The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf, page 1
Copyright © Timothy Taylor, 2024
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The rise and fall of Magic Wolf / Timothy Taylor.
Names: Taylor, Timothy L., 1963- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230566995 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230567002 | ISBN 9781459753198 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459753204 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459753211 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8589.A975 R57 2024 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
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For Jane and Brendan
And for my parents, Richard and Ursula
1 Paris
Père-Lachaise
It was the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death when Magic Wolf first came into the world. I didn’t see the coincidence at the time because I didn’t really see something being born that moment. But something was. And my mother, Lilly, was there from the start.
I was twenty-four years old. It was a Sunday, my day off. I was lying there on my lumpy futon in my below-grade studio flat in Rue des Partants up behind Père Lachaise Cemetery, watching the ankles of passersby in the high window, watching the light ripple on the low ceiling. I was thinking about her on that day, of course, thinking of my mother in our family kitchen in West Vancouver making bread. One of my earliest memories: me sitting on the counter next to her, age three or four, riveted by all the action in that kitchen. She struck me as enormously powerful, my mother. And she was tough too, I know now. Holocaust-survivor tough. Flinty resilience, loyalty, compassion. These are the things I remember most about her. And that bustling kitchen was the stage on which I saw that first played out, making those endless loaves of bread. It was very physical: banging out the cups of flour, tossing in yeast and water measured by eye, mixing and gathering everything on the big board with her hands, punching down the dough. I remember how sometimes she’d wipe a stray hair from her forehead with the back of her wrist when she couldn’t use her fingers because they were caked in sticky dough.
So I had these childhood images running through my head as I lay there in my apartment in Paris that day. The sharp pain of her death had receded by that point to the dull ache of absence as my own life took on its direction in the kitchens of Paris, my own callouses and burn scars forming. And that was the moment when my childhood friend Magnus chose to call.
No introduction. No hello. He started in as if he’d stepped right into my thoughts. He said, “Your mother. I only just heard. I’m sorry, Teo. Really am. I’ve been in England. Cancer was it?”
And I answered as if it hadn’t actually been a decade since we’d spoken, since long ago West Vancouver in our teens, West Van as it was only ever known, just as Magnus Anders himself — in his burgundy corduroy jacket and yellow Adidas Kopenhagens, his inextinguishable slant-grinned confidence — had only ever been known as Magic.
“Cancer, yes,” I said. “Colon. Then liver. Then everything else. It was brutal.”
“I remember her really well,” he said. “Lilly.”
“That’s right.”
“The way she’d call you in for dinner. ‘Teo-oh!’ Like she was singing. I remember her voice.”
People said my mother had an accent, a musical, European lilt. I wish I could have heard it so I might remember those melodies now.
I said, “How’re you doing, Magnus?”
At which point I lay there listening to Magnus Anders talk about life in London for a while, about the wife and kids he apparently already had, all the while thinking myself of Magic rolling tires off that bridge above the railway tracks. Magic starting up that bulldozer that ended up crawling down onto the beach and out into Horseshoe Bay. Magic taking a rock to the head during a street game we simply called War. And I saw that last part in slow motion while we spoke, the blood spray, Magnus falling backward flat in the grass, blood pulsing out between his fingers.
After West Van we lost track of one another, which is the way things go. My family moved. Or more accurately: my father became restless one last time. My father, Arthur Wolf, with Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Spain behind him already. Met my mother, Lilly, in Ecuador, where her family had fled after the war she refused to speak about. All I knew was that she’d been a refugee and ended up in South America while Arthur had been a nomad wandering around somewhat aimlessly when their paths finally crossed. They were married in three weeks, the story went. And by the end of the decade, had three kids, all born in San Tomé, Venezuela: Simone, then Jonah, then me — Matthew as I was named, but who was only ever called “Teo” due to the nickname given me by local kids.
What I couldn’t see then, and what is so plain now, is that no man who travels around for so many years and has his children in the middle of the Orinoco jungle is going to settle permanently in groovy 1970s West Van with the neighbour who grew pot under his back deck, the draft-dodger sculptor across the way, the transcendentalists and yogis, the eccentric architect who built the airplane in his basement.
“Remember the Thierrys?” I asked Magnus that day.
So we pulled it back together, that summer day the airplane came out of the house in pieces and went onto a flatbed truck. A stubby wing, a fuselage, a tail assembly. We sat on our bikes in the road, mustangs and banana seats. We imagined flight.
So did my dad. So did everyone. Permanence was not in the coding in old West Van. And so my father had voyaged onward and my long-suffering mother, who I imagine would have been happy to settle just about anywhere after surviving the Nazis, made not one sound of protest.
Of course, no one ever asks the kids. So me and my two older siblings, Simone and Jonah, we were just along for the ride, this time to the sky-domed prairie, Edmonton, Alberta, the land of rural routes and four-by-fours, megachurches and farm equipment in primary colours, the infamous oil sands, the fields of dirty snow and distant beige treelines, and where for all my father’s big plans and the powder-blue vastness above, every door seemed to slam shut immediately and lock tight around me.
“So, England,” I said. “Doing what?”
“Making money,” Magnus said with a sigh, like that was just a thing people decided to do. Boring really, he said. Something about technology, private equity investment pools, European partners, computer trading systems, and the new ways that banks moved money around.
“And married?” I asked. “Who would marry you?”
Zaina was her name. Her family had come to England from Lebanon early in the civil war when she was a baby. Two boys already, three and four years old: Caleb and Zach. They had a place in Chelsea off Sloane Square, but Zaina and the boys were moving to a house on a bit of property in Essex. I didn’t know enough to realize what any of this meant. A bit of property. Magnus barely twenty-five years old at the time. Meanwhile, I was dragging myself off a borrowed futon to listen to this part of the conversation, standing now and drifting into a kind of trance, my gaze through the black iron window bars to the fan-patterned paving stones in Rue des Partants. Something was shaping there in the swirls and crests. Something in Magnus’s intent that I sensed but could not yet see.
“How’s your father?” I heard Magnus ask. “How’s Mr. Wolf holding up?”
Always the formal address when it came to my father, who was a legend to Magnus from the time we were boys. Served on the sweeps in the Med. The minesweepers. That was some hairy shit there. That was Magnus telling me, not my father who always gave incomplete answers on this topic. My father would say that the mines made a plume of water ten stories high when they exploded. Brought up a black slick of oil once, though the Germans did that from time to time, loaded up the tubes with garbage and used engine oil, shot it out to make it look like they were sunk. Sardines in a can, he said that time. Poor bastards. But then he’d change the subject as if he’d gone too far.
“He’s good, thanks,” I said. “Bought a farm before my mother died. So he’s a farmer now. Or he’s not, really. He rents the fields to a local guy who grows canola. But he has a tractor and he drives around. He built a big greenhouse. He’s into orchids. He has dogs, these huge Anatolians.”
“He misses her. We talk every couple of weeks, much more than we used to.”
“Always admired him,” Magnus said.
Which I knew to be true. So I said, “It was his idea I move to Paris, in fact, to learn from the best.”
Why tell this lie? It had been my mother who really encouraged me to go when I told her the idea. I’d been studying English at university and suddenly had to get out. She seemed to understand immediately. And it’s doubly unfair, as I think back on it, because even though he never objected particularly, I’m not sure my father ever really paid much attention to my decision to leave. First he was consumed with caring for my ailing mother. Then he was grieving her. And after I’d gone, he didn’t seem to think I’d made an impulsive mistake in going to Paris any more than he thought Simone was a paragon of wise choosing for becoming a cardiologist (which she was) or that Jonah was foolish running off to be a photographer in Japan (which he wasn’t really; he was very successful, in fact). Leaning in over his orchids with shears and reading glasses, walking those dogs along the frozen berm down to the steel-cold lake, grieving my mother intensely every moment, his mind was cast out along the track of that long journey around the world to find her, again and again. And when I called him a few weeks after returning to Paris from my mother’s funeral, lost in the blur of those first weeks in a Paris kitchen, I remember he asked me why I was calling so early in the day and I realized he’d forgotten I was in France.
Maybe I told Magnus what I thought he wanted to hear: a heroic lie about a father figure he admired. Maybe I told him that because I sensed that my mother’s death couldn’t possibly be the real reason Magnus was calling, that he had some other motive that day. And once again, Magnus seemed to tap directly into my thoughts with the next thing he said.
“But Paris!” I remember him saying. “Now that is really something. You cooking in Paris. Who picked you for the future celebrity?”
I laughed. Celebrity. Give me a break. But Magnus was insistent. And he was going to prove no different than a lot of other people here who thought cooking was some sort of glamourous vocation.
I tried to talk him down. I gave him the basics. My job was at a place called Le Dauphin, one of the big ones up there in Montparnasse where they produced celebrated Parisian bistro fare for hundreds of diners daily — tourists, regulars, visiting famous people. The place was never not slammed, without question the hardest work I’d ever done. Twelve-hour days, six days a week. And on the seventh day, you worked only eight hours because we didn’t do Sunday dinner.
“As in,” I said, “zero glamour.”
“But wicked fun!” Magnus said.
“Wicked exhausting,” I said.
“Working with such cool people.”
“The chefs patrons are completely psychotic honestly, though the sous is great.”
“What’s a chef patron?”
“They own the place,” I explained. “Chefs Denis and Marcel. The Pellerey Pricks as they are known.”
Of course, Magnus immediately wanted to know psychotic how? So I told him there, in that very first conversation, neither of us really hearing it the way I hear it so clearly now.
“Psychotic like hitting people,” I said. “Like throwing plates, grabbing you by the balls.”
And I was saying this remembering the brandy-inflamed face coming in over my shoulder just the week before, the hand clamped over my testicles from behind. Screaming, “C’est quoi ce bordel?”
Magnus was howling. You’d think it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. And I was laughing too, no point denying it. Because laughter was absolutely necessary to survive that shit. Not in the moment, certainly. You never laughed to their faces. But the Pellerey Pricks cussed out the servers daily, slapped the dishwashers for nothing at all. They’d brandish blades and weaponize butane torches at the apprentices and the junior cooks. They’d hurt you, those two. They’d call you fiotte or sous merde. And you’d bark Oui, Chef! And get back to it. You had to. That was the order of things.
But you’d laugh later. Up at the bar in Pigalle. You’d tell the story, you’d wear the burn mark proudly, you’d have the second drink, the third drink, the fourth. It’s how you kept your sanity. Or so we thought.
“And the sous?” Magnus asked.
“François Coté,” I said. “Frankie. He’s a great guy. Came over from Montreal to Paris about ten years ago.”
Friend of a friend, I explained. Which had been my angle, because no way was I getting a job at Le Dauphin otherwise.
“And look at you now,” Magnus said. “Living the life in Paris.”
“All day every day,” I said. “Eighty hours a week.”
“Life of Riley,” Magnus said. “And partying like crazy after hours, I’ll bet. So you single or what?”
I misheard the spirit of this question. I should have seen that Magnus was making a display of largely courteous envy about the lifestyle he imagined. Single and cooking in Paris. Bars and booze in Pigalle. Life of Riley, sure. Only, what I sensed in the moment instead was the chasm yawning between his situation and mine, the very different distances we’d managed to travel over precisely the same number of years. Even if I didn’t understand what kind of dough a house on a property in Essex actually meant, or for that matter a wife and two children and another on the way — the alleged tedium of doctors, daycares, school applications, rushing home by car service from Heathrow after a last-minute trip to Moscow — I sensed immediately the enormous value of property and family to those in his sphere. So I nudged my own reality toward what I imagined was his, not really knowing what I was doing, much less planning it at the time.
No wife, I said. But yes, there was someone.
“Come on,” Magnus said. “Who is she?”
She was a professional cook, a very good one, I said, both true. We had mutual friends though we weren’t exactly dating, true and true. But lately, I told Magnus, something seemed to have clicked between us. And I thought we were really beginning to imagine a future together. And at that point, in a conversation between two old friends reconnecting, I veered into the wholly aspirational.
There would have been more. I would have told Magnus that her name was Stephanie, that she was originally from Seattle. I would have told him some short version of the story that Stephanie knew an old girlfriend of mine from high school, that Stephanie was the one who then put in a word for me with Frankie Coté. Graduated Culinary Institute of America, top of her class, came to France for the same reasons I had only five years before. I might have even told him that Paris hadn’t been easy for her, that she’d struggled to advance in the all-male sanctuaries that were restaurant kitchens in the city still at that time. Maybe I told him that Stephanie seemed sane in our insane world of kitchens. That she mentored young cooks without hitting them. That she could laugh at herself, at all of us. At me. Maybe I mentioned that she was writing on the side, that she’d published stories in magazines about her time in France, that she was mulling over when might be the right time to return home. Maybe I told him all that and how beautiful she was too, her intensely observant green eyes, the golden hair that she shook in a certain way to clear her face.
I can’t honestly remember all that I told Magnus that day, only that I would have been thinking about all these things, and that there was a dense quality to the silence that then followed, whenever I did finally stop speaking.
That silence seems notable to me now. I can hear it still. And I’m forced to wonder if it was in that very silence that the idea came to Magnus, that the design was revealed. Not Magnus’s biggest idea ever. Just the one that would end up making the biggest difference to me.
He said, “So you cook in Paris. You rise through the ranks. You learn from the best.”
“Sure,” I said. “That was the plan.”
He said, “You love this woman, Stephanie. Who sounds great, by the way.”
Did I love her? I hadn’t thought that far ahead, though as he said it, I was easily persuaded.
Magnus said, “So we do our work. Then in a year’s time, maybe two …”
I waited. The silence stretched. Finally, I said, “Then what, Magnus? In a year or two what?”
