February (14 page)

Then she comes to a pizza place with a single customer sitting on a stool. She stands on the sidewalk to watch the cook throwing the dough into the air. She watches it fly up off his raised fists and spin around in the air and stretch bigger.

She is thirty-five and doesn’t have a boyfriend. This was her chance, she realized when she’d seen the two pink lines on the pregnancy test almost seven months ago. It had been a
yes
, and she hadn’t believed the yes. She had read the little folded sheet with illustrations and some print in red. The sheet said there was such a thing as a false negative, but a false positive was impossible. She let her shoulder hit the metal stall of the public bathroom she was in and tried to think about what that could mean. It had seemed like a Zen koan.

She had wanted the baby from the minute she’d known. There was no question of abortion. She had not considered it.

Jane goes into the pizza parlour and orders a slice, and the smell of baking dough and tomato and oregano makes her very hungry. She thinks she can smell oregano on the hands of the man who gives her the change from her twenty. It is oregano or the smell of dirty silver coins. She can smell his sweat too, from being near the heat of the ovens. The smell of his sweat mingled with the smell of his deodorant, which is fruity, and for some reason he smells good.

The walls of the narrow pizza shop are mirrored and the lone customer leans into his pizza slice, and as he bends forward his image splits where the mirrors meet in the corner and there he is, an infinite number of times, his woollen coat and plaid scarf, pulling a piece of pizza away from his mouth, thousands of him, an indefatigable army of the same man having to lean forward after his food, the strings of cheese stretching long, and he leans back again and the infinite reflections fold together and disappear.

She and John are going to meet. John has a business dinner tomorrow and then he will fly to Toronto on the last plane and get a taxi from the airport to the hotel. He has booked himself a separate room. They would meet for lunch, he said. After a pause he said: I’m looking forward to seeing you.

. . . . .

John’s Job Interview, 2005

I’VE WORKED INSIDE
petroleum tanks, John said.

Mr. McPherson touched the knot of his tie. It was a crazy, distracting tie. John felt his eyeballs stretching towards it against his will.

Shoreline Group had invited John for a job interview. He’d heard he was going to get a call and a few days later they called. The money was spectacular.

John told Mr. McPherson about his employment history, a job he’d had in his twenties. When he had started with the oil industry.

You crawled in there with equipment, Mr. McPherson said.

I did that job, yes.

Checking for fissures.

Fissures and cracks, John said. Anything that’s going to—Cost, Mr. McPherson said.

Leak, John said.

They’d tie ropes around John’s ankles and when he was done he’d knock on the side of the tank and they would haul him out. If he got stuck they would pull him through. Climbing into oil tanks, checking them with ultrasound equipment—this was a job he’d learned in Fort Mac. You needed to be a certain size for that kind of job, and John was a compact man who watched his carbs. He worked on his chest and arms and he ran 10K three times a week, but he could fit through a pipe. He was what they called health conscious. But during this interview he was suffering a serious case of heartbreak. He had a physical ache from it that could make him short of breath.

John had heard there would be a substantial salary. The trick, he gathered, was to look unmoved when the interviewer quoted a figure.

Memorial University, School of Engineering, Mr. McPherson said. He had a Southern drawl and he was scowling at John’s resumé.

A half-hour earlier John had knocked and heard, Come in. He had expected a secretary but there was no secretary. There was a view of the harbour in St. John’s, right out through the Narrows. And a large man facing the wall of glass. There was a long beat before the man turned from the window. A theatrical pause. John and the man had taken each other’s measure by their reflections in the window. The office floated over the landscape outside the glass. The blue water cooler hanging in the blue sky and the wall of framed diplomas checkering the waterfront. A car coming down the curving road of Signal Hill seemed to beetle across Mr. McPherson’s white shirt, and then it disappeared.

Ronnie McPherson, the man had said. He turned and put his hand out. And John shook it. McPherson had a too-tight grip that bespoke the motivational speaker circuit. There was a dull zeal in the handshake that would require an unnatural amount of eye contact.

Ronnie, John said. Stifling the urge to say
sir
.

Red.

Pardon, John said. Sir?

Call me Red.

John had started in the oil industry with sonar imaging, crawling into tanks. Anything went wrong, they hauled him out by the ankles. Then he’d done engineering at
MUN
. He’d gone out on the rigs, starting as a roustabout and working up to toolpusher.

Ronnie McPherson had black hair, longish for his age, streaked silver, curling over the collar of his shirt. There was nothing red about him. There must have been a pause before he put on that tie, John thought.

Shoreline Group specialized in risk assessment, organizational restructuring. They specialized in all the touchy-feely stuff from the 1980s: lateral thinking, creativity in the workplace, psychological support during downsizing or natural disaster, pink slips, sweater-vests and distressed denim, a bold new self-generating speak that boiled over and reduced to a single, perfect word:
efficiency
.

John had read up. Thirty-two was getting too old for the rigs. In his twenties he had spent his summers crawling into pipes, and the air in there—it can’t be good for you. He didn’t want to be selling drill bits all his life, either. He’d had a stint at selling. At Shoreline there would no doubt be weekend retreats, role-playing, diagrams, sharing, massages. Flip charts identifying personal goals and company goals, with asterisks where they intersected. The unions were getting to be a pain in the ass, according to Red McPherson.

Some pipes John had crawled through, he’d had to work one shoulder forward, then the other. Keep his chin tucked in. That was not a job for you if you were claustrophobic. There were pipes so narrow he’d had to develop a kind of shimmy with his hips. He’d had to put his head down and take short breaths. If you had a fear of being buried alive, you wouldn’t go in for the job he’d done when he was younger. Any kind of tank that held petroleum. Once he’d been in a tank from a place that produced gummi bears.

There would be travel with Shoreline, and John loved travel. He wanted to see everything.

Someone intimate who held a serious grudge must have advised McPherson on his tie, John thought. The tie had pineapples wearing sneakers and riding skateboards through white clouds lit with silver lightning.

Crawling through petroleum tanks, you had an added advantage: you were doing something for the environment. John had started in the industry that way. Wanting to make a difference. He might have stayed on checking for fissures. But a guy can’t do that forever.

John was smarter than a guy with ultrasound equipment hanging off his hip, but it was Sophie who had pushed him. Sophie said, Do something else. Sophie told him to go back to university. She nagged and insisted. Sophie was his ex. She was the cause of his heartache while he was being interviewed for the job with Shoreline.

Engineering, Red McPherson said. He rubbed his jaw. He was glaring at John’s resumé with an eyebrow cocked, as if a degree might be an impediment they’d have to work around.

It’s a good idea to have a piece of paper in your back pocket, John’s mother had said all his life. She was big on a degree.

Pineapple upside-down cake. John’s mother would whip the cake batter by hand and lecture him on the merits of a good education, saying about that piece of paper.

The advantages, she’d say. She’d put the bowl of batter down and make fists and then spread her fingers wide. The world just opens up, she’d say.

John’s mother had made one cake her whole life, and it was a pineapple upside-down. The chief advantage of this cake was that you mixed it in the pan you cooked it in. He could see her laying the rings of canned pineapple in the frying pan and pouring the batter on top. It was as if John’s own mother had come into the room during his job interview. The cake had come from a recipe she’d found in
Good Housekeeping
, a recipe that promised to take no more than fifteen minutes, start to finish, designed so you could make it over a campfire or on the engine of a car if you had to, and for the years John was growing up it had been his mother’s crowning culinary achievement. It was a cake that, if you had to, you could make in a bomb shelter.

His mother had said: If you have that piece of paper you’ll be all set.

Or she’d say, A degree is something to fall back on.

She’d be sewing under a single lamp in the living room. The sewing machine rat-a-tatting, full of short-lived spite. John would switch on the overhead light and his mother would press her finger and thumb against her eyes.

Then she’d say, I have been thinking about your education, John.

Back then his sister Cathy was working at the first A&W in town, the one on Topsail Road, and she had the orange hat and the brown polyester suit and she carried the trays out—you latched them onto the window—and if the mugs got stolen the company took it out of your wages. Cathy running down Topsail Road after some car full of boys, yelling, Give me back those mugs, you bastards, I know you got them.

John had gone into all kinds of oil tanks and they were completely dark and any kind of a bang had echoed in his skull. The walls were bubbled and pocked and unfinished, and the flashlight just showed how very black it was in there. There was a crunch underfoot or it was slippery.

When he graduated with an engineering degree, his mother was in the front row of a bank of folding chairs on the grass outside the Arts and Culture Centre. His mother put her arm around him on the lawn. His hat with the silky tassel got knocked crooked, and his Aunt Louise aimed a camera at them and said, Closer.

All over the lawn: young men and women in caps and gowns, and their mothers and grey-haired fathers, and the dandelions. The sun a long, narrow disc across the centre of the dark duck pond. The first in his family with a university degree. He had gone to university because Sophie forced him to go. His mother spoke through a camera smile, Hurry up, Louise.

Say
sex
, Louise shouted.

You’ve got your piece of paper, his mother said. The flash went off in their faces.

Then they had a big family meal, with John and his sisters doing the cooking.

She never said education to us, Lulu said.

When she said education to us, she meant secretarial school, Cathy said.

She meant get your typing, Lulu said.

That is not true, his mother said.

What she said to us was, Get a trade. She said nursing. She liked the idea of a white uniform.

And she wouldn’t let John in the kitchen, Cathy said.

Or retail, Lulu said. She saw Cathy and me in retail. She saw us married is what she saw.

I said education, his mother said. I said it to Cathy and I said it to Lulu and I said it to Gabrielle and I said it to John. I said education to all my children.

Mr. McPherson’s chair swivelled and squeaked. The part of Mr. McPherson’s leg that showed between his pants and the thin black sock was hairless and had coins of opalescent scarring. Had he been shot in the shin by something with scatter action?

Climbing into a petroleum tank was a feat of contortion, John said. The comment caused Red McPherson to smooth his tie. He put John’s resumé down on the desk and laid just the tips of his fingers on it, as if it were a Ouija board. Then he opened a drawer and took out a manila file.

And John knew he had the job. The trick was to look blasé about the money when McPherson made the offer.

Crawling through tanks had been a bad job but it had kept John off the bloody water for a while. Maybe it had integrity, reporting to watch groups, taking soil samples, telling it like it is, but he’d been in that job because he wanted to stay off the water.

He was afraid of the water.

His experience: everybody is afraid of something. Find out what everybody else is afraid of and go into that.

Then you went into sales, Mr. McPherson said.

I sold drill bits, John said.

I’m not going to fool with you here, Red McPherson said. He had been reading the manila file.

Thank you, Red, John said.

I like being straight, the man said. He was lost in a column of figures and he spoke as if in a dream. All the tension had left his face. The wince he’d worn, examining John’s resumé, was gone and his eyelids drooped sensuously. How old is he, John wondered.

We’re talking a million, a million-point-five a day to keep a rig operating, Mr. McPherson said. We need men with skills. Smart men.

John had a photographic memory, which was something he didn’t say. He skimmed a page once and he could recall it word for word. He had to close his eyes to do it and he saw the page and could read it out as if it were a thought that had just occurred to him. This wasn’t smart, exactly, but it could pass for smart.

Smart was about intuition, and John had that too. Smart was: you didn’t exert effort but you knew the answer anyway. You thought about it, yes, but the answer came via a different route. Smart was: you always had access to that different route. The answer came in the back door while you were cooking or even while you slept.

You grow up with a mother whose specialty is pineapple upside-down cake and you learn to cook. He had a two-hundred-dollar bottle of truffles in his kitchen. He’d ordered the truffles from Montreal. Stinky things, dank and ripe; a lewd smell had puffed out as soon as he’d unscrewed the cap.