Other People's Love Affairs

by D. Wystan Owen

  facade. He could see that it had indeed been restored, its steel lines brightly catching the sun. In a small lot beside it other cars had been parked.

  Ribbons he’d brought her, and paper and string. The flowers

  came daily on a separate truck. “A new boy,” she said the first day he arrived. “What have you brought me? What treasures? What

  gifts?”

  “Ribbon,” he said.

  “Yes, but what sort?” She laughed aloud. In the next months

  he would learn to discern all the types: taffeta, grosgrain, jacquard, and chiffon.

  She had red hair; auburn, she called it. At work she wore it up

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  in a bun. Her eyes were green but with a darkness about them,

  serenely set. She wore summer dresses.

  At the Princess, when they went there together, she would

  never allow him to smoke. “It will age you,” she’d say, “the way

  it’s done me.” There wasn’t any point in contradicting her claim,

  though she could not have been much beyond twenty-five. She

  would kiss his forehead or his cheek when she said it and then

  drag slowly on her thin cigarette, exhaling a narrow white line,

  like a ribbon.

  The film on today was And Then There Was One, a B picture.

  “One senior,” he said, the money passed through a gap in the

  box-office glass, as it had been, too, in earlier days.

  “Two adults” was what she’d always said then, glancing to

  catch the flush in his cheeks.

  Trilby’s was the name of the shop, a single window between

  the bank and the butcher. When he stepped through the door a

  bell was set ringing, and she would look up to see him, pretty and alarmed. Above the flowers and the branches of willow and birch,

  fairy lights were haphazardly strung. She might equally have called the business Loraine’s, but she said she had never been fond of her name.

  After a week there was something almost daily for her, small

  orders: jute twine, a bag of glass beads.

  “Bring mine last,” she had said. “There’s never a hurry. Then

  you can stay for a while and chat.”

  He paid for his ticket and was given a stub. The doors were

  old-fashioned, deco as well: wide swinging glass with piping

  around.

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  “I have always liked flowers,” she said. “Ever since I was a girl.

  I suppose I have a fondness for beautiful things.”

  They were seated in the small space behind the counter, at

  opposite ends of a sofa. The day’s delivery had been signed for and put away. She liked to sit there and invited him, too. The wireless played at low volume. She said she was wild about Patti Page.

  Her hands were busy, always turning small objects; you’d want a

  cigarette near the end of the day, but the smoke would spoil the

  flowers, she said. She talked of anything that came to her mind,

  and he listened, liking her to. He sipped the lemonade she had

  given him: fresh squeezed from a tree grown in a pot.

  “They’ll cheer you, I find. When you’re in need of cheering.

  Don’t you think so? Do you like beautiful things?”

  He did not have the courage to say, I like you. He said, “I like books. Treasure Island and those.”

  “It keeps me busy, owning the shop. We can’t have children, as

  it turns out. I haven’t told anybody before, but I felt I could tell you. I felt you were kind. It’s the reason Mr. Trilby bought me the shop.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He could not imagine why she should have

  chosen him to confide in. It made him feel special, and burdened

  as well. He looked at all the many bunches of flowers, arranged in pails along the walls of the room.

  “That’s a disappointment in a woman’s life, Gerald.”

  “Yes.”

  She was glum all that day. She carried pain, he thought, the

  way an animal might: calmly, her body protecting itself, as if the deep, silent ache were precious to her.

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  Other days she was playful with him.

  “Do you like music?” she said.

  She adjusted the knob on the wireless set.

  “I played the trombone for a while in school.”

  “Not dance music? Have you danced with a girl?”

  He said he had, but she laughed, catching his lie.

  “It was a lucky thing, the first day you came in. I said it myself: I’m lucky with this one. He’ll be a friend. I could tell.”

  When he was late getting home, his father grumbled about it.

  “They want to talk,” he said in defense. “Some of them you

  can’t get away.”

  “You’ve got work to do, boy,” his father replied, not looking up

  from the crates he was sorting. It didn’t really matter, he knew. A plate had been set aside for his dinner.

  Evenings, he imagined where she might be. Closing up, the

  door to the shop locked behind her, sign turned in the window,

  Sorry, We’re Closed. He imagined her cooking dinner at home, a

  small kitchen, wallpaper patterned with bees. There was the gar-

  den with the lemon tree in a pot. Over dinner she would tell about the flowers she’d sold, and Mr. Trilby would say he was tired from work. Business she’d said was her husband’s profession. He wondered, would they talk about the lack of a child? It might be that that was something they didn’t discuss.

  In the grand foyer of the Princess, the carpets were new,

  a blue where before they were purple or red. He bought Milk

  Duds because the film hadn’t begun. They tasted of the paper

  box they were in, but he ate them anyway, the sweetness being

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  welcome just then. Elsie had never cared much for sweets. She

  preferred a bit of cheese at the end of a meal, a cup of coffee sometimes if it wasn’t past ten.

  The foyer was a long room, like a corridor, high and open up to

  the rafters. The walls were covered with old posters from films. A few young people milled about and sipped beers, beer being sold

  now with the other concessions.

  “See we don’t have to carry you out again, Freddie,” one of the

  youths said, nudging his friend. “You remember last week? All

  right, what was the film?”

  High on the walls, signs made to resemble the marquee pointed

  the way to the theater, the lounge. The toilets were at opposite

  ends of the hall; where before they’d been marked merely Ladies

  and Gents, now they said Femmes Fatales and Private Dicks.

  He found a seat near the back of the theater, which was where

  he had always sat in the past. It was a large room, still oddly resembling a barn; a false ceiling sloped down to salvage acoustics. The screen was very large, and there were not many seats; half were

  empty, half taken up with couples and friends. When the lights

  dimmed, he placed his hands on his knees. The projector lit a

  stream of dust in the air.

  She had died, Elsie had, on the third day of March. Winter

  hadn’t yet broken. Since then, he’d moved through the house in

  a dream, meals taken and as quickly forgotten, the garden half-

  heartedly raised. You got used to a person, in addition to love, used to the way they acted and spoke, to the sound of their laughter

  from the next room when something funny occurred on TV. For

  years she had
taught piano lessons at home; now the instrument

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  sat unused and ill tuned. At night in bed, she had liked to sleep

  very near, an arm or a leg draped over his person. “So you won’t

  float away,” she had said. “So you won’t float up and out the win-

  dow from me.”

  In the film, a policeman suspected a fraud. He said, “There’s a

  dame at the bottom of this.”

  When Peter had got a splinter at the playground in Glass, it

  was Gerald who had had to remove it. There was pain, sometimes,

  removing a splinter, and Elsie couldn’t bear to cause pain.

  He looked down at the sweets and back at the screen.

  Widowerhood had so far been this way: you thought a memory

  might bring some comfort, then found that it caused only guilt

  or regret.

  The curtains were different now, too, he had noticed. Purple

  velvet, where the old ones had been patterned in gold. He remem-

  bered Mrs. Trilby pointing to them, touching his arm with the

  bare skin of her own. “They’re jacquard, you see, Gerald. You rec-

  ognize that? Same as the ribbons you brought me today.”

  What a thrill it had been to hear her say it like that: the ribbons you brought me today.

  Perhaps things would be different if he hadn’t retired. If his

  mind weren’t free to run any which way. He might have stayed on

  after selling the tearoom; one or two days a week would have done.

  On the morning of Elsie’s death he had thought to himself,

  It is happening. It is actually here. For years, the thought of their separation had been merely abstract; time had seemed renewable

  then. You didn’t know the end of something until it arrived. It

  was the same way when his mother and father had died, his sister,

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  Janet, too: as if he hadn’t quite believed in the permanence of it.

  That night, while people spoke to fill in the silence, he had merely looked down at his hands, thinking the world had only one secret

  left to reveal.

  “Would you want to see a picture with me, Gerald?” she’d

  said. She spoke as shyly as if she were the child. It was July, a gray day, not warm for the season, so she’d made them tea in beautiful

  china. The flowers painted on were magnolia kobus. You’d know

  them by the thin white petals, she’d said.

  “In the evening? I don’t think I could.”

  “It would only be a bit of fun for us, Gerald. Mr. Trilby doesn’t

  care for the pictures. It would be a relief to him if you went.”

  There was varnish on her nails he had noticed. She wore lip-

  stick, which matched the red of her dress.

  “They’d have an adventure film. I wouldn’t mind that. They

  might have a pirate adventure,” she said.

  On the wireless, a program was ending. She turned the knob to

  shut it off and they were left in the silence. She smiled.

  “I’m lonely as a matter of fact. That’s the truth of it.” She

  glanced out the window. “Mr. Trilby isn’t home very much.”

  He said maybe he could come into town on his bike. His

  mother and father would allow that if he wasn’t too late.

  “It isn’t the Gem I had in mind,” she said. “Only there’d be

  talk if we went to the Gem. People are so cruel about that. Always looking to take the wrong end of the stick.”

  He felt himself blush deeply at the suggestion.

  “Not Mr. Trilby, of course. He would know it was only a bit

  of fun. I wouldn’t care what people thought, either, only it might

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  not be good for the shop. People wouldn’t like to buy flowers

  from a woman if they thought badly of her. There’s a different

  picture house called the Princess. Two or three miles along the

  Payne Road. It’s more private. If you could manage. If you came

  into town we could go in my car.”

  The bell sounded and she put down her cup. A man asked

  about making up a bouquet. Gerald watched her move about,

  choosing the flowers: red and purple stocks, lily grasses, and ferns.

  She had told him the names and he had remembered. The same

  as had happened with the ribbons he brought.

  He wondered how it would be, sitting beside her in a cinema,

  how it would be with the lights going down. Watching a picture

  and knowing all the time she was there, breathing and blinking

  only inches away. She gave cheek to the man who was buying the

  flowers, asked him what he’d done to wind up in the doghouse. A

  smile, a wink; they liked that, she’d said.

  In his mind, he said, I am falling in love.

  He left before the end of the film, being homesick in

  the dark and ill from the sweets. Outside, he shielded his eyes

  from the brightness. It wasn’t really much of a film; there had

  indeed been a dame at the bottom of things.

  He had nowhere to go; the thought returned with its usual

  weight. He would drive into Glass since it was close and since,

  he knew, that was part of his plan all along. He would look in

  on the old town: the pub where he’d unloaded whiskey and beer,

  the butcher, and the bank. Perhaps he would drive himself into

  the hills.

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  In truth, there was some anger he felt. That it should have been

  he who took the splinter from Peter’s palm, he who performed

  all such duties through the years: applying iodine or alcohol to

  skinned knees, meting out punishment when punishment was

  needed. Perhaps that was why Peter called only on Sunday, Leslie

  only when something was wrong. It was shameful to envy Elsie

  the love of her children, but there it was.

  On the evening of their first trip to the Princess, he stowed

  his bike around the back of the shop. He had not told his parents

  it was Mrs. Trilby he’d be seeing, thinking they might object if

  they knew. “Is it a girl, Jerry?” his mother had asked, and he had blushed and said no, it was boys from his school.

  “It’s great you came, Gerald,” she said when he arrived. “We’re

  going to have a good time, you and me.”

  She drove them in her pale blue baby Austin, all the time

  describing films she’d seen as a girl. She’d been keen on the cinema then; her town had had a great big one, she said. Her favorite was Mandrake the Magician; she never missed that particular one. She glanced at him from time to time as she talked, swerving a bit on

  the road when she did.

  She was dressed as she had been for work, her makeup reap-

  plied, a hint of perfume. She said he looked good in his suit. “You look very handsome,” she said.

  When the film was over, she didn’t want to go home. In the

  coming weeks, he would find this was always the case.

  “How about a walk?” she said. “Or ice cream. Would you want

  to have an ice cream tonight? I know about a place where we

  wouldn’t be known.”

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  He looked at his watch. His sister, Janet, home from secretarial

  college, had sulked: “I never had the freedoms he does.” She had

  been the more troublesome teen, brooding, seeming always in search of s
omething just out of reach. A year ago, late on the night before she left home, she had come into his room. “I’ll miss you,” she’d

  whispered from the foot of his bed. “But I’ve never been happy.”

  “Or we could pull off the road for a bit. There’s places to sit.

  We could chat for a while.”

  Each week the scene was repeated. In her dresses she would

  sometimes catch a chill after dark, and he would offer his coat to drape over her shoulders. She would gaze at the stars or up and

  down the Payne Road. When the picture was over she couldn’t sit

  still. She couldn’t keep from looking about.

  “I have to get home, I’m afraid. Another time we can have ice

  cream,” he said.

  “All right,” she said. “But hold my hand in the car. Would you

  do that? I’m feeling lonesome tonight.”

  With the windows down, the sea air was fresh, and their hands

  touched as they moved through the night. Vaguely, coming into

  the village, she said Mr. Trilby wasn’t at home.

  At the flower shop, his bike still leaned against the back door.

  Dropping him, she said, “It’s good of you, Gerald,” then drove off before he had made a reply.

  They saw seven films together that summer. One every Friday,

  till August was done.

  Now in Glass the lights along the roads had come on.

  The sky was like the inside of a shell. He passed the pub and

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  thought he might stop for a drink. It had perhaps been a mistake,

  after all. Perhaps it wasn’t right keeping vigil at the Princess, with Elsie only just having died. In the early days of their courtship

  there had been nights of disclosure, a wine bottle dwindling as

  they told of past loves. Even then, he had said nothing of the

  woman from the flower shop; even then he had kept the memory

  for himself. There had been a heat on those nights as they con-

  fessed their virginity, a heat the first time she slept pressed against him. It had felt as if no space existed between them, when in fact, hardly noticing, he was maintaining one. Over time, that he had

  not told her became a part of what there was, the memory as

  much privately his as a dream in the moments just after waking.

  He stopped briefly outside the Green Man, then reconsidered

  and continued downtown. Hyde Pantry was the name of the diner.

  He did not get out of the car, only parked it and looked at the front of the building, the stucco unchanged, though the awning was