Toronto Noir Read online

  “I wouldn’t ask her to.”

  “Because it would be uncool, you mean?”

  “Beyond uncool.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Never mind. What do you say we put out the lavender honey to sample?”

  She touches my arm with her bony hand. “I meant that I’m sorry I wasn’t sensitive to how awkward it might be for you to work today, with the shoot going on outside.”

  Awkward? Before Honey popped up, the situation was awkward. Now, it’s mortifying, enraging, soul-destroying. I try to breathe deeply and evenly, which is difficult when my forehead vein is throbbing to the beat of a goddamned rock band. When I can speak without spitting, I say, “So, lavender honey, then?”

  Karen shakes her head. “I don’t know how you can stand a life in show business.”

  Me either.

  She says, “It must be so difficult, what with the constant rejection and being passed over in favor of people who are probably no more talented than you are.”

  Probably? What the fuck’s with probably?

  I spend the next few hours minding the hut, serving customers, and thinking of ways to harm Honey, remove her from the local talent pool. The butter knives we use to spread honey on crackers don’t have sharp edges, but applied with force at the right angle, they could draw blood. The honey walnut cake that we serve could do damage if Honey has an allergy to nuts, but what are the odds of that? I’m picturing taking the end of one of her hair extensions, winding it around the electric juicer we use to squeeze the lemons for honey lemonade, and turning the power to high, when Honey herself shows up at the stand, in full makeup.

  She says, “They don’t need me on the set for at least another hour, so I thought I’d come over and visit. Hey, this place is cute!”

  Karen begs to be introduced, asks Honey a flurry of questions about Denzel, and gives her a free jar of our finest orangeblossom honey. Honey proclaims delight at this gift, the two of them chat away, and Karen doesn’t read my eyes when I use them to communicate volumes—or even a haiku—about how I want Honey to go away, not linger. “Take a break with Honey, go outside, get some fresh air,” Karen says. “I’ll be fine here.”

  I take Honey out to the second-floor veranda on the south side of the building, a picnic tabled area with a less-than-enchanting view of the Gardiner Expressway, an affordable housing complex, and the occasional homeless person shambling by with a shopping buggy. She refuses my offer of a cigarette, I light mine up anyway, and I let the wind blow my exhaled smoke in her direction, but she doesn’t flinch, only retrieves a few pages of script from her bag and says, “Would you mind running lines with me? Pretty please?”

  Maybe I can hold up the train of her gown when she goes onstage at the Academy Awards to collect her first Oscar too.

  The scene she wants to rehearse calls for her to walk along the shop-lined street, hand-in-hand with two adorable children, singing “The Wheels on the Bus” (Is this cloying and cliché enough, this setup for violence? I can already hear how the scene will be scored, with pingy piano music in a minor key), when a street thug with a gun pops out of a picturesque doorway and, right before the traumatized eyes of the kids and babysitter, shoots dead a gangster who is getting into a limo.

  To entertain myself and help Honey get a feel for the material, I could do the voices of the characters in the scene, alternate my pitch and cadence between those of the kids and the adults. But reading the lines in a flat, uninflected tone, like casting directors do whenever I audition, is way more fun. Especially if doing so might freak Honey out or throw her off.

  She does better than I thought she would reciting her lines opposite my monotone. She’s not stellar, but not terrible either. The consolation is that she’s not as confident in her line readings as someone in her charmed position could be.

  After we’ve run through the scene, she bites her lip and says, “What do you think? Am I underplaying it too much? Should I go bigger?”

  I’m stubbing out my cigarette when she says this—not on her arm, because a cigarette burn would not render her unemployable or even unconscious, and scars can be covered with makeup, so why bother?—but on the tarmac floor of the veranda. I grind out the butt, and realize there’s more than one way to end her career before it starts.

  I say, “Now that you mention it, I think you could go bigger. In fact, you should. Definitely. Good idea.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I’ll let you in on a trade secret: You know that crap about how in the theater you have to play to the upper balcony, but in the movies you’re supposed to be low-key in close-up?”

  She blanches under the heavy makeup. “That’s crap?”

  “I’m afraid so. Especially for someone like you who’s petite to begin with—what height are you without heels, four-footeleven?”

  “I’m five-three!”

  “Same thing. And you’re so young too. If you underplay your part, you’ll be invisible. Which is great if you want no one to notice you in the role, if you want to let the scene be about the other actors and the stunts and the special effects.”

  “I don’t want that. This is supposed to be my big break!”

  “Then make yourself memorable.”

  “Let’s try the scene again,” she says, “and I’ll play it up.”

  She’s such an easy mark, I almost feel bad about what I’m doing to her. Almost.

  Karen slips out during the afternoon to watch what she can of the shoot from behind a barricade on the street, and reports back that multiple takes were done of a scene that involved Honey. When I press her for details, like were Honey’s reactions the focus of the retakes, and did Honey seem to be overacting, she says she doesn’t know, the whole setup was a little confusing. Also disappointing, because boo-hoo, she didn’t see Denzel.

  I force myself to saunter outside rather than run when I emerge from the Market Building after 6, after we’ve closed up shop. Dusk has fallen, Front Street rumbles with rush hour traffic, and on the side streets, crew people are packing and loading up equipment. The day’s shooting is done then, but is Honey also finished? As in fired? I’m starting to think she’s skipped off without saying goodbye, when she comes out of a trailer in her street clothes, her bag over her shoulder, a tissue in her hand. Could she be wiping her eyes? She is wiping them. Fucking A.

  I erase the diabolical smile that has come out to play on my face, replace it with a picture of innocent concern, wave, and say, “Hey. How’d the day go? You still alive?”

  In answer, she hugs me. Right there on the sidewalk, in the middle of the evening foot traffic, in front of random strangers rushing by on their way home from work or going out to dinner and the theater. She hugs me, and she laughs her annoying merry laugh, peals and all. “It went well, thanks to you! The director loved my energy and passion—he said my performance was perfect for the high drama of the scene. He liked it so much he got the kids to ramp up their reactions to match mine and did lots of takes. And get this: Denzel said that he’d never seen anyone act so well in their first movie role, that I was a natural!”

  Her energy and passion? Please. My chest feels tight and my eyes ache. How much good luck—how much of my goddamned share of all the goddamned available luck in the universe—does this little twat have? I’m about to start sobbing, that or stabbing, but all I can say, stupidly, is, “I thought you were crying just now. You were wiping your eyes.”

  “I was trying to remove some of the makeup they used to cover my freckles. But who cares if I look pancakey? I’m a real movie actress now, woo-hoo! Want to come for a drink with me and celebrate? I’m meeting some friends at a pub around the corner.” She steps over to the curb, then turns back to where I stand, stunned, behind her. “Come,” she says. “Join us. Come and be happy for me.”

  A flower truck, high and wide and white, accelerates along the street behind her, gunning to make the green light. I don’t have to shove her. A good nudge—like a hurrying pede
strian could give her by accident—is enough to topple her, in her silly high-heeled boots, over the curb, onto the road, into the path of the oncoming truck, all five tons of it.

  She died instantly—I know, because I stuck around long enough to watch some guy who’d seen too many medical shows on television run over and feel for a pulse on the neck of her mangled body after the truck driver had slammed on his brakes (and dragged Honey another ten yards) and jumped out of the cab and freaked out big-time. “Call 911!” the guy directed an onlooker, and he bent down to listen for breathing, to see if her chest was moving. A minute later, when he stepped back from her corpse, he said, “Does anyone know this girl? Was anyone with her? Who saw what happened?” People spoke all at once, no one noticed me, the truck driver wailed on, and I walked away, unlocked my bike, plugged in my headphones, and rode home, let music drown out the sounds of the crash that still reverberated in my ears: the screech of the brakes, the dull thud of the impact, the crunch and squeal of metal bending.

  Tomorrow I’ll go to work and Karen will be all teary—she’s boring that way. She’ll ramble on in a quavery voice about how she can’t believe such a tragic accident happened to someone so young and sweet whose life was so full of promise and isn’t it horrible? And I’ll say yeah, I heard it on the local news this morning, what a shock: It is horrible.

  What I won’t say is how horribly unfair it was for Honey to make it without paying her dues, without suffering for her art, without living, every night and day, for years and years, with self-doubt and self-loathing and shame. I won’t say that for Honey to do so well, so easily, was not just undeserved, but not right. Not right at all.

  I’ll let Karen pat me on the arm in the way she does that makes my flesh crawl, and I’ll change the subject, talk about Denzel. Later, when I take my smoke break, I’ll call my agent and tell her enough with sending me out for the ingenue gigs or to play young moms, I’d like to start reading for character roles, for parts that are a bit more meaty and complex and nuanced. I don’t want to get my hopes up—and I won’t, because I know better than to be optimistic, after all this time, after everything I’ve been through—but I think I could do justice to that kind of shit. I really do.

  STALLING

  BY EMILY SCHULTZ

  Parkdale

  Apparently, Bonnie Brown-Switzel couldn’t shop for an affair. One week away from their third anniversary, she kissed Mr. Switzel (as she affectionately called him) goodbye as they both left the loft. She set off through the city to do her errands—grocery list neatly tucked inside an angora mitten. As she headed west, each step her Camper boots took felt extra long. The February street smelled like wet newspaper. The wind carried a rancid whiff from the tucked-away abattoir that kept their condo affordable. Bonnie felt like she was carrying the idea of the affair inside her mouth—words she couldn’t say. She bit her lips to keep it inside, in case it should fall out onto the snow, only to get picked up by the wrong person.

  The boy at the Price Chopper who helped her get the olive oil from the top shelf—“No, the virgin”—had long pink fingers that limped across the labels self-consciously. Two distinct spots of red blazed on his cheeks. His blush was endearing, as were the pale thick lashes that fused above his large eyes. The bone nubs in the back of his pants as he stretched for the proper brand and bottle were irksome. Bonnie urged the dizzy-wheeled cart away.

  She would have to take more decisive action. The last flirtation she’d had was five years ago, with an actor, genteel and passionate, the type who noticed everything, the type who wooed. On her way out of the store, she passed by the karaoke bar where they had met, the black and silver Applause sign still propped up in the front window beside the stage. Five years. Post-marriage, it seemed seven times as long. Not that she had anything to complain about. As marriages went, hers was supine. They were only three years in, but they had passed without quarrel. The memory of the long-past flirtation nibbled at her mind.

  Drawn out again, after ten minutes of walking—farther into the worn-down and newly built-up neighborhood of Parkdale— she turned onto the street where he lived. She didn’t know which house the actor lived in, only the street. It had been so long, and she had never been inside; declined his offer coyly when they’d shared a cab, he stumbling out, she traveling on to the safety of Roncesvalles and High Park. Now, she pulled a tube of Mac from her pocket and coated her mouth without stopping. Her boots punched semi-circular tracks into the snow. Today she enjoyed the tap-tap-tap sounds. Today she wanted to be noticed.

  What would she say if they met? There was plenty of likelihood, after all—this was his street, and he was not the type to hold a day job. She stopped in front of an old Skylark, the color of sky. This was his car, she was sure of it, it must be. He hadn’t had one then, but time had passed. If he had a car, it would be this one. She peered in its windows for hints of its owner—only a snow-scraper and a portable stainless-steel coffee mug—and glanced at the houses on either side. She recalled the strength of the limbs beneath his pressed shirt, his muttony chest, the tab of fur that showed between his clavicles, the rosemary-wine smell of him through cotton-wool. Her heart accelerated. She was almost at the end of his street. If she were to meet him, it must happen now.

  A woman was coming toward her along the same sidewalk, a black Paris-style shawl around her shoulders. Could she have an affair with a woman?

  They shared a look and the woman smiled as they passed one another. Bonnie had no idea the woman was actually his sister-in-law, that she was, at that moment, taking him cough syrup and throat lozenges, that he stood behind one of the tall glaring windows, not recognizing the swaying tendrils of Bonnie’s hair, seeing her only as a man sees two pretty women together on the street, that he watched the exchange with one hand in a striped flannel pocket and the other reaching suddenly to grope himself—in spite of his sickness—quickly, without release.

  Before Volker Gruber arrived in North America, he had imagined a never-ending party: women who were easy and sophisticated, men who would share their drugs, their musical equipment, their couches. Instead, he had to work all week just to afford going to one of the few meager parties. The women never said hello and the beer was weak. He quickly learned that in Canada anything before 1979 was irrelevant; in a way, it was one of the things that had attracted him, the newness. But since his arrival, he found himself missing Germany more and more. He felt it most under the fluorescent glare of grocery aisles, trying unsuccessfully to find words he knew.

  Volker watched the stock boy strain upward for a bottle of oil, jerkily deliver it to the woman with the dark hair and even darker halos around her eyes. The movements of the people accompanied a strange rhythm in Volker’s ears, pumped from headphones. He left his sweatshirt hood up, the headphones like a secret antenna connecting him to the outside world though a constant pulse. Volker pushed his cart up aisle three to Kruder and Dorfmeister, scooped out several bags of oatmeal and sugar, visited the meat counter, lifted potatoes and onions from produce. The cheeses were atrocious, he wouldn’t even go near them. That required a special trip to Kensington Market.

  On the streetcar, a young blonde sat in the single scoop seat across from him. She was wearing a dark-blue hoodie, the cuffs punctured with holes through which her thumbs looped. Her silver fingernails keyed a rhythm on her knees. She had good pants, good shoes. A short choppy haircut framed her head and she wore purplish-pearl lipstick. She looked like the girl in the Internet service advertisement overhead. He smiled through the music at her pale sleepy eyes. She didn’t look at him. Blondes never did. For some reason he got the brunettes, the tall leggy ones who hid in baggy pants and hunched over to surprise him with their height and grace. Not unattractive, but brunette nonetheless, they loved him. It was because he was dark too.

  It was different with guys, easier to make friends with them. They stood together and nodded their heads, watched whoever was playing or spinning. They shuffled alongside one another, faces say
ing everything: It’s good, it’s good. He could do that. Volker spoke in a different dialect with this group— one of drum machines, sequencers, oscillators, filters, brands. E-MU Emulator, Roland TR-909, Korg MS-20, ARP 2600. Women required more language. Sometimes Volker knew he could get by with a head nod, a smile, could hook up if it were a friend of a friend, if there were someone who knew him to introduce him, vouch for him. But in the morning, the drugs were gone and the girls always seemed to hang around, uncertain, their movements—with the headphones off—composed of snapping, Volker’s words stilted and loud, saying not much of anything.

  Toronto was very sluggish when it wasn’t dancing. During the day it was an ugly smear of fried foods and snow, people with their hands out, the buildings only a few heads taller than the people. During the day he bussed dishes in a restaurant on Queen Street West. At night he changed his clothes and went clubbing. It was the one thing the city was good for. Six months of this. He played the first Thursday of every month. Familiar and unfamiliar faces in front of him, a flurry of cute girls with pierced tongues bopped under his hands. He moved over his gear like a magician, the sound in his head finding its exit. Between each set, thirty days of penned ricocheting, lifting dishes and glasses in and out of the machine.

  The streetcar rattled up an incline on its tracks like an automatic hospital bed. He felt it but didn’t hear it.

  The amount Cynthia Staines ate diminished in direct relation to the things she bought. These days, she ate almost nothing at all. She skipped lunch because she was working; it was an excellent excuse, no one could argue with it. Anyway, she did not have time to chew the fat with a bunch of do-nothings at The Muddy Duck.

  Today she was savoring a tuna wrap one of her coworkers had brought back for her. Cynthia had already made up her mind: She would eat half and that was all. The other woman had already gnawed her way through a southwestern chicken sub, all tomatoes and orange sauce, balled up the napkin in her little fist, her pin-striped lap littered with crumbs, a plump polyester pair of Old Navy’s passing for office wear. It had smelled like heaven, and disappeared like it was a mirage.