All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  she said. “I just went in and sat down, cool like it was, not because I never go to church or anything like that but I was thinking about me and my girlfriends. I mean, we’re all married and though we’re all happy we’re not happy, you know what I mean. So we spend a lot of time together, which is good, and our husbands like it a lot because it keeps us out of harm’s way from men and what for us was just getting together for a few laughs turned into more than a few drinks, with at first a little touching and then a lot and nobody takes it seriously except it’s serious. And now we actually strip down, sometimes pretending it’s a kind of fashion show and it is beautiful, you know, the way a woman can be so tender to another woman. You get a funny kind of companion sense of yourself. Even a couple of our husbands know what’s going on, including my own, but he prefers it that way because it’s no threat to him so it leaves me sad the way we all have to do these things in life without thinking,” and what is that? To be free of thinking and empty in the head instead of this impotence of the heart while suddenly so alive in the cock. So I just took off a couple of days ago, walking, you know. Everybody takes off.”

  She stayed with him for two days, saying, “He’d never look for me out this way because I don’t know anybody around here and nobody knows me and you’re really nice treating me just like I was a princess or something,” on the back porch, a grey squirrel running through the hacked-up flower beds. The grass was brown. He smiled. There were anthills in the lawn, pustules of sand. She was lying on a sun cot. She had taken her clothes off but still wore high heels. She had two small scars close to her light reddish hair.

  “You know what’s nice with you?” she said. He looked at her. Her eyes were closed. “There’s no questions asked. That’s what’s nice. Not that I figure there’s ever a real answer to a question, but I can see you got lots of books and stuff around so you must be up to something inside your head, but mute, the way you are, you’re not always heaping it on me, see?”

  She sat up. She had dark nipples and her heavy breasts sloped sideways and what’s it like with mother’s milk suspended in different directions and a vacancy between the legs? as she said, “Except there’s a thing I’d really like to know, without prying or nothing, but I figure you cut down all those dead sunflowers lying out there or else you got a nutty neighbour, so why would you do that, leaving them there like dead rope or bodies lying around, you know what I mean?” He touched her breast and she took his hand and wet his finger in her mouth so that his touch on her nipple was wet. She undid his trousers, drawing him out as he lay back remembering his boy’s bunk bed, his bunk box below, the haunting presence of an absence above, and he stared at the row of empty narrow planting boxes on the porch rail. She swallowed his semen as he lay beside her, shaping silently words she could not see, grace lights of zero, and looked at himself, limp, all stems fall down, and bridges, and later when they were upstairs lying in bed, when she thought he had gone to sleep, she got up and went down to the telephone and he sat on the top stair listening.

  “In the heart, that’s where. A little something… I know I’m crying… Yes.”

  She came back up. He was in bed in the dark. He could see her in the doorway, hands on her hips. She sighed. He did not move. She folded her arms. Then he sat up and she sat beside him. He touched her hair and kissed her cheek. He kissed her on the neck, then shrugged and let her go, and she said, “Well, I’ve got to move on. It’s how it is.”

  In the ochre lamplight she leaned over him, her hair falling around her face, kissed him and said, “You’re in my heart, I can hear you in there.” Then she was gone and he stood at the window, staring into the dark caves of leaves in the maple trees.

  In the morning, there were ants in the kitchen. There had been no rain and the garden earth was grainy. A little boy had come to the door in the afternoon selling small Red Cross flags on behalf of Crippled Civilians. He had bought two and stuck them through the eyeholes of the lawn Sambo. A country singer was singing “just another scene from a broken dream” on the radio, and that’s bullshit. Nothing’s broken, just bent. Altered, by owl light. It was ten to nine. He was listening. He stood up, looking out the window. He preferred glass in the dusktime, the ebony reflections he could see of himself and also see through as if he held all the landscape inside himself, the way he held his mother’s words before she’d gone into the rest home. “And you are groping,” she had said, “and groping’s no good. It pours down on you. I can see the dark right there in your eyes, which is wrong because the sky’s got a glaze, and if you look up you can see that. Look up. Anybody can see that, while I got what’s important to me right here in these bundles, and I need a rest and when you need a rest you go to where people rest, which is a rest home, so that’s where I’m going.”

  She had moved into the home, after burning old dresses and all her high-heel shoes in the firebox, along with a carton of papers, a quilted blanket, and a small lace tablecloth smelling of mothballs sitting spread-legged on a stool, and where was the fat-bellied man in the string undershirt making paper airplanes sitting on his stool surrounded by rubber snakes and Mother laughing at the snake in the tree and the gulls down by the lake, and the rest home was down by the lake, so every day she saw gulls with slate-grey wings ripping at dead fish, dead from eels and oil slick. There was an old empty wooden shack on the beach and each morning she went down the path between tall pine trees, carrying her bundles. She kept her stool in the shack and sat and waited until the sun burned away the mist. The gulls came with the glare. She cradled her bundles against her breast and sometimes scullers appeared on the water from the rowing club, men hunched forward and skimming the water, their blades nicking the water. “And you don’t know why I’m thinking what I’m thinking,” she said, “but then it’s not necessary to know. We all pretend to know too much. The more we talk, the more we think we know. You’re you, that’s all. You are, and that’s everything because nothing is nowhere and you’re here. That’s a fact. Look at it this way. You got more secrets from me than I’ll ever have from you.” He visited her every Sunday. The caretaker stood at the door. There were old people in all the rooms, whispering like shedding light. He found her sitting in an easy chair. “I was just sitting here,” she said, “staring through that open door and it struck me that maybe an open door’s like a coffin upright, you know. Someone was telling me the other night that at the old Irish wakes they used to stand the body upright in the open box to be among the people in the dining room so a body wouldn’t miss the dancing.” They got up and went into the hall with all the elderly people who were walking with their arms linked or holding hands. Some bedroom doors were open and women sat in their chairs facing the hall. One afternoon, he saw an old man with pure white hair embracing an old woman. She was wearing a pale blue dress. The woman was fumbling with his trousers.

  “Some things never die,” his mother said, shifting the bundles under her arms, and she led him to the music room, glass-roofed and full of light. A dozen men and women were milling around music stands, and they all wore white straw boaters. He stood in the doorway as his mother took a chair close to the back windows, stacking her bundles. She smiled at him as she squared her boater on her head and opened up a black leather case, took out a gleaming triangle, which, as everyone else sat down, she held up, framing her face, and tapped with a little silver rod, giving a precise ping like a bullet note, and was Father Marshall somewhere with his ear to the wall, listening, chalking angles on a blackboard, isosceles perfection piercing the heart of God, and he saw that the saxophones, clarinets, flutes, and the small slide trombones and trumpets were golden-spangled plastic, and the caretaker, hushing the shuffling players, lifted his arm, and then they began to play Darktown Strutters’ Ball – the sound nasal and whining and yet sometimes whistling and sweet – and the old men and women hunched forward, earnest and intent, puffing their cheeks, wagging their elbows. His mother beamed when she hit one clear note on the triangle, and then she picke
d up her bundles and together they walked out onto the lawn and stood under a linden tree. There were several old couples promenading, nestling against each other. The light through the leaves dappled the lawn and Mother, she never wanted to have friends but only a genuflection before her special sense of her own self, said, “You should come to Sunday Mass some morning because we play at Mass and I ring the bell when the priest lifts the cup. I don’t care much about the Mass but sometimes I think the sound of that bell is as close to the sound of God as we’ll ever get.” They walked through the tall pines toward the lake and the small dunes where there were wild plum trees and dried roots hung in mounds of sand. They sat on a ridge of salt grass, her bundles beside her, containing maybe a man’s name who played the piano in a red caboose like the devil, as she touched his hand, and it was an unabashed touch of tenderness, he thought, wondering why that morning he had suddenly stood up, taking a hammer and, striding to the shed, he had opened the door, hammering the old plate-glass mirror to pieces, the shards of glass catching the light on the ground like glittering knives, an explosion of light in the loins of shrivelled men and women staring into the white abyss hole, fingering life, and does Mother even now do what she hasn’t done for years and does she hide her bundles, her secret, under the bed, breathing what words into the gumming mouth of which old man, and to what music? and one Sunday, he found the caretaker at the door. “She wasn’t at Mass, and nobody noticed until the priest raised the cup and there was no sound. She’s not in her room either or down at the shack.” Ansel ran along the beach, past the rowing club, and then he saw the seagulls circling slowly, their birdsong along the back of my earbone, her inside her hump of clothes there on the sand, hip ajar, one shoe straight up, pointing, the heel bottom a pinpoint I heard like a little hole letting air out of the sky, and “You are, that’s all,” she had said, “and nothing is nowhere but you’re here,” where he found her sprawled flat on her back and face up to the sun, arms spread wide and the bundles free. He closed her eyes and reached for the bundles, down on his knees, moving around them like a prowler, putting out a tentative hand. He ripped them open, bewildered as he dipped his hands into a confetti of tiny pieces of scissored paper, and on each little piece there were notes, quarter-notes and half-notes, clefs and all the soundless sound she said was heaven-sent, and he filled his hands, hurling the scissored music into the light, the sun high like a flower of mirrors where it glittered white, and the paper notes swirled around his head and maybe she was right as little clouds of notes curled and fell, covering his hair, his shoulders, and all her body. And as he knelt, inside his skull he heard the word of love. He didn’t know if it was his voice. He had never heard his voice.

  COMMUNION

  The old man had a hunch to his shoulders as if he were under a heavy load. Even on hot days he wore a suitcoat to hide the numbers tattooed on his left arm. In April, he came to the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. He was late for Sunday Mass, coming in after the sermon. He stood at the back of the crowded pews under the ninth station where Veronica wipes the face of Jesus.

  The old man had withdrawn his left hand into the sleeve of his suitcoat. As if he were an elderly war amputee, he extended the empty end of the sleeve as a welcome to a fellow latecomer, who called him brother and then dipped two fingers of his hand into the piscine. The old man did the same with his right hand but did not make a small cross on his forehead.

  At the ringing of the Sanctus bells, the old man got into line among those who had confessed and been granted absolution. After a few shuffling minutes, he stood at the altar railing in front of the priest. He put out his right hand to take the host that had been proferred to him. He held the wafer in his open palm, stared at the dry white O as it lay across his lifeline, lifted it, and felt it settle on his tongue. Letting his left hand fall free from his sleeve, he bit into the host. Wanting to swallow this God down, he gathered his spit and did.

  UP UP AND AWAY WITH ELMER SADINE

  1

  Elmer Sadine was sent to Saigon and assigned to a squadron of Phantom F-4s, but he did not see battle action. He saw sullen men under propeller fans in bars, sitting on the edge of their chairs waiting for the end of the war, for their flight home, men who sweated too much as they talked about morphine sulphate. Elmer hitched a ride on a helicopter recon flight and as the gunship followed a mustard-coloured river, he fired off an M79 launcher and watched a rocket grenade explode in a clump of trees. A lance corporal laughed. “Now,” he said, “when it’s all fucking over they’re sending us the sharpshooters.” Elmer was offended. “Up your ass,” he said. The lance corporal punched him in the face and stuck his .45 in Elmer’s mouth. “Suck this,” he said.

  Elmer met a nurse, a woman older than he was. He met her outside a whorehouse. She asked him how he’d got his swollen eye, and if he wanted her to look after it. The whorehouse was surrounded by old vines and flowering trees. He didn’t know the name of the flowers but he said they looked like orchids. “Damned beautiful.” The nurse said they weren’t orchids, the trees were common as weeds in Saigon, but the real little flowers were in the whorehouse. She told him she had worked for two years with medivacs near Da Nang but now she was living in the whorehouse and looking after the young girls, testing them for infection. “It’s my penance. Our guys carry more shit in their veins than the world can handle,” she said. None of the girls was older than thirteen. She tested Elmer and then made love to him. She liked to undress him in her room and she was meticulous about his body. After they made love she fondled and washed him tenderly, which aroused him again, but she smiled readily at his arousal and turned away. “Too much of a good thing makes you stupid,” she said.

  One day when he came by the whorehouse she swallowed a green capsule and told him he could watch as a child prostitute made love to her. The child smelled of Tiger Rose Pomade. Then she sent the girl away and undressed him, made love to him, and washed him. He forced her back onto the bed, bruising her wrists. “You’re raping me, you know,” she said. She laughed, sang snatches of songs, and then she cried a little. She wouldn’t kiss him.

  “You’re wired,” he said. “Fucking wired.”

  “Never mind that, never mind the girl. It was just something to do,” she said, “something before the weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

  “The gnashing of teeth?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if someone’s lost his teeth?” he said, trying to make her laugh.

  “Teeth will be provided,” she said.

  He went back to his room and got drunk and wrote her a note, saying he couldn’t see her anymore. “I don’t believe in much and you don’t believe in anything,” he told her. He blamed her for their breakup but he did not send the note. He burned it. For some reason he kept the ashes in an envelope. He put them with his military papers and went for a walk in the night, close to a rancid, stagnant lagoon where there were thousands of refugees’ shanties. He was carrying a .45 under his raincoat. He fired a single blind shot into the dark toward the shanties. He didn’t know if he’d killed a refugee or not. Two days later, the whole shantytown went up in flames. A cooking stove had exploded. Then most of his squadron were shipped home. The nurse went with them. He stayed on and took a room for a week in the whorehouse. He slept with the children, grew a moustache, and then left. He plucked a flower from a tree and pressed it between his papers.

  2

  When he came home from Saigon, his father, Albert, a successful stockbroker, said, “I know you. You don’t want a job, you want a position. You should go into local politics.” His mother, Ethel, thought that was a wonderful idea. “I’d love to see your picture in the paper,” she said. “Yes, and you could present yourself as something of a war hero,” his father added.

  “A hero?” Elmer asked.

  “Sure. Nobody knows who our heroes are now, a picture in the paper, a sign of the times,” his father said and laughed.

  “You’re laughing at me.”

/>   “No, no, I’m laughing at the times.”

  “Your father loves you,” his mother said.

  “You’re my only son, I’ve left everything to you,” his father said. “What else can I do?”

  “Nothing,” Elmer said.

  He knew his father was not mocking him, that his father loved him. But he also felt his contempt, perhaps because his father had a quiet sneering contempt for everything. He was glad he did not feel close to him. It was safer to talk to his mother about his father because she was always in a cheerful mood, even about her own disappointments. Whenever he’d had an angry word with his father she would bake a big cake, chocolate or maple walnut, and after that he and his father would sit at the dining room table in silence and eat cake while she sat in the kitchen and sang quietly:

  She wheeled her wheelbarrow

  Through streets broad and narrow

  Crying cockles and mussels

  Alive alive-oh…

  Every October, his parents took a short holiday; they drove into the Caledon Hills to see the changing leaves.. His father drove a Buick – they wouldn’t have any other car – and they stayed in regular motels as long as the motels had swimming pools. They never went swimming. “But sitting by a pool drinking your morning coffee kinda makes it feel like California, or the movies,” his father said. Since Elmer had just come home from Saigon, they asked if he wouldn’t like to come along. “No,” he said. “I’ve seen jungles full of trees.” They said, “We thought you might like to visit with us,” and set out. As they drove along route 401, they were killed, crushed when a transport trailer truck broke an axle and overturned onto their car. The truck, carrying tons of watermelons, burst into flames, the diesel lines rupturing at the fuel tanks under the trailer. In the intense heat, hundreds of exploding watermelons blew open the trailer doors.