Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  “What?” he said from across the kitchen, turning towards her.

  “Where would you find another one?” she said, not even looking back. Dialing another number already. “Lost ads, please.” The Sun, The Province, The Straight, The Courier, The Kitsilano News. It took her fifteen minutes and she was back on prep. Dinner service marching towards them both.

  They were full through to ten, ten-thirty even. Compliments flowed back through Dominic and Zeena. The music pulsed along, jigging and jagging. Gypsy Kings. Jimmy Smith. On towards eleven o’clock Jeremy thought he heard a snip of Alice Cooper in there somewhere. He tried not to look at the knife rack. He tried not to feel the absence of its heft in his hand.

  “There’s someone here to see you,” Zeena said. “A girl.”

  She was at table seven, sitting a little sideways, a shoulder leaning into the exposed brick. Dressed in tight black velvet. Or was it purple? It was, in any case, one of those in between colours that drew the eye tightly to her, and down her length. From the short-sleeved, vampy, cleavage-enhancing top, across the narrow waist to where she settled into the chair, the fabric of the pants still holding her tightly (holding his eye) down the crossed legs to just below the knee, where they flared. She had high black boots on that covered the calf, laced up along a lattice of chrome eyelets.

  Benny was smoking and drinking a martini. Rocks. Twist.

  “Hello,” he said

  “Hello,” she returned slowly. Showing him the stud.

  He leaned down and kissed her on both cheeks, then he sat opposite. “You look great.”

  “Thank you. I feel a little out of myself. I feel a bit make-believe. Of course, my day began strangely—you weren’t open this morning.”

  “I slept in,” he said. “I wish now that I hadn’t. But I did.”

  “I forgive you for sleeping in.” Benny was looking around the restaurant. “There is a different crowd at this hour.”

  “My foodies, or what’s left of them. We were full earlier.” He was leaning into the table. He straightened up a little and said: “I’m glad you came down.”

  “I was thinking about you this afternoon,” Benny said.

  He didn’t answer, waiting for her. She smoked deliberately.

  “They fired me,” she said eventually, exhaling.

  Jeremy felt the news pass through him and felt immensely tired. So tired that he removed his toque, leaned forward and put his forehead on the tabletop.

  “Damn,” he said. He could feel the tablecloth biting a fine pattern into his skin.

  “Lift your head up,” she commanded in a low voice.

  He did as he was told.

  “There is no point in worrying now,” she said after he had replaced his chef’s hat. Ice cubes clinked in her glass as she finished the martini. “What’s lost is lost, right?”

  He laughed a half laugh. How right she was. “Look at you,” he said.

  “You don’t like it?” Benny said, glancing down at her velvet, shrink-wrapped self.

  Jeremy stared at her body, as he had been authorized. “I like it very much,” he said.

  “All right then,” Benny said. He ordered her another martini from Zeena, who was watching them carefully.

  “Get back to work,” Zeena said to him playfully.

  “Not just yet,” Benny said.

  Zeena left them.

  “Tell me what happened,” Jeremy asked her.

  “They called me into the manager’s office. They said, ‘We’re very disappointed in you.…’ ”

  “Shit. I am—”

  “Forget it,” Benny cut him off. Her emanations were shifting minutely between sexual invitation and anger. Back and forth. “So I lost something—maybe I found something else already. It took me a whole day to find other work.”

  “Tell me what they actually said.”

  “That Jeremy Papier is a thief.”

  “But I’m not.”

  “That it might be fraud … that if you didn’t pay them immediately when they wrote to you that they might well get the police involved, in which case it was going to be hard for them to say exactly whether or not, under the circumstances—because I’d been a really good employee up until then—whether there would be reasonable grounds to charge me too.”

  She stopped just as she ran out of breath.

  He glanced around and saw that they still had a few tables left, one of which, having noted that the chef was in the dining room, was smiling and nodding in his direction. He returned the smile.

  She lit another cigarette and eyed him. “You have to go,” she said.

  He didn’t get up right away.

  “You have work to do,” she said. “Not to worry, I’ll stay.”

  He looked at her once again down her velvet length. She grew sharper with each thing she said, more desirable. “I’m glad,” he said. “We could go for a drink in an hour or so. Are you hungry?”

  Benny craned her neck to look at the chalkboard. Zeena had scratched up the prix fixe menu—two appetizers, four entrées—in her signature Gothic block caps, with needless umlauts and tiny spear-tips capping the upstrokes on the odd lower case h or capital N.

  The salmon was gone. So were the lamb shanks.

  “I think I want a pork chop,” she said like the word amused her.

  “Grenadin de porc Normande for the lady,” he said, standing and bending slightly at the waist.

  “No,” she said.

  He stopped momentarily in surprise. She knew what it was apparently.

  She skewered him with a return glance. “I am familiar with Calvados. And not incidentally, allergic to apples.”

  “I see.” He was thinking how the dish could be prepared quickly a different way. “Do you eat mushrooms?”

  She did.

  “And what do you feel like drinking?” There was a reliable way in which people revealed to you what they really felt like having for dinner. It was half the fun of cooking, this investigation. “Something new,” he said, taking a step for her. “Something to discover on the day you lost something else.”

  “All right,” she said, smiling and compliant now. She would let herself go with whatever he had in mind for her just then.

  He went back into the kitchen. The dish-pit guy was in, starting on the cycle that would return all of their plates and pots and skillets and cutlery and glassware to its proper metal rack for reuse in the morning. Most nights up until now, they hadn’t stretched the limits of their inventory. Tonight, and several nights this week, he mused, by the end of the evening they were running out of one tableware item or other. He felt a satisfying sense of pushing snugly against their capacities.

  Jules smiled at him, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. She was assembling a small selection of cheeses on a bed of arugula and purple kale. He watched momentarily, as he often did in the wind-down section of the evening, enjoying the movement of her strongly veined hands. Their sureness. It occurred to him that there was no cook in the world that he really admired more than Jules Capelli. Her simple understanding of the food universe was as stable and sure as Pépin. She laid out a wedge of Brie de Meaux, a small block of Pont l’Evêque and a piece of Saltspring Island chevre.

  Tom Waits trickled through the overhead speakers into the kitchen and the dining room. “Semi Suite.” He turned to Benny’s dinner. He would make something à la minute. One dish uniquely for her.

  He scooped up a skillet in one hand and let it bang onto the black gridded top of the range. He went to the walk-in and found the few remaining pork chops, which had been put away. He removed one, then picked a large bottle of Chambly La Fin du Monde. A Trappist-style Quebec beer, one of the best in the world as far as Jeremy was concerned. Benny would never have tried it, and he guessed that she would not believe that such delicate effervescence could come from a beer at all.

  There were still sliced chanterelles and shiitakes, diced onion, cream, garlic, crushed pepper, all prepped and in containers next t
o the stove top. Mise en place. He poured Benny a glass of beer, watching the uneven bubbles forming in the firm head, letting the foam rise a good half-inch above the rim of the glass. Then he poured off a cup of beer into a small bowl and put it next to the other prepped ingredients, put the tall bottle next to the glass on a serving tray, slid them onto the stainless steel pass-through for Zeena.

  “Table seven, sweetie,” he said.

  “Your new gal, Jay?” Zeena said. He could tell she was looking forward to her post-action joint.

  “How’d it go out there?” Jeremy asked back, pretending not to hear the question for which he didn’t know the answer.

  “We rocked,” she called back over her shoulder, pushing through the swinging portholed doors and into the dining room. “OK tips. Got hit on twice.”

  When the pan was hot he added a knob of butter and some oil from a plastic, red-nozzled bottle, let it heat through and foam while he vigorously salted and peppered the chop. He dusted it with flour, then gripped the protruding bone with tongs and pressed it down into the foaming fat. When it was browned on both sides, he tested its firmness with his thumb, pushing gently on the flank of the hot chop, pulled it out and onto a small plate that he slid into a low oven. A few onions went into the pan, a grind more pepper, chanterelles and shiitakes sliced thin, some minced parsley. He tossed the mixture, letting it slide to the far edge of the pan, pulling it back and up towards him, which made it break loose from the slick surface and turn over before landing. He let it cook through, whistling with the music—they had segued from Tom Waits to Tom Jones. When the mushrooms were starting to brown, he added a bit of garlic and the beer, swirling the contents of the pan to mix them while they boiled. A knob of butter to thicken the sauce. A new dry side-towel before grabbing the chops out of the oven. Back they went into the sauce, half-covered and slid just slightly off the flame.

  He chose new potatoes for her, much better with the beer. He laid down a bed of the browned mushrooms in their sauce, nestled the chop on top, triangulated with three of the waxy yellow potatoes, sprayed the plate with more parsley and carried it out himself.

  “Grenadin de porc au beurre La Fin du Monde,” he said, sliding it onto the table in front of her.

  She inhaled the steam, her eyes closed now, enjoying the aromas.

  He watched her for a second, then leaned over her and kissed the top of her head, his lips gently brushing the white blond hair. The first time he’d kissed her. And seeing down the front of her, past the bulge of cleavage, he admired his creation sitting warmly on the plate, made with his own hands.

  She looked up at him, her neck craning back.

  “Where’d you get a job so soon?” Jeremy asked.

  “At an Inferno,” she said smiling. “I’m a barista now. Kiss me properly.”

  Which he did, although quickly, sensing at least one of the remaining tables watching, and feeling a mixture of feelings. One, familiar and not unpleasant: a gonadal, possessive stirring against the inside of his pants. Something actually moved down there. Another feeling hovered outside of him. A feeling of circumstances aligning, in a portentous way that refuted free will. The trees in Stanley Park had swayed above him in the same black way that he and Benny now just briefly swayed together.

  The third feeling was hard and metallic, startling against his lip and, for the merest of instants, under his own tongue.

  Sunday he ran errands. Dry cleaning, some shuffling around of withdrawals and deposits; they had a good week, and he had a few thousand dollars to wind the kite in tightly a turn or two. He bought milk for home. Bought some stamps. All of these activities an elaborate stalling tactic to avoid a trip he knew he was going to make.

  It didn’t matter that Jules had placed the ads. It didn’t matter that the markers had been set out that might lead his lost treasure back home. It was gone in the way that the recently departed are gone, their presence still burned on memory’s retina. He would look each time he passed the familiar spots, the knife rack, the wooden chopping surface. He would look involuntarily, expecting to see it miraculously restored.

  He brought the Sabatier papers of certification to Bloom’s, a high-end knife shop in the basement of the Hotel Vancouver. Sigmund Bloom looked these over with some curiosity.

  “This is a very rare piece you have.”

  “Had,” Jeremy said with a pained expression.

  Bloom looked up expectantly. With such timeless artefacts, items fully expected to outlive your grandchildren, there are only strange and noteworthy ways for them to require replacement.

  “I lost it,” Jeremy explained.

  Bloom winced. He picked up the papers again, hoping to see something that would improve the situation. But he shook his head finally and said: “L’Enfer was an unusual factory. They were situated at the base of a waterfall on the river Durolle, in the Thiers region of France. It was the least desirable location on the river, hence the name. Rumour had it that the owners of the factory collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. Bayonets, you understand. Their output was duly shunned afterwards, leaving a warehouse of unsold items to be discovered in later years.”

  “Hence the name?” Jeremy said.

  “It was nearly under the waterfall. I understand the noise in the factory to have been constant and oppressing. The factory took the name Le Creux de l’Enfer, which roughly translates as ‘The Pit of the Inferno.’ ”

  Jeremy processed this description. “ ‘The Pit of the Inferno,’ ” he repeated, staring at the jeweller.

  “Yes,” Bloom went on. “Or ‘The Depths of Hell,’ if you like. That is the better translation, in the sense that fer means iron, and enfer may be construed as ‘in irons’ or ‘in captivity,’ hence ‘Hell.’ Still, I like ‘The Pit of the Inferno’ better, since the sound made by the constant pounding of the Durolle over the waterfall, combined with the wail of the grindstones, must have sounded very much like the roar of a bonfire. Imagine working in such a place. You’d go mad.”

  “It’s remarkable really,” Jeremy said. “ ‘Pit of the Inferno.’ How can we be sure that my knife came from that factory? Sabatier had a lot of factories in the region.”

  “The blade mark,” Bloom said. “A little devil stick figure running with a trident.”

  Jeremy nodded slowly. “That’s the one.”

  Bloom shook his head sympathetically. “The trouble is, there’s little chance you’ll replace such a blade, short of buying from another collector.”

  “It has to be replaced,” Jeremy said. “Not necessarily with Sabatier, but a blade of real quality.”

  Bloom ran through some high-end options. Wurstof Trident, Sabatier’s present Maître de Cuisine line. “At the very high end,” he said. “There are also handmade knives coming out of Japan. The zirconium-oxide ceramic blades won’t get dull for decades, literally. They also don’t oxidize like your old carbon-steel blade, and they’re stronger and lighter.”

  “How much?”

  Kyocera’s KC-200 black ceramic, hot-pressed, six-inch chef’s knife with a wooden handle retailed for $522.40, including taxes.

  “And they go up from there.”

  Jeremy raised his eyebrows. Something about his curiosity in the best, in the most expensive, captured Bloom’s imagination, and he went behind a glass partition into the rear of the shop, where he dialed the combination on an old green safe.

  Bloom returned with a black wooden box and set it gently on the counter. Opened, the box revealed a blue satin lining, and on this satin lay a most unusual blade. A nine-inch chef’s knife. Absolutely black from the point to the butt of the handle. It seemed to absorb the light.

  “Fugami,” Bloom said. “Made with extraordinary care, in batches of sixty only three times a year. The ceramic compound is thirty times harder than similar knives. Maybe the Kyocera will need sharpening in a couple of decades, but technically speaking, this Fugami will not need sharpening until sometime early in the fourth millennium.”
/>   Jeremy exhaled. He didn’t want to hear the price.

  “Are you a collector?” Bloom asked, gently anticipating the unasked question.

  “No,” Jeremy said. “I’m a chef.”

  “You do not need this knife.” His voice was paternal, dissuading, and he made a small motion to close the box. But Jeremy reached out quickly and touched the black wood, and Bloom’s hands dropped away. Jeremy pulled the box across the glass counter towards himself, removed the blade. The Fugami nestled firmly into the meat of his palm, nearly weightless.

  “Thirty-two hundred dollars,” Sigmund Bloom said.

  Jeremy actually gasped. In part it was an expression of impossibility. There was no way he could consider such a purchase. The Monkey’s Paw just now making its first small steps towards profitability. At the same time, it was perfect that the blade should cost an amount approaching the threshold of physical pain. Perfect that he should suffer for it—Jeremy’s mind was spinning forward as he held the knife in his hand—perfect that for the loss of his Sabatier he should put himself again at the lip of the volcano, yes, staring down into the inferno itself, and with penance and risk-taking restore his talisman.

  “You must think about it carefully,” Bloom said after a few seconds. “Take some time.” He left Jeremy standing there and went into the back room.

  Jeremy pulled out his wallet, instinctively running his thumb down the edges of the cards. Even with a good week under his belt, even with the kite pulled in a few turns, none of them had that much room.

  Bloom returned in a few moments.

  Jeremy took a deep breath. “Do you take Amex?” he asked.

  He dropped the knife at his apartment and went to meet the Professor. They walked to a different place, a clearing where the earth was reddened with decaying cedar. It wasn’t a secret spot, but a place where they could sit together on a log and look like any other two people stopping for a breather in the middle of a long walk.