The Empty Room (26 page)

Colleen didn’t want to go through the lobby of her building dragging a dead cat, nor did she want to walk all the way around to the back. It was cold. She was cold. Her nose dripped. The situation was absurd. As she neared the building entrance a car pulled up alongside her and stopped at the front doors. It was a sports car, bright yellow, low to the ground. Nobody living in this building could afford a car like that, surely. She walked past, determinedly
not looking at it. A girl giggled and told the driver she’d be back down in a minute. Colleen opened the door to the building and the girl followed her in.

“Hey. Wow, it got cold, huh?” said the girl. She was dark haired, with a lot of eye makeup and very red lipstick smeared around her mouth. It was on her teeth, as though she’d taken a bloody bite out of something. Perhaps she had.

“That will happen in Canada this time of year,” said Colleen.

The girl chuckled as though what Colleen had said was funny, and then she looked down at the bag Colleen carried and wrinkled her pert little nose ever so slightly. The smile on her face faltered.

Oh, charming, thought Colleen. Now I’m the old lady who smells. She was just at that point when she could see behind the masks people wore, could see down to what they really thought and felt and understood the judgments they passed—and it was always so ugly, so wounding.

She kept her stride long, and pretty darn even, all things considered, and made her way to the back of the building. Laughter, inappropriate and slightly worrying, bubbled up her throat. Oh dear. Oh dear. That wasn’t a great sign. Next she’d be laughing and crying all at once and if that was going to happen she really needed to be in her own room where no one could see her and think they should call the cops. She would not look good in a straitjacket. Almost no one did.

The rear door was heavy and the wind was against her, so she shouldered into it. It slammed back in a gust, and as it did, it
caught the garbage bag in the jamb. Something, possibly a leg bone, snapped and the bag tore slightly. The smell, which she really hadn’t noticed before in spite of the red-mouthed girl’s insulting nose crinkle, now burst up with the power of a stink bomb. Colleen would not look at whatever poked through the plastic. She heaved herself against the door and it gave way so that she stumbled into the parking lot. Holding the bag as far away from her body as possible, she jogged to the three rusty rubbish bins standing in a row by the service entrance. It wasn’t hard to toss the mushy bundle over the side of the container. It hit the metal with a sickening thud and rustled to the bottom.

And then it was done. Minoche was no more. She wondered if she should say some words. The only thing that came to mind was “the song of mehitabel,” Don Maquis’s poem about a free-spirited alley cat in her ninth life:
wotthehell wotthehell / there’s a dance in the old dame yet / toujours gai toujours gai
. There was no denying Minoche was an alley cat now.

Oh dear, there was that laughter threatening again.

What was wrong with her? She was not a callous person. She had loved the little fluffball, so imperious with her green eyes and aloof flick of the tail. She had been such a pretty cat and poor Helen’s only friend. Gone for want of a phone call, perhaps. Dead for want of someone to take her to the vet.

Oh dear, there were the tears.

Colleen hurried back inside. In the lobby—
thank you for emptiness
—into the elevator—
still no one, bless you, elevator
—along the blissfully
vacant hall to her door.
Click, you lovely lock, get ready little Russian fairy, here comes Colleen
.

The door closed behind her and once again the unoccupied apartment, which just a moment before had seemed such an appealing sanctuary, took on a sinister aspect. The bone-grey light from the city outside flowed through the windows. Such an aggressive, soulless light. It made the table, the shelves, the television, the sofa, all look malevolent, as though they might come to life at any moment and hunch across the floor toward her. Ridiculous, she told herself, and flicked on the lights. That was better, but she couldn’t get over the feeling something might come slouching along the hallway from the bedroom. Some hand might grip the corner of the wall. Colleen’s chest tightened.

Get a hold of yourself
. Why was she suddenly so frightened of the place that had been her home all these years? She reached for the vodka bottle on the kitchen counter without taking off her coat and—to hell with it—lifted it to her lips and drank. One gulp and then several more.
Hello, little Tatyana, Fairy Queen. Dance me a pretty Cossack dance. Dance
away
my fear. She would be like Dostoyevsky—a realist who did not fear the results of her study.

The apartment was impossibly, accusingly quiet. She removed her coat and dropped it on the floor next to her purse. Who cared? She poured a glass of straight Russian courage—why bother with the cheap illusion of a mix? She went to the living room and popped Tom Waits into the CD player. Tom sang about orphaned things left out in the rain, things no one wanted. She sang along to the
music. Was there a sadder song on the face of the planet? The despair tango. She drank and swayed and turned out the lights. The place didn’t look so frightening anymore. Tom sang on about all the broken and rusted things he’d never throw away. And then the long lonely train whistle. She sat on the couch. Ah yes, here came the tears, the pretty tears, sparkling like diamonds on her lashes.

Tom Waits’s gravel-velvet voice floated over her. Such sweet sorrow. Someone knew her, someone sang her soul. She was born in the wrong time. She should have been a young woman in the 1930s, working in a diner, maybe, pouring coffee for the customers, engaged in repartee. Her eyes would be haunted with some past heartbreak of which she never spoke. She would answer the invitation to the blues. In fact, maybe she’d start leading that life now. She’d just take off, leave her crazy mother in the semi-capable hands of the nursing staff. She’d cash in her inheritance and buy a silver trailer, one of those round ones—Airstream—that’s what they were called. She’d drive it out to cowboy country and get a job in a bar. Why not? Or a desert restaurant. She’d be the one all the regulars told their stories to and she’d write those stories down and just like Annie Proulx out there in Newfoundland or Montana or wherever she was these days, she’d tell the truth about the lives of everyday folk and she’d be a great success. A great success at last.

But first, she would send Jake an e-mail. Tell him exactly, and finally, what she thought of him.

In the bedroom, glass nicely full and sitting there so prettily next to her laptop, she stared at the computer screen. How to begin?
Somewhere from the region of the living room came Waits’s voice, singing about a girl sending someone blue valentines from Philadelphia. Oh, that was a message from the gods, surely.

Dear Jake,

This will be the last you’ll hear from me. But I couldn’t go without reminding you of a certain afternoon. I’m listening to Tom Waits right now. Do you remember? That’s what we were listening to: we were listening to Tom Waits singing a song about a man haunted by the only woman he’d ever loved, whom he treated so badly she left him and never came back.

You were high. You were always high then. You only told me you loved me when you were high. You sat on my old brown plaid couch and I sat on the floor in front of you and you tangled your fingers in my hair. I ran my nails along your thighs and felt your muscles jump.

It was snowing outside. I remember that. Snowing so hard the late-afternoon light coming in through the window looked bright even though it was almost dark.

I’d never loved anyone the way I loved you and it didn’t matter to me that we fought as much as we did. I couldn’t get enough of you. I didn’t know what you were thinking just then. I used to think I understood you, but now I’m not so sure. The man I thought I knew wouldn’t have done what you did today. Wouldn’t have been doing what you’ve been doing all these years. I see that now. Maybe I just made you up. But that afternoon, what you did took me by surprise. You lifted me up and held me on your lap with my face buried in your shoulder so I couldn’t see your eyes. I tried to pull back but you wouldn’t let me.

“If I ever fuck up, I mean really fuck up,” you said, “you do what it says in the song. Send me a blue valentine from wherever you are.”

We sat like that for a long time, till long after the song had finished.

“Promise me,” you whispered.

“I promise,” I said.

But I never did. Why should I be the one to keep a promise? Then again, maybe I’m keeping it now. Consider this your blue valentine, you cold-hearted, manipulative shit.

It wasn’t bad. It was almost poetic. Maybe she had what it took to be a writer after all. She imagined Jake reading it. She imagined his great regret. She imagined he’d see how much he lost when he lost her. She imagined him tossing in his bed at night, calling out her name when he made love to that ridiculous Taquanda. She pressed send. And there it was, gone.

She hummed along to the music as she danced a little dance on the way back to the living room. Waits was singing now about his bad liver and broken heart. She sang along. She knew all the words, every stinging soul-etching word. She’d been singing along with Waits since the mid-eighties, back when she could drink anyone she knew under the table and then, what? What had happened? When had it happened? All those people she knew once upon a time were somewhere else now, married with kids, driving BMWs and Audis and working as stockbrokers or insurance executives or lawyers. She still had her writing. She should be writing this very minute. She would get her journal and begin immediately.
Inspiration twirled along the notes of Waits’s poetic dissolution …

She stood up, a bit too quickly, and yelped when she cracked her shin against the coffee table. She grabbed her leg, lost her balance and ended up on the carpet with vodka spilled down her chest. For a moment she simply sat there, shocked by the fall. For the second time that day she was covered in spilled booze. It was unbearable. She drained what was left in her glass. Her vision swam. She’d gone too far. Had had too much. She needed food. It took her a few minutes to get to her feet and she used the wall as a support as she made her way back to the kitchen. Crackers and butter. Cheese. A piece of bread and butter. She hadn’t known she was so hungry. She considered making scrambled eggs, but even in her vodka fog she understood using a gas stove at this precise moment might not be prudent.

Oh, little Russian fairy, don’t you turn against me now
. The Russian fairy was one of the more perfidious. She could snap from fire-honey comfort to sweet restful sorrow to Rasputin rage to Gulag horror in a matter of minutes. She should have remembered that when she bought the bottle. Why did she never remember these things when she was sober? It was as though the mystical knowledge acquired when drinking was only accessible again when drinking.

She half-stumbled down the treacherous hall and into the bedroom. She stripped off her clothes and left them pooled on the floor. It was important to move with deliberation. She pulled sweatpants and her favourite manky black sweater from the bottom of the closet. She wrestled her way into them. She was chilly. She put heavy socks on her feet. She would write, she would.

At her desk the lines on the paper slithered and slipped. But, to begin was everything. She wrote that down.
To begin, to begin, and I am here beginning and you and me and we are all here together. I see you, Moon. Don’t think I’m blind. It’s not true. True is that I’ve come home by way of you. By your full-blown light here in the muslin night, filled with concertos and kindness least expected. There will be a battle …

What utter bullshit, she thought.

Colleen threw herself on the bed and sobbed. The bed spun and her stomach lurched and she slid halfway to the floor to stop it. She knelt by the bed and found herself praying. She prayed for something to happen, anything to make the pain stop, and death would be fine, right now, if she could just slip away in her sleep and have it all be over.

She stood up and headed for the bathroom. Perhaps there was something in there with which she could kill herself.

Pardon me
?

Colleen stopped at the threshold. Had she really just thought that? She had. A hole gaped where thought should be, black as the dark side of the moon. She sat on the side of the bath. On the shelf above the toilet stood the pretty perfume bottles: Dior, Trésor, Chloé, Oscar de la Renta, Angel, Perry Ellis 360, Intuition, Ysatis, Opium, L’Air du Temps, this last with the pair of tiny doves on top. Sweet little bottles, magical potions of promise.

What a fucking joke. How many times had she sat right where she was now, staring at those toy bottles, believing their cheap plastic promises? Lies. Why had she never seen that before? Like
her job, like her friends, like her family, like her dreams of one day being a writer, it was all tawdry, cheesy, imitation life.

The sound that came out of her mouth was of something ripping inside, something that could never be stitched up again. Colleen launched herself toward the shelf and smashed her fist down on it. The bottles flew every which way, crashing to the floor, in the bath, the sink. The star on the Angel bottle cracked and a point fell off. The Trésor bottle broke, as did the Intuition. The others lay scattered on the floor. The air reeked of stale perfume, the mix of odours so astringent and sweet at the same time that it smelled like decay.

Some of the glass bits were nice and sharp. A hot bath, a lovely glass of Chablis and a glass shard, followed by an eternal restful sleep. What more could a girl ask for? She pictured herself in the bath, her hair streaming out in the water, the water itself the colour of a garnet, her skin the palest ivory.

A part of her retreated to the far corner of the small tiled room and considered. It appeared madam was earnestly contemplating taking the great leap, the final fall, the last bus, the long walk off a short plank. That was a sobering thought, although not nearly sobering enough.