Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

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 full-throated 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.