The Empty Room (3 page)

Oh, lovely. Now she was channelling Scarlett O’Hara.

Last year she got a phone bill with a long list of calls she didn’t remember making. When she called the phone company to complain, a woman explained they were from a charge-by-the-minute service. All at once it had come back to her. The late-night commercials with a handsome man saying “Call now, ladies, I’m waiting to talk with you.” It had sounded sexy and forbidden and she’d thought,
just this once, why not
? Who knew what might happen? But she had to keep paying for more minutes, going deeper and deeper into some mysterious telephone labyrinth where the man on the other end almost said something naughty but never really did. Apparently she’d been on the phone for some time. Apparently she’d made a number of calls. “My damn roommate,” she said, and assured the woman at the phone company that she’d handle the matter.

The elevator pinged and the doors opened. It was packed, as it always was at this hour, but she squeezed in. Most of the people in the car were young women who worked in the gleaming offices and fancy clothing boutiques downtown. The one with the fancy suede coat, the classic, not-a-hair-out-of-place blond French twist and diamond studs in her ears, worked at Holt Renfrew. Colleen pictured her there, tall and graceful and utterly self-absorbed behind one of the cosmetics counters. She went into the store one lunchtime, wanting to buy some new blush, but when she approached the girl, emboldened by the fact they were neighbours, the girl’s gaze skimmed over her as though she were a cleaning lady or something, and she turned to assist a decked-out matron. Colleen had nearly burst into tears, although she didn’t really know why, not even now. What did she care if some club-bunny, some little tart like that, acknowledged her or not? She’d never been back to Holt’s, not once.

Now, she smiled in a general sort of way at the crisply dressed young things with their polished hair and nails and perfect skin and tiny waists. The smile was meant to be self-assured, as though she could float through any trial in life with the serenity of a Buddha. She hoped it didn’t look stiff. She couldn’t bear it if anyone suspected how she longed for an empty elevator.

“Morning,” said a blond girl in a black coat.

“Good morning.” Lovely girl, thought Colleen. She noticed a rhinestone pin in the form of a dragon on the girl’s lapel, which was approximately at the level of Colleen’s nose. “What a pretty brooch.”

The girl merely smiled. Colleen felt short. When did everyone get so tall?

A couple of the young women talked to each other about someone named Danny who was apparently hot, hot, and everyone ignored Colleen. A young man in the back, shorter than most of the women but still taller than Colleen, wore sunglasses, which was such an absurd effort at coolness Colleen might have chuckled if she weren’t feeling so queasy.

It seemed such a short time ago when she was one of these young girls, her waist an impossibly slender twenty-three inches, her hair long, swinging freely down her back, her delicate ankles shown off to full advantage by a pair of four-inch heels. How many young men had asked her out, on this very elevator, for a drink or a meal, or something else?

The elevator air was thick with the combined fug of seven or eight different perfumes and Colleen held her thumb and forefinger beneath her nose so as to block some of it. Her poor stomach. Did these girls have no thought for anyone but themselves? Didn’t they take into consideration the fact so many people were now allergic to perfume? Of course they didn’t. They were self-centred in the way of the young.

They stopped on the sixth floor to let in more people, a couple this time, holding hands, dressed in head-to-toe black, he with a silver buckle on his belt in the shape of a death’s head. Colleen had to step back and practically press up against the girl from Holt’s, who, of course, wouldn’t step back herself. The girl in black had
pink hair this morning. It wasn’t always pink. It had previously been green and blue and several shades of red and a black so deep it was indigo. Colleen knew this pair. In the summer the girl wore dresses of astonishing skimpiness, revealing tattoos so extensive they covered her arms like a blouse. Where could such a creature possibly work? What demimonde existed where such a thing was permissible? Like those waiters and waitresses in the Queen Street restaurants with piercings in their eyebrows and lips and noses and great plugs in their earlobes, creating enormous loops of flesh. They called it neo-tribal, for God’s sake. Colleen considered it an insult to regular old tribals. What happened when they took the plugs out? The flesh-hoops must dangle and flap. A sheen of sweat broke out on Colleen’s forehead.
For the sake of your stomach, don’t think of that now
.

At last they reached the ground floor. Everyone bustled out, but most turned left, heading for the exit to the parking lot. Colleen and two girls walked to the front exit. Colleen had never owned a car and couldn’t imagine how most people afforded one—the gas, the insurance, the parking, the maintenance. The girl who worked at Holt’s, the
cosmetic girl
, for God’s sake, had a car. How was that possible? Maybe she earned a little extra on the side. When Colleen first moved to Toronto from Burlington she knew girls like that—leggy, buxom things who worked as receptionists and hostesses, but who lived in apartments Colleen certainly couldn’t afford and who never paid for a meal or a drink. Professional girlfriends. Not her, no way, thank you very much. She was no one’s plaything.
She had been propositioned—in nightclubs as well as offices where she’d temped—by men she was sure could afford mistresses, but she didn’t like them, with their loud voices and scotch breath and arrogance.

She pushed open the glass door and, once outside in the cutting October wind, had a choice to make. The stop for the bus that would take her to the subway was right across the street, but no one was waiting at the shelter, and if she’d just missed the bus, there might not be another for fifteen minutes. She looked at her watch. 8:25. If she walked, it would take ten minutes, but that extra five minutes might make all the difference. A gust whipped a leaf into her face and it stung like a slap. She looked down the street but there was no sign of the bus. Looking the other way, toward Yonge Street and the subway, she thought she saw it.

“Shit,” she said, and started walking.

She crossed to the other side of the street, just in case the bus did appear and she could make it to one of the two stops between here and the subway. She already felt a burning sort of pain right on the balls of her feet, and these weren’t even high heels. She tried to ignore it. The wind buffeted her face, making her dizzy. She sucked in air too quickly, and that made her stomach even dodgier. She had never thrown up in the mornings, the way she’d heard some people did, but there was always a first time.

When she was thirteen and learning how to smoke (something she worked very hard at, since all the cool kids smoked), she used to get appallingly nauseated. Once, while riding the bus to the
shopping mall, she smoked a Matinée cigarette pilfered from her mother’s purse.
Imagine being able to smoke on buses, or in movie theatres, the way we used to
! By the time she arrived at the Burlington Mall, she was sure she was going to throw up. The only question was, would she make it to the bathroom in time, or would she throw up on the floor outside the pet store? She reached the toilet stalls and stood there, trembling, sweaty and pale, her mouth filling with saliva, wanting only to heave and get it over with. Then the waves passed and off she went, to smoke again another day, to repeat the same madness over and over until, finally, she smoked like a pro.

Now, Colleen was so busy trying not to wobble in her dizziness that she forgot to look behind her, and whoosh, the bus sped by.

“Shit!”

She walked faster, afraid she might actually start crying. She should have gotten up earlier. She shouldn’t have bothered with a shower. She mustn’t cry; her mascara would run. There was nothing to be done but walk and hope she made her connections. When she reached the subway station she hurried down the stairs with a hundred other rushing people. They reminded her of those biology films showing white blood cells swooshing through veins. She caught a whiff of urine. Heard a thousand pairs of shoes tapping on the tiles, the shriek of brakes as the subway approached the station. She was propelled forward by the force of the bodies around her and into their midst, away from the handrails. She wondered what would happen if she stumbled and fell; pictured her body, in her pretty red coat, trampled underfoot. What if there were an
emergency, with all these people crammed together? If there were a bomb, or a fire? They’d never get out.

A train pulled in and people exiting the car swam in two directions like salmon swirling in a spawning pool, some trying to get up the stairs, Colleen and others trying to get down. She reached the platform and shouldered forward. As she neared the doors she looked down at the gap, which she hated. It would be so easy to get pinned between the platform and the subway car, mangled and crushed …
Don’t think about that
. Then she was inside, just barely inside, with bodies a solid wall in front of her and even more perfume smells and coffee-and-orange-juice breath, which was one of the worst smells in the world. Someone pushed in behind her and she lurched forward into the back of an older black man.

“For heaven’s sake,” she said, “there’ll be another train in a minute. No need to crush us all.”

The man turned to look at her. His eyes were yellowish and the pores on his shiny skin large and open. You could, as her mother used to say, drive a Buick into one of those pores. “Sorry. Not you,” she said.

“No problem,” the man said. “Sardines have better lives.” He turned away.

Colleen manoeuvred so she could at least grab hold of a tiny portion of pole. A woman who had pushed in after her stood facing the doors, so her absurdly poofed-up blond hair was in Colleen’s face. Colleen tucked her purse under her arm—this scenario was a pickpocket’s dream—and brushed the woman’s hair out of her face.

The woman glanced over her shoulder and glared at Colleen with one heavily made-up bright green eye (contact lenses, no doubt). “Excuse me,” she said, and then turned back to the window. “Jesus. Really.”

Colleen thought it would almost be fair justice if she vomited right into that rat’s nest of bottle blond.

At Bloor Station she had to transfer to the westbound trains and over to St. George Station. If it had been a nice day, if she weren’t so hungover (yes, might as well just admit that), and if she weren’t so late, she might walk over to the Geography Department where she worked, but today there wasn’t much choice. When the doors opened, she exited the train, edged her way past the hundreds of people waiting to get in and inched down more stairs to the east—west train platform. It was chockablock, bodies pressing, people being pushed to the edge. Colleen could not help but think of Nazi cattle cars. She checked her watch. It was just gone nine. She was officially late, but then again, maybe so were all these other people and surely there must have been a problem on the line. That’s what she’d tell them at work. Perhaps there was a jumper. No, that was an awful thing to say, but on the other hand, there might have been a jumper.

She snorted. The Hepburn insouciance didn’t seem to be working.

She pressed ahead, shoulder to shoulder with the others. A train came, regurgitating an astonishing number of riders, all of whom pushed to get up the stairs, while behind her more people tried to get down. Colleen’s breathing became shallow and her palms
sweaty. Her stomach growled. She’d have to pick up something to eat. It would help settle her tummy. She could hardly breathe with all these bodies around her. Somehow she managed to get near the front now, too near in fact. She hated being this close to the edge. All it would take was some maniac at the back of the crowd to push forward and they’d all topple into the path of the oncoming train. Saliva rushed into her mouth. She was sure she’d vomit. She was thirteen again and about to humiliate herself utterly, irrevocably. Everyone was surely looking at her; they could see she was sick and hungover—

“Are you okay?” asked a woman about her age.

“I’m fine. Stomach flu maybe.”

The woman held out a bottle of water. “Would you like this?”

The bottle was half empty. “No, thanks.”

The sound of the approaching train deafened her. She felt as though it might jump the track, mangle all of them on the platform. She must get out of here. She swivelled and met a wall of faces, some irritated, some bored and bland as paste.

“Excuse me,” she said, “excuse me …” and tried to elbow through, but no one moved.

Then the train was in front of her and the door opened and people pushed past her. All right, she had to get to work. Soldier on. She lifted her head, took a gulp of air into her lungs and lunged forward. There was a seat, oh God, a seat on the other side of the aisle. She snagged it, plopped down and wiped the damp from her upper lip. The woman with the water bottle stood nearby. She
smiled and Colleen smiled back. The man in the seat next to her moved his leg away, as if afraid she might be contagious. She must look horrible. If she could just sit here for a moment with her eyes closed and breathe, she’d be all right. She’d be all right.

People stood next to her so closely, so packed in; a woman’s handbag dangled next to Colleen’s ear. She put her hand up so it didn’t smack her and the woman tugged the bag away and glared at Colleen as though she were about to snatch it. Nobody wants your bag, thought Colleen; everyone can see it’s a knock-off.

Colleen’s stomach was settling at last, and she was quite sure now that she would neither vomit nor pass out. At Bay Street Station many people got out, but only a few got on. There was a little breathing room at last. 9:10. Well, it couldn’t be helped. She’d stay later tonight, that’s what she’d do. She’d walk right into David’s office and say there had been a problem on the line and she was very sorry, and she’d be happy to stay late tonight to make it up. He wouldn’t mind that, surely.