glances at me. Now that most of her makeup has leaked off, I’m surprised to see she’s only about sixteen.
“He told me I’m not really cut out for it.”
“Modelling?”
She nods.
“Clive Thompson? That’s terrible.” I know he’s right, though. The dance clubs of Toronto are filled with girls like her—young shooter girls who can only make it by on their tips. Because so many guys are always trying to sleep with them, they get the impression they’re hot. By the time they discover they’re not, they’re usually too old or too married to care. This one made the mistake of believing her patrons. The only work she’d be able to get would be in a makeup commercial. They’d hire someone that looks a little like her for the “After.”
“It’s probably just that you’re maybe a little too short.”
“You think?” She lifts her head off her knees.
“Yeah. You know how they like those big, long girls. Why don’t you try acting instead? They don’t care how tall you are.”
“I used to be in the drama club at Sir Leopold Carter, my old school. And my teacher always said I was pretty good. I had a guy come up to me once. From a talent agency, I think.”
My head nods while I escape through the back door of my mind. I wonder if I did the right thing by lying to her. Maybe I should have been honest and told her she’d be better off going back to school. Better to know and accept this now than to have one’s heart broken a thousand times before the age of nineteen. The ancient Greeks actually determined a mathematical equation for beauty. If I knew what it was, I could show this girl her face is a problem that can never be solved. I wonder if the formula still holds. Is math ever wrong?
She thanks me for listening, and I turn left down the corridor, toward Clive Thompson’s studio, knowing that if things go bad, there will be no one out here willing to lie for me.
I’m in the bathroom at a McDonald’s in the Annex, desperately trying to take off my makeup. But not even their industrial soap has any effect. If any man whistles at me, I’ll cut two holes in my jacket and wear it as a mask.
I’m supposed to see an apartment at 2:30 near Avenue Road, but I forget to allow for wind resistance on Bloor Street, and no one’s home by the time I get there. Yesterday I told the agency that I’d be moving out of Breffni, Augustus, and Crispen’s model apartment, and they said a new model from out west would take my room next week. If I don’t find a place soon, I’ll be sleeping next to that guy.
I leave McDonald’s and step around a bare-chested man playing a drum on a plastic barrel. Wearily I pull out my map and weigh my options. Every neighbourhood has a name: the Annex, Swansea, Rosedale, the Beaches, Cabbagetown. I’ve tried the first, following up on ads. The last sounds pleasant enough. Its name reminds me of Sunday-morning British cartoons. I can see Hedgehog and his friend, the talking tugboat, living there. I’ve noticed a lot of FOR RENT signs in other neighbourhoods, so I figure I might as well try my luck.
At Bay and Bloor secretaries and salesclerks are out on their second lunches. They’ll exchange high heels for white sneakers at five. I avoid the streets with more homeless than homes. It’s getting cold, days away from the first snowfall, but it’s still a beautiful afternoon to walk. I’d hate to be driving in this circus—at every intersection accosted by street anemones with dirty squeegees and shiny nose chains who offer to defile your windshield for a dollar. I head down Bay, deciding to cut across town on College or Dundas. The megalopolis is a labyrinth of one-way streets and traffic-control signs, many of them contradictory. On one street a sign reads: 1 HOUR PARKING 9-3. Two feet away another sign warns: NO STOPPING. I have visions of earnest drivers hurling themselves out of their windows as their cars glide along in neutral.
Yonge Street is the hungriest street in the world. Hot-dog carts line up along the curb like taxis. I stop in front of one stand boasting BEST SAUSAGES IN TOWN. Its neighbour proclaims: BEST SAUSAGES IN THE CITY. Clearly one is lying. Either would be gastrointestinal suicide. I halt instead at a newspaper kiosk and buy a bar of happiness and a can of rotten teeth.
I’m still not sure where Cabbagetown begins and ends, so I check my map, stop a passerby, and ask, “Excuse me, is this the best way to Cabbagetown?” I trace my proposed route on the map.
“Yeah, that’s right,” the man says as I lean into his bad breath.
“Okay, thanks,” I mumble as the guy ambles away. In my experience there’s a fifty percent chance people will answer yes or no to any given question, regardless of what the truth actually is. You used to be able to ask directions from gas station attendants. But now that none of them are actually from Toronto, one might as well ask the pump.
I stroll into a restaurant to get detailed directions. It could be a diner off the highway. Small Formica tables. Yellow flycatchers. Everyone in baseball caps. There isn’t a nonsmoking section. A bus driver, teasing the waitress about her new hairdo, is getting the usual. If I buy something, maybe they’ll help me. I glance at the menu, which dangles over a long hot plate. Eggs and hamburgers are being fried together.
“What’ll it be?” the cook asks. A greasy Band-Aid hangs from one finger.
“Thanks, I’m just looking.” Even the carrot cake seems greasy. Now that I’m a working model, I guess I should listen to the boys and watch what I eat. “Could I just get some toast, brown, no butter, and a glass of water?”
He hands me a plate of cremated bread and a paper cup of warm, brown-smelling stuff from an open jug. I think I see plankton. I throw them both out and head outside, directionless.
On Carlton Street I meet more white trash in track suits and ill-fitting tattoos. The obese zip around in mechanized chariots. Construction workers operate heavy machinery in their underwear as I glide by a pawnshop. In the front window little black men with thick red lips and cheap red vests clutch lanterns and pool cues. Nigger art.
Eventually I reach Cabbagetown. The streets are lined with apartment buildings featuring pastel aluminum balconies. The better-looking ones have graffiti spray-painted on their lower walls. The worst are being decorated as I stride by. It seems to me that most of Cabbagetown’s inhabitants must only be able to afford cabbage. One half-decent building has a BACHELOR FOR RENT sign in an upper-floor window. There’s a basketball court nearby and a small restaurant downstairs. On the lawn by the main door a sign announces: IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW. Except somebody has changed HOME to DEAD. I’m not sure what that means, but it doesn’t inspire confidence.
A grey man is doing tai chi in the parking lot. I recognize a few of the forms: White Crane Spreads Its Wings, Push the Boat with the Current, Cloud Hands, Yellow Bee Returns to Nest. I took a couple of tai chi classes by mistake in college. By mistake because I confused tai chi with tae kwon do. When I didn’t hit anybody by the third class, I dropped out and took karate until somebody chopped me. The man teaching our tai chi class always talked of being effortless and yielding, quoted the Tao Te Ching, taught us the proper way to embrace tigers and repulse monkeys, but he was only a master’s student, no older than I was, had pimples, and was failing Introduction to Neurobiology and Behaviour. So what could he know of yellow bees and white cranes? In the class all our movements were rusty, jerky, as if we were breakdancing, popping and locking, doing the Robot. The man in the parking lot is a crane, actually possesses cloud hands. I don’t want to interrupt him,
