Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  Sometime later she took him to the source de la Seine. It was on the far side of the ridge above the town, the side of the ridge that faced away from the quiet of rural Burgundy and down towards the tumult of Paris. Here, in a little park of Parisian symmetry, a statue of the goddess Sequana guarded the famous source. She lay in a grotto built by Napoleon III, vacant eyes cast upwards as if imagining the City of Light, where this bubbling water would eventually flow under the Pont Neuf and around l’Île de la Cité and on to the sea.

  In her direct manner Patrice only explained: “Here from the ridge flows the water that will wet the grass that the cows will eat to make the cream for your coffee when you leave me and go to Paris.”

  He climbed across the low iron railing that separated Sequana from her visitors.

  “Ger-ah-mee,” Patrice scolded.

  He took a long step across the pool that surrounded the goddess, stood next to her, then climbed into her lap. She held him securely. He lay his head in the hard valley between her stone breasts and gazed out of the grotto at Patrice.

  She was laughing. “Wait,” she said. “Do not move now.” And she produced a Polaroid camera from her handbag and took a crooked shot.

  He remembered that after taking the photo, they heard the diesel snort of an arriving bus, trucking in the tourists from Paris to visit Sequana, to understand something of how Paris came to be.

  “You must come out,” Patrice said, holding the developing Polaroid.

  “Tourists,” Jeremy said, affecting a weary, spoilt tone. “I cannot bear them.”

  “I think the goddess likes the tourists better than you,” Patrice said after he had climbed out. “They are maybe not so familiar.” But they stood there for a few minutes longer and watched the picture become clear. It had turned out nicely.

  Of course, he knew he had to return home eventually. Work visas aside, there came a month during which thoughts of leaving came up once a week, in each case riding sidecar on a sweeping memory of his mother’s death. Of how she had launched him, sent him across the world to escape the vacuum of grief. To escape the palpable sense of guilt that emanated from his father at the funeral and in their few abortive conversations that followed. He had fled, Jeremy knew, and fled successfully, although now he heard the silence between them ringing. He sent a letter, a note really—part warning, part reassurance. Coming home. Things are fine. He enclosed the Polaroid from the source de la Seine, hoping it would help rebuild bridges.

  “Well, you must go home then,” Patrice said, looking out the window when he finally told her.

  They went on one more long walk together, his last day in Burgundy. He suggested a parting visit to the source de la Seine, and Patrice looked at him curiously. It had just occurred to her that Jeremy thought that little park captured the region, with its gurgling brook artificially routed between the green benches, its gaudy statue and tour buses.

  “Oh, no,” Patrice said. But she laughed. She could let him take away this false impression. But he had a sweet way of looking at her, and he had lived here long enough that he deserved to know the truth.

  She explained the geography of the area as they walked from the car down a small road, just a few kilometres north-west of St. Seine l’Abbaye. The ridge formed a break point in the countryside, like a continental divide on a small scale. To the west, the Seine ran its course to Paris, to the Atlantic, to places beyond. To the east, down the other side of the ridge, ran the Ignon River.

  “The Ignon?” Jeremy said.

  He hadn’t even heard of it. He was, Patrice thought, such a boy. She took his hand and led him down an embankment next to the road.

  It was quite different from the other side of the ridge. There was no signage, no park or statue. But at the bottom of the hillside, water emerged from the soil. From a hundred spurts and eddies coming out under roots and stones and a carpet of white flowers. The ground flowed with water that gathered and gathered again until it formed the top of the Ignon River flowing northeast and into the Burgundy countryside.

  “The water of this region,” she said, looking at him. “All around you.”

  The blood, thought Jeremy.

  They stopped by the restaurant to say final goodbyes. Claude pumped his hand in the militaristic way he had, once up, once down. Chef Quartey clapped Jeremy’s head in his hands and kissed him on each cheek.

  “You will be,” Chef Quartey said, looking for the English word, “exceptional.”

  Patrice drove him to the train station in Dijon, where they kissed a final time. She surrendered no tears, but said only: “Bonne chance, Ger-ah-mee.”

  The cheapest flight from Paris had a twenty-four-hour stopover in Amsterdam, where he wandered the streets without purpose. He drank glasses of beer at a string of cafés until he could feel nothing but a light humming throughout his system. He sat on a bench near the Prinsen Gracht, thinking of the relais but watching the trolleys. One after another they would arrive, brilliantly lit in the night air, the entire length of the train an advertisement for Nike or Panasonic or Kit Kat chocolate bars. People spilled from each car and joined the traffic tumbling down the canal roads into the bars and restaurants and smoky cafés. Amsterdam was teeming: slackers and clubbers and queens; the Euro-homeless now free to wander and be poor on the streets of any city in the union; businessmen in French blue shirts and gold ties; Amsterdam women who looked like whooping cranes, all hips and shoulders mounted high on gaunt black bicycles. And every three minutes, another train with another load of people, and another marketing message designed to address the tumult.

  He felt sick. He imagined he had macroscale motion sickness that came from moving between St. Seine l’Abbaye and Amsterdam, such a great distance in so short a time. The next morning he hid in the Rijksmuseum for relief. He would have been happy only for some quiet, but he found instead three paintings that combined into a single lasting image of his entire experience in Europe.

  The Beheading of John the Baptist. He stopped primarily to admire Fabritius’s depiction of Salome, a frivolous aristocrat, which brought to mind the Audi or the Saab or the Benz that might as well have been waiting for her out front of the prison. But the image lingered as he moved on; Salome the patron had so airily inspected the proffered head as it dripped in front of her, held high in the hand of the workmanlike executioner, whose face reflected technical satisfaction in a distasteful assignment.

  Bueckelaer’s Well-Stocked Kitchen. It made him smile. A meta-image of thankfulness and plenty. Christ sat with Martha and Mary, surrounded by skewered game birds, Dutch hares, ducks, finches, pheasants, partridges, roosters, sandpipers, zucchini, cauliflower, tomatoes, grapes, artichokes, plums, cucumbers, lemons, apples, squash and blackberries. Jeremy imagined working with the large clay oven in the background.

  Then: The Threatened Swan. Standing like a boxer, beak set to jab, wings cocked, feathers flying. Jeremy admired the bristling stance the bird took towards the attacker, knowing that in Asselijn’s day, the threat might well have been a rookie cook like himself.

  He walked the gallery many times, seeking out all the food pictures, all the glistening still lifes, but returned again and again to these three. The patron, the kitchen, the swan. As the clock marked off the few hours until departure, he stood in front of these images, one after another, and he found himself thinking again of his American friend who set to war the culinary Crips and Bloods. His mind swirled over his time in the relais, over his Sunday nights. Those loud late evenings when Patrice did not go home to Pellerey but consented to return to his bed with him. The hours and days he had spent with her in the forest above the town. The source d’Ignon. The true source of the region. It seemed that all his time in France had been captured in these images, triangulated. Fixing him like a crapaudine on the skewer of his own culinary training.

  “These have been the years,” Jeremy thought, reflecting now on his return to North America with new, unexpected enthusiasm, with something like zeal. “These ye
ars have made me Blood.”

  The Monkey’s Paw Bistro was conceived of this conviction. It took him four years to raise the nerve and figure out how to raise the money, and a few weeks longer to convince his new friend Jules Capelli to join him as sous chef and pastry chef.

  They had met only six months before, appropriately enough at the public market. He spotted her first. He was sifting through a basket of chanterelles, for his own dinner on a Monday night off. She was across the way, intently unstacking and restacking a pile of celery roots, setting aside ones that met some clearly exacting standard. His attention was arrested. She was about his age, thirtyish or a few years younger. Attractive, definitely, but she also emanated a quality he wasn’t sure he could articulate. Something like strength and vulnerability at the same time. She had eyes too large for her face, almost sorrowful, but set under impossibly strong black eyebrows. A straight, austerely beautiful helmet of even blacker hair, blue-black, which she stroked gently behind her ears. And as he watched, she leaned over the stainless steel counter and auditioned the celery roots in her strong hands, the veins standing out in firm relief as her long fingers felt the rough surfaces. She held each one gently up to a nose that arched distinctly across the bridge. Smelling one in particular, she closed heavy lids over her eyes, finding the quality she sought. He held his breath, a chanterelle in one hand, halfway to the bag.

  Jules felt this stare on her eventually, opened her eyes and turned to find it. Jeremy looked away sharply at her first movement. He found himself above the chanterelles again, found the one in his hand and began to move as normal, raising it towards the bag. And then—remembering what he had just seen but forgetting both himself and her actual presence five or six feet away—he raised the dusty orange, pine-needle-covered mushroom past the rim of the bag and to his nose.

  Jules was looking surreptitiously around herself, having been unable to find the stare immediately. She was glancing back to her celery root when she spotted him. The guy in the suede leather coat, high cheekbones, dark eyes and thick, unkempt dark hair. He was staring back down at a basket of chanterelles, looking with faint recognition at the one in his hand. And standing, staring, his face had become dreamy. The mushroom drifted up to a spot under his nose, where he inhaled its fragrance deeply, taking a long, shuddering draw.

  He opened his eyes again and dropped the chanterelle into the paper bag, apparently satisfied. At which point he noticed that she was looking back at him, laughing silently. He saw the chosen celery root hoisted and sitting on the palm of her hand, next to her shoulder, as if ready for shot put.

  “Is that what I look like?” she asked him. “Like I’m trying to get high?”

  He reddened. He ran a hand nervously through his hair.

  “You cook,” Jules said. It wasn’t really a question. He looked tired. He was checking out chanterelles with a practised eye. He had a snip of Elastoplast around his left index finger, right where you might take off a slice of knuckle if you were behind on prep and not getting enough sleep. But he didn’t ask how she knew, just accepted that she had spotted him as a professional.

  “My night off.”

  She nodded, eyebrows arched high. “From …?”

  He told her about his work, sauté man at a popular tourist restaurant with a steady-on salmon-and-prawns-type seafood reputation. She was doing pastries and desserts at The Tea Grill, a well-known and overtly experimental kitchen, the kind loved by a certain glossy variety of critic and the financially enabled patrons that follow in their wake. A serious Crip credential, but Jeremy was impressed.

  They had coffee several weeks later. She called. They met at Save On Meats, in a rough block of East Hastings Street. Jeremy knew about the legendary Vancouver butcher—part slaughterhouse, the band saws and heavy cleavers were in use right behind the glass counters—but he hadn’t known about the little diner at the rear. It had a narrow yellow Arborite counter that curved in and out to form conversational peninsulas. They sold drinkable diner coffee and enormous hamburgers for $3.50.

  Jeremy loved it. He looked around the counter area with a broad smile. Jules found herself pleased to have predicted approval.

  Save On Meats became a weekly thing, talking shop mostly. He confided in her quickly, told her of the irritations and rewards of his present work. He told of his ideas, his taste for the simplest, most direct and local cooking possible. “Highend urban rubber-boot food,” he said at one point. He told her about the restaurant where he had worked in France, Chef Quartey, Claude, the cast of other characters and the surrounding countryside, which had all joined to inspire one single idea: The Monkey’s Paw Bistro. He could almost draw the details of the room in words, so long had he lived with the vision. He told her about the slow-dawning possibility that he may have enough seed-investment money. He spoke of his so-far unsuccessful search for that one other chef he would need.

  Jules nodded and listened over a number of similar conversations, watching his angular face work with enthusiasm around dark, shining eyes. She thought he was starting to like her, maybe he even had a little crush at this point. And she would have acknowledged a mutual attraction if someone had asked her. She would have admitted that once—the second or third time they got together—there had been a moment when she thought she was going to kiss him. A short lull in the conversation, very typical and comfortable. They were sitting on adjacent too-small stools. Jeremy shifted his weight, and their thighs rubbed. Jules turned with a smile, with a ready quip, just as he turned to her. They were staring at one another. Their expressions grew serious. And there it was, a hovering instant of possibility. Both of them floating in it. She looked at his lips, so full, so nicely formed. She could have. She would have.

  But they didn’t. From the start, Jules sensed a very different and possibly better way their relationship was directed. She liked this Monkey’s Paw idea. She liked the implied day-to-day spontaneity, culinary theatre sports in a kitchen where two people could riff off one another. And she also knew that a professional relationship would scuttle romantic possibilities, no matter how their feelings were evolving. She made it a practice not to sleep with cooks in the first place, but turning up the heat with someone from your own kitchen was a truly ridiculous idea. Cooking was a twelve-hour day, more. You couldn’t spend that kind of time together, dancing around the same prep counters, the same hot grills, literally rubbing against one another, and then go home to the same bed. Jules had tried it once—she knew. The experiment had been to good effect for exactly two nights, to bad effect for the additional two months it took to extricate herself from a life that had so physically, so intensely woven through her own.

  Her evolving sense of their relationship was also rooted in her own irritations and rewards. She told him that there had been a time when she had wanted nothing more than the kind of job she had. The Tea Grill was new; it was highly visible on critical radar. At twenty-seven, coming out of cooking school after several years on the sales side of hotel catering, Jules felt she had to jump on board something moving, happening. Something on which a reputation could be quickly built.

  “Hip at any cost,” Jules said. Coming out of school it felt like there was no time to waste.

  “And now?” Jeremy asked her.

  “Turns out I don’t want to be there.” Jules wanted independence. Jules wanted to be known for her own work. “The restaurant gets raves, fine. I’d do something smaller just to establish my own personal connection with something good. Not huge, but good and my own.”

  Jeremy watched her eyes. Green. At once open, accessible and yet bottomlessly resolved. She was right about him. His interest had begun to migrate towards the romantic, although he had taken his time deciding. He hadn’t had a girlfriend in the year since he started his most recent job. No dates even—too busy. Sex exactly twice, both with restaurant people, although not from his restaurant.

  “There are a million things I can do,” Jules was explaining. “An endless list of desserts that I
can dream up and make. They all taste good. Caramelized peaches with cumin infusion, brandy-yam ice cream.”

  “And there is liberty in it,” Jeremy said, articulating what he believed to be her point.

  “Sure. But I like key lime pie.”

  Jeremy considered this confession.

  “The intent is spontaneity,” Jules went on. “But the more I think about it, the more I imagine our creations to be the product of a ‘spontaneity rule’ of some kind. Like: Classic Ingredient A plus Exotic Technique B plus Totally Unexpected Strange Ingredient C equals Wacky Dish D. Sauce with something black or dark blue and you’re good to go.”

  Jeremy was nodding.

  “Everything works, clearly,” she continued. “Crème de bourbon and lemon-grass tart is actually very good. But I sometimes think what I’m doing is totally … incoherent. That I’d rather make key lime pie.”

  “Key lime pie,” repeated Jeremy (who didn’t particularly like key lime pie, as it happened, but who could think of nothing more sumptuous just then, nothing more compelling, more richly personal than the idea of the key lime pie that Jules liked.)

  “For example,” Jules said.

  It had not been since Quartey that Jeremy had had such a sweeping sense that somebody knew exactly what he was talking about.

  She said yes a week later, to the question she had been anticipating. He started to address the harder choice this answer represented. “You know, one thing I’ve always thought about working together—you and I.…” He stammered into a conversational cul-de-sac.