Easy to Like (26 page)

“Don't you get the news up there in the
wilderness? Never mind. The Faranists are planning to kill people in Los
Angeles, something from the Bible about separating the wheat from the
chaff.”

Now Elliot saw the bursts plainly: one,
three, and then another two simultaneously. They were like flash pots. The
popping sound was delicate but of a pitch that cut through the growing roar of
the distant fire and a rising choir of sirens. Sinister forces seemed to be
making some sort of mischievous movie out in his vines. Now flames were licking
the vines at the site of the flashes. It was a tinderbox. Silverman was still
talking.

“They've quite obviously gone
insane.”

“Very much so, obviously insane. What's
this about a fire?”

“Started during the police assault.
Conditions have been terribly dry down here and it started some
wildfires . . . I don't like being the one to break the
news, but we've lost the vineyard.”

“Are you sure? I . . .”
Elliot said. Fire had a solid hold in a grove of trees between the old
field-blend grapes and the first Grenache vines he had planted years ago. Embers
were passing overhead, shooting stars on a drunkard's course. A comet killed the
dinosaurs, thought Elliot.

“Hey, don't sweat it, Elliot,” said
Silverman. It was as if he were merely giving Elliot notes on the new ending the
studio wanted for a picture. “The land alone is probably worth more now with the
grapes gone. Who's Walt?”

“My vineyard manager and
winemaker.”

“He down here in California?”

“Yes.”

“Lives at your winery, I suppose?”

“Nobody lives there.” A gust raced
under the fire and lifted it up like a blanket from a bed, flames flapped in the
air, the great sheet billowing and then landing gently at a distance and
catching all there ablaze. Silverman was still talking but Elliot had lost him
for a moment. “I'm too young to have worked with Walt Disney,” Lucky was saying.
“I will always regret that. He was a great man.”

“I guess.”

“You know why he wrote down Kurt
Russell's name just before he died?”

“Walt Disney?”

“Yes.”

“I didn't know he had.”

“There's another reason I'm
calling.”

“About Kurt Russell?”

“No, your son, Mark.”

“Yes?”

“He was that cute kid in
Family Planning
, right?”

“Yes, he played Little Ricky.”

“I loved that show.”

“Really?”

“‘Really?' Like, for real, did I
genuinely enjoy watching the show? No, I fucking hated it, Jonson. It's just
something you fucking say! It was a fucking courtesy.”

“Of course, sorry.”

“So, Little Ricky is, I understand,
doing hard time in Soledad Prison.”

“Yes.”

“A lot of child stars from our industry
run into trouble later in life.”

“Indeed.”

“Animals used to be a bitch to work
with too, but these days the training is . . . This town has
been good to me, Mr. Jonson. I've become wealthy. I would like to give something
back. I took the liberty of talking to the governor about Mark's case.”

Elliot could hear shouts from the
direction of Haldeman Estates and the sound of their irrigation system starting
up.

“You what?”

“And it seems nobody sees any problem
with him being transferred to a Canadian prison, to serve out the remainder of
his sentence closer to you.”

“This
is . . . I . . . I will have to speak to
his mother . . .”

“Lucy's in complete agreement that this
is the right thing to do.”

“You've spoken with Lucy?”

“Lucy Szilard, yes. I'm producing her
picture.”

“The documentary?”

“No, it's an action picture, vehicle
for Barry Hart. Lucy wants what's best for Mark.”

“I . . . I'm sorry
about that thing with your wife.”

“With Robin? It's okay, next time.
Listen, even if she wants me to, I won't fuck Lucy and we'll call it even.”

“I gotta tell you, Lucky —”

“Call me Mr. Silverman, please.”

“. . . Yeah, well, my position in
Toronto, here . . . it's not long-term. I can't remember
what was said on that conference call. If I was compelled to testify, I wouldn't
be able to tell them anything.”

“I was never on that call, Jonson, got
that?”

“Right, sorry, I —”

“God bless Canada, Jonson. There's no
place like home.”

“They don't say God bless Canada up
here.” A gust fed the fire and Elliot could almost see something, something
animated, beyond the vines. It did not so much emerge from the wall of trees as
chalk itself out of the shadows with its white lines. Not lines — stripes. The
animal advanced toward him in frightful bucks and kicks, with hard-muscled
“horsehorsehorse” locomotion. There was too much spirit in the creature for it
to keep straight, and it shied and danced laterally, side passing and half
passing, on its way. When it stopped, as if considering where to next run, its
show of teeth was more human than equine, the smile of someone deranged. It
tossed its head, neck, and shoulders, pushed off with its hind legs, and was
gone.

The phone was still at his ear but the
line was dead. Elliot ran to the truck. Sprinklers, used to cover the vines in
ice when there was a risk of frost, were whirling over at Haldeman. They had
water galore there.

He was at the gates. In the side
mirrors of the truck Elliot saw his winery as a hole in a towering curtain of
incensed scarlet and orange. The smell was of something stronger than smoke: it
was sour, a breath-stealing burnt black. It was elemental. Iron and sulphur and
tar.

HAZEL SAW TO IT
that clippings of good press were placed on
his desk every morning he was away. Critics were universally positive about the
new season. Liberal cultural commentators heralded the return of the national
public broadcaster to its founding principles. Victor Rainblatt, everyone
agreed, had been a great Canadian.

But this night, two months after their
debut, Elliot sat at his desk and confronted the numbers.
Reason
was perhaps their most critically acclaimed show in a decade.
It had started poorly and declined steeply.

Les Les
had
benefited early from a measure of controversy, but now more people from Alberta
were complaining about the show, by phone and email, than were watching it in
the entire country. The show's producers, who'd fought every compromise in its
development, smelled doom and sent Elliot a panicked note about introducing
“paranormal” elements to the show.

501
Pennsylvania
was being called the “smartest comedy of the season,” an
obituary in television. They had lost the gang at Elliot's weather office. They
were big with the crowd that never watched television.

There was one exception. One show was
that rarest of beasts, beloved by scribblers and rabble alike.
Benny Tries Again
, the program for which Elliot bore
sole responsibility, was a smash. From his premiere, when Benny tossed Barry
Hart, his first guest, off the set for being, as Benny put it, “a fake fuck,”
people had been tuning in and staying. Soon after the opening-night debacle, the
category of self-promoting celebrities willing to risk the show when they passed
through Toronto dropped from the B's to the C's and D's. But this did nothing to
diminish Benny's charm. His self-deprecation was so truthful — “After my last
show I didn't end up doing infomercials, I ended up living with a family of
raccoons” — that it gave his cracks cred. And debased as he was, he was
genuinely sympathetic to people's woes. Guests were utterly disarmed and opened
up completely. Of course, if you were a fake, like Barry Hart, an appearance was
perilous. Starved of celebrities, Bennie interviewed his rather ordinary
Canadian guests as though they were huge stars.

The numbers for news should have been
cause for dismissal, but they were no worse than the competition's. Television
news was a dying animal. The one thing Elliot could crow about was the
tremendous savings he'd made by purchasing International News Makers, a company
in Mumbai, to gather and produce the broadcasts. They were fed the raw footage
for the stories by satellite; the cameras in the studio in Toronto were robots
controlled by a reliable cadre of cheap faraway Maharashtrians. There was a lot
of grumbling about the change among the journalists, but watching as those of
their peers who dared to complain were dispatched to the Yukon and Newfoundland,
most kept their peace.

“Why do I
have
to tell them they're being cancelled?” Hazel was standing before
his desk in an orange and cream gown, a girl's princess costume all grown up and
regal. By the way it gathered at the waist to show off her shape, Elliot could
tell it had been custom-made for her.

“Where were you, dressed like
that?”

“A gala, a fundraising gala for the
opera.”

“That's one of those Toronto elite
things, isn't it?”

Hazel ignored his remark. “You should
tell them,” she said. “You're the one cancelling them.”

“Hazel, yours was the privilege of
delivering the good news when they were scheduled in the first place,” he said.
“There's nothing I can do, it's the numbers.”

“Fuck you, Elliot. You agreed it wasn't
about the numbers.”

“I said it wasn't entirely about the
numbers. Whether the shows are worthy or not, I can't piss away the public
purse.”

“You are completely abrogating your
responsibility.”

“My responsibility to what?”

“To . . .” Hazel thought
about it. “To nation-build.”

“Maybe Canadians don't want any more
nation-building. Maybe they want to remortgage and blow the cash at some shitty
resort in the Dominican.”

“Because Benny Malka is working out,
now you think you're some kind of programming genius?”

“Who accompanied you to the gala?”

“None of your business. What are you
going to replace them with?”

“Shows Alice likes.”

“Who is Alice?”

“I told you about my weather office
—”

“Not with the weather office again,
Elliot.”

“Yes. And there's a receptionist,
Alice, a big woman, somewhat withdrawn, very private.”

“So guarded that she won't even open up
to the person who imagined her? Elliot, get help.”

“What do you think she likes to watch?”
Elliot asked.

“I have to get back to my event, this
is ridiculous.”

“She's watching television right now,
while you're going to a gala. While I'm here at work. She's watching television.
She doesn't surf the Web; husband Fred, with whom she hasn't had sex in thirteen
years, lives on the Web. He's online now, in his room in the finished basement.
Alice gets all curled up and cozy, maybe with a blanket and some snacks. Snacks
are her weakness. Alice gets perfectly comfortable on the couch, and to forget
it all, to forget the passive abuse she suffers at the office, the emptiness of
her life at home, to forget that she is overweight and unloved, she watches
television. So what does she watch?”

Hazel was avoiding his eye, as if
contact would provoke a rage.

“She likes comedy,” Elliot said, “broad
stuff, hates that cerebral junk. Nothing with a showbiz setting, no smarty-pants
inside jokes, absofuckinglutely nudding ‘meta.' She likes game shows for their
hosts, they've got to be good people. She likes curling, especially
women's . . . She's one of that number we've never been able
to understand. In a drama she wants a protagonist she can root for, not damaged
with a spinning moral compass, but a good guy. She wants a redemptive ending.
She likes ‘uplifting.' Television is her bestest friend.”

“Television has such a large circle of
friends. How can anyone really be its bestest friend?”

“Because, at its bestest, television is
a crowd-pleaser.”

“You know Alice well.”

“I do, finally, I do.”

“What does she drink?”

“I'm sorry?”

“You, ex of the beverage industry,
should know. What does Alice drink, Elliot?”

“Pepsi.”

“I would have thought Diet.”

“I give her more credit.”

Elliot replaced
Reason
with a reality show called
Canada's Stupidest
. It was good-natured fun, feeding
off viewer-submitted stories of funny, dumb things friends and relations did.
The producers of the
Canada's Worst
series of shows
called Elliot in a snit, claiming proprietorship and threatening a lawsuit.
Elliot dared them.

Taking the
Les
Les
spot and an extra half-hour, Elliot green-lit
Murph Village
, described by its producers as a “fun
action-adventure-comedy-mystery-drama.” It was about the derring-do of the
eponymous Des Murphy, a dashing yet sexually non-threatening boy-man and private
dick in Vancouver. The scripts Elliot read made no sense but featured peeling
tops and tires. (There was something charming about the CBC's prudishness in the
media age of the amiable anus. The national public broadcaster took the sight of
a bra strap on a bare back for titillation, as well, thought Elliot, it should.)
The pilot made Vancouver a character too, sunny as Malibu, colours digitally
jacked so that it seemed built of Jolly Ranchers.
Murph
Village
didn't aspire to originality; rather, it covered, almost
credibly, hits of the genre. It was junk, but it was “our junk.” Elliot's only
intercession was to ixnay a tendency to David Caruso–style sunglasses acting.
There were limits. Weren't there?

The cast of
501
Pennsylvania
were said to test high, so Elliot kept the show but had
the producers sack and replace the creative team with some fat guys and gals
from
Benny Tries Again
. He eliminated the
Friday-evening news and replaced it with
Your Product
Here
, which recycled the best television commercials shown around the
planet that week.

And to put truth to the fibs that got
him the job in the first place, Elliot was in business with Lucky Silverman —
one of Lucky's outfits, anyway — as one of many international partners producing
the miniseries
House of Saxe-Coburg
. The Canadian
end was post-production at the CBC facilities in Mumbai and a young actor named
Brad Hodder, who was to play a young Prince Philip. In an interesting turn,
Barry Hart was taking the role of Wallis Simpson.

It had been weeks since Elliot had
heard directly from Hazel.

From:
[email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: chat

I want to speak to you in person. I
understand you will be in Niagara for a few days. I will drive down there
tomorrow. I have something for you.

She was standing six metres from the
front entrance, by the curb, smoking furiously.

“You're not coming in?” asked
Elliot.

“To a management seminar? At the
Niagara Institute? You're kidding, right?” Hazel squinted at a glassed-in
display next to the front doors. “Which one are you? ‘Challenging Your
Diagnostic Style'?”

“‘Managing Stakeholder Expectations,'
Node A17, actually.”

“Dear God.”

“My team are going to take away a lot
from this experience.”

She gestured with her smoke to the
glass in Elliot's hand.

“How's the vino?”

“Oh . . . I don't
know . . .” Elliot noticed that he was, indeed, holding a glass
containing a transparent yellowish liquid. “I haven't given it much
thought.”

“I've just come from Dr. Palme.”

“Doctor who?”

“Jurgen Palme, the host of
Reason
. He was inconsolable.”

“You showed him the ratings, surely a
rational man —”

“Everybody has
feelings . . . yourself excepted, I suppose.”

“I gave the shows a shot, Hazel. But
we're the national public broadcaster. Without a public —”

“I also am obliged to convey a message
from Kurt and Heather.”

“I don't know any —”

“They're the creators of
Les Les
.”

“Kurt?”

“They want to make it a drama. They
want to make Claudette, the Québécoise, straight. She leaves Betty, the
Newfoundland character, for a man, a nice one, South Asian Ontarian. Betty's
tested poorly and —”

“It's too late.”

Hazel knew this was true.

“They are going to ask you to be
president,” she said.

“I already got the call.”

“I didn't think you had the
French.”

“I don't really, but theirs wasn't good
enough to tell the difference.”

“Is that why you raced off to
California when Victor died?”

“What?” Elliot was genuinely
perplexed.

“To look like you didn't want the job,
to let the other aspirants cut one another down in your absence? It's being
called one of the great Machiavellian moves.”

“I was booked to go before Victor's
accident. As for Machiavelli? The CBC's hardly worth the candle.”

Hazel took a studied drag of her
cigarette and exhaled the smoke over Elliot's shoulder, shooting a hot cloud
past his ear.