“Yes, Mr. Papier. What kin ah do fer you?” His customer service representative appeared to be stationed in Austin, Texas.
He relayed what he knew: Derek, two calls, his personal spiritual devotion to the card. I am a member. A pure, gold card member. I am an original celebrant at the Amex Eucha-rist. I carry but do not (normally) use your card. You’re not like the others. I carry you inside me, like faith. I am an Amex stoic. Pure and good and Protestant. You could make an advertisement about me. Chef Jeremy Papier, disciple since 1995. God may be in his heaven, Jeremy said to the woman, but my comfort shall lie with thee.
Or actually, what he said was: “If there’s been any kind of problem or mistake, you know, I would be, of course, keen to immediately clear things up, you know, as soon as possible.”
Austin, Texas, went away again for a moment and returned. There was an account manager assigned to the file, she said nervously, who was no longer in the office but would call him in the morning. She was also able to confirm (she sounded pleased, maybe she thought it would please Jeremy too) that the account was frozen and that borrowing privileges had been suspended.
“So it’s not cancelled exactly, it’s jist that you cayn’t use the card until this all is sorted out,” she said to Jeremy, her drawl like lemon juice in a cat scratch.
“Right,” he said to the stinging news, but in the silence that followed, its context, its meaning was weirdly shunted aside by the question that invaded Jeremy’s frontal lobes: Why Austin, Texas? Why was he humiliated further by being forced to deal with an American?
“Where are you from?” he asked her. “I mean, on the earth. Where are you located? You’re not in Texas, by any chance?”
“No, sir. We’re a calling station just outside of Moncton, New Brunswick. That’s Canada, sir.”
“I know where Moncton is. I’m Canadian.”
“Yes, I see, sir.”
“And you receive calls from all over?”
“We cover calls from all over North America, yes, sir. Ourselves and several other calling stations. But if I might suggest something, sir, is that you give the American Express public relations department a call. They’re open from nine to four and it’s a Toronto number.…”
“Where are you from, though?” Jeremy said. “You’re not Canadian, are you?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I cayn’t …”
“You’re from Texas, aren’t you?”
“Sir, I …”
“How did a Texan get up to New Brunswick anyway?”
“Excuse me, sir.” A third voice. A different woman. Austin had gone to the help function, although Jeremy could still hear her voice in the background: “I cayn’t …”
It all just happened in the ether. These disembodied voices flying over his head. Careering over the world.
“Did he hang up?” said Austin.
“No, I’m here,” he said.
“Is there a problem of any kind, sir?” asked the help function.
There was a singing silence filled with the shapes of voices. Like black birds at night. Like bats.
“I just wanted to know …,” he started. “I just wanted …”
Then he hung up, shaking.
He looked around his strewn bachelor for something to rest his eyes on, but nothing looked good to him. Everything was in disarray. The kitchen was spilling out of itself. Glasses and ashtrays and an overflowing garbage. CDs were out of their boxes. His futon was torn free of sheets, looking like a lumpy beige carcass in the middle of his living room.
He went to the kitchen and looked in the fridge. It was empty except for coffee beans and milk. As he leaned over, his head in the cold yellow-lit interior of the small fridge, he thought about the Great Satan Amex now mobilizing its lesser devils to embark across the face of the world in his pursuit. He hadn’t missed a payment—he hadn’t used the card in two years before the Fugami purchase—but there they were. They needed no reason. The card wasn’t meant to be used. He’d promised himself over the years that it would only be used in an emergency, and even then only when it was clear that he could pay it off immediately. He’d violated his own rules. And by month end, it seemed now quite certain thanks to Doug Acer, he was going to violate the rules of the Great Satan too. And that was worse, because Amex would know. Amex would know Jeremy was weak and vulnerable, that he could be taken from the back of the herd.
Just when things were looking up, they tried to beat you down, Jeremy mused. His head was still in the fridge. He thought suddenly: This would be how a chef gives up. Cuts the freon tube and closes the door behind himself. Gas is too pedestrian. A freon cold snap for me.
He called himself a cab instead, now late for work. When he said where he was going, the cab took off without question. Jeremy thought, He knows where it is. He knows my restaurant. At least I have made this small footprint on the landscape.
In front of The Monkey’s Paw he reached into his pocket and realized he didn’t have any cash. He opened his wallet and looked at the rainbow of cards. He had an almost overwhelming urge to upturn the wallet and shake the cards onto the floor of the car. To see them all (what were there now—eleven, thirteen of them?) strewn in the wet and dirt of the place where countless feet had been. But he resisted.
It took four tries. Diners Club was hopeless. Both Visas were rejected. The cabby was looking a little disgusted (and dubious) by the time he swiped the BMO MasterCard and the authorization number squeaked back through the system, across the telephone lines, through the cell frequencies that crowded the city airwaves, and onto the glowing green screen that sat on the dashboard in front of them like blindfolded Justice herself, beeping irrefutable answers to the questions being posed.
Inside he did some serious prep and set-up. Jules was taking the morning off, and he lost himself in the two soups, carrot-ginger and a curry-leek with yogurt. Today was a one-pasta day, he decided. Rabiata. Hot and decisive, filled with discs of chorizo made by John’s Meats and slivers of olives. Zeena arrived in time to help him put together sandwiches on the buns that had arrived from La Baguette. Chevre, chive and onion. Roast beef and horseradish mustard. His own salami. Basic and fast—he didn’t think his choices through exactly, but went to the walk-in and reacted to what he saw.
They didn’t talk much. Zeena said at one point: “What’s up?”
“Nothing is up,” he said.
“It’s always nothing with guys,” Zeena said, musing aloud along a favourite tangent.
He continued with the sandwiches. Zeena started loading them into wicker baskets to put out on the front counter.
“Time?” He asked her.
“Ten-fifty,” Zeena answered. “I’ll go unlock.” And when she was finished with the first load of sandwiches, she carried them out through the portholed swinging doors and into the front. She came back after a few minutes. Jeremy had the second load of sandwiches ready and was over at the range checking his cauldron of rabiata.
“Ready?” he said.
“I’m ready,” Zeena answered, but she made no move towards the sandwiches. “I’m always ready.”
He looked over at her. She was staring at him.
“What is up with you? That’s the question,” he said.
“Are we OK?”
“OK how?”
“OK here. Us, here. Jules, you, Dominic and me. The Paw. Everything.”
“We are fine.” He tried to make his voice sound as gentle as it should, although her attention was grating. In the final analysis, he thought, maybe it was best to work with strangers, who would leave what you were thinking alone. People who didn’t feel they had personal access to your feelings.
“Well, why do I get the impression that there’s, like, this …,” Zeena stalled, and then came up with: “Like the phone’s about to ring and it’s going to be bad news.”
Jeremy said it again. It was nothing.
“Ahh well, there it is,” Zeena said, half-turning away. “Nothing. The ultimate out. There’s never
anything except nothing. I wish I could pull it off myself. Nothing all the time. Never something, just.,” Zeena held a hand up, fingertips together, then spread them sharply open, “poof. Nothing.”
“All right, all right. Spare me,” he snapped at her finally, not wanting to be mean, in fact forgetting who Zeena was for a second entirely. His friend. Their friend. He had showed her the town when she first moved here, given her a job. That Zeena.
“Well, sorry,” she said, and left the kitchen.
Lunch ended up being slow. Typical, thought Jeremy. Here I am bearing down and where is everyone? They spring out of nowhere when I sleep in or don’t show up for some reason.
“How’d we do?” he said to Zeena at about two o’clock, when the trickle had tapered off to almost nothing.
“You did fine,” she said, and in her voice he heard something he had never heard before. “You didn’t do as well as last Thursday, but you really did OK.”
“Hey,” he said, and he reached out to put his hand on her thin shoulder. She didn’t shake him off precisely, but there was a rigid acceptance of his touch that made him pull back his hand.
“I’m sorry about what I said earlier. I apologize.”
“I can’t even remember what you said,” Zeena answered, just as Jules stormed in surrounded by her high-pressure zone of optimism.
“Hello, my babies,” she said, kissing them each in turn. “Look what I have here.” And she flourished a copy of Gud Tayste and smacked it on the counter.
Jeremy picked it up like it was something he’d never heard of before.
“Page ninety-six,” Jules said.
Zeena forgot sufficiently about their tiff to slide in next to Jeremy and lean against him. “What? What? Are we famous?”
“No,” Jules said, pinching Jeremy’s cheek. “Our baby is.”
He couldn’t find the page. First he skipped past it, then trying to leaf back, the pages stuck together and he ended up near the beginning of the magazine again.
“Gimme that,” Zeena finally said, and took the magazine out of his hands. She turned quickly to a regular front piece called “Hack Your Food.”
“New from the Rim,” it read. There were entries from Los Angeles and San Francisco.
“ ‘Vancouver!’ ” Zeena squealed, then read aloud, fending off Jeremy, who was reaching for the magazine. “ ‘And we’re not talking Vancouver, Washington. The one north of 49. The Monkey’s Paw Bistro. French Chef Jeremy Papier hacks his homeland cuisine with ingredients drawn from the rain forest around him. The scene: groovy, zippie, raver, addict, beemer. Good at: late. Good on: gin.’ ”
Jeremy finally got the magazine from Zeena. “ ‘French’?” he said. “ ‘Drawn from the rain forest’?”
“That would be the canned peaches they’re referring to,” Jules smirked.
Jeremy smiled at the ribbing. “So what else do we have here?”
“There’s a recipe for soba alfredo at the front,” said Zeena.
“Ack,” Jeremy said. “Typical.”
“Ever tried it?” Zeena said, in a tone that suggested she had just remembered the morning’s small abrasion. “They should have said you were the Pacific Northwest’s preeminent Food Nazi.”
Jules laughed loudly, and they walked back into the kitchen together to talk about dinner. She put her arm around his waist as they pushed through the swinging doors into The Zone.
“I’ve had kind of a shitty day so far,” he told her.
“Oh yeah?” she said. They both knew that already. What she thought he didn’t know yet was that you needed bad days. You needed bad days to conquer, to make a job into a commitment. “It’s going to happen,” she continued. “It’s mid-week, Thursday. The day we take off again. We always do.”
He tried to smile at her, smile into the face he knew so well. That impossibly strong and serene face, the angling confident nose. Jules had pretty ears, he thought. I wonder if I will ever stop noticing these things about her? Will I ever be free of noticing new things about her, recognizing things I’ve known about her all along?
She smiled back, a smaller smile, and he noticed again: pale green eyes with an edge of sorrow. The colour of a broken wave. She didn’t ask him anything tough at this point. Anything like “What’s on your mind?” She didn’t ask him anything that would make him lie again.
The weekend was mediocre. On Wednesday of the following week—a cycle of Wednesdays complete—he received the notice in the mail from the Toronto Dominion Bank. They had not honoured the cheque to Simms, Brine and Lothar. Custer Quan phoned in the afternoon and gave him a lecture about writing cheques for which he didn’t have the funds. Dante’s secretary phoned also. Would he phone Mr. Beale that afternoon? She provided a number in Chicago.
When Jules arrived, he explained that he needed to get a little air, and walked over to the Inferno Pender to say hello to Benny.
There was a high sky, clouding over but still bright, and bursts of wind that always made Jeremy think of travelling. It was a get-going wind, a wind full of gusty changes in direction, sudden impulses satisfied. He realized that it felt good just to be walking away from the restaurant. Right now he needed to get his head into the breeze and out of the confines of those dark wood walls. The Paw was a place built squarely on his own visions, and he had a breezy feeling of being unloaded, unplugged from the darkness of his own obsessions. Maybe he’d take Benny to lunch. Diva at the Met—one of the cards had to work. He thought he would stare into her eyes over a lunchtime bottle of Merlot and say frank things that would make her young heart beat faster. He thought he might woo her, change things from what they had been into something quite consuming and new.
Benny had seen Jeremy coming from a long way off. From her position on “the bridge” (dubbed thusly by one of the baristas, a Deep Space Nine enthusiast), Benny had a clean view: over the espresso stations, over the heads of the customers at the front counter, through the broad sweep of the Inferno Pender’s front glass and out into the busy intersection at Granville and Pender streets in downtown Vancouver. Jeremy was walking up Pender. She spied him. She fixed him the second he hove to, hands dug deep in pockets, shoulders folded forward, looking at the ground about twenty yards in front of himself.
My sullen artist, she thought, with an internal smile.
A customer was bantering near her elbow, had been for several minutes and would again tomorrow, the next day. A VSE type: green suit, thin loafers, bad hair.
“Oh, I am sure,” she said, in response to whatever had just been suggested, looking down from the bridge and into his watery eyes. But she cracked a glance up again quickly. She kept Jeremy in view. Around her the three baristas in her charge were rapping the orders between them. Latte, frappuccino, Americano. The place was packed. It was always packed.
When Jeremy got to the lights, Benny saw him lift his eyes to the front of the coffee shop. Looking for her. She touched the VSE guy on the shoulder, smiled a brief distracted smile and stepped down from the bridge. She slipped through the crowd, out the front door.
“Hey, barista,” he said, slowing his pace as he saw her, smiling now.
She hugged him hard. “Location supervisor,” she said into his ear. “I supervise the baristas.”
“You run the show,” Jeremy said.
“I am the show, baby,” she said. He didn’t quite let go of her but let his hands slip to her waist, his eyes lingering in hers.
So, she thought.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Exactly,” she said back, which stalled him.
“You …,” he started.
“Lunch, my place,” she said. Then she kissed him. “I have a craving for Ichi-Ban.”
He was smelling her, thinking: CK smelled like citrus, patchouli smelled like loam. It was a promising, protecting and deeply sexy Mother Earth-y combination. Base and acid combined, a total smell.
The wind found them. Down through the towers of the business district, the unpredictable g
et-going wind was made even more volatile by the deflections and facades, by the downdrafts and the vortexes created in the alley mouths. By the seething traffic. A gust found them standing there, his hands on her hips, just as it had snaked through the trees in a forest somewhere and laid flat a targeted cedar.
They took a cab. She let them in, both of them breathing a little heavily from the jog upstairs. Four flights in a tight, impatient spiral. Up around the glass shaft housing the elevator that took too long to come.
She sat him on the bed, pushed him back. She pulled her own shirt open, button by button, freed her breasts from the white sports bra. She pulled her panties down with a crooked index finger and tossed them into the corner.
With the exception of the round, metallic, blue bauble in her belly button, she was a smooth stretch of golden pink and white.
They rolled over onto the bed, Benny on top of him. She opened her legs around him. No foreplay, no condom. They didn’t think of it. There were none. She rode along with the natural arc of the moment, straddling him, holding him tightly with her knees, occasionally leaning back and looking at the ceiling, then back down at him, way down it seemed. She towered, cast a long, curving shadow across his torso.
Jeremy watched her profile as she cleaned herself with tissues that she lobbed into the wastebasket by the door. Then she rolled back onto the bed next to him, smiled, stretched briefly and fell asleep.
He’d never seen her place before. It was bigger than his, nicer. Immaculate hardwood floors, a separate dining room, and a cute galley kitchen with a gas range and an exposed brick wall. In the living room her stereo was prominent, CDs spread around: P J Harvey, Radiohead, Combustible Edison, Sinatra, Le Nozze di Figaro, choral works by Vivaldi. Her books in stacks, used: paperbacks by literary celestials as many light-years apart as Will Self and Flaubert. In the corner of the front hall there was a pile of what must have been dry cleaning: orange sweaters, velvet dresses, trim grey skirts.
The moment had come. He called Dante from the living room. Got him in the car, of course, although the static was particularly bad.
Stanley Park Page 18
