She shifted in the chair just now, a few feet from him. Not so close that he could reach her with an outstretched hand,
but from this short distance he could admire her profile, tired, proud. Her fine nose, the resolution of her set cheeks and her strong chin. Her breasts swollen too, tumescent above the belly where her hands caressed the tight surface of her skin through a thin housecoat. She found her own navel, stayed over it a moment, a finger tracing the circumference of its taut rim. Descended to feel the knot of umbilical chord, to feel the thrumming connection. And with that small motion of her finger complete, she rolled her head over towards him, hands now very still. She told him: “It is a boy. It is Jeremy.”
He opened his mouth to say something—to ask how she knew or to say how happy he was—but Hélène was crying. Not sorrow, a different kind of tears. Tears as silver as the moonlight around them and so full, so thick with sudden knowing that they filled his own eyes too. They poured from her and into him. They covered him. He gasped for breath.
He gasped waking, the sheets wet with sweat, not tears.
It was hot. Mid-July. The season for this dream. The room was dark, but there were stars showing. There was a moon not far from the horizon, he guessed. The Professor rolled in bed and confirmed the time: 3:25. Always close. He climbed from bed, went downstairs.
In the kitchen he poured himself a large glass of lemonade over ice. He took the phone from its cradle and slipped it into the pocket of his housecoat. On the back deck he found the now-wobbly Adirondack chair. He lowered himself onto the wooden slats, raised his bare heels onto a rickety bench. The moon above was a waning crescent. In the black night sky, the stars blinked, a little sluggish in the heat.
Her view was unchanged after a decade, although he had to trim the trees back a little each year. No houses had been built below. He folded his hands across his stomach and let his eyes sweep across it. To the southwest, the night was deep
over the Gulf Islands and the Strait of Georgia. To the west lay the Sound, Passage Island, the Sunshine Coast beyond. Mountains began to the northwest, snow-covered, silent.
The Professor felt the flat chair-handle next to him. Felt without looking for his lemonade. Felt its heft, the beads of moisture on the outside of the glass, its coldness descend inside him. He set the glass down again and pulled out the phone. He dialed Jeremy’s number.
He answered on the first ring. “Nothing is wrong,” said the Professor.
He heard his son pull himself up in bed, prop his back against the wall. “As it happens,” Jeremy said, yawning, “I wasn’t sleeping.”
They compared notes on not sleeping. Jeremy sometimes pulled on sweats and a T-shirt, slipped into sneakers and went running down to the seawall and back. The Professor liked the sound of that. The boy flying down through the night air, standing, looking out to sea.
“Although not often, I hope,” the Professor said.
“Less, now that I’m in the groove again,” Jeremy confirmed. “Tonight, I can’t explain.”
“Do you remember the story about how your mother knew you were a boy before you were born?” the Professor said. “Just before.”
Of course Jeremy remembered.
“Since she died,” the Professor said, “I dream that story around this time of year. I dream the part where it actually happened. Once, twice. Then the dream goes away.”
He told Jeremy the details. Hélène sitting in the very earliest hours of the day. Looking over her view, her hands on her belly. When the Professor was finished, Jeremy was silent at the other end of the line for several seconds. “Thank you,” he said finally.
They talked for a long time after that. They talked about how it is when something is nearly finished. If it has
gone well, the moment of understanding about what has been accomplished arrives just before the crest of the hill, just before your objective. Then you reach the summit and for a while there is nothing but the summit. No ascent behind you. No descent ahead. It’s all finished and the finishing is everything.
That moment came for Jeremy just as Kiwi left his kitchen. Her last wordless look conveyed incredulity, amazement, curiosity. A dangerous combination in a voracious journalist interested in the avant garde. She kissed him on the cheek. Thanked him. And as the swing door went still behind her, Jeremy imagined her entering the dining room with a brand-new hunger. A hunger for story. An appetite that would not be sated until she knew all the remaining ingredients in the recipe the chef had only partly given her.
She would find out. He didn’t care. She had a different role in the scheme of things than did the others—the
celebrants
, he found himself thinking—who had been fed. Fed well. Fed goodness like they had never been fed. And they had eaten it, been delighted, were now satisfied and strengthened and full of unknowable joy. Sanctified by his efforts. It was possible, standing at the top of his evening like that—staring around the empty kitchen, gleaming, ready for the future—to feel briefly messianic. Like he had done a truly great and lasting thing.
Later, Olli was there. He was full of laughter, spilling over with a kind of genuine pleasure Jeremy hadn’t seen in him in years, since school. The front room was booming with all the right noises: voices against other voices, bottles on the bar top, the espresso maker howling steam into milk, ice cubes on crystal and jazz thundering over it all. Olli stood inside the quilted aluminum kitchen door, beaming. He had a bottle in his right hand and a long-ago familiar glint in his eye. They drank whiskey out of water glasses and talked and
smoked and rambled, sitting on the prep counter. Olli never said a word about dinner.
Two days later, Jeremy was still on the summit, although looking far out, far towards the horizon, there was an undeniable seam of storm clouds ringing, racing in. The restaurant was closed for all of that week and the next, reopening Friday of the following weekend as they had planned. Dante was unexpectedly absent. Philip wasn’t answering, and then his voicemail message abruptly changed to a generic Inferno greeting:
The person at this extension is not available
. The receptionist thought they might both have the flu that was going around, which Jeremy had not heard about and found unlikely in any case. He tried Dante at home, tried his cell. Nothing.
He was making phone calls to suppliers. He had just talked to a Hawaiian shark broker about bringing in mako direct. He hung up, leaned back in his chair and heard a knock at the alley door.
Three men. They had municipal paperwork granting them sweeping access to his kitchen, to purchasing records. They wore lab coats, carried clipboards, were monosyllabic and in every way fulfilled Jeremy’s fears about the health inspector. One of them appeared to be a stove specialist. He wore a small headlamp on a Velcro headband. The cold-storage man had a down vest. The squad leader did dry goods, work tops, ventilation, fire control and examined the paperwork.
They spent an hour in total. Jeremy sat in his office as instructed. “Well?” he asked when they were finished. “I trust everything.…”
Temperatures were good. Storage containers appropriate. Safety measures above standard. No evidence of insect or rodent infestation. Everything was, the man said with marked suspicion, extremely clean. They drove off in a white van without further word. Jeremy got back on the phone. He spoke to his cheese man in Montreal for the next hour, partly business, partly for the pleasurable distraction of it. They
talked about an order cycle for a range of unpasteurized Irish cheeses that Jeremy had decided would comprise the next month’s cheese plate, and when he hung up he had six voice-mail messages: three oddly enthusiastic well-wishers, two from Kiwi Frederique and one from City Engineering.
He had his first ripple of nerves.
They came around that afternoon and put a lock on the dumpster. Jeremy heard the noise and went outside.
“Can I help …,” Jeremy started.
Don’t shoot the messenger. The men loading the locked dumpster onto the back of a flatbed truck had no idea why they had been asked to do what they were doing. They only knew Jeremy had to sign a release before they could remove the dumpster and that the Health Department would apparently be carrying out something called “refuse analysis.” Jeremy made some calls and was stonewalled, although a technician at the laboratory to which the dumpster had been directed did confide that Refuse Analysis was a little-known part of the Civic Emergency Plan—a procedure intended for use in instances of viral outbreak. For the first time since the opening, Jeremy had an uneasy night’s sleep.
The next morning, the dumpster was back. It still had evidence of yellow biohazard tape on the lid, but the box had apparently passed the screening tests to which it had been submitted. Jeremy took a breath, key in the lock, breathed out and heard the phone ring inside.
Dante had resurfaced. Jeremy went over to the Inferno offices straight away, as it was suggested to him. His first thought on arriving was that Inferno employees were on strike. His second: stark surprise at the idea of Dante allowing them to unionize.
“You going to cross my picket, honey?” said a sharp-faced elderly lady whom Jeremy couldn’t imagine working at the Inferno in the first place. She forced a brochure into his hand. The headline read: Vivisection Is Vile.
“I’m sorry?” Jeremy said.
Posters in the hands of the three dozen picketers carried slogans like Embrace the Vegan Village, Living without Cruelty, Choose Soya and, of course, Meat Is Murder. Inferno International Coffee, it seemed, was not vegan-friendly, and worse: the story was circulating that a recent restaurant opening had been a particularly grizzly carnivorous frenzy.
“They flew in exotic and rare animals from around the world,” the woman stated, blocking his path. “I have a friend who was there.”
“What kind of animals?” Jeremy asked, impossibly curious how this tale had evolved.
Everglade alligators, Kenyan roebuck, platypus, iguana, hyacinth macaw. The list went on. Jeremy’s personal favourite was anteater.
“You can’t be serious,” he said.
“Oh, I am serious, sonny,” the woman said angrily, as Jeremy pushed by her. And he heard her voice join in the rising chant at his back: “Chuck out the chicken! Bin the Beef! Trash the Turkey! Shame! Shame! Shame!”
Security guards watched curiously from inside the glass. They frisked Jeremy thoroughly before they let him go upstairs.
“I have one overriding question,” Dante said when Jeremy was shown into the boardroom. He was standing with his back to the door, staring out the sweeping windows and down ten stories into the square. Someone was on a bullhorn now, and the words were just filtering through the glass.
“Animal slave traders.…” The crowd roared.
Dante listened for many seconds before continuing. “That question being: What have I done to deserve these insults?”
Jeremy opened his mouth to answer and, without turning around, Dante raised his hand sharply, palm open, snuffing out any interruption. “You know what one of them said to me?” he continued. “A young man, as I passed. He said: ‘In the beginning, we did not eat meat.’ ”
Dante finally turned from the glass and looked at Jeremy. All the strength of his face—the fearless lines, the steel-strength suggested by the dome of his crew-cut scalp—all these stood out in disdainful relief against the city that sprawled behind him. The downtown towers stood cap in hand, the West End swarmed nervously behind them, the outer harbour lay in respectful silence beyond. There were ships at anchor there, motionless, meekly waiting for Dante’s next words.
“Whatever could have convinced that young man,” Dante said finally, “that returning to the beginning had ever been an option?”
They held eye contact.
“Let’s keep it simple,” Dante finished. “You’re fired.” There was an envelope at the front desk, and he did not say more. Firm, not angry. Terse, decided. Wanting done with what had to be done.
The settlement was generous. Jeremy held the envelope with his cheque as he passed again through the picket lines. It was only in east Vancouver, visiting Jules the following week, that the full breadth of the rumours began to dawn on him. The Inferno off Commercial Drive had been graffiti-bombed: Do You Smell a Corporate Rat? in very large red letters that began on the side wall and continued around the front, over the windows and the door. The shop was empty.
Jules had saved him an article from the cover of
The Province
the day before. The headline read: “Inferno Victimized by Urban Myth?”
“And then it was over,” the Professor said, sipping his lemonade and shifting in the wooden chair. “The ascent, your brief enjoyment of the summit. The descent.”
“I suppose,” Jeremy agreed. It took a couple of months to depressurize, but he had moved on. Onward towards the next
hill. He was cooking again. New kitchen, new neighbourhood, new and improved outlook. “You too,” Jeremy said.
The Professor agreed. He was nearly finished the book. Working title:
Stromovka
. “And then, I don’t really know. Maybe I’ll retire.”
Jeremy laughed.
“Or become a restaurant critic.”
“That would require actually going to restaurants. You never go out.”
“Well, I can’t get a table at your place, can I?”
The waiting list was long, Jeremy acknowledged. “But for you, it’s a phone call away. Is this the phone call?”
No, no. There was the dream. The Professor had wanted to tell Jeremy about that for a long time. It just happened to be the night. “Sorry about the hour,” the Professor said.
“No problem. Dreams will happen when they happen.”
The other reason was more mundane. “Happy Birthday,” the Professor said.
“You’re getting old. My birthday isn’t for two weeks.”
The Professor waited for him to figure this part out.
Hands on her belly, Hélène had given him life. Three in the morning, the middle of a hot summer. Given life as she touched the chord connecting her to Jeremy and weaving them both into a much longer chord. Two weeks before the umbilical would be severed, that longer chord was as taut as it had ever been, strung tight between heritage and legacy.