Free Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor Page B

them is that they come and they go. Which is why they work on locations. So don’t build your business plan around TV people unless you’re planning to open a string of poison wagons, and Jay, my darling, I ain’t slapping together falafels in the back of a poison wagon even for you.”
    Being contrapuntal was a good part of her significant appeal, thought Jeremy during these speeches.
    “So, honey. What’s tonight?” she said then.
    “Chilliwack rock doves.”
    “And what’s up with that?”
    “Pear-brandy glaze,” Jeremy said. “Roasted.”
    “You see?” Jules said, lifting her chin slightly, as if to capture the aroma of a typical Papier-Capelli idea.
    She was so unimpeachably wonderful, he always had to pin reminder notes to these thoughts that they were friends, just friends. Although he allowed himself the pleasure, as she turned again to her tapenade, to observe how Jules wore her subtle oppositions physically. The black eyebrows and hair. The strong nose, firm square shoulders, athletic legs and powerful hands. These things opposed by a fragile, feminine mouth and vulnerable eyes, with their pale green irises forming the narrowest of rings around the pupils. Expressive in two distinct ways. Sometimes, watching her eyes, Jeremy thought he saw right back to the child that he imagined Jules had been. An odd, quiet and beautiful girl. Tough in the school yard. Stronger than the teasing boys from her grade-school classes. Streets smarter, then and now.
    “The Snub notwithstanding, we have a good thing going,” Jules was saying, gently folding the tapenade.
    “The Snub,” he said, shaking his head. It still annoyed him almost a full year later.
    Just after opening, they had inquired about participating in a local foodie festival called Seasons of Local Splendour. The event was held on a farm—with the migraine-inducing name Garrulous Greens—where twenty or thirty local chefs and vintners would hand out samples from kiosks. Crowds of foodie and organic farming enthusiasts would descend on the farm, and mill about nibbling food, sipping wine and having their various epiphanies along the lines of: “The food I eat comes from the
soil!”
    It was a worthwhile event, one they felt especially suited to, but The Monkey’s Paw was rebuffed. Jeremy got a letter saying thank you but that the slate was getting full of “the better known organic and Pacific Northwest restaurants.” They received no encouragement to apply again next year.
    Jules hadn’t been fazed in the least. She pointed out that they were starting to get busy, that the people who tried them liked them and that they didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. Their food was local, demonstrably local. Not braying about its localness, just doing it. And with that, the Seasons of Local Splendour Snub became a routine part of the kitchen banter.
    “We have the food, sugar,” Jules said. “The foodies will follow.”
    “Food is a language,” Jeremy said. “We must keep our sentences simple and coherent.”
    “How about: Service in thirty,” Jules said, as she moved over to the big aluminum fridge door, swung it open and disappeared inside.

    It was just over a week since he had visited the Professor. Friday morning, and Jeremy stood on the steps of his apartment building, the Stanley Park Manor, contemplating the street with some dissatisfaction. It was drizzling, again. What was happening to their spring?
    He was also feeling sleep deprived. The night before he had done a foolish thing. The four of them at The Paw would often have a drink or two after closing, frequently with lingering customers. But after these (thinking about making it to Chinatown by six o’clock the next morning), Jeremy would normally walk directly home. It took half an hour, but he enjoyed the cool after-midnight air and the sound of the city pulsing around him.
    Last night, he reached the door of the Stanley Park Manor and looked past it, down Haro Street, to the