Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

Slamming the car door, she clattered across the sidewalk. An Italian restaurant blaring teen pop normally would have given Cynthia reason to doubt the quality of food. But she was not concerned with quality. She ushered herself in quickly, did not wait to be seated. “Scotch and water and a menu,” she said when her server appeared.

“What type of Scotch would you like, ma’am? We have—”

“Your best. And I’ll have some bread right away, focaccia or garlic bread, whatever you have... and a garden salad.”

“Shall I still bring a menu?”

“Yes,” she snapped.

The food was over-seasoned but warm. When she got this way, it didn’t matter. Forkfuls went in without acknowledgement. Her mouth and eyes filled with steam. If she noticed the server watching her from the back, she didn’t bat an eyelash. She was all gnocci, all bread and olive oil. She was swallowing, swallowing, swallowing. The brown swirl of vinegar adorned the plate three times, and Cynthia felt herself melt into its shapeless whirl.

A woman at the counter was acting very coy with the busboy. From where she sat, Cynthia could see the servers through the small rectangular window. One wall of the dining room was mirrored and, though she doubted anyone else could see, their positions were reflected to her. They were standing at the back of the kitchen, their hands traveling back and forth with a skinny white spliff, on which they both took turns. Cynthia piled her plates at the corner of the table so the busboy would come and take them. She glared at the dark-haired woman, whose small rump, upon the red bar stool, made a pinpoint like an exclamation mark out of her tight composed body.

The busboy was on his way back to the kitchen when Cynthia flagged him in the same mirror she had used to watch his coworkers. Cynthia saw the woman on the barstool observe their interaction, still coyly sipping from her wineglass through lips that left a dainty colored smudge.

The boy, who was perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five, tall and dark and wiry, approached the table. His thumb knuckle grazed her plate. She put her hand on his arm, waylaying him.

“What do I owe you?” she asked, her purse snapping open, a wad of bills there, appearing instantly in her lap.

He looked down at the money, sheathed from anyone’s sight inside the open mouth of the black silk change purse inside the black leather bag.

“Server...” he replied. He had an accent. She liked that.

She smiled, lopsidedly, a quivering finger going to her hair, which she wrapped around it, the long blond strand falling forward in a manner he would surely understand. “Where is your bathroom?” she queried him with an openly sexual smirk.

He gestured helplessly, his face a blank slate.

When Bonnie Brown-Switzel entered the ladies’ room, her ears filled with the sound of panting and shaking. The metal walls of the cubicles resonated with a strange savage music. The quiet grunting came from the third stall, bumping firmly against her ears. She had been about to let the door fall closed, but reached behind her and caught it, shutting it softly.

Without looking at the shoes beneath the pink partitions, she knew that it was the busboy and the blonde: a short, sharp woman with a Roman nose, pin-straight yellow hair, and powerful watery eyes, the kind of woman who held herself very upright in spite of her height and made Bonnie feel as if she should do the same. Bonnie had seen him go down to the basement after the blonde, a couple of rolls of toilet paper under one arm and a plastic gray key taped to a wrist-thick stick with Don’t Lose written on it in black marker. One of them was moaning — him, Bonnie thought — the other grunting. As they pitched against the side of the cubicle, the toilet paper dispenser mouse-squeaked a repetition of hips and tin, and Bonnie stood motionless in the doorway.

Slowly, she made her way along the wall, toward their hideout and into the stall next to them. The cubicle door closed of its own accord. As she set one foot upon the toilet seat, it wiggled. She paused — her heart hammering louder than any other noise she made — and then lifted the other foot up. The sound of grated breathing filled her ears. She held her breath. Crouching, she put her hand flat against the partition, and could feel the vibration of the two bodies on the other side. The exact spot behind where one of them was pressed naked.

Then the woman whispered urgently, “Not like that. Do it hard. Make it... make it hurt.”

“I can’t,” he replied, his voice thick.

Bonnie felt a heaviness welling low in her stomach, as it did when she had drunk too much coffee. She felt her head duck inside the feeling. She pulled her hand across her belly and leaned sideways, bracing her cheek against the thin makeshift wall that thrummed with them. Under the other hand, a heart was etched into the cubicle’s wall. Michael, it said inside it, though “Michael” would obviously never enter the ladies’ room to read it.

In another moment, the room filled with squealing, which was stifled, perhaps by a hand. It turned to a soft mewl, and what the man said was rough, in another language. She had no idea if it was vulgar, or if an “I love you” had fallen deafly between strangers. The scent of spring rose in Bonnie’s nostrils, the acrid airing out of things from winter. Over the soapy rose smell of the bathroom came a pungent, earthy aroma. Their bodies in motion. She imagined the places from which the smell seeped — from the boy’s pits, from his balls, from between the legs of the pin-straight blonde. Bonnie moved carefully to find a better position, leaned her forehead against the spot where she could feel them most, curled her fingers through her hair, and pulled it to keep herself silent.

Soon they stopped. He exhaled. Bonnie could hear the saliva in their mouths, ticking. There was the sound of shuffling. Buttoning. A belt buckle. A clasping of snaps, or was it purse lips? Then the woman said simply, “Thank you.”

The cubicle door opened and the skeletal wall shook beneath Bonnie’s cheek. She pulled her hair harder. The wooden door to the restroom opened and closed. He was gone.

In a moment, palms slapped the floor and the woman in the next stall began to wretch, vomiting violently. Bonnie shifted quickly, the squeak of the toilet seat concealed by the moist unpleasant wash of things going down the drain next door. The unzipping of a bag, and the woman had straightened. Bonnie could feel the weight as the woman leaned again against the wall nearest her.

A moment of cold-tile silence followed. The fluorescents crackled.

Then the woman on the other side began to cry, her sobs small and controlled, like stones thrown into a basin.

Bonnie waited until the door had opened and closed again and stillness stretched past 8 p.m. Then she tentatively left the cubicle, her face, in the mirror as she passed it, much as it had been that morning. She stopped to wash her hands, though she didn’t know why.

At home that night, as she lay in bed, her back pressed to Mr. Switzel’s ample stomach, his great arms wrapped plainly around her, thin rivers ran from the corners of her eyes. She wondered where the boy had gone when he finished, what waited for him, what words he had said, and whether he would remember them later. She wondered if the woman lived alone. Mr. Switzel shifted, patted her thigh solidly, as if it were a cocker spaniel. Outside, she could hear the wind bubbling through the thin, decorative tree below their balcony. Three years, she thought, the length of time they had been married. Forty-seven years still ahead. It will all disappear, she thought. I will ruin it all.

CN Tower