With a smile, he remembers saying, “Rain again,” displaying the screen of his cellular phone. That memory has been with him all day, through his half shift at the bookshop and at the market as well. She was riding the bus as he’d known she would be: the thirty-six, going north to the city center. Mornings, she works in a publishing house, a local one, small books of poetry, mostly. He knows because he followed her there, unable to believe his good luck. On the street, autumn leaves littered the pavement; with her sharp, mincing steps she neither sought nor avoided them. He would hardly have credited that it was her, except you’d know her by the birthmark she has. No way you’d mistake her for somebody else. Dark red, the birthmark: like a wound at the eye.
Beneath the surface of the hot plate, grease has collected. With the back of a spoon, he scrapes it away.
She smiled when he showed her the phone, set more at ease than she had been before. When he’d sat down beside her she had stiffened a bit, clutching her purse instinctively nearer herself. He didn’t mind; he wasn’t offended. Things are that way in the city. Later, the memory of her initial disquiet will perhaps be something they laugh at together.
He steps back. The kitchenette looks more presentable. In the main room, adjacent, the futon is rumpled, the sheets untidied for several days.
It was chance, good fortune, that brought them together. He will say that if ever they are alone. A blessing for him, and for her as well, because in a strange way they need one another.
He needs her because she might be a friend. He is lonely sometimes, if he’s telling the truth. It was the same with the woman he met in the bookshop, but that didn’t work out in the end.
She needs him because he alone knows her secret. He has a certain gift for collecting up secrets. In a way, it is a kind of vocation. On Monday he will explain that to her.
He will tell her what he saw those decades ago. He will assure her that all is forgiven.
From Old Telegram Press she makes her way to the bus stop, her coat insufficient to a chill in the air.
She has missed her usual bus, made late because of a misaligned type form. A half run of poetry chapbooks was ruined, or anyway had to have pages replaced. The machine is antique with finicky parts: reglets and quoins that easily loosen, a flywheel that seems to keep an unsteady pace. Angharad ought to have noticed the error—she was supposed to be checking the prints—but some days the girl can hardly be bothered.
“Oh dear, forgive me,” Mr. Buchanan said, knowing she dislikes to be kept late. She is paid minimally for her time, the press being run at a perpetual loss, and in exchange its demands of her are minimal, too. He is kind and always has been, Mr. Buchanan. But scattered. These days he is not up to much. At a holiday party, after some wine, he once playfully hinted at marriage. It was an absurd proposition, a joke really, not least because he is gay. “You forget, Robert’s only been gone a short time,” she said, and he nodded, chastened, being widowed after a fashion himself. Sometimes she wonders how he’s got on; thirty years he has managed the press on his own.
At the bus stop she doesn’t sit down on the bench, preferring to stand the few minutes alone. There is one other woman waiting with her, disheveled, smacking toothless gums. Normally, she sees the same driver each day. Forrest Clarke, a black man her own age with gray in his beard. He does not ask to see her pass anymore, since they are well acquainted by now. It is a small, simple pleasure at the end of a day. “Darling,” he calls her, as if she were young, though he knows she isn’t and knows her given name, too. They talk about trivial things from the past: television programs, advertisement jingles. He will have wondered about her today. She will tell him on Monday about lazy Angharad.
When the next bus arrives she pulls herself up the stairs, showing her pass to the unfamiliar driver.
It upsets things, a change in routine. Even a trivial one. You arrange the details of your life, just so, and then something comes along to upend them. She finds a seat near the back and sits down. It makes it harder to manage. She might drive to work—there is still the Capri—but that would bring about its own set of worries. There is comfort in the predictability of her life—the quiet morning commute, the hours she works—as there is comfort in her superficial friendships as well. With Mr. Buchanan, with Forrest. It is routine, not intimacy, she has sought, as it was routine and not love she valued in marriage. Widowed four years, she does not mind the solitude, solitude being her due.
This bus is more crowded than her usual one. Beside her, a boy with a nose ring and headphones taps his foot, keeping time with a song she can’t hear. She leans her head back against the rattling window, feels the vibration at the base of her skull.
Perhaps she ought to give up the Capri. It isn’t much good to her anymore, averse as she is to the road after dark or if it rains, as it did briefly today. Mr. Buchanan might be able to use it. It has always been well kept and maintained. Even now, it is like new in the garage. Robert believed in that sort of thing.
Lurching, the bus makes a stop and continues; she pulls the cord when her street is announced.
At home, evening has not yet descended. The garden stands awash in westerly light. A rabbit chews at the leaves of a zinnia, but she doesn’t chase it away. There is nobody to wheel about a garden anymore, to speak to knowing there will be no response. There was that in youth, Camille in her dresses, and again later, briefly, when Robert was ill.
“Zinnias, Camille,” she hears herself saying. “Petunias. Sweet peas. Collard greens. Radish.”
Sun falls upon pale, unmoving arms, a face lifted as though to be kissed.
“A rabbit, Camille. Shall we watch him a while?”
She is kind when she thinks of her sister. Gentle. Patient. It is always the same. Today the thoughts have come on a bit early. There is the weekend to negotiate yet.
“Will you dine with us, or will you take the food in your rooms?”
Mrs. Usak does not bother taking his order because his order is always the same. She wears a blue sweater, large rings on her fingers. Her hair, dyed reddish, is aggressively coifed. To glance at her, one would think she was strong, but he knows how she sometimes suffers at night. He has heard her, after the restaurant closes, lamenting her daughter’s licentious behavior. “I should throw her out of the house,” she has said, “but I would miss her too much if I did.” Since she installed the motion light in the stairwell he has not been able to listen as much, but he watches her, the fatigue in her eyes, the stoop in her shoulders when she walks to the kitchen.
“Here, Mrs. Usak. If it’s all the same. I’m off to work soon, as a matter of fact.”
In the restaurant now there are two other parties, couples both, seated next to the windows. One, near his own age, eats without speaking. The woman looks sullenly down at her plate. He has chosen a small table facing the room, the better to observe everyone. The other couple is younger, speaking in whispers; they lean forward, disregarding their food.
It is not a good turnout for Saturday lunch. The room appears dark with its wood-paneled walls, its low ceilings, the unoccupied space. They might do well to paint the facade; he has mentioned as much to Mrs. Usak before, feeling entitled since he depends on the place for his room.
The unspeaking woman makes him think of the bookshop. How the wrist, when he touched it, was quickly withdrawn. Nothing was said in that instance, either. Not until later, when she called to complain. Three times in a week he had seen her come in, a thin woman, anxious, with red in her eyes. The books she was buying had to do with conception. He felt for her: a sad thing, the want of a child.
His salad is brought by Mrs. Usak’s youngest son. Water is brought, too, silverware, coffee. The waiter’s white shirt is buttoned up to the top.
“Anything else for now, sir?” the boy says.
Not looking up, he examines the fork. Last time it had been left a bit scummy. A mistake of that kind will come out of the tip, a savings for him and only fair that it should. Satisfied, he
smiles.
“Nothing,” he says.
He loved the woman from the bookshop, in fact. For what is love but to suffer another heart’s pain? Alone at night, he has thought about her. Two years have passed and he hasn’t forgotten. There have been others: sick men who read about death; adolescents who seek comfort in childhood books. To them, he has been forbidden to speak. Arthur has made that perfectly clear.
But the woman from the thirty-six bus is different. With her, there is some chance of connection. What he knows about her is not intuition. He truly is a part of her past. She won’t recognize him, but that doesn’t matter: she will know when he tells her what it was that he saw. He looks different now, his hair having thinned; years ago, a procedure corrected his vision. Shown a picture, she might say, “Ah yes, I remember. The boy who was always alone.” From his stoop or from bus stop benches he watched her. He watched when nobody else was about.
“All right, then?” the waiter says when he returns.
“The seeds of the cucumber might be removed. Of course, I’ve suggested that in the past. Your mother has her reasons, I’m sure. But it’s very good. Timothy, is it? Yes, it’s very good, Tim,” he says.
The boy stammers something and then moves away, the silent couple having asked for their bill.
The birthmark never spoiled her face. In fact, it lent it a certain distinction. Still it was the sister who was really the beauty, or who would have been. That was often remarked. A certain fineness and resolution in the lines of the face, as if sculpted by a steadier hand.
Those days of his life were spent at loose ends, home for the summer from the school where he lived. At home, as at school, he wasn’t paid much attention, a boy, he’d heard it said, of middling promise: not bright in any particular way, not skilled in athletics, not physically strong. Saliva often came thickly to his mouth, a fact he could not help though he tried, and because of that, others disliked eating with him. It spoiled your appetite to see that, they said; Robin Mullins complained to the head of school that it did. His father was hardly ever about, even sleeping some nights in the office. His mother, he had found, required silence at home, her headaches excited by the smallest of sounds. And so, aware, always, of the nuisance he was, he would wander the quiet, unpeopled roads. It was there, while he swung from cherry tree branches, or searched for unusual stones, that he saw them, the one who rides the thirty-six pushing the chair.
Right from the start he fell in love with the sisters. He will tell that to the one on the bus if he can. It wasn’t love of the cheap, lurid kind seen in films, nor the childish love he’d heard some claim at school. It was, rather, pure and complete fascination; he loved them the way a person might love the sea. They strolled about, unaware of his gaze, the well sister describing the world for the ill one. The names of things. Their look or their color. Day after day that summer he found them; he walked the roads, searching for them, till he did.
His own bill arrives and he pays it in cash.
“Sister well, Tim?” he says, counting the money. “A nice girl, your sister, I always thought. Tell Mrs. Usak I asked about her. Will you? That I said she was nice?”
It is strange that she never dreams of her husband. Waking before dawn, she thinks about that.
He was good: kind in marriage, honest in work. An accountant with a local government office. She ought to make an effort to remember him more. That much he is probably owed.
In the bedroom that they never slept in together, a crack in the curtains reveals the pale sky. The clock on the nightstand reads 5:24, and she turns over knowing sleep won’t be reclaimed.
His illness was the happiest time in their lives, weakness drawing her to him as goodness never had. She was grateful in those months for the care he required, grateful because she was busy with him. It had not been an affectionate marriage, a fact that had suited her better than him. In the first, milder months of his illness, he helped her arrange for the sale of their house. He never expressed resentment about that, the ease with which she could cast off the past. “I’d like to be nearer the city,” she’d said, and he agreed that that was the sensible thing.
Last night, she dreamed again of Camille: Her pleasure at a flock of geese overhead, at a flower held in front of her face. The way, hearing music, her fingers would move. How she wept, unconsoled, at her grandmother’s casket: that woman with hands like the roots of a tree, who’d brought lemon candies and peppermint bark. In the dream, as in life, Camille keened beside her. It hadn’t been known whether she understood about death.
Other memories present themselves now. Pretty dresses unworn in the closet; dances, recitals, the leavers ball missed. “Am I to be a nursemaid?” she said, though in fact no invitation had come. “Selfish child,” her mother admonished. “It is ugly to envy your sister.” Her father said nothing, as ever cowed. He would die young, wounded on behalf of his daughters, not having wanted to outlive the ill one.
Last week she caught her face in a glass. One so seldom looks anymore. There were times when she stared at Camille and cursed the beauty wasted on her.
With her fingers, and by long, unthinking habit, she traces the mark at her eye. Its edges are not discernible to the touch, and yet she knows them exactly by heart.
In the bookshop, customers browse the remainders. A mother reads a picture book to her son.
There are titles to put away, shelves to be tidied. He adjusts the spines so they line up precisely, knowing that Arthur likes them that way. “Try to dress smartly,” the head clerk has said. A younger man, Arthur dresses smartly himself. He frowns, regarding the dirt on his own cuffs. It was Arthur, too, who heard the woman’s complaint.
Since the incident he has kept a certain distance from customers, speaking only when they ask him for help.
In his school days he always kept a distance as well, trying for friendships tentatively. Seeing the sisters, he had learned to be watchful. He came to know which boys had had letters from home, which had failed an exam or were otherwise troubled. But never did this knowledge lead to a friendship. Sometimes the things he knows about people, the care he has given to observing their lives, makes him feel as if he is brimming with something: a love he has not been allowed to express.
He does not begrudge her any of what he witnessed. That is what he is hoping to say. It can’t have been easy, the sister that way. Clearing up after her, pushing the chair. The beautiful sister, the delicate one.
“Filthy,” she said the first time he observed it, because the ill sister had vomited. He watched them from the branch of a damson tree, sucking overripe fruit from the seed. When she spoke, he felt at first he’d misheard her, the tenderness falling away from her voice. He’d grown used to a certain measure of violence: teachers or students speaking harshly at school, his own mother losing patience with him. Only that morning his parents had fought; yet, somehow, he wasn’t prepared for this cruelty: The quiet. The intimacy.
The well sister knelt down in front of the ill one, cleaning the liquid with a napkin she held. “What a foul, wretched creature,” she said. Lips firmly abraded, an ear roughly pulled.
It was hot out and he felt the sweat pricking his neck. Tears in his eyes caused his glasses to fog. As they carried on, away down the road, he felt the great burdensome weight of his body.
“A millstone,” she said on other occasions, while the ill sister quietly wept. Flesh was many times prodded or pinched; firm blows were applied to the ribs.
At the front desk, he refills the register tape. He offers to place a man’s book in a bag.
“Plans for your weekend?” Arthur says, meaning Monday and Tuesday because he is off.
When that summer ended he returned to his school, but memories of the sisters remained. He carried them in his heart through the winter; on Sundays in chapel his prayers were for them. He wasn’t surprised when news came of his parents’ divorce. His first thought was not of his mother or father, those distant figures he had not come to know. It was,
rather, about the two sisters he’d watched and whether he would ever see them again.
“Yes,” he tells Arthur, “as a matter of fact. Monday I am going to see an old friend.”
The bus sighs as it pulls away from her stop, and she takes her seat in the usual place. She slept poorly last night, as all weekend she did, agitation remaining despite her fatigue. It is still there now, though the morning has soothed it, this resumption of her weekly routine.
On Afton, they stop at Meadowlark and then Charles. An ad above a window says It’s Never Too Late. At Bradbury, she looks to the front, aware vaguely of somebody’s gaze. A man pays his fare, stealing glances at her; she suppresses an urge to lift a hand to her face. He wears a blue slicker over his shirt, a pale one with a collar, a tie loosely done. Six feet or so and average in other respects: balding in the usual way, his skin pale and pitted from childhood acne. She has seen him before, last week on the bus. In any other context she wouldn’t remember, but here, in this space, the memory rises. The rain he predicted for Friday has come; he smiles a little as he approaches, lifts his eyes as if to acknowledge the fact. Even then there was something about him. When he leaned in to show her his cellular phone, his fingernails were long and unclean.
Her umbrella has been folded and placed on the seat beside her, so he sits down in the one next to that. At once, he can feel her recoil, the almost imperceptible movement away. He does not take offense, as he didn’t on Friday. Soon he will speak and she will see he is kind. He has tried to dress smartly today.
The birthmark is on the left side of her face, the one that is nearest to him. The red of it is carnal and deep, as if a piece of her heart were on the outside. She is beautiful, more so than in youth. Lines have been etched about her mouth and her eyes, but in other ways she is unchanged, her face still recalling the ill sister’s, too.
Aware of his shifting eyes, she is nervous. There is something prying in the way he regards her. She looks around the near-empty bus, a pretense sought for moving away.
Other People's Love Affairs: Stories Page 17
