All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  Charlie, who had washed his hair in the kitchen sink and had a towel wrapped around his head, told Slaverne to phone the police. Slaverne cursed and went to his bedroom closet and took down the pistol case. He came back into the kitchen, saying, “Don’t worry, it isn’t loaded.” Charlie laughed. “You should see yourself.” Slaverne stood handling the gun for weight, as if its balance were suddenly important, and he said, “I’m going to scare the living Jesus out of that punk, that’s all.” He went along the hall at a half-trot in his high heels, hoping no one would see him, hunching down as he went out the back door into the cover of the bushes.

  He angled up the side of the slope and held close to a big sugar-maple tree, his heels sinking into the soft earth, certain he couldn’t be seen. He held the pistol along the length of his leg and heard steps and the snuffling of a dog in the underbrush, and then there was a shadow on the other side of the tree. He stepped out and said in a thin reedy voice, “Hold it right there, you son-of-bitch.” He was surprised when a tall boy, backing away from the gun, said, “You’re crazy.” Slaverne, peering at him in the shadow-light, said, “I am not.” He was trying to sound reasonable, but he was suddenly afraid the boy, who he thought might be sixteen, would attack him. The unloaded gun was useless and he felt confused, but then the boy bent down and cradled the small dog. “You’re crazy, lady,” he said, “and I’m going home.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Slaverne said, his voice rising.

  “Oh yeah,” and the boy turned. He was clutching the dog to his chest. The frightened dog’s little legs were pedalling in the air. “You bet I am so going home,” he said. “There’s no way no crazy dame is gonna shoot me. You’re crazy but not that crazy.” Hesitant, and then suddenly hurrying, he started walking around the house toward the street. Slaverne, trying not to hook his heels in any loose roots, got into step behind him, saying, “Maybe so, but get out of line and I’ll knock your head off with this thing.” The boy kept going. As they passed the music room window, Charlie, wearing a brassiere and half-slip, almost luminous in the box of amber window-light, appeared. He had brushed out his long brunette wig and he looked more beautiful than Slaverne had ever seen him, so beautiful that he wanted to stop and stand there in the darkness and stare. He had never seen Charlie in that light before, but the boy was leading him along the walk to the street and Slaverne was suddenly furious at Charlie for always parading in the windows and he screamed, “For God’s sake, close the curtain. That’s the end. Close the curtains and get out.” He tried to cradle the pistol casually in the crook of his arm.

  “Where are we going, lady?” the boy asked when they got to the road.

  “What do you mean, where are we going?” Slaverne said.

  “Where we going?” the boy said, darting across the road.

  “The cops,” Slaverne blurted out, hurrying after him.

  “I don’t see no cops.”

  “The cops are all over the place,” Slaverne said, because every night policemen in yellow patrol cars came down the dead-end street and put parking tickets on all the cars. “Yeah, the cops,” Slaverne said as he looked up and down the empty road.

  The boy strode between some low bushes in a small park, going toward the busy downtown streets. Slaverne saw that city gardeners had cut back the bushes. He circled around, so he wouldn’t catch his dress. It was Saturday night and he knew everyone would be crowding into restaurants after the late shows.

  “Why the hell were you peeping, anyway?” Slaverne called out. He was several strides behind the boy.

  “I’m not a peeper.”

  “Sure, you’re just walking your dog.”

  “That’s right,” the boy said, “and there’s no law against that, but I’ll bet there’s a law against you poking that gun at me.”

  “You were looking in my window,” Slaverne said, shifting the pistol to his other hand. “And anyway, you want to look at bare boobs, the bars are full of naked bimbos.”

  “I don’t drink,” the boy said, “and besides, I’m underage. I’d be breaking the law.”

  “Are you crazy,” Slaverne cried. “You’re a peeper, I caught you peeping.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Well, maybe,” Slaverne said, suddenly wondering what he would do if the boy could prove to the police that he was not a Peeping Tom. “What’s your name?”

  “You are crazy,” the boy said over his shoulder. “You think I’d tell you my name?”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re weird,” the boy said, and then he stopped and turned around, circling Slaverne in the dark, staring at him intently, and suddenly bawled out, “Jesus Christ, you’re a fucking guy. You’re a fucking guy in a fucking dress.”

  “You’re goddamn right and I’m just liable to do anything, you lousy little punk,” Slaverne cried as the boy hurried off toward Cecil Street and all the Chinese restaurants. Slaverne followed. As they came out under the rippling neon signs, Slaverne heard his name called out. He looked back and saw Charlie hurrying in his bare feet, holding his long skirt with one hand and his high-heel shoes with the other. Slaverne and the boy, shoulder to shoulder for a moment by the curb, stared into the luminous red and yellow Chinese restaurants’ lettering and the flashing headlights. Slaverne suddenly ducked his head, as if they were all on him, and he let the pistol dangle along his leg. The boy, surrounded by all the light and suddenly laughing, stepped into the traffic, and Slaverne was nearly hit by a taxi as he went after him, leaping sideways.

  People stared. Slaverne ran across the street after the boy, but before he could threaten him, the boy turned. He had taken off his steel-rimmed glasses and he had muddy little eyes. Laughing, he said, “You goddamn stupid queen. Let’s go to the goddamn police station, eh! You think the cops’ll let a crazy freak like you go around the streets with a gun?” Charlie, having stepped into his high heels on the other side of the street, looking stylish and elegant, was parading through the cars, letting a lace handkerchief dangle in the air, stopping traffic. Putting down his little dog, the boy strode off toward the police station.

  Slaverne kept stride for a few moments with the boy, but men and women seeing the gun suddenly stepped aside, glaring, and someone cried out, “What are you, lady, crazy?” He yelled, “Mind your own fucking business.” Then the boy turned and screamed, “He’s a goddamn freak. He’s a goddamn guy in a dress.” An elderly couple recoiled just as Charlie, wearing a black velvet dress with a scoop neck, took Slaverne’s arm. The boy was now far ahead, looking over his shoulder, and then he ran off into the crowd, the terrier scampering after him. Slaverne was suddenly frightened and he cursed, seeing himself trailing his dress along a dusty courtroom floor, a white-bibbed attorney pleading, “None of us are the same, Your Honour.” He lifted his slit skirt and jammed the pistol into his garter belt along the inside of his thigh. Charlie was giggling. Across the road, Chinese waiters, all wearing burgundy serving-jackets, were lined up along the curb, waving and laughing.

  “It’s all your damn fault,” Slaverne screamed at Charlie.

  “My fault? You charge out of the house like a crazy man with a gun and it’s my fault?”

  “I told you to get out. Get out of my life. You’ve humiliated me.”

  He grabbed Charlie by the shoulders and spun him into the darkened doorway of a grocery store. There were shining steel hooks in the window and two pressed ducks on white tiles under the hooks. “You tart,” Charlie yelled. “You goddamn pretentious tart.”

  Slaverne, with all the neon light catching his silver lamé dress, cracked Charlie across the face and Charlie screamed, letting go a looping left. He missed and they wrestled each other to the curb, and Charlie, his nose bleeding, wobbled on his high heels and turned an ankle. Slaverne knocked him down. The waiters on the other side of the street yelled. One called out, “Yankee imperialists, go home.”

  A sloppily dressed man, a drifter, sauntered drunkenly along and stood over Charlie, who lay tangled
up in his long velvet dress. The drifter said, “Aw, come on.” Slaverne punched him in the face and the drunk collapsed and began to cry. Slaverne strutted into the street, crossing toward the waiters, smoothing his dress and hair, trembling. There was a little blood on his dress. He suddenly threw his shoulders back. He knew that his legs looked good.

  “Well, it’s a man’s world,” he called to the waiters, wheezing for air, his voice deep. There was giggling laughter. He adjusted his wig as a car came along and spun on his heel, hiking up his skirt, hitching a ride with his thumb out in the air. The driver hunched forward over his wheel and stopped. He reached across the front seat and opened the door, smiling smugly at the waiters. Slaverne saw Charlie crawling along the curb, his velvet dress torn at the shoulder. Slaverne slipped into the front seat and, with his face framed in the side window, he blew the waiters a Hedy Lamarr kiss. As the car sped off, the waiters broke into applause.

  MELLOW YELLOW

  The McBrides lived in a comfortable house in a row of red-brick houses on the south side of Amelia Street. There were tall sheltering elms and a stone wall on the north side of the street, a wall that enclosed the old cemetery. Beyond the cemetery was a railroad track, a single line that was used only early in the morning when Marie-Claire would waken to a low train whistle and get up to draw back her bedroom curtains and look out over the stones – many of the thin slabs tilted and broken. She’d played in the cemetery as a child. She had never been afraid of the graves, not since she’d stretched out on her stomach and called down into the earth and listened, called again, and listened. No one had answered. She’d decided that no one was there, that she was safe inside the walls, so the first time she’d let a boy touch her naked body had been in the long tufted grass, lying between the stones. But he’d been so frightened of the dead and her white body in the failing light of dusk that he’d suddenly stood up and run away to the doorway in the wall.

  At nineteen, her full breasts trembled when she walked quickly. She had long legs and auburn hair down to her shoulders. Boys whistled at her when she walked down the street. She didn’t mind. Sometimes she put two fingers to her mouth, as her father had taught her, and whistled back. She didn’t like young men her own age. She liked men who were old enough to be serious, but that didn’t mean she liked old men. Older men weren’t serious, she said. They were worried about dying. She never thought about death, even when she went for a walk in the graveyard. She felt wonderfully alone and at ease with herself among the stones, alive and eager to see the world. That’s why she thought the morning train whistle was like a call, and on some mornings as the train rumbled slowly past the yard, she leaned against her window and let out a low muffled wail, calling to the train, giddy with expectation as she went down to breakfast where her mother said to her, “Whatever in the world are you going to do with your life?” and she said, “I don’t know, but I’m going to live it.”

  She brought Conrad Zingg to the house to have supper with her mother and father. She had been seeing him for several months and her mother had said that she wanted to meet him. “This is Conrad,” she said, and her mother smiled because he was tall and slender with a lot of black hair, a firm mouth, and steady dark eyes. “Call me Connie,” he said, taking her father’s hand but smiling at her mother. He seemed very sure of himself, very amiable and yet aloof. “Yes, all my friends call me Connie,” he said and stepped back, shoving his hands into his suitcoat pockets. Her father stepped back, too, disconcerted. “Connie, eh,” he said. “Connie what?”

  “Connie Zingg.”

  “Zingg? What kind of name is Zingg?”

  “Viennese. My parents came from Vienna when I was a child.”

  “You grew up here, then?”

  “This is my town,” he said.

  “And here you are,” Mrs. McBride said, “at home in our house for supper,” then to her husband, “And doesn’t Marie-Claire look happy.” Conrad said, “Zingg went the strings of her heart.” Mrs. McBride laughed, and taking him by the arm she led him into the small dining room. Marie-Claire was startled. She felt a tinge of betrayal. She didn’t think they should be talking about her heart, taking for granted how she felt, even though she had wakened that morning wondering, listening to the train, if she didn’t love him.

  She tried to think of how she would tell him after supper that he shouldn’t joke about her feelings, but then as they stood by the table her thoughts drifted back to the afternoon they had spent together on the bay. They had laughed and laughed, riding the ferry, not getting off, but pretending that they were docking at all the great cities. As she had stared at the sunlight on the choppy waves, she’d felt that she was wonderfully safe beside him, safe in the shelter of his self-possession, safe to dream that she could be anywhere she wanted to be in the world. “Well, sit down,” her father said. “Marie-Claire, she says you work at being a traffic consultant. What’s that?”

  “I design the traffic downtown.”

  “You dress it up?” her mother said.

  “No, no,” he said affably. “Computers. I work out the timing, the red and green lights, trying to get the flow.”

  “Stop-and-go,” her father said.

  “Right.”

  “You’re in charge of the stop-and-go?”

  “Right.”

  They ate their supper. It was a good supper of pot roast and potatoes. Marie-Claire was pleased because her mother was happy. She knew her mother was lonely for company. She also knew that her father was morosely uncomfortable, eating with a stranger in the house. He didn’t like having strangers in his home. He thought a home was a safe place for friends where he didn’t have to explain himself. He did not have many friends. But Conrad had been very attentive to her father’s silences. He had not talked too much or been overbearing. At the end of the evening, after saying goodnight to her parents, he kissed her lightly at the front door and said, “Salt of the earth, your people. Salt of the earth.”

  Her father was still at the table as she passed to go upstairs, content that she’d shown her parents that a successful young man could be attracted to her and want to court her, but her father called out, “It doesn’t work.”

  “What?” she asked, startled.

  “The stop-and-go. Any damn fool can see that?”

  “Nonsense,” she said angrily.

  “He may have designed it, but it doesn’t work.”

  She got into bed feeling wounded, as if her father had passed judgment not only on Conrad but on her. For a moment she wanted to rush downstairs and say as cruelly as she could, “What do you know? What have you ever designed?” but she was naked in her bed and too tired to get dressed again. “Tomorrow is another day,” she said and went to sleep.

  She admired Conrad’s confidence, and how sure he said he was that he had a future. Her mother and father had always talked about the future as a day to be afraid of, a day when everything would go wrong. As she listened to Conrad talk she tried to keep a grave expression on her face. She wanted him to take her seriously. He talked about traffic, and how his control of where and when people went was crucial to the control of chaos. “Red and green, in themselves they don’t mean anything,” he said. “It’s like right and wrong. We agree to agree about what’s right, and what’s wrong. Red and green. Life’s that simple, and that hard.”

  “I like yellow,” she said, though she’d never thought about it before, and in fact, with her auburn hair, she did not think she looked good in yellow.

  He laughed. “You’re priceless,” he said.

  “So are you,” she said, sitting cross-legged on a sofa in his apartment, watching him throw darts at a yellow and black board he had put up on the door to the hall. Sometimes, he would quietly play by himself for an hour, touching each steel tip of a dart to his tongue, counting down in his head as the darts hit the board. “You’ve got to not only learn how to count down,” he said, “you’ve got to think backwards.” She did not understand why he wanted to think backwards
or how he could watch darts programs on the sports television network, sometimes for two hours, hardly saying a word to her. He would glance at her as if he were going to speak, but all too often he had the back of his hand against his mouth. He liked to sit with his hand like that, and once she had said, “Are you chewing your knuckle?”

  “No, of course not,” he’d said, and he’d put his hand defensively down on his knee, but she had seen that his knuckle was red, almost raw.

  “Do I frighten you?” she’d asked impetuously.

  “Don’t be silly,” he’d said. “A slip of a girl like you?”

  “Do you want to arm wrestle?”

  “I’d break your wrist,” he’d said, rubbing at his inflamed knuckle. “Yes, I would.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” she’d said.

  One evening, he asked to meet her a little earlier than usual so that they could take a walk before going out to supper. She wore a simple black raw silk dress. His hair was cut. He was very erect as they passed several expensive stores. He gave her an approving smile and folded her arm under his. Then he stopped by a jewellery store window and asked which ring she liked, and when she said she wasn’t looking for a ring, he grew sullen and distant.

  “I don’t like diamonds,” she said. “I like pearls.”

  “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” he said.

  “Not this girl. And I don’t like red roses either,” she said, trying to take a light impish air. “Yellow, white, anything but red.” He said nothing. For some inexplicable reason as they walked along the street in silence she felt guilty, as if she had failed him.

  She asked him where they were going.