Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  “Assets,” he said, recovering speech and finding only this word.

  “Um, yes. Lower-left corner please.”

  Jeremy nodded numbly and signed in all of the places she indicated. “And the debt is paid off,” he said, more to himself than to her, although she primly responded.

  “I suppose that could be seen as one of the many bright sides of the arrangement. Once you declare bankruptcy, you don’t have to pay anybody.”

  Jeremy let the words register. “And why would anyone agree?”

  She smiled patiently at him, shrugged a millimetre up and down. “Some arrangement?” she said. “The TD Bank is the Inferno International lead lender.… I’m not stating anything directly, of course.…”

  He left a message for Jules that night, much later. “We’re closed tomorrow,” he said. “Meet me at two, please. I’ll explain. I’m sorry.”

  He turned off the ringer, feeling empty and foolish. Benny pulled him down onto the couch next to her. “All I wanted.,” Jeremy started.

  “What?” she whispered, leaning close.

  He started to tell her about the relais. About the wooden walls and the low light. The regulars and the langue de boeuf à la moutarde. He wanted to tell her everything. About Patrice, resistance fighters, river sources, feelings of Blood. These simple things he had wanted to do with The Monkey’s Paw, these things that were put on at every side.

  But Benny didn’t want stories just then. Benny wanted him to make love to her, and then to sleep next to her between the cool sheets. She said: “Baby.” Then again, she repeated: “Baby now, no thinking. Nothing.” She took his hand. “Here.…”

  He was so nervous the next morning that he had to take beta blockers. Just thinking about their meeting made his hands shake. He tried being angry at Dante, bearing down on that feeling. Injustice. Betrayal. Hadn’t he been promised Jules would …?

  But it only made him feel worse. It was his own fault, not Dante’s. It was a cluster of his own failings that had brought them all to this painful morning.

  He took sixty milligrams, which was a lot, three pills where one or two would do. Since propranolol lowered your blood pressure, beta blockers had the side effect of producing lightheadedness. It was a complex trade-off between the shakes and passing out, Jeremy realized. In the eye of the observer, he reasoned, the shakes were indicative of moral and emotional weakness, while passing out was a sign of some kind of serious structural flaw. You might go either way depending on who you were facing, and for Jules, right then, moral strength seemed paramount. He sat in the front window and waited for her, and Jeremy did venture to have a coffee, watching himself carefully in the reflection of the glass as he raised the mug steadily to his lips.

  “Jules,” he said when she came in, smiling weakly. He looked a bit sick, she thought. His eyes were red and bruised from lack of sleep. His hands tremored minutely.

  Jules poured coffee and sat. “How bad?” she asked.

  Beta blockers also had the effect of slowing his speech, or his perception of its speed in any case. He may have been pumping out the same number of words per minute, but to his ear they emerged methodically, one at a time, and dropped awkwardly into the space between himself and Jules, like blobs of spaetzle dough. “From the top,” he said, “understand that none of what has happened is your fault.”

  Jules established with her eyebrows that the thought had never crossed her mind.

  Then he told her the long story. The story in which his kite went aloft and his options grew fewer. His own inability to budget or handle a credit card. The story in which Dante was the only source of assistance on a bleak financial landscape. Dante’s promise of “business as usual.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Jeremy pleaded. “You and I having this conversation.”

  And then—just as Jules realized fully, unswervingly, that this was the ending she had feared—he did something neither of them had expected. He blamed it on the Professor. The Professor had not been doing so well lately, he said. He described the Professor’s living arrangement, his clothes. He described the Professor’s smell and his fingernails. Jeremy claimed to have been distracted by this situation. He’d let things get out of control.

  Jules listened and did not take her eyes from his face. He was talking about the park now.

  “Siwash,” Jules said.

  He was only trying to illustrate.

  “Tell me.”

  Babes in the Wood. Jeremy gave her the précis.

  “Wow.”

  “Jules. Please.”

  She let him continue. He described how he thought things had been turning out. How, in a rush, everything had come apart. “The banks came crashing in. Dante thinks we’re going to need a transition period.”

  “Dante,” Jules said, testing the word. “Transition to what, do you suppose?”

  Of course, he had no answer. He didn’t know.

  Jules looked out the front window. She didn’t see her own reflection; it was unlike Jules to look on herself. Only outward, forward, up the street and beyond. She shook her head a fraction of an inch either way.

  “What?” he said. From outside the slender tower of strength that was Jules Capelli, you didn’t get a glimpse inside very often.

  But she didn’t answer, just continued to stare. Up past Victory Square. Past the granite cenotaph with its vaguely accusatory inscription: Is it anything to you? Past the sleeping bags that surrounded its base, the kids having a lie-in, enjoying the morning sunshine. Flaked out in an enviable ambition-free drift of what appeared to be more or less satisfied disaffection. Past this scene to the tips of the downtown towers that sprouted along the ridge line, hemming slowly in from the west, appearing to savour the moments before a frontal assault.

  It hurt, this news. It surprised her by hurting physically, something like stomach flu. She had seen it coming, although not precisely and not the pain. But what surprised her more was that she was not thinking about Jeremy at all, but about Dante. The coffee baron filled her mental stage. He pushed out all other thoughts. There was only the Emperor of Inferno International and the backhanded compliment he had given her by devouring The Monkey’s Paw. The greatest compliment of her career. The greatest affirmation that she had done the right thing to leave The Tea Grill, to come here. To cultivate what they had, give breath to the culinary elements that they both did, fusing ideas that had been theirs alone with ideas they had inherited and protected.

  Inferno International Coffee had been drawn to them, despite itself. They had captured the Inferno. Captured Dante. And it didn’t matter that the ideas of The Monkey’s Paw would not be used, probably not even ruined through improvement but thrown away utterly. She knew they could not be destroyed, and that in the great, culinary meme-pool their ideas were now loose. To some, threatening enough to be feared.

  Of course, implied compliment or otherwise, she hated Dante for it.

  “They killed a girl who worked in the Money Mart,” Jules said, finally.

  “I heard about that.” He was glad to hear her voice. The worst outcome, he thought, would have been for her to silently leave.

  “The guy went running off down Hastings Street with a black plastic bag full of money.” She shook her head and looked out the window again. “I heard that there was money coming out of the bag, streaming out onto the pavement behind him. He was carrying so much cash he couldn’t even keep in all in the bag.”

  Jeremy grimaced appreciatively. “Desperate people.”

  “I hear he courted her. He sent her flowers and other presents for several months just to get to know her. He pretended all that time that he was attracted to her, that he really appreciated who she was.”

  Jeremy didn’t say anything.

  “People warned her about this guy,” Jules said, shaking her head slowly. “Then he comes to the place at the very end of the night when she’s alone. And he shoots her in the head.”

  “I don’t know,” Jeremy answered, mistaking th
is last detail for a question.

  Jules turned now and looked directly at him: “No. He did. I’m telling you. He came after hours. She was trying to lock up. He talks sweet to her. She opens the door. Then he shoots her right in the head.”

  Jeremy swallowed but held her eyes with his own. In the pale green you could also see tiny flecks of brown if you looked closely. He looked for them now but couldn’t see them. You had to be closer, he thought. You had to be inside a breath’s distance, on the lip of intimacy. They were flecks of something essential and eternally strong. He imagined them distributed throughout her, trace elements of something he connected with this strength, but she looked away firmly.

  “Zeena thinks he’s the Devil,” Jules said.

  Jeremy tried to laugh, unclear. “Who are we talking about?”

  “Think about it,” Jules said. “The way he looks and talks. That whispery mean-streets gangster schmooze. That shark-skinned, cloven-hooved, razor-striped, over-acquisitive, Thatcher-era, glancey-eyed, price-of-everything, kind of put-the-boots-in bullshit. And he’s got pointy ears. Top and bottom, ever notice that? Zeena pointed that out to me once. His ears taper at the top and the bottom. He looks like he should have a tail.”

  Then she got up and disappeared into the kitchen. Jeremy was left watching the doors swinging and settling. Thwop thwip thip squeak. Silence.

  He sat in the window for another minute. He wanted to follow her, but the propranolol chose that moment to lick viciously through his bloodstream. He held the table edge, blackness sweeping up under his feet in a cold wave at the same time as the feverish prickling swept over his skin, microscopic, system-wide sweat production moistening the skin along his arms, down the backs of his legs, across his shoulders and over his entire scalp.

  He held the table edge long enough to determine that it would sweep on through him and that he could, indeed, stand. And when he had wobbled back into the kitchen, Jules Capelli was gone, leaving the alley door ajar.

  Jeremy was afforded the opportunity to discover how an irredeemably guilty conscience expressed itself. After all those years of early mornings and late nights, countless Camel Lights, and maybe more than his share of Irish whiskey, he would have expected a good long swing in the hammock to hit the spot. But not a half-hour went by in those first weeks when he did not think about his betrayal of Jules. The circumstances left him less than drifting—he was becalmed and agitated, a bad combination. And without constructive purpose, the sine wave of his week, of his life, simply switched off. He stopped drinking entirely. The weather turned sour. Clouds lowering the skyline, threatening rain. Not producing until he was well out of the apartment without his umbrella, at which point they would open in short, vindictive bursts. The streets would shine, then dry. The clouds would threaten again. Repeat.

  Jeremy tried taking walks but found them dissatisfying. Quite aside from getting regularly doused, there were only two places he ever went. Two places he would end up. One was walking around the lagoon in Stanley Park. He found himself waiting for the Professor to emerge from the woods and was repeatedly disappointed when he didn’t. This development was new and depressing. He realized he had no sure way of finding his father, and that without The Monkey’s Paw, Caruzo wouldn’t know where to find him.

  Otherwise he’d launch himself out the front door of the Stanley Park Manor, walk numbly through the streets up through the West End towards downtown. He followed a track like a computer-controlled supertanker on the high seas. Only the end points mattered, the points on the arc were irrelevant. As a result, Jeremy would emerge from the Stanley Park Manor and (having opted not to go to the lagoon) would end up standing at the doors of the locked up Monkey’s Paw.

  He had keys, naturally, so he would go in and sit in the front room. Or, if it was getting dusty, he would sweep. If there were spiders in the big wash-basin, he would get out the disinfectant and do the entire prep area and the dish pit. He even polished the fish poachers once.

  Dante phoned him at home at seven o’clock in the morning. They had spoken only once since Jeremy inked the deal and turned his back on the past. A short conversation, Dante in an airplane somewhere. Jeremy tried to bring up Jules—he found indignation, a small wedge of it—but Dante cut him off with a cold non sequitur before the name was even said.

  Dante said: “From where I’m sitting, I can see mountains.”

  Jeremy said: “Pardon me?”

  And Dante went on: “From where I am, I see the mountains. I see all of them. I see the entirety of a single one and the way they join together. I see the way they rise to points and fall away in snow-covered slopes. I see the way people die falling off them.”

  And then he had to go.

  This time—Dante was actually at home, earthbound, porch-bound, in fact—Jeremy was sitting bright-eyed and bored silly staring out across the West End and Stanley Park. Gazing into the grey, sipping Postum. For some ridiculous reason he’d given up coffee too.

  “I’m going to have some design people come over this week. What shape is the place in?” Dante asked.

  “Clean,” Jeremy said. “Real clean.”

  “All right. I want you to give them their space.”

  “Can I be there?”

  “No. These are the design people. You are the food person.”

  “I have ideas.”

  Dante was not soliciting his opinion. Jeremy forged ahead. “French Bistro.”

  “Sorry?”

  “We make one. It would go down huge and I know the food. We won’t need to change the room much.”

  “Jeremy, please.” Dante sighed. “Let the vision emerge. Stay clear for the time being, enjoy your downtime.”

  He felt isolated by this last statement, but he had to admit he was also impressed. Dante had just opened a reported 25 million dollars’ worth of Inferno locations in Chicago (Jeremy had been reading the paper cover to cover lately, even the Business Section) and yet when he gave ten minutes’ worth of mental space to this little project of his Dante was able to bring a laser focus to bear. He nailed decisions, flowcharted the future, marshalled resources, delegated and disappeared. He got a lot done.

  Authentic French Bistro. Well, he had to suggest something, and hadn’t Jeremy been highly vocal over the years about his desire to capture what the Relais St. Seine l’Abbaye had been? What it meant to him to slide up the black iron shutters in the morning, to open up the doors and windows and release the not-unpleasant oaky-winey smell of the previous day? To see the ivy growing up and around the window boxes? To let the golden light flow into the wide, low wooden room? To work devotedly all week and then on Sunday to hear the shuffling rubber boots behind him as the farmers and their families took their places along the tables near the west wall?

  “Bonjour,” they’d say to Patrice. “Un demi blanc, s’il vous plaît.”

  And hadn’t he regaled Zeena and Jules and Margaret, and anyone else who would listen, with inarticulate accounts of how he wanted to secure the spirit of that thing (the Relais) within the clay vessel of this thing (The Monkey’s Paw)? But he never did, did he? Always the foodies and Brollywood types, and never the farmers. Always the polyglot kaleidoscope that was Crosstown and never the quiet, musty uniformity of rural France. The quality of spirit there, Jeremy now felt certain, simply couldn’t be found here. Perhaps it was the right approach to merely capture the physical beauty of the relais. To take the clay vessel from somewhere else, as it were, and bring it on over to Crosstown to fill with whatever spirit lived here.

  He went out walking after he spoke with Dante. Benny was working longer hours than before, and with The Paw off-limits he didn’t feel he had anywhere else to go but the lagoon. Around and around, the water rippling in the breeze, occasionally spackled by raindrops. It took about twenty-five minutes to do a circuit, since Jeremy was walking very slowly and stopping periodically to watch the ducks and the racoons. Or letting himself stand stock-still at the shoreline and gaze out across the papery rushe
s and the steel-cold water towards the octagonal fountain, a hollowing pull like the force of suction forming within him as he drained empty of every sense but that of being alone.

  The Professor was playing God. Silent in his swaying, green heaven, resolved not to reveal himself no matter what the entreaties. The trees stood thickly in their places, leaning and brailing one another with their bushy black-green fingers, forming a wet mass of separateness he could not enter. What would be the point? In the unlikely event he found the Professor’s camp without guidance, how would he answer the questions that would then be posed?

  “You fired Jules Capelli?” his father would ask, incredulous, his expression the soul of fatherly disbelief. How could my seed contribute to such stupidity? Or maybe he would say: “Babes in the Wood?” knowing well that Jeremy knew nothing more.

  And so, guilty, irritated and with time on his hands, Jeremy stood in due course in the pizza-fragrant atrium of the library, shaking rain off his umbrella before going inside.

  “Back for that Babes in the Wood file,” Jeremy said when he saw that Gil was manning the Social Sciences desk.

  Gil recognized Jeremy and offered something friendlier than a smirk, although not yet as unguarded as a smile.

  “You just can’t get enough, can you?” the librarian said.

  “I have a problem.”

  In the carrel he took a deep breath, eyes on the ceiling, before diving in.

  He read all the articles, top to bottom. When he finished each one he ticked it off on a separate list he had made and turned the sheets face down on the left side of the file folder. He drew a diagram on another piece of paper, a lopsided Stanley Park. He drew in the Reservoir Trail, where the bodies had been found. He marked the dates of death and discovery: 1947, 1953. He registered the fact that the bodies, thought to be a boy and girl for decades, surrendered the DNA of brothers when examined just a few years ago. He considered Miss Harker’s story, plotting her course through the park as he imagined the day. He marked the spots where she had seen the woman with the children, entering the forest here, emerging near the bear cages over here, running through the rose gardens. He sketched the alternate routes she might have taken, looping into the forest and returning.