One in red scrubs, the other in black.
These women, they are attractive. Around thirty, they look like they’re used to getting hit on in bars, to knowing what it feels like to have a man watching carefully as she leans over the pool table to take a shot. Neither woman makes eye contact or acknowledges anyone else in the elevator. There is an unspoken hierarchy. We all know it.
They continue their conversation, which had likely followed them all day, as if nobody else was present, as if nobody else was visible. And so we all stand there, subordinate now, pushed just a little further to the margins while they talk about the perfectly normal privileges of being young and desired.
And then the elevator doors open and we walk out into the foyer. A classical quartet is playing beneath the Shopper’s Drug Mart sign. All the players in black suits and ties, all concentrating. The music is familiar and dislocating. Like a dream memory. Listen carefully. And yes, yes it is a classical interpretation of Under Pressure. And suddenly you are transported to when you first heard the song, back to when you played pools in bars and your heart was inexhaustible, back when within each day the premonition of true love was ever-present.
As I was waiting in the elevator, a woman suddenly angled through the closing doors and appeared amongst us. Slightly startled and self-conscious, she looked about at the motley crew surrounding her. A handsome man, with whom she had just made eye contact, asked her what floor she wanted.
“Seven,” she said, and then as if it was a word she thought she was saying in her head rather than out loud, softly added, “oncology.”
Nobody said anything, and she looked down. Her blond hair was still shiny and immaculately maintained, and she had one of those artificial tans that stood out, somehow suggesting she had always aspired to be a trophy to someone.
She smiled weakly at me, “ To look at me you wouldn’t even know, “ she began, but then as if seized by a kind of shame, she stopped. None of us felt like we belonged, it wasn’t just her. And then we all rode the elevator up in awkward silence, each one of us getting off at our own particular floor, each one stepping into a world we never dreamed we might belong.
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