Stanley Park (11 page)

“He’s, like …,” said Caruzo. He was holding his hands apart now, palms inwards, as if trying to contain something. An idea. Hold it in its invisible box so he could see it. So Jeremy could see it. “He’s, like, counting. Waiting. Counting. Waiting. Like the Professor, only the Professor is writing. Listening. See? The same.”

Caruzo grabbed his hand. Uh-oh. The brown fingers wound around his own palm, fingertips clamping almost at his wrist. They had no fingernails, Jeremy could now see. Only pads.

“Signs, Jay-Jay.”

“Signs?” Jeremy said.

“Signs and signals. Signals and signs. From somewhere. Signs of life. Signs for life. I believe in the signs, Jay-Jay. I really believe in these signs.”

Caruzo let him go and they both got up.

He had customers, more film students. More coffees. Later smelt fritters and house tartar mayo. What was for dinner tonight? Black cod, of course. He was going to have to prep himself a little roasted shallot sauce then, wasn’t he?

“I’ll tell the Professor. Your promise,” Caruzo shouted
from the front door, startling everybody in the place before disappearing out into the drizzle.

“Sorry,” Jeremy said. “He’s a family friend.” He took their orders, glad suddenly, overwhelmingly, that there was a morning service. What other signs did he need? And what would he be doing without them? Sleepless in his apartment, looking out over the park and wondering.

“Iced tea, please.”

“Made here,” he said automatically, distracted, smelling her before he looked up, a blend of patchouli and CK.

“Smelt fritters yet?” she asked.

He looked finally. Fantastic blue eyes, angelic face. Had he seen her before? He thought so, once or twice. She hung out with the design students. He had looked before but looked away. A bit young, twenty-two, twenty-three. “Fritters,” he said. “Everyone wants fritters. I throw them on ten-ish. What is it now?”

She consulted a gold nurse’s watch pinned to her black velvet pants. Narrow shoulders, small round head with short white hair, tiny lobeless ears. Scrubbed-clean symmetrical features and frosted coral lips. She wore a tight orange sweater with blue athletic stripes around the right sleeve. North Star runners. Faux school gear strapped tightly around a Barbie from the toy section of the 1978 Sears catalogue.

“Nine-ish,” she said, a tongue stud glinting as she spoke.

She was waiting for his answer. He could feel the appraisal. Of his decoder-ring tattoo. (His was on his right forearm, Popeye-style. Olli had demurely gone for the shoulder, invisible most of the time.) Of the cowboy boots and Wrangler jeans he typically wore before dinner service. He saw her take it all in. And when she looked back up to his face, she laughed a little through her nose. Laughed as if she had just had an idea that pleased her.

“Close enough,” he said. “It’ll take me about twenty minutes.”

“I’ll be in the window,” she said, still smiling.

“And the name?” he asked, his pen hovering over the pad. He might need it to call out from the counter. It was a good idea to get it.

“Benny,” she said. Then she walked away slowly. Moved across his oak planks towards the high arch of his front window. Split up into its many panes, each one now crying streams of spring rain onto the pane below. Streams that pooled at the base of the brick front wall and ran off down the sidewalk vaguely seeking the sea. The sky was coming down now. There it was on his window, outside his door. Tapping audibly on his glass above his oblivious slacker customers (who rocked back in their chairs and blew smoke upwards, laughed loudly all at once, and did any confident thing that came to mind).

Oblivious but for one, who folded her arms across her rib cage under her sweatered breasts. She lowered her chin as if to listen to the current monologue, lids set in an expression of rigorous boredom. But with her head turned slightly to observe Jeremy at the back of the restaurant, to assess whether the ray she had beamed out had been received.

He had finished entering her order, taken his boot off the chair behind the counter and walked over to the kitchen door. He had his hand on the wood, leaning forward to push it open. But he was thinking about something. Benny waited.

He turned and glanced back.

Benny caught the glance and turned her head slowly back to the conversation, betraying no satisfaction, although she knew. Of course she knew.

Jeremy turned his head more quickly and went into the kitchen. He put the smelts in salty beer batter almost as light as tempura. And when he lowered the basket into the fryer, the oil frothed around the slender fish. They would crisp
down in a few minutes into a crunchy mouthful, which, dipped in tartar mayonnaise, rivalled any french fry.

“Benny,” he called when they were ready. She got up slowly, came over.

“Thanks, Jay,” she said. “So, like.” She ate one standing there. Dipped it in the tartar mayo and took it gently between her teeth.

“They’re hot,” he warned.

She chewed it gingerly. “They’re delicious.”

“Thank you,” he said. He described the process of making a smelt fritter, knowing the magic implied. The magic of how the fritter was conceived (art). The magic of how it was tossed together back there, out of sight, in just a few minutes (craft). The magic of its taste now (alchemy). What was that spice? A bit of powdered ginger, in fact, one of his few trade secrets.

Benny ate another one, standing there, looking at him and listening to all that he said. And later, as she and all of her friends clumped to the door, she appraised first that he was watching before she turned and smiled again. She waved a wiggling-finger wave and mouthed very distinctly:
I’ll be seeing you
.

He waved back—she was gone. The Monkey’s Paw was now empty, and there was sixty-eight dollars in the till. He had held it off all morning, but now he stood behind the counter and felt a wave of fatigue break over him. He struggled to banish an image of a night-lit lagoon from his mind, and forced himself to remember Benny’s glance and wave instead. Better that, he thought. Better to be incrementally cheered. Cheered despite hemming debt, despite a hovering blackness, a sense of things going steadily out of balance. Cheered by the simple fact that a raver angel named Benny liked him, liked his smelt fritters. He made it, she got it. Was there a better chemistry?

Jules came thundering in just then. Her timing perfect. He could dig down and find his strength, but hers spilled to the surface, always.

“Hey, babe,” she shouted, and slapped him hard on the butt as she passed. And with hardly a word, they were swept up in the momentum that would build towards lunch, through the afternoon and on to dinner. The kitchen came alive with the slam of the oven, the scrape of the fridge door and the clatter of pots and knives. Astor Piazzolla materialized in the air as Jules popped in a stack of her eclectic CDs, and a spike of energy entered the collective bloodstream.

When they were prepped and Zeena was in, before the first lunch tables were seated, Jules poured a glass of soda water and leaned against the cutting block. She sipped and watched him adjust seasonings for a moment.

“You look a little tired,” she said.

He nodded.

“How’s Dad?” she said, reading him perfectly. No surprise.

He didn’t say anything.

“Ah, come here, honey,” she said. And she put down her glass and hugged him. Hard (she was strong). Squeezed his bones together, made him feel weak but safe. Safe in a place that smelled like caramel, like lightly scented soap. Like the solid breakfast he never had.

Benny took an active interest. Jeremy had the quality, she decided. After all these years of going to design school, working survival jobs, she felt she was in a position to recognize that this guy—not bad-looking with his impossibly messy hair and despite the cowboy boots—this guy had the quality of actualized self. Needs, freedoms, known desires, a creative centre. Benny was often impatient with her peers for lacking all these things, for being not yet formed. Everybody grew up late these days, lived at home for years too long, became adults at thirty. Benny had been supporting herself since sixteen and prided herself on only dating adults. Her
friends may have noticed that she suggested The Monkey’s Paw more often now. (Or they may not have, it didn’t concern her.) But she never mentioned his name, just said something like: “I’m at The Paw around three. You coming?” Everybody always came. They were sheep. They filled up that front window and ate smelt fritters, and she only cared that she managed to talk with him each time for a few minutes. He had noticed, she knew that. The chef had definitely noticed.

One time she got him at the front counter and manoeuvred the conversation into dates. Good ones, bad ones. She invented a bad one from the night before to get things rolling, although she kept the details sparse so as not to create something, somebody, he might view as competition.

He offered a bad one in return, from years before. But he also described a good one. A time when he took a girlfriend on a surprise trip to Ucluelet. He phoned her up on a Thursday; they left on Friday morning. They stayed for the weekend in a cabin on Long Beach with a fireplace and a tiny, rudimentary kitchen. Benny could not keep this story inside herself. A week later she was talking to a girlfriend and she said, with little preamble: “Imagine you had a boyfriend who phoned you up and said, ‘Let’s go to Ucluelet for the weekend.’ ”

Her friend looked at her very blankly indeed.

“Like as if.,” Benny started, “as if any twenty-three-year-old guy would
ever
do that.”

She went from being a new face to an almost daily face in a handful of weeks. He didn’t mind that she acted like they’d known each other for months and months. He didn’t ask why. She was an appealing cluster of contrasts. Hip. Overtly ambitious. Deferring. Argumentative. She was a schoolgirl, sure, but she appeared to be getting on with things.

“What do you study?” he asked her. She was picking up her smelt fritters, lingering as she did now at the counter while her friends shot the breeze and blew smoke rings in the front window.

“I’ve told you,” she scolded. “Design. I want to be a designer. I
will
be a designer.”

But one needed to pay the bills, and so there was Canadian Tire, where, in six years of part-time employment, she had reached the rank of floor supervisor. He succeeded in not laughing the first time she told him. With her white spiky hair, Benny in a Canadian Tire uniform was a dissonant mental picture. Still, he was impressed by the evidence of practicality. Her diligence in paying her own way. What had he been doing in his early twenties? Getting drunk at Decoder gigs. Fighting with Olli and Wes about the album that never got made. Completely at odds with the idea of a game plan. Even now, Canadian Tire was what? An unused credit card. An untapped source of cash. An emblem of his irresponsibility or his bad business sense. Of deepening trouble.

The mail was not improving but it was that time of the month. He was shuffling through a stack of envelopes. Mid-morning, a Tuesday. Benny hadn’t been in because she was working, but her crew had gone, and Jules had arrived in front of her own personal ridge of high pressure. Clouds were scattering. There were a number of thick statements in the pile, the envelopes reassuringly hefty. When they closed your account, Jeremy imagined, you received only a slim letter.

He set aside the statements to consider later. At the bottom of the stack there was a Postal Announcement Card. He checked the optional boxes across the top of the card for clues as to what was waiting for him. It was not a parcel but registered mail. Not good.

They had a medium lunch service, enough to be encouraging. When it was finished, Jeremy borrowed Jules’s old Impala station wagon to run some errands. In truth, a single errand, but he kept it to himself.

In the main branch of the post office, the ceilings of the
central hall were so high that a single trapped bird could not be captured. They had tried food, drugged bait, nets and finally BB guns, at which point
The Vancouver Sun
did a soft feature. There was a minor public outcry, the result being that you could now, if you were very lucky, get shat on by a starling while standing in the interminable line.

Jeremy retrieved his letter and walked to the marble side counter. He was already muttering the words: “Damn, damn, damn, damn.” It was a very slim envelope.

One sheet only. He spread it flat on the countertop, and read: “We regret to inform you that your account with Royal Bank Visa has been closed and that all borrowing privileges …”

Jeremy took a deep breath and let his eye skip down the page.

“… $5,243.50, including interest. Payable immediately.”

He let the breath out, his eyes unfocused, staring through the page, through the countertop, as he processed this news. Very bad news for a kite, he knew. You could not simply remove fifty-three hundred dollars from the soaring, madly circling stream of payments without threatening to crash the whole unstable contraption. Nothing from Peter meant nothing for Paul. The money, or at least some portion of it, would have to be replaced.