Safe and Sound

Chapter 3

Chapter 3“So how did it go?”

“Ugh,” Rory said, adjusting the screen of his laptop so he could see Mikayla better. They were on one of their weekly Skype chats, since Mikayla wasn’t always able to find a babysitter for her two kids under four, and her husband didn’t always work the most consistent hours at the local hospital. The two of them had been chatting aimlessly for the last fifteen minutes about their favourite books and the latest Netflix craze when, of course, Mikayla had to go and get serious.

Rory stared at the screen of his laptop, hoping that Mikayla would get his subtle brow shifts and drop the topic. But she was, as ever, distracted by something on her side of the screen. When her son Callum, a rambunctious three-and-a-half-year-old, came into her line of sight and started to sing an unrecognizable song, Rory flicked towards an email he’d gotten yesterday—in his own time—but only read this morning from the hiring committee of East Anglia which said tough luck, no job, but in fancier prose.

“So?” Mikayla asked, still oblivious to Rory’s discomfort. She now held her son on her lap. He was not singing anymore but had a stuffed animal in his hand that had a bell on it which he shook every other word of his mother’s. “Any news on the job front? Doesn’t have to be from The School, but one of the many other I know you’ve applied for.”

Rory sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He’d spent the next Saturday trolling through academic listings to see what he could find in his area of American Literature. There were, not surprisingly, little in Canada in that regard but many positions in that specialty in the US. So he shifted tactic once again, applied to a couple schools across the border, and then sent Austin another message over f*******:.

Let’s not talk about The School. And there have been no other job interviews forthcoming, so next question.

“Oh, Rory. I’m sorry.” Mikayla smiled kindly. Her curly red hair swayed as Callum squirmed in her lap, her own lightning bolt-esque personality not diminished by the screen whatsoever. “But at least you’re prepping like a pro, right?”

“Sort of, sure.”

“So something will happen eventually. I know that England seemed so magical, but you just wanted to travel, right? As long as it’s a different school, I know you’ll be happy.”

Rory wanted to shrug again, but he held back so he didn’t seem like a petulant child. His dissertation was on road narratives, like that of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and his dreams of travel were no secret to Mikayla. Or Austin. It was something the two of them brainstormed together. “I appreciate the good thoughts,” Rory said slowly. “But I really did want that job in that school. Austin—”

“Ugh.” It was Mikayla’s turn to be annoyed. Even Callum stopped shaking his toy when he heard the tone in his mother’s voice. “Really? You’re still talking to him?”

“Over Facebook.” Rory opened a browser on his laptop. Austin had read his message but did not reply. “Sometimes, anyway.”

“Oh, sweetie. Why are you still throwing your heart into a bottomless pit?”

“What?”

“Austin broke your heart once when he left without telling anyone, not even the person he was sleeping with,” Mikayla reminded him in her stern voice. “That was bad enough. But he keeps stringing you along, not allowing you to move on. It’s like those blind reviewers at academic journals. They don’t go in with the intention of helping your paper. They go in with the intention of finding your mistakes.”

“That’s not—Austin’s not like—”

“He is, sweetie. He’s just mean sometimes.”

Rory could feel the heat on his cheeks. He didn’t know how to argue with Mikayla because really, she was right. Austin was sort of mean. He was smart, so Rory thought that his callous comments were sometimes part of being smart. But as Mikayla listed a few conversations they’d had in the past, ones she was around to witness, he remembered the bruised ego he’d almost always come away with. “You’re allowed to have your own thoughts, you know that, right?” Mikayla said. “Even if Austin disagrees with your understanding of an author, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong. Or that he’s right. It’s always more complicated than that.”

“I know. But this isn’t about academics anymore. I just…miss him.”

“I get that. You love him. You miss him. But it’s like a drug, okay? You just need to say no. Lest I break out the frying pan a la Rachel Leigh Cook and show you your brain on drugs.”

Rory chuckled as he remembered the public service announcement preventing drug use from the late 1990s, which was a remake of a 1980s PSA. For a minute, his ego and heart were forgotten as he pulled up the commercial on YouTube and sent it to Mikayla for her to watch as well. They lost a couple minutes going through retro commercials, especially the Canadian Heritage minutes that seemed to always be on during their youth. Even though they’d only met one another in their first year of graduate school, they had both grown up in small towns that made them stay indoors for long stretches of time during the winter, had a limited friend group the rest of the year, and so, ended up watching a lot of TV instead. Mikayla had her super religious parents to thank for TV seeming like a forbidden object all itself, so she snuck viewings as much as she could, while Rory had his own quips and hang-ups about why he wanted to stay inside and not play with anyone from the neighbourhood, even when they came by to ask.

“Hey, Kay,” Rory asked, once their retro wave had died down. “Do you think I sound gay?”

“Not this again.” Mikayla shifted in her seat freely, now freed from Callum at her side since he’d run off during the second Heritage Minute commercial. “You do know that I can’t possibly answer that question.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a ‘damned if I do and damned if I don’t’ situation.” Mikayla made a stressed face and turned to see if Callum heard anything of her cursing. Satisfied that he hadn’t, she gave Rory a withering look. “I love you. It doesn’t matter if you sound queerer than a three-dollar bill when you get excited and speak really fast and lisp. So what? Who cares?”

“It matters when I’m in an interview.” Rory felt a knot at the base of his stomach. He wanted to believe that his lack of a job came from his mistake about British vs. English as descriptors for literature, but what if it had been something as trivial, but also as pivotal, as his voice? “What if they heard me speak and decided not to hire me because I’m gay?”

“Well, then that’s illegal. But I don’t think that’s the case. This is a university, and it’s the UK. They don’t exactly have a homophobic reputation. And even if they did,” Mikayla said, her voice shifting a register to sound like her classroom voice, the one in grad school where she would correct fellow students on page numbers for the readings, “they can’t actually tell anything from your voice.”

“Come on. You’ve heard it.”

“I’ve also seen The Birdcage, where Robin Williams and Hank Azaria also do that voice. They’re not gay, just good actors. And even Hank Azaria then went onto The Simpsons where he played an Indian man, which he clearly is not. So a voice is just a voice. But hey, you hear about that doc, by the way? The Problem with Apu? It’s pretty good. All about how Azaria—”

“Stay on track,” Rory said.

“Right, right. We’ll watch it later. But seriously…it doesn’t matter if your voice sounds gay, even if you are gay, because the schools you’re working for shouldn’t care. That’s illegal now, and even if they could get away with not facing a harassment or discrimination suit, then you still shouldn’t want to be part of their institute if they didn’t want to hire you because you say fith and chipth.” Mikayla paused to let him know that her imitation was not done out of meanness, but of the point she was trying to make. “Even if you could sound like the straightest man in the world, and you wowed them with your expertise on all things manly, you wouldn’t want to work there because you’d know, deep down, they wouldn’t respect you. So if you think you didn’t get this job because your voice gave you away, then good riddance.”

Rory was quiet for a long time before he nodded. He was relieved that he’d called Mikayla now and regretted that he’d gone to Austin first to ask about this issue. Austin would never answer that f*******: question because, of course, he’d already answered it in person a half dozen times. And Austin always wanted to tell Rory the bald-faced truth, which was yes, he sounded gay. On a regular basis. Sometimes Rory could control his voice and he’d practiced for years doing that, but there was only so much he could do. At six feet tall, with broad shoulders, and wearing that grey suit, he might look like an average guy, downright butch—but open his mouth to speak, and there the real Rory was. The childhood taunts came back to him, he realized now, almost every time he asked Austin for the truth and he told him it without filter.

But Mikayla told him the truth, too. Only she did so in a way that communicated love and respect. And that also told the world to f**k off in the process. “Thank you,” Rory said. “I needed to hear this.”

“Good. What I live for. Especially since I can’t get in the classroom very much now. But hopefully I can fix that soon, too. So in the meantime, I will live vicariously through you. Tell me. How’s the PhD defense coming along?”

“Ugh,” Rory said again. This was yet another point that had come up during the interview that haunted him: his lack of official PhD date. He’d finished all the writing last year, and finished the edits earlier in the winter semester, and the rest of his committee had been sent the final product. He’d done all the paperwork and tests he’d needed to do. There was just…waiting now and waiting for a date that seemed so far off in the horizon. “I can’t even think of that right now. Seems like a fantasy.”

“Don’t lose hope,” Mikayla said. “You’re still ahead of everyone else.”

“Not Austin.”

“Shush about Austin. I’m still convinced that boy cheated in some way.”

“What? How?”

Mikayla shrugged, clearly not wanting to get into it, though she and Rory both had witnessed some fishy things in Austin’s writing and research process. When Mikayla’s cheeks went red, too, Rory suspected her resistance to confide was more related to her owns stalled out status on her PhD. “You do know,” Mikayla soon added, “that the average span for a PhD isn’t the four years they give us funding for. It’s upwards of seven or eight. So really, I’m on track even with all my breaks for babies and you’re still ahead of the game.”

“Neat,” Rory said. “But let’s talk about only good things.”

“Fine, fine.” Mikayla held up her hands. “I was trying to lighten the mood with all my YouTube challenges, but that can be more of an annoyance than anything else. So, my friend, you either need to get a baby so we can talk about diapers and cute things, or you need to get a hobby. And applying for more academic jobs, or writing academic articles, does not count.”

Rory had to laugh, though he’d also felt caught. In several other open tabs on his computer were academic journals, prompts, and numerous half-started paragraphs for said journals. “Does it count as a hobby if the academic article is in a different subject area?”

“So not American road literature of the 1950s, but American train fiction of the 1850s?”

“Sort of.” Rory flicked open one of the tabs and read off the prompt. It was on American historical figures of the Prohibition era. “I figured I could write something about gangsters.”

“Huh. You like gangsters? We’ve never once even referenced The Godfather. Let me tell you, I can reference the heck out of that movie. And make it child-friendly in the process.”

“Very skilled.”

“Totally. So how are you writing about gangsters?”

“I don’t know,” Rory said, shrugging. “I figured I could use my knowledge of the budding highway system to talk about prohibition and smuggling…It sounded different. A challenge—”

“Uh-huh. Cool. But you need a hobby. A real hobby. Not one that involves books.”

“Well…I was thinking of going for a run today.”

“Of course, you say that. All your hobbies turn into productions. I should really stop fighting who you are deep inside and let you workaholic yourself. If I keep encouraging you to be different, alas, I’ll be no better than the possibly homophobic university who rejects you because of a voice.” Mikayla shook her head again, but her tone was playful. “Didn’t you even apply for a PhD because you were bored one night?”

Rory smiled—a real one this time, not one induced by YouTube clips or borrowed nostalgia. His application story was legendary, at least among the three of them during their first year in graduate school. He’d been bored one night and decided to write out long winded thoughts he’d had about the American authors he’d grown up loving, but since he was Canadian, the landscape they explored felt more like fantasy than reality. These winding thoughts had turned into his plan of study, and since the boredom persisted for another couple nights, he found some schools who were still accepting applications this late in the year, and then voila. He was accepted into graduate school on a whim, with a scholarship and everything.

“Still seems like fate, you know?” Mikayla said. “Like you were supposed to come here out of all the places in Canada. Why not just stay here and accept that fate?”

“I can do that, too. I just…feel like I need to move a bit more. I think.” A flash of Austin’s face came into Rory’s mind, especially from that first year when things truly did seem fated and he and Austin talked long into the night about world travel. Rory soon pushed it aside.

“You need to move a bit more, sure,” Mikayla said. “But make sure you have someone different in that passenger seat, all right?”

Rory sighed. “Hey. Let’s talk about something happy again. Show me your other child.”

With a sigh, Mikayla obliged. While she left her perch in front of her webcam, Rory browsed some Canadian universities for jobs. He was soon halted in his mission by the beginning tune of The Lion King’s theme music. Mikayla had come back into the living room where her Skype was set up and held her eight-month-old daughter, Devin, like Simba from the movie. She even sang the first few verses of the song, though they were garbled by her lack of Swahili. The entire time, Devin smiled and giggled.

“How’s that for positivity?” Mikayla sat back in her desk chair and continued to tickle her daughter so she guffawed.

“Excellent, thank you so much,” Rory said. “You get an A.”

“Thanks. I’ll put that on the fridge and everything for later.” Mikayla gave her daughter a soother so she could continue the conversation with only minor interruptions. “You really do need a hobby. Not a productive one. One more like day drinking.”

“No, enough alcoholics in a PhD program. And in the books I read. I’m not ending up like Kerouac.”

“Fair enough. So take me day drinking. I can be your hobby.”

“Um.” Rory wasn’t quite sure where to start with these statements. “Aren’t you…?”

“Not allowed to have any fun, or a sense of self, according to most parenting books? Yes. Technically, I’m still breast feeding. But I can drink something if I pump before, and she’s going to get weaned soon, so she’s gotta get used to me not being around entirely. Either way, I will figure it out so you don’t have to make that face at me as I tell you the details of breastfeeding.”

Rory relaxed the muscles of his jaw. “Sorry. I know it’s natural and fine and—”

“But you’re, like, super gay.” Mikayla chuckled. “I didn’t need to hear your voice to figure that out. But anyway, please just go out with me? For an afternoon? I just want to live a life…”

“What about babysitting? I thought Andrew needed to be at the hospital?”

“He does. But I’m slowly allowing the idea for his mother to watch the kids. Don’t know why I resisted this for so long. I think I didn’t want to lean too hard on her, make her a babysitter instead of a fun grandma. But I’m dying for adult time, academic adult time. So Doreen is going to help.”

“That’s great, then.” Soon the plan spawned between them as they cross-checked their calendars to see when things would work. Once they found a date they were both free, they stared at one another for a beat before breaking into laughter. Rory couldn’t help but feel utterly bereft of things to do.

Then he remembered the face of the bartender from the night of his interview. The bar was big, and it didn’t solely focus on getting people hammered. There had been a charm to the place, even though he’d only been there for an hour or so, and he’d lost the job he’d thought he’d wanted so badly, he liked it. It would be perfect for the two of them. Maybe that same guy would be working there, too.

“What about The Campus Cavern?” Rory suggested. “You remember that place? They still have a nice arrangement, and there is…um.”

“Ah, I know that expression. We are definitely going to that bar. And you can tell me the rest of the story then. Because right now I hear crying.”

Sure enough, the once light-hearted singing of Callum had now become strained wails. Devin was soon reacting to the cries as well and fussing against Mikayla. She sighed, but also lingered on the screen, her green eyes and wide smile content. “See you around, Rory.”

“Yeah, looking forward to it.”

“And no more job applications!” Mikayla shouted, just before she cut off her Skype.

Rory had no chance to reply. He was soon left staring at his own screen, the dozens of windows open for jobs and academic journals, and then Austin’s f*******: profile. He’d logged on. The green light hovered around his image, and as much as that filled Rory with longing, he now fought it. For the first time in a long time, he realized that being like Gatsby from one of his favourite novels, and continually staring at the distant past horizon, got him nowhere.

He shut down his computer. Then, in spite of what Mikayla had said, he grabbed his sneakers and gym shorts for a run around the block.