Stanley Park (30 page)

“That
was
my restaurant,” he said. “In fact, it’s closed now. It’s reopening, eventually.
We’re
reopening. I have a partner.
But there will be another restaurant. A new one. New name and everything.”

He stopped talking.

“Hey, if you’re sure,” Gill said, and with that he spun and wheeled away.

He made one last visit to The Paw to remove things from the kitchen that he didn’t want touched by the designers, whoever they were going to be. The Fugami blade of course, but also some of his smaller knives and favourite utensils (a green Vaseline glass lemon juicer, by contrapuntal example).

When he was finished he stood for a moment with his loaded box and looked around. The Zone. The blackened range, towering still. The familiar black and white tiles of the floor. The swinging door into the dining room.

“Goodbye,” he said aloud, then noticed that Jules had left one of her chef’s jackets hanging on the back of a shelving unit. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. The heavy white cloth was lightly stained at the cuffs and across the front. Stained with some simple dish they had jointly created. He fingered the embroidered
Capelli
on the left breast. He began instinctively folding it, folding in the dirty sleeves onto the breast, doubling down the jacket onto itself.

And then, without warning, he was crying. Bawling, mewling, blubbering. He found himself saying aloud: “What?” As this riptide swept around him, his mouth and nose filling with mucus. “What?” he said, hands to his temples now as Jules’s jacket dropped to the floor. His shoulders were shaking with convulsions, eyes seized shut, mouth agape, slick strands of viscous fluid connecting his upper and lower teeth and lips. “What?”

“You don’t like that we might be working on parallel projects,”
the Professor had once said to him. He might have made the
comment years before. They were feasting on a canvasback together. A bird plucked from the lagoon, spit-roasted simply.

His head was spinning. He picked up the jacket and wiped his face with it, paused. He wondered what his father had done, packing away her clothes. He pushed his face back into the safety of that stained cloth. There was a residual smell of her, not perfume of course but sweat. A tired smell, an end-of-the-night smell. The smell of their hugs after things had really worked.

God help me, thought Jeremy, standing with his face still buried.

He lifted his head from the damp jacket, which he stuffed into the cardboard box on top of his knives. Looking up, he saw the lumpy, rain-soaked figure standing there regarding him.

“Jesus!” His whole body jerked back in surprise.

“Hey, hey. Hey.”

“Caruzo.” He was almost yelling. “Don’t do that! You scared me.”

“Smoke, Jay?”

So they smoked together, Jeremy’s hands shaking. Caruzo was looking around the place, nodding, not understanding why the lights were out. Saying nothing for a long time.

“Hey, Jay. Know something? Wanna know something. I never cry. True. Never cry. Not even once. Not then. Not now.”

“Forget it, would you? As a favour, just forget it.”

But now Caruzo was staring blankly at him, having moved on from the particulars of the incident. He had something else to say.

“OK, why? Why don’t you cry, Caruzo?”

“No ducts,” Caruzo said, exhaling smoke. “I got no ducts. No ducts at all. Anywhere in my head. No ducts. My head is defective that way.”

“Because you have no ducts,” Jeremy said.

“My old man had no ducts neither,” Caruzo said.

Jeremy smoked and nodded. “Both my old man
and
I have ducts,” he said to Caruzo.

Jeremy might have guessed that was Caruzo’s point all along. “You do,” Caruzo said to him. “Ducks and ducts. Your old man. You too. Ducts and ducks.”

Jeremy began to laugh. It was a satisfactory alternative to crying, although it too required ducts. He laughed until a different kind of tears came down his cheeks. Caruzo laughed along politely with him, a steady dry chuckle.

“You have time,” Caruzo said, when they were finished. “You have some time today, tomorrow?”

“I have time,” Jeremy said, taking a last draw on his cigarette.

“You coming to the park maybe?” Caruzo said. “Coming on down to the woods?”

I am, Jeremy thought, nodding to Caruzo. I most certainly am.

“Dinner. Yeah?” Caruzo was saying.

The Professor looked at Jeremy.

“Dinner,” Jeremy agreed. “I’ll cook.”

“Hooray,” Caruzo said, then crashed off into the bush.

Jeremy glanced after him, then over to his father.

The Professor shrugged. “It’s best not to try and understand his comings and goings,” he said. “He’ll be back.”

The Professor had been proudly displaying his new snare. “Observe,” he said to Jeremy now. He unfolded a white cane that he had pulled from his knapsack. “The net was a dead giveaway. But it is remarkable, really, how the blind are left alone. Police, especially. It embarrasses them.”

“You pretend to be blind?”

“When I walk the park trails near public spaces, I use the cane. It took some trial and error,” the Professor said, snapping together the cane into a single 4 ½-foot length. He paused here for a second. “The original idea was to fasten my Swiss Army knife to the tip like a spear.”

Jeremy shook his head.

“Precisely. A violent, uncertain undertaking. I maimed a squirrel, I’m afraid. Never caught him. Caruzo was quite upset with me.”

“I read it,” Jeremy said, interrupting.

The Professor stopped what he was doing, his hand at the
tip of the white cane. He looked lost for a moment. “You see, the knife was fastened poorly. On impact it did not pierce firmly. It buckled instead—”

“The file, the notes, everything,” Jeremy said.

The white cane balanced in his father’s hands. “You understand,” the Professor said finally.

“I think so. I understand that when she and I came together to Lost Lagoon, when you were away, she came to be near you.” He told his father how they had fed eggs to the racoons, about her laughter. “We didn’t come the final time in 1987, of course. I was gone myself, too old by then. She was alone.”

The Professor nodded slowly.

“Did you come back here afterwards? When I was in France?”

“Oh, no,” the Professor said, exhaling a large breath. “I took a long break afterwards.”

Jeremy had many other questions he wanted to ask. “Is there any chance Caruzo did it?” he said finally. “Killed the children, the Babes in the Wood?”

“None,” the Professor answered.

“But he saw them. He followed them on the day they died, was distracted by the girl, Miss Harker, lying prostrate on the path—”

“Supine, technically,” the Professor said.

“—and by the time he remembered the children, they were gone,” Jeremy finished. “What do you think?”

“I think this project will be the last major work I do.”

Jeremy allowed himself to be deflected from his line of questioning.

“I can’t do it forever. It has killed before, and now, appropriately enough, it’s killing
me.”

“Don’t say that,” Jeremy said, exasperated and troubled. He turned away from his father.

“Your work is killing you too. You are younger, granted, so it is killing you at a slower rate. But it is killing you nevertheless.”

“Fine,” Jeremy said, turning back. “I’m dying at some rate appropriate to my age. I will even accept that I killed something by giving up The Monkey’s Paw, my project. What I don’t accept is that either of us are dying in any real way, beyond the way that is synonymous with living: day-to-day choices, some bad ones, but continuing. Sure I destroyed something, but I’ll create something else far better, far more powerful, just as you have done here.”

“I’m a little more tired than before,” the Professor said quietly and truthfully.

“Move in with me. I’ve offered before. Use my apartment as base camp. I want to see this work complete, behind you.”

It was always a mixed feeling with those you loved the most, the Professor thought. The boy’s words made him proud and worried at the same time. But what different feelings could he possibly inspire in his son?

Jeremy broke the silence with a question. “Had she been sick?”

“In truth, I don’t know,” the Professor said. “I was told sudden heart failure.
Arrhythmogenic right-ventricular dysplasia
. The heart skips a beat, inserts two where there should be one, syncopates. You die.”

He watched Jeremy as these words came out. They were riding back together over the years, full of their joined memories. And observing this reaction in his son, the Professor opened some part of himself that had been closed for a long time.

“She was unique, Jeremy. As a woman, certainly. As a person too. She lived a critical paradox, embodied a complete contradiction. I knew it when I met her—I was drawn to it. I knew it more as the years went by. But I never fully knew it during her life.”

The Professor took a breath. Jeremy found he was holding his own.

“In my work, as you know, I have made a lifetime of examining the evidence of the root or its absence. All people, I have
observed, will reveal two things in this regard if you look at them from the right angle. The first is an innate polarity, a tendency to either root or move. The second is evidence of the alternative that has been foregone. In my parkade, those years ago, you could say there were only the homeless. Indeed, many people said precisely that, Dr. Tully included. But lived among, talked with, clothed similarly to,
learned from
these homeless were observed to include both the derelict and the celebrant. And each of these, in turn, revealed evidence of the life left behind, tracings of despair and of manic joy, broken and rejuvenated spirits. My job, you might say, has been the mapping of these qualities within the community. For in this topography, I have come to believe, is the seed of how we live. From this relationship people strike with their physical earth, from this intercourse is borne our understanding of many many things: home, culture, language …”

The Professor looked at his son for evidence of understanding.

“Food,” Jeremy said.

“Crucially, yes,” the Professor said, relieved.

“It is trite to observe,” he continued, “that in the West we are uprooting ourselves. We know the culprits: information flow, economic globalization. Trite and, for me, not professionally engaging. For me it has always been the individual, the calculated or imposed decision, the personal evidence of allegiance to, or repudiation of, the soil.”

The Professor stopped to think. He handled the white cane very gently. Folding it again as he thought.

“She lived in the middle ground somewhere,” Jeremy said.

The Professor nodded. “Yes. I think she did.”

“She and I built a lean- to once and slept outside,” Jeremy said. “I don’t think I ever told you this story. In the backyard. 1976 or 1977. We cooked a chicken over the fire. She crushed garlic into olive oil and brushed it on with rosemary branches.”

“She was intensely proud of what we had here,” the Professor said. “Intensely proud of you, of our house and new citizenship, even of me for a long time. In that sense she was a celebrant of the changes that her family had brought about, happily turned aside from the road life, from itinerant trading, from the
vardo.”

“She missed it more than you realized.”

“Not that so much. It was as if she put down roots and they did not take. I understand now that she might have succeeded were it not for me. When it became apparent to her, she fell back into a place of no places. Unrooted but constrained, capable of celebrating neither. And stranded in this way, she became the key to all of what has consumed me, capturing the universe of my studies in the small frame of a single, very beautiful person.”

Around them the air stretched cool and still.

“I loved her,” the Professor said. “Much more than any of that, I miss her terribly.”

They embraced, and they weren’t father and son for those moments. Had they been, the embrace would have parted much sooner, each conscious of the many small abrasions that rough the surface of that most complicated of loves. This time they embraced as two people who had set out to travel around the world at the Equator, leaving the same spot on the same day, travelling opposite directions. And who, some time later and quite exhausted, have met again at precisely the opposite side of the world. Face to face again, half the journey complete.