by Dani Couture
Gaetan said thank you and tipped the man generously with money he shouldn’t have spared and immediately regretted it.
“You’re from somewhere else, aren’t you?” the owner, Hal, asked. “I mean, you have an accent.”
“Quebec.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Bet it makes people feel like they’re somewhere else when they’re talking to you, hey? Like they’re in goddamn Paris, or something. Where’d you learn English? School?”
“My cousin used to live here,” Gaetan said. “I used to visit a couple times a year until she moved to Miami with her husband. He was from Scarborough.”
“Well, this ain’t no fucking Miami or Scarborough neither. It’s better. Middle of it all.”
The day after Gaetan’s first shift, he’d gone to a bookstore and bought a drink-making guide. Never in his former life had he been asked to make the strange cocktails and potions that customers at The Brass Ring asked for. These were people who’d been around the world and returned home with new palates and cravings for the drinks they’d had abroad, each of them trying to outdo the other in asking for something the bar “couldn’t possibly stock.” Gaetan liked it best when they just ordered a beer, even if it wasn’t domestic. Nevertheless, he’d spent a solid week studying the geography of the drinking world and sampled everything the bar had to offer, so he knew exactly what he was pouring, or so he said.
The man who’d ordered the Scotch had almost emptied his glass and was already eying the bottle.
Gaetan took the cue. “More?”
A slow, sleepy nod of approval. More people passed by, touching the man’s shoulders like he was a good luck charm. He didn’t even turn to look at them, only nodded into his glass. Gaetan poured two shots into the glass.
A large group walked through the double doors at the front of the bar. They were already drunk and one of the men was wearing a bridal veil over his baseball cap. The night was getting busy again. Gaetan was glad for the bar, the hard wood that separated him from everyone else, with the exception of the three other bartenders who moved fluidly around him, barely speaking until closing.
Gaetan had quickly learned the silent physical shorthand of working behind the bar. The bartenders saved their smiles, jokes, and flirting for the tipping customers. Where there had been empty booths only twenty minutes earlier, the bar was now standing room only. The waitresses busted through the kitchen doors with heaped plates of nachos, fries, and wings.
The people who came to The Brass Ring seemed to spare no expense. Gaetan wondered where all their money came from. No kids, probably. The drinks were overpriced and the food mediocre, even if there was a lot of it. The short-skirted service didn’t seem to hurt, either. The women, some hardly more than girls, were required to dress in black polo shirts and black-and-red kilts. Hal made sure he only ordered the uniforms in size small and hired his staff to match. The waitresses were a tough lot. Carrying trays loaded with drinks, they skillfully weaved through the inebriated ranks mostly managing to avoid the slaps on the ass with which some of the men tried to “tip” them.
Gaetan looked up from the pint of Guinness he was pouring. One of the girls, Aasha, was unsuccessfully trying to excuse herself from a booth.
“I’ll be right back with your beer,” she said, with a large fake smile, teeth as white as ceiling paint.
“I love you,” the sergeant slurred leaning close to her chest. He was only a half hour off duty and already drunk.
The waitress staggered back and held her tray in front of her like a shield. “Do you want something to eat maybe? Coffee?”
The man tried to playfully bat away her tray. “No, no, no. Just you and that beer I ordered.” He knocked his empty beer bottle over. “You wanna sit down with me?”
“How about some bread?”
The sergeant smiled and then his face crumpled, his eyes watering. He grabbed Aasha’s forearm. “Even when I’m an asshole, and I’m an asshole, you keep coming back to check on me and ask me what I need.”
Aasha tried to wrench her arm free and catch the attention of the doorman or one of the other waitresses.
“It just means so much to me. Thank you. I love you. I completely love you.”
With that profession, he shut his eyes and fell sideways out of the booth and onto the floor. Aasha screamed and dropped her tray on him. People turned around and laughed. Hal stomped across the floor, unceremoniously elbowing his way through the crowd. Luckily, the sergeant’s friends arrived at the booth before Hal did and scooped their fallen friend up by his arms.
“We’ll take him home. Sorry about that,” said the largest man in the group. “It’s not like we won’t need the same favour sooner or later.”
Another one of the friends handed Aasha four twenty-dollar bills. “Cool?”
Aasha nodded at the forty-eight-dollar tip. “Inconvenience fee,” the man said, and smiled. “Hey, do you know where his shoes are?”
She shook her head and watched the men drag their barefoot friend out of the bar.
As soon as they were outside, Gaetan watched Aasha reach under the booth and pull out the man’s boots, his socks still tucked inside. She looked around to see if anyone was looking and walked toward the kitchen and tossed his boots in the trash.
Algoma wouldn’t have let those boots go to waste, he thought. They’d have been plant holders by the end of the day.
He leaned against the cold glass of the beer fridge. Although he hadn’t left home that long ago, it already seemed like years. After Leo had died, the days seemed to repeat, varying little from one to the next. Even the weather became predicable. His grief did not lessen or change into something more manageable. He felt unleashed, while everyone and everything around him was an anchor.
Each day, he’d had to contend not only with his own loss, but with Algoma’s as well, and Ferd’s increasing flights from reality. And the notes. He’d read and reread them, looking for the message within the message, the date the madness would end, or how he could stop it, but the answer never came.
Unplanned, and in the middle of a shift at the bar, Gaetan had gone out for a smoke. Once finished, he tossed his butt into the snow and walked until he reached the highway. He only had to walk for ten minutes along the soft shoulder until someone picked him up and he was on his way. With each kilometre, he felt lighter, the distance between himself and everything else he knew growing greater by the minute. By the end of the week, he’d started working at The Brass Ring and living in one of the owner’s apartments. “Investment properties,” he called them. It had been like living in a mining town, most of his earnings went back to his boss for rent. But at least there had been no questions. Hal hadn’t cared about Gaetan’s life, only that he showed up for work. A perfect arrangement.
If asked, Gaetan would not have been able to explain why he’d left Le Pin, or if he would ever return. He felt calm and light now, completely unburdened, under a new sky. Everything had been left behind—Leo’s death, Ferd’s notes, his weather journal, his wife, his life. While he knew he would miss his family, his need to escape the eyes of the town had been stronger. At the twenty-four-hour grocery store on Chestnut Street, no one asked him with wide, pitying eyes how his wife was coping; they just bagged his groceries. When he went to have his hair cut, the barber didn’t slap his back and say, “I’m sorry, man,” for the sixth time in as many months. Back home, he’d not been able to escape the town’s memory of his loss, but here no one knew to ask. They passed him on the street like he didn’t matter, like he was not there at all. It was perfect.
Ferd could take care of himself. He had made sure of that early on. And Algoma would be okay, she would adapt, this much he knew. She’d fill his empty space, so that it was as if he’d never left. She would cut and restitch his memory into something new that she could use. While his new life did not feel like it was his o
wn yet, it was something different and that was enough to allow him to sleep after a hard shift at work—and they were all hard shifts—something he hadn’t been able to do in a year.
Most of the regulars at The Brass knew Gaetan only as the quiet guy they liked, the one with the accent who poured any drink they asked for no matter how many they’d already had. He poured generously and they tipped him well. At Club Rebar, Gaetan had no longer known if the men were tipping for good service or out of pity.
Gaetan looked around the bar. None of the women looked like his wife, here they were hard and shiny, leather and platinum. Some were cops’ wives, and others wannabes. And a few, whom Gaetan could easily pick out, were on the force. He liked them best. They exuded purpose and precision, but could also throw drinks back like the rest of the guys, looking like little could faze them. Algoma, under her veil of scarves and used furs, always looked like she was on the verge of imploding, disappearing entirely under the weight of everything around her.
The media had been captivated by Leo’s death and the bear for weeks, focusing just as much airtime on the animal as they did the boy. Animal experts and hunting guides were interviewed. Long distance shots of school children crying made the local news. Everyone was an expert. Everyone knew someone who knew someone. Gaetan wondered if anyone had mourned the loss of the bear. He had not, but whenever he thought of Leo, he thought of the bear. The two were as entwined in his mind as Leo and Ferd had once been. Inseparable.
The night was a blur of drinks and exchanged cash until people in the bar started leaving, piling into the cabs outside. Gaetan looked at his watch. It was five to two. He could go home soon.
After a few drinks with the closing staff after the doors had been shut, Gaetan left the bar. Outside, the sky was already changing. He could see the light blue glow of morning bleeding into the black. He was tired. Cabs slowed down beside him as he walked home, but he didn’t look their way, so they drove off to the next person. He liked that about Toronto, the city was never entirely closed, the streets never completely empty.
Close to home, Gaetan passed a homeless man seated on the sidewalk. The man was older and had a cardboard sign resting in his lap that said “Just had open heart surgery.” A German shepherd slept to his right. Gaetan dropped whatever change he had into the man’s crumpled coffee cup and kept walking. The man looked like his father. The resemblance was so strong that he struggled not to think it was his father shored up and broken against the brick.
When Gaetan arrived at his apartment building, there were two young men in the elevator who were only partially successful in holding one another up. They were drunk and arguing about food.
“Nothing’s open this late and I’m starving,” the blond one whined. “We should’ve picked up something earlier.”
The other man starred at Gaetan, his eyelids fluttering, blue eyes rolling back: “Do you know if anything’s open around here? I mean for delivery?”
Gaetan shrugged his shoulders and looked at the floor and mumbled, “No.” Then he thought of that steak on a bun place on Yonge he liked, but didn’t say anything. He stared at the closed door. When the elevator arrived at his floor, he turned to wave at the men as a sort of apology for not being able to help them, but they were now deeply kissing, the food ordeal forgotten.
“Sizzlers,” Gaetan said quietly.
He put his apartment key into the lock, one of only three keys he had now, and opened the door. His place was clean and empty except for the usual kitchen appliances, an orange-and-brown floral print couch that one of the waitresses had given him and a futon bed he’d bought after sleeping on an air mattress for his first three weeks in the city. He planned to get a small TV next, something to have on in the background, but for now the balcony provided him with all his entertainment. He sat out there for hours after work when he knew he should be sleeping, sitting in his lawn chair until the sun peeked over top of the apartment buildings and the glass shone like mercury.
Gaetan changed out of his work clothes and tossed them into a corner with the other dirty clothes. The pyjamas he’d purchased the day before—new and full price—sat on his unmade bed. He tore open the cellophane wrapping and pulled out the matching shirt and pants. They were too large. Regardless, he put them on and shuffled out onto the balcony like a child who didn’t want to go to sleep. He sat down, lit a cigarette, and, despite the chill, listened to the two women talking on the balcony below. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, or why they were up this late (or early). He just hoped they wouldn’t stop.
Three fat pigeons were perched on the window sill, cooing and murmuring, as they had been for the past hour. Gaetan tossed a pillow at the window where it thumped against the glass.
When he heard the birds fly away, the flap of their wings, he lay back down and closed his eyes. He needed to pick up one of those plastic owls to scare them off. Better still, he wished he had a pellet gun.
Unable to fall back asleep, Gaetan sat up and wiped his eyes. Sometime during the night, he’d taken off his pyjamas and now sat naked on the edge of his bed. There were no curtains on the windows, but the sun was in his favour—no one would be able to see him. He opened the drawer in his bedside table (a curb-side salvage) and pulled out a package of postcards. He shuffled the postcards in his hands, writing side up, and randomly selected one. Toronto landmark tarot. He flipped the card over: the CN Tower surrounded by blue sky and too-perfect clouds.
He looked outside. The early afternoon sky was clear, bright, and cold. Winter’s last gasp. The windows were not rattling as they normally did, which meant there was no wind. He jotted a note on the back of the postcard, wrote down an address from memory, and tossed the pen and the rest of the postcards back into the drawer. He leaned back, head on his pillow, postcard resting on his chest, and fell back to sleep.
When Gaetan woke up again it was night. His windows were black except for the occasional sweep of a spotlight high above. He switched on the light, thinking curtains would be helpful now. However, there was no curtain rod, and that was enough of an excuse. The room was cold, the single-pane windows doing little to keep the heat in. He pulled on a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of jeans and grabbed his wallet. It was his night off, and he was going out. He felt like he hadn’t been heard or seen by anyone in months. Tonight, he’d change that, even if he didn’t know just how yet. He was sure the city would provide the opportunity if he just looked.
Even though Gaetan had lived in Toronto for months, he’d seen very little of it, already tethered to his new schedule and routines. Tonight would also give him a chance to adjust to the tilt and keel of this new city of cement, grease, smells, and sirens.
Instead of turning right at the end of the driveway as he did when he was going to work, Gaetan turned left. Within a couple of blocks, he’d walked past several stores and half a dozen restaurants. Had there been a Korean barbecue back home? He couldn’t remember but doubted it. The only restaurant that Algoma had ever wanted to go to was House of Chips—a diner with photocopied menus in Plexiglas holders that sat on the round, Formica tables. The waitresses were quick and the prices cheap. On Good Friday, the diner sold a lake’s worth of fish and chips. Gaetan had enjoyed the first visit, but the charm wore off after half a dozen years of weekly visits, the same menu each time.
On the main street, a half dozen scraggly young maples pierced the sidewalk of each block, each raised on an anorexic diet of car exhaust and rain runoff. When Gaetan looked down the side streets he saw one-hundred-year-old oaks and maples towering above the frayed rooftops. If even one fell, he thought, it would take out several homes and businesses, maybe a car or two. Nostalgia, he realized, was a potential liability.
After he’d been walking for some time, Gaetan found himself on the sprawling campus of the University of Toronto. Dark and gothic at its centre, it felt like another world. When one of the campus polic
e trucks drove past him, his heart beat faster. He thought about the letter he’d sent to Algoma to ensure he would be left alone; however, every day he half expected someone would come knocking on his door, ready to drag him back to Le Pin. But no one ever came. Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe his leaving had been a blessing.
Walking along a side street that ran parallel to Spadina Avenue, Gaetan stared at houses, a new favourite pastime. Some were massive and probably once beautiful, but they were now in a state of disrepair—half-rotted fences, clutches of bicycles chained to any available pole, mailboxes overflowing with yellowing fliers. Every window had a different type of covering, most improvised. He saw tinfoil and newspaper, Bristol board, and even a collage of McDonald’s hamburger wrappers. Everyone living with the wallet they had been born with. His father had once told him that you could tell everything you needed to know about a person by looking at their curtains. The house in front of him, likely rented to students given its proximity to the university, had five windows that faced the street. The main bay window was covered with a pink and white striped sheet. He could see the faint outlines of plants and possibly a cat sleeping on the inside ledge. There were three windows on the second and third floors. White lace, tin foil, dark green mini-blinds. The window in the front door was covered by a triangle of fabric, dark green with a large, gold pattern. Gaetan noted the drawstring dangling in the middle. A woman’s skirt. It was the closest he’d come to wanting to go back home.
A quick right turn, another left, and Gaetan found himself in the middle of Chinatown. It felt like a new city, the street overflowing with people, lumbering streetcars, fruit and vegetables spilling over onto the asphalt, piles of empty wood crates, mountains of garbage. It was near impossible to manoeuvre the sidewalk, so he walked along the curb, cars whizzing past him.
Almost every storefront was a restaurant or market. On the sidewalk, permit-less vendors sold homegrown vegetables, fake designer handbags, phone cards, pirated DVDs, and potted herbs, all showcased on overturned cardboard boxes or card tables. The smell of the neighbourhood was a mix of sickly sweet rotting fruit and fried food, which Gaetan found oddly pleasing. Between the constant noise and pervasive smells, it was impossible to hear one’s own thoughts. It was perfect. His stomach grumbled. It was time to eat.