Juliet Was a Surprise (16 page)

“Your son gets in the way of you doing the job you were hired to—”

“Say this to Paytro. Look at him when you say it.”

Now Fernandez was only being cruel. Fine.

“Paytro, I've asked your father to come to work alone, and he refuses. I've asked him formally, twice. We call them warnings. He ignores—”

“Tell Paytro why you want me to work alone.”

“Fine.” Raymond swung his gaze back to the son. The boy watched him back. He was hard to read. It was hard to know what he understood. “Your father is a good worker, a highly skilled worker, and that is what we pay—”

It came out shouted, sloppy, but with equal emphasis on each word:
“I'm a good worker too.”

“Yes, but—”

“He's teaching me.”

What struck Raymond most was the boy's utter lack of accent, considering his father's was so thick. Paytro had hidden his twirl-hand in his windbreaker and it humped around in there, shushing the nylon. Raymond recalled times he'd spied on Fernandez as he supervised Paytro scrubbing solvent on puck marks or, outside, sweeping the leaf-blower in scythe-like arcs. Fernandez would interrupt and take over his son's slow job, demonstrating proper pace, then hand back the gear. Raymond suspected that the father-son team was productive enough to justify Fernandez's salary. It was that he'd been told to come alone and he'd blatantly ignored the order. A boss could not just ignore being ignored. In a hierarchy, insurrection created
consequences. It was nothing but natural, and Raymond must let nature take its course.

He spoke clearly and met Paytro's eye.

“You are a good worker. I am glad he is teaching you. But, as manager, I have to end your father's employment here. The reason? I told him to come to work alone, and he didn't obey me. I told him twice. Then I told him three times.”

Looking at Fernandez, he once again explained that insurance didn't cover his son, who, if hurt, could sue both of them. Surprising himself, Raymond added that, once fired, Fernandez could apply again for his job. Finally, he said he could supply him with a good reference letter if he wanted, but Fernandez was already shaking his head in automatic disbelief and leaving, guiding Paytro out the door ahead of him.

But first Fernandez stopped, turned to face Raymond, ponderously held his eyes to say, in his heavy accent, “Look at youself,” then left.

Raymond respected Fernandez enough to do this, so he sat down. The instructive silence grew louder with the man gone. He sat with this task for several minutes, then flipped open his laptop. It was likely the start of another entry for Romance:

“An unexamined life,” she said, naked of irony as well as clothing,

He saved it and closed his machine. Raymond had learned that when he memorized an opening fragment and then went
about his day, some part of his brain kept working behind the scenes and came up with the best bad ideas.

Down an employee, he had to scrape and flood three ice surfaces himself. It was a chore he found more meditative than anything else, though skaters did complain, especially the old-timer hockey players, who demanded the most pristine surface, like they were fairies of the pond, not chuggers. But he couldn't quite find the knack, or settings, and he left grooves. He wished he could have accelerated hiring a new man, but you couldn't very well advertise before firing, could you?

“An unexamined life,” she said, naked of irony as well as clothing,

Riding high on the Zamboni, he let phrases simmer as he drove an oddly rectangular oval, old mauled snow disappearing under the front bumper while a strip of shining water followed. He tried to work up more:

as they rode together on the Zamboni, its engine beneath their bare, cold bottoms droning deeply but blindly, like a massive phallus asleep but prowling in its dream

Bad-on-purpose was anything but easy. It had to be knowingly salacious. It had to be subtle in its build to looniness. (He mentally crossed out the massive-phallus-asleep line, which was somehow both too cheap and too poetic.) Clauses had to invert and sometimes buckle and then flow horribly on.
Clichés had to be the right ones. Puns were discouraged unless they stretched pun-logic to snapping. And were punishing! The best entries tended to rise in a limp frenzy and end not on a punchline but on a downbeat, like tobacco spittle after a hillbilly whoop—which was how it might indeed be described in Bulwer-Lytton language. It was a near-impossible contest to win, with its thousands upon thousands of entries. This despite no cash award at all. Crime, Western, Science Fiction, Romance, Historical Fiction, Fantasy—all categories had their aficionados, their style-mavens. Sometimes Raymond recognized the entrants before reading their names.

Cruising rink number three he came upon another bit. After parking and shutting down (he simply left the snow to sit and melt in the Zamboni's back bin instead of dumping it outside; Bernie was on in an hour and he'd do that chore, grumbling and swearing), he hurried back upstairs to type:

“An unexamined life,” she said, naked of both irony and clothing, as they rode atop the Zamboni, its engine beneath their bare, cold bottoms droning deeply but blindly in its work, which when you thought of it was nothing but eating snow at the front and spraying water out the back, “is

Is what. Nothing more came. He opened a new file. He was hungry, and it was almost time to go, but he had a palpable sense of time running out. It was getting down to the wire. He stood hovering over the keyboard, shifting foot to foot on his office's weird rubber floor, stepping in and out of two pools of water under his shoes. It wasn't just taking a good idea one bad
step too far. It was rhythm too; it was building a good sentence with a tin-ear clunk that sabotaged it.

After ten minutes he had this:

Her heart's desire ran in two directions, the main one leading to her husband, the other to Jungle Jones, but her lust ran in even more directions, so many that the word “direction” lost all meaning, like when you said it over and over, say, a hundred or, in her case, seven hundred and sixty-three times.

Raymond had no idea who the hell Jungle Jones was, what he looked like or what readers—if there were any—made of the name. It just sounded right. It was funny in that slightly gut-churning way.

He pressed Send. Submitting entries he knew wouldn't win felt a bit like throwing letters at a closed mailbox. Or, like pissing at a tree protected by glass! He typed “is like pissing on a tree protected behind glass” at the end of “An unexamined life.” He read it a couple of times. Then deleted it. It was too abstract, however astute it might be philosophically.

He was closing his laptop, anticipating his nicer screen at home, when the phone rang. Elizabeth's bouts of solitary depression usually lasted awhile, plus she did tend to respect his request not to call him at work, so he was surprised it was her a second time this afternoon. Her tone of saying hello told him she was beyond instructing, so he kept censure from his voice when he told her how nice it was to hear from her again
today. She ignored him—interrupted him, in fact—and what she said sat him up straight.

“Raymond. I want to kill myself, sooner rather than later, and I want your help.”

“My help. To …”

“To do it, yes.”

He could picture the musty brown couch she was probably sitting on, its fabric a reminder of haunted theatres, and it made him sadder than her words had. He asked her to repeat herself, and she did so, word for word, including his name with the period after it, as if to make sure he knew he could not escape.

After the call Raymond sat for a while. He neither moved nor intended to. Pucks boomed without meaning outside his door. He promised himself he would not feel guilt when he opened his laptop. When he did, he typed this:

Jungle Jane wasn't given to cheap sentiment, but she wondered, fingering the noose around her neck, test-rocking the rickety chair beneath her feet, thinking disturbedly of the empty pill bottles scattered like Hansel's bread crusts along the sidewalk all the way to her house, if he would still respect her tomorrow.

WITH THE DEADLINE
creeping ever closer, Raymond finished thirty-eight more sentences over the next weeks, taking him to ninety-six. Five he considered exceptional, with a solid chance at a prize or a mention. He'd been coming to work distracted. He
wrestled awkward phrases in his dreams, and a good dangling modifier could wake him. He was afflicted by sentences whose skewed meaning wouldn't leave. “The hole in her cheek, larger than her head …” always made him try to visualize it, and then he had to stand up, breathe and run on the spot. One Saturday night he stayed up till dawn and one day he slept in and was an hour late for work, two things that had never happened before. He stopped taking Elizabeth's calls and she did try to kill herself, half-heartedly and without his help, displaying both her indecision and impatience in this as in all things. Since taking up residence in the psych ward she seemed more stoically content than she had in years. She was proud to have improved at Sudoku and she thought her memory disease was getting better, but Raymond didn't think so and suspected it was just the structured regimen of hospital life, though of course he said nothing. He lost half of the pinky finger of his left hand while trying to adjust the height ratchet of the scraper under the number two Zamboni, and now it hurt like the devil to type, but almost a ghost pain, because his pinky never had touched keys in the first place and it certainly didn't now. Several times he saw Paytro out on the main street near the arena complex, quite alone, walking steadily as if pulled by the propeller of his rotating hand. Mr. Fernandez didn't reapply for his job, though Raymond continued to wish he had, because MacLean, the new fellow he'd hired, scared him with a latent insubordination so severe he thought it could someday become violent. Maybe it was the prison tattoos on the knuckles of MacLean's hand, “JESUS” or not, the “J” almost unrecognizable there on the thumb. The man made good ice, but he could barely bring
himself to nod when Raymond wished him a good morning or nice weekend. So Raymond stopped saying these things.

And God knows why, but tonight, the night of the deadline and with four more entries to make one hundred, he went on the date he'd found excuses to put off for months and months. It was his first date in easily a dozen years, more like fifteen and perhaps closer to twenty. It had also been that long since he'd had sex. It was in the back of his mind that, yes, he was probably giving it one last chance. Not just romance, but everything, anything. Her name was Leslie and she lived on the same floor; theirs had been an elevator relationship since she moved in. She was shy to the point of being monosyllabic. He suspected correctly that it would make her even more nervous, but because he never went out himself he took her to an absurdly high-end seafood place that had recently opened, called only small “s,” a simple unlit woodblock affixed to the concrete wall. (Apparently the famous chef's previous restaurant had been called “sea.”) He could tell that one part of her wanted to make some kind of racy joke out of ordering the raw oysters appetizer but she couldn't bring herself to do it. Instead she ate them non-theatrically and embarrassed. In a kind of answer to her non-delivered joke he picked up an oyster body with his injured hand, the bandage only recently off, knowing it would look ugly, and he positioned it to his ear and knit his brow for a few seconds, then simply laid it back in its open shell, not saying, “Listening for pearls.” He made a promise with himself that if she was sensitive enough to know exactly what he'd just done, and what his joke had been, he would ask her to marry him. But she pretended not to have seen him
do it. The food was very good, in some sense too good, and they spoke respectfully about each different dish, and the wine. That and careful politics, from which he could gather that she was the more liberal. He knew he could have sex if he wanted, but he didn't. Nor did he want to analyze why.

After he stumbled over her name while saying goodnight outside their elevator like always, he got home, turned on his computer and read items from his favourite news sources. Headlines abounded concerning what some were calling “the most perfect storm,” wherein UN reports of irrefutable proof that ocean levels would indeed rise combined with several countries colluding to default on their debt, which appeared to be nudging global markets past anarchy toward total collapse. Next, he read local weather forecasts. Any dramatic change in temperatures meant he needed to adjust settings at work, for ice conditions. The next week appeared stable.

Raymond opened his files, found the sentence and typed:

“An unexamined life,” she said, cold naked ironic bum blah blah, “is like keeping wings tucked, is like staying in the nest, is like staying in the egg, is like never being born.”

Thus completing that problem sentence. Which, for reasons too obvious to think about, he didn't send.

Midnight was the deadline. He did reach ninety-nine, typing three more in a final flurry, sitting there at his laptop, sweating, good clothes still on and pinching at the throat and crotch, sentences that had been percolating throughout dinner.
These he wrote without strategizing much, bad sentences a good habit now, and after fixing a single punctuation error he considered them finished and pressed Send three final times. He deemed them neither good nor bad, because you couldn't tell anymore, you truly couldn't. Especially in recent years, when even irony was used ironically, when bland-on-purpose square-danced with cool. Not that these were that.

In the restaurant so fancy it had no name at all, never blinking at him once, she slowly slurped several slippery bivalves in an attempt to seduce him, which eventually would have worked, had she not had to pay a visit to the little girls' room, where she sauntered to, to vomit.