Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

Donny Freemont was just too damn disappointed to go on. It was as if floors had fallen on the inside.

He lowered his head and thrust his chair away from his desk, then leaned all the way back to stare fixedly at the stippled ceiling. It was ridiculous, he knew that, but there was no denying it had taken firm hold. He put the call through to his receptionist.

“But Mrs. Sanjit is already here,” Tina protested.

Donny squinted at the door, as if he might see through the bird’s-eye maple laminate that had impressed him so much when he signed on at the clinic two years ago. Then he concentrated on the hiss in the receiver, tried to match it to the space beyond the door, to Tina wriggling at her desk, and the line of molded cobalt chairs out there that he considered a grave mistake because they were flimsy and uncomfortable.

“Does she know I’m in here?”

Tina huffed. “She’s not an idiot, is she? She’s been here half an hour. You know how she is.” She lowered her voice. “She saw Mrs. Lawford come in and then leave. And I think she might even have been here when your one-fifteen left. Shit, you’re going to want me to cancel all those for you too, right, Donny? You have a full slate of appointments this afternoon. And you know I’m not going to be able to reach most of them, and they’re going to show up and I’m going to have to talk to them.”

“Do you think she can hear you, Tina?”

“Oh, now you think I’m the idiot.”

He stood at the window and waited for the all-clear. A half-mile away, a glass-fronted elevator climbed the CN Tower. Below him, a woman scurried diagonally across the intersection. Another woman shook out a yellow Shopsy’s umbrella and inserted it roughly into the bracket on the side of her hot dog cart. A light snow began. He tried (and failed dismally) to track the first flakes all the way to the ground.

He had glanced at the day’s appointments when he arrived. In addition to Mrs. Sanjit, he could look forward to Howard Desai and his grossly swollen prostate. And Timmy something-or-other, who needed twelve sutures removed from his forehead. There was Anne Davies, chronic, non-responsive depression, and ancient Hetta Jamieson experiencing another flare-up of her gout. Flu shots, blood work, and sore throats. Hardened lymph nodes that frightened the hell out of everybody. Well too bad, Donny thought. Today there was nothing he could do for any of them.

Safely out of the building, he headed north and then west along Queen. Turned up the collar of his wool jacket and burrowed into the afternoon’s cold shadows. He slowed a little beyond Spadina. He liked this stretch. The halogen-drenched tattoo parlors and used CD shops, the YMCA mission and thrift shop, the all-white design stores and so many restaurants: The Left Bank. La Hacienda. Citron. The Paddock, a few doors south on Bathurst. The last time he was in there — was it Thursday? Friday? — they had been playing the new Radiohead CD and Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump . He was pleased to recognize both those albums, particularly Grandaddy. It had made him feel relevant, it had made him feel young. His noting the way it made him feel was, he suspected, a sign that he was, in fact, not young at all, and was just clinging to the illusion of hipness because he haunted once in a while the “alternative” aisle at HMV. But he was mostly at ease with that. He believed that in all the important ways he could still pass for a man in his late twenties.

He ducked into the Stephen Bulger gallery. He wanted to warm up. A small vee of snow had gathered in the neck of his coat. He shook himself out, stamped on the welcome mat. The woman in the back room looked up from her work and smiled. They knew each other. Eleni had been at his wedding. She and Maria, his wife, had graduated from Queen’s University at the same time, both of them coming away with a degree in English literature. And now Eleni worked in this gallery and struggled with a first novel, while Maria worked at least half the year (or so it felt) in northern Ontario, scouting land for a reforestation company, each spring supervising a team of tree planters, setting up bush camps, keeping in touch with her husband via radio phone, meeting him in Thunder Bay occasionally for a rushed and never completely satisfactory twelve hours before he flew back south and she lit out once more for the logging roads.

“You missed the opening,” Eleni said. She indicated the walls. A husband and wife team had photographed human embryos preserved in formaldehyde, snakes curled in thick-walled beakers; fish crammed together and stacked heads up, like... well, like sardines. He saw at once that the colors involved were brilliant, alive; the work hummed. One of the fetuses seemed perfect, viable, and wore what was described in small black type as a Turkish cap . Next to it were another baby’s feet, severed at the shin, the cuts ragged and amateurish, the plump toes webbed. The photographs were mounted on sheets of half-inch acrylic which, Donny supposed, was intended to approximate the experience of viewing the original containers. “They were here,” Eleni continued. “The artists. Do you like them?”

He stood before huddled pre-infant polar bears, three of them, floating, with oversized velvet paws and hooked ivory nails, golden fur. But all he could think about was the damn music. The reason for his having fled the office and scurried like a rat along Queen Street. For his standing beside Eleni when he should be listening to the irregular heartbeat of Janice Wolcyk, while his wife, the adult, fulfilled her obligations and slept under a thin floral duvet at Thunder Bay’s Lakehead Motel.

“Who knows,” he said. And then he confided in her.

She took him to her desk, set him up with a glass of Pinot Gris left over from the weekend opening. She pushed aside assorted slides, black-and-white proofs of Italian industrial sites, a pizza box from Terroni’s a few doors down, and then sat on the edge of the work surface. She crossed one leg over the other and tugged at the thick, soft hem of her black leather skirt. She’s the doctor here, he thought bitterly. And I’m the patient. I am Sunil Desai with his strange rash. I am Angel Caddis with his night blindness.

“A new CD did this to you?” She seemed amused more than anything. It wasn’t very professional of her.

“I know. I know.”

“A bad song has you running away from your responsibilities. You have to be kidding. Are you?”

“Well, obviously it’s not really that. It can’t be.”

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I only know what triggered it.”

“A song,” she repeated.

“Right.”

“Jesus.” Eleni stared into the gallery as if ghosts were waltzing at its center. Finally she said, “I remember one of their songs.” She sounded wistful. She looked at him. “Well, I remember a lot of them, of course. But they were never really my thing. Too boy for me.”

“Which one?”

“In the video, he’s sitting in a bar, moving a glass of whiskey around gently. Singing. It’s really quite moving.”

Donny nodded. “ ‘One,’ ” he said.

Eleni reached out and touched Donny’s shoulder. She laughed lightly. “You’re right. That’s it.” She took back her hand. “And at one point he doesn’t sing along with the song. He just stares mournfully, as the words go on without him.”

Donny nodded again and she poured him more wine. She thinks I’m a sad case, he thought. Perhaps even that I need to be medicated. He held her gaze until she looked away awkwardly, into the gallery. She asked after Maria.

“She’s fine. We’re fine. It’s not that.”

He remembered the phone call he had made to Maria last night. It was late, past 11. The polls had closed hours before in the American presidential election, and the result was too close to call, he thought, but the networks had just called it anyway. There was a one hour time difference between him and her. It was enough that she might still be awake.