“When I come back? How long?”
“I won’t stay long, Brunswick.”
Laurence breathed in deeply through his nose. “I’ll take you home, Mr. Carbone. No need to trouble . . . her.” He had forgotten the name already. Pathetic.
When the woman was gone, Corey Carbone shrugged and smiled, and his tiny voice said, “Sorry about this. She tries to get me out of the house regular. But she don’t think too much about where besides out. Sorry.”
Laurence smiled – the second apology was all he needed to feel generous. “No trouble at all. Syl’s more the stickler for scheduling than I am.” Another lie from the clear blue. Laurence felt like cupping it fondly in his palm.
“Whatcha making? Another pie?”
Laurence considered. Finally: “Bake sale. Church. Syl wouldn’t want them to miss the donation, just because she had to go out of town.” He was staring into the pot of bubbling watery cherries. It looked liquid, drinkable, utterly un-pie-like.
A shift of chair legs. “Things all right, Brunswick? Syl’s ok?”
He saw an expectation of tragedy in Corey Carbone’s leftside features – not smug, only fearful. “A celebration, actually. Our first granbaby got born. How ’bout that?” Where had the slang come from? To match Corey Carbone’s happy-hour slur, perhaps.
“How ’bout that? Fantastic, Brunswick.” Corey Carbone slapped his right knee and Laurence winced. “Boy or girl?”
“Boy. Brian. Seven weeks.” Laurence pointed at the fridge picture – the fat mottled face and blue-veined skull. All children were ugly at birth, but Brian looked like a champion anyway. The cherries were making little splashing noises. “Syl’s gone to help out a bit.” When Laurence bent over the pot, red bubbles popped and splattered his arm.
“Glad for the quiet? Or you miss ’er?”
Laurence turned down the burner, frowning.
“I could never stand it, myself. Rysa and I spent maybe ten nights apart, all told. Maybe less.”
“Rysa?” Laurence searched his mind for an image of a woman in the Carbone driveway, but he came up empty. It was another strange name, or perhaps only a standard one that Corey Carbone’s tongue could no longer render. He hoped she wouldn’t turn out to be a Doberman as he asked, “You folks were married a long time?”
“Thirty-five years, but that don’t seem long when you start at eighteen.”
Laurence did the math from the apparent age of the man – Corey Carbone had likely been a widower for twenty years. The cherries were starting to sink in the goop. He stirred forlornly. “In all those years of married life, Rysa ever tell you how to make a cherry pie?”
“Well, no, not that I . . . Why?”
“Why? What do you – That’s what I’m doing here. Trying to do.”
Silence. Laurence looked up. Corey Carbone sat with both legs kicked forwards, one elbow on the chair arm, the other hand rested atop his cane, which was leaning on his thigh. It should have been a casual pose, but for Corey Carbone’s stiff body, it looked like the rack. “Sorry, Brunswick.” He shrugged; only the left shoulder rose.
Laurence sighed. “Sorry, man, sorry. Tough morning.”
“What’s gone wrong? Smells good.”
Laurence sniffed dismissively. To him, the smell was over-sweet, syrupy, wrong. “Thank you. But it’s not like a pie filling. From here, it’s like cherry soup.”
“Such a thing, y’know. Cherry soup. Had it on a cruise once.”
“A cruise?” Laurence abandoned the question. “I don’t want soup. I want pie. I was trying to boil down the juice to . . . gel, you know. But it won’t.”
Corey Carbone shook his head, and his jowls wobbled equally on both sides. “Too much juice? Or not enough thickners?”
Laurence stood completely still and felt his neck crack. “Thickener?”
Corey Carbone’s good eye squinted. “Whaddya put in?”
“Cherries. Frozen ones.” The pebbly pie crust looked greyish in the slight sun through the kitchen window.
“And . . . ?” Corey Carbone nodded stiffly, left-leaning, encouraging.
“Sugar. Because they weren’t all that sweet.”
“Pie cherries are, uh, sour cherries, yeah. You hafta add the sugar . . . and . . .”
“And . . . ?” Laurence asked. He set the spoon on the spoon-rest. A little of pink dripped on the white stovetop.
“Dunno . . . flour?” Another uneven shrug.
“Flour? Flour goes in the crust, I found a recipe for the crust.”
“Didja find one for the filling?”
Laurence turned off the stove. “I don’t think she uses one. Anyway, I couldn’t find it. Her files are a mess.” He went over and took a seat at the table.
“First time she’s been away in how long?”
“Not that long.” Laurence slouched forward, arms on the placemat, chest pressing down. “I used to travel a lot, on business. I only just retired.”
“Ah.” Corey Carbone grinned. His eyelid and mouth stayed flaccid on the right, but both eyes were bright. “First time she’s been away in . . . ?”
Laurence whistled. “Ever, I suppose.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
The pink smell of cherries was starting to stifle. Laurence wondered if it would be rude to open a window. “I had work to . . . cover.”
“I thought you retired.”
“The new team, they need a little saving, sometimes.” Laurence had said this dozens of times, always in a hearty, resigned tone. Today, the words sounded almost violent.
Laurence had a momentary flash of Syl’s perfect puff of white hair wandering down an ugly alley of thugs and thieves. “Plus, it’s hard to travel, laid up like this.” He waved his cane, then glanced at Carbone’s own and felt bizarrely guilty.
“Oh, well, I’m sure you’ve seen enough of the world.” Corey Carbone squirmed in his chair, both hands pressed on the cane top as he hauled his butt forward, then shifted his weight onto his left hip.
“You all right?”
“S’ok,” Corey Carbone said tightly. It was several seconds before he finally leaned back again and relaxed his grip on the cane. “If yer giving up on that pie, we could just eat the cherries, you know. With spoons.”
“Pretty sad thing to offer a guest.”
“Well, I’ll take what I can get. Be a proper dessert with a little ice cream, if you got it.”
Laurence got obediently to his feet, though he felt himself listing far more leftward than usual, white-knuckling his own cane. An apology for inhospitality fished around in his brain, but all that came out was, “I think we might have, not ice cream but sherbet – ”he opened the freezer and foam-white air fogged his glasses “ – shoot, sorry, Corey Carbone, it’s raspberry.” He shut the freezer with a sad thump.
“You think I care about clashing shades of pink?”
“Right.” Laurence nodded and reopened the freezer.
“And whatcha call me by my full name for? Think some other Corey will pop in, demand ice cream – sherbet?”
Laurence jolted again. “No, sorry, Carbone. Your name just sorta slides off the tongue all in one piece, you know?”
“Never heard that one. Course, nothing slides off my tongue, these days.”
Laurence tried to picture the pre-stroke Corery Carbone, sober-spoken and smooth, or at least not sounding quite so boozily meek. He couldn’t. The thin red juice dribbled to the bottom of the bowl, and the cherries clung like slugs to the sherbet. It looked revolting. Laurence took the dishes and spoons to the table, sat and asked, “What was your profession, Carbone? Before you retired?”
Corey Carbone swallowed his first bite and smiled. “Professor. Physics. Quantum. The way I worked, no one does any more. But then, I don’t do it either.”
The cherries were sickeningly sweet; Laurence figured he’d overdone the sugar in his frustration. Corey Carbone’s pants were a shade of an unripe banana, pulled up topside of his gut. He did not look like an intel
lectual. “You miss it?”
“Must’ve, once, I guess. Twenty years ago now. Too much else to miss, in the meantime. I miss Rysa, smartest lady in Weston and a damn fine ornithologist. I miss walking to the can without having to hang off that little girl like a lecher.” Corey Carbone dug his spoon into his pink mess again. “This is damn good, like that spun sugar crap kids get at the fair.” His speech was smoothing out, slightly.
“Cotton candy.”
They were silent a moment, eating. Finally, Laurence had to ask, “Corey Carbone, do you remember what happened when you had that stroke, and Syl came over, all that? Could you see her?”
“Sure I remember, sure I saw her, sorta.” Corey Carbone smacked his lips, glanced down at his empty bowl, then over at Laurence’s, still mainly full. “Sorta long to explain, I guess.”
Laurence pushed the pink swirl towards him. “Me, I got nothing but time. You don’t mind?”
There was a pink drip of raspberry on Corey Carbone’s lower lip that he made no move to lick. It seemed suitable just there, like a beauty mark or a freckle. “You got it right – nothing but time.”
To: All onsite employees; all temporary employees
From: Reception
Re: Red Camry, License BKILLA
Friday 9:55 a.m.
Your lights are on.
RESEARCH
THE RESEARCH DEPARTMENT at Dream Magazines has been reduced. In straitened economic times, something always has to go, and this time it was knowledge, in the form of four-fifths of the research team. More specifically, these are (were) the suspender-wearing architectural historian whose sexuality could never be determined; the tall willowy former model who ate Altoids by the box; the moonlighting Chinese chef with his mounds of recipes and climbing ivy plant; and the legal expert who received an angry phone call from his ex-wife every day at three p.m.
On Monday morning, they were all already gone by the time the last employed researcher arrived. She was 38 years old and possessed of several credits towards a masters in cultural anthropology; twin teenaged boys; a Nescafé jar on the right corner of her desk; and the lowest salary, least seniority, and least sarcastic sense of humour in the department. Leadership felt they’d settled on a prudent choice.
At first, she did not realize that she had become the sole embodiment of the research department. The baffles of her cube were high enough that she rarely saw her colleagues accidentally, and since they were on flex hours, she often couldn’t find anyone even if she tried. So the echoing silence did not bother her when she arrived at 8:55, set her lunch bag (SpongeBob, one of the boys’ discarded treasures) in the fridge, prepared her Nescafé in the microwave, and set to work on the last of her research for an article on fastenings in Dream Beading.
By 10:06, she had already solved what a grommet was, and had begun the question of what one might do with it. Also at 10:06, the team from Building Services arrived and began to dismantle the cubes of the research room. Because of her hard won ability to tune out the hungover mutterings and heavy footfalls of her (former) colleagues, she looked up only when her own walls came down. A vista of dusty desks and dead plants suddenly opened. Far far at the end of the room was a window she had never noticed before. It beamed pale light over her former colleague’s many empty Altoids tins.
Men were walking away with the walls. She knew a corset was laced through a grommet, as was a shoe, and also through a grommet a flag was bound to its pole, but she did not know what was going on. She was alone except for a man with “69” on his T-shirt who was removing the phone that had brought so many calls of marital devastation.
“Where have they gone?” she asked him.
“Who?”
“The rest of the department.”
He weighed the phone in his palm. “No one tells me, sorry. I just come to take the phones.”
“But . . . but the whole . . . everyone?” She thought for a moment. “Should I be gone too? Did someone forget to fire me?”
“In these straitened economic times, I would not dare to say,” said the man with the phone, and then he took it away.
She had never received formal assignments in research – usually her more-senior colleagues just sluffed their least appealing tasks onto her. Without a task, without colleagues, without even walls, Research felt most unmoored. She went, silent in her Payless Maryjanes, to her supervisor’s office, though she had been instructed never to go there before noon unless she was dead.
The supervisor’s office was empty. More alarming, even the seemingly solid floor-to-ceiling walls that bound it had been removed, so that it was no longer an office at all, merely some space at the end of the hall.
At this point, she had to go research who supervised her supervisor. This turned out to be a junior VP, who was on paternity leave. He was supervised by a senior VP who was at a kitchenware convention. She plunged on through the org chart, only to find that next in the chain of command were the Offices of the CEO.
The men who ran the company, distant from her as Andromeda stars, were no one she could picture asking anything, let alone what came after grommet. But if they weren’t to provide the next action-item memo, who would? She had never been a self-starter. She was always bolstered by her colleagues. The now-terminated chef had been especially kind, always calling her kid and gently punching her shoulder.
He was gone now – they were all gone, but both her boys needed upper and lower retainers. She had to steel her soul, stay at her desk, and formulate her own action item. But that was when the 69 guy came back, nodded absently to her, picked up her phone and began to disconnect it.
She slammed her hand down on the keypad. “I’m staying. I’m Research.”
“Ah. Sorry.” He drew his hand back. “What are you researching?”
“I . . . what do you think I should research?”
He blinked at her, blushed slightly. “I overheard an editor on the fifth floor, someone from Dream Woman, say they wanted to run a feature on women’s orgasms.”
“Seriously?” She was homesick for her old workstation, for when she was secure within walls with a day’s docket of concepts to investigate. That morning’s grommet had been left over from a long, complex assignment, from hook and eye, to the toggle to the more complex spring-ring and lobster. Only grommet turned out to have nothing to do with the necklaces and bracelets, just a braced hole in fabric. All the others were in the article, but grommet was out, and even that, though sad, was satisfying. How would she know what was in or out if she didn’t know what was on the list?
“What, specifically, about orgasms? What questions do they want answered?”
The guy shrugged. “If I were you, I would not limit myself to the simplistic binary of question and answer. Yes, there are many questions worth answering: why is the sky blue? Who are we when we are dead? Is the public fascination with the Gosselins schadenfreude or pity? Why do some nations drive on the right and some on the left?”
“Those are the sorts of research items I am used to.”
“But there are matters that do not beg a question, only attentiveness. We do not ask questions of a waterfall, of a BMW engine, of a newborn. We must only observe, minutely – through this care we come to know not only the answers but the questions.”
She didn’t know what to say, but the clock on the wall behind the phone guy’s head said 12:30, lunchtime. Actually, it was a sushi clock, so it really said unagi:30, but in any case she was hungry.
Without colleagues for company, Research ate her cheese-and-tomato sandwich while beginning her research on the female orgasm. She read an article about how women are chronically cheated on the pleasures of oral sex. It was surprisingly boring. She took some notes, started the second half of her sandwich, and opened weather.ca. The temperature at Pearson airport was 22 degrees, and skies were clear. That sounded nice. And now that everything and everyone were gone, she needed only to turn to see 22 degrees and clear skies over the airport. The window felt miraculous.
It wasn’t miraculous: there were fireworks of bird-shit on the outside and fuzzy grey dust inside. But it was also floor to ceiling, eight feet across: blue light and white contrails and green grass and traffic. It had been a long time since anything had changed in Research, and now everything had changed, even the light.
She stood up and went towards the light until she bonked off the glass: left arm, plastic glasses frame, both breasts. At the airport, a fat-bodied aeroplane lofted up, and a striped windsock whipped. It looked like a lovely day out there but the window frame didn’t open, so she had no empirical knowledge of the current weather.
She went to her desk and read about barometric pressures, cool fronts and rising air, and what a windsock means. She didn’t glance at the powdery blue sky until the 16:55 commuter rose towards Washington, D.C. It was narrow and glinting in the afternoon sun, like a needle that could thread a grommet. She watched its whole ascent, the perfect stab into the sky, until the tailfins disappeared at the top of the window.
Then her phone rang. She picked it up, held it to her ear and said, “Research.”
“This is Ella from Dream Woman editorial?” said a hesitant voice. “I was trying to reach my usual research contact, extension 7195? Tall, well-dressed, nice breath?”
“You don’t know her name?”
“I knew her extension, but apparently it has changed?”
“She’s . . .” Research knew so little. “Gone. She doesn’t work here anymore.”
“That’s awful? I’ve got this unconventional-orgasm article to fill in . . . ?”
Research missed her pretty, angsty colleague, their chats between stalls in the ladies’ room about Canadian Idol. But she had a mortgage, a car loan, a taste for out-of-season fruit. “I have some material I could send you.”
There was a pause. Perhaps the woman was wondering what sort of person researched unconventional orgasms without being asked. Finally: “Anything good?”
Research completed the call, formatted her notes on vaginal, clitoral, G-spot, and anal, then powered down her computer at 5:03. She took her cardigan from the back of her chair, her lunch sack from under it, and said goodbye to no one. Then she went out to the parking lot. She counted 196 cars as she walked to the bus stop. White was the most common – 68 cars. She could not remember the colours of the four cars now missing.
The Big Dream Page 11