Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

The only thing she’s ever done for money is serve men drinks in bars. Just men, because the bars have always been strip bars. “It’s easier,” she explains whenever it is suggested she wait tables in a proper restaurant instead. By easier she means there are rules in strip bars she has come to depend on. The men keep their eyes on the dancers, their hands to themselves, and tip foolishly well. No description of the chef’s special features, no flirty walk through the wine list recommendations. No female, diamond-necklaced customers giving her looks meant to remind her that what she is doing now is all she is. Will ever be.

She is twenty-six years old.

In moving to the city, she’d planned on doing something else. She wasn’t sure what. They shot a lot of movies in Toronto. Could there be a job for her on set? Wardrobe? Makeup? Fetching the director’s cappuccino? Whenever she walked by a movie shoot on her way to work, most of the people seemed to be standing around drinking coffee, or mumbling into walkie-talkies, or stifling yawns against the backs of their hands. That was moviemaking? She could do that .

But what was she doing? What employment was she walking to as she passed these boring yet still somehow glamorous location shoots? She was on her way to serve men drinks in a strip bar.

Her five nights a week at For Your Eyes Only is temporary. A cash grab to pay for the time required to settle in, make some connections. Soon she’ll quit. Soon, her real Toronto life will begin. This is what she told herself, and what she mostly believed.

In those moments when doubt crept in — when she felt she might as well be back in that smaller city with the name she was too embarrassed to say aloud — she had one consolation to return to. She may be a strip bar waitress, but she wasn’t a stripper . She’d been asked many times and always refused. This was her sustaining source of pride, of identity. She wasn’t a woman who showed her body for money. Not looked at. Not an object.

When she delivered trays of beer and rye-and-gingers to men in the places she worked in, they rarely made eye contact. Sometimes this was because they were absorbed in the entertainments on offer, but mostly because, for them, she wasn’t there. It was skin they wanted, the uninterrupted study of hidden parts, and in that room — windowless, overpriced, smelling of baby oil — they were freely allowed to watch. It made her feel invisible.

But what if you started feeling invisible all the time? Not just in strip bars, but on the street, standing before the bathroom mirror? Her answer was to move to Toronto, rent a studio apartment on Queen West with a back alley entrance, join the millions of others pursuing fame, breakthroughs, love, matters of real importance.

So far it hadn’t helped. If anything, the city had only perfected her invisibility. There were so many more people not to notice her. So many more shared looks or Good mornings or acknowledging smiles that didn’t occur.

It’s because of this that, when his face appeared at her window, she thinks he is someone she knows. After only three weeks in Toronto she’s learned that strangers keep their eyes to themselves.

Her apartment — just a room, really, with a fridge-sized toilet and kitchenette peppered with mouse turds — has only one window. She kids herself that she chose the place for the view. A brick wall, ten feet away on the other side of the alley, plastered with graffiti tags and a pleading, unheeded homeowner’s message: Hobos! Please don’t poo here! This is the small square of world she can see from her mattress on the floor. It is ugly. But she’s always thought the truly big cities, the real ones, are meant to be ugly. It is the sort of apartment and the sort of view that, down the line, she will look back on as Where She Started From. She reminds herself not to replace “shit” for “poo” in the retelling.

It is lying on this mattress, staring through this window after a slow Tuesday at For Your Eyes Only, that she sees him. The top of his head at first. And then, as he rises higher, the whole of his face. Because she is almost asleep, she spends some moments trying to fix him in her mind as an introduction to a dream. The pause allows her to get a good look at him. And for him to see her too. Only later will she realize that he would have noticed that her eyes were open, her hand inches from her phone, and that this hadn’t stopped him from looking.

Of the different kinds of men who visit strip clubs, she would guess the man at the window belonged to the Ones Who Don’t Want to Be Here. Men forced to entertain visiting business associates, a shy friend dragged along to a stag party. These men watch the dancers too, but in the way the visitors to the AGO studied the Rothkos and Moores and Carrs. They are art appreciators, not perverts. This was what they intend to convey with their thoughtful squints, their chins held in their palms.

Yet here this man is, staring at her in her bed. And she isn’t art. She is a woman wearing nothing but bikini underwear (it is hot, the room is always hot). And he is invading her privacy. He is breaking the law. He is a creep.

Even as she sits straight and pulls the sheet up to cover her breasts, she takes note of his features for the composite sketch the police will ask her to help make of him when she calls this in. White. Thirties. Prematurely gray hair cut preppily short. A face belonging to someone who, if he were to open the door for her or lend a hand lugging her groceries onto the streetcar, she’d think, There goes the last of the good guys . Good with kids, dependable, few vices, if any. A little sexy, but not dangerously so, not someone who’d have to hurt you to excite you. A man to marry if you were lucky.

And money. His face says money. Born with it, educated to make more of it, would always have it. She’d never gone out with anyone for whom these things weren’t an issue. She’d never gone out with anyone like him.

She picks up the phone. Starts dialing 911. The face falls away.

Leaning out the window, she hears him round the corner of her building, but doesn’t catch sight of him. Just the pebbly scrape of his leather-soled steps. And below her window the three-legged chair he’d pulled out of the garbage to stand on.

She doesn’t press the last digit that would bring this moment to official attention. Instead she turns the phone off, puts on a T-shirt, and returns to lie on her mattress. She’s scared. But there is a prickling sweat on her forehead and neck that has nothing to do with fear. The man at the window reminded her that she is not actually invisible. And with visibility has come a rush of blood to her extremities, a lead weight in her limbs. She’s so heavily, uncomfortably alive-feeling that, for a time, she’s not sure she can move.

She doesn’t call the police that night, or the next morning, or at any other of the hundred points over the twenty-four hours that follow the Peeping Tom’s visit when she’s told herself, I have to do something . Because it runs against what she regards as her plucky, take-no-shit nature, she wonders why she doesn’t. The theory she tries to situate at the top of possibilities is that she has deemed the guy as nonthreatening, a corporate frat boy she can easily handle if he ever returns. He hadn’t looked like a rapist (though she knows better than to judge these things on looks alone). But this isn’t the reason she doesn’t call the police. Nor is it because she is curious about him, or suspects her physical description wouldn’t be enough to go on, or that his watching her turned her on. It’s because she thought this was the sort of incident one experienced in the city. Complaint wasn’t part of the bargain. A cheap apartment off a crack-pipe-and-needle alley, a neighborhood known for its human stew of drugs and punks and artists and out-patients off their meds: A face at her window is the least she should expect living here.