Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

Slowly, inch by inch, she raises her head. Holds her breath.

An empty room. Traditionally furnished, ancient rugs on the hardwood. But this oldness is offset by the abstract canvases on the walls, a pair of cubist nudes. A room that speaks of a family’s generational hand-me-downs — the slightly frayed sofa and chairs — as well as the sensual vitality of the current inhabitants. She hadn’t seen the living room precisely this way in her dreams, but now that she has seen it, she knows this is how she will start dreaming of it.

A child totters into the room. Followed by her mother, laughing after her. The child is Pampers-ad cute, the mother clear-skinned, tread-milled. Tom’s wife. A woman she would like to study further if it weren’t for the arrival of Tom himself.

He is laughing too. His daughter is at the age of still learning to walk but believing she already can, so that her movements are a comical series of lurches and grabs. He comes to stand in the middle of the room. His wife chasing after the little girl, both circling the coffee table.

Happiness . This is what she’d title this picture, if it was a picture. For if these people aren’t happy, if what they have and share and can look forward to doesn’t make them happy, then who is?

Tom turns. And sees her.

Neither of them move. Neither speak. Tom’s wife and daughter continue to swirl around him like an eddying tide upon a rock. He’s not surprised to see her there looking in his window. It’s as though he’s been expecting her for some time.

She will debate this point later, when she remembers this moment and stretches it out, mining its details. It may only be her imagination, but her vision is good, her view unobscured. There is only a sheet of glass and fifteen feet of air-conditioned space between them, which just makes her more certain. He smiles at her.

He is rich. And she is poor.

She realizes this only now, her feet sinking in the pungent mulch of his flowerbed. Of course she’s always been aware that she doesn’t have money, but looking into Tom’s home, she sees that she will likely never have it. And not just money, but all the tailored, meaningful, identity-making things she’s dreamed of one day acquiring. Opportunities, epiphanies. An escalation of jobs on one of the movie sets where Toronto is made to look like New York. All the good things that aren’t destined for her.

She stares at Tom, and he at her. His eyes tell her something. How moving to Toronto from wherever she came from could open up a world, but just as easily expose her existing world as the limited, luckless thing she sometimes fears it is. She thought the two of them were connected, but she was wrong. They are strangers. As it is for the patrons at For Your Eyes Only, the one rule of living here, in a real city, is that she can look at the lives of others, but not touch.

St. Lawrence Market

I thought about calling in sick today because of the big-whoop movie shoot that’s going on, the shoot that everyone in the South Market Building, the whole neighborhood it seems, is so stoked about. But if I avoided every person, casting director, film production outfit, or theater company that has ever rejected me for a part, I’d never go anywhere or see anyone. And if I stayed home, I’d have that shitty not-invited-to-the-cool-party feeling, even though the shoot won’t be cool, or a party. I’d just spend the day writing angry thoughts in my journal anyway, and listening to my stomach acid churn, and the self-help books say I should accept the successes of others in the face of my defeats, not obsess about or dwell on them, so fine, I’ll go to work.

This way, I can hear the banal and inane comments live — from Karen, my boss at The Honey Hut, and Nick from the cheese shop across the way, and Nadia from the butcher counter — about how they saw Denzel and Scarlett in person and how short they are and how there’s an awful lot of waiting around in the moviemaking business, isn’t there? They’ll say: But you know that already, don’t you, Jen, because of that movie you were in. With Mark Wahlberg, wasn’t it? When you were listed in the credits as “Girl in Disco?” That was funny. You were good in it, though too bad about the makeup job they did on you. And that leather bikini top you had to wear. How come you aren’t in this movie, didn’t you audition for it?

I might as well sooner rather than later give them a bullshit line about how I guess I didn’t get the part because I wasn’t right for it. Rather than because I’m a big motherfucking loser who, when I heard that the call was for an “office receptionist with attitude,” thought the role was so right for me, would be so easy to play, that I made the mistake of getting my hopes up, when how many times have I sworn never to hope again, never to go into an audition expecting anything at all? N-to-the-fucking-power-of-n times is how many.

I ride my bike downtown like always, and coast along Market Street, past the lineup of camera trucks and movie trailers staked out by a row of orange pylons. When I park the bike at my usual stand and lock it up between two big rigs, I kind of hope some crew guy will emerge and tell me I can’t leave it there, so I can get testy with him, and maybe start a yelling match, but no such luck. I light up my prework cigarette, step over the stream of electrical cables winding across the sidewalk, settle into my smoking spot under an overhang, and hear a squeaky young voice say, “Jen? Is that you?”

Coming at me is a short, thin girl in a floaty top and tight jeans tucked into stiletto-heeled boots. Her too-long-to-be-real curly hair extensions coil and loop over and around her pert tits. What is she... eighteen? And how the hell does she know me?

“It’s me, Honey Cooper,” she says. She has a pretty face, all blue eyes and cute upturned nose and glowing skin and curly eyelashes. “From the Ryerson theater program? We met when you came out to speak to my acting class last year, and you said it was funny my name was Honey because you worked at a honey place at St. Lawrence Market? Hey, that’s where we are now. Small world or what?”

Christ, I met her when my old drama prof invited me to speak to the naïve little undergrads on “Hard Truths about the Acting Life.” The topic was the prof’s idea, not mine, though I had no trouble spinning cautionary tales about the profession based on my own bitter experience. This kid must be one of the suck-ups who approached me after my talk and claimed to be a fan of my work, which consisted, ten years post-graduation, of twenty measly acting credits. Still consists of twenty measly credits a year later, fuck me.

I say, “Is Honey your real name?”

“No, it’s a nickname that my grandma gave me. When I was two years old, she thought I was so sweet that—”

“Did you graduate from the Ryerson program yet?”

“Um, yeah, last spring. And I’ve been auditioning like crazy for anything and everything ever since, like you said people have to do when they’re starting out. I want to thank you for giving that talk, by the way. It made such a difference to get the inside story on the acting life, to know what to expect, how hard it would be to break through.” She tilts her head and smiles. Fetchingly. “You were so inspiring!”

This is hard to believe, considering that I’d ended my talk by telling the class that if I’d known when I was at their age and stage what I knew ten years later, I would have given up on acting, and set my sights instead on marrying some rich guy who could bankroll a comfortable lifestyle. I was dead serious, but the class laughed as if I were joking.

I muster up some fake interest in Honey’s career. “And how’s it going? Have you done any commercials yet? My first job was in a commercial. For tampons.”