Other People's Love Affairs

by D. Wystan Owen

“I was friends with your mother,” he said.

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  OTHER PEOPLE’S LOVE AFFAIRS

  At work, Beatrice told her his name.

  “He’s missing a screw, but harmless,” she said.

  They were crossing the hallway to Specialty Care. The sound

  of their heavy clogs echoed about them.

  “That pram of his,” Eleanor said. “I thought it might be he’d

  taken a child.”

  “Oh, heavens. He’s nothing like that.”

  Beneath the lights of the bridge, he had asked her, “You like

  the Fairchild lady?”

  She’d started to ask him how he knew where she worked, then

  remembered that she was still wearing her badge.

  “Her husband paints houses, you know. Used to be wed to the

  Chamberlain woman.”

  She hadn’t said anything. She’d watched him replace the lid of his pram, testing it firmly to see it was shut. As he shuffled on, having spoken no further, his head had bobbed again through the night.

  At lunch, she and Bea carried cafeteria food back along the cor-

  ridor to the ward. Eleanor only picked at her tray. It reminded her of school lunches in youth: foul-smelling things she’d been forced to consume. Precious they’d considered her there, swapping a tray

  of kidney pie for an apple.

  “What does your husband do, Bea?” she inquired.

  The older woman ate soup, cottage cheese. Her appetite was

  larger than Eleanor’s was.

  “You mean other than watching TV? Well, he drinks beer. He

  eats crisps. From time to time he still paints a house.” She laughed.

  “Oh, he’s all right. If he made more I mightn’t have got into nursing. So at least I can thank him for our being poor.”

  Lovers of a Kind

  11

  Months passed. The sea, dark gray through the winter,

  grew paler blue and was still on its surface. Eleanor’s eyes ran with salt mist and pollen; she bought herself short dresses in town.

  In time, she stopped regarding the phone. She did not wait

  with dread for bad news of her mother, or with hope of hearing

  that she had returned.

  One evening, at home, she was smoking the last few crumbs

  of her grass rolled up in paper when she heard a hollow knock at

  the door.

  “Who is it?” she said, standing at once, waving a hand through

  the smoke in the air.

  “The tooth fairy,” came a voice through the door. She heard a

  body shift in the frame. “It’s Deegan. Kirb-acious. Open up, Ellie, would you?”

  She did so, relieved to see Deegan Kirby awaiting her with

  good-natured impatience.

  “Paranoia?” he said.

  He’d grown a mustache, which suited his face. He was dressed

  demurely in a T-shirt and short pants, the latter stained with flecks of blue paint.

  “I thought you might be Mr. Brevik,” she said.

  “And you, my dear, have been a little bit naughty.” He made a

  show of sniffing the air. “He wouldn’t evict you, but open a win-

  dow: it positively reeks in the hall.”

  Beside the table, he picked up what was left of the grass, lit it, and helped himself to a toke.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, catching her face. “I promise, I can get

  you some more.”

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  OTHER PEOPLE’S LOVE AFFAIRS

  Eleanor blushed. “Sit down,” she said. “Would you like

  anything?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of imposing.” He took a seat on the sofa.

  “Unless you have beer. Or whiskey. Or gin.”

  “I don’t drink, I’m afraid.”

  He shrugged. “Then I’ll have what you’re having.”

  She filled a glass at the tap.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t got a telly,” she said.

  “I haven’t either. I listen to Ridgewe’s.”

  They talked about his dull work, his love of the stage. He

  made jokes. Once or twice, she nearly mentioned her mother but

  dreaded the somber mood that would follow.

  Obliquely, he referred to his own past, the distant place he’d

  grown up. He told about the unending flatiron landscape, the

  storms that rolled through with violence and speed.

  “They were quaint, churchy people. They tried to be kind.

  They treated me rather like the kid with the clubfoot, or the deaf mute who lived on my road.” He laughed.

  “I was born here,” she said. “But I grew up at school. My par-

  ents were almost strangers to me.”

  He frowned and regarded her flat. “You keep it tidy,” he said.

  It was the first time she’d had a visitor there. She told him that and then looked away. In the room were a small shelf of books, a

  cassette deck, her desk, the photograph of her mother. On the wall beside the door to the toilet hung a calendar depicting a horse.

  “Do you find yourself lonely?”

  She didn’t know. “I think perhaps I’m not that kind of person.”

  He nodded.

  Lovers of a Kind

  13

  “I’m used to being alone.”

  “So am I.”

  “I’m sorry about the smell in the hallway.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. I’m grateful, in fact. We’ve had such oppres-

  sive sobriety here.” He took another toke from the grass. “And in

  any event, Mrs. Ridgewe stinks worse than you ever could. Those

  horrible fish every morning.”

  She laughed; she’d begun to feel rather stoned. “Now who’s the

  one being naughty,” she said.

  She passed the old man, on the street or the strand.

  From a distance, she would recognize him, but he never knew her

  until they were close. Saturdays, he was in line at the church; the baker offered him stale or burned rolls. Once she saw him trying

  to fish; twice she saw him eat from a bin. At home, thoughts of

  him preoccupied her, over dinner or when she was trying to sleep.

  She came upon him in front of the bank. People milled about,

  awaiting tables at Hyde Pantry. She scrawled a note and handed

  it to him.

  I can feed you on Wednesday at Mercy, it said, the day chosen because Beatrice had meetings at noon, and instinctively Eleanor

  knew Beatrice wouldn’t approve.

  And so he came to the courtyard where families gathered to

  visit their sick. She was waiting for him there with a tray. He took it. There was lunch enough only for one, and he did not ask her

  about that, perhaps having guessed that she was giving him hers.

  There was ice cream. He ate it and wiped his hands on his trousers, then peeled back the lid on a tin of fruit salad. One of his feet

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  OTHER PEOPLE’S LOVE AFFAIRS

  was touching the pram, his toe lifted up and propped on a wheel.

  In that posture he resembled a father out for an afternoon at the

  park, his foot there to hold a napping child in place, or to worry it gently if ever it fussed.

  “Have you found any treasures lately?” she said.

  “Once I found a diamond ring on the strand.”

  She told how she’d nearly been engaged in the city. He looked

  up from his tray at her, puzzled.

  “Aren’t you a Sister?” he said.

  She laughed and covered her face with a hand. A heat was

  rising into her ears, a strange sadness settling into her chest. She knew that she was hurting his feelings, so she gathered herself.

  “Have you still got it? The ring, I mean. The one from the
/>   strand.”

  “Turned it in. A person’d hate to lose that.” He seemed sur-

  prised at the question, surprised she would think he’d done any-

  thing else.

  “It was good of you.”

  “I got a reward. Two hundred. I was king for a day.”

  “Still, it was good.”

  “Ah, well.” His expression was pleased and embarrassed. He

  said, “The wine merchant, Ault, lets the Gillett boy steal. Did you know that? Wine, whiskey, cigarettes, beer. Hundreds worth he’ll

  have taken by now.”

  She nodded.

  “You don’t believe me? He told me. Ault did.”

  “I do believe you,” she said.

  “His own son used to bully the Gillett boy. That’s back when

  Lovers of a Kind

  15

  they were in school. It’s the sort of thing that will stay with a person. The Gillett boy had a difficult time.”

  His tuna sandwich was finished; his apple was chewed to the

  core.

  “Tell me about my mother,” she said.

  “She’s kind. Even though I’m a street person, she is. Mr.

  Whitaker, she calls me. Never Wen.”

  “She’s left, you know.”

  “Yes. I miss her,” he said.

  “How did you meet?”

  “She was sometimes unhappy. I’d see her walking in the reeds

  where I live. People don’t often come by that way. Many don’t

  even know it is there. But she did. She would walk there alone.

  Sometimes I came home and knew she’d been near. She left flow-

  ers she’d picked at my door.”

  “And you talked?”

  “Yes. About where she had been. How she’d dreamed of strange

  creatures, of flying, or music.”

  Eleanor tried to see them together: fellow travelers of a desolate road, speakers of a dead and beautiful language.

  “And do you dream of those things?”

  “Yes, of course. Don’t you?”

  “No. Never. I wish I did.”

  At the other end of the courtyard, a man in a wheelchair sat in

  the sun. He shivered a little, delicately, though his dressing gown was thick in the heat. A caretaker sat beside him, reading a book; Eleanor didn’t recognize her. Closer to them were a man and a

  woman: they spoke in whispers; the woman was crying.

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  OTHER PEOPLE’S LOVE AFFAIRS

  He went on. He told about Eleanor’s mother dancing ankle-

  deep in a stream. “Only she could hear the music,” he said. “The

  hem of her dress became heavy with mud.”

  She wished he’d say more, but his focus meandered; already she

  felt him drifting away. Soon he turned back to habitual subjects:

  the spate of weekly reductions at Star, the double feature on for

  Saturday night.

  “I’ve never been to the pictures myself,” he said. “Not for a

  long time, in any event. Only I like to look at the banners. They’re some of them really beautiful things, and some of them very funny

  as well. Sometimes after a film’s run is finished they let me take the banner home in my pram. I’m sure they’re as good as the pictures

  themselves. In many cases I’m certain of that.”

  At the greengrocer, they called her Miss Cartwright.

  She bought food for herself and for her father, knowing he’d oth-

  erwise eat TV dinners.

  “Good of you, Miss,” the greengrocer, Blake, said. “Has there

  been any word?”

  She shook her head.

  The fruit buyer was a small, gentle man who spoke little English,

  being late of Croatia. He showed her how to choose a good melon

  by pushing against the scar from the vine. Stone fruits he held

  very close to his face, smiling when she mimicked the act. He said,

  “Many fruits will soon be in season.” Sometimes she saw him at the rear of the market, smoking or chewing at a piece of dry fish. He

  waved if he saw her, sat up a bit straighter; about him lay empty

  and broken-down crates, a refuse bin spilling sacks of old food.

  Lovers of a Kind

  17

  “What do you do with turned fruit?” she asked Blake. He was

  placing her things in a bag.

  “Chuck it out if we can’t take it home. Or give it away if it isn’t too bad.”

  “Before you chuck it, would you leave it outside? Just on the

  ground there, next to the bin?”

  “I can’t be having rodents,” he said.

  “Only for an hour, I mean. There’s someone who’d take it

  away.”

  “Wen Whitaker.”

  “Yes. He eats from the refuse, only it would be nicer for him.”

  An infant who had seemed to be wel on the mend took

  a sudden, sharp turn and died in the ward. A boy. All of it hap-

  pened so fast; there was not even time to have him moved to

  the city, where the hospital offered more critical care. When his

  mother was told, she collapsed to the floor. Eleanor watched her

  fall in a daze. It seemed the very force of her life had gone out; she might have been a marionette whose strings had of a sudden been

  cut. She had not been present at the moment of death, and it was

  that fact she lamented now as she wailed. The father, of weak and

  youthful appearance, stood aside, struck dumb and fearful as well.

  The dead child was mournful and blue. In the last hours it had

  been too ill to touch.

  Only Beatrice remembered herself. She went to the floor beside

  the broken woman—herself little more than a girl—and touched

  her without hesitation, gripping her with arthritic hands as firmly as she’d touched the boy in his brief life.

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  OTHER PEOPLE’S LOVE AFFAIRS

  The next morning, Wen Whitaker came.

  “I’ve brought some of my best things to show you.”

  Eleanor nodded, abstracted and vague. All night she’d

  lain awake on the floor, Deegan Kirby on the sofa beside her.

  Sometimes they talked and sometimes he slept. She kept won-

  dering what had been said in the car while that young couple

  made their way home alone. She’d seen them every day for a week,

  checked them into the ward, remembered their names, and yet she

  couldn’t begin to imagine. She didn’t know them at all.

  “I’d fed him,” she whispered in the darkness to Deegan. “All

  last week. With a bottle, I did. More times than his own mother

  was able.”

  “I’ve seen lots of people die,” Deegan said.

  She was quiet.

  “It’s strange. They were all of them grown, but they looked

  exactly the way you’ve described it. They all looked so dreadfully young.”

  Now, in the courtyard, Wen Whitaker spoke.

  “This is a hairbrush I found near the creek,” he said. “The

  backing is made of a shell. Now what do you suppose it was doing

  down there?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “And this is a ribbon I got. There used to be a shop here that

  sold them,” he said.

  She felt as if she might weep. It was time she was going back in.

  She said so, looking down at her watch, and then, without quite

  knowing why, she began to detail the work she performed, the

  smallest things: the changing of sheets, the rearrangement of files.

  Lovers of a Kind

  19

  She told about the ache in the arch of her foot, ho
w Beatrice said to be firm with her touch.

  “We soothe them,” she said, describing the soft, translucent

  skin, the strained fingers, the way their bodies calmed in her arms.

  Wen Whitaker lifted his head. For the first time in their

  acquaintance, he looked directly into Eleanor’s eyes.

  “They’re born prematurely, you know. They ought still to be

  in the womb. Beatrice says it’s like they’re in pain. Every moment they aren’t touched, they’re in pain.”

  Summer came, and with it a trickle of tourists. Some

  weekend days she walked by the sea. Children ate candy or swam

  in the surf. Lovers held hands and made for the shadows, but she

  did not feel envious of them.

  With Deegan she sat, eating mussels in wine.

  “I’ve gotten quite good with the infants,” she said. “I’m not

  frightened to touch them these days.”

  He nodded but didn’t reply. Elsewhere, a clatter when some-

  thing was dropped. He was drinking his second glass of Chablis.

  Behind him, the sun had dipped in the sky; the water resembled

  an orange’s peel.

  He’d been downcast of late; she didn’t know why. Sometimes,

  as if for no reason at all, a sadness seemed to descend over him. On the bus across town he’d mostly been quiet; through the marina

  on the way to the restaurant he had frowned at the beaches and

  parks: mothers photographing their babies, men and women sun-

  ning themselves. Her own moods were scarcely strong enough to

  be felt, a low hum of sorrow, or gladness, or fear.

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  OTHER PEOPLE’S LOVE AFFAIRS

  He covered his face with his hands. At the edges of his nails and

  the cracks of his cuticles, red and sometimes blue varnish remained.

  “Deegan,” she said.

  He parted his hands.

  “Only I wanted to ask: How would it be if I saw your revue?”

  He was silent a moment, closing his eyes. For the first time, she

  wondered how old he might be. Sixty, perhaps. It made her feel sad.

  “You don’t want to see it,” he said.

  “Why? I want to know what it’s like.”

  “Trust me. You don’t. It’s not any good.”

  “You’re only being modest,” she said. “I can hear you when you

  sing in the shower.”

  He gave a brief, wan smile. “Stop it,” he said.

  He had a way of leaving her chastened, aware of how little

  she’d gleaned of his life, of how little effort she’d made.

  “Oh, Eleanor. It’s a drag show in Croft. Why on earth would