Toronto, city of immigrants, of Tamils and Serbs and Italians and Greeks, has distinct constellations of sexual light: elegant Argentinian dance clubs, Russian bars dense with smoke and debate, sweaty, flirtatious West Indian restaurants, strip joints filled with careful South Asians in masked repose.
     The city is outwardly decorous, the lives lived within it closed to view, wholly unsuspected, each culture keeping separate and harboring secrets. It is a city for sexual tourists. For people like me, now I say it, descended as I am from the founding group of brisk, inhibited Scots. When I'm lonely, I tour my own town.
     I plod the empty streets in endless winter, body hunched against a biting wind, sex buried deep within my dumb, utilitarian snow boots, and slip through certain doorways into heat.
     The Tapas Bar on College Street, a particular favorite. Old Victorian house, windows fogged in January, the interior awash in the sounds of flamenco, the smell of red wine. A family of Spaniards runs the place, Senora upstairs in her kitchen creating plates of smoked trout and chorizo while her sons — ah, her sons — move through the room with impatient grace.
     These gorgeous boys tend bar, they grow bored, they're irrepressible, they seduce me. They squirt wine into my open mouth from a goat skin, leaning in around my tiny table, grinning as wine dribbles down my chin.
     Then one of them collects me and begins to dance a rumba, hot and close between the tables. Other patrons push back chairs and clasp each other's wrists and move their hips, the frost-bitten WASPs surprisingly expert alongside their Latin companions, because, of course, that's why they come here. Silent and shy and sensual.
     Sliding through doorways, here in my secretive town.

The Tapas Bar
226 Carleton St., Toronto
416-323-9651

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