Stanley Park (51 page)

Kiwi went to the bar before returning to her table. She had a Scotch and talked to a man there about his dinner. El Chaco Angus tenderloin, as it happened. He had never eaten anything quite like it, found it a bit gamey.

“I should think you did,” Kiwi said to him. This admission from a man who claimed to have a taste for musk-ox kidneys.

The young girl Benny was on a roll by the time Kiwi sat down. Dante was looking faintly displeased. Banks lost. The nice couple were embarrassed. Only this Riker fellow seemed to be having any fun, and Kiwi had already picked him as a bit dodgy. Unshaven at dinner. How charmingly eighties.

But Benny certainly was on. Kiwi declined a refresh on the white wine and turned to listen to her ranting about the
chef’s favourite dish, something she evidently found appalling: beef tongue with mustard sauce. She was looking for support on this point, and Kiwi found herself dragged into the discussion.

“I mean, ick,” Benny interrupted her. “No offence to anyone French here, but.”

“None taken,” Olli said. “Oh wait. I’m not French.”

“And he had some other brilliant ideas too,” Benny went on, rolling her eyes in Philip’s direction again, receiving his subtle encouragement.

“Remember though,” Olli tried again, “all his ideas legally belong to Dante.”

“No, I mean, like … really off-the-wall stuff,” Benny said.

“Like what?” Kiwi said. She turned to look directly at Benny.

Margaret did not like where the conversation was going, quite suddenly. She didn’t know why. Call it instinct, but she turned to Dante, actually put a hand on his arm—something Olli did not observe her do often. “Perhaps,” she smiled broadly, “you could tell us about your future plans. Other restaurants? Other cities?”

Dante smiled back with some relief and took the offer. He opened his mouth to begin.

“I don’t know,” Benny blurted. “Like
squirrel …”

What? Olli thought.

“I’m sorry?” Kiwi said.

“You heard me,” Benny said, defiant, although now she also looked like she might start crying again. “Squirrel. I know
for a fact
that Jeremy eats squirrels.”

She found one in his refrigerator, that’s how. And don’t try telling her that it got hit by a car and that he took it upstairs and put it in a
wheelchair
or something, and that it died and he put it in the fridge like his place was a squirrel morgue.

Dante struck Olli as a guy who didn’t look really alarmed very often. Like he did now, say.

“Oh, baby,” Kiwi said. She didn’t reach for the Palm. No need for notes, she’d remember this one. She put a hand on Benny’s arm. “Are you for real here? Yeah?”

“Uh, yeah,” Benny said. “I saw it. It was grey.”

“So brilliant,” Kiwi said.

“I am just … a bit … lost,” Olli said.

“Maybe all is not as it seems,” Kiwi explained. It wasn’t just a meal, it was a performance, she was saying now. A brilliant one too. Jeremy had fed them a range of things, a range of delicious, forbidden things. The chef was challenging the grid. Taste-jacking. He was apparently doing something called
meta-hacking
. For reasons that were not clear to Olli, Kiwi was suddenly using a lot of
Wired
“Jargon Watch” words.

“I ate,” Margaret said, tired of it. “I’m full. I’m happy. But the meal was what the sheet said, all right?”

“What did you eat?” Kiwi asked Philip, ignoring her.

Silence.

“El Chaco miniature Angus? Wonderful, but excuse me? I’ve never heard of it.”

“If Jeremy says—” Olli started.

“Then check the kitchen and be done with it,” Philip said back to Kiwi. He had been enjoying the fun up to a point, but when she went serious all of a sudden, he pulled right back.

“Go ahead and try,” Kiwi answered. “But our performance artist this evening has scoured the place. There isn’t a trace of anything. Imagine that. Not a single bit of anything left over.”

Everyone took the same nanosecond to consider this detail.

“And it’s a tremendous thing, isn’t it?” Kiwi drove onward. “In drama, in art. He performed for us. He showed us some things and kept some things secret. Left us to discover the unexpected, strange connections. We should all be
thrilled
to have been part of it.”

“What did you eat?” Olli asked her, regretting it instantly as Margaret kicked him sharply under the table.

“That’s the whole point,” Kiwi said, eyes wide. “I have
no idea.”

Olli was certain she was serious, and that inspired a strange cascade of thoughts. But what was striking him as more unexpected was his sudden impulse to laugh out loud, really loud. What if it were true? On one level—and here Olli cracked a look at Dante, just a half-shade paler than usual, really
thinking
—on one level it would be fucking great. Wouldn’t it?

Dante wouldn’t have agreed if he’d been asked. Because at that moment, he was rifling through a disorganized stack of thoughts, and he wouldn’t have described any of them as “great.” He flashed on the Professor, whereabouts again unknown. The mother, glowering at him from the coffin. That woman Jeremy had worked with, the sharp one, overtly hostile. And the young man himself—Dante had tried, Christ had he tried—always faintly resisting. They were like faces staring up at him from the plate, laughing. He had been caught out, fooled, made an example of. He was staring down at his empty plate and he couldn’t remember what he’d just eaten. Here these images had skipped across the surface of his consciousness, and all that remained were streaks of purple sauce, a few grains of mocking gold couscous. He felt very full, all at once. Sick full. And braying laughter was coming from a nearby table. The expanse of the room was opening around him, a sense of food in his belly was growing stronger, and everything Benny and this Kiwi person had been saying seemed, just then, very plausible.

Olli watched Dante and only got the sense that if there were a menu handy he would have picked it up and reread what he had ordered. “You were saying …,” Olli said, growing serious. Taking a last shot at changing the subject.

But now the room was in motion around them. People were getting up from their tables. Dante was greeted by someone and stood to speak with them, turning his back on
Olli without a further word. Philip disappeared somewhere, to smoke a joint, thought Olli. To get some air. Albertini split to the washroom to regrease his hair, smooth the creases in his cape. Margaret changed seats and sat next to Benny, their exchange having migrated to a sisterly tone. He thought the substance of Margaret’s input would obviate anything he could say.
Maybe you should go home, honey.…

He leaned back in his chair. He let his eyes drift around the busy room. Everybody was having a good time. The woman with the gold riding crop was stroking it across some old fart’s bald spot. His friends were laughing big, male, locker-room belly laughs. Full and red-cheeked. There was a great quantity of Scotch going down and many, many cigars being waved around.

Olli was offered a Scotch with this very thought, leaning back in his chair thinking about it and watching through the front window as Kiwi hailed a cab and disappeared into the night. Just thinking about that and a voice next to his ear said: “Scotch, sir?”

“What do you have?” he asked by mistake.

“Glenmorangie, Loch Dhu, Balvenie, Dalwhinnie, Glen-kinchie, Cragganmore, Oban, Talisker, Lagavulin, Macallan, Laphroaig, Connemara, Glenhaven and Sheep Dip.”

They didn’t even have Glenfiddich. But he was thinking of Jeremy anyway. Not his taste, Scotch, was it? Ever. Even years ago, years and years. Decoder years when they used to go out together and get right polluted. When life had been a developed, consensual, rockabilly fantasy and that had been just fine.

“You have Irish whiskey?”

Of course they did. Black Bush, Jameson, Paddy’s, Power’s—

He cut the waiter off. “Bushmills is fine.” He pressed a twenty into the man’s palm and looked back towards the closed kitchen door. “Bring the bottle,” Olli said.

She slipped out of bed in the very early hours.

The Professor knew it. He had been awake himself, thinking. Lying in the heat of mid-summer. Outside the moon was a waning crescent, but still bright, and the thin light of that moon washed the room. She rolled once, awkwardly. Then again, to her other side. Finally she sat up quietly, trying not to wake him. He heard her legs swing out of the bed, find the floor. Heard the springs sigh just a little as she shifted her weight to her feet.

He breathed evenly, didn’t say anything. The clock on the bedside table read 2:30.

At 3:15 he went to look for her. He poked his head into the bathroom, the spare bedroom. Downstairs he padded through the living room and into the kitchen. He expected to find her there. She had been eating strange concoctions at even stranger hours lately—pickled cauliflower sandwiches in the wee hours—but there was no one at the counter. No cutlery in the sink. No dirty plate, no left-open jar of mayonnaise. No peanut butter.

He stood in the middle of the moonlit family room for several minutes before walking to the picture window that looked out over the back deck.

Hélène was there, reclined in one of their Adirondack chairs, her dark hair tumbling over the slats, feet propped on
a wooden bench. She was looking out over the forested backyard, down over the expanse of trees to the black and silver water of Howe Sound. Her hands were clasped lightly across her swollen abdomen. Thirty-six weeks swollen, just two weeks more. She had chosen the names. A boy would be Jeremy, the appointed one. They would call a girl Stephanie, after Hélène’s mother, who covered up her Romani name with the feminine of St. Stephen, chosen herself on her own tenth birthday. Stephen, who addressed the Sanhedrin council with a history lesson about the homeless, wandering tribes of Israel.
The most-high does not live in houses made by human hands
. Stephen the martyr, dragged out of the city and stoned to death, whose face was transformed before his persecutors into that of an angel.

Most days the Professor was certain Hélène wanted a girl, but not all days.

He slid the glass door open quietly and she rolled her head over an inch, registering his approach. Then she went back to looking over the tree tops, down to the glinting water.

Once, short months after they moved into this house, Hélène had called it
her view
. He liked the sound of that so much that he didn’t have words for several minutes. He busied himself with painting the railing or potting seasonals in the planter or whatever they had been doing together at that moment.
Your view
, he said to himself,
please let it be so
. And from that point forward the Professor never referred to it without reinforcing the idea, saying
your view
. Those trees, that slope of green, the sailboats in the water. Even the island in the Sound, Passage Island it was called. All yours.

He took another bench from against the wall of the house and set it near her, off to one side where she could see him, not too close. He smoked a Sportsman plain—he still smoked then, once in a while. Packs went stale but he kept them around for these late nights when everything was silent, inside and out. The cigarette flared peevishly when lit,
then settled down to a sullen ember. When it was finished, it surrendered with an angry hiss at the bottom of an empty Coke bottle.

“Hélène,” he said. But he knew he could not cross that distance and be with her in front of whatever future she saw lying there. He only knew she saw one, and that it was long, and that it filled her with an irreconcilable mixture of dread and delight.

She didn’t answer. She hadn’t been answering these past two days. Three, even. At the beginning of the pregnancy they had experienced the joy people typically report. She missed one period, then another. The day that the doctor confirmed she was carrying, she was waiting inside the front door to tell him when he got home from the university. She was shaking with excitement, a measure of fear, nervous energy. They went upstairs. He inspected her minutely for changes. Stroking her still-flat stomach, her breasts. They made love. It was cold outside, just into the new year, and freezing rain was hammering the house in a million tiny strikes. They steamed up the windows.

The middle months were overcast but still. A turgid sky anticipated heat that summer, and May warmed steadily from beginning to end. A shower in the first week. Clouds in the second. Nothing but tight blue from then on. The Professor was away, just briefly, three weeks. When he returned, the summer had begun as spring warned. Grass was watered and did not stay green; the maple out front made shade that was not cool. The Professor wrote up results on his legal notepads, spread out on a card table under a heavy canvas umbrella with a fringe. He drank pitchers of lemonade. Hélène baked on the chaise lounge, eyes closed to her view. He was home from school for the summer, available to watch the day approach, but the closer it came and the larger she grew, the more silent she became.