Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  Dante said: “Gotta call you back, Jay. Where are you?”

  Jeremy went into Benny’s kitchen and boiled water for the Ichi-Ban, a Costco box of which he found under the counter. Three flavours: pork, seafood and miso. It appeared to be the only food Benny had in the cupboards. He picked miso.

  Dante phoned back in twenty minutes. Benny was still asleep. The Ichi-Ban water was simmering, and having scoured the fridge and found nothing else, Jeremy was sipping a Coors Light, which tasted metallic and smelled like sulphur.

  “What number is this?” Dante’s first question, asked sharply. In the background Jeremy could hear heavy traffic, non-stop horns. Dante was lounging in the passenger seat of a rented Jaguar while Philip drove, no doubt.

  Jeremy provided an explanation for the strange number. It pleased Dante enormously, disproportionately.

  “I was beginning to think you needed a mujer, my friend,” Dante said, pronouncing the word moh-hawr and laughing. “Is she strong? Is she smart?”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Yeah, well, I hope so.” There was crackling silence for a second or two.

  “What’s on your mind?” Jeremy asked. The telephony grid rippled with sufficient static to drown out a few words before settling back to the normal sea-state hum.

  Dante was mid-sentence, “. Inferno Michigan Avenue. Went to a White Sox game. Then Lowry’s, heard of them, Jay?”

  “The seasoning salt people. The steak house.”

  “That’s right. I was thinking of ordering tofu, but Philly told me they don’t like faggots in the Windy City.”

  Jeremy laughed dutifully.

  “So, instead, I had a little sixteen-ounce steak. USDA prime. A nice light meal. You see, Jay, this is why I mention Chicago, because I’m meeting with bankers down here and moderation is not part of their game. It’s a steak or it’s your liver they’re eating, and either way they use steak knives.”

  There was another wave of static and talking in the car at Dante’s end.

  Dante came back on: “Jeremy? I’ll call you back.” And the line went dead.

  Jeremy leaned back in Benny’s sofa. Bankers, he thought. Now where might this story be going?

  He looked across Benny’s living room and through her bedroom door, where he could see the sheeted outline of her shoulder, gently cresting and falling with sleep. There was freedom in that narrow roll, neither dropping nor rising too far. Just the bandwidth of an unconstrained breath. He thought about that breath. He remembered its tiny puffing heat, its very light scent, like a sweet dough, like stollen. He imagined feeling it again. He imagined inhaling enough of it to be partway free himself.

  He got up and gently closed the bedroom door, anticipating the phone, which then rang.

  “Jeremy,” said a voice from the same staticky place. “Philip. Here’s the man.” And then there was some hand shuffle and clatter as Philip handed over the cell.

  “Had to take another call. Where were we?” Dante was unhurried.

  “Steaks,” Jeremy tried. “Bankers?”

  “Bankers. The reason for my call. Always better partners than bankers. Partners is negotiated co-operation out of mutual interest. Nobody forces you to take a partner, and you can always get divorced, am I right?”

  Jeremy didn’t even have time to answer.

  “Bankers, on the other hand, work with you when times are good and against you otherwise. This is a fundamental principle when it comes to using other people’s money: always trade something for the money, always be a partner. Because if you borrow the money, you’re renting it. And then you answer for it on bankers’ terms.”

  “Right,” said Jeremy. He was now listening carefully.

  “All right. I’m going to tell you a short story. Two years ago, a Sunday night, I hear from someone I haven’t seen in five or six years … son of Mr. Papier, who has been my neighbour for almost twenty years, my favourite chess companion, loopy but not yet entirely crazy.…”

  “Dante …,” Jeremy started.

  “Don’t interrupt me. Ten minutes from now I’m at O’Hare, and ten minutes later I’m in the air for New York, and between now and then you and I have to go a much longer distance.”

  Jeremy had only meant to say: Dante, you don’t need to remind me. I remember sitting down with you that day. I remember your generosity. I remember being ashamed that I could not ask my father. I remember. I remember. But he shut up.

  “We ate lobster, do you remember that? I had Nova Scotia lobsters flown in that weekend for a party Saturday night. I had two left. We spread newspapers on the picnic table on the deck below the house. It was a beautiful, sunny day looking out over Howe Sound, and we had a proper feed. A big bloody crustacean each and a bucket of Harp on ice. You remember that, Jay?”

  “Of course I remember, Dante.”

  “So the kid has a couple of Mick lagers and starts talking about restaurant ideas, and in an instant, Jay, in an instant I can tell there is a good idea here. I know business ideas—I know when they’re too simple and when they’re too complicated—and I looked at this kid, back from cooking school in France and working in a hotel kitchen he doesn’t like, and I say to myself: He’s got skills and vision. He’s going to take all this classical training he learned from the frogs in the white hats, and he’s going to turn the local sow’s ear into a culinary silk purse. It’s a vision and the kid has got it.”

  He took a breath and a sip of something. Pellegrino drunk from the neck of the stubby green bottle, thought Jeremy.

  “What did the Professor think of you going to France?”

  “Ambivalent,” Jeremy said, surprised by the question.

  “He doubtless thought it a very stupid idea.”

  Jeremy was left to think about this assessment while Dante took his mouth away from the phone again. When he returned he said: “Philly says I have three minutes or I’ll miss my plane. If you charter a plane you might figure the bloody thing could wait for you, but apparently this is not strictly the case. All right, so money. The kid and I discuss money. Eventually everybody talks about money and the kid with the vision doesn’t know chalk from cheese when it comes to money but even he ends up talking about it. What he says is: Mr. Beale this, and Mr. Beale that … at the end of the day it’s something like two hundred grand for a bare bones start-up. I suggest a partnership and the kid says he wants to borrow the money. Get me on as a guarantor, but otherwise do it on his own hook.”

  Jeremy didn’t remember it this way exactly, but he did remember that he had welled full of confidence as he spoke and that he had felt possessive about his ideas.

  “And I have to tell you, Jay … first off I thought it was going to be more—I’m still amazed what you’ve done with so little. Second, although I might have liked to be a partner with you, I couldn’t help being impressed with what you did there: You said borrow. You said guarantee. You were talking about your vision.”

  “I don’t recall precisely those terms,” Jeremy said.

  “Well, I bloody well do. You decided you wanted a banker,” Dante said, and then he broke off for a moment to take another drink of water. “OK, listen to me. The agreement that we came to over lobsters in the sun in August had the effect of motivating me to do a range of things that my good man Philip thinks were extremely unwise. He might have even used stronger words than unwise.”

  Jeremy thought he heard laughter in the background at this point.

  “There was the bank loan. There were the credit cards,” Dante rhymed off the obligations. “And when I guarantee somebody else, then I’m somebody else’s borrower. And if I’m borrowing from somebody, even indirectly, then you’re borrowing from me.”

  Jeremy tried again: “I only wanted to build something for myself.”

  “Of course you did, and you’ve succeeded. Only now you’ve built something with four walls, no door and bars on the windows, and I’m your banker, not your partner, so I guess the question is, How should I respond to a phone call
from the Toronto Dominion Bank, a courtesy phone call from a fellow I know, informing me that there are problems with your loan, with your account, and they would like the matter of $230,000 ‘taken care of’? What do you think, Jeremy? Are they suggesting I might have to pay them? And if I do have to pay them, do you think you could find some way to pay me back at rates of return that satisfy my opportunity cost of capital?”

  He was shouting by the end of it.

  “So, I suppose I need to know the following at this point,” Dante hollered. “Do you need my help or not? Say yes truthfully and I can’t be your banker any more, but I will be your partner like I’ve offered many times before. I’ll give you five percent of the place and some freedom. If you say no truthfully, I stay your banker and everyone should be happy. You’ll take care of the bank and whatever other difficulties you may have at the moment—and in my experience, these troubles always come in clusters. But if you say no, Jeremy, and you do in fact need help … well, then I’ll know very quickly anyway and I’ll still be your banker, but I won’t be working for you any more. You’ll be working for me.”

  “I understand,” Jeremy repeated.

  “I remember when your mother died,” Dante said, changing tone. And then he let the silence hang as Jeremy did not, could not, answer. “Sudden crisis and everybody ran for cover, didn’t they?”

  He wasn’t wrong, of course.

  “I have no family, Jeremy. My family tree is a series of opportunities linked by branches to the main trunk of my life. I see the opportunities, I take them. It’s like picking fruit. You might think to do the same. Now, your move.”

  Jeremy was too tired to think, so he finally said the words: “I need help, Dante. You know it. Just tell me it will be business as usual around here. Free of money problems, we’ll go through the roof. Business as usual and you won’t be sorry.”

  Dante sighed. Business as usual, he knew, was code for Capelli. He stalled. “What’s with this Derek person at Amex? ‘Unusually large purchase.’ We sent over a cheque, but why is he calling me?”

  “You did what?” Jeremy said.

  “It was a sign of good faith,” Dante explained. “Now, tell me what I bought you.”

  “You bought me a knife,” Jeremy stammered, and told him about the Fugami. Top end. The very best.

  Dante enjoyed the description. “Perfect. Utterly perfect.”

  “I can return it,” Jeremy said.

  There was an atypical moment of silence between them. It came to this.

  “All right. Business as usual,” Dante said.

  “You won’t be sorry. Jules and I—”

  “Don’t,” Dante interrupted. “I agreed.”

  “I accept,” Jeremy said.

  After which the details didn’t feel like details. Once the words were released they were simply the operating assumptions, the underlying flavour of a new world into which he had been suddenly born.

  It should have been an evening they all enjoyed, he thought, walking across town towards the park. It was 1:45 in the morning now, and he wished he could turn in at any of the bars he passed along the route, Dunsmuir, then Robson, then Denman. The same kind of evening they would have normally kicked through together, riffing at each other, bitching, flirting.

  The menu killed. Out front, people were enjoying themselves. Dominic and Zeena carried the comments in from the dining room. Someone liked the wild salmon tartare with grilled oysters on curly endive. Someone liked the black-cod ceviche. (Zeena wrote “Raw Fish Night” on the chalkboard.) They sold out of penne with gorgonzola and only put a few of the rabbit legs in the fridge for Thursday lunch. In all, it was a chemistry Wednesday. A Wednesday to launch them up the rippling back of the wave that would carry them into the weekend.

  But Jeremy took little pleasure from it. He struggled to focus, his mind spinning forward to meeting his father, not looking forward to the very certain reaction his news would provoke.

  “Mint leaves, puh-lease.” Zeena was back at the pass-through with a trio of sorbets that he had forgotten to garnish. Then, a joke: “Come on, Chef, get with the program.”

  To which they all heard the Chef respond: “Program?” A kind of dubious snort. It came out involuntarily.

  Of course, he gave Zeena (or more precisely the customers) the mint leaves that they were due, and turned irritably to other tasks. But not without catching Jules’s eye, catching the look that said … well, he wasn’t sure what it said. It was like the single word no said slowly, repeated with a changing intonation, from dread, fear, doubt, to more deliberate, emphatic denial, a self-reassuring denial of what had been feared: No, no, no …NO.

  “Drinks?” she asked afterwards, tentative.

  “Believe it or not,” Jeremy said, a little angry all of a sudden, “believe it or not, I have to visit with my father this evening.”

  “What? Where?” Zeena said, sailing into the kitchen. “Weed?”

  “Me, please,” Jules said. Then: “Nothing, honey. Chef and I are just—”

  He had never told Zeena, but why did he even care who knew? “My father,” he said, cutting Jules off, “lives in Stanley Park. He lives there at night. He lives there during the day. He eats ducks.”

  Zeena exhaled a blue cloud of sweet smoke. “Cool.”

  Bang on two. The Professor was running behind, atypical for him, but the park had become more talkative lately, more distracting. The trees swayed and barked, the residents and new arrivals sought him out. They approached him and held his attention while the hours slipped away. Notes didn’t always do the testimony justice and so the Professor was finding strange diagrams on his yellow legal pads. Circles connected by lines, an evolving complex molecule. The largest circle was in the middle of the page. It was marked “The Woods.” There were lines emerging from it running to other circles, one very thick line marked “Caruzo.” Another connected to a circle marked “Siwash,” a dotted line. Other names, other circles. And then a ring of still smaller circles not connected to the centre at all but clustered at the periphery of the page, as if drawn into orbit by gravity.

  Caruzo kept him abreast of new arrivals. “Four,” he said, calling from the forest early that week. “Plus dog makes five.”

  The diagram grew. Earlier that evening he had bumped into Chladek near Prospect Point. Chladek was a displaced Czech journalist-cum-merchant-mariner living under the Lions Gate Bridge. He had already earned his own circle, was approachable, talkative, only rarely incoherent.

  Chladek offered a sip of Becherovka, a medicinal Czech liquor in a square green bottle, a shareable portion of which was frequently in his possession. The Professor offered back a package of saltines that Chladek accepted.

  “Tell me,” the Professor said, after they had sipped from the bottle again. He gestured to take in the entire forest around them. “What is this wilderness to you?”

  “Maybe not so much as it is to you,” said Chladek, who was capable of being difficult. But he turned the corners of his mouth downwards and nodded slowly, considering the question. “It is Stromovka,” he said finally.

  The Professor didn’t understand.

  Chladek smiled. He set the bottle of Becherovka on the pavement with a clink. He spread his arms, palms open as the Professor had just done. “Stromovka,” he said again. “The place of the trees.”

  The Professor pondered this comment at the fire later, time slipping by, sketching lines and erasing them. “Stromovka,” he said, looking up into the canopy above, then back down to his diagram. It was no kind of formal science he recognized, but the Professor followed the whisper of an impulse and wrote the word inside the largest circle, the circle at the centre of the page. The Woods. Here he wrote: Sanctified. Stromovka. The Place of Trees.

  Then he lay back in the ferns to let it all flow over him. Jeremy stood at the centre of his own diagram, the Professor thought. In the thick of his own woods. A joined drama. People turning against the wind, returning to Eden. Those seeking reconciliation
with the stable rhythms of the earth, with their own beginnings. Here, in the park, where out of desperation, for lack of options, a living theatre of rootedness had been reborn from distant tragedy. In Jeremy’s kitchen, where a sense of lost connection played out in culinary theatrics about the return to a familiar soil.

  And just as the thought creased through him—the Professor hoped it might be discussed between them that very evening—he realized it was two o’clock. He jogged to the lagoon, arriving at the cherry trees completely out of breath, his case clutched under his arm. His diagrams folded into a yellow wad and stuffed into his rear pocket.

  Jeremy was not at the designated spot, on the city side of the lagoon at the cherry trees. He stood high on the rise above the lagoon, past the tennis courts. The boy had chosen to stand on the lip of grass that was the absolute easternmost edge of the park. The last bit of green before the curb, before pavement and buildings began. The outside. He was looking down.

  The Professor climbed up towards his son. The light glanced down from the streetlights across Jeremy’s face. It threw shadows under his tired eyes. His downturned mouth. When they were face to face, they stood in silence for a number of seconds. The Professor felt disappointment fill him. “You have not been back to the library,” he said.

  “Shitty week,” Jeremy snapped. But he stopped at that, because in the Professor’s eyes, those impervious eyes, there was a colour that he recognized. A shade of bruising. A shade of vulnerability. He lowered his voice. “How is Caruzo?”

  “Sends his best.”

  Jeremy steadied himself.

  The Professor spoke first. “There was a woman in the park on the day they died.”

  Jeremy dropped his head. God.

  “She saw something that day … someone …”

  Jeremy turned and stepped into the street. The Professor remained on the grass. He held the last inch of his park. “The two are meant to be together,” he said, talking to Jeremy’s back. “Just as the two were drawn from the same soil, so too must the same soil hold them.…”