The Empty Room (11 page)

“Really? Hey, wait, sorry. Yes, can I help you? Do you have a reservation? Parker. Yes, right here. Ruth, can you see the Parkers to table six? Thanks. Okay, I’m back, now tell me again, why did you quit?”

“It’s complicated. Any chance you can come over after your shift?”

“Today?”

Of course today, what kind of a question is that
? “This afternoon, this evening, whenever you get off.”

“Oh, Colleen, I can’t today, honey. I’m working until three and then I’ve got to drive Ian to work—did I tell you he slammed his car into the neighbour’s mailbox? Why do we let teenagers drive?—and I promised Madeleine I’d take her shopping for a new coat and I’ve got to get to the grocery store …”

“Tonight, then, come over once Lewis gets home.”

“He’s working late tonight. I can’t believe you quit your job. Not an easy time to find a new one, not these days, and well, I don’t know, but this is, what, your third job in five years?”

“What’s that supposed to mean? I transferred within the university. Was that a crack?”

“Listen, I’m really sorry, but this place is about to go crazy. Why don’t I call you later?”

“Fine, whatever.”

“Come on, Colleen, don’t be like that.”

“I’m not like anything. You’re the one who apparently doesn’t have time. God knows I’ll be here.”

There was a moment’s silence. “Sweetie, listen, I’ll call you later. But in the meantime, don’t drink too much, okay?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Well, you’re drinking, right?”

“Of course I’m not drinking. It’s not even noon, for God’s sake.”

“I wouldn’t blame you, but I thought I could hear it in your voice. If I’m wrong, never mind.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Good. Okay, well, like I said, it’s crazy here right now. I’ll call you later, and I’m sorry, okay?”

“Wonderful. Splendid.”

Colleen flipped the phone closed and began to cry scalding tears. Lori was her best friend, had been since they’d met back in their early twenties at a dance class. They told each other everything, even things Lori didn’t tell her husband, Lewis. They knew each other’s secret wounds, like the torch Lori still carried for Kent Wilde, the lacrosse-playing high-school heartbreaker to whom she had lost her virginity. Before Lori got married seventeen years ago to Lewis, she and Colleen had made the club scene together, and even dated a couple of guys from the same band back in the day. When the junkie drummer Lori had been seeing for six months told her he loved her, Lori’d almost had a breakdown, since no one (other than Colleen) had ever told her they loved her—not even her uptight Swiss parents. The drummer—a guy named Mike
who reminded Colleen of Animal on
The Muppet Show
—had apparently mumbled those three magic words into Lori’s neck one night, just before he ran to the bathroom backstage, puked and promptly passed out. Lori had come undone, appearing at Colleen’s door in a state of near hysteria.

“This is how I first hear those words? This is all there is? He won’t even remember them tomorrow,” Lori had sobbed, hanging onto Colleen like a drowning woman. “I feel like the biggest thing in my life has just turned into trash, into shit, and I’ll never get it back.”

And maybe Colleen hadn’t really seen what the big deal was, but that didn’t matter. She poured Lori a tumbler full of scotch and listened to her rant and rave all night. She hadn’t said she had to work the next day, hadn’t said she had more important things to do. That was the way it was between them. They were there for each other when no one else was. How many nights had she listened to Lori complain about her job, or her lack of creative fulfillment? How she was too old to be a singer now and never got the right break. How she should have stayed in Paris when she had the chance and become the great artist she was meant to be. Lori had her music and Colleen had her writing, and even if they never became rich and famous, at least they had each other as a cheering section. Or at least that was how it had been before she married Lewis and had the kids.

Colleen went into the kitchen, opened the new bottle of vodka and poured herself a little more. Not too much. Just enough to calm her down so she could figure out what to do next. She took a
sip. She should put the white wine in the fridge, just in case someone came over later. The clock on the oven said it was nearly noon. She should also probably eat something. She opened the refrigerator. Half a loaf of bread. Some olives. Yogourt. Some cheese slices. What was that green thing in the back of the crisper? A lemon, wholly covered in a green-grey velvet mould. Using the tips of her fingers she carried it to the trash bin, which, when she flipped up the lid, produced some nostril-searing fumes and a small cloud of fruit flies. Colleen coughed, plucked the bag from the bin and tied it shut, hoping most of the flies were trapped within. She was going to have to clean this place, really clean it. She’d let things slide, she would admit that, but this was the start of an entirely new life, wasn’t it, and she should start it by giving the whole place a good going-over.

She took the garbage bag and stepped out into the hall to carry it down to the chute. The hall was so silent at this time of day. She passed the doors of people she barely knew, but with whom she shared walls and floors and ceilings. They practically breathed the same air. She used to know her neighbours. When she first moved into the building it had been like one big party until, slowly but surely, the people she knew moved out, got married, moved on. And she was left behind. It had been a better-kept building back then too, she thought, as she noticed the scuffed baseboards, the stains on the carpet, the grimy windows overlooking the front of the building, where the overhang roof was strewn with debris: plastic bags, bottles and—
what was that
?—a broken doll.

She reached the garbage room and opened the door to find the chute jammed, again, and a pile of plastic bags on the floor. She accidently nudged one with her foot as she leaned forward to place her own at the back of the pile, and as she did a swarm of cockroaches skittered out and she shrieked, dropped her bag and jumped back. She caught her heel in the threshold ridge, and staggered backwards, arms flailing windmill style, and she thought for a moment she’d be able to right herself and could even imagine laughing later at how silly it all was, just some innocent insects and everything was all right, but then it wasn’t and in a great whoomp of air and impact she hit her head on the wall and landed on her behind.

Her eyes closed, she gripped the back of her head. She smelled the sickly, somewhat sweet stench from the garbage chute. Cockroaches running toward her! She opened her eyes. No cockroaches. She took her hand away from her head and looked at her palm, knowing there wouldn’t be any blood, she was quite sure of that, but that was what one did, wasn’t it? There was no blood. She looked behind her at a head-shaped dent in the wall. She must have hit with some force. Her right knee hurt and she considered it might be badly wrenched or even dislocated, and maybe she’d have to sit here until someone came home and there would be ambulances and a great deal of fuss and she’d need X-rays and maybe she had a concussion, which would mean staying in the hospital.

She looked down the hall, undecided if she wanted anyone to come to her aid or not. On the one hand, it was a shock, toppling
like that, and she could use a strong arm and someone to tell her she was going to be fine. On the other hand, it was humiliating to be a middle-aged woman flat on her bum by the garbage chute, possibly smelling a little of vodka.

She wiggled her toes and that was all right, so she tried to bend her knee. She was able to do so with only a minimum of discomfort, and she chuckled at what a close call that had been. She’d have to talk to the super about fixing the stripping, not to mention the goddamn roaches. She’d already had to have her apartment fumigated twice in the past two years. She shuddered. She had some roach spray. She’d spray it round the floorboards right away. She rolled onto her side and then up on her left knee, bracing a hand against the wall as she pushed up with her right leg. Pain shot along the inside of the joint in both directions. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, but managed to get to her feet. She rolled up her pant leg. Was the knee swelling? It looked okay, maybe a little swollen. She rubbed it.

The elevator bell rang and the door opened, letting off Charlie, the young man who lived at the end of the hall—some sort of blue-collar worker, a plumber or welder or something.

Oh, fine, now someone shows up
.

She quickly unrolled her pant leg. Her legs weren’t shaved, for one thing, and the knee-high stocking and the white skin above that—puffy around the knee, mottled with spider veins—was hardly an attractive look. Charlie wore painters’ overalls (was that what he did?) and a down vest. He carried a shoulder bag that clanked as he walked.

“Afternoon,” he said.

“There are cockroaches in the garbage room,” she said, standing in front of the dent in the wall.

“In my kitchen too,” he said as he walked past her. “Better get yourself a can of Raid.”

Charlie slouched down the hall, his broad back and bushy hair reminding her of a pudgy bear. She didn’t want to start back to her apartment until he was in his own place, for fear he’d turn and see her hobbling away. But she couldn’t just stand there. She couldn’t lurk. What would he think of her? Then again, why hadn’t he asked her how she was? She put her weight down on her right leg. Not too bad. It ached, but no sharp pain. She probably hadn’t torn anything. One step. All right. And then another. It was just the shock, that’s all. Horrible creatures, cockroaches. Anyone would have been frightened.

She looked over her shoulder to see Charlie disappear into his apartment without even looking at her. Well, perhaps he wouldn’t have been scared. He probably didn’t even care they were in his kitchen.

Safely back inside her own little sanctuary, her own temenos, she poured a bit more of the Russian fairy into her glass. Medicinal. She’d had a shock. It would dull the pain and relax her. She took her glass to the bathroom and knocked back a couple of Advil in the hopes it would stop her knee from swelling too much. In the mirror over the sink her face looked pale. She plucked a lipstick from the basket on the back of the toilet tank.
Rapture Red
. There, that was
much better. She rather liked this look—the red lips, the pale skin. It was romantic, and yet bold. It was still the face of an interesting woman. Perhaps not pretty any longer, but certainly interesting. She could live with that.

Her knee was little more than an irritation, an inconvenience, and wasn’t most everything, to one degree or another, just an inconvenience? G.K. Chesterton had said that, hadn’t he? Or something like it?
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered
. That was it. She would rightly consider. This little knee thing didn’t matter. She hadn’t fallen down stairs and broken her neck. She wasn’t sprawled out in front of a speeding subway train. Those were things that happened to drunks. She had merely snagged her heel. It could have happened to anyone. Look at that face in the mirror. She smiled, just slightly, so the dimple in her left cheek showed. She arched her left eyebrow. She was just in the spot where drinking made her look better, where it put a sparkle in her eye. You still
got it, kid
.

She drank and giggled. She was filled with good cheer and hopefulness. Perhaps, although she’d had a fall and a terrible shock at the morning’s miscarriage of justice, she might choose to look at these things as signs that life was full of close calls and bad choices and she was liberated from a job that wasn’t working anyway, and she bet she had an unfair termination case just waiting for her, an adventure rightly considered.

She raised her glass to the interesting woman smiling back at her with such confidence and such interesting lips. A woman like that could tackle anything, do anything she chose, be anyone she chose.

She would call the temp agency right away and get started on this new life that lay waiting for her in a glimmering slipstream of possibility. As she walked down the hall from the bathroom to the living room she was aware, although the ache in her knee was hardly noticeable, that she was just the tiniest bit unsteady. That cinched it. No more to drink today. Absolutely not. She drained the glass of the last of the vodka and picked up the phone, but what was the number? Right. Silly woman.

Carrying the phone, Colleen retraced her steps to the bedroom. Her favourite room, the room where all dreams happened. The bed, which needed making, but why bother when she’d be back in it soon enough? The bureau with her pretty music boxes on top and the leather-bound collection of books—Dickens and
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
—and, most importantly, her desk, there, under the window. It was a plain old oak desk, marred by nicks and dings and gouges that added to its character. When she found it in the second-hand store on Mount Pleasant, she had imagined it was once the desk of a newspaper man or a professor, and perhaps it still held some residue of their intelligence, their dedication to the art of putting words on paper.

She sat in the office chair she’d bought for next to nothing when the Registrar’s Office was renovating (that stung, thinking about the university), and flipped open her laptop. Open the Outlook program, find the number for C&C Staffing. She checked her e-mails. Had she wanted a larger penis or to invest her money in Nigeria, she would be all set. Concentrate. Get the number.

“Hello, C&C Staffing. How may I direct your call?” a man’s voice asked.

“This is Colleen Kerrigan calling. I’d like to make an appointment to come in and register as a temp.”

“Have you worked with our agency before, Ms. Kerrigan?”

“I have, several times. I’ve always been very pleased with the agency.”

“Let me pull your file up. Can you spell your last name for me?” Colleen did.

“Oh, right. I have the file here. And you’re looking for work again?”

“I am. Just as of this morning. I lost my job and I have to get back to work quickly. I’m the only support for my ailing mother, you see. You’ve always been good in the past about getting me temp work.”