Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  STANLEY PARK

  “[This] intelligent and leisurely … novel serves up chi-chi restaurants, Blood and Crip sous chefs and exotic culinary dishes, but it is also a pointed comment on the act of creation—whether someone is working toward a soufflé, a movie, a work of art or a romp in the sack.… One thing is clear: the talented Timothy Taylor … is very good at writing about food, on a par with Jim Harrison or Sara Suleri.”

  The Globe and Mail

  “Stanley Park is both feat and feast: a smart and enthralling narrative that urgently binds together its twin obsessions with place and food and culminates in a pièce de resistance that proves a triumph both for Chef Jeremy Papier and his creator, Timothy Taylor.”

  Catherine Bush

  “[Stanley Park] is a modern morality play [and] an assured debut that stands well above many first novels. Taylor is a writer of undeniable talent who has proven himself adept at both the long and short form, and whose wave will no doubt reach the shores.”

  The Toronto Star

  “Vancouver breathes in Stanley Park, from its architecture and granola culture to its status as an American TV-show haven. It is a cosmopolitan, big city pushing to become an international, economic hub. It is also a natural wonder, with an ocean and a mountain range within spitting distance, a rainforest, and enough red tendencies to elect quite a few NDP governments. Jeremy is at once an élitist and a man of the people. Bravo to Timothy Taylor for capturing this tension so well.… This is a powerful début; expect to hear a lot from him.”

  The Edmonton Journal

  “Nothing short of superb … A novel to savour [and] a page-turning story. [Taylor is] a gifted writer whose next book will be eagerly awaited by fans of Stanley Park.”

  The London Free Press

  “[Taylor’s] exploration of the opposing forces, which motivate the idealists, the opportunists and the materialists, is an extraordinarily creative metaphor for life in the modern age.… Taylor may be on his way to becoming the head chef of Canadian letters.”

  Winnipeg Free Press

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2001

  Copyright © 2001 by Timothy Taylor

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2001. First published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, in 2001. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  National Library of Canada

  Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Taylor, Timothy L.

  Stanley park

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36359-6

  I. Title.

  PS8589.A975S82 2002 C813’.6 C2001-903370-2

  PR9199.4.T39S82 2002

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Jane and for my parents,

  Richard and Ursula

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Part One The Canvasback

  Becoming Blood

  Part Two Dante Beale

  The Tree of Knowledge

  The Help Function

  Babes in the Wood

  Stromovka

  Part Three Local Splendour

  The Critical Path

  Frankie and Johnny

  The Guerrilla Grill

  Part Four The Source

  Acknowledgments

  Timothy Taylor is a recipient of a National Magazine Award, winner of the Journey Prize and the only writer ever to have three stories published in a single edition of the Journey Prize Anthology, as he did in the fall of 2000. He is the author of The Internet Handbook for Canadian Lawyers; his short fiction has appeared in Canada’s leading literary magazines and has been anthologized in such publications as Best Canadian Stories and Coming Attractions. His travel, humour, arts and business pieces have been published in various magazines and periodicals, including Saturday Night. He was born in Venezuela and now lives in Vancouver.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  One strand of this novel is based on fact. In January of 1953 the skeletal remains of two children were found in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. A hatchet was found with the bodies, which was determined to be the murder weapon. From the time the bodies were discovered until 1998, police believed the bodies to be those of a boy and a girl, aged between seven and ten years. DNA tests subsequently proved that the children were brothers. They have never been identified, no charges have ever been laid, and the case remains open.

  ONE

  THE

  CANVASBACK

  They arranged to meet at Lost Lagoon. It was an in-between place, the city on one side, Stanley Park on the other. Ten years of rare contact, and they had sought each other out. Surprised each other, created expectations.

  Now the Professor was late.

  Jeremy Papier found a bench up the hill from the lagoon and opened a section of newspaper across the wet boards. The bench was between two cherry trees, the pink blossoms of which met high over his head forming an arch, a doorway. It wasn’t precisely the spot they’d discussed—the Professor had suggested the boathouse—but it was within eyesight, within shouting distance. It was close enough. If he had to wait, Jeremy thought, settling onto the paper and blowing out a long breath, he was going to sit. He crossed one long, aching leg over the other. He fingered the tooling on a favourite pair of cowboy boots, ran long fingers through tangled black hair.

  He sat because he was tired, certainly. Jeremy accepted that being a chef, even a young chef, meant being exhausted most of the time. But there had also been a family portrait taken here, on this bench, years before. Also early spring, he remembered; the three of them had sat here under the cherry blossoms. Jeremy on the one side, seven years old. His mother, Hélène, on the other. The Professor had his arms around them both, feet flat on the grass. He looked extremely pleased. Jeremy’s mother was less obviously so, her expression typically guarded, although she made dozens of copies of the photo and sent these off to relatives spread across Europe from Ireland to Spain, from the Czech Republic to as far east as Bulgaria. Documenting settlement. He wondered if his father, who had no relations other than those in the photo, would remember this detail.

  Now Jeremy lit a cigarette and watched an erratic stream of homeless people making their way into the forest for the night. When he arrived there had been seawall walkers and hotdog eaters, birdwatchers, rollerbladers, chess players returning from the picnic tables over by bowling greens. Then lagoon traffic changed direction like a freak tide. The flow of those heading back to their warm apartments in the West End tapered to nothing, and the paths were filled with the delusional, the alcoholic, the paranoid, the bipolar. The Professor’s subjects, his obsession. The inbound. Four hundred hectares of Stanley Park offering its bleak, anonymous shelter to those without other options.

  Of course, Jeremy didn’t have to remind himself, the Professor had other options.

  They had discussed meeting on the phone earlier in the week. When Jeremy picked up—expecting a late reservation, maybe his black-cod supplier, who was due into Vancouver the next morning—he heard wind and trees rustling at the other end of the line. Normally reticent, the Professor was animated about his most recent research.

  “… following on from everything that I have done,” he said, “culminating with this work.” From his end, standing at a pay phone on the far side of the lagoon, the Professor could hear the dishwasher hammering away in the background behind his son’s tired response.

  “Participatory anthropolog
y. Is that what you call it now?” Jeremy was saying. “I thought it was immersive.”

  “Like everything,” the Professor answered, “my work has evolved.”

  He needed help with something, the Professor said. He wanted to meet.

  “How unusual,” Jeremy said.

  “And what advice can I give on running a restaurant?” the Professor shot back.

  “None,” Jeremy answered. “I just said there was something I wanted to talk to you about. Something that had to do with the restaurant.”

  “Strange times,” the Professor said, looking into the darkness around the pay phone. Checking instinctively.

  Very strange. The stream of those inbound had slowed to a trickle. A trio of men passed, bent behind shopping carts that were draped and hung with plastic, heaped to the height of pack horses, bags full of other bags. Jeremy could only wonder at the purpose of them all, although the Professor could have told him that the bag itself captured the imagination. It held emblematic power. For its ability to hold, certainly. To secure contents, to carry belongings from place to place. But even the smell of the plastic, its oily permanence, suggested the resilience of things discarded.

  Jeremy watched the three men make their way around the lagoon and disappear into the trails. He glanced at his watch, sighed. Lifted his chin and breathed in the saline breeze. It brought to mind the ocean beyond the park, sockeye salmon schooling in the deep, waiting for the DNA-encoded signal to turn in their millions and rush the mouth of the Fraser, the tributary offshoot, the rivulet of water and the gravel-bed spawning grounds beyond. Mate, complete the cycle, die. And then, punctuating this thought, the rhododendron bushes across the lawn boiled briefly and disgorged Caruzo, the Professor’s manic vanguard.

  “Hey, hey,” Caruzo said, approaching the bench. “Chef Papier.” He exhaled the words in a blast.

  He dressed for the mobile outdoor life, Caruzo. Three or four sweaters, a torn corduroy jacket, a heavy coat, then a raincoat over all of that. It made the big man even bigger, the size of a lineman, six foot five, although stooped a little with the years. Those being of an indeterminate number; Jeremy imagined only that it must be between fifty and ninety. Caruzo had a white garbage bag tied on over one shoe, although it was only threatening to rain, and pants wrapped at the knees in electrical tape. His ageless, wind-beaten face was protected by a blunt beard that fell to his chest. Exposed skin had darkened, blackened as a chameleon might against the same forest backdrop.

  “The Professor,” Caruzo announced, “is waiting.”

  Jeremy followed Caruzo between the cherry trees and around the lagoon. They passed down an alley of oak trees that stirred another memory of his mother. When they were alone—the Professor was often in the field on other projects, never explained—Jeremy and his mother would spend weekends here, feeding the animals. Bread for the swans, nuts for the squirrels. The racoons would take eggs from your hand and climb up into these same bent trees, crack their prize gingerly and suck clean the interior. Once a racoon bobbed its head in silent thanks before eating. His mother laughed for a long time at that. It was as happy as he remembered her being, ever. From his earliest memories right up to the day in October 1987 when Hélène Papier died, not long after his twentieth birthday. His father was again in the field. Jeremy had been seeking his own petulant distance, living on campus, playing in a bad rockabilly band called The Decoders and failing economics. When Jeremy thought of it now—ten years separating him from the events that had so tragically, so quickly, unfolded—it sometimes felt as if she had given up on both of them, all at once. In the middle of a dream turned left, not right. Taken her leave. The suddenness of it sent Jeremy and his father flying across the world in different directions.

  Caruzo marched ahead. He was chanting, as he would from time to time.

  October 5, 1947,

  The date of their demise,

  When the things I saw in the trees and the sky

  Made me finally realize,

  It’s the fir and the arbutus

  Whose leaves will fall to meet ye,

  And touching the soil mark the morning of toil

  When the light it fails to greet ye.

  “And now I singe, any food, any feeding,

  Feeding, drink or clothing,

  Come dame or maid,

  Be not afraid, poor Tom will injure nothing.”

  When he reached the end of the chorus, Caruzo stopped on the path, held his hands out as if soliciting critical commentary.

  “Food, drink or clothing?” Jeremy asked.

  “How about a toonie?” Caruzo said.

  Jeremy produced the two-dollar coin and they walked another fifty yards, over a small arched bridge and up to a trail mouth that entered the forest proper. A pay phone stood there. And since the Professor was still nowhere to be seen, Jeremy phoned Jules at the restaurant.

  “How are you making out?” she asked him. She had the cordless phone tucked under her chin while she walked across the kitchen of The Monkey’s Paw Bistro.

  “It’s all extremely strange,” he said by way of an answer.

  “Strange itself is not bad,” Jules said. “All my father ever talks about are husbands and mutual funds. Turns out the evaluation criteria are similar.”

  She was trying to cheer him up, which he appreciated as always. “What are the numbers tonight?” he asked her.

  “Twenty-six covers early. We have a six-top late. A few tentatives.”

  “Thursday,” he said, exasperated.

  “Walk-in Thursday,” Jules said. Jeremy deduced from the steady scraping sound he heard that she was stirring the roasted carrot-ginger soup he had prepped earlier.

  “I was going to use a bit of cinnamon in that soup,” he said. “Is Zeena in?”

  “Zeena, of course, is in,” Jules said, and then, knowing he was trying to think about work as an alternative to what lay before him, she prodded, “Talk to me, sugar. How’s he doing?”

  Well, he’s living in a park, for one. But Jeremy knew what she was really asking. “I can’t be sure,” he said to Jules. “He’s not here yet.”

  “He’ll show,” Jules said. “Take the evening. I’ll manage.”

  “Everything else prepped up?”

  “Puh-lease.”

  “I made a demi from those duck bones. I was going to use that in the sauce for the duck breast with an apricot preserve.…”

  Sous-chef Jules Capelli met these instructions with long-suffering silence.

  “Sorry.”

  “I got the notes,” Jules said. “Now take the night and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Caruzo had become the messenger. He could still cover great distances quickly on his long legs, and so he had been sent to set up this meeting, loping all the way across town to The Monkey’s Paw to secure Jeremy’s commitment in person. He returned with the good news, and a complimentary plate of lamb sausage and new-potato ragout inside him, retracing his steps through favourite back alleys, forest paths and finally to the Professor’s camp.

  “Yo hey,” Caruzo called from the darkness, adhering to the protocol they had developed: Call from a short, respectful distance away. If there is no answer, come back later. “Hi, Professor,” he called.

  The Professor cracked the fly with two fingertips. He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the little tent, sorting through piles of yellow foolscap pages. Each legal-sized sheet covered on both sides with handwritten notes, scrawled in pencil.

  “Yo hey,” Caruzo said. “Chef says yes. Jay-Jay is coming.”

  The Professor leaned out of the tent a little ways to catch the words. He was pleased.

  “Five o’clock tomorrow,” Caruzo said, nodding vigorously. “But hey,” he continued, then stalled. The Professor waited while the big man squinted and relaxed his eyes repeatedly, milking out the thought.

  “It’s good,” Caruzo said. “Jay-Jay coming.”

  “Jeremy coming is good,” the Professor said, nodding reassuranc
e.

  “I’ll meet him at the boathouse,” Caruzo said. “Meet him, bring him in?”

  “Fine,” the Professor agreed. “I’ll meet you both at the bulrushes.”

  “Right,” Caruzo nodded. “Right.” But he made no move to disappear into the dark, no move to find his way through the blackness to his own camp, so skilfully hidden for all these years. Instead he waited, a little nervously. “Do you want to talk?” the Professor asked, sensing Caruzo’s mood. He quickly confirmed the presence of a pencil behind his ear, then felt around himself for one of his yellow legal pads.

  He made a small fire. Then, as he had done so many nights since he discovered this place and the people in it, the Professor leaned back in the grass around the fire and only listened.

  Caruzo spoke in the tongues of angels, although the fire of his words licked around the ideas he worked to express and often consumed them. Tonight again, he spoke of the children. “Their death pulled,” Caruzo said, rocking. “The boy, the girl. Killed as they were. It pulled me and it sent me. Pulled others too. We were like the dry leaves, and their death was a puff of black air. For years I searched for them, and when I found them it all began.” He gestured around himself at the park, the darkness. “From a leaf to a lifer,” he went on. “That’s me. A lifer to a leaf.”

  He burned himself out eventually and left as he typically did: without offering firm solutions to his riddles and without saying goodnight. He rose from his haunches, turned in the soft grass and vanished into the shadows.

  The Professor read over his notes, then put the yellow legal pad back in the tent. He returned to the fire to watch it as the flames died. Since their last series of meetings, Caruzo had not untangled. So their deaths had drawn him here, the Professor thought, trying to work it through. The leaf blown by the evil event, the black wind. The leaf becoming a lifer, permanent. The lifer anticipating how he would one day, again, become a leaf. Was that it?