The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf, page 8
“How many is that for you?” I asked her, Frankie bellowing for more brandy across the way.
“Are you watching out for me?” she asked. “Five.”
“Five! Maybe enough, hey?”
She leaned her head into my shoulder as she sometimes did. She said, “Red?”
“Yes?” I said.
“There is a man who asked me to go to dinner,” she said.
I nodded, waiting. The idea of Ines at dinner with a man didn’t thrill me, speaking honestly. Ines with her wide brown eyes and cutely crooked nose. Ines who was small and quiet and about whom I felt protective. “Who is he?” I asked.
This bothered her. And I saw her bite her lip.
“Do I know him?” I asked.
“Well, you might!” she said, covering her mouth.
“Tell me who,” I said. “Someone here tonight?”
But she only looked away and made a face, wrinkling her nose very much as a kid might. But so much not a kid. Le Havre had been tough, she’d told me. She’d jumped at the chance to be free, to go to Paris, to be introduced at a restaurant where she might have a stable job that grew into a career. I remember when she told me about her hometown I wanted to imagine that I identified, that we’d both broken out of prison to come to this place, to embark on this life. Only when on those occasions we really connected, when her eyes met mine and I looked into that deep velvet brown there, when I really saw her, I knew that our friendship didn’t give us similar backgrounds or equivalent privileges or immunities. Something burned in Ines that she’d keep to herself and that I knew I shouldn’t attempt to dislodge or disturb, much less try to share.
“So what are you asking me then?”
“Well,” Ines said. “Il est un peu plus âgé que moi.”
I processed this a moment. “How much older?”
She shrugged. “Older.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“Ah,” Ines said, and looked around, making that same face.
“Should you speak with someone in your family maybe?” I asked.
“Oh no!” she said, eyes wide. “My family is small. Everybody knows everything.”
“So your parents wouldn’t approve.”
Ines rolled her eyes and sipped her beer. “My parents …” she said, but didn’t finish.
“Where does he want to take you?”
“Dinner at his place,” Ines said.
“Okay,” I said to her, “listen —”
“But with people there!” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t say this. It’s a dinner party.”
I looked at her carefully. “Sunday night?” I said.
“Yes, of course. It’s my only night off.”
“Ines,” I said, but I couldn’t continue. There was an ache forming, a sense of shortened breath. “Let’s go. I’ll walk you home.”
I glanced across the bar. But Frankie had taken no notice. He had his back to us and was, as usual, regaling those assembled with a story. So Ines drained her beer and we slipped out unseen and walked the cobblestones in silence, up and around the corner a block north of the boulevard where I felt the quiver of history, where I thought of my mother as a scared young woman in these same streets. And when I left Ines at her door — she shared an apartment in Rue Véron with a cousin in whom she apparently could not confide — while I could have said any of the dozen things swimming through my mind just then, I only said “see you tomorrow,” and she pecked my cheek and said the same.
“À demain, Red.” And then a key in the lock, a creak of old hinges, shoes on the stair, and Ines was gone.
* * *
I didn’t go back to the bar, as I’d originally thought I might. I didn’t go back and insert myself into the group of them, maybe even try to get Stephanie alone for a second to tell her Ines was like a kid sister to me. And I never raised Ines with Frankie either. I planned to do that as well, thinking that a friendly question might be all that was required. Frankie, you really think bringing Ines to Sunday dinner is a good idea? I mean, there’s an awful lot of drinking and there’s drugs and she works for you and she’s also really young. Nothing confrontational, more of a request for an exchange of views.
But none of it was ever quite said. And that Sunday, I had to go to Le Dauphin to supervise a deep clean of the grill and roasting ovens. So I was black with grease and soot to the elbows while Frankie was doing his weekly entertaining. It occurred to me as I was scrubbing an iron grate down with steel wool out in the side street that I hadn’t missed a Sunday dinner in Belleville in many months, even a year at that point. It was a hinge in the week-to-week of my life in Paris. And I won’t lie, I was hungry imagining it, thinking of the donair that was probably the only dinner in my future. There was Frankie up in Belleville at his beneficent best, doling out amuse-gueules and cocktails du jour, endlessly chatty, and inspiring the same in all who attended. And that’s how hungry I must have been, remembering all those Sunday meals, how self-pitying I was there sitting on the curbstone watching the blackened soapy water disappear into the sewer grate, that I thought only of what I was missing and Ines slipped from my mind entirely, not returning until I was on the metro home.
I didn’t pick up a bottle from the late-night. I felt like it, but didn’t. And if the Parisian kitchen had taught me anything, it’s that the deprivations were handled in one reliable way: You faced up. You did what you had to do. Then you sipped and sipped until the morning came. Then you did it again however you felt. You worked it through in your duxelles or your brunois, you made that hollandaise you’d been tasked with making. You trimmed those halibut, laid out the duck legs in the fat, and put them in the slow oven. You took the rolling pin to the back. Oui, Chef. Picked up the pieces of shattered plate and scattered food from the floor. Oui, Chef. You carried on. Pushed on. You did not stop for any feeling or anybody.
But I didn’t feel like drinking just then. I felt instead a kind of fury rising.
“Can we speak?” I said. And even so, without a hangover for the first morning in what seemed like months, I waited until Frankie passed my station before asking. I’d long learned what the coffee together on morning one had meant, a signal to me of all that would not follow.
He looked at me prepping chickens, perfectly trussing them as I’d learned two and half years prior from young Ricky. He looked red around the eyes, in what I thought might be a first, a rosy tint in the whites that surrounded those grey irises, the wide black pupils. He gestured with his head and we walked back toward the walk-in.
“I gotta ask, man,” I started.
“Chef, please,” he said.
“Sorry, Frankie. Chef.”
He leaned in close and smacked my arm. “Fuckin’ with ya. Can’t this wait ’til we’re drunk?”
“I don’t think so, Frankie.”
He straightened, gestured again. All right then.
“Did you have Ines to dinner last night?”
And his eyes went wide. He stepped back. He spread his arms at the elbows, fingers splayed, like someone who’s just opened the door to his apartment to find all his friends assembled, balloons descending. Surprise!
Then he stepped forward, real concern in his eyes. He put one hand on either of my shoulders and looked at me, slightly upward as was our relative size. “Is that what’s bothering you?” he asked. “Brother Teo, tell me true. You think this?”
“Ah, shit,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“No, sorry! You’ve been carrying this worry since last night, shovelling shit out of the grill box. Ah, Teo. No, it’s I who will be sorry here.”
“So …” I started, but I had nothing.
“No!” Frankie said, hands still on my shoulders, eyes holding mine. “She is too young. I know this, mon ami.”
I heard the words. I let them sink home.
“You’re not sure,” he said.
“No, listen. It’s crazy. She told me something.”
“What did she tell you? Did she say she visit with me?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Ask her tonight. Don’t worry. It’s all good. Last night was a special night, but it was not Ines. I swear.”
“Last night?”
“Special,” he said. “Very special.”
I looked at him and he was smiling. But the feeling in me was one of sudden unravelling. From one moment to the next, relief to dread. Renewed health, my breath back, my spine straightening. And suddenly sickness. I felt sick. I wanted to puke and very nearly did.
“Tranquille, relax,” Frankie said, looking at me. “Someone you don’t know. I hardly know her.”
That night I saw Ines again in Pigalle and again we drank together. Stephanie once again didn’t show but this time I was in agony somehow. Frankie, for his part, was unaffected by whatever had gone down. He held court at the bar as he always did. It was all normal. It was all desperately normal and before I knew it the room was spinning and I staggered outside to lean on a wall, to take some air. And Ines was there, speaking from very close, saying, I’m going to take you home this time.
“Nah, nah. I’m way up in Père-Lachaise, forget it.”
“What, Teo? What, my Red? Why did you drink so much?”
She had her hands on my face now, up on her toes, her lips very close. I touched her hair.
“Ines,” I said. But nothing else came out. She was looking at me from so close. Then she let me lean on her shoulder as she walked me inside and over to Frankie at the bar. There was some negotiation here as Frankie agreed to pile me into a taxi for the purpose.
“Il est saoul!” Frankie said. “Atta boy, Tranquille!”
“You get him home,” Ines said to Frankie, who bowed at the waist in response to the command from the young service girl. Then I felt the peck of those small lips to my cheek. And her laughter, not harsh but happy to my ear. I remember her happy laughter dwindling behind me as Frankie helped me toward the door.
* * *
The following week, Frankie asked if I wanted to help him prepare the weekly meal for friends. And I remember how much that pleased me, how I rushed home and cleaned up, put on a fresh shirt and clean jeans. I jogged up the hill to his place in Rue des Envierges where I arrived just in time to help the Le Dauphin butcher carry in the supplies Frankie had laid on. Six stewing hens, a bag of marrow bones, two whole foie gras, a beef tenderloin for tartare, some pork loin, and a couple of litres of pig’s blood in a plastic bucket.
Frankie blindfolded could cook the menus from Alain Chapel or Jacques Pic. But that day he showed us his home food: coordinates Trois-Pistoles, Région du Bas-Saint-Laurent, Québec. So we made boudin noir. And we stewed the hens in red wine with heads of garlic. We made ploye buckwheat pancakes that we topped with thick slices of browned foie and crisp bacon garnish, served with a reduced maple syrup sauce. We stuffed a half dozen small pig’s stomachs with a mixture of ground pork and grated potatoes, cockles and clams cooked in Barsac, all flavoured with garlic and sage. We cooked these with langoustine shells, tomatoes, and pork stock, then brought them to the table in tureens, bathed in a reduction of the cooking liquid and garnished with the shellfish meat. I don’t remember people actually arriving. It seemed that all at once the table was loaded with food and the room was full. I was carrying out those stewed hens on platters, each bird plated between roasted marrow bones that were each topped with a thick slice of boudin noir. Frankie was handing out his amuse-gueules — crispy fried smelt in baskets, little discs of aspic in each of which was suspended some spider crab meat and a dill flower. The tartare was on the table with mustard and pickles and crusty bread. The cocktail that night, because the weather was fine, was an English gin and tonic, and there were pitchers of these along the sideboard and on tables in the garden.
I remember that evening unrolling in familiar fashion. Although I do see now that something different was afoot with Frankie. He was bringing us to his family. I could have asked why. What was it in the moment that made Frankie want to draw us close? But for the first time since my mother’s death, I found myself thinking of home and not immediately of either her or my father. There was another person hovering there, significant for their absence.
Dinner was over. The cigarettes were out on the table. Frankie was dancing with a woman near the turntable to an old Chet Baker record. I remember the moment it snapped into place. I wasn’t thinking of my mother or Frankie’s mother or Ines for that matter. I was thinking of a glaringly obvious hole in the centre of this thing no matter how you looked at it, visible from every angle: Stephanie. She moved in the shadows of the book stalls, she leafed pages, she read lines. And she was everything and the only thing I could think of that moment, everything and the only thing I desired.
It was early for me to leave, only nine o’clock. But I knew how to find her if not quite where. I was down at the bouquinistes inside thirty minutes. I surfed the quays, but most of the vendors were closed. Then I went looking in the nearest likely spot I knew. First time lucky. The church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. In the very last pew. Evening prayers. I noticed she wasn’t kneeling or even moving her lips with the echoing words from the distant front of the nave. I slipped in beside her and she didn’t startle. I saw an old copy of MFK Fisher’s Consider the Oyster. She turned and looked at me steadily.
We didn’t say a word to one another for over thirty minutes. I opened my mouth to say something in the church and she put a finger to her lips. So I stayed quiet until the service was over and we’d walked all the way back to Quai du Louvre. Then she spoke: “Kinda wondered when you might show up.”
The Seine was black. The bateaux-mouches were bristling with tourists, plying the waters up and down and beaming their white searchlights on Notre Dame and at the picaresque bridges. We leaned against a railing and Stephanie lit a cigarette. She had a way of smoking that stayed with her all the days that I knew her as a smoker. Instead of holding it between the first joints of the index and middle finger, she pinched it between the tip of the index finger and thumb, as if from the first puff she were readying the thing to be flicked away in a long arc of embers.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” I said, finally.
She exhaled smoke straight upward past her nose. “And you came all the way down here from Frankie’s before the totally drunk part of the evening to tell me?”
We went to a café at the corner of Rue du Pont Neuf where we found a table at the rear of the terrace under the awning where the light was yellow and a dense laurel bush closed in from the street side and gave us some privacy. Coffee and Calvados arrived. Then a plate of baguette with rillettes and cheese and apricot preserves because Stephanie said she was starving. We worked on that together — spreading rillette and Saint-Marcellin, sipping rich coffee, clinking brandy glasses before the first sip — and I pretended not to notice that we were crammed in that corner, our legs touching whenever we moved, that I could smell her — green apple, lavender — and that she hardly said a word while eating and I felt no particular need to fill the silence.
After that — when the second glass of Calvados arrived without me ordering it, around the same point I realized that Stephanie knew the waiter, that he was paying close attention to her, that she was entirely in control of our evening — only then did we really talk. But I remember only snips of it. Families and personal history. Where we spent our childhoods. For Stephanie it was outside Seattle, only child to her father, George, and his third wife, Theresa.
“Who I called Tess,” Stephanie said. “Like from age six, no idea how that started.”
“And what were Tess and George all about?” I asked.
Love, she said. Tess and George had truly loved each other despite everything. Despite George’s first two marriages, which hadn’t worked out well at all. The first lasted weeks, apparently. They were young. The second ran long enough for George to have two daughters who now didn’t speak to Stephanie.
“Not a great divorce,” she said. “Neither of them. But George and Tess are both dead so can we maybe talk about your family now?”
Of course, of course.
“Siblings?”
“Two,” I said.
“Kind or cruel?”
One of each, was the truthful answer. Simone had always looked out for me in her quiet way. A brilliant student, determined and loyal. She’d wanted to be a doctor as long as I could remember because that’s what my mother had wanted to be before the Nazis took all ambitions from her. Jonah was our rebel, always fighting with our parents or teachers. He’d wanted out of the family from the time he was about twelve, I figured. He was in a lot of fights at school and pummelled me at home, maybe for practice.
Meals too. I remember talking about the ones we remembered from our earliest years, others that we’d made for parents when we were in our teens. Stephanie had produced a meal of quail at one point, bought whole and alive from a farmer down the road, plucked and spit-roasted all on her own. I remembered making ceviche out of prawns bought from a fisherman in Horseshoe Bay, buckets of shellfish and onions, tabasco and lime.
Parents, siblings, dogs.
Why vespers? I might have asked her or Stephanie might have posed the question herself. To repeat something, to steady oneself for the insanity of what we were doing every week. I thought I understood.
“So … Frankie,” Stephanie said. “Do we need to talk about that?”
“You were at CIA together.”
“We were,” Stephanie said. “We came to France together.”
“Okay,” I said. “I see.”
“No, you don’t see,” Stephanie said.
“Tell me then.”
