It began, as things often do, with an argument over history.

I had bought a Smith Corona just that morning.  It was a beautiful thing—a top-of-the-line, twelve-hundred dollar word processor of the sort that was expected to hold back the tide and eventually make computers obsolete.  Of course that was all wrong, a testament to the sort of eighties cultural logic that had romanticized the prospect of nuclear annihilation—that had made it kitsch for undergrads to dance with tears in their eyes.  But the Smith Corona was still a marvel.  Even though it was about to get whomped in a technological war, its green glow, the light from the screen penetrating an otherwise unlit room, infused me with a sense of power, as though I might triumph in some other world, a world where the clear, curved letters the typewriter’s mechanical keys shaped in that distinctive font would matter.  That first night with it, I worked in the dark contriving the sentences of a new curriculum vitae, while the processor’s radiance lent my skin an otherworldly pallor.

From her perch on my bed, Chloe occasionally looked up from the Robertson Davies she was reading by flashlight and offered advice.  Her father had died less than a month earlier and I suppose that made the issue all the more urgent for her.  Chloe didn’t want me to return to my position at sea, but being a marine engineer wasn’t just a job I held: it was a career—a stable career at that.  On graduation from Georgian College in Owen Sound, Ontario, I’d taken the first opportunity that presented itself—a berth on a tanker working out of Halifax.  I’d relocated, met Chloe.  We’d become a sort-of couple until her father died.  Cancer.  That made us real.  It seemed appropriate—not a sacrifice of autonomy, but a confirmation of the power of a community, albeit a community of two, over death.

Working at sea meant I’d be gone for three months, back for one.  There was no one on my oil tanker who’d had a stable relationship.  On average, everyone I knew who was over forty had married three times.

That would happen to me, too, and we both knew it.

I’d been on vacation for three weeks, with six days left.  I’d been sent home early for the funeral, and the funeral seemed to last the whole time I was back.  Chloe was inconsolable.  So, at last, I had come to terms with a way of “fixing” things.  I would find a way to translate my work as a marine engineer to a shore job.  I was a steam engineer at sea; I’d be a steam engineer in Halifax.

All I had to do was look for stacks.

To an engineer, every city smoke stack is a monument to good taste. 

What might seem bothersome, an eyesore to the uninitiated, is a work of beauty to the trained eye, a tower of industry as aesthetically pleasing as the battlements on a castle.  I had often in the last weeks wandered the perimeter around the downtown core and admired the brickwork ringing the city with its emotionless vitality.  Who knew the vision of the original architects, some dead a century to judge by the brickwork?  What was that city they had looked upon with such vigour?  No doubt some of the stacks had cast their first shadows over dirt streets.

How proud the fresh rich orange tube rising above the Victoria General Hospital, the plumage of a Foster Wheeler D-type! or the rich red brick at the Catholic School, symbolizing the old traditions, home not only to green-tartanned students in their old-school uniforms, but also to a Scotch boiler of the sort that first powered ships filled with immigrants in the early days of the twentieth century, just before a Scotch boiler-powered munitions ship blew the North End of Halifax to smithereens in 1917.  The history of progress, the march of civilization, was inscribed on the outstretched arms of faith that rose above the harbour.

This was my domain:  the world beneath the stacks—a tidy room with a boiler to tend to.  Shift work, no doubt, but quiet work away from the madding crowd, where I could ply my trade and, on quiet nights, bathed in the symphonic hum of a well-contented fire-tube, put my feet up and read.  I was into Shaw at the time.  The trip before, the Missions to Seamen had delivered a box of his plays to my ship and I had begun working my way through them at sea and was now polishing them off on shore.  I was saving Major Barbara for last, thinking that a war play would make fine punctuation to my understanding of Shaw’s polite socialism.  I could well imagine the luxury of reading while enclosed in a red-brick room beneath the red-brick stack that marked my sanctuary like a gravestone.

Chloe frowned at the screen. 

She had her hair pulled up like she meant business.   She said, “It’s awfully thin.”

She was right.  The fact that I was twenty-one made my task peculiarly difficult.  How could I be concise when I had so little material to pare into pithy chunks of meaning?  All I had mustered so far was a single-page resume on which I listed four past jobs—three of them were summer placements given to me by the school while I was still a cadet.  The only other position I’d ever worked was the job I’d be going back to in a week.  In an effort to flesh things out, I’d been puzzling over some way to write “meritorious” without sounding like an asshole—in my brief career, I’d never heard an engineer use the word.

“What about high school,” she asked, “didn’t you work then?”

It was true.  I had worked in high school, but the very thought of the experience conjured hateful memories.  For six months during grade twelve I was a dishwasher in a local restaurant.  It was a humiliating task, endless drudgery with no benefits, working for chefs who assumed I was only moderately more human than the Hobart dishwasher that dominated my reeking corner of the kitchen.

“It doesn’t count,” I replied, but that was a lie.  Being a dishwasher had determined me to become an engineer.

“Everything counts,” she replied with some irritation.  She wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip away.  I absolutely HAD to get a shore job, and she would make sure of it.

“I washed dishes.  How desperate will that look if I have to put it on a resume!”

“If you put that on, you’ll hit the second page.  Don’t you want a second page."

“Everyone wants a second page,” I said, driven by irritation to irony. “But it’s how you make the second page that matters.”

“Not to them.” It was going to be another “them” conversation.  Chloe didn’t like “them.” She was always describing “them” in terms of defects.  She said, “It won’t matter to them what you did.  All that will matter is that you’ve made the second page.”

“It’s humiliating.”  There.  I said it.

"No it’s not,” she countered.  “Put it in.”  The argument might have lasted all night.  I chose not to let it, which means that I won.

The next morning we were off, strolling Halifax streets, cruising for stacks, with the two different versions of my life story in Chloe’s bag. 

Twenty-five resumes made me out to be a one-page engineer, another twenty-five told “them” I was a two-pager who had, quite naturally, come to engineering through dishwashing.  We had agreed to alternate resumes and see for future reference which landed a job.  Chloe was a student of “them.”

Our first stop was at a magic shop on Prince.  It was a humid store.  It held the heat of a late May morning so fiercely the walls sweated the smell of incense.  The store was stocked with trinkets, the whole world fetishized into peculiar shapes:  wooden elephants painted green were a chip off of Africa.  Under the front counter a wealth of cut glass stared back at customers.  There were cats and Victorians and elaborate crystals that suggested magic for anyone willing to fetishize his or her own imagination. But there were no stacks.

The next stop was at a patio bar where Chloe tried to read my fortune with the tarot cards she’d bought. I ordered a quick beer, but drank it slowly when I realized the pack came with a book explaining the history of the tarot and the meaning of the cards, and that Chloe was determined to be accurate in her reading.  I said, “You know, we really have to move on if we’re going to make any sense out of this day.”  But Chloe insisted and so I took off my watch and put it in my pocket and I ordered another beer.

When we finally hit the streets the sun was in full temper and I found myself drained by the heat and the beer.  There were three stacks on Spring Garden that we followed like a pillar of fire through an Egyptian wasteland.  Every time I passed in my paper I was met with courtesy.  There seemed a brotherhood of engineers, and I noticed the men I met looked very much alike.  They were thirty with the long faces peculiar to Scots Haligonians.  I noticed that Chloe, an Acadian, took an instant dislike to all three of them.

We hooked round to Water Street where the same procedure was repeated at the buildings adjacent to another company of stacks.  We toured historic properties, dropped another resume off at the museum.  “Still Scottish,” I murmured, and Chloe asked what I meant.  “Everyone we meet looks like he could be from the same bloody family.  Haven’t you noticed?  The nose, the ears, even the way they talk.”

In all we found seventeen offices next to different shapes and sizes of stacks in which men with long faces were willing to take my resume.

“That was a good day,” said Chloe.  “I thought fifty resumes was unrealistic.”

“How many do you think will reply?”

“No more than seven.”

“That would be enough, I think.  It’s not good pay you realize.  I’d just scrape by.” My current job paid plenty.

She stopped me then and held my eyes with a deep, emotive look.  “All that matters is being together.  Who cares about money?  You can’t eat it.  You can’t wear it.  You can’t live in it.”  It seemed to me that she was wrong on all three counts.  It seemed to me that money bought food, clothing and shelter.  It seemed to me that that was precisely why it was minted under armed guard.

But it was late and I was tired and it didn’t matter anyway.  Seven prospective employers were not going to reply.  I was not going to give up on the job that paid enough money for us to dog around Halifax buying useless things in useless stores and getting tipsy by twelve.  No one would call.  I didn’t look like them and it was too much of a coincidence that they all looked the same.  And what good is any resume sitting in a filing cabinet, if it makes it that far?  At every place I heard the exact same statement:  “We’ll keep this on file for a year.”  It sounded rehearsed to the point of being meaningless.  It had never occurred to me before that I could be an alien in my own country amongst people who looked remarkably the same as me, but there it was.  Still, there was no point telling Chloe I’d be back at sea in a week.  Instead, I held her hand and I told her, “We don’t need money.” 

She held me fast.  “We’ll be okay,” she replied.  “You like me.”  It was a “questment”:  a statement in search of an answer.

I said, “Yes, but we might need a new city.”

It felt strange walking back to our apartment, hand-in-hand, knowing that, in time, I’d let her break up with me.  It wouldn’t happen just now, but it would happen.  As sure as Chloe was that my being a sailor meant I led a double life, I knew that I was living one life – one life that she knew only half of, and that she never would know completely.  She wouldn’t allow herself.  As sure as she was that I was in need of amendment, that I had to be corrected of folly, I knew that we could not sustain our love.  And the stacks we pursued like a faint hope, now seemed to attest to that fact.  They were the tombstones of an idea I’d had about my life.  And when Chloe read my cards, when she pulled the fool and said it meant our spirits, our souls, were commensurate – I believe that was the word she picked  – I knew for certain we read the signs differently.

It was the saddest walk we’d taken together since the funeral.  Slow.  Loving.  Lost.  But as the apartment drew in sight, with its tiny chimney hardly announcing its presence, I observed in the dwindling light that Chloe’s jaw was set, and I thought she’d be okay.  Life holds death.  It just does.  And sometimes we hold each other.  And that’s okay.