m in the locker room putting on my B-ball shoes I know I’m all wound up and alive inside like I can’t wait to get on the floor and then I find the gym is totally empty with not even the old guy
running around the track, like he knew this morning I needed to be alone absolutely, and everything I do with the ball feels loose and I’m doing layups real easy and I get this weird feeling that whatever I want is right there at my fingertips. I start dropping in shots from fifteen feet and doing backhanders and scoops, cross-overs and double pumps. I can’t miss like I’m unconscious I’m so good, and then I drop this long looping hook shot like a rainbow from almost centre court, which I know before I even let it go it’s perfect. For a minute I want to cry. I want the guy with my tree to be there sitting maybe in a folding chair with his turkey in his arms seeing this, ’cause suddenly I got the conviction that we’re connected though I never seen him and he’s never seen me, but somehow I know I got the touch like it was given to me maybe in the street when I had my hand in the air, which is what my father always used to do when he’d just put his hand in the air over my head and say nothing like he was real peaceful. And I’m thinking about this guy like he’s there all peaceful with his face lit up, and suddenly I’m standing at centre court doing something I could never do before, which is get the ball spinning on my fingertip like it is the whole world, and I feel this terrific astonishment that I can’t explain. I’m so surprised at being alive let alone I should have this special touch, which for once in my life I really know I got, ’cause for once I did what I didn’t intend to do, which was leave the guy alone with whatever happiness he got from what I gave him. My only regret was he couldn’t call me by my real name, which is Cohen ’cause now my name is Cowan, which lets you know right away where I stand, except standing there at centre court I didn’t feel that I was me at all ’cause I don’t exactly know who I am but now I know I’m not nothing.

  PROWLERS

  Slaverne Tuttle’s mother wanted a girl. She loved the name Laverne, but when he was born a boy she settled for Slaverne and kept him in flowing curls until he was seven, when children on the street clipped his hair in the rose garden with a pair of pruning shears. His mother cried, but he took the clipping calmly. His father died during the war, parachuting behind enemy lines. Slaverne had only a faint recollection of a small man with steel-rimmed glasses, but his mother was tall with a slightly bent nose, a pastor’s daughter, who became morose sitting alone listening for her husband’s step. “He had a noticeable limp,” she said. Slaverne grew up feeling sorry for his mother. One night he came home and found her drunk by the fireplace, dressed in her white wedding gown, and he said, “I am the man in your life, Mother.” She cracked him across the face and wept as he tried to hold her, blood from his nose staining her dress.

  It was only after she died that he began wearing her clothes. During the day he worked as a court clerk and he enjoyed the work, sitting at his own oval table, his slender fingers moving like spiders silently over the keys. Sometimes a judge asked him to read the evidence aloud. He always smoothed his closely cropped hair, quietly clipping his words. One judge told him testily that his thin monotone made all testimony sound the same. “The world is full of impassioned pleas,” the judge said. “And none of us are the same. Never forget that.” The judge had gathered his black robe and swept into his chambers, nodding at tight-lipped attorneys wearing white bibs. “It’s due process,” Slaverne told his friend Charlie, who was a long-distance bus driver. “You look at these people and you know it’s all a question of who’s in their high-heel sneakers. The cops strut around in crash helmets like space thugs, the hookers play pouting virgins. It’s all a laugh. No matter how you look at it, life is a costume contest, Charlie, and don’t you forget it. We’re not weird.”

  He had met Charlie, who had a aquiline nose and hooded eyes that were languid and sensual after only a touch of eye shadow, at an indoor shooting range. They shared a love of high-powered pistols and the oiled sheen of the barrel as they stood side by side, insulated from the echoing shots by big padded ear-cups. Charlie was also good at pruning roses.

  They agreed that he should stay with Slaverne after coming in off the road, and soon after he had his own closet in the small frame house set back from the street in a downtown cul-de-sac. The kitchen and music room looked out on the garden of roses, honeysuckle, and dogwood. Slaverne liked the garden because it seemed secluded. “Those are the enemy lines out there,” he’d told Charlie, but sometimes drifters came down the cul-de-sac and fell into step behind him late at night. He often thought he was being shadowed, and one night he broke into a run, furious at people who would not leave him alone. When he got to the house and looked back down the dimly lit road, there was no one there. Disconcerted, he doubled back, watching for movement in the bushes. He knew there were always prowlers watching and peeping in the bushes behind the house, because on hot summer evenings with the windows open he had heard a twig snap or a muffled cough.

  Charlie was easygoing and had a sensuous slow walk. He got out of his uniform as soon as he was in the house and put on lace underclothes and a little jewellery. He usually cooked supper wearing a brassiere, a short slip, and heels. He knew his legs were long and lovely. He seldom closed the kitchen curtains and Slaverne, sensing someone out in the dark, would see a shadow pass. He spoke sharply to Charlie about walking around half-naked as if they were alone and had all the freedom in the world. “We don’t, you know,” he said sourly. “Everybody’s a criminal these days.”

  Charlie said he was sorry and closed the curtains and the drapes in the music room and curled up beside Slaverne on the cozy sofa. Slaverne kissed his closed eyes, but they were becoming more curt with each other. Slaverne thought Charlie was turning into a showoff, wearing a leather suit to a party one night with a parachute pack strapped to his back. There were several small bottles of champagne in the pack, and Charlie had been the centre of attention even though he was a short man, smaller than Slaverne, who was lithe and lean. “Look at me,” Slaverne had said testily. “Here I am in my late thirties and I still look like a track star.” He felt lethargic about their affair and he blamed Charlie.

  “Maybe the trouble is you don’t love me anymore,” Charlie said one night.

  “Don’t be silly,” Slaverne said. “You’re beautiful.”

  “Who’s silly? I take off my clothes and you look like you’re looking through me.”

  “What can I say?”

  “Say something.”

  “Maybe we’ve known each other too long, maybe clothes make the man,” he said, crossing his legs.

  “Since when is two years too long?”

  “I mean, maybe we’re used to each other, that’s all. People get used to each other.”

  “Yeah, well not me. I never know what you’re doing.”

  “Maybe that’s the trouble,” Slaverne said. “I don’t get any surprises anymore.”

  “So, what am I supposed to do, hop-dance with a dildo?”

  “Look, I’m just telling you I feel boxed in. Maybe we need to take another look at each other. What do I know about why I feel this way?”

  “If you don’t know, who does?”

  Slaverne heard a noise outside. He parted the drapes and looked into the darkness, listening for footsteps. On another evening he had caught a glimpse of a man limping up the garden slope. He had called the police and waited nearly two hours for them to come, but they never did, and he went to bed with Charlie feeling angry and betrayed because the police hadn’t taken the invasion of his privacy seriously.

  He knew there were prowlers out in the garden every night, sitting on their haunches in the shrubbery. There were several small apartment buildings close by, and the peepers were looking for women who had forgotten themselves and left a little opening of light into their bedrooms as they undressed. Slaverne and Charlie now made love in the dark.

  Then one day Charlie received an unsigned note in the mailbox from a man who said he had seen her through the kitchen window, “because there you were in your underclothes and didn’t seem to care, so I’d like to say hello. It’d be terrific if you’d call the enclosed number at three in the aft
ernoon on Tuesday. It’s a pay phone and I’ll be there and I’ll know it’s you and you don’t have to feel self-conscious because we won’t be able to see each other.”

  Charlie promised to keep the curtains closed but Slaverne sat around feeling sour because someone had stood undisturbed in the dark watching Charlie. “I don’t count. I mean, if he’s seen you, he’s seen me, he knows I’m here. I’m the man of the house, but you’re just supposed to phone some phone booth like I don’t exist.” He threw open the living-room drapes and stood scowling into the darkness.

  A few nights later, Slaverne heard slow steps through the long grass. It was late at night and he and Charlie were dressing for a pre-Lenten ball. Some of the more dashing dowagers were expected and Slaverne had said excitedly, “We’re going to prowl in the owl hours tonight.” He was wearing a silver lamé sheath, a beautiful brunette wig, his mother’s pearls, and red patent-leather shoes. Charlie, always a little late, was still in lace underthings. Slaverne parted the drapes and there by the kitchen window, pale, almost putty-faced, was a young man wearing round rimless glasses “That’s it,” Slaverne said, “that does it,” as he watched the young man go up the slope of the back garden followed by a black-and-white toy terrier.