The Book of Stanley

by Todd Babiak

  The thin man opened his mouth just slightly, a long bubble of saliva connecting his dry lips.

  “Will we die proud of all the television we watched? All the Australian wine we bought? Or are we–?”

  “I’m sorry, lady. I don’t want to be rude, but can you go away now?”

  Tanya collected her wine and exited the store. Outside, the mountain wind continued its struggle with the heat of the sun. Couples and families from around the world filled the street, awed by their journeys in and out of sporting goods stores rather than up and down mountains. She had hoped that quitting her job would make her cheerful and optimistic. But just a few hours later, at the corner of Bear and Caribou, Tanya was lost.

  A man in a toque and a “SAVE ANWAR” T-shirt strode past her. Tanya stopped him. “Do you see me?”

  “Huh?”

  “Am I here? Do you see me?”

  The man glanced about suspiciously. “Yes?”

  “All right, how about this.” Tanya tilted her head and nodded. “Do I mean anything?”

  It appeared the man was going to answer her question. Then, with a determined pivot, he said, “I fix mountain bikes, lady,” and hurried down Bear Street.

  The lobby of the Chalet Du Bois was connected to a Tony Roma’s. Tanya entered the lobby and her first, destructive thought was thus: I am going to eat a large plate of ribs tonight, and sleep with the pimply waiter.

  An Indian gentleman wearing the largest Rush concert T-shirt in the history of progressive rock blocked the stairway.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  “Of course. But. Have you been crying?”

  Tanya wasn’t aware of crying. She looked down and hid her eyes, in case the makeup had smeared her into an Uncle Fester lookalike, and tried to muscle past the gentleman.

  Instead of standing aside, he put his hand out for her to shake. “My name is Alok Chandra. We’re here to help.”

  The Chalet Du Bois was a three-storey hotel with a small and ridiculously slow elevator, but Tanya would take it. She walked past a beautiful young woman and a quasi-elderly man with vivid blue eyes. He opened them widely to her, and smiled. Tanya couldn’t help but conclude, in that first instant, that the quasi-elderly man would have outstanding screen presence.

  Tanya stopped. “Are you a delegate?”

  “No,” he said.

  “How do I know you?”

  The beautiful young woman reached over and rubbed his arm. “This is the Lord.”

  The Lord shook his head. “You have to stop saying that, Maha.”

  An older woman, standing on the other side of not-the-Lord, braced herself against the fake log wall. She looked as though she might faint. Alok Chandra put his arm around Tanya. The big man smelled of the chips one spreads along the bottom of a hamster cage. “You were destined to find us here, in the lobby of this hotel.”

  “This is my hotel. I stay here.”

  “Just as we do,” said Alok Chandra. “Just as we do.”

  The faint woman brought her hands to her face. Tanya was bewildered, and still feeling lost, so she stepped out of the man’s embrace and pressed the call button. “Pleasant to meet you all. Mr. Chandra. Not-the-Lord.”

  “Wait,” said Alok Chandra. “Who are you?”

  She did not pull a business card from her jacket pocket. “Tanya.”

  “All right, Tanya, what I’m asking is: who are you and what are you doing here?”

  She had trained herself to answer questions quickly and definitively. A reputation for dithering or excessive thoughtfulness was detrimental to the career of a marketing and development executive. Now that she was no longer in the television business, she paused. She waited patiently and passively for the answer to arrive, and it did not arrive. The response was stalled, like the elevator.

  Not-the-Lord looked down at his watch. “We just got here. We’re going upstairs with our luggage and then we’re going out for dinner. Would you like to join us?”

  Usually, during her yearly visit to Banff, Tanya dreaded dinner invitations. The artificial friendships, the small talk about government funding and political threats. The flirting, wine, and inevitably bad hotel-room sex followed by guilt and lies and headaches the following day.

  “No, thank you.” Tanya gave up on the elevator and walked determinedly back through the crowd and up the first set of stairs. With each step she felt less whole.

  In her room, Tanya opened the bottle of wine and filled her glass. Without sniffing the cork or oxygenating the Hermitage, she swallowed it back. Her breath, in and out of her nose, was noisy. The dry air. The dry wine. The moisture evaporating from her body ounce by ounce, leaving only crooked ditches and dead pores.

  She poured a second glass, with the heat of the first wiping away the cardboard wall that separated her from tears. So that was where her body stored moisture. Tanya turned on the television, watched the first five minutes of Wife Swap, went into the bathroom, and locked the door. Then, without splashing any water on her face or even wiping the mascara from the hollows of her eyes, Tanya ran out of the hotel room, down the hall, and into the empty lobby.

  “Where did they go?” she said, to the clerk.

  “Um,” said the clerk.

  “They were putting their bags in their rooms and going out to eat. Where did they go?”

  “Um.”

  Tanya considered pulling a decorative antler off the wall and punishing the clerk for his obviously chronic methamphetamine use. Instead, she took a small dining magazine from the information rack and ran out onto the street.

  TWENTY-SIX

  A hockey team can be hot for a month, only to fall into the most inept and awkward spell. The simplest things, like passes into the neutral zone, become impossible. The mysteries behind these inconsistencies applied, Kal learned, in the restaurant business as well.

  Sometimes, for an hour or more, the dishes arrived at a perfect pace. Kal would wash constantly, without any pauses long enough to inspire boredom, listening to a lengthy violin sonata or something gay by Gershwin. Then, even though everything about the diners remained the same, a great idleness would arrive, with no dishes, followed by a momentous pile for which there was no room on the stacker. And Kal would panic. Forks would emerge from the washing machine with cheese baked on their tongs. Cups with rings of hot chocolate inside.

  During one of the lulls, Kal walked into the dining room to draw a ginger ale. And there she was: the woman in the hot tub. Only now she wore a sleeveless black turtleneck sweater and sat next to an obese man in a Rush T-shirt. Across from her, an elderly couple.

  Kal waved at Chip, on the other side of the bar. “You have to do me a favour, buddy.”

  Chip did not seem to appreciate Kal calling him “buddy.” The proprietor of Far East Square backed away and snorted. Behind the sounds of conversation, laughter, and cutlery on plates were trickles from the wall fountains.

  “I need to buy a drink for that girl.” Kal pointed. “Whatever she’s drinking. Chip, my man, that’s the girl I was telling you about. Check out that posture.”

  “No.”

  “Please, Chip.”

  “Maybe you should call me Mr. Yang from now on.”

  “Mr. Yang, this is very important.”

  “Not to me. You know, Mrs. Yang thinks you’re crazy. You’re on her shit list.”

  “I’m not crazy. I’m smitten. They’re two different things.”

  “Go back to work.”

  “Only if you find out what she wants to drink, and give her one on the house.”

  “On the house?”

  “The house is me.”

  “The house is me.”

  “Right, Mr. Yang. Say the drink is from a secret admirer. No, no. From me.”

  “Does she know your name?”

  “Kal from the hot tub, say. Say that. No, say it’s from Kal–the awesome guy from the hot tub.”

  Chip filled a glass with mineral water. “I don’t know if I can say that. Now,
get back into the kitchen. Your apron is filthy.”

  Kal formed his hand into a mock six-shooter, emptied the cartridge into Chip, and returned to a new stack of plates and cutlery in front of the dishwasher. The song on his earphones was about being caught in the rain. Kal danced while he washed.

  “You better not break anything else,” said Wendy, loud enough for Kal to hear over the lyrics. Wendy had never been friendly with Kal, but in the last few nights she had turned hostile. Some people, Kal knew, lacked the proper chemical connection to be teammates. You could force it, but the team never felt right. With time, annoyance turned to distrust and eventually hatred. In his hockey career, it had taken Kal a few seasons to understand this. He’d fought with teammates, even sabotaged their play, because he’d failed to recognize the biological facts. Human life was finite. A guy was better off surrounding himself with sweet chemical connections. “One more glass and you’re fired.”

  With Wendy, it went beyond chemicals and beyond the usual pattern of annoyance, distrust, and hate. Kal recognized in Wendy Yang a profound sadness, the sadness he himself had felt since he’d left high school to become a full-time hockey player. It was everywhere in the kitchen of Far East Square. The stacked plastic white lard bins were sad. The blank walls and fluorescent lights were sad, doubly sad as it all reflected off the stainless steel of the cooking station.

  And it was more than sadness he saw in Wendy. It was fear. As a hockey player, Kal had worked to strip the fear from his decision-making processes. If a guy was too thoughtful on the ice, he wouldn’t take risks. Yet Kal knew that a wall of fear stood between him and greatness. No matter how much rye and Gatorade he drank, Kal could not strip the fear from his play.

  He removed the earphones and leaned on the shiny counter where Wendy assembled the dishes. “You’re thinking too much, Wendy. It’s making you anxious and shaky. Look at your shaky hand!”

  “Get back to your station.”

  “Do you want to be a mediocre chef, or a great one?”

  Wendy looked up at Kal and frowned. “Leave me alone. Stop talking and get to work.”

  “Put that cilantro down, Wendy, and focus. See the meal. The perfect meal. You want the people out there to have a special experience, don’t you? Not just a sorta-good experience?”

  “Get to work, Kal, or go home and never come back.”

  “You’re scared, Wendy. You’re scared of greatness. I used to be scared of greatness, but I’m not any more.”

  Wendy stood up from the plates and stared straight ahead, at two bowls of soup on the warming tray. Her rosy cheeks had turned fully red, and her head quivered along with her hands.

  Chip walked through the door and placed another tub of dishes on the stacker. “She won’t accept your drink.”

  “Make Kal work or fire him.”

  “Wendy.” Kal walked around the stainless-steel island and put his hands on Wendy’s arms. They were tiny and tense. Every muscle was active. “You must change your life.”

  Before the fork made contact with the skin of his cheek, Kal spotted it out of the corner of his eye and wondered whose mouth had wrapped around it. He had time to hope the fork had been inside the woman from the hot tub’s mouth. The pain was more explosive than, say, a cross-check in the mouth, because he hadn’t partaken of rye whisky.

  Wendy released the fork and it remained in Kal’s cheek. Kal backed into the stove and stopped when he felt its heat. If Wendy had not been scared before, she was now. She screamed and pointed at Kal’s face. Then she ran around the island and stood with Chip at the dishwashing station. Kal pulled the fork out of his cheek and held it out. There didn’t seem to be any blood on it. Chip drew a butter knife from the dish tub and brandished it before Kal’s fork like a sword.

  Years of hockey had built a web of nuance around Kal’s reaction to pain. It hurt quite a lot to be stabbed by a fork, and it hurt even more to pull it out. But every smart player knows that if you react too quickly, if you surrender to rage and revenge, you will only end up in the penalty box and hurt your team. So Kal placed the fork in the sink and cupped a hand under his right cheek, where the blood was now dripping. “I was just trying to help, Wendy.”

  He passed the other chef, Yip Suen, and stood over the deep sink in the corner near the door. First Kal washed his hands and then he began splashing cold water on his cheek. Yip Suen stood next to him with a clean white handtowel, and once he was satisfied the wound was relatively free of black bean sauce, Kal held the towel to his throbbing face. “Yip Suen, thank you.”

  “No, thank you,” said Yip Suen. “I will pluck the fear out of my cooking, and become a master.”

  “That’s terrific.”

  Kal fashioned a large bandage from another clean towel and taped it to his face. The cat, Philip, was walking through the kitchen unharassed now. Wendy was already back at work, her chest heaving with sobs. So was Yip Suen, with a new air of delight about her. This truly pleased Kal, despite his light-headedness and the certainty that he would need a tetanus shot. Chip had already written up a crude liability agreement, releasing Wendy from any wrongdoing.

  Chip presented the handwritten sheet to Kal. “If you do not sign, and if you try to bring action, I will tell the truth. You sexually assaulted my wife!”

  “No, he did not,” said Yip Suen. “Don’t sign it, Kal.”

  Kal dished Yip Suen a high-five and walked out of the kitchen into the dining room. At the table of the woman from the hot tub, he smiled and cleared his throat.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Lord would not allow Maha to call him the Lord, so she called him Stanley. It was such an old-fashioned name, a salesman’s name. In her heart, the Lord would remain the Lord, even if on her lips he was Stanley.

  In Montreal, she had walked past places like Far East Square hundreds of times. The wall fountains and tiny chairs, the simple marriage of dark wood and glass. But she had never eaten in a place like this. Her parents thought restaurants were too expensive, and she only went to food courts and cheap cafés with Ardeen.

  Maha was about to ask the Lord how he came to be the Lord when the hot tub man, who had already tried to buy her a cocktail, arrived at the table with a square of cotton taped to his right cheek. It was soaked through with blood. He cleared his throat.

  “My name is Kal McIntyre.” He stared at Maha, so she looked down at her plate. She didn’t want to be embarrassed by this mentally handicapped man in front of the Lord and his wife. The appetizers had just arrived–deep-fried prawns in the form of lollipops, with a ginger sauce for dipping. Maha focused on the dollop of ginger sauce, the non-colour of a vinyl-sided condominium.

  Alok Chandra engaged him. “What happened to your face?”

  “Wendy Yang stabbed me with a fork, but that’s not important.”

  “Right you are, my son.” Alok gestured at the table. “We’re here to find what is important.”

  Their server, an excited Asian man, ran out of the kitchen. He was waving his arms about, smiling at the diners and laughing. “It’s a wild night, folks, no tax. No tax on your meals.” Yet when he reached Kal, his whispered threat was loud enough for Maha to hear. “If you do not leave right now, I will make sure you die.”

  Perhaps the server did not understand whispering, for it was clear that everyone at their table and the table behind Kal had heard the server. The Lord reached up and took the server’s hand. “He’s going to join us for dinner.”

  The server struggled with this news. But he was also at the mercy of the Lord, whose touch had calmed him. The server no longer smiled or laughed nervously or grimaced.

  “Do you understand?” said the Lord.

  “I understand.”

  “And of course, you didn’t mean what you just said to Kal.”

  “No.” The server turned to Kal. “I did not mean what I said. I will not poison your food or hire someone to shoot you.”

  Kal rubbed the server’s back. “Great news, Mr. Yang. I’ll sleep be
tter tonight, knowing that.”

  Once Mr. Yang was gone, Kal sat next to Maha. The back of her neck tingled. She did not turn and look directly at him, but she could feel him there, his breath and his beating heart.

  Frieda and the Lord introduced themselves to Kal and he shook their hands. “I just have to tell you, Mr. Moss, that was something else. The way you calmed Chip down like that. I was just about ready to take a fork in the other cheek. Are you some sort of hypnotist?”

  “No.”

  Alok reached across Maha’s plate and squeezed Kal’s hand.

  Then Kal turned to Maha. His eyes on her like a heat lamp. “And you are?” he said, as though they had never met.

  “Maha Rasad.”

  “Now that is one hell of a pretty name. I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss Maha.”

  Around the table, everyone started eating the deep-fried shrimp again. Maha sneaked glances at the Lord, who kept looking up and staring at something or someone across the room. A couple of times, Maha turned around quickly to see what it was. But there were only paintings on the wall back there, and the window to the street.

  Frieda asked Kal what had brought him to Banff and he told his story. A story Maha had already heard in the hot tub. This delighted Alok, who informed Kal that he had been called here, like everyone else. “Young man, you have changed your life. In twenty years you will look back on this night with a sense of divine wonder.”

  “Divine wonder,” said Kal. “I could sure use a wedge of that.”

  When they had arrived at the restaurant, the only available table was for six. Maha would have preferred a gathering of two–her and the Lord. She was lamenting the number of filled seats when the woman from the hotel lobby appeared, huffing, at their table. “Is it too late to join you?”

  All right, this is enough, Maha wanted to say, but Alok welcomed Tanya Gervais warmly. Kal stood up and called her “ma’am.”

  The waiter brought cutlery and wine glasses for Kal and Tanya, and a sort of calm descended on the table. The music, slow dance beats behind a whale song, was gallingly perfect.