Stanley Park (35 page)

On their way to the car, walking between Jeremy and Margaret, Trout said, “Look.”

And they noticed the TV crew filming the row of marigolds next to the lane. The heavy-set camera man was holding the camera out, swinging it across the yellow blossoms for a sweeping, dramatic shot that Jeremy imagined opening or closing the segment.

Margaret began to giggle.

“What’s funny?” Olli asked.

“They’re filming the flowers,” Margaret said, laughing louder.

“Maybe they’ll ask them questions too,” Jeremy said.

They arrived before Olli and Margaret. Dante and Benny went up towards the house, but Jeremy impulsively returned to the street to look back up at the two houses side by side.

The streetscape was familiar. The old house sat next to Dante’s, now dark, uninhabited. Both houses were set back off the crescent in a forest of cedars with salal undergrowth. The Professor’s house was the more imposing, with a high, shingled roof and dormer windows staring out from between the trees. Dante had the architect’s house, an Erikson. His
work didn’t sit on the ground, it emulated the terrain, in this case forming a low shelf that spread among the trees and traced the lip of an escarpment that plunged to the rear of both properties. Dante’s house had a flat tar-and-gravel roof covered with deep green moss.

The Professor’s lawn was cut and trimmed.

“I have my landscapers do it,” Dante said, who was waiting at the front door when Jeremy returned up the drive.

“Thanks. He’s forgetful.”

Olli and Margaret pulled up in the Land Rover, waving. Dante looked for a moment like he didn’t remember who they were, then turned and went inside with Benny.

“You ever carry a sleeping kid, Chef?” Olli said, from the back door of the Rover.

“Gee. I don’t know. Is there a special technique?”

Trout was sitting in place, shoulder belt holding him upright, head lolled to one side. He was snoring.

“Just like carrying a large prosciutto ham I would imagine,” his father said.

Margaret smiled, collecting her things from the front passenger’s seat.

The house was a sprawling split-level. From the black stone entrance hall, stairs stretched down to the lower level and up to the living room, the upper terraces, the wide-open kitchen and dining areas, and from there to other rooms that spread out to the right and left. In the centre of the house was a fifteen-foot-wide stone chimney with fireplaces in either side, one facing into the living room the other towards the kitchen. The chimney ran through the floor and down to fireplaces on the lower level.

“Come on in,” Dante called from the living room as they entered the foyer. He was up in the living room, pulling bottles out of a cabinet and setting them on a folding mahogany table. Scotch, vodka, gin, port. He kept his back to them, calling from the far end of the room: “If Trout wants
to play downstairs, there’s a box of toys down there somewhere.”

When he turned, Dante’s eyes locked on Jeremy holding Trout.

It hadn’t been that difficult after all, Jeremy discovered. Although Trout’s head fell heavily across his shoulder and he thought it might have been drool he felt on his neck, at least the kid’s legs crimped around his waist in a subconscious grip, sensing true sleep, deep, bed-sleep was near. Jeremy smiled back at Dante. Look what I found.

Trout was still snoring, louder.

“Well, fine then,” Dante said, lowering his voice, but his stare did not easily disengage. While Margaret and Olli made their way up into the living room, he continued to stare, processing something. The connection between Jeremy and Margaret? Between Jeremy and Olli? The connection between him and Trout? Was he just remembering hearing somewhere, sometime in the past, that Jeremy had a godson?

Dante directed Margaret to an unused bedroom down a hallway behind the kitchen. She motioned Jeremy to follow, which he did. “You’ll be talking him back to sleep before this is over,” Trout’s knowing mother assured. And sure enough, set on the bed, sneakers removed, Trout was awake.

“Hey there, adults,” he said, looking from one of them to the other. Margaret got him under the covers and kissed him on the forehead.

“Uncle Jay-Jay’s going to say goodnight, then you sleep. Roger?”

“Roger.” Thumbs up.

She flicked off the light, leaving only a swirl of orange coming into the room from the hall. Jeremy sat on the bed and looked around. There was a window on the far side of the opening onto a narrow stretch of garden between the
house and Dante’s greenhouse, where Jeremy knew he kept dozens of orchids.

“So,” Trout said.

“So, bedtime,” Jeremy said.

“But it’s not.”

Jeremy pretended to study his watch closely. “But it is. Your. Bed. Time.”

“My time, yes. My bed, not.”

Clever. “You know who’s bed this is?”

Trout said: “The Devil’s.” His voice rang a bell in the still air.

Jeremy stared down at him.

Trout’s mock-serious expression finally broke and he started to laugh. He then produced a credible impersonation of the figurehead in the Inferno Coffee logo. He adopted a stern, regal expression, drew his chin down as if to suggest a lengthy, weighty beard, extended one hand slowly as if it were holding a very deep mug of coffee. When his hand was out as far as Jeremy’s chest, Trout’s eyebrows glanced up, inviting, beguiling.

“Very funny,” Jeremy said.

“Very serious.” Trout held the pose.

“Time for Zs.”

Trout dropped his arm, settled. He closed his eyes. Sleep was right there.

Jeremy got up gingerly. On his way out he paused at a framed print near the door. A pale sketch on ivory paper, hard to make out at first, but its overall shape drew his eye. A map of an island. A peninsula, with shore lines and topographical marks, trails and road beds. Concessions, beaches all marked. He scanned the image closely now, taking a bird’s eye view of the place he was only now getting to know at ground level. Down in the lower-left corner he read the engineers block letters: S
TANLEY
P
ARK—CITY OF
V
ANCOUVER
.

Laughter was coming from the living room when he rounded the corner and rejoined the group. Dante was holding
court. Olli was sipping a Scotch. Jeremy looked and looked away, but Olli caught the glance and shrugged very slightly.

Dante was pouring Margaret a glass of red. Firesteed Pinot Noir, no doubt Dante’s deliberate choice. Wine from Oregon’s self-proclaimed “virtual winery”: no vineyards, no winemaking facilities. Firesteed contracted instead with a handful of growers, wineries and winemaking consultants from the Williamette Valley to produce a red of very broad appeal. And Jeremy was rightly confident that Margaret would pick up on it. She accepted the glass, sipped and took immediate note of the label. Undeniably drinkable—well market-researched—with bright fruits, medium body and what wine writers called
approachable tannins
.

Jeremy accepted a Bushmills.

“And such a way with children,” Dante said to him, smiling. Trying for warmth, Jeremy thought, and failing. He went and sat at the top of the squared horseshoe that the couches formed around the perimeter of the room. “But seriously and in all modesty,” Dante was picking up the thread of a conversation that had been underway before Jeremy entered the room, “it was no surprise that we drew such a crowd. Could our product be more local? We thought it up here.”

“And this makes Inferno coffee the product of local vegetables?” Margaret said.

“Droll,” Dante said. “Very.”

“Kidding. I meant the Local Splendour folks are focused on the local produce angle.”

“Certainly,” Dante said, turning away from her. Then to Olli. “But conceived here, that’s local, don’t you think?” Olli protested to be the wrong person to ask, but Dante pressed. “No local on the Net, is that it?” he said.

Olli didn’t much like techno-philosophy. It was undisciplined. But he tried for an answer. “The Net still relies on
wires and fibres. They need to be strung on poles. The poles need to be stuck in the ground somewhere. Somewhere, that ground is local.”

“Then there’s wireless,” Dante said.

Fine. Olli allowed the point.

“You know …,” Dante started, expansive. Host to a large idea. “I think I’m wireless. Culinarily, I mean. Yes.”

Jeremy fleshed it out for him: “Where the duck is twice-cooked New England mallard served in a restaurant in Moscow, and the salmon is Chilean-farmed Atlantic planked on Lebanese cedar in a restaurant south of Cork City.”

Margaret laughed out loud. Dante glanced at her.

“Precisely,” he said. “And so our little Season of Local Splendour, fervency aside, served most in flagging the rules to be broken. Reminding us of where others think we should not go. Maybe I need my young neighbour just as he needs me, to allow us both to take this next step.”

Everybody thought it over for a second while Dante refreshed drinks. And then Benny, who had been piecing it together slowly said: “You lived right next door.… Why don’t you invite your father over?”

A refreshed drink appeared in Jeremy’s hand just as the question aired and he hid a moment’s hesitation behind the swirling of his ice, the blunting down of his Irish whiskey, the tentative first sip. Why stall? To protect himself? To protect the Professor? Not quite.

That the Professor might not be disturbed.

“Travelling.” Jeremy said. Behind Dante, behind all of them, the plate glass made a perfect mirror. And Jeremy saw there what he knew the rest of them were now appraising, himself by the fire, whiskey in hand, cornered.

“Like, uh, where?” Benny said.

“Stromovka,” Jeremy heard himself say. “It’s in the Czech Republic.”

Everybody said:
Really?
From Margaret to Olli and around
the horn to Benny, four iterations of the word. Amused, impressed, polite and overtly doubtful.

“The Professor is an interesting man.” Dante came smoothly to the conversational rescue. “We used to play chess rather often, he and I. He won consistently for several years. After that, he didn’t win so much any more. I miss the competition. Joint?”

And here he produced a silver cigarette case from his inside pocket, extracted a very neatly rolled joint and tapped it on the back of the case.

Only Jeremy declined. Margaret said she’d had too much wine, but when the joint got to her she took a toke anyway. Olli was thoroughly loosened up on Scotch. Benny was going to accept whatever Dante offered. Jeremy wondered, in the instant her lips closed on the worm of dope, whether he would ever have sex with her again. Whether he would ever hold her tightly from behind, one hand over each of her breasts. This coming Tuesday would be the next scheduled coupling, a crass thought and he knew it. He wanted her and was also faintly nauseated by the idea.

Dante got up and opened a cabinet next to the TV. “Cooking videos, what do you say?”

Margaret began to giggle.

He popped in a Paul Prudhomme tape, fast-forwarding to the part where the famously fat chef blackens a snapper. The idea was enough, Benny was doubled over on the couch. Olli was guffawing.

The scene cut to a Louisiana back country fair. Prudhomme was in a motorized wheelchair, chatting with a man at one of the kiosks. Behind the man was a rusting forty-gallon barrel of bubbling oil into which descended a sturdy chain, taut with the weight of something hanging below the surface. Turning a winch and hauling in the chain, slowly, minding the splash, the man pulled up a twenty-pound turkey that had been suspended in the boiling fat. The bird
glistened brown and hissed audibly as the fat seeped free of the crusted skin.

“I didn’t notice Local Splendour had any of that,” Dante was saying.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Benny said.

Jeremy only knew he felt the need to leave the room. His face was crimson—he was deprived of oxygen or dehydrated or developing a fever. He slipped out of the room without comment, through the large kitchen and into the hallway that ran past the room where Trout was sleeping. He found the bathroom and closed the door silently behind himself.

His eyes were bloodshot and tired. He ran the cold water and submerged his face in a sinkful, letting the cool seep into his skin and scalp and into his head, chilling and stilling. Prudhomme in the market had been an unsettling sight, in one way. Seemingly overweight to the point of immobility. Talking with the yocals deep-frying their catfish and hush puppies and, yes, turkeys. And for knowing—as Jeremy knew—that this food would be delicious, worth any indigestion, any artery thickening costs that might be imposed, the chef was the clown fool, was he? The room had been shaking with laughter. None of them considered that these backwoods Louisiana locals had something for which they might be profoundly envied. With their bib overalls and greasy ball caps they had a local-ness, ordinary or otherwise, a self that would continue to be the same self long after anyone stopped watching through the lens of a TV camera.

Jeremy pulled his face from the water, hearing it run off him in streams. He took a deep breath and pushed his face back into the sink. He imagined the water was a pool, and that he could dive down into it, swim for a long time submerged, then rise to the surface in a different place entirely. Transformed and clean. He held his breath until it hurt. Holding, holding. And when he finally pulled his face from the water gasping, there was an instant of swimming
blackness, flecked with red, and in this blackness there were trees that thrashed in a silent wind. Leaves stripped from the branches swirled towards his eyes. Jeremy thought, Careful now, you’re drunk.