February (13 page)

Going with my cap in my hand, he said. But if he got a job on the rig they could buy a house.

For the first little while they’d had the apartment on Lime Street. The snow used to come in under the back door. They’d gotten drunk in a bar and gone home together and they were all caught up in each other. They were caught up. Caught. Cal’s apartment on Lime Street in the candlelight. Sometimes she babysat for a couple she knew.

They’d had a condom break. People say that doesn’t happen, but it does. He’d had his back to her, sitting on the edge of the bed, and he was doing something. Fiddling with the condom.

It broke, Cal said. He let all the implications settle in. He held out the broken condom to her and there was a tear in it, and it was flat and milky looking on his fingers and wet.

It broke, he said again. She remembers him saying it twice. His face was flushed, and she felt the rough wool of his sweater that she had bunched up under her head. She sat up on her elbow to look and the sweater uncrumpled, slowly, moving by itself.

Helen had wanted to hold on to him, but she didn’t know if he was the sweater, rough against her hot cheek, or the translucent bead of wax dripping down the candle, or the sex smell, or the date crumbles from his mother that were in a cookie tin lined with waxed paper on the bedside table, or the book he was reading.

Cal liked to drive by dilapidated old houses around the bay, with rippled glass in the windows and a storm door with blistering paint and a sagging roof, houses that had been built by hand and left with the kettle still sitting on the oil stove and all the dishes in the cupboard. He’d wanted one of those houses; he would fix it up and they could be in the country on the weekends or for the summers. He had wanted a view of the ocean, and he’d wanted the long grass and the root cellar. He felt an affinity for silvered wood and cobwebs and the battered suitcase under the feather bed with old receipts written by hand and spelled wrong.

Drop in later in the week, the man at the Harvey Road office had said.

There would follow, after the rig sank, a lot of talk about risk assessment. The oil companies held a symposium.

The oil companies were all about acceptable levels of risk and they always had been. They spoke of possible faults in the system and how to avoid them. Here, here. They advised strongly against intuition when assessing risk. If you were scared shitless, they said, that was only intuition, and you should ignore it. They asked the public to consider the overall good to be achieved when we do take risks. They spoke in that back-assed way and what they meant was: If you don’t do the job, we’ll give it to someone who will.

They meant: There’s money to be made.

They meant: We will develop the economy.

They meant there isn’t any risk, so shut the fuck up about it. Except they didn’t say
fuck
, they said: Consider the overall public good.

Helen had not for a minute thought she was pregnant. She hardly knew Cal (although she knew everything important). She hadn’t thought it was at all probable that she would fall in love. Love was a fault she easily could have avoided if she (1) hadn’t been tipsy; (2) knew about risk assessment then and all the ways to avoid risk; (3) wasn’t in love already.

She and Cal had been drunk their first night together, and it was all still so new, and she liked him a lot but she didn’t want to say
love
. Or, they had been slightly inebriated and had made light work of the date crumbles. The hole in the condom had struck them as kind of funny, because how likely was that? But they were lucky people. They had flopped back down on the bed and the candle flame had wagged back and forth and they had recounted for each other personal stories of fabulous luck. He had won a hundred dollars off Nevada tickets. She had been born with a caul. They had both had their throats blessed—two cool candlesticks tied in the middle and opened to form an X at the throat, and a Latin prayer—and then they were safe from telling lies or getting throat cancer.

I love you, she said. It had just popped out of her mouth. It had been exactly the wrong time of the month to have a condom break but she hadn’t thought she was pregnant because that wasn’t the sort of thing that could happen to her.

Cal just happened to be in the Harvey Road office at the right time.

Look what the cat dragged in, the fat guy said when he saw Cal.

Cal was in the right place at the right time. And he was lucky. He happened to have his shirt ironed, and it was the same guy on the desk, and the guy was sick of looking at him. Helen had missed a period and thought nothing of it.

What comes over Helen when she’s tired is a kind of fog. A day at the beach after a long drive. How the yellow grass caught the light and the edges of the blades gleamed like steel. The end of a season. A haze hanging over the breakers. A whiff of something dead, there and not there, in the breeze. The foam rolling out, tinted yellow, thick as whipped cream. Those jeans Cal wore.

We were young, Helen thinks. The clear, cold ocean roiling up and dragging back, encircling Cal’s bare ankles like chains. And he bent and dipped his hand and put his fingers in his mouth.

. . . . .

Jane, November 2008

YOUR ROOM WILL
be covered, and all the other things, John said. Jane heard a horn blast somewhere near him. He was on a street in New York and she was in a streetcar in Toronto and they were going to meet up. He was on his way home for Christmas. They were going to talk about the baby. And he would pay for a four-star hotel.

I just go into the hotel off the street, she asked.

Your incidentals, he said, will be covered.

When the call was over she rode the streetcar a couple more blocks and found the hotel and dropped off her suitcase, and now she is walking until she finds a mall. She wants a food court. French fries and cheeseburgers and the shushing of cash registers, fake storefronts themed like a frontier town or a global village, thatched huts or cedar shingles, moulded plastic furniture and blinking neon. She needs to pee and then she wants to plunk down in an orange chair that can swivel from side to side, a chair that is attached to a table with a metal bar. She has a craving for grease and noise.

People do not say
failed
any more, Jane thinks. They say other things. A whole movement has risen up to avoid the acknowledgment of failure. People want to learn from failure, they want to embrace it.

But failure isn’t good, she thinks. If something can be redeemed it isn’t really a failure.

Jane is failing spectacularly. She’d had an eighty-thousand-dollar scholarship at the New School in New York to do a PhD in anthropology on the rituals and practices of modern spirituality as seen in New Age sects all over North America. She’d made a stir with her master’s thesis, an ethnography of street people living in New York. She’d hung out with street people who slept outdoors or who lived in squats; she had been equipped with a little digital recorder that she could turn on discreetly.

Jane had shaped the material because she’d felt for a while that she knew what it meant. Or she’d pretended she did. Conclusions were necessary and she had come up with them.

But she had also learned things she didn’t put in the thesis. The street people had frightened her. Some poor people were right-wing and violent. Some were avaricious. They were hungry and cold. They had runny noses and glittery snot-caked sleeves. They ate with their mouths open. They had glazed eyes and addictions. They were illiterate and they had lice. Or they were brilliant and meticulous with their appearance and saintly. They could see ghosts. They were fair-minded. They shared what they had. They had nothing. They fed the pigeons. They were full of wisdom. They were full of worms. They were full of
AIDS
. They were spiritually bereft. They were luckless. They were a
they
. Best of all, they knew the scope of a single lifetime and how not to make a mark.

When Jane had finished studying the street people, she experienced a glimmer of what it might mean to be invisible, to live without a trace, to hurt nothing. A kind of passivity that harkened back to an Aquinian notion of grace. One had to be empty to experience grace, empty or uncertain, and even then it was not a sure thing. She had kept all of that out of the thesis. Her master’s thesis had made a mark. She was not willing to be empty.

A woman Jane had interviewed frequently saw a dead boyfriend at the bottom of her bed. This was an eighty-year-old woman who had six cats and a collection of thirty dolls still in dusty cellophane bags lined up around the baseboards of a temporary bed-sit. The room stank of cat litter and empty wine bottles and human shit because the woman hadn’t gotten out of bed for three days. The old woman’s abdomen was swollen—hard with cancer, she said—and she was drunk and she had a foul mouth and her boyfriend, Archie, had died last week.

Right here in the bed next to me, she had said, spanking the covers. The woman had a brother in jail for stealing a chalice out of a church and she was afraid of Satan and she gripped Jane’s hand.

Make me proud, she said, over and over.

She spoke to Jane and then focused on a spot just over Jane’s shoulder and said, Don’t say anything, Archie, until the little girl is gone.

Jane returned with her little recorder ten times and asked questions, and the woman answered. Jane changed the sheets, of course, and cleaned the cat litter and put out the wine bottles. She cooked food.

That thing on, the old woman would ask, composing herself. Preparing the story of her life. She was obsessed with the chalice her brother had stolen and she wanted to know if they would all go to hell. She had asked Jane to feed the cats and to bring her cigarettes and to move the dolls around.

Once Jane had put a doll with black curly hair and a red velvet dress with gold braid and a matching parasol on the bedside table, leaning against the lampshade. The old yellowed cellophane around the doll crackled like the sound of a fire starting. The woman watched from the bed and lifted her hand with effort and moved one finger to point, tapping the air, and then the arm dropped. Jane saw that the woman wanted the light turned on, and when she pressed the switch the doll’s eyes blinked shut.

The woman died shortly after, and Jane listened to her voice on the recorder, rewind, fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward, for a week while she transcribed. Each ragged breath audible.

Jane had also interviewed a man who argued that since the populations of Africa had the highest mortality rate, that was the place to outsource toxic industry—those industries whose toxins collect over the years in the lungs and blood and bowels and turn into full-blown cancer when most of the population turns, statistically speaking, fifty-five years old. Many Africans weren’t going to make it to fifty-five, was the logic of this completely insane litigator-turned-street-person. He had grabbed her breast and squeezed it hard, twice, like you’d toot a horn.

They had all been famous something-or-others in another life, the street people she met. Or they were retarded. Or they had been abused as children.

Toxic industry wouldn’t affect the Africans, the former litigator had said. They would be dead by the time the toxins kicked in anyway. They’d never know.

This had been a conversation over a fire in a burn-barrel under a bridge in some industrial park on the outskirts of New York. There was a man dressed in a robe made of burlap sacks with
Jesus Saves
in red paint across his back. He had healing hands and he laid them on Jane’s head and she felt a definite zap. A current of some kind zoomed through her skull and the man told her she had painful memories knotting the muscles in her back and calves, and her scalp was tight. He had loosened those memories, he said, and she would become very sick for several days but it would be her body releasing those memories for good.

The profanity used by the street people Jane interviewed was dazzling, and Jane broke it down, counting the number of times certain words and phrases appeared in each given sentence. She made charts. Polyglottal and euphonious, and full of waste and sex and death. The profanity was a casual encryption of despair. She made graphs.

All of this had looked very good on paper, but now Jane was studying New Age spiritualism throughout North America and she had lost her bearings. She had her digital recorder and a laptop. She had method and theory. But she was disoriented by the calm belief these New Age followers—followers of every sort—brought to utter nonsense. It unnerved her. She was charting the unassailable certainty of the subject who gives up logic. In the midst of their canny, bitter arguments, Jane had lost faith.

Jane buys a container of french fries and she holds four miniature paper cups, one after the other, under a pump nozzle, and ketchup squirts out. She puts each little cup in a line on her orange tray, and she thinks she might faint with hunger. She goes at the fries with the bottle of vinegar, slippery with other people’s fingerprints, and she tears open two packets of salt.

Not good food for the baby, she thinks.

All afternoon she has been thinking about the pregnancy and the state of her thesis. She’d known from the beginning that she wanted the baby. There had been some spotting in the first month and the doctor had said it was nothing to worry about and to take it easy, and yes, she could keep on with her work.

Jane devours the french fires and rides the escalator up to the street, and the mall is full of Christmas music and artificial trees and there is a giant moose with a candy basket. The moose hands her a candy cane. There is an entire face, a woman’s face, at the back of the moose’s throat, under the big snout. A strip of pink felt, the moose’s tongue, is like a runway leading to the woman’s chin. She is an elderly woman with bright orange lipstick and glasses.

What’s it like outside, the woman says. I’m baking in here.

Jane passes a tattoo shop, bright and clean as the inside of a fridge. There is a bald man with a crown of thorns tattooed on his head. He has an elastic band stretched between his two index fingers with a pen hanging from it and he flicks the pen so it twists up and twirls out. Jane feels big kicks over her pubic bone and stands still for a moment, watching the man with the pen.