Read The Empty Room for Free Online

the teasing and the play and the attention. They were colleagues. It was networking. She never intended it would lead to anything. People got the wrong impression. She didn’t mean anything. It was just drinks, after all.

A LUVERLY BUNCH OF COCONUTS
    T he subway arrived at the St. George stop. Hers. She zipped into the coffee shop on the corner and bought a breakfast sandwich with cheese and bacon, which she ate as she walked the long blocks to her office. It wouldn’t do to let anyone know she had stopped to get food, late as she was. Cheese and bacon, she thought as she chewed, pulling a bit of paper wrapper from between her teeth. Not exactly the fare they once served at Winston’s.
    The grease and carbohydrates soaked up some of the acid in her belly, and by the time she reached the building in which the Geography Department was housed, she felt half human again. She stopped at the elevator, which was notoriously slow. All three cars were at the top floor, so she headed for the stairwell. She popped a mint in her mouth as she climbed. Four sets of stairs, and frankly, by the time she reached the top she was a bit shaky again.
    When she first came to work at the university, she was only eighteen, and she’d planned to work during the day and take classes at night so she could get her degree in English Literature with a minor in Comparative Religion, since her parents hadn’t put any moneyaside for her education. She took courses in the short story, Canadian literature, Shakespeare, John Donne, Victorian Realist Novels, world religions, Celtic saints. Each semester she swore she’d buckle down this time, do all the reading, never miss a lecture, write the papers, hand them in on time, but a few weeks in she found herself slipping, making excuses to miss one class and then another. She was so young then, younger than many of the students, in fact. There was always an invitation to a party, or to go out for drinks or a bite to eat. She’d get home late, have a glass of wine, start to read and fall asleep. She’d fall behind. Eventually she’d withdraw from class, vowing to do better next semester. She never got the degree.
    She worked over in the Transcripts Department for a year at first, and ran up and down the stairs like an athlete. She remembered some woman saying that must be how she stayed so slim. And really, she was still slender now, although things seemed to have shifted around a bit. Her waist, her tiny twenty-three-inch waist. That was gone. From the Transcripts Department to the English Department (where she’d been so sure she’d take courses and begin writing seriously, maybe even do an MA in Creative Writing), then off to Bay Street for that little interlude, followed by a wild foray into the music business, back to the university and the Medical Research Department, then to the Registrar’s Office, the History Department, the Faculty of Theology at St. Michael’s College, and now … here.
    She had met him at the university in 1978 when she was twenty and working in the English Department. Jake. Beautiful Jake, whoboxed in the Golden Gloves, light heavyweight, and won a silver medal; Jake of the amber eyes and the café au lait skin. He smelled of cinnamon and his chest was hairless. He studied finance. For four years she and Jake tangled round each other. She was the only girl his boxing coach, the gnarled little French Canadian Michel Lucien, would let come to the matches, because she was a lady and never freaked out if Jake got hit, if the blood flowed. Jake moved into her apartment for a while, and then he went to New York to be a big-deal stockbroker and she was supposed to go with him and get married but she didn’t, not when she found out he’d been sleeping with that stewardess. Flight attendant. Whatever . Her name was Jane Smith. Jane Smith , for the love of God. How unoriginal. She’d told him if she ever caught him cheating, it was over, and so it had to be over, whether she liked