The Empty Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

knock-off.
    Colleen’s stomach was settling at last, and she was quite sure now that she would neither vomit nor pass out. At Bay Street Station many people got out, but only a few got on. There was a little breathing room at last. 9:10. Well, it couldn’t be helped. She’d stay later tonight, that’s what she’d do. She’d walk right into David’s office and say there had been a problem on the line and she was very sorry, and she’d be happy to stay late tonight to make it up. He wouldn’t mind that, surely.
    The man next to her wore headphones. Given the audible thumping bass and squealing voices, the volume must be up to maximum. He looked like a Bay Street guy, but one never knew what sort of lives people really lived. She’d worked at a brokerage on Bay Street for a while between jobs at the university. It had been the early ’80s when everyone was rich and fat and lunches consisted of three or four martinis. She remembered Bruce, a trader, who had crawled out of the elevator on all fours one afternoon around three o’clock. She’d felt nothing but contempt for him. After all,he was responsible for other people’s money, and look at the state of him. The other traders had thought it hilarious, but then, they were three sheets to the wind themselves. How could anyone get to that point? Even then she’d had her standards, which was why things hadn’t worked out for her in the stock market world. She was probably the only secretary not sleeping with someone. Well, there was that one time, but that didn’t count; Isaac had been too drunk to get it up and she’d sent him home to his live-in girlfriend. But she’d loved to go out after work with the boys. Loved to show them some of the bars they didn’t know—the soul bars, the jazz bars way off the Bay Street beat. She could drink them under the table, too, and did on many a night.
    Then, there was that night when Brian, her boss, made a pass and she called him a sleaze and he got mad and she could see then she wasn’t cut out for Bay Street. She flushed to think of that now. He was a sleaze. Colleen had met his wife, for God’s sake, and yet he thought nothing of telling her about how this girl or that girl was going down on him behind his desk and not to put any calls through to his office. And those girls who thought those guys would leave their wives because they did things the missus wouldn’t. What fools. She knew better. After all, her father had always, in the end, come home to her mother, hadn’t he? For what that was worth.

YOU’RE A SMART GIRL
    H is name was Thomas—he was never called Tom—and he drove a silver Bentley, although Colleen had no idea how he paid for it, since he did little more than hang around the office, drinking scotch with Brian, or holding court at Three Small Rooms in the Windsor Arms Hotel with the rest of the glitterati. He was an investor, he said, and had persuaded her boss, Brian Stack, to put a good deal of money into some film deal, something starring Donald Sutherland. Thomas was an Englishman who wore his thinning hair in a greying ponytail, and lifted weights so his biceps bulged rock hard under his crisp white shirt.
    One day Brian suggested Colleen join him for lunch with Thomas at Winston’s, a nearby power-lunch spot. Very art nouveau—all red velvet chairs and Tiffany lamps—a diner over which the owner, Joe Arena, presided like a Mafia don.
    She wore a black pencil skirt, a cobalt blue blouse and very high black heels. Thomas looked her up and down as she approached the table and patted the banquette next to him. “Sit here, baby.” When the waiter appeared, he ordered sixteen-year-old Lagavulin for the three of them. “And make it a Winston’s,” he said, meaning the obscenely generous pours that had helped cement the restaurant’s popularity.
    “Ice?” the waiter asked, looking at her but not the men.
    “And ruin a good scotch?” she said. “I think not.”
    “Exactly so,” said