Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  He was also feeling sleep deprived. The night before he had done a foolish thing. The four of them at The Paw would often have a drink or two after closing, frequently with lingering customers. But after these (thinking about making it to Chinatown by six o’clock the next morning), Jeremy would normally walk directly home. It took half an hour, but he enjoyed the cool after-midnight air and the sound of the city pulsing around him.

  Last night, he reached the door of the Stanley Park Manor and looked past it, down Haro Street, to the black bulk of Stanley Park crouched at the foot of his street. And having failed to push aside thoughts of his father living among those trees—thoughts that were simmering, reducing and strengthening all week instead—that blackness at the end of the street seemed now to be waiting expressly for him. He yielded to the pull and walked the rest of the way down the sidewalk, to that point where the city abruptly ends and the park begins. That spot on the curb above the tennis courts, above the short stretch of grass. Above the portal of cherry trees. He walked down the slope tentatively, crossed the grass and stood under the trees, staring across the silver water of the lagoon at the forbidding forest. He turned back to the city after only a few such moments, frustrated, angered. And in this agitated frame of mind he had returned to Denman Street, piled into a cab, and gone all the way back across town to The Marine Club, the after-hours booze can of choice for a range of food and beverage industry night owls. There, Jeremy made diverting small talk and drank a number of large Irish whiskeys to smooth his nerves and ready him for sleep.

  Down very late and up very early. Jeremy’s emotional constitution felt like a chain of open links, waiting for some critical slackening of tension to disassociate themselves one from another and send them pinging off the pavement like a pocketful of loose change. He was up, at least. On the pavement in time to bus across town to Chinatown, kibitz with the suppliers, line up deliveries in time for dinner prep. And pay. Yes, there was that. He made a mental note to visit a bank machine and determine which cards had room.

  First stop, coffee, but he walked by the Inferno Denman without looking up. Dante Beale was a decent man, whatever the Professor thought. A compliant financier. Still, Jeremy couldn’t bear the bright-sheeted stare of the Inferno’s front glass this early in the morning, its arched eyebrows of blond wood framing the window, the cheek-pinching bird-perch stools along the narrow window-counters not designed for newspaper reading but for gazing vapidly through one’s own reflection into the flowing street. And above all of it, the ubiquitous Inferno Coffee logo visible from virtually any point in the city where a potential consumer might come briefly to light, a stylized godhead with a coffee, the steam from the cup sweeping and enveloping the face, providing the deity’s obligatory beard and long hair. It could have been Adam’s perspective on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, God offering not the touch of life but a hot cup of joe. Jeremy avoided looking at the Inferno Denman, just as he avoided drinking the over-roasted coffee Dante favoured for what Inferno ads trumpeted as its Italian richness and nerve-jangling strength. It was not Italian, rich or strongly caffeinated, Jeremy knew. Just burnt. And mostly Honduran, he understood.

  From the cracked door of the Inferno bled the drying trickle of canned classical music (Vivaldi, always), barely audible. Dante’s market research paying off, no doubt. The iced-gut violin strings of “Winter” having proved at focus groups to encourage the purchase of a peach Danish to go with the morning double-shot, skinny, extra hot latte. Following a similar rationale, the music changed in the afternoons to Blue Note compilations, nothing being an accident in the Inferno organization. Not the music they chose nor their conspicuous absence in Crosstown. Inferno didn’t know the people in Crosstown yet; they hadn’t been fleshed out in the catalogue of customer types to whom Dante felt confident he could sell, always sell, reliably sell every morning and lunch, to the extent that there was a business case for the investment in blond wood, canned music and barista training.

  I don’t grudge him his business plan, Jeremy thought, but two doors down, the Vivaldi finally diluted in the air behind him, he swung into Melchior’s Coffee House instead. This coffee house was one of the many competitors that circled each Inferno like moons, although Melchior’s was not a blatant rip-off. They had no blond wood, no bicycle-seat chairs either, instead a garage-sale assortment, beanbag to wingback. Second-hand dining-room tables were strewn with a frenzy of magazines toeing some line between hip and intellectual: Paper, Interview, Flash Art, Z Magazine, Tikkun, Adbusters. Jeremy noticed a copy of Gud Tayste lying prominently on the front counter, the millennial food magazine of choice for foodie-scenesters on both sides of the Atlantic. In a thick, large-format monthly with columns such as “The Chefosphere” (on new gadgets) and “Hack Your Food” (on twenty-first-century culinary developments), coquettishly named editor Kiwi Frederique championed something she referred to as “International Groove Food.” Cripper than Crip, but Jeremy still couldn’t help wondering how it felt to be hyped by people who could produce a magazine of such relentlessly cool, ravingly optimistic flavour. Invincibility came to mind.

  In Chinatown he half-heartedly looked for a bargain but went with black cod anyway. He was imagining the roast shallot sauce already. He bought pork tenderloin as well, paid with a cheque, then walked back to the restaurant. Despite the drizzle, there were traveller kids sleeping in Victory Square park, one right at the base of the cenotaph whose inscription read: Their names liveth evermore, / Is it anything to you, / All ye that pass by? The words whispered out of the stone.

  He started up the ancient Turkish coffee maker in the front room, and went to have a cigarette in the kitchen. “The Zone,” as they called it, a cheesy name that stuck. It was a zone of perfect balance; he knew where everything was. His heart quickened with the first graceful touch of nicotine and, as he picked a stray piece of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, he let his eyes drift over the room. The Vulcan-Hart, the black aluminum sauce pots and skillets. Above the prep area were the knife racks, and there hung Jeremy’s favourite indispensable tool. A ten-inch Sabatier chef’s knife, engraved in tiny letters on the handle: Chef Jeremy, We are reminded of our beginnings.

  Sabatier had been a name he’d encountered numerous times in France. Chef Quartey and Claude both used a range of these blades from the venerated maker in Thiers. But Sabatier had been out of his financial reach at the time, and so his father had surprised him with the presentation of this perfect gift on his return. A 1903 high-carbon knife, no less. Several hundred of these had been found by Sabatier in a warehouse attached to an old factory near Thiers. Here were oilskin-wrapped blades of matchless quality, never to be made again for the cost and craftsmanship required. Each thick blade entirely hand-forged—you could still see hammer marks on the blades—and each with a drawn tang that tapered down inside a blackened pear-wood handle. Jeremy’s was also marked with an enigmatic stick-figure stamp, a devil running with a trident. Collectors had snapped them up.

  And as the years had passed since his return, although it had not ushered in easier relations with his father, the Sabatier had evolved to become an essential in his cooking day. It became a toby without which the day might never start or be completed. And the sense of its shape and weight remained in his right hand after closing time. Now he passed his eyes across the antique blade and felt the reassurance offered by its dull gleam, a reassurance enabling him to turn his full attention to yesterday’s mail.

  Diners Club registered its reminder in wounded tones, about credit limits and payment due dates, the underlying implication that they wished they hadn’t taken Quan’s word for gospel. He was approaching a critical ledge here (and he was getting an instinctive feel for this ledge), the computer behind the words even now preparing the follow-up correspondence that would shift permanently to more formal language.

  He stubbed out the cigarette and went into the front room to check the coffee. It occurred to him that Dante would not issue such a reminder and would never be
wounded. If he suspected anything beyond a few struggles with the bank’s line of credit, he didn’t comment. The last time they spoke, he said instead: “Don’t think of me as pressure; I want to relieve pressure. You need space to do what Jeremy does, to make the interesting food for the interesting people. I only want to give you that space.”

  Jules laughed out loud when she heard that. To say that she and Dante had not hit it off was to say that the angel Gabriel and Beelzebub had been uncomfortable seated at adjacent tables. The first time they met, Jeremy read it in her eyes. Bottomless distrust.

  Dante had been on one of his typical, slightly possessive walkabouts, touring the kitchen, no matter how busy, sniffing things. Jeremy didn’t mind particularly, or he had chosen not to mind, given that he owed Dante two hundred grand. Jules, not privy to this information, took a different approach. One more suited to her personality.

  “Uh …,” she said, skating down the range top, slammed, hair plastered to her forehead, fielding new orders and finding a man in a double-breasted suit hovering in the steam above a sauté pan of mushroom ragout. “Ex-cuuse me?” Shouldering into position.

  He took the hint and left, not unmiffed. And when he came back later to say goodnight, chatting with Jeremy, he dropped another hint about the way they all might collaborate.

  Jules disguised a smirk, poorly.

  Dante nodded and took his leave a second time, feeling something he was not used to feeling: rejection. And, steamed just a little at this, he disappeared behind the shelving that obscured the door to the dining room but did not leave. He eavesdropped. Shameful, he knew, but she had tasked him to this point.

  Jules did as Jules would. She talked up what they had. She reminded Jeremy of things they had planned together. Spontaneity. On-the-fly creativity. Urban rubber-boot food.

  “Am I to understand you oppose the idea of Dante’s involvement?” Jeremy said.

  Jules spread her hands. What can I say?

  Dante made to leave, quietly. Then she spoke again. So close, but no. Couldn’t let it go.

  “I oppose him,” the woman chef said. “I don’t like him personally. He’s smarmy. He’s after something. And I oppose what he stands for.”

  There was more. Inferno was polluting the city with sameness. Inferno was a cost model, an exercise in scale. Inferno was a celebration of everything they were not. Inferno was …

  Dante made himself leave before Jeremy could respond. But he took pains, thereafter, to observe how Capelli held back Papier.

  “Do you suppose she’s a dyke?” Dante asked Jeremy. “Dykes are difficult. It’s always politics with dykes.”

  “Jesus Christ, Dante,” Jeremy said, angered.

  “She has a very bad attitude.” Then: “On the subject of which, do not swear at me, do you understand?”

  These words put Jeremy on his heels. Dante had the voice of a gangster when he needed it, suits and deep pockets to match. A pleasant, personable British exterior with a well of unexpressed violence hovering somewhere behind his eyes.

  “You know, I happen to really love this woman,” Jeremy said, not quite beaten down.

  “Oh, listen to this, will you?” Dante said. “They love each other. If you’re not getting scraped, it’s not love.”

  “Jules and I are teammates. You have to see how that works, how the ideas and the creativity flow between us. I’ve felt this way since I first met her. She’s integral.”

  “Jay, my friend, two things: First, I’ve seen the team in action, and I think she’s a constraint. Second, she’s mentally unstable.”

  “She’s volatile and passionate. Sometimes creative people can be rude when they get interrupted at their work.”

  “Rude is fine; I’m rude. She hit me.”

  This was how the event had been logged. It was a shoulder, no more. True, Dante did step back from the physical contact with such surprise that he narrowly missed getting brained by the dishwasher, who was jogging by with a huge, aluminum, stock cauldron.

  Jules said, not urgently: “Behind you.”

  Dante swivelled out of harm’s way. Tripped on a crate of beets. Did not fall down.

  It was close.

  “Besides,” Dante went on. “This Capelli, for all her personal complexities, won’t be out of work for more than ten minutes. So you need feel no guilt.”

  Which served precisely to make Jeremy feel guilty, of course. Guilty about keeping Jules in sixty-five-seat Cross-town bistro when she could take her shining black hair, her beautiful strong nose and pointed opinions right back up the street to The Tea Grill or Jonah’s, The Cedar Café or one of the others, up the street to any established kitchen you could name.

  “And what would you do without me?” she once asked when he suggested she was a free agent.

  “I could keep on going or go back to France,” he said.

  “France.” Jules said. “France was school. We have what France prepared you for right here. What we wished for. And something with legs too. Those kids in the front window smoking roll-your-owns are bellwethers. They know when something is real and when it isn’t.”

  Oliver Michaelson didn’t know the kids in the front window from squeegee kids anywhere, but if somebody had ever asked him directly he would have said he hoped The Monkey’s Paw was real. He hoped on Jeremy’s behalf, godfather to his five-year-old son, Trout, university pal and once band mate. He hoped on behalf of Jeremy’s financial solvency, which had been an ongoing issue over the years. There were certainly closer coffee shops to his loft office on Water Street, home of Michaelson Data Design, but nobody could say that he wasn’t a faithful friend to those who warranted it. Plus, there was his wife, Margaret, who had been part of the university gang and since evolved into a devout foodie. She had been a steady customer of Jeremy’s first, and suggested Olli do the same. Investment in a friend’s business was one thing, an unwise thing in Olli’s view (and he had thought about it carefully before saying no), but patronage wasn’t too much to ask.

  Olli pushed open the door of The Monkey’s Paw at his usual hour, bang on seven, when the place opened for the coffee trade. He entered the long, dark space with the crazy art that his friend collected from local artists, and Olli smelled—with a nose that had grown canine-sharp since he quit drinking and smoking—both the coffee and a very slight dankness from the walls. He wondered how much the inevitable renovations would cost.

  As usual, Jeremy was in the back, clattering around, when he arrived. Olli decided to wait at the counter quietly. He could have rung the bell that was left out in the mornings. But there was the odd occasion, coming to this place owned by an old friend this early in the morning, when he opened the serial port to a very short instream burst of nostalgia. It was, for example, provocative to entertain the thought of how they had stayed friends coming from the beginning they shared. Jay-Jay and The Decoders, from the school of toxic rockabilly. Jeremy played a hollow body electric, a position he fancied most amenable to being drunk during a performance. Moss Craven on traps (Olli hadn’t heard of him in years). Olli himself played stand-up bass, poorly in fact but nobody at a Decoder gig knew the difference anyway. They each got a decoder-ring tattoo, felt so similar to one another in those months, in the weeks even, the days before they all launched off into their own utterly different futures. How did that work?

  Jeremy came through the swinging door from the kitchen, glanced up sharply. Dragging his hungover ass around first thing in the morning as usual, thought Olli, not without a trace of jealousy.

  Jeremy cracked a smile.

  “Yo,” Olli said, smirking a rockabilly smirk in return. “Gas me up.”

  “Decoders, go,” Jeremy answered. And after they had shaken hands, he tapped out coffee for the double espresso Olli favoured, burped out two black bullets into a to-go cup, the whole time watching his friend with one eye. Olli drifted in his presence sometimes, Jeremy had observed, sweeping his eyes around the room as if trying to remember something. This morning Jeremy
was checking surreptitiously for indications of how his godson was doing, before committing to the question. Trout had health problems from the start, and a heart condition that persisted. They were the model sick-kid parents, Olli and Margaret, hyper-attentive without betraying the least sign of it. At dinner parties over the years, Jeremy had noted how things might get raucous but the radar was always on, scanning for a signal from the loft bedroom above.

  This morning, as Olli waited for his coffee, Jeremy found himself thinking that his friend was showing signs of strain.

  Even before he got rich, Olli always looked rich. He had good posture, for one, a lean athletic frame for a guy who didn’t go to a gym until his late twenties when he was a recovering alcoholic. He wore wide-shouldered, fitted Italian suits and big, off-white, made-to-measure shirts with two sharply pressed front pockets. Wide colourful ties. Then Commotion Works bought Trout World, his original software development company (before Commotion Works went spectacularly bust). Olli pocketed the cash, looked like a genius for timing, and didn’t really change that much. Margaret picked them out a penthouse loft in Yaletown, and they both kept on working as hard as before. She was a seismic engineer, and her firm was involved in half the upgrade projects happening across the city (ongoing, frenetic preparation for The Big One. Jeremy thought there was something increasingly millennial about it.) But money didn’t stabilize the tectonic plates or Trout’s heart, and they both carried on carrying on. Emblematic of this fact, Olli stayed with the sharply creased, made-to-measure, two-pocket shirts, just like he was still looking for that first $2.35 million.

  His money only came up once that Jeremy could recall, and the memory always embarrassed him. It was in the early years of his planning for The Monkey’s Paw, before Dante. Jeremy’s cheapest conceivable vision of the place could have been realized for one hundred grand, but the answer was still no. Polite, but firm. There was money, Olli had explained, and there was liquidity. Lots of the one didn’t necessarily mean lots of the other.