Stanley Park Read Free Page B

produce, cheese and wine.
    “I could use that,” the Professor said. “ ‘Local bounty’ is rather good. I think we share this passion, you and I.”
    Jeremy considered a retort along the lines of: “You and I share nothing but blood.” But he imagined this approach would end the conversation. He would get no advice and have who knows what other effect on his father, and so he sat there and listened as the Professor elaborated on their supposed professional overlap, describing what he called “the stories of the residents.” There was great deference in his voice. There had always been people here, the Professor said, solemn. There had been a First Nation, of course. Squatters later. Men who lived in trees. But this generation was the homeless, the new Stanley Park people. This was the story—collected lives and anecdotes, assorted obsessions and misfortunes—the Professor would now stitch together. The great Work-In-Progress.
    “Is Sopwith Hill taking it?” Jeremy asked. A prestigious if aging textbook house, Sopwith had done the Professor’s other books, some of these approaching mainstream popularity. Jeremy actually read one before the disastrous fall of 1987, before he fled to the culinary institute in Dijon. He couldn’t remember the title, but he thought the Professor had spent three months in the downtown east side, interviewing panhandlers. Panhandling himself and living in a range of unsafe outdoor places, including under parked cars left overnight in a downtown parkade. Jeremy heard this story after the fact, his mother’s bitter version. At one point (she had fumed) somebody had returned early to retrieve their car and had nearly run him over. He moved into an unused culvert behind the SeaBus Terminal at that point. “To be run over, that wouldmaybe be the best to understand these people. These ‘no-homes,’ ” she had said to Jeremy. “Only in dying like them, you can no longer write about them.”
    The Professor looked briefly away before answering the question. His son’s tone registered doubt, incredulity. “They’ll take it eventually.” But his voice was a little tight.
    So Jeremy sat back on the bench they had found, ran his fingers through his hair, which was in worse disarray than usual, a manic bristle. It was only appropriate that it started to rain lightly just then, fine drops hissing into the foliage around them.
    “Fires,” said the Professor, attempting to illustrate his point about learning a little each day. “Now there’s something I knew nothing about. Thank God for Caruzo.”
    It was, for a moment, the single most unexpected revelation of the evening: The Professor could light fires.
    They talked for over an hour this way, holding one another at a familiar arm’s-length, both in their own way reflecting that Hélène was all the distance between them. Alive, she provided the bridge. Gone, she was the chasm itself. They might not yet have filled any of that emptiness, but a silver distance opened between them and the city. They sat, at the very least, in the same descending darkness, looking across the lagoon to the now gleaming towers of the West End, a parallel universe separated from them by the surface of the water on which slept hundreds of ducks.
    “You stand watch,” the Professor instructed quietly, when he deemed the time was right.
    “For what?”
    It was only his first visit. “Others.”
    Jeremy looked distinctly concerned.
    “Not militant vegetarians precisely. More like the police.”
    “Oh, just that,” the chef said. “Well, then: Charge.”
    Jeremy took shelter under a cedar. The Professor gotdown on his knees and began to creep across the walkway. He held the old fly-fishing net in front of himself as he approached the clutch of rushes on the far side of the path. He rose to his knees and parted the papery stalks silently, the net aloft. Jeremy could make out several ducks within range. As he watched, all movement ceased.
    And then the