The second Wednesday in an otherwise upbeat July was tougher than usual. Despite a fully blooming Vancouver summer—business ticking along in the heat—Jeremy had a message on his home voice-mail from American Express. Somebody named Derek, who didn’t state the reason for the call, only said:
We’d like to talk to you at your earliest convenience, Mr. Papier
… He hadn’t even received his Amex bill.
Disturbed, but certain he had done nothing wrong, he ignored it.
Dante called the next morning. Just catching up, he said, although Dante was a conversational heat-seeking missile.
Within a few minutes Jeremy realized they had segued from talking about Chicago to talking about The Paw, about business volumes, and then—literally at the moment she walked through the door—they were talking about Jules Capelli.
“You just don’t understand,” he was saying to Dante as she burst into the kitchen, her expression typically sunny.
Dante laughed and took the cell phone away from his ear. “I don’t understand,” he said, talking to someone off-line. Then quietly, mouth now very close to the phone, close to Jeremy’s ear: “I think I understand that I’m offering you help, yes?”
Jules wasn’t waiting for him to get off the phone, exactly; she was beginning the prep routine. But she turned and said hello, and he fussed with things on his desk and pretended to look something up in the phone book, until she finally said, “Who doesn’t understand
what?”
“Oh, you know,” Jeremy said, thinking. “Xiang is putting us back on cash again.”
“I see,” Jules said, wondering why he was lying to her, and about what in that case.
It wasn’t a complete lie, in fact. Xiang did put them on cash the previous week. Jeremy had been looking for value, cutting corners, even jeopardizing what they were trying to do with his efficiencies. It hadn’t been a great year for wild sockeye, prices were up at the market and farmed Chilean salmon finally made it into the seafood risotto. It didn’t taste bad, exactly; it just didn’t taste
right
. He was adjusting seasonings when the reason came to him. A fish pen up the coast from Santiago might as well be up the coast from Osaka or Vladivostock or Campbell River. The fish in such a pen lived independent of geography, food chain or ecosystem. These salmon were perfectly commodified as a result, immune to the restrictions of place. There was no
where
that these fish were
from
. And to what end had he made this critical sacrifice, made this culinarily homeless risotto that no amount of saffron butter would resurrect? He had still managed to bounce a cheque. He was paying more in
credit card interest than he was in rent to Blaze Properties, and he somehow … well, it happened: A lousy thirty-eight-dollar cheque for potatoes and onions bounced, and Xiang was mad at him. He put them back on cash.
He wondered if Jules was now angry with him too. Or worse, fearful of their future. Her voice had been edged with vulnerability. He knew that he held some key ingredients for their joint future and was himself scared by nothing more than the thought that he could misuse these ingredients and hurt her. She loved this place that they had built together. She had poured her tender intensity into it, and through it into him. There was intimacy in that, intimacy that could be betrayed. They both knew it, although Jules remained outwardly unshakeable. In fact, she chose that moment to suggest that Jeremy cease comping the assiette du fromage to even the
Last Chapter
folks or their most regular foodies, even if they had just polished off the most expensive dinner/wine/dessert combination on the menu.
“It’s a bit rookie, isn’t it?” Jules said. “A bit eager.”
All things considered, he didn’t mind the suggestion. And after they were finished a very slow Wednesday evening, with far less kitchen chat than they normally enjoyed, he yielded to temptation and went and drank enough Irish whiskeys at the Marine Club to have a hangover on Thursday. He didn’t really remember getting home, but he must have fumbled his keys into the tiny keyhole of his aluminum mailbox because—standing blearily in front of his bathroom mirror holding a mug of coffee the next morning—there was a letter taped to his mirror, unopened.
He looked at it stupidly, letting the coffee do its faithful work and burn a tiny hole down through the middle of his sensory constitution like drain cleaner. It had the return address
Simms, Brine and Lothar
in Toronto, which rang no bells. He pulled it off the mirror and hefted it in his free hand. One sheet, maybe two. He put it down again nervously.
He punched up voice mail instead, stalling.
You have
[pause]
five messages
. Nellie the computer-generated voice-mail matron sounded remonstrative about such a middling number of messages.
One new message
meant: Someone out there wants to talk to you, be happy! Five were enough to imply you weren’t staying on top of things. He once heard her say fifteen. Totally different again. She sounded astonished, impressed. She sounded like she wanted to meet him.
Margaret. Benny.
Derek.
Hello, Mr. Papier. Derek at American Express Cardholder Services calling again. I would really appreciate it if you returned this call when you got in.…
He had to put the coffee down, but he still found it in himself to delete the message.
His father had phoned twice.
Jeremy. It’s your father
. There was a long pause, and despite a screeching bird in the background the Professor’s silence cut the recording off. He phoned back.
Can you spare yourself? I had hoped … ehem … well … Listen. How about at the lagoon, Wednesday week? Late is fine. You work until one, two o’clock, I think. Yes, all right then.… Let’s say two
.
Babes in the Wood research, Jeremy thought. Like I have time.
After he’d showered, his head cleared a bit. He dressed, pulled on his cowboy boots and went out. He waited at the elevator and listened as, back down the hall, his phone began to ring. Perfect. The elevator was coming. It dinged open in front of him.
They really wanted to talk to him, didn’t they? he thought.
“Hello?” he said, out of breath.
“Mr. Jeremy Papier?” A voice that made it immediately clear he should not have taken the call. “Doug Acer, calling
from Simms, Brine and Lothar. We’re representing Canadian Tire in their claim of … what is it? Well, I guess you owe them three thousand bucks or something. You’ve received our letter, Mr. Papier?”
Jeremy’s eyes fell to the envelope now lying on the coffee table.
“Just a friendly call. I wondered if we could settle this thing up? It’s Jeremy, right?” the lawyer said.
Jeremy agreed that it was, sinking down into the couch as he spoke. His face rested on the phone and the open palm of his other hand.
“We can go two different ways on this one, Jeremy,” Acer was saying, a discernible edge of meanness in the voice. Acer was bored mean, thought Jeremy. Twenty-five years old, just finished articling. Acer’s Wednesday was a zenith, and he was looking down from the peak of his week into the delicious trough of his after-work drinks on Friday and saying, “.so basically, we can pay this thing up right now or go to court, which is kind of a waste of everybody’s time, don’t you think?”
Jeremy was silent.
“Do you have a lawyer, Jeremy?” Acer asked him. “Should I be talking to your lawyer?”
Now Acer went quiet and waited.
“I’ll pay,” Jeremy said.
He could hear Acer sit up. “Certified cheque.”
“It won’t be certified,” Jeremy said. “I’ll mail you a regular cheque.”
“All right, all right,” Acer said. “So, we have some interest at 28.8 percent per annum. Let’s say four thousand dollars with fees.”
Jeremy was awake now, if nothing else. He was thinking through the ways he might swing it. Some combination of advances. He could see fifteen hundred dollars, maybe—two thousand tops—by month end.
“Sooner is good, later is bad,” Acer said. “How about today?”
Jeremy wrote the cheque with Acer still on the line. He addressed and sealed shut the envelope after hanging up, and was just about to leave for The Paw, get on with his day (ideas for dinner were already forming) when he grabbed the phone again.
“Mother’s maiden name, please,” the Amex woman said.
He told her.
“Just a moment, please.”
Out towards the park Jeremy could pick up the movement of people down the paths that funnelled into the West End. Slow moving twos and threes and ones, emerging from the forest to enter the daytime and the city. To comb the dumpsters, to hope their hopes, to string together their moments as best they could.
“Yes, Mr. Papier. What kin ah do fer you?” His customer service representative appeared to be stationed in Austin, Texas.
He relayed what he knew: Derek, two calls, his personal spiritual devotion to the card. I am a
member
. A pure, gold card member. I am an original celebrant at the Amex Eucha-rist. I carry but do not (normally) use your card. You’re not like the others. I carry you inside me, like faith. I am an Amex stoic. Pure and good and Protestant. You could make an advertisement about me.
Chef Jeremy Papier, disciple since 1995
. God may be in his heaven, Jeremy said to the woman, but my comfort shall lie with thee.
Or actually, what he said was: “If there’s been any kind of problem or mistake, you know, I would be, of course, keen to immediately clear things up, you know, as soon as possible.”
Austin, Texas, went away again for a moment and returned. There was an account manager assigned to the file, she said nervously, who was no longer in the office but would call him in the morning. She was also able to confirm (she
sounded pleased, maybe she thought it would please Jeremy too) that the account was frozen and that borrowing privileges had been suspended.
“So it’s not
cancelled
exactly, it’s jist that you cayn’t use the card until this all is sorted out,” she said to Jeremy, her drawl like lemon juice in a cat scratch.
“Right,” he said to the stinging news, but in the silence that followed, its context, its meaning was weirdly shunted aside by the question that invaded Jeremy’s frontal lobes: Why Austin, Texas? Why was he humiliated further by being forced to deal with an American?
“Where are you from?” he asked her. “I mean, on the earth. Where are you located? You’re not in Texas, by any chance?”
“No, sir. We’re a calling station just outside of Moncton, New Brunswick. That’s Canada, sir.”
“I know where Moncton is. I’m Canadian.”
“Yes, I see, sir.”
“And you receive calls from all over?”
“We cover calls from all over North America, yes, sir. Ourselves and several other calling stations. But if I might suggest something, sir, is that you give the American Express public relations department a call. They’re open from nine to four and it’s a Toronto number.…”
“Where are
you
from, though?” Jeremy said. “You’re not Canadian, are you?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I cayn’t …”
“You’re from Texas, aren’t you?”
“Sir, I …”
“How did a Texan get up to New Brunswick anyway?”
“Excuse me, sir.” A third voice. A different woman. Austin had gone to the help function, although Jeremy could still hear her voice in the background: “I cayn’t …”
It all just happened in the ether. These disembodied voices flying over his head. Careering over the world.
“Did he hang up?” said Austin.
“No, I’m here,” he said.
“Is there a problem of any kind, sir?” asked the help function.
There was a singing silence filled with the shapes of voices. Like black birds at night. Like bats.
“I just wanted to know …,” he started. “I just wanted …”
Then he hung up, shaking.
He looked around his strewn bachelor for something to rest his eyes on, but nothing looked good to him. Everything was in disarray. The kitchen was spilling out of itself. Glasses and ashtrays and an overflowing garbage. CDs were out of their boxes. His futon was torn free of sheets, looking like a lumpy beige carcass in the middle of his living room.
He went to the kitchen and looked in the fridge. It was empty except for coffee beans and milk. As he leaned over, his head in the cold yellow-lit interior of the small fridge, he thought about the Great Satan Amex now mobilizing its lesser devils to embark across the face of the world in his pursuit. He hadn’t missed a payment—he hadn’t used the card in two years before the Fugami purchase—but there they were. They needed no reason. The card wasn’t meant to be used. He’d promised himself over the years that it would only be used in an emergency, and even then only when it was clear that he could pay it off immediately. He’d violated his own rules. And by month end, it seemed now quite certain thanks to Doug Acer, he was going to violate the rules of the Great Satan too. And that was worse, because Amex would know. Amex would
know
Jeremy was weak and vulnerable, that he could be taken from the back of the herd.
Just when things were looking up, they tried to beat you down, Jeremy mused. His head was still in the fridge. He thought suddenly: This would be how a chef gives up. Cuts the freon tube and closes the door behind himself. Gas is too pedestrian. A freon cold snap for me.
He called himself a cab instead, now late for work. When he said where he was going, the cab took off without question. Jeremy thought, He knows where it is. He knows my restaurant. At least I have made this small footprint on the landscape.
In front of The Monkey’s Paw he reached into his pocket and realized he didn’t have any cash. He opened his wallet and looked at the rainbow of cards. He had an almost overwhelming urge to upturn the wallet and shake the cards onto the floor of the car. To see them all (what were there now—eleven, thirteen of them?) strewn in the wet and dirt of the place where countless feet had been. But he resisted.
It took four tries. Diners Club was hopeless. Both Visas were rejected. The cabby was looking a little disgusted (and dubious) by the time he swiped the BMO MasterCard and the authorization number squeaked back through the system, across the telephone lines, through the cell frequencies that crowded the city airwaves, and onto the glowing green screen that sat on the dashboard in front of them like blindfolded Justice herself, beeping irrefutable answers to the questions being posed.