Other People's Love Affairs

by D. Wystan Owen

  new. He imagined, as he had more than fifty years prior, Loraine

  Trilby locking the door. He thought of his bike and of the flowers in the window. Now he could see a man sweeping the floor.

  With his mobile phone he rang Peter’s house. He was still

  in the driver’s seat of the wagon. The safety belt had not been

  unclasped.

  “Dad?” Peter said. “Hang on a minute.”

  Gerald heard him move to a quieter space. “I know it isn’t

  Sunday,” he said.

  “That’s all right. You can call any time, you know, Dad. You

  all right?”

  “Fine,” Gerald said.

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  “Good. So what’s up?”

  “Only I was thinking of your mother a bit.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wanted to say that.”

  He leaned his head on the wheel. Perhaps the phone call had

  been another mistake. It was embarrassing, calling this way. There was a silence, and then Peter said, “I’m sorry, Dad. We should

  mention her more. I didn’t know whether you wanted to talk

  about it or not.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay, well we can. Les and I do, you know. So we can.”

  “The first time I saw her she was catching a bus. She was the

  only one waiting, and it almost didn’t stop. She stood on her toes and waved to be seen.”

  Peter made a sound that might have been interest, or grief.

  “Do you remember you got a splinter at the playground in

  Glass?”

  “I remember we went there. Ages ago.”

  “I took it out because your mother couldn’t bear to cause pain.

  That’s why I took the splinter out, Peter.”

  “You were good with that sort of thing. You used to hum a

  little tune while you did it.”

  “Of course, your mother was the musical one. Well, I only

  wanted to tell you.”

  When he’d rung off, he lifted his head from the wheel and

  found that the day had come to an end. His view inside the diner

  was clearer now in the dark, dinner guests sitting down, men and

  women together.

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  On their last trip to the Princess, she had tried to be gay. She

  said sweetly how she wished he didn’t have to go back to school.

  At home, his father had commended him brusquely. The mer-

  chants in Glass had been pleased with his work. “Take the Morris

  tonight,” his father had said, not knowing that a car had been

  used all that summer, driven to a wayside theater by another

  man’s wife.

  “That’s a first,” she had said when he arrived at the shop. “A

  ride in a delivery van.”

  She was wearing her most beautiful dress, pale silk with a pat-

  tern of lavender flowers, cut to expose the rise of her breast. He had told her once that he thought it was pretty, a boldness in the first days of what had since attained an air of intimacy.

  As he guided them along the familiar route, she talked about

  what a fine summer they’d had.

  “You’ll visit? You’d say you will?”

  He agreed that he would.

  The picture was No Stranger to Crime, and all through it she held firm to his hand. He scarcely watched, only looked at her face in the dark. Her eyes caught reflected silver light from the screen, and he thought she might have wept, but he couldn’t be sure.

  When it was over, her high spirits were down. She said little

  as they walked to the van. It was there, as they headed back into

  Glass, that she said it. “My husband isn’t any good to me, Gerald.”

  He didn’t know what to say. She had spoken little of Mr. Trilby,

  except of his absence, and he was startled to find the man should

  be in her thoughts. On the road, the van’s headlamps cast a small

  orb of light: moving pavement, at its edges thin branches and

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  leaves. On some evenings that summer her car and its lights had

  seemed to enclose the whole of the world.

  “He’s the reason I can’t ever be a mother,” she said. She lit a

  cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. “That’s a great dis-

  appointment in a woman’s life.”

  She spoke as though very distant from him, subdued as she

  had been that day in the shop when first she had spoken of her

  childlessness.

  “Perhaps that will change,” he said.

  She exhaled.

  “Perhaps there can be an adoption.”

  “How can there be? How would I manage? Sometimes I wish

  he weren’t kind to me, Gerald. I wish he would hit me or say

  something cruel.”

  She had the rigid self-possession of an ill-humored youth,

  which, he realized, she must lately have been. She was like his

  sister when a mood was upon her. Janet, who’d said she had never

  been happy, though there were times in his memory when he’d

  have sworn that she had been.

  From the shop, she directed him to her house. He had never

  been there and didn’t know where she lived. The street was dark

  but for a light on her porch. It was a small cottage with a rosebush in front.

  He stopped but she didn’t want to get out.

  “Who will bring me my ribbons and twine? Who will sit and

  be sweet through a dull afternoon?”

  He did not want her to go either. It seemed something pre-

  cious was passing from his life, or perhaps that it already had.

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  When he asked which was her favorite of the pictures they’d seen,

  she said she couldn’t remember a one.

  Through the front window, he saw that a lamp was switched on,

  pale and plaintive beside the brighter light from the porch. It caught his attention a moment, and as he regarded the house he noticed a

  wooden ramp beside the steps to the door. Behind the curtains, a

  vague figure sat in relief, a low shadow that might have been a chair or small table, except that it seemed to rock slowly in place.

  He looked at her, uncomprehending.

  “Does somebody live with you and your husband?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Mrs. Trilby, is your husband unwell?”

  “I didn’t think he’d be up.”

  “He isn’t well, then?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He remembered holding her hand in the dark, kisses accepted

  on the forehead or cheek. He had imagined telling his disbeliev-

  ing friends back at school but now felt he wouldn’t wish them to

  know. It put a different color to things, the husband having been

  ill at home all the time.

  “It was only a bit of fun, Gerald,” she said. “He wanted me to

  have that. He was glad.”

  She opened the passenger door.

  “It doesn’t feel right, Mrs. Trilby,” he said.

  “It was right. It was a kindness you did.”

  When she moved, her necklace caught a flicker of light.

  All the way home that night he thought about them: what infir-

  mity might have fractured their lives, and by what means they had

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  agreed to press on. The image of Mr. Trilby loomed over it all, and for the time being he could see no way past it. An illness, maybe, or a wound from the war; it was sh
ameful, this thing they had done.

  He parked the van outside his own house, amid his father’s cast-aside pallets and crates, a welcome sight, the whole unlovely mess of them.

  Soon he would be grown and would leave. This would be the last

  summer of the kind he had known. On the grass that grew beside the door to the kitchen, he lay down on his back, looking up at the stars.

  At some length, he became aware of a presence and turned

  his head to find that Janet was there. She sat beside him, cross-

  legged in the darkness. She lit a cigarette, something she’d started at school, and handed it to him for a drag. They were silent a

  while. He was glad she was there.

  “These will be the nights you remember,” she said.

  Beneath his illness from the sweets, his fatigue, and his

  sadness, he felt also vague stirrings of hunger. It crossed his mind to have a meal in the diner, but he didn’t have the heart to go in.

  Through the years of his marriage the flower shop had been

  with him. Sometimes scarcely thought of for years, even then it

  had nevertheless been a presence. He wondered if Peter and Leslie

  had sensed it, and he thought that, in the wordless way of chil-

  dren, they had. It would have been there whenever they visited

  Glass, in the silence as they passed the derelict picture house, the diner that had at one time been a florist’s. That would have been

  the reason they seemed withdrawn: he had never been entirely

  theirs. All along they’d have known that, just as they knew without having to ask that their mother’s piano had fallen from tune, or

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  that his thoughts drifted back to dwell in a past to which none of them had ever laid claim.

  Elsie would have been aware of it, too, a wife’s intuition as

  strong as a child’s. She’d have seen it every time he came in with flowers, elaborate bouquets he’d assembled himself, garnished with lily grasses and ferns. Had she watched him from the window as

  he moved through the garden? Had she seen how he paused to

  smell the rind of a lemon, to finger the white petals of magnolia

  blossoms? Yes, he thought. Yes, she probably had.

  He backed the car away from the diner and pulled forward

  onto the road. In the mirror he watched as the building receded,

  the same way he had done on his bicycle, evenings, the touch of

  her hand like a wound on his brow.

  That touch remained, as all the rest of it did, though time

  was beginning to soften its texture. They had been young, he and

  Loraine, hardly more than children at play, their game one not of

  seduction but of innocence: a bit of fun in a burdensome life, a

  lost adolescence briefly restored. A bit of fun need not diminish

  all that came after, nor need it diminish what had brought it to be.

  Love had flourished in the dark at the Princess, granted by still a worthier kind. There was beauty in the gift Mr. Trilby had made,

  though surely its price had been terribly dear.

  The years with Elsie had likewise been a gift. The presence of

  her, the weight in the night. She had known when she said “So you

  won’t float away.” It was what she had meant, sensing him truant.

  She had not remonstrated, being better than he, had only stayed

  near that he not lose his mooring, that he not find himself as he did now: adrift, a mere ribbon of smoke come apart on the wind.

  Housekeeper

  z z z

  Autumn and winter were passed by the fire, Louise

  cross-legged on the soft carpet, reading, Mr. Harris

  folded into the crook of his armchair, watching

  television programs with the sound turned off. His hearing wasn’t

  good anymore, and the noises only frustrated him. Louise liked

  the way he held the TV remote in the palm of his left hand and

  used the forefinger of his right to press the buttons. She would

  glance up sometimes from her book to regard him, so much like

  a child in his old age. In such moments—unspeaking and near—

  she felt extremely tender toward him.

  It was curious that he should enjoy the television so much

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  without any sound. Sometimes he watched football, which was

  easy to follow, but at other times he watched news or comedy

  programs, and he seemed untroubled as to their content. Louise

  would have liked for him to read. She knew he had read a great

  deal in his youth, and his shelves were still full of old books: wrinkled spines, yellowing pages. In the early months of her employ

  he had spoken of them, had teased her good-naturedly about the

  detective novels and pulp romances she favored, but he had not

  done that now for some time. He’d shown little interest in such

  things of late, something that made Louise terribly sad. For hours they would sit in the flickering hearth light, she with her book

  and he with the remote control in his lap and his hands spread

  like spiders, or like the oversize feet of certain wild birds, across the upholstered arms of his chair. She watched him even as she read,

  so that she would often reach the end of a page or a chapter and

  have to turn back to read it again.

  “Do you wish it would snow?”

  Wood hissed and popped in the hearth. She had drawn the

  curtains an hour ago, as the light fell and heavy fog clung to the glass.

  He asked her to repeat what she’d said.

  “Do you wish it would snow?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Harris said. “I wish it would.”

  They both looked at the fire awhile.

  “I never saw snow until I was sixteen,” Louise said. “Real snow,

  I mean. I lived near to the seaside as well—with my nan—and it

  only ever dusted a bit. Then I was taken to live somewhere else,

  and there was snow all over the place. The first day, a girl pushed

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  133

  me down and I cried. I thought I would be wet and freezing all

  day. I never knew snow was dry before that.”

  Mr. Harris laughed.

  “I wish it would snow, too,” Louise said, turning back to her

  book. “I wish it would snow us in.”

  They had been, in this way, together since August. The

  arrangement suited her well. In the boardinghouse, she hadn’t

  been liked. “Looney Louise,” she’d heard Ann Archer say. “I’d lock my doors with her in the place.” Over breakfast one morning she’d

  circled the ad: housekeeper wanted for elderly man.

  She’d found the house at the north end of Glass, where the

  roads veered eastward, away from the sea. It stood in a long row

  of others just like it: short, whitewashed, cinderblock things, like a collection of military barracks. Outside, she gathered herself.

  Growing up, she’d been painfully shy and unpretty; better that

  way, Nan had insisted, though she’d often felt it estranged her

  from things. Even now, she felt that: at thirty years old, her very life hung about her like an ill-fitting garment.

  At length, she’d knocked at the wrought-iron screen and was

  greeted by a middle-aged woman. “Esther,” she said. “Mr. Harris’s

  daughter.”

  From the doorway he could be seen in his chair, bent silently

  over a large bowl of soup.

  “We need someone for a few hours, daily,” the woman explained
/>
  as they entered the house. It appeared as if she had someplace to

  be. “He can feed himself, bathe himself, that. We only need you

  to wash up, do the shopping. Make sure he swallows his pills.”

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  “His pills?”

  The woman lit a cigarette and exhaled. “The bottles are labeled.

  Just keep the place up.”

  And so she’d begun working days in the house, riding in on

  the predawn bus from the city. Through windows she watched the

  world be remade, the slow rising color of sky, earth, and sea. It was only weeks before she moved in, having entered one morning to

  the odor of gas, the oven having been left on, unlit, through the

  night. “It’s good of you,” Esther had said. “God, how it all slides to hell in a day.”

  The old man never seemed to question her presence, even

  when first she began in the house. He treated her as someone who

  had always been there, the way a person might treat a neighbor-

  hood cat.

  He had suffered two strokes already, though his faculties were

  not very bad. At first, the only clear signs of ill health were a weak lower lip, a vague slur in his speech. Unpleasant, that, Nan would have said, illness so plainly declaring itself. But Louise did not find it so in the least. He took blood thinners and other medicine, mornings, swallowing them deliberately. She would stand beside

  him as he went through the progression, holding a tea towel under

  his chin. After he had finished she would retire with the damp-

  ened rag, and each would behave as though nothing had happened.

  Eventually, she knew, age would make further claims, as it would

  have done, too, with Nan if she’d lived. Louise dreaded all that,

  and what it would mean, but dreaded still more that he should die.

  Her bedroom was spare, with one window. It resembled her

  childhood room: a chair, a washstand; this one had a mirror. The

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  bed itself was narrow and firm. It must have belonged to Esther

  at one time, but no trace of her presence remained. Louise hung a

  saint’s image over the dresser, though she didn’t know which saint it depicted. There had been no formal religion at Nan’s, a gospel of relinquishment only. She’d bought the picture at a jumble sale in the city, liking the gentle look of the face. At the boardinghouse, she had bragged of the move: no more rides on the bus into Glass, no more