Other People’s Love Affairs: Stories by D. Wystan Owen

Author:D. Wystan Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Published: 2017-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Daylight persisted when Kenneth stepped out; he had lingered only a little. The sky above him was pale blue and milky, the iris of an unseeing eye; fog had not yet rolled in off the sea, though it hung, as if waiting, along the horizon. He would walk the short distance home, his car safe in its space at the rear of the practice. The air was full of all the scents of late spring; the evening was like something lost and then found.

At Douglass, Mel was crossing the street, and Kenneth quickened his own pace to catch up.

“Mel,” he said. “Do you walk home every day?”

The periodontist had his hands in his pockets, his head tipped back and bathed in the light. With his long hair and round eyeglasses, he was plainly himself: an old burnout made perfectly good.

“Often,” he said. “When the weather permits. It’s good for you, Kenny.”

“It’s a beautiful day.”

“I’m of quite the same opinion,” Mel said. “Speaking in my capacity as a doctor, of course.”

An old joke.

They walked together some blocks. Kenneth said, “I was thinking today. About the dinners we used to have in the office.”

Mel looked up without recognition.

“You remember. Alma would show up with dinner and three bottles of wine, and we would sit around in the examination chairs or up on the counters. We just couldn’t get over owning the place.”

“Are you sure I was there for that?”

“Of course. I’m certain. You used to use my scalers as forks and tease Alma with the mirrors, like you were looking up her skirt.”

Mel laughed. “I admit, that sounds like something I’d have done.”

It was strange that he shouldn’t remember. In Kenneth’s mind it seemed there had been countless such dinners, but perhaps there had only been two or three. It happened that way with memory now; time warped, the same as it had with Miranda, the same as it had with the years of his marriage.

“I was doing a lot of nitrous in those days,” Mel said, still chuckling. “But I know we had fun.”

They parted ways, and Kenneth walked on. Gulls passed overhead; something larger, a swan. In gardens along the road, honeybees gathered, humming in bushes of rosemary, bluebeard. Across Birch the old vagrant, Whitaker, passed. One man jump-started another man’s car. A pair of boys kicked a ball against a battered garage door. A woman walked an old and timorous dog.

In their respective homes, Alma and Ruby would be preparing to sit down with their husbands to dinner. Miranda would perhaps already have finished hers. He would eat his meal alone at his crafts table, surrounded by his models, as he did every night, a practice that, by now, could only be counted among the choices he’d made. At the anniversary party he would be the one hovering at the edges of other people’s lives, unconnected but by the diminishing pull of memories either shared or disputed. What he had been offered was a place on the periphery, a

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