Other People's Love Affairs

by D. Wystan Owen

  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,

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  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, show-

  ing 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 morn-

  ing 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.

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  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 stairwel he has not been able to listen as much, but he watches her, the

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  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 every-

  one. 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 but-

  toned 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,

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  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; adoles-

  cents 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.

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  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 athlet-ics, 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?”

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  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 draw-

  ing 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 pepper-

  mint 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

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  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 custom-

  ers, 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.

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  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 dam-

  son 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 sis-

  ter 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 mem-

  ories of the sisters remained. He carried them in his heart through

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  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 mem-

  ory 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

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  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.

  At the next stop, more riders board. Their presence is a comfort

  to her.

  “If only that were true,” he says, lifting an arm. It is the ad he refers to—It’s Never Too Late—and at once she is made nervous

  again.

  She smiles weakly, not meeting his eye, then stands and moves

  herself nearer the door.

  “Miss,” he says. “Madame.”

  Other riders look up.