Free Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor Page A

jowly but otherwise trim, thinning on top, a preserved fortyish with simultaneous softness and meanness in the features. With his manicured fingers that tapered almost to points, Lucas radiated an absurd, carnivorous health that Jeremy associated with the biz like which there is no biz.
    When they were seated, Jeremy sprinted back to the kitchen to let Jules know. He wasn’t sure why he bothered; she refused to be impressed by TV people.
    “What do you recommend?” Lucas asked.
    Jeremy suggested the roast duck breast with peach green-peppercorn sauce. “It’s quite light, really. I’m sure you’ll like it.” Please like it, he thought.
    “Luke is vegetarian,” Duke murmured through a smile.
    “I’ll have the pasta,” Lucas declared.
    “That is made with squid, I’m afraid,” Jeremy said.
    On vegetarianism benchmarks, Lucas announced: “I don’t eat stuff that can think. Squid can’t think.”
    Jeremy checked back on them when they were finished, hands clasped earnestly in front of himself. They were talking about this 1996 Vancouver spring, which had yet to manifest itself in sunshine.
    “It kind of … you know,” Duke thought carefully about his choice of words, “… gets me down. This rain. Down.”
    “Rain or not, the thing I like about Vancouver,” Lucas said, looking up at Jeremy, “you can make it look like any city on earth.”
    “I should go to Cozumel,” Duke murmured to himself. “Sun will warm me.”
    “That was very good.” Lucas was now looking down at his plate.
    “Thank you,” Jeremy said, pleased. “I really hope you’ll both come back and try us again, and if I knew you were coming, I could prepare something vegetarian—”
    “But when did you go Italian?” Lucas cut him off.
    Internally, Jeremy winced. Fresh red and yellow tomatoes flavoured with minced capers, garlic, some lemon. Lightly sautéed squid. They were umido-inspired flavours, sure, but local everything except the capers. And here his target market had no idea that the dish was grown in this place, was
of
this place. Of the hard blue ocean full of this squid and that rain. Of the hands that gutted and cleaned and sliced and sautéed those squid, and the tongue that tasted it, and goddamnit, in the end it was better not to think about it too much because
You, sir, are a fucking Crip
.
    “We try a lot of different flavours,” he began, not sure where he was going with this equivocating response, but the question, thankfully, turned out to have been more rhetorical than anything. Already Duke was beginning to murmur about how maybe Tuscany would be better than Cozumel.
    “Have fun in Tuscany or Cozumel,” Jeremy said smiling, holding the door for them.
    Jules, returning later to her theme of organic growth and spontaneous creativity said: “You’re right in trying to make them happy, but you can’t worry too much if they don’t get it. The point is that in here—between you and me—that stuff just happens. Remember when Xiang started bringing in those Maris Piper potatoes? What did they become?”
    Among other things, Jules was the queen of unexpected illustrations.
    “Ten things we didn’t expect,” she continued. “Vodka-potato soup.”
    “Killer,” Jeremy said, remembering.
    “Roasted with the garlic cloves and lemon,” she said. “Mashed with dill and mustard. Potato
galette.”
    “You’re right.”
    “So we riffed, baby. We get stuff and riff. That’s what we do. That’s how we stay honest. That’s Who We Are.”
    “You’re absolutely right,” Jeremy said, inspired again.
    “The thing about TV people.,” she continued, assuming her self-evident-statement pose. She put a hand on a hip, still holding a spoon sticky with olive tapenade, her head tossed slightly back, eyes gazing at a spot above and to the left of Jeremy, where hovered (he was sometimes forced to presume) a cloud of obvious insights visible to the world but outside his own peripheral vision. “The thing about