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A Likely Story (Preview)

Chapter One

The night they took the first car, I was driving to work as usual to be at my office by six, which meant driving across town during rush hour, always an ordeal because I’ve never felt at home behind the wheel. On this night, though, I was on automatic pilot. I left my apartment and arrived at the college parking lot with no memory of having negotiated any part of the trip — making all the turns, changing lanes, stopping at the red lights — all because I was trying to think about Carole, my partner, now well into the last weeks of her pregnancy and us not yet started looking for a cradle, or me for a regular job.

My name is Joe Barley. I’m a part-time instructor in the English department at Hambleton, a college in the east end of Toronto where I have been for too many years, hoping for a proper appointment with pension rights and sabbaticals and a course of my own. I have finally accepted that it isn’t going to happen, that this is probably my last year at Hambleton, even as a part-timer, unless an epidemic wipes out my colleagues.

This morning, the subject of Carole’s pregnancy having been introduced subliminally by my noticing the trouble she was having squeezing through the space between the refrigerator and the kitchen table, I said, “Anything happening yet?”

“Like what?”

I said, “Let’s have an agreement that if you don’t know what I’m talking about then you know what I’m talking about.” I pointed at her navel. “In there.”

She leaned back against the kitchen counter, smiled, patted her belly, and said, “Nothing I could identify.”

The message I got from this was that she was still happy with her situation, just watchful, certainly not worried; content.

We were an item, Carole and me, unmarried but certainly hitched. According to her sister and brother-in-law, both psychiatrists, we were bound together by our insecurities, mostly mine. Life without her would be unthinkable, and I know that she feels the same. Given the number of ways a marriage or its equivalent can screw up these days as the generation quests in search of perfect sex — how goes your orgasm lately? — I had recently been counting myself extraordinarily lucky — and it is luck — in arriving at the right time with the right person able to say, this is it, it won’t get any better. I was right: we’d done it by instinct and indulged in very little in the way of self-analysis. The fact is, we’d blundered into the good life. Though neither one of us had actually lived with anyone else before we met, both of us had backed out of one or two blind alleys, and after a very nervous beginning our present situation had become secure over the last five years.

We knew, though, that at some point we had to make our luck permanent. We had come together without romance, in curiosity, really, and for a long time I didn’t know if she was for keeps until we had a misunderstanding that shook her into revealing what she felt about me, showing herself to me naked, as it were, and in tears. We have never referred to that day again, so the opportunity to create a fuller dialogue of understanding was let go.

And so, although we were certain of each other’s hearts, the minds still waited to be explored. For example, I was surprised in the recent election to find that she is both apolitical and much further to the left than anyone we know, but she is no longer engaged in the process. She almost forgot to vote, and when she did go into the booth it was to put a cross for the Green candidate. She isn’t active in support of the Greens between elections because she sees the ecological situation as hopeless so long as there is money to be made out of poisoning the earth, the air, and the water. She does nothing to make things worse, like buying newspapers, but doesn’t waste her time trying to make things better. For her, the future will be determined by nuclear mistakes and manufactured plagues and there is nothing to be done about it. The daily pleasures — books, prepared foods from Pusateri and the Summerhill Market, and me — are enough to be thankful for. Let Armageddon take care of itself.

Then she got pregnant.

When she first made the announcement, I said “How did it happen?” She grabbed the chance. “Well,” she said, in the bright voice of a cartoon chipmunk, “First of all, as my old granny advised me, I had a nice all-over wash, then ironed my favourite nightie and sprinkled it with lavender water. Then you took off your pants and put out the light ...”

“All right, all right. You really think it’s happened?”

“You think I’m rehearsing for a play? Yes, I have the symptoms of pregnancy.”

“Are you surprised?”

“No.”

“You’ve been expecting this?”

“I thought it might happen.”

“And now it has happened. Are you terrified, alarmed, worried, curious, pleased, or ecstatic?”

“It sounds as if you’ve been rehearsing. All of the above.”

“When will you prefer one of these emotions?”

“I’m waiting to find out.”

“Is there a good chance you’ll be ‘pleased’?”

“Yes.”

“So there’s no chance you will want to have an —”

“I’ve already passed that point, in my head.”

“This is not an intellectual pro-life decision you’ve found?”

“I am all in favour of people not having unwanted babies, even if it’s just because they don’t want them.”

“So we are going to have a baby.”

“Unless I miscarry. Very common with old women like me.”

Carole is thirty-eight.

“If that happens, we’re back to square one?”

“That’s right. Maybe square two. I’ll have had a major experience and no consequences to cope with.”

“But assuming you go the distance, what then?”

“I’ll have a baby. A little bastard.”

“We’ll have a baby.”

“Right. I didn’t hear it first time.” She stroked her belly. “That ‘we’ is good news.”

“Of course it’s ‘we.’”

“I wasn’t sure. It was never in our plans.”

“We never had any plans. We’ll have to make some.”

“Like grown-ups, you mean? Soon I’ll be able to look at those girls with baby-carriages, eighteen and nineteen some of them, and tell myself I know as much about life as they do.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling myself lately. ‘Grow up,’ I’ve been saying to myself. Now, how are we going to live?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll need a permanent job.”

“What about your novel?”

“I’ll ask around, find out how married men with jobs get their novels written. Actually, this may be the excuse I’ve been looking for to abandon it. I’m sick of the characters, anyway.”

“Do you think they’ll fire you soon?”

“It’s a question of whether they’ll rehire me.”

“Have you been thinking what you might do?’

“I’ll start looking around tomorrow.”

“Advertising? Journalism?”

“No and no. I’m too old to start in advertising. To the hotshots in that world, I would look grizzled. And I wouldn’t know where to begin in journalism.”

“You know what a counsellor would say? Treat this as an opportunity. I can support us both for a while. Think of something you’d like to do. Oh, sweetie.” She produced a huge sob, smiled, and came over and put her arms around me and I thought, this is the first time she has ever called me that. She said, “I’m so happy. Find a way to join me.” She kissed me then, and reached out and groped me conjugally, looking for a response to the new earthiness she was feeling.

Chapter Two

I woke up from my reverie to see Tommy Stokoe, the campus security officer, crouched by the gate of the parking lot, holding up his hand. He peered through the windscreen then walked around to the side window. He said, “Park your car would you, Joe, and give me a minute.” I drove around the lot until I could find the kind of space I need if I’m going to manage to park the first time, and walked back to the gate where a small group of people now surrounded the security officer.

When I started at Hambleton I looked about for some other work to eke out my part-timer’s salary and I found it with the Atkinson Detective Agency; low-level work, looking for husbands who haven’t kept up their support payments mainly, the equivalent in status to my teaching position. Everyone in the college knows what I do when I’m not teaching, and it is this work that has brought Tommy Stokoe, our security boss, closer to me, though not me to him. For Stokoe I am the one person who might understand how hard his job is.

Now he said, “Need some information, Joe,” and asked me questions to find out if I used the lot regularly, and if I had used it earlier that evening, and if I had at any time noticed anyone unusual in the area. An assistant, a uniformed security guard, stood ready to write down what I said. By the time Stokoe had finished questioning me, I gathered that a car had been stolen from the lot earlier by someone unknown.

As usual, he looked away from me as he spoke quietly out of the corner of his mouth, creating an air of talking in confidence. He even used this stance to pass on his opinion of the weather, and I had learned to look past it to listen to the words. And as usual he spoke rapidly and without punctuation to give as much of the backstory as he could before anyone could interrupt. “I mean Christ you’d think a guy would know when he arrived I mean shit most people leave home at the same time every day and take about the same time to get to work so when you ask them about it they can tell you when they usually get home at night at least maybe the time it usually takes and if there was anything different that held them up that day an accident maybe but not this clown he doesn’t know what day it is.” He licked a small fleck of spittle from the corner of his mouth and I got a word in edgewise.

“Who is it?”

“Professor Munchkin over there.” He flicked his head in the direction of a man who was having his story taken down by a security guard: Vladimir Petrov, a professor of sociology, originally from Bulgaria, an extremely excitable man who was usually, and now obviously, beside himself. Petrov is a Marxist who allies himself with every student protest. I like him because he likes me because he thinks I’m a closet socialist who is denying his true nature.

“Joseph,” he called (the only person, now my grandmother has died, who gives me both syllables), waving me towards him and swinging his shoulders around in an arc to claim a wider audience. “Joseph, will you please explain to these ...,” he pointed to the security guards contemptuously before he remembered that all men, especially working-class men, are created equal, and forced a smile, “...people that forgetting where you parked your car is not an offence against the state?”

“You can’t remember where you parked?”

“Better than that, Joseph. I can’t remember when I parked.” He looked triumphant.

The two guards waited silently. Vladimir turned and took a couple of steps away from us to give himself more room to wave his arms about, and flicked a finger at the guards in a “You-may-now-speak” gesture. Vladimir was born into the Bulgarian aristocracy, or, at least, into their landed gentry, and in times of stress his heritage overcomes his acquired political convictions. Still he had probably built up some credit with the guards in previous encounters — he likes getting down and dirty with them to show his egalitarianism; they in turn seem to regard him with affection. They have nicknamed him The Count.

Now one of the guards, who was trying to take notes, spoke. “We’re not sure when the car was stolen because Professor Petrov can’t tell us when he last saw it. Seems he might have left it here overnight.” He consulted his notes as the other guard looked at the sky. “Says he came out of class this afternoon, and when he went to drive home, he couldn’t find his car. This was about three-thirty, sir?”

Vladimir nodded from a distance.

The guard continued. “Not being able to find it in his usual spot, he assumed he hadn’t brought it today.”

The other guard seemed to be choking.

“But when he got home the car wasn’t in the parking space in front of his house, either. Then he remembered coming to the college on the subway this morning — subway and bus, that is. He distinctly remembers the bus, don’t you sir?” he added, smiling.

“So the car disappeared from his house?”

“Well, no, sir, see, he also distinctly remembers coming to work by car yesterday because he gave a ride to a neighbour.”

“But he didn’t drive home yesterday?” I was going to be late for work.

“Seems not, no.”

I turned to Petrov, who had paused to listen to this discussion of his movements. “So, Vladimir, the car disappeared sometime between yesterday morning, when you arrived at the college, and this afternoon, when you tried to go home. Probably stolen.”

“Unless Professor Petrov left it somewhere else.” Both guards were grinning steadily now, having fun.

“Vladimir?”

“I am a creature of habit. If I had changed my routine I would haf remembered, and also why. I went home on the subway yesterday, forgetting I had my car here. I came to the college by subway today, intending to drive home. But when I came to the parking lot this afternoon I could not find my car, so you see I then thought perhaps I did drive home yesterday and had parked it on my street. I was very tired, and the entrance to the parking space at my house is very narrow and obscured by a utility pole which has been known to leap out and scrape the side of my car, especially when I am tired. But this morning the citizen in me took over from the professor, and, not seeing the car on the street, I assumed I had left it here in order to safely haf a couple of beers after work. Which I only do when I don’t bring the car.” He smiled sweetly at us, all the little near-jokes showing he was enjoying himself now.

Vladimir’s English teacher in Sofia had been an Oxford man, a public school man, too, I would think, because Vladimir speaks whole sentences like a true Wykehamist — grammar, landed-gentry accent, the lot — but then, somewhere in the middle of a paragraph, the Bulgarian sidles in with a “haf” instead of a “have.” But his Bulgarian accent is most marked when he is unstressed, which makes me suspect that it is entirely under his control, that he is doing it for fun.

The guard with the notebook said, “Here’s the cavalry now. I’ll report all this to the boss.” He gestured to the gate of the parking lot, where Tommy Stokoe was talking to a city cop in a squad car. The guard said, “If it’s lost, they’ll find it, if it’s stolen ...”

“They won’t,” his colleague said, still grinning.

None of this was remarkable. As Tommy said, “We’ve all done it shit forgotten that we brought the car or left it at home well not me of course but it happens point is the car was here all night probably when the lot was empty so it would be a great temptation for a lot of jerk-offs and there are plenty of those hereabouts shit our security was never designed for a thing like this we don’t have enough people on the ground see ...”

But as he began the next tape, about how he manages his limited resources, I constructed a way to share an immediate concern with Petrov who was now on his way out of the parking lot.

“Vladimir,” I called, pressing Tommy’s arm to show how much I would like to have stayed if I hadn’t had to share something of life-or- death importance with the sociologist. “Wait for me!” He stopped and stared at me. “Someone has stolen my car!” he said.

“Yes, I know. I was there. You don’t think ...?” I was going to suggest that he might have loaned it to someone, or left it in a garage for servicing. Or simply left it in a parking lot on the other side of town. All these were possible and not just with Petrov. The best campus story on this topic is of the professor of geography who drove down to the municipal offices to protest a parking ticket, had his protest accepted and the parking ticket cancelled, then went home in triumph on the subway, leaving his car all night on King Street, where the parking police found it, towed it away, and charged him two hundred and twenty dollars to get it back.

But the suggestion sounded rude as I formed it up, because I did actually think Vladimir was a bit of a nutcase.

He saved me by shaking his head seven or eight times. “No, no, no, no. I remember clearly now. I came with my car yesterday and parked next to that woman in Nursing. Carmela.”

“Black is beautiful?” I said, automatically.

“What?”

I regretted the words immediately. They phrased a compliment that a few of us in the English department paid to a shimmering beauty from Trinidad who taught in the Health Sciences department, a nurse. They were first uttered by a Philosophy instructor, who further offered that she made him feel like the hunchback of Notre Dame, or someone from an inferior, much uglier species who belonged in a cage. Bert Crabtree, the philosopher, was just exaggerating to make a point but these days anything said by man of woman goes into the language laboratory to be sifted for trace elements of racism or sexism. Crabtree’s description of the Trinidad beauty is still preserved among a few close friends, but it wasn’t to be trusted to Petrov.

I said, “I’m sorry, Vladimir. I was thinking of something else, an ad I saw for a new car. You might have to get one. A new car. You’ve got complete coverage?”

“Of course not. I buy old cars and insure them only for third parties. Insurance is a racket, run by the richest companies in the world. Let me tell you something, Joseph; my neighbour had his car stolen, and when he reported it to the insurance company they told him he was entitled to a rental car — he had paid an extra premium for this — but if his own car was recovered undamaged he would have to pay back the cost of the rental. The company assumes, of course, that my neighbour is a crook, like them, and would pretend to have lost the car in order to have another one for a while, an extra one, for his wife, perhaps.”

“Will you look for another Ford?” I asked, to cut him off. Most of the faculty in the Humanities’ departments drive European or Japanese cars on the orders of consumer magazines, but Petrov, I knew, supported Canadian factory workers and their products.

“Probably. Is there a subtext to that question?”

Flags were everywhere waiting to go up. I said, “Not that I’m aware of, but there’s no such thing as an innocent question, is there? I’ll try another thought, equally without a subtext. Are you teaching tonight?”

“I just came back to see if I had left my car here after all. Now I am going to my office so that I can start going home again.” He smiled widely to show that now he was really making fun of himself.

“Perhaps,” I said, “as you are preparink to leaf, your body’s memory will direct you down a different path to the place where you parked your car.” I was appalled to hear myself speaking with a touch of a mock- Bulgarian accent, already polishing the story to relate it to Carole. But Vladimir didn’t hear it. “Perhaps,” he said. “That is what I meant.”

in my office, i looked around for something to do. A few potential students had sent queries about the courses to be offered next year, and one former student had asked for a copy of his record to apply for accreditation at some other institute. There was a request from the instructor teaching business correspondence to see me after class. And that was it. About fifteen minutes before I could get on with my novel.

It hadn’t gone well for some time, not as a novel, that is. The writing was in its second year and had reached a crucial stage — the middle, I hoped. I was bored to numbness with it, but every time I thought of abandoning it I read it through early in the day and found some serviceable bits of writing here and there and pressed on again, hoping to find more. After all, Madam Bovary took ten years, didn’t it? I am hired by the session to teach whatever is left over after the chairman has made up the timetables of the tenured faculty. This year I’ve been given two courses in the day program, but two courses at the hourly rate aren’t enough to live on so the chairman found me three hours teaching remedial English to foreign students, and then added a tiny (paid) administrative responsibility, appointing me coordinator of non-credit English courses in the extension program, a sinecure with almost no work attached. (He’s a nice guy, my chairman, but in giving me this little job he has reached the limits of his power to help me.) Subsequently, too few students registered for my night course and it was cancelled, but the position of coordinator remained in the budget. I don’t usually have to stay the whole evening.

To sum it up, my position is bleak. I am looking for a regular fulltime permanent job without any qualifications except those in plentiful supply and with no real experience of any kind of work other than teaching English. I am like a middle-aged nun whose vocation has been taken away from her and now is to be led to the gates of the convent to fend for herself. It’s my fault; I know; I just went on hoping for too long.

I put the manuscript of the novel aside after twenty minutes and started to prepare my day courses. At nine o’clock, the man with the appointment, David Simmonds, my teacher of Business Correspondence, arrived.

Simmonds had been hired as we experienced a sudden unexpected surge in enrolment in the “correspondence for business” course. Most of the extension classes are assigned to instructors in the spring; then, in the fall, close to the beginning of the term, we look at the enrolment to see how many extra sections we might need. Thus it was that Simmonds appeared so fortuitously in answer to a need for an additional instructor at the beginning of term. He had been recommended by someone in the administration, and had given me no problems so far, itself a great recommendation for a new instructor in the extension program.

I remembered that he had not shined himself up much for the hiring interview; alternatively, he may have dressed very carefully. He was very tall, perhaps six feet three or four, dressed in khakis and a leather blazer over a blue denim shirt, all of his clothes very new. He was bald across the top of his head, with thick black hair sprouting at either side, a heavy, ragged moustache, and elsewhere, dark stubble. Seen through eyes older than mine he might have looked like someone on the fringes of society who had been given fresh clothes by a welfare agency in order to get this job, but to his own generation he could just as easily have been a television presenter, as long as he remained seated.

Because almost immediately, just in sitting down, he showed an extraordinary clumsiness. He had these very large feet laced up in strong brown boots that seemed to have a mind of their own. As he sat down, one of his boots went sideways to kick over a wastebasket that was only just in his way, making him look down in surprise at what was going on down there, and when he left, the boots seemed to clear their own path to the door, taking their instructions from his knees, while his hands locked up his briefcase and then tried to straighten out his coat collar, which had twisted itself under his coat.

I asked him about his experience. He said he was an office manager, had written a lot of letters.

“But teaching?” I asked.

He said he had to show the new clerks how to write a letter.

“But no actual lectern experience?”

“Is it so hard?” he responded, not aggressively, but not really wanting to know, either. Rhetorically. Then he added, “College teaching isn’t like high school, is it? You don’t have to be trained for it. You learn whatever tricks you need on the job, right?”

“More or less,” I said.

He waited for me then. He’d made his point. We all have to start somewhere, and teaching correspondence for business at night was surely close to the bottom rung.

I thought, all right, the one thing certain was that he felt sure of himself, which is nine-tenths of the game in teaching; the rest is knowing something.

He sat still, smiling mechanically at my jokes, but not making any of his own, showing his comfort, not so much by his body language as by the absence of any body language. But his record was adequate, he spoke more or less grammatically, and his own letter of application for the job was flawless. I remember asking him if Toronto was his hometown, and he said, no, he came from Edmonton.

Now I waited while he explained his problem. He had two students registered in his class he wanted to get rid of. I said, “I don’t think we can actually get rid of anyone in a non-credit extension course unless they are disturbing the other students. Mostly they just go away.”

“These clowns are unteachable. They’ve skipped half the classes, and they’re taking up space. They’ll have to go.” He leaned back in his chair and looked around the room while I considered the problem. He wasn’t asking for my decision, just explaining what I had to do.

“Who are they?”

He opened his briefcase to take out a sheet of paper, then dropped the briefcase, spilling its contents over the floor.

I came around the desk to help him pick up, hoping not to find any half-eaten sandwiches on the floor, or miniature bottles of vodka, or ointment for hemorrhoids. There was nothing except the paperwork of a class.

He took his time about sorting the paper into a sequence before returning it to his briefcase, leaving himself with a single sheet.

“Clem Downie and Jack Zimmerman,” he read. He handed over the piece of paper with the names printed on.

“They sound familiar.”

“They’re a pair. They came together. They play hockey, remember?” Of course. The hockey players, brought to the school by the head of Physical Education at the urging of the president, awarded the nearest thing Hambleton has to an athletic scholarship, dreamed up by the president himself. The president dearly wanted us to win a cup or a league or something. Just one game would do, for starters.

I said, “It was the president’s idea, to give athletes too poor to pay the fees a chance to get into the education stream. Like late bloomers.” “I know the story, and I know the real reason, but why me? Why did they get put into my class? It’s a good group, all mature students.”

Now Simmonds belched, louder than I’ve heard anyone belch in an office before. He looked around the room as he waited for my answer.

I smiled with automatic tolerance. I said, “These boys needed something easy and structured. I’ve taught your course. I thought you could adapt the principles to any level.”

“Not to these guys. The Slapshot Boys. You know?”

“I saw the movie. I’m sorry. Maybe they’ll go away.”

“They keep going away, but they always come back. They were there tonight, after the break.”

“The game with Sudbury Teacher’s College is coming up and they have to attend a certain number of classes to qualify as students. It’s an ordinary league game, actually, but a big one for us — the first that we might have a chance of winning, I hear.”

“Can’t we give them their money back?” Now Simmonds began to hear that the solution to his problem might be harder than he had thought. This was the world of higher education — of a kind — not whatever world he was used to.

“They’re here on scholarships. We’re paying them.”

“Jesus.” Simmonds stood up, knocking over his chair behind him. “I’m wasting my time even talking about it, I guess. I’ll give them a packet of crayons and put them in the corner.” He set the chair on its legs.

There was nothing I could do for him. The awarding of hockey scholarships was just one of the ideas the new president has dreamed up to boost the public’s awareness and possibly the status of the college. Among other proposals that had come out of his office were suggestions for several new disciplines — even “Graduate Studies” was being whispered. A winning, or at least a competitive, hockey team that would be noticed by the Toronto Star fitted the president’s dream of the future. All he wanted was to be allowed to sit at the same table as the big boys. He would not mind being least among equals, at first.

“Are they creating a disturbance?”

“Yeah, just by being there. And the language. They treat the place like a changing room. Hey, that’s neat.” He was standing in front of the only picture I have hung in my office, one that Carole had given me as a joke. It was a greeting card that she had had framed to cheer up the room, the well-known picture of a pig taking off from a springboard over a pond.

I tried again. “Are they a real problem? Can you handle them?” He turned to look at me, still thinking about the pig. “Huh? Oh, I can handle them. I grew up with guys like them. They’re just a pain in the ass.” He nodded. “Take it easy,” he said, and was gone. And that was the last I saw of him for two weeks. He disappeared, leaving a note but no forwarding address.

When he reappeared he was wearing granny glasses and a gold earring, sitting in his car outside the building.

“Professor?” A man with a ladder stood in the doorway, holding a light bulb, ready to replace one that had burned out. I stuffed the manuscript into my briefcase and left.