In the deep calm of 4:00 am, Toronto was fast asleep. The stillness of the night was a continuum broken only by blowing bursts of howling gales. Bone-chilling October winds crept down upon the city from the northern Arctic; winds that shook the almost leafless trees to create a sort of chime in the air like the hum of a babbling brook traveling between tall buildings in the empty streets before the gust subsides until there is only quietness again.
Even in the city's center, there was no motion. That is, other than the low-hanging clouds racing across the night sky. A night sky whose blackness had been brightened to a navy-blue hue by the perpetual lights of the watchful buildings, towers, big neon screens, and the waning streetlamps. A city that was afraid of the dark even as it slept.
Although in its own right, Toronto was Canada's metropolitan gem and was usually compared to New York City but with better manners. Unlike the city that never sleeps, Toronto needed its full eight hours' worth. Few exceptions did exist; chief among them: Clara Desbiens.
Perched high up in the penthouse like a satellite above the clouds, the brothel was a reflection of the lurid stillness outside, as it always was in the dead hours between 4 am and dawn. Any evidence of the roaring ruckus, of just a few hours earlier, existed only in the aftermath it had left behind. The place was strewn with tired dance marks, confetti that had lost its luster, empty cocktail glasses smeared with lipstick and fingerprints, and ashtrays full to the brim. But there was one place inside the brothel that always escaped the carnage. Always out of sight, always untouched.
Tucked all the way behind the bar in a closed office in a windowless room, Madame Desbiens' face was illuminated at an angle by the desk lamp. It cast an elongated shadow of her head that irritatingly spilled darkness on whatever she was straining to read. Funnily, this interplay of desk lamp light and shadow made the image of a nondescript middle-aged woman sitting at a desk, crunching numbers, absurdly overdramatic. And yet, her face was completely unrecognizable.
Not because it was shrouded behind the horn-rimmed reading glasses she wore whenever conducting office work. No. It was the lines of concentration teetering on the edges of a grimace. A stark contrast to the conviviality of the role she played in front of eager patrons. In the seriousness of this room, she was a mistress of hospitality no more. The way she intently counted the money as the notes of currency ruffled between her thumb and index finger made her seem like a poker table dealer. All she was missing was the clear green visor. But she wasn't dealing. She was meticulously balancing the books and allocating the earnings to her employees. To each their lot.
"Madame Dezzy..." An inquiring voice followed the knock on the office door.
"Come in..." the Madame responded without breaking her concentration. The slender figure of the bartender as she entered had completely disappeared under the cloak of a trench coat.
"I finished bottle inventory..." She yawned as she placed the notepad at the edge of the desk.
"Oh, I also got an email from the cleaning crew, they had a double booking, so they'll be an hour later than usual."
Still judiciously counting the money and placing different amounts in various envelopes, the Madame took the news in. She put her forefinger against her temple and cocked back her thumb as if she was pulling a gun's trigger. They both giggled with the subtle appreciation of how truly heavy was the head that wore the crown.
"Here, hand these out to the rest of the girls," the Madame commanded as she handed the bartender the white envelopes, "and these to the boys." The boys being the two bulky security guards whose graveyard shift always ended by making sure Madame Desbiens' beautiful employees got back home safely in the deadness of 4 am.
"Thank you, thank you..." The bartender brightened as she took the envelopes. More so than the actual money, she appreciated the responsibility of being the Madame's de facto second in command.
"Be safe..." Madame Desbiens said maternally as the bartender left the office.
Despite the payroll allocation, there remained an impressive pile of cash on the desk. The sight of it had always left a bittersweet lump in the Madame's stomach. On the one hand, it was a wonderful testament of her booming success; on the other, it was a stark reminder of the un-bankable state of that same success.
Although Canada has an international reputation of being progressive, sex work remained illegal. As a consequence, the Madame's establishment did not enjoy the basic privileges and amenities that a small business desperately required, like a bank account. No matter how prosperous she was, her money was condemned to remain money, never breaching the threshold of becoming capital. The edicts of men in the legislative assembly would not allow her to join the club of capitalism. It was an obstacle that she worked tirelessly against. Thankfully, not without allies.
Wayne was an avid supporter of the Madame's good fight. He had to be. As a startup investor in her erotic endeavors, he furnished the Madame with his web of contacts to work for her cause. Their cause. "Think federally, act provincially," Wayne would always tell her during their usual strategy meetings.
Swiveling around in her chair, Desbiens placed the piles of cash discreetly in the safe behind her back before she turned off the light and slipped out of the office, and in an instant was altogether out in the deserted streets.
The city slept, but Desbiens was unsure if it dreamt. To entertain, to enthrall the sleeping masses was to give them something to dream about. Everything she did had moral significance she reasoned. A satisfied smile drew itself on her face as she surveyed the empty streets. She liked the silence at this hour. The stillness of it. This short walk from the brothel to her loft was when she could hear her thoughts loudest.
The coldness of the breeze seeped into her trench coat like someone playfully blowing cool air down the back of her neck. It was a source of pleasurable shudders all over her skin, making her retreat cozily into her coat like a grinning child quickly draping her uncovered cold feet under the warmth of her blanket. She began to walk.
Her gaze was drawn skyward to the windswept clouds that moved in the night against the coming of dawn. Between the glimmering downtown skyscrapers, the night sky was starless. Not from a lack of stars. Not at all. But by a sleight of lights. Everything was still too bright. Orion's belt, the big dipper, Cassiopeia, and all other constellations vanished in the face of modernity, in the face of practicality. And with them, the ancient myths and symbols, by which society oriented itself, were gone as well: almost as if by some collective covenant, there were to be no stars without darkness. It was a bargain she happily accepted. Not that she was afraid of darkness. Not at all. But she too was a woman of utility. She needed to be.
A single mother who resolved to build something of herself, if not solely for herself, Clara Desbiens had followed her imagination all the way to Toronto. And from where she was brought up, she might as well have been from a different country.
Clara was born and raised in a French-Canadian town located on the fertile banks of the Saint Lawrence River in Northern Quebec. It was a small town in the heart of the dizzyingly green Gaspé backwoods. A paradoxical wilderness that offered endless pristine nature but was also confining in its solitude. There was no clear line in the grass separating the town from the outskirts other than the army of white, yellow, and pink lilies creating a botanical border of sorts. Although the lilies blossomed in abundance, bursting into being, claiming the cool northern air with their perfume, they were outnumbered by the fleur-de-lis French heraldry fluttering on the Quebec flags. Fleurs-de-lis purposefully hoisted higher than maple leaves. It was a town, radically proud of its French-ness. The remnants of which were retained only in the flatness of Clara's English which, to Torontonian ears, sounded rather memorized. As Madame Desbiens continued her walk in the heart of Toronto, surrounded by the skeletons of new towers being built, she could not even remember the smell of the lilies. How beautifully different she found it all to be. Twenty years of living in the big city had not ameliorated the starkness of that contrast and always left her reminiscing during her walk home. Reminiscence not borne of heartfelt nostalgia but of steely-eyed gratitude for having escaped her hometown.
It was a place of short naps and long dreams; endless days were spaced apart with the dullness of inactivity. There, Clara's dreams always took her elsewhere. And when her eyes were open, they were always set on the distant horizon. She wanted more. Much more. Her clamoring finally reached an apex when her father passed away.
Her mother had withdrawn into herself, barely speaking to her daughter...hardening and growing colder and hollow by the day until Clara couldn't even recognize her mother's face without its perpetual grimace. It was intolerable. But being her mother's only child, Clara was tormented between wanting to leave and the guilt of abandonment.
So, Clara did what the townsfolk always did when they found themselves in the most primordial of human conditions; alone in the darkness, unable to breathe: she turned to God. The Church however provided no solace, it offered instead empty platitudes and clichés. Nothing was ameliorated and no patience had been gained. So, she gradually disengaged. In a small town, however, every move or lack thereof is noticed. Monitored. Her weekly absence from Sunday Mass was a calling call for the older ladies of the town. In small places like this, Social Services was not a thing. Its function was instead outsourced to the collective wisdom of the tribe.
Clara could no longer walk around freely. The older women always wanted to teach her something; speaking in rhetoric, ought-nots, and 'you don't want to be like so and so.' Desbiens would nod but would not be listening, glimpsing instead in the lives of these older ladies, a future that sent shudders down her spine. She didn't want to end up like them. Those who stayed in town were gripped by dogma; those who left were spoken ill of with rigid moral indignation.
Having finally saved $1,000 from working odd jobs after school and on weekends, she fled like a blasé bird in flight. Without goodbyes, without second thoughts, without plans, stoically leaving behind a trail of broken hearts. She wasn't quite running towards something as she was running from it. By virtue of selecting a destination antithesis to everything she knew, Clara came to Toronto. She had never been here before. But the CN tower, piercing the darkness of the night sky with its brightly lit needle, had always served as a lighthouse guiding those driven by the audacity of want, the possibility of hope, and the simplicity of grace. Those bringing with them yet another dream to be added to the overall mosaic of three million dreams.
At first, she didn't mind doing things she hated to get the things she loved. To Clara, that took the form of working minimum wage as a barista. However, sadness ensued when the things she loved grew finer in taste and began seeming economically out of reach. But not for long. The gap began to shrink when she saw the opportunity to monetize the most primal of human needs: sex work. She looked at things matter-of-factly, recognizing that the only hindrances were fabricated social mores; the notions that made sinners regardless of any good...notions she had consciously left behind. Not before long, her supplemental income was proportionate to the type of clients that paid for the pleasure of her company. The expensive clothes and undergarments that she pined for were never ornaments of an underused closet but instead were professional equipment and tools of the trade; the guilt of buying finer things was nonexistent. It was in sex work that she had met Wayne.
He was a man after her own taste. Of all her clients, she was drawn to him the most. In that, she saw so much of what she wanted in the way he lived. All her life, she knew nothing of leisure. But from a distance, she admired it, respected it, worshipped it. And in front of her was a man who surrounded himself in nothing but beautiful and lavish things. In turn, Wayne admired her drive and ambition among the many carnal aspects of her that he deemed worthy of his admiration.
And in that reciprocity, Clara found the reassurance of familiarity in entirely new surroundings. Even when she suddenly found out she was pregnant and could no longer engage in sex work. But counting someone else's money does not make a person rich. And so, Clara took matters into her own hands.
Appealing to the investment banker opportunist in Wayne and the innate human propensity of chasing the thrills of mastering a new venture, she came to him with a proposition. Clara wanted to set up an elite brothel, a destination for the notables and the economically capable; the first of its kind in a city accustomed to dilapidated erotic establishments. She had the hunger; he had the wherewithal. The wherewithal to open to her a world she yearned for. It was a promising business and as such, Wayne helped her set it up. Alongside him, her anxieties faded into the surety that he knew everything...that was twenty years ago.
Gone were those lamentable days; the days of the struggling single mother. Right now, Madame Desbiens was the queen of her own slice of a kingdom, steering the city like her own personal carriage. She stood in front of her condominium, in the small garden by the glassy and glamorous entrance.
At this predawn hour, the darkly green trees looked black except for a sudden accumulation of white dusting on the tips of branches. Snow flurries began alighting from the clouds, teasing what is yet to come. Desbiens was immediately filled with that sinking feeling of freefall that marks the beginning of winter. But it wasn't yet winter, and the birds were outraged. Nightingales, Robins, and Blue Jays filled the air with eloquent songs of resistance against the dominion of winter. Playing music to kill the weather, remote in time in an otherwise silent world. Feeling part of its song, part of its sadness, Desbiens let out a smiling sigh before she entered.
She flicked on the lights and was careful with her movements so as not to wake up Angie; her daughter. The loft had two floors and was as big as a house. With the floor-to-ceiling windows and plants decorating every nook and cranny, the loft felt open and inviting, like a modern glass treehouse suspended in the middle of Toronto. A beautiful slice of nature captured and tamed for aesthetic domesticity.
Desbiens lingered for a few moments outside her daughter's room and peeked through the slant of the open door. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, a shape took form on the bed. Although she was proud of her queenly accomplishments and improbable successes in life, lying there in bed, was the finest jewel in her crown. A crimson jewel, like the bright red hair she inherited from her father. Her daughter endowed meaning to otherwise hollow endeavors that without her could have been devoid of purpose. Desbiens' mouth broke in a smile springing from the heart. Gratitude fizzled in her chest with warmth like drinking room temperature whiskey neat.
After a long day, the bathroom was Clara Desbiens' temple. Her initials were embossed on towels, bathrobes, and the essential trappings of modern comfort. Subtle reminders were key. She drew herself a hot bath. Slowly slipping into the warm waters like a baptism she no longer believed in until she melted.
But it was her ritual of rebirth. The hot water dissolved the kisses, the stickiness, the sins of the day. She was pure. She was saved. She was made whole.