“You see,” Olli said, sitting stiffly in his office chair, running fingers through his short sandy hair, turning to glance at a huge monitor on his desk that had given a cock-a-doodle-doo to signal incoming e-mail. “From the standpoint of cash, we’re both broke.”
Had Olli stopped there, Jeremy would have left resentful. He would have walked out the door thinking, Well, if you’re going to be broke, I suppose it pays to be rich first. But he remembered taking a minute to digest the words, looking out over Olli’s shoulder to the sunlit inner harbour. The stacks of shipping containers made a colourful quilt against the high blue mountains on the North Shore. And Olli, sensing a distance grow briefly between them, leaned forward on his elbows. “Jay-Jay,” he said sincerely. “You think I’m being cold about this.”
“Nah,” Jeremy said.
“You do, but you’re wrong. A) I can’t afford it. I simply don’t have one hundred thousand dollars, and I’ve borrowed all the money my bank is comfortable lending, trying to do this thing that I’m doing. And B) …”
It wasn’t exactly a stand-up-come-around-the-desk embrace, but Jeremy felt the warmth.
“B) I can’t afford us getting into a big fight, having a falling out. Trout ending up without a godfather.”
“Why would.,” Jeremy started, but he knew the risk better than most people. What were the chances of going down in the restaurant trade and losing your investor’s money entirely? Fifty, sixty percent?
Olli had leaned back in his chair and done something Jeremy hadn’t seen him do since university. He reached for his smokes. Of course he’d quit and didn’t have any cigarettes on him—they both knew that. But in that moment, flustered despite appearing otherwise, Olli’s fingers went to the lip of one of those sharply creased front pockets on his made-to-measure shirt. They found the seam of cloth, realized their own mistake and quietly withdrew to the desk top.
Jeremy now finished the espresso, added the two teaspoons of brown sugar he knew Olli liked. Stirred it and handed it over. Olli went into his pants pocket for change while Jeremy looked again at the familiar shirt.
Ironed badly, he thought all at once. That was it. There was a crease stamped across one of the pockets and a brown mark on the collar, which was splaying out the jacket at the back. In a cascade of details, Jeremy redrew his mental picture of Olli. He was looking frayed, that was it. A little mad, although in a nice, middle-class way. He knew Olli had given up drinking years before, less than a year after Trout was born, in fact, but he was giving off a combination of jerky signals that Jeremy associated with drinking. (Madness accompanied his own hangovers. In Jeremy’s case this sense was sidecarred to a careening paranoia and a kind of gyroscopic rigidity in the brain, centred somewhere in the cerebrum. He’d try to look sideways out the bus window and something would strain against realignment. Push his eyes back to the front.)
He checked out Olli’s eyes. They were clear but watery. He could be using Visine.
“So, tell me about Trout,” Jeremy asked.
“Oh …,” Olli said, scratching his head. “He’s painting dollar bills. Perfect replicas of U.S. dollar bills. We have 133 now.”
Jeremy smiled. He had some godfatherly pride in the strange creativity this project suggested, and he might have liked to hear more about the boy but Olli, as usual, had to fly.
“Dinner Monday?” he said, extending his hand. “Margaret wants to show off her new Aga.”
“Sure, and wow,” Jeremy said. He preferred a flame himself, but he was aware how much an Aga cost. They shook again, a short firm shake like Claude’s. Like the ones you earned from countermen in French cafés but only after months of patronage. These patterns were important, Jeremy thought after Olli had left, although this comfortable thought was unsettled somewhat by the pattern suggested by his next customer.
Jeremy kicked a cowboy boot up on a chair behind the counter, ran an elbow across his knee. “Caruzo,” he said.
There were many horsepower of something coursing through Caruzo. He panted out his words in anxious, breathy gasps, and was frequently helpless to movements that flashed through his limbs. He bobbed on his feet. Head-faked. Dodged invisible punches.
“How about a cigarette?” Jeremy suggested after watching Caruzo for a while. And he pulled one out, lit it and handed it across the counter to Caruzo, already looking past him to his first film students of the day.
“Hey, Jay,” one of them said, angling around Caruzo, who stood adrift in front of the cash register, sucking on the smoke. Bobbing. “Coffee. What do you want?” he said to his friend, who answered in the slow, cadential speech of the recently stoned.
“You got eggnog lattés?”
Jeremy sighed. Wherever did people learn to like this stuff? The Inferno. “Not now. Not ever,” he said.
“Just give him a coffee,” the first one said. “Do you, like, have the fritters going yet?”
“Not until ten,” Jeremy said.
The kids took their coffee to the front window, laughing. At Caruzo, no doubt.
“Yo Jay, yo Jay,” Caruzo said. “How about a coffee? You got just plain coffee? Coffee?”
“I think so,” Jeremy said. “Black, right? That will be twenty dollars please.”
“Damn. Left my wallet in the park.” Caruzo took the coffee and started to laugh at the regular joke they shared. A hiccuping, belching, farting sound. It sent his shoulders jogging, produced white flecks at the mouth corners and, more often than not, jarred a little pendulum booger out to the edge of his upper lip. Sure enough, there was the booger.
“Oh right, I forgot. You don’t have any money,” Jeremy said, slapping his forehead.
“Hey, I got money. I got money, you know,” Caruzo said, who had now spilled coffee on himself, the counter and the floor. “Just not on me. It’s not on me. Hey Jay, though? Jay, I am a messenger.”
“Here’s a napkin, blow your nose. How about a seat?”
He led Caruzo across the room to a table against the brick wall. They sat down together, and Jeremy waited while Caruzo blew his nose, elaborately examining the contents of the napkin. Blew again. It was a big nose, like a sap extrusion on a cedar trunk. His eyes were a faraway storm colour, against which it was hard to pick up the pupil movements.
Finished finally with the napkin, Caruzo delivered his message. “The Professor is asking after you. Asking after you, Jay-Jay.”
“I see,” Jeremy said, glancing around the room.
“Babes in the Wood. It’s all about that, Jay, nothing else. Babes in the Woods, most of all. Needs to know soon, right?” Caruzo was staring at him intently. Staring through him. “Needs to know what you found out soon, Jay.”
“Fine, Caruzo,” Jeremy said. “Tell him I’ll be down to the library next week.”
Caruzo was a permanent jangle of ticks and repeated words, but he went absolutely still with this answer and spoke the first complex, non-fragmented sentence Jeremy had ever heard him speak. “The Professor was expecting that you would have done the research by now.”
It made an impression. Jeremy said, “I promise I’ll do it this weekend.”
Caruzo nodded slowly and seriously.
“Caruzo?” Jeremy said, trying out something he’d been wondering. How did you go about asking questions of a person like Caruzo? What did his father hear?
“Jay?” Caruzo said back, all ears.
He couldn’t think of any better way of phrasing the question. “What do you and the Professor talk about, Caruzo?”
“Oh. Phhhhhht,” he shrugged, snorted, boogered on himself again. He was talking through the napkin, eyes bulging from the incomprehensible activity that surged within. “Well, he’s writing. You know. Writing. Always writing. And listening too. Always listening. Listening and writing. Writing and listening.”
“About what, though?” Jeremy was beginning to see how these conversations could be trying.
“It’s like Siwash, Jay-Jay.”
“It is?” Jeremy sai
d. There was always the danger Caruzo would unspool on you. Only once had Jeremy been forced to ask him to leave.
“He’s, like …,” said Caruzo. He was holding his hands apart now, palms inwards, as if trying to contain something. An idea. Hold it in its invisible box so he could see it. So Jeremy could see it. “He’s, like, counting. Waiting. Counting. Waiting. Like the Professor, only the Professor is writing. Listening. See? The same.”
Caruzo grabbed his hand. Uh-oh. The brown fingers wound around his own palm, fingertips clamping almost at his wrist. They had no fingernails, Jeremy could now see. Only pads.
“Signs, Jay-Jay.”
“Signs?” Jeremy said.
“Signs and signals. Signals and signs. From somewhere. Signs of life. Signs for life. I believe in the signs, Jay-Jay. I really believe in these signs.”
Caruzo let him go and they both got up.
He had customers, more film students. More coffees. Later smelt fritters and house tartar mayo. What was for dinner tonight? Black cod, of course. He was going to have to prep himself a little roasted shallot sauce then, wasn’t he?
“I’ll tell the Professor. Your promise,” Caruzo shouted from the front door, startling everybody in the place before disappearing out into the drizzle.
“Sorry,” Jeremy said. “He’s a family friend.” He took their orders, glad suddenly, overwhelmingly, that there was a morning service. What other signs did he need? And what would he be doing without them? Sleepless in his apartment, looking out over the park and wondering.
“Iced tea, please.”
“Made here,” he said automatically, distracted, smelling her before he looked up, a blend of patchouli and CK.
“Smelt fritters yet?” she asked.
He looked finally. Fantastic blue eyes, angelic face. Had he seen her before? He thought so, once or twice. She hung out with the design students. He had looked before but looked away. A bit young, twenty-two, twenty-three. “Fritters,” he said. “Everyone wants fritters. I throw them on ten-ish. What is it now?”
She consulted a gold nurse’s watch pinned to her black velvet pants. Narrow shoulders, small round head with short white hair, tiny lobeless ears. Scrubbed-clean symmetrical features and frosted coral lips. She wore a tight orange sweater with blue athletic stripes around the right sleeve. North Star runners. Faux school gear strapped tightly around a Barbie from the toy section of the 1978 Sears catalogue.
“Nine-ish,” she said, a tongue stud glinting as she spoke.
She was waiting for his answer. He could feel the appraisal. Of his decoder-ring tattoo. (His was on his right forearm, Popeye-style. Olli had demurely gone for the shoulder, invisible most of the time.) Of the cowboy boots and Wrangler jeans he typically wore before dinner service. He saw her take it all in. And when she looked back up to his face, she laughed a little through her nose. Laughed as if she had just had an idea that pleased her.
“Close enough,” he said. “It’ll take me about twenty minutes.”
“I’ll be in the window,” she said, still smiling.
“And the name?” he asked, his pen hovering over the pad. He might need it to call out from the counter. It was a good idea to get it.
“Benny,” she said. Then she walked away slowly. Moved across his oak planks towards the high arch of his front window. Split up into its many panes, each one now crying streams of spring rain onto the pane below. Streams that pooled at the base of the brick front wall and ran off down the sidewalk vaguely seeking the sea. The sky was coming down now. There it was on his window, outside his door. Tapping audibly on his glass above his oblivious slacker customers (who rocked back in their chairs and blew smoke upwards, laughed loudly all at once, and did any confident thing that came to mind).
Oblivious but for one, who folded her arms across her rib cage under her sweatered breasts. She lowered her chin as if to listen to the current monologue, lids set in an expression of rigorous boredom. But with her head turned slightly to observe Jeremy at the back of the restaurant, to assess whether the ray she had beamed out had been received.
He had finished entering her order, taken his boot off the chair behind the counter and walked over to the kitchen door. He had his hand on the wood, leaning forward to push it open. But he was thinking about something. Benny waited.
He turned and glanced back.
Benny caught the glance and turned her head slowly back to the conversation, betraying no satisfaction, although she knew. Of course she knew.
Jeremy turned his head more quickly and went into the kitchen. He put the smelts in salty beer batter almost as light as tempura. And when he lowered the basket into the fryer, the oil frothed around the slender fish. They would crisp down in a few minutes into a crunchy mouthful, which, dipped in tartar mayonnaise, rivalled any french fry.
“Benny,” he called when they were ready. She got up slowly, came over.
“Thanks, Jay,” she said. “So, like.” She ate one standing there. Dipped it in the tartar mayo and took it gently between her teeth.
“They’re hot,” he warned.
She chewed it gingerly. “They’re delicious.”
“Thank you,” he said. He described the process of making a smelt fritter, knowing the magic implied. The magic of how the fritter was conceived (art). The magic of how it was tossed together back there, out of sight, in just a few minutes (craft). The magic of its taste now (alchemy). What was that spice? A bit of powdered ginger, in fact, one of his few trade secrets.
Benny ate another one, standing there, looking at him and listening to all that he said. And later, as she and all of her friends clumped to the door, she appraised first that he was watching before she turned and smiled again. She waved a wiggling-finger wave and mouthed very distinctly: I’ll be seeing you.
He waved back—she was gone. The Monkey’s Paw was now empty, and there was sixty-eight dollars in the till. He had held it off all morning, but now he stood behind the counter and felt a wave of fatigue break over him. He struggled to banish an image of a night-lit lagoon from his mind, and forced himself to remember Benny’s glance and wave instead. Better that, he thought. Better to be incrementally cheered. Cheered despite hemming debt, despite a hovering blackness, a sense of things going steadily out of balance. Cheered by the simple fact that a raver angel named Benny liked him, liked his smelt fritters. He made it, she got it. Was there a better chemistry?
Jules came thundering in just then. Her timing perfect. He could dig down and find his strength, but hers spilled to the surface, always.
“Hey, babe,” she shouted, and slapped him hard on the butt as she passed. And with hardly a word, they were swept up in the momentum that would build towards lunch, through the afternoon and on to dinner. The kitchen came alive with the slam of the oven, the scrape of the fridge door and the clatter of pots and knives. Astor Piazzolla materialized in the air as Jules popped in a stack of her eclectic CDs, and a spike of energy entered the collective bloodstream.
When they were prepped and Zeena was in, before the first lunch tables were seated, Jules poured a glass of soda water and leaned against the cutting block. She sipped and watched him adjust seasonings for a moment.
“You look a little tired,” she said.
He nodded.
“How’s Dad?” she said, reading him perfectly. No surprise.
He didn’t say anything.
“Ah, come here, honey,” she said. And she put down her glass and hugged him. Hard (she was strong). Squeezed his bones together, made him feel weak but safe. Safe in a place that smelled like caramel, like lightly scented soap. Like the solid breakfast he never had.
Benny took an active interest. Jeremy had the quality, she decided. After all these years of going to design school, working survival jobs, she felt she was in a position to recognize that this guy—not bad-looking with his impossibly messy hair and despite the cowboy boots—this guy had the quality of actualized self. Needs, freedoms, known desires, a creative centre. Benny wa
s often impatient with her peers for lacking all these things, for being not yet formed. Everybody grew up late these days, lived at home for years too long, became adults at thirty. Benny had been supporting herself since sixteen and prided herself on only dating adults. Her friends may have noticed that she suggested The Monkey’s Paw more often now. (Or they may not have, it didn’t concern her.) But she never mentioned his name, just said something like: “I’m at The Paw around three. You coming?” Everybody always came. They were sheep. They filled up that front window and ate smelt fritters, and she only cared that she managed to talk with him each time for a few minutes. He had noticed, she knew that. The chef had definitely noticed.
One time she got him at the front counter and manoeuvred the conversation into dates. Good ones, bad ones. She invented a bad one from the night before to get things rolling, although she kept the details sparse so as not to create something, somebody, he might view as competition.
He offered a bad one in return, from years before. But he also described a good one. A time when he took a girlfriend on a surprise trip to Ucluelet. He phoned her up on a Thursday; they left on Friday morning. They stayed for the weekend in a cabin on Long Beach with a fireplace and a tiny, rudimentary kitchen. Benny could not keep this story inside herself. A week later she was talking to a girlfriend and she said, with little preamble: “Imagine you had a boyfriend who phoned you up and said, ‘Let’s go to Ucluelet for the weekend.’ ”
Her friend looked at her very blankly indeed.
“Like as if.,” Benny started, “as if any twenty-three-year-old guy would ever do that.”
She went from being a new face to an almost daily face in a handful of weeks. He didn’t mind that she acted like they’d known each other for months and months. He didn’t ask why. She was an appealing cluster of contrasts. Hip. Overtly ambitious. Deferring. Argumentative. She was a schoolgirl, sure, but she appeared to be getting on with things.
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