Through the peephole I saw the exchange.

Her red raincoat steamed as blond curls clung to the creases at her eyes and pursed mouth. Beautiful manicured hands gripped a ‘tall-to-go’. Such fleeting glimpses of her outside my door and the occasional vision through the crack of the closing elevator were as close to her as I ever got.  The physical distance did not deter me. Standing half-naked in my cracked bathroom mirror I’d asked her out hundreds of times. The fractures cut across my face, splicing my right nostril and left eye together and so forced my right eye to hang suspended above my hairline. There, surrounded by a comforting sea of green tile and mildew, I would speak with her.

“Jen! Hi!”

“Who are you?” I mouth her parts with an eyebrow cocked.

“We’re neighbours. I live across from you- suite 513? We met that day when your key got stuck in the mailbox.”

“You offered to call the police.” While this ought to be said as though fact, she sounds accusatory.

“Right…” It degenerates from here as she invariably conjures up the memory of a flustered me asking to borrow a stranger’s cell phone.

“Hmm…” She is nodding and staring past me.

I end these dialogues of obsession red with embarrassment and longing. For days after I’d review each phrase; I’d question her responses and reframe mine. These conversations only reinforced that talking to her would be a bad idea.

Therefore I contented myself with watching her. She was home by 5:23 on weekdays. Bags from M&M Meatshops indicated she ate mostly prepared food. She liked the color red; she had crimson nails, ruby earrings, and rouge furniture. Sometimes she’d wear blue. Usually on these days she looked mad, or sad, I couldn’t tell which.

A chance visit to the Russian tea reading room down the Avenue confirmed our fated relationship. It was spring. Walking home with a jug of milk in one hand and a bag of shelled peanuts in the other, I passed the cafe as I had hundreds of times before. Directly in the path of passing pedestrians sat a sign advertising: “Fortunes Told”.  In a rare show of spontaneity, I veered left and entered the shop. The Madame motioned for me to find a seat in the haze of incense. Sitting down, my leg rocked uncomfortably.

As soon as it begun, The Madame sensed my urgency for the reading to be over. I drained the liquid from my cup and passed it to her careful not to look at the remaining leaves. She frowned and peered at the mound that steamed like Mother’s compost. She spoke quietly:

“You are one who is suspicious of everybody and nobody. You are one who has experienced much unfaithfulness; you can’t trust anymore.” Raising my saucer, bracelets tinkled. “Peace will come from your pieces,” she whispered fervently. “Wholeness will arrive on your door step; watch for it -- watch.”

I tried to contain my excitement as I paid. I raced home.

Since that reading of a mushy lump of green huddled at the bottom of my gold rimmed tea cup, I had watched for “it”. I had watched Her. After slipping a card with Madame’s contact information under her door, patiently I waited behind my peephole for the woman in red from room 510 to realize her destiny and turn expectantly toward my suite.

He came into view looking as a lamb led unto the slaughter. Not the look of a man in control, I thought. His eyes were beseeching, one arm reached out for her sculptured hand.

Infuriated, she turned, flaming in red and steam. A cocking of the wrist, an effortless launching of her cup, the sizzle of coffee on skin.

He and I both stood transfixed. As his face began to sag with the heat of her coffee, the mask of her perfection melted. I marveled detached, at how gracefully she had just crushed two spirits. Once enemies, I nodded my head at him across the oak door. Cocking my neck I tried in a surprisingly benevolent mood, to meet his eye. Truce.

Her door slammed me out of benevolence. My eye left the peephole. My lanky silhouette assumed its usual position framed in the window, backed by the light of a lone bulb swaying from the wind of her retreat.

Splashes of sun sprayed the room, rainbows refracted off the rainwater that clung to the window. The dark afternoon clouds had emptied their usual fury on the city and now were spent. All that remained were faint wisps of white, strung out like unspun fibres in the sky. The spider I’d watched hunt frantically for a hiding space amid the downpour hesitantly peered out from under a flake of paint that peeled from the pane. Could I not let him in? I mused. The canopy of the hot dog stand below winked in the light distracting me from the spider’s plight. I was hungry.

A quick glance at my watch, it was six o’clock -- supper time. Spinning on my heel, I strode halfway across the room before remembering the incident in the hall. I froze. What would I do if he still stood there? Tensing my body, I silently raised my heels from the floor, and cleared the remainder of the distance to the door on my toes.

Furtively I screwed up my face, winked, and took stock of my escape route. My narrow scope revealed the boyfriend, still there tentatively knocking on her door. Coffee glistened from his sideburns. The lady in red had barricaded herself in her suite and refused to respond to his appeals. Instead of leaving, Mr. Boyfriend knelt down on the hardwood. Crouched lower than seemed possible, he took on the appearance of a skulking cat. With his head cocked and cheek flat on the door, his left ear hung eagerly listening above the space between her door and the floor.

I furrowed my brow and counted, willing him to retreat. Thirty seconds. One minute. One minute and twenty. One and forty. Still there.

I ducked away, waited another count of twenty and peeked again. My stomach sunk; he wasn’t going to leave.

“Jen, you’re hyperventilating. Do you have a paper bag in there?” Now he shouted, his lips squeezed under the door so far that his ears were turning a bruised purple colour.

This was a predicament. How do you slip out of an apartment without the guy on the floor across the hall noticing? Perhaps he would be too absorbed- but perhaps not. My stomach’s gurgles reached thunderous proportions.

I shuffled to the couch. After struggling into my raincoat, a massive yellow rubber I’d found discarded in the back alley, I gingerly set my headphones over my ears. On my way back passed the coffee table, I grabbed the hand mirror that lay there discarded. It was double sided. One side reflected what was true. The other side reflected truth double the size. The solution to my problem lay reflecting in my hand; the mirror would act as a perfect distraction. I watched the plan unfold against the faint orange backdrop of my closed eyelids: Slipping into the hall I would immediately place the mirror, level with my head and tilted, zoom side out, slightly towards the ground. As I slipped by, all the boyfriend would see if by chance he was distracted by me, would be himself -- then he’d probably wonder what the hell he was doing kneeling on the floor for a woman who had minutes before thrown coffee on him.

Deep breath. I took hold of the doorknob; it twisted to the right. I winced as the latch clicked loudly out of place. A crack opened wider, wider until I had a full view of the hall. Air sucked back down my throat at an alarming speed. Worst case scenario.

The boyfriend stood directly in front of me.

His jacket lay on the floor. White sleeves were rolled to the elbows, tight from the bulge of his bicep as he prepared to knock at my suite. Catching my widened eye, he lowered his arm and relaxed his fist.

And promptly I closed the door.

A deafening knock crashed through the heavy silence of my apartment. An inaudible groan welled in my throat. I began to gently knock my head against the doorframe (a behavior proven to relieve stress and, more importantly, make the person hailing go away).

Unfortunately unable to see me carrying on in this manner, he knocked again. Three rapid raps. I rapped back -- two long and one short. He hesitated. Two slower knocks responded. I answered with three of my own. He shuffled his feet uncertainly and cleared his throat. A minute passed and there was silence. I ventured a quick glance through my hole. What stared back elicited a yelp of anger and surprise. Spidery red lines snaked through milky white. A giant brown Saturn hung suspended by lines, its ring undulating tempo-less, filled my scope.

I sucked the dense air through my teeth until it whistled eerily atop the tension. I gulped and put my mouth to the peephole. Using my scope as a mouthpiece I said curtly, “Get away from my peephole.”

“Did you call me an arshole, buddy?”

“No, I said peephole,” I repeated indignantly, a little louder. Furtively I squinted, hoping Saturn would no longer be obstructing my view.  He had removed his eye but now condensation limited full vision into the hall.

“What do you mean -- some people? I just need to use your phone,” He was beginning to shout loudly. The lady in red would emerge from her self-imposed captivity any second and surely understand my obsession. That would not do.

My hand darted to the knob. I cracked the door slightly and whispered as menacing a whisper as I could muster: “What do you want?”

He seemed unfazed. “I just want to use your phone. No harm done. My girlfriend has locked herself in her suite and I need to clear some stuff up.”

I simulated the sniff he had cast at me in the elevator. He appeared undaunted. The crack widened. “OK, OK. She’s in the corner.”

“My girlfriend?”

I was confused. “The phone is in the corner. Do this quick.”

“Hey, no problem. Thanks for this. I’m Jerry.” The proffered hand was left hanging in mid-air. I was already locked in the bathroom.

    t seemed his presence had displaced all the available oxygen in my suite.  My breathing was ragged. He just couldn’t stay. He couldn’t. This was my house. Mine. He belonged in the hall. I belonged here. But now he had forced me into the bathroom.

A deep breath proved that my lungs were quite definitely shrinking. It was the same sensation that had overwhelmed me last time someone ventured over the threshold of my apartment. He’d grabbed me before I had a chance to duck behind the canopy of the hot dog stand. He was an old high school classmate, not really a friend. We had studied English together. We had failed Science together. He was the only other student without a date to prom, so I guess he figured we were friends. Fully dressed in black leather, even as the sidewalk emitted waves of dry prairie heat, he smeared sauerkraut on his ‘Lawng Dawg’ and talked at me.  Up the elevator and into my room, he followed me without invitation. And I even said to him, "You’re not welcome," but he had laughed, "That’s what you always said.  Remember when you’d be studying in the library and I would sit at your table asking you the study questions anyway? Good times, good times…" He slunk on the couch and asked for a beer. There was a bottle in the fridge but I said I didn’t have any. "Go get some," I suggested as casually as possible. He left. With the cheery automated ding of the descending elevator, I scribbled, “Away for the weekend. Do not disturb.” on loose-leaf with heavy red felt pen. I had taped it to the doorbell, locked the deadbolt, and retreated to the bathroom.

Now once again I found myself surrounded by tile and mould, only this time the intruder remained inside. Anything to not think about his presence. In the broken mirror I mouthed silent obscenities. I ran out of words. So, with my finger, I applied pressure to the end of one crack in the glass that splayed out at an awkward angle from the rest; I willed the line to push further south, to carve my chin from my lips and jaw out from my jugular.

Instead, the crack aligned. A face stared back at me, whole; eyes were set side by side, framed by nose, eyebrows, ears. Who was this? I quickly released the fracture as though burned and frantically began to pry the mirror’s corner from the wall; one long crack severed it from the rest.

If I could just pull it off.

My breathing was quickening. Pumping lungs matched the pace of my pulse.

It gave way. So too did my legs. Gripping the jagged corner of glass, I rocked. Cross-legged, I huddled over the piece cupped reverently in my hands. Saliva dripped, thick as blood, obscuring the image refracting from the mirror’s edge. I could hear him talking.

And so I counted: one, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand, four... five, one thousand, six, one thousand, seven... And on until my veins cooled. The pounding in my ears quieted but it felt a long time before I heard a faint click announcing the boyfriend’s retreat.
I rose with difficulty; the rubber coat pulled at the skin on my arms. The pain was good. I squeezed the shard of mirror and two red beads slipped quietly along its edge. With newfound resolve, I cautiously opened the bathroom door and again headed across the room on my toes. This time I had no intention of leaving or looking; I locked the door.

Copyright 2007, Carissa Halton.

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