All the Lonely People: Collected Stories
504
All the Lonely People: Collected Stories
504Hardcover(None)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781550967906 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Exile Editions |
| Publication date: | 11/17/2018 |
| Edition description: | None |
| Pages: | 504 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
BECAUSE Y IS A CROOKED LETTER
... a motiveless malignancy ...
— JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost
THERE'S A HOLE IN THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
It began over a year ago. I was going to drive to the foothill town of Saratoga to stay for two weeks in a rambling, spacious house and try to have lunch every day at a table under the tent at the old gabled racetrack. I had renegotiated the mortgage on the house and bought a new pair of tinted prescription sunglasses so that I could read the racing form in the glaring sun. C. Jane had packed several oblong dark bars of wax and her slender steel tools. She is a sculptor. I am a poet. We went out the back door of our house, through the vine-covered and enclosed cobblestone courtyard, and decided to move the car forward in the garage, toward the lane. I turned the key and the Audi lurched backward, breaking down the stuccoed wall, dumping concrete blocks and cement into the garden. I looked back through the rear-view mirror into an emptiness, wondering where everything had gone, and I heard the whisper of malevolence and affliction on the air. I did not heed it.
The car was fixed. Mechanics said that wires had crossed in the circuitry. We drove to Saratoga where every morning in the lush garden behind the house I wrote these words while sitting in the shade of a monkey puzzle tree:
pain and pleasure are two bells,
if one sounds the other knells.
The house was a brisk walk from the racetrack where shortly after noon grooms started saddling the horses under tall spreading plane trees, and then they led the horses into the walking ring and people pushed against the white rail fence around the ring, the air heavy with humidity. Some horses, dripping wet, looked washed out, with no alertness in the eyes. It is a sign, but it is hard to know if a horse is sweating because of taut nerves or heat, so I looked for the blind man.
I stood against the rail along the shoot from the walking ring, at a crossing where the horses clopped over hard clay. The blind man came every season on the arm of a moon-faced friend, and they always held close to the rail as the horses crossed, the blind man listening to the sound the hooves made. "Three," he said at last, "the three horse." The horse was dripping wet from the belly but I went to the window and bet on the blind man. The horse got caught in the gate, reared, and ran dead last. A warning, I thought, but before the next race the blind man said sternly to his friend, "I can't close my eyes to what I see." I moved closer to him. The other horses he heard during the day ran well. He called four winners and I strolled home to the big house and C. Jane and I drank a bottle of Château Margaux, 1983, a very good year. A few more winners and I might be able to pay for our trip.
That night I dreamed of butterflies swirling out of the sky and clouding the track. "It's all our lost souls," C. Jane said. The days passed. I worked on poems in the morning and forgot the blind man and the butterflies. I wrote about my dead mother, who would sit in candlelight, her sleeves stained by wax, and play the shadows of her hands like charred wings on the wall.
The sun shone but did not glare. I did well at the track and bought a Panama hat.
One morning, the phone rang and it was C. Jane. She had driven through town along the elm-shaded side streets. There had been an accident. When I got to the intersection I found our Audi had been T-boned by an elderly man from California who was driving a Budget rental car. "I was listening to Benny Goodman on the radio," the man said, "Sing, Sing, Sing. It still sounds great." He had gone through a red light, slamming the Audi up over a sidewalk and onto a lawn, smashing it into a steel fence. Marina had stepped from the car unscathed but stricken. The car's frame was bent and twisted and it was towed to a scrapyard where it was cannibalized and then reduced to a cube of crushed steel. There was a whisper of malevolence and affliction on the air but I did not heed it and we went back to our home in Toronto where I was cheerfully sardonic about the hole in our garden wall. "There's a hole in the bottom of the sea, too," I said, and laughed and then began to sing, There's a hole, there's a hole in the bottom of the sea ...
LIKE MY BACK AIN'T GOT NO BONE
Our house was in Chinatown, a red-brick row house built about 1880 for Irish immigrants. It had always been open to writers who dropped in on us for a morning coffee, and a little cognac in their coffee; sometimes I made pasta or a tourtière for two or three editors; and since C. Jane was a splendid cook, we had small suppers for poets from abroad and often we held house parties, inviting forty or fifty people. It was a friendly house, the walls hung with paintings, drawings, tapestries – all our travels and some turbulence nicely framed – but one Sept-ember afternoon the front door opened and a young man with bleached hair spritzed like blond barbed wire walked boldly in, his eyes bleary, and one shirt sleeve torn. He stared sullenly at the walls, spun around, and walked out without a word. C. Jane was upset. She began to shake and I felt a twinge, a warning, but I was too absorbed in getting ready to give readings in Rome, Zagreb, and Beograd, and then I was to go on to Moscow and St. Petersburg before coming home in late November for an exhibition of C. Jane's sculpture. We decided to relax before I went away by celebrating Thanksgiving at the family farm near a town called Conn.
We loaded food hampers onto the back seat of our new Audi parked in the lane (C. Jane's car was in the garage). I looked back through the broken wall, through the jagged hole. There had been no time to cement the blocks back into place. I felt a vulnerability, as if in the midst of my well-being, I'd forgotten to protect myself. Before she died, my mother had warned me, "People who buy on time, die on time, and time's too short." I checked the deadbolts and locks on the house doors. An old, fat Chinese woman waddled along the lane watching me with a stolid impassivity that made me resentful. She was my neighbour but I knew she didn't care what happened to me. As she passed, I felt a sudden dread, a certainty that she belonged there in the lane, between the houses, and I didn't. I remembered that my father, whenever he felt cornered like I suddenly felt cornered in my own mind, used to sing:
rock me baby,
rock me baby like my back ain't got no bone roll me baby,
roll me baby like you roll your wagon wheel home
THE QUEEN FALLS OFF HER MOOSE
Our farmhouse was on a high hill surrounded by birch and poplar and black walnut woods. The back windows of the house looked over a wetland, a long slate-coloured pond full of stumps and fallen trunks lying between gravelly mounds. The trees on the hills were red and ochre. There were geese on the pond. At dusk, we ate supper in the dining room that had old stained-glass church windows set into two of the walls, sitting under a candelabra that burned sixteen candles. "I think there's a song about sixteen candles," C. Jane said. "Or no, maybe it's sixteen tons, about dying miners, or coal, or something like that." For some reason, we talked about violence, whether it was gratuitous, or in the genes, or acquired, and whether there actually was something called malevolence, evil. I read something I'd written that morning to C. Jane: I love darkness that doesn't disappear as I wake again but leaps a distance, unseen, and then as the sun sets, draws near. I see someone approaching: emerging from the dark, merging into the dark again. I smoked a pipe and we listened to Messiaen, Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine, and then we went to bed. I lay awake for a long while hearing the night wind in the eaves and a small animal that seemed to be running up and down the east slope of the roof.
In the very early morning, the phone rang. It was a neighbour from the city, a painter who had made his name by painting portraits of the portly Queen wearing epaulettes and seated sidesaddle on a moose. He was a shrewd, measured, ironic man, but he sounded incoherent, as if he were weeping. "Come home," he said. "Come home, something terrible, the house, it's been broken, come home." I phoned our home. A policeman answered. "Yes," he said, "you should come home, and be prepared. There has been a fire. This is bad." For some reason, as we drove through Conn, I started hearing in my mind's ear Lee Wiley singing over and over: I got it bad and that ain't good, I got it bad ...
A DREAMBOOK FOR OUR TIME
We pulled into the lane behind our house (after two tight-lipped hours on the road). I felt a terrible swelling ache in my throat: there, alone and in pairs and slumped in sadness, were many of our friends. What were our friends doing there? They came closer and then shied away, as animals shy from the dead. The police were surprised. They were expecting C. Jane's red car (it was gone from the garage), and at first they did not know who I was, but then a detective took me aside. "You should get ready before you go in ... I don't know if your wife should go in, it's the worst we've ever seen." I looked through the gaping hole in the garage wall. "She's not my wife," I said. "We've lived together for twenty years."
"Do you have any enemies?"
"I don't know."
"It looks like it."
"Why?"
"Because it looks like somebody's tried to hurt you."
"Really."
"We'll have to go around to the front of the house to get in, they never did break the deadbolt on the back door."
"I've got a key," I said.
"Oh right, sure," the detective said and another cop tried to lead C. Jane away, but she broke free. "No one's keeping me out of my own home." In the kitchen, a long black-handled carving knife had been stuck into the wall over the telephone; two fires had been set, one on the floor, the other on the gas stove, and the house had the sour reek of smoke; papers and broken glass and crockery covered the floor tiles; the television set was gone. In the dining room, the armoire doors hung open, armloads of old family crystal and china had been swept out onto the floor ...but I saw that a portrait of me, a painting by Kurelek, had not been touched and I said warmly, "They're not after me, otherwise they would have slashed that."
"Don't be so sure," a cop said smugly. "It doesn't look like you."
"The red car's been stolen," another cop said. "It's just been reported in a hit-and-run accident."
We went into the living room with its twelve-foot high ceilings: the black sofa was hacked to pieces; an engraving by my old Paris friend, Bill Hayter, had been hammered off the wall and lay in a scorched heap; a tapestry I'd brought from Cairo, carrying it through the Black September war in 1970 when I was a war correspondent, was slashed open down the centre; the floor was littered with boxes, broken crockery, papers, broken frames, torn cloth, broken records and cassettes, a Chinese vase and ripped books; the lace curtains in the bay window (Lace curtain Irish, C. Jane had liked to call us, since she was Lithuanian) had been set afire, charred; and in the vestibule, a turquoise funerary piece that had once been in a pharaoh's tomb, the pharaoh from the time of Moses, lay broken and beside it a Phoenician bronze bull that had been crushed under a heel, or at least there were well-worn black shoes left beside the bull, and I realized my leather cowboy boots were gone.
"The son-of-a-bitch," I said, laughing grimly, "he's not only cut and slashed his way through my house but he's gone off in my goddamn boots and left me his lousy Goodwill shoes."
"This is terrible," C. Jane said. We shied away from the grand piano. A fire had been set under it. I could see the blackened veneer, the warped lid.
"It's worse upstairs," a cop said.
"Well, lead on, Macduff," I said. The cop looked at me quizzically.
The second floor was worse; they had torched a vase of antique silk flowers and a Kashmir carpet on the landing; the word processor was stolen (a literary prize I'd never learned to use, didn't want to use, and was secretly glad to see gone); my books were spilled on the floor, yanked out of their shelves (they'd tried to set a fire in the study by using two books: Child of the Holocaust by C. Jane's cousin, Jack Kuper, and A Dreambook for Our Time by the Warsaw novelist, Tadeusz Konwicki); in the bedroom, they'd thrown a child's pine pioneer chair through one of C. Jane's large brush drawings of tangled lovers; Chinese porcelain figurines that my dead maiden aunts had brought from Shanghai in the late 1920s were smashed; and they had ransacked the bureau drawers for jewellery ... all the silver and gold ... rings, charms, bracelets ... all were gone ... all our bindings of love ...
The third-floor studio walls were soot-blackened: dozens of C. Jane's frames and drawings smashed; an enormous black and brown oil painting by one of her former lovers, Homage to John Kennedy on his Death, slashed; the sofa-bed springs had been pulled apart with a claw-hammer, the sofa pillows burned; plaster casts hacked open or broken; and the floor was slick with a sludge of burned, scorched, and then doused papers ... they'd started a fire in an old Quebec armoire ... acting like a fire box, it had funnelled flame to the ceiling and had burned through the roof of the house, the heat blowing out the windows ... and all my papers, so assiduously kept over the years – letters, manuscripts, transcripts ... twenty-five years of intimacies, words chosen with care, exactitude ... a wet grimy ash.
"We had the water on her three minutes after the alarm," the fire chief said. He was pleased, full of self-approval. "Thank you," I said. He had a grey bristle moustache. C. Jane asked me if I thought he trimmed it in the morning with little silver scissors. "When we got here the whole house was full of black smoke ... luckily the front door was open, luckily a woman across the road saw the smoke coming through the roof ..."
"Who would want to hurt you?" the detective, a Sergeant Hamel, asked again.
"I don't know. All I know is the Dom Perignon is gone." C. Jane went downstairs from the studio and then came back. There were tears in her eyes. She does not cry easily. "It's the piano," she said. The piano had been given to her by her laconic father before he died of throat cancer, a cancer he'd contracted during the War when he'd enlisted as a boy, too young, having lied about his age, and he'd been gassed and buried alive for several hours in a rat-infested trench. A rat had gnawed on his left little finger. He'd told her two things: "Always listen to music no matter what, and never tell anyone you're Jewish." He'd given her the piano, a 1912 Mason & Risch, a mahogany grand with a beautiful fiddleback grain and carved legs.
The fire under the piano had burned down into the hardwood floor and then up an antique silk shawl draped from the lid. When the lid was lifted, the piano was a burned-out, warped, gutted box.
"It's gone forever," she said.
"No it's not," I said.
A standing whalebone shaman, a drummer figure who had the four eyes of the mystic, done by Ashevak, the finest of the Inuit carvers until he died in a house fire, was still on the piano but the drum was broken, the beater scorched black.
"Don't you feel violated?" a newswoman friend, who'd come in from the lane, asked. "Don't you feel raped?"
"No," I said.
"You don't?"
"No, and you're a woman, you should know better. This is a house. No one's entered my body, no one has penetrated me. This isn't rape ..."
"Yes, but ..." She took off her glasses and then put them back on. She was offended, as if I had been difficult when all she had intended was sympathy. But I was being difficult, because I believe, especially in times when there are charred shadows on the walls, that exactness is one of the few ways I can make a stand in the ditch against sentimentality, self-pity, falseness.
"But the rage," she said. "Someone attacked your place in a state of rage."
"It looks that way."
"How do you account for such rage?"
"I don't know."
"Any ideas?"
"Motiveless malignancy," I said. Then a cop, who I noticed had cut his neck while shaving, took me by the arm, smiling a tight little angry smile. "We've got one of them," he said.
"You have!"
The cops, while driving down a lane behind the El Mocambo club, had seen a shabbily dressed man sitting huddled in a doorway, and he was clutching two bottles of Dom Perignon. "We knew right away that something was sure wrong," a cop said. They had handcuffed him. Strung out on crack, he said he would show them the house he had broken into that morning, and now he was in the back seat of the cruiser in my lane.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "All the Lonely People"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Barry Callaghan.
Excerpted by permission of Exile Editions Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Full Disclosure Preface by Margaret Atwood,
Because Y Is a Crooked Letter,
The Black Queen,
Without Shame,
Piano Play,
Our Thirteenth Summer,
T-Bone and Elise,
Intrusions,
Between Trains,
Dreambook for a Sniper,
Déjà Vu,
Crow Jane's Blues,
All the Lonely People,
Dog Days of Love,
Drei Alter Kockers,
Third Pew to the Left,
The Harder They Come,
Buddies in Bad Times,
And So to Bed,
Anybody Home?,
Poodles John,
Dark Laughter,
A Terrible Discontent,
The Cohen in Cowan,
Prowlers,
Mellow Yellow,
The Muscle,
A Drawn Blind,
Mermaid,
Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven,
Willard and Kate,
A Kiss Is Still a Kiss,
The State of the Union,
Silent Music,
Communion,
Up Up and Away with Elmer Sadine,
Paul Valery's Shoe,