Toronto Noir Page 19

  He doesn’t return to her window that night. Or the next. But on Thursday, waking with a People still bent between her fingers, he’s there.

  This time she screams. A bubbly, uncertain utterance that takes a moment to find itself, before coming out as a fullthroated horror movie declaration. It makes him disappear. Yet when she goes to the window, expecting to catch him in hasty retreat, he is merely backstepping down the alley, facing her, taking his time. A kid being called away from joining the line for a roller coaster.

  Over the next week, she catches him twice. Which means that he has come more often than this and she has slept through it. Or perhaps not. She believes she is able to detect his presence no matter how deep in slumber he might find her. They are connected, the two of them. Not romantically, nothing like that. In fact, he comes pretty close to disgusting her. His unmet need. The passivity. The lies he must be telling someone. Maybe it’s all her experience being around watchers and the watched. Whatever it is, without liking him, he’s become hers.

  She calls him Tom.

  It’s only when she spots him that she realizes that she was looking for him. Walking ahead of her along King Street near Bay. A suit among suits. She knows it’s him from the shape of the back of his head, his swimmer’s shoulders, the ambling steps that carry him faster than would appear possible: the parts of him she sees each time he makes his back alley getaway.

  He hasn’t seen her. She had been making her way along the opposite side of the street. Her ostensible purpose was a time-killing wander that would lead her down into the underground malls for a bit of shopping (a new bra) and maybe lunch in the food court (nasty Chinese) before her shift at For Your Eyes Only. But she knows she has no reason to be down here with the traders and lawyers and bankers, other than to see if Tom is one of them. For her to see him for a change.

  So you’ve got a thing for street meat, do you? she thinks, trailing him after he buys a hot dog from a vendor on the corner. Maybe that’s what I am to you. Street meat.

  Tom stops to wave to some others at the far side of the Toronto-Dominion building’s broad concourse. A group of men and women laughing at some shared joke that Tom’s appearance has reminded them of. Friends. They’re just office pals, she feels, but he would have plenty of others. University drinking buddies, childhood mates, close siblings. His long list of associations tests the memory of his BlackBerry’s address book. It makes her wonder about her own friend count, who she would call first if she had to confess something terrible or share lottery-winning news. Soon this question becomes who she would call at all.

  He moves on, wiping the mustard off his hands, tossing the soiled napkin into a trash container in a graceful, basketball free throw. He joins the others funneling into the building, people moving purposefully toward their places on the sixty floors above built slim and black as a domino tile.

  A truck passes on the street between them. When she can see into the glass-walled lobby again, Tom is gone.

  That could have been it. A “chance sighting” that provided her with some small measure of private revenge, a turning of tables. But instead of letting go of Tom, she starts to follow him. Even after several days pass without catching him at her window, she spends her free afternoons and days off shadowing his movements, noting what he eats for lunch, the routines and schedules that make up his life. He’s a lawyer. Married (a gold band), with a family (a baby seat in the back of his Mercedes). He golfs, but she suspects this is mainly in a client-entertaining capacity. A big tipper. As far as she can tell, hers is the only bedroom he peeps into. Then again, because she works most nights, she couldn’t say this for sure.

  It’s just a game she’s playing, a tit-for-tat, which prevents her hobby from being a violation or strange or sad, though she can’t help wondering if it is some or all of these things. She’s getting to know him. Somehow the anonymity of their relationship only makes it more intimate, in the way that all shames are intimate.

  She continues to wait for him to appear at her window. Yet over the days—and then the weeks—of her surveillance, he doesn’t return. It’s ridiculous, she knows, but she can’t help feeling a rejection every night she stays up late, her eyes on the wall across the alley, waiting for him to break the spell of invisibility that’s been cast upon her. She’s angry with him, but her anger is not for his perversity, but his rudeness. She’s been twice wronged. Once for peeping on her, and twice for not keeping his promise to return.

  On her day off, she waits in an idling taxi on King Street, and when his car emerges from the underground parking lot, she instructs the driver to follow him.

  She’d expected this part—the car chase through the late rush hour traffic—to feel like a movie. Instead, it makes her wonder if she’s going to throw up out her open window. It’s sick, and it makes her feel sick. But she can’t stop. Can’t, meaning won’t. Can’t, meaning something portentous and life-altering has been deemed to hinge on where Tom’s journey ends, and what happens when he arrives there.

  They head north up Bathurst. Past the gaggle of squeegee kids skipping suicidally through the lanes like filthy elves at Queen, the bleary-eyed hospital workers in their scrubs at Dundas, and up beyond Honest Ed’s, where downtown gives way to leafy, residential blocks in which, when she was first looking for a place to live, she’d viewed a dozen basement apartments she couldn’t afford.

  The Mercedes takes a right. She tells the cab driver to make the same turn. A couple blocks on, across from the park on Albany that borders a huge, seemingly half-finished stone church, Tom parks at the curb. She tells the driver to stop.

  “Are you, like, a detective or something?” the driver asks her. What she’s doing suddenly gives her a thrill. This isn’t some lonely, pointless quest after all. It’s a job.

  “Yes,” she says. “A private investigator, actually.”

  She watches as Tom gets out of his car and walks up to the front door of his house. One of the stately, renovated Victorians that tend to be featured in the Real Estate section of the Globe, the only pages she looks through sitting at For Your Eyes Only’s bar as she finishes a coffee before her shift. A tasteful home with historical quirks: original stained glass, tin ceilings. Located in the Annex, a neighborhood she has been told was once a ghetto for students and immigrants and hippies, but is now an enclave of million-plus properties for those professionals not quite ready for their graduation to Rosedale or Forest Hill. The sort of house she has literally dreamed of. And in these dreams, a man like Tom has been there with her, kissing the back of her neck as she tends to the fresh-cut flowers he has brought home for her.

  Once he’s gone inside, she waits for the taxi to leave and then, as though the idea has only just occurred to her, she walks to the parked Mercedes. She is alone on the shady street. A dog yips in a neighbor’s yard. More distant, a child practices piano scales.

  She bends at the waist and trots across Tom’s lawn, arms swinging closely at her sides, as if a soldier making a smaller target of herself in the midst of cross fire. The grass under her feet has been recently mowed. After her weeks of breathing Queen Street alley flavors—rank garbage, hobo poo—the smell is lush, exotic.

  Around the side of Tom’s house she lowers herself to her knees. Crawls into the flowerbed beneath the living room’s bay window. It strikes her that her fear of turning around, of not seeing what she’s come here to see, is greater than her fear of being discovered. She is a private investigator. But somehow it is her own privacy, not Tom’s, that she is investigating.

  Slowly, inch by inch, she raises her head. Holds her breath.

  An empty room. Traditionally furnished, ancient rugs on the hardwood. But this oldness is offset by the abstract canvases on the walls, a pair of cubist nudes. A room that speaks of a family’s generational hand-me-downs—the slightly frayed sofa and chairs—as well as the sensual vitality of the current inhabitants. She hadn’t seen the living room precisely this way in her dreams, but now that she has seen
it, she knows this is how she will start dreaming of it.

  A child totters into the room. Followed by her mother, laughing after her. The child is Pampers-ad cute, the mother clear-skinned, treadmilled. Tom’s wife. A woman she would like to study further if it weren’t for the arrival of Tom himself.

  He is laughing too. His daughter is at the age of still learning to walk but believing she already can, so that her movements are a comical series of lurches and grabs. He comes to stand in the middle of the room. His wife chasing after the little girl, both circling the coffee table.

  Happiness. This is what she’d title this picture, if it was a picture. For if these people aren’t happy, if what they have and share and can look forward to doesn’t make them happy, then who is?

  Tom turns. And sees her.

  Neither of them move. Neither speak. Tom’s wife and daughter continue to swirl around him like an eddying tide upon a rock. He’s not surprised to see her there looking in his window. It’s as though he’s been expecting her for some time.

  She will debate this point later, when she remembers this moment and stretches it out, mining its details. It may only be her imagination, but her vision is good, her view unobscured. There is only a sheet of glass and fifteen feet of air-conditioned space between them, which just makes her more certain. He smiles at her.

  He is rich. And she is poor.

  She realizes this only now, her feet sinking in the pungent mulch of his flowerbed. Of course she’s always been aware that she doesn’t have money, but looking into Tom’s home, she sees that she will likely never have it. And not just money, but all the tailored, meaningful, identity-making things she’s dreamed of one day acquiring. Opportunities, epiphanies. An escalation of jobs on one of the movie sets where Toronto is made to look like New York. All the good things that aren’t destined for her.

  She stares at Tom, and he at her. His eyes tell her something. How moving to Toronto from wherever she came from could open up a world, but just as easily expose her existing world as the limited, luckless thing she sometimes fears it is. She thought the two of them were connected, but she was wrong. They are strangers. As it is for the patrons at For Your Eyes Only, the one rule of living here, in a real city, is that she can look at the lives of others, but not touch.

  A TASTE OF HONEY

  BY KIM MORITSUGU

  St. Lawrence Market

  I thought about calling in sick today because of the big-whoop movie shoot that’s going on, the shoot that everyone in the South Market Building, the whole neighborhood it seems, is so stoked about. But if I avoided every person, casting director, film production outfit, or theater company that has ever rejected me for a part, I’d never go anywhere or see anyone. And if I stayed home, I’d have that shitty not-invited-to-the-cool-party feeling, even though the shoot won’t be cool, or a party. I’d just spend the day writing angry thoughts in my journal anyway, and listening to my stomach acid churn, and the self-help books say I should accept the successes of others in the face of my defeats, not obsess about or dwell on them, so fine, I’ll go to work.

  This way, I can hear the banal and inane comments live—from Karen, my boss at The Honey Hut, and Nick from the cheese shop across the way, and Nadia from the butcher counter—about how they saw Denzel and Scarlett in person and how short they are and how there’s an awful lot of waiting around in the moviemaking business, isn’t there? They’ll say: But you know that already, don’t you, Jen, because of that movie you were in. With Mark Wahlberg, wasn’t it? When you were listed in the credits as “Girl in Disco?” That was funny. You were good in it, though too bad about the makeup job they did on you. And that leather bikini top you had to wear. How come you aren’t in this movie, didn’t you audition for it?

  I might as well sooner rather than later give them a bullshit line about how I guess I didn’t get the part because I wasn’t right for it. Rather than because I’m a big motherfucking loser who, when I heard that the call was for an “office receptionist with attitude,” thought the role was so right for me, would be so easy to play, that I made the mistake of getting my hopes up, when how many times have I sworn never to hope again, never to go into an audition expecting anything at all? N-to-the-fucking-power-of-n times is how many.

  I ride my bike downtown like always, and coast along Market Street, past the lineup of camera trucks and movie trailers staked out by a row of orange pylons. When I park the bike at my usual stand and lock it up between two big rigs, I kind of hope some crew guy will emerge and tell me I can’t leave it there, so I can get testy with him, and maybe start a yelling match, but no such luck. I light up my prework cigarette, step over the stream of electrical cables winding across the sidewalk, settle into my smoking spot under an overhang, and hear a squeaky young voice say, “Jen? Is that you?”

  Coming at me is a short, thin girl in a floaty top and tight jeans tucked into stiletto-heeled boots. Her too-long-to-be-real curly hair extensions coil and loop over and around her pert tits. What is she … eighteen? And how the hell does she know me?

  “It’s me, Honey Cooper,” she says. She has a pretty face, all blue eyes and cute upturned nose and glowing skin and curly eyelashes. “From the Ryerson theater program? We met when you came out to speak to my acting class last year, and you said it was funny my name was Honey because you worked at a honey place at St. Lawrence Market? Hey, that’s where we are now. Small world or what?”

  Christ, I met her when my old drama prof invited me to speak to the naïve little undergrads on “Hard Truths about the Acting Life.” The topic was the prof’s idea, not mine, though I had no trouble spinning cautionary tales about the profession based on my own bitter experience. This kid must be one of the suck-ups who approached me after my talk and claimed to be a fan of my work, which consisted, ten years post-graduation, of twenty measly acting credits. Still consists of twenty measly credits a year later, fuck me.

  I say, “Is Honey your real name?”

  “No, it’s a nickname that my grandma gave me. When I was two years old, she thought I was so sweet that—”

  “Did you graduate from the Ryerson program yet?”

  “Um, yeah, last spring. And I’ve been auditioning like crazy for anything and everything ever since, like you said people have to do when they’re starting out. I want to thank you for giving that talk, by the way. It made such a difference to get the inside story on the acting life, to know what to expect, how hard it would be to break through.” She tilts her head and smiles. Fetchingly. “You were so inspiring!”

  This is hard to believe, considering that I’d ended my talk by telling the class that if I’d known when I was at their age and stage what I knew ten years later, I would have given up on acting, and set my sights instead on marrying some rich guy who could bankroll a comfortable lifestyle. I was dead serious, but the class laughed as if I were joking.

  I muster up some fake interest in Honey’s career. “And how’s it going? Have you done any commercials yet? My first job was in a commercial. For tampons.”

  “I remember that one! Where you wore little white shorts and rode a bicycle? That was a classic! But hey, I’m doing better than that, because this is my first job, today, here. Is that wild or what?”

  The dreadful meaning of her words seeps into my brain and clogs it up so that I can only repeat, “Today? Here?”

  “In the movie that’s shooting up the street! It’s such a great story how I got the part: I auditioned to be a receptionist, and I was mad too young for it, but they liked me so much they created a character in the movie, just for me!” Her eyes dance while she tells this story. The Macarena, it looks like, but still.

  A vein in my forehead starts to throb, and I say, dully, “Just for you.”

  “Isn’t that amazing? I play a babysitter who looks after Denzel’s kids. The scene we’re doing today is where I take the kids downtown to meet their dad at his office and we witness a shooting on the street that leads to the whole home invasion thi
ng that happens later when I get caught in the cross fire and die.”

  “You die? That’s great.” Her eyes stop dancing and I say, “For the acting opportunity, I mean. Death scenes can be real career-makers.”

  “I know! But I have to get through this week’s scenes first, and I’m so nervous! What if I sweat all over Denzel when I meet him today? Or faint on him. Wouldn’t that be the worst?” She emits merry peals of laughter at this point, I’m not sure why—because she’s a merry young soul, maybe. I, meanwhile, struggle to swallow the anti-merriment bile that has surged into my mouth.

  I can still taste it when an assistant dude comes out of a trailer and calls to Honey that she’s needed inside.

  “Hey, break a leg,” I say, in all sincerity.

  “Thanks. I’m so glad I ran into you. You’re, like, my role model or whatever. Come visit me on-set when you have a lunch break?”

  I’m in no mood for improv, but I feign regret. “I don’t know if I’ll get a break. The Honey Hut gets busy at this time of day.”

  “Please? You could coach me. Give me some more of your wise advice.”

  “Tell you what: I’ll try.” Sure, I could coach her a little. Or I could cut the bitch. Either one.

  My boss Karen is all agog when I go inside and tell her I ran into someone I know who has a part in the movie. She says, “Could she introduce us to Denzel, do you think?”