Easy to Like (13 page)

Not these.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re. Re. Re. Re. Re.
Counoise

Horsey?

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re.
Counoise

Miguel says donkey.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re.
Re. Counoise

Bad yeasts in the mix? Like Brett?

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re.
Re. Re. Counoise

No. But microflora under the scope.
Someone at Davis?

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re.
Re. Re. Counoise

NO! Nobody at Davis. I'm going to see if
there is any way I can get down there.

Even as he clicked “Send” Elliot knew the trip
could not happen. His predecessor's television season was now being born with
such horrible deficits and defects that it would be left to die without
intervention. As the attending physician, Elliot couldn't leave until he'd
broken the news to the weary and teary mothers and signed the certificates.
Hazel was filling his schedule with discussions about the coming year as a way
of changing the subject and moving on. A Daytimer, Elliot saw, was a
shackle.

MEETINGS AND MORE
meetings, meetings always concluding with the assembled consulting agendas to
determine when they should next meet. Elliot was no stranger to the drill:
Hollywood loved its meetings. The majority of those Elliot had been obliged to
“take” were to receive notes on scripts. These would come from the many
disparate parties participating in the making of the film or television project.
In recent years, this meant the additional contribution of multiple middle
managers from the media conglomerates consuming the trade like flesh-eating
disease. Often — no, always — notes from different sources prescribed mutually
exclusive or contradictory actions. Thus Elliot was often sent away from a
meeting with the command to make it shorter and longer, funnier and more
serious, with characters who were at once older and younger than they'd been in
the preceding draft. There was only ever one universal note from all chiming in,
none of whom had a clue about storytelling: the entreaty to make the protagonist
more sympathetic. If screenwriters did what they were told, the lead in every
flick and program would be a puppy dog.

Now, barely three months into his post
at the CBC, he found himself slogging through meetings, called on his behalf, of
exactly the sort from which bad ideas originated. The hydra of Creative Heads
brought forward proposals for new shows but, lest they be blamed for their
failure down the line, did what they could to find fault with them. This was not
a demanding task: the shows had been worked over by so many notes and hands by
the time they got this far that they were indistinct enough to have no possible
chance of exciting an audience. Frustrated, Elliot wondered about the hundreds
of pitches that were not reaching him. If the ones he was seeing were so poor,
then . . .? “Only worse,” was the response.

There was a fatalism informing every
presentation. The CBC, Elliot was informed, was doomed — as was, in fact, all of
television, art, and entertainment in the Canadian context. The CBC had it
worst, naturally, because its audience was so old as to be resistant to change.
The hope of attracting new, younger viewers was futile; they were abandoning the
medium. The Corporation could not yet deliver them material made specifically
for the Internet — it had limited staff and infrastructure for doing so, no
agreements with content providers over fair compensation, and no effective
commercial model. (Content, they said, was king. But Elliot discovered there
were only six writers among the entire staff of the CBC.) It was all so
discouraging and confusing that Elliot decided to use one of his cards and fired
the Creative Head, Movies and Miniseries. The poor bastard cried at the news,
claiming a mentally ill wife at home and limited prospects in the ageist job
market of showtainment. Alas, his unit's recent output, mostly clunky historical
dramas, while costing many millions, had attracted audiences of many thousands.
A subhead from the documentary division took a message on his BlackBerry while
Elliot was speaking. Elliot sent the guy to a leadership seminar at the Niagara
Institute in the hope they taught manners.

A yet more lachyrmose display was
offered by Jill MacDonald, the in-house girlfriend of Elliot's predecessor. She
claimed she was now a pariah at headquarters for her
collaboration horizontale
with the tyrant Heydrich. Elliot gave her
safe passage to the supper-hour news in Calgary, a sort of internal exile.
Someone, whether they liked it or not, was getting a co-host.

On top of these meetings, Elliot
learned, he was expected to fly all over the country to meet with his soldiers
in the provinces and with the whiny, threadbare independent producers living in
the huts outside the battlements. Everyone wanted money — every region, every
city within every region, every genre, every department, everyone. The
government support for television production was balkanized, Hazel explained, so
regions continually argued their cases against the others. The CBC was favouring
the Prairies, with three shows (all terrible) on the network, at the expense of
the West Coast. The depopulated East Coast was overrepresented compared to the
expanding Centre. Stuff proposed by Newfoundland was too scat for the national
palate. There was nothing from the North, and everybody on air was too white.
The process sounded too wearying to endure, so Elliot excused himself from the
first, eastern leg of the tour and sent Hazel in his place.

Quite improbably, she departed for
Moncton, Halifax, and St. John's with enthusiasm.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Terra Nova

Good series of meetings Hfx and NB, even
if prod. community feeling hard done by. Staying on in St. John's extra day.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re. Terra Nova

And pray do what?

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re. re. Terra Nova

Hike Signal Hill AM, play I want to see at
LSPU Hall, late supper bar at Raymonds

The trails around Signal Hill could be
treacherous in December, gales whipping up spray and polishing the ice it left.
Was it his place to warn her? Would that be presumptuous? Paternal? Patronizing?
And, more important, with whom was she dining?

Before leaving, Hazel had answered his
call for a portrait of everyone in Canada and all their “ways,” leaving him to
study a voluminous document, in a three-ring binder, of statistics and analysis.
Elliot, who'd hoped his impulsive request had been forgotten, failed to open the
thing. He was learning that as an executive it was all too easy to set whimsical
notions, embryonic ideas, into motion, and all too difficult to whistle them
back. Hazel also left Elliot with notes in preparation for a pending meeting of
the Board and the Executive Committee. Elliot did begin these but, finding
himself in disagreement with many of the points Hazel was making, put them
aside. It wasn't Hazel's job to direct policy; most likely she'd created such a
provocative document only to stimulate some thought.

His condo was equipped with a pool and
a gym, which Elliot tried but soon gave up using. At first he appreciated that
the facilities were undersubscribed by the building's other inhabitants, but
quickly began to feel, whenever he went in there, like Dave Bowman at the end of
2001.
Alone in his private white Louis XVI digs,
beyond the end of time.

Force-fed processed air in his office
(the entire Broadcast Centre shared one consumptive artificial lung) and the
condo, he pined to draw a breath in his vineyard. “The air is wine,” Jack London
once said of his plot up in Sonoma. In Elliot's free time, which was being
consumed by ever more of less and less discernable significance, he availed
himself of the only alternative — he took to the hoof on the chilly streets of
Toronto, telling himself that he was discovering the
Volk,
and so the CBC's audience.

The nearby lakeshore should have been
appealing, but the tainted slush on the beaches was not borne by tide and
seemed, to a man born by the sea, lifeless. The vistas there were not of
openness but of emptiness. The vicinity of his condo was by day a characterless
concrete canyon and by night a sewer into which drained the waste of the
street-level nightclubs. The city was essentially without pedestrian malls or
warrens of narrow alleys. It was a car town, evidence that its European settlers
had been determined to make a clean break, to leave the good ideas behind with
the bad when they crossed the pond. Protestant Toronto clearly understood
renewal to be a culling process and was self-loathing in its compulsion to smash
its material history, as idols, to dust. There were fewer old buildings than in
any other city Elliot had visited.

For no particular reason Elliot enjoyed
perambulating the tiny Vietnamese neighbourhood around Broadview Avenue. This
street lead him to the Danforth, which, while only a mixed commercial strip, was
rooted in something older than its years. Had Elliot any intention of staying in
Toronto, he would much prefer to buy something off Danforth Avenue and not, as
the grand social plan would have of a man of his station, in swish Rosedale or
the Annex. But each day he was more and more resolved not to remain. The level
of dysfunction at the CBC was such that leaving would be a mark of achievement,
the right move by an executive not afraid to do the brave thing. It would also
be a demonstration that Elliot Jonson was a man with options. No one would
admire his courage at deserting so early in his tenure so much as those left
behind.

Initially chuffed at having pulled off
the job interview, he'd briefly thought he could stick it out for three or four
years — by which time the winery would be profitable. But now that he'd seen the
situation up close, he was thinking a couple of years, max. And two years wasn't
enough time for his incapacity to perform the job to become evident to the
people who had hired him.

There was no one keeping him in
Toronto, no woman. Not Hazel. Yet Elliot realized that even after the short time
they had known one another, he would miss Hazel's company. If she could be
coaxed to come down to Los Angeles she would do well — though there was
something hopelessly Canadian about her, attachments to antiquated ideals about
the country that would probably keep her forever bound to Fort York.

He wondered again — with whom was she
gallivanting around St. John's? There was never any mention of a partner or a
lover in Toronto; maybe she kept one out there, some enchanting pirate. Maybe
she occasionally indulged in a little sex tourism in the colonies. They said she
was married to the CBC. Someone in such a relationship would have unmet needs.

Owing to his chronic labyrinthitis,
Victor Rainblatt, the president of the CBC, had, for Elliot's first two months
on the job, communicated only by phone. Rainblatt was confined to bed and couch;
if he stood up, the room spun and he fell. What was more, it was impossible for
him to watch television without becoming nauseous, so he deferred to Elliot's
opinion of existing or piloted projects. He was “a manager of people, not a
programmer,” Rainblatt said. In this way, Elliot and Victor had become almost
friendly.

Now, under a new pharmaceutical regime
— something called Nelfex — and therapy, Victor Rainblatt's condition had
improved. His coming out, his return to the helm, was a series of meetings:
first, an all-day affair with the Executive Committee of the CBC, on which
Elliot sat, and then, the next day, a shorter, half-hour session with the Board
of Directors followed by an informal mixer for the two bodies. Elliot guessed it
would be not unlike an intersessional meeting between the Presidium and the
(symbolic) Supreme Soviet.

All the executives were towing their
attendant seconds. Owing to her extended stay in Newfoundland, Hazel was coming
straight from the airport. But at 9:45, fifteen minutes before the powwow was to
begin, there was no sign of her. Elliot called Hazel's EA, a bright young man
named Troy.

“I've called Ms. Osler's cellphone, Mr.
Jonson, but I'm getting that message saying the phone is off or out of
range.”

“Was the flight delayed?”

“I have the arrivals board on the
screen in front of me, sir. It says the flight arrived
early . . . at 9:09.”

Hazel was mad! Even assuming that
morning traffic would be ebbing, this was cutting it too close. It was at least
thirty minutes from the airport. Add the wait for the luggage. Elliot dashed to
the elevators and went downstairs.

He was about to quit pacing the
sidewalk of Front Street and try the John Street entrance when a Crown Vic
pulled up. A back door opened. It was Hazel. Her complexion was transformed by
salt air and wind, and even behind her specs Elliot could detect a cold sea's
clarity in her eyes. For all its deficiencies, for all its torments, the
atmosphere in Newfoundland was a cure. Either that or she had indeed enjoyed the
comforts of some rogue.

Hazel had put one heel on the pavement
when Elliot, forgetting himself, took her hand and pulled her up and out of the
car and toward him and kissed her cheek.

“Oh my,” she said. “I shall go away
more often.”

Elliot looked to see if any staff were
about. His inexplicable indiscretion would surely be reported in one of the poxy
blogs hosted by his disgruntled employees. No one was staring, at least. A
couple of shivering yobs smoking by the entrance seemed scarcely conscious.

“Just glad you made it in time for the
meeting.”

“I left you notes. You would have been
fine.”

“Actually, I'd wish we'd had time to go
over them together. The direction they take, in terms of programming, it's not
what anybody at that meeting wants to hear.”