Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

“Would you prefer a window or an aisle?” The Air Canada attendant had slender, creamy fingers, and nails that shimmered like oysters. This made Christine ashamed of her own, red-rimmed and bitten down to jagged nubs, and she drew her hands into fists after providing her passport.

“Window, if you have it, please,” she said.

She spent the hour before her departure at the gate, sitting with her legs crossed and watching the wanderings of the suits and bickering families that populate an airport in the morning. A stroller designed for three children wobbled by, conducted by a weary-looking young woman. Taking a turn, it fell, and Christine stood up to help before noticing it was empty. When she sat back down, she realized that her legs were shaking. Not just that — everything below her hips was convulsing, possessed by some violent, unknown force. She pushed her heels into the carpet of the departure lounge, then counted the rapid beats of her heart until the flight began to board. Finally, at somewhere just past 3,000, it did.

But the plane itself was even worse. A mild anxiety had shadowed her for the past week, ever since she first made her discovery. Now, trapped inside the small space, it began to balloon, swelling up and contaminating the captive air. Christine tried to measure her breathing, but it seemed that — even when she opened her mouth so wide that her lips felt stretched against her teeth — her lungs would not fill. She glanced around the business class cabin, worried that someone might notice her silent terror, but no one was even looking in her direction. An attendant came by with glasses of water, and she took one, then closed her eyes and, disgustedly, allowed her mind to wander to the only memory that eased its trembling. Pierre.

She had seen him perform many times, of course. Even before they met, before the dinners of homemade pasta and weekend trips to the island and lazy Saturday mornings spent watching Italian soccer matches in bed. Before she even knew his name, she had seen him on the stage, in his debut. Her twenty-fifth birthday. She had been eager to get out and party — her boyfriend at the time, a rugby player named Eli, a grizzly bear of a man, had arranged a boat cruise in celebration. But attending the opera alongside her father was her birthday tradition, one that extended back to childhood. She loved all music, but preferred opera to concerts, which offered too much time where you were just alone with your thoughts. Without a story to follow, she often found her mind wandering to its darkest corners, spaces filled with thoughts and impulses best left buried.

Pierre was a phenomenon, even from the beginning of his career. However, that first performance was not Christine’s favorite. Pierre was not yet familiar enough with the limits of his own talent. He sought to replace experience with furor, and chased opportunities before the music presented them, trampling the subtlety that would eventually form the hallmark of his style.

Nor did she imagine him as he performed now, reduced to supporting roles and celebrity appearances, obviously well into the twilight of his career. There were exceptions, of course — the odd, understated aria could still illuminate him, causing the entire audience to almost imperceptibly lean forward in their seats, straining to ensure they caught every note. But these moments only sharpened the contrast with his former self, underscoring how the ellipses of his moment in operatic history would not rival its prime.

It was nearly a decade ago, in Bologna, that he had given the performance that her memory anointed as his finest. His hometown, although he had never really lived there, having moved to Canada before beginning school. But when the Teatra Comunale invited him to lead their production of Falstaff , there had been no deliberation necessary. Christine was doing graduate philosophy work at the time, so her summers were open to adventure. A week later they were in Italy, at the beginning of three glorious months.

Of course, the locals hated her — they saw only a shy, mousey Canadian woman who kept a fine Italian boy locked up far away from home. But she spent most of her time in the library anyway, continuing her studies. And for Pierre, it was heaven. He slipped perfectly into the role of the foolish knight, and took the stage each evening with a sense of self-confidence that eluded him in his North American appearances. In character, he became far less troubled than in reality, when an uncontrollable European moodiness would sometimes sweep him without warning.

The performance Christine chose to remember was his penultimate one in Bologna. The opera concludes in a solo. Falstaff, who has just suffered the embarrassment of a beating at the hands of fairies, surrenders in a fugue that the whole world must surely be a farce. With each show, Christine found herself more and more desperate to hear Pierre bring the evening to its climax. She knew, even then, that he would never again be so transcendent. But that night, just as he began, there was an accident. A young oboist, well-known for his fondness for a preperformance drink, had passed out in the pit. A sound like a duck being stepped on brought the music to a halt, and the orchestra mobbed the fallen boy, swiftly bearing him up and over to an exit. The performers on stage looked at each other, suspended in the instant, unsure of how to proceed.

And then Pierre began, without accompaniment, to sing. For the rest of her life, Christine would insist that no single superlative could sufficiently describe the joy that credenza released inside her. She felt suddenly conscious of all the layers of reality around her — that of the audience, the theater, the opera, and the music itself, which seemed like it had been evolving for thousands of years toward each of those perfect notes.

Thinking of that moment — her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin buried between her knees, her feet pulled up onto the tiny seat beneath her — Christine felt herself relax. As the plane lifted above the clouds and began its journey, she closed her eyes and, for the first time in seven days, finally found her way to sleep.

Pearson was a gargantuan airport, far larger than Vancouver’s, and Christine strode through it with her head down. The crowds terrified her. So many people, yet so little talking — airports were one of those places, like subway cars, where the density of solitary travelers created great moving, silent hordes. The thicker the swarm, the more isolating the experience. The baggage concourse seemed to have been built with this in mind — pillars like redwoods were spaced throughout a room the size of several gymnasiums. Christine imagined that the entire population of Toronto could likely fit inside the space. But it would somehow still feel empty. Its walls and roof were all glass and white steel, so that it felt like she had moved not only east, but also forward, through time itself, and arrived at some point in the future, inside the hangar for some monolithic spacecraft that had not yet been invented.

Christine’s bag was one of the first, and she snatched it off the ramp so suddenly that it slipped to the ground with a crack. No one paused their own searches to notice.

The hotel was connected to Terminal 3. The lobby was nearly empty when she arrived. One geriatric traveler sat sleeping at a coffee table before a bowl of green apples, that morning’s paper scattered across his lap. Two young men, barely more than teenagers, stood at the front desk. Christine was only steps away before they noticed her, and thus she had to endure one describing to the other how he had been “whipping his dick like it owed him money.” Red-faced, he turned to her. Ripe, moist acne covered his cheeks, and his blond hair hung in a limp swoop across his forehead.