How Happy to Be (16 page)

The Editor had the idea that on the front page, right below the lead news story, I should have a daily bold-face column listing the restaurants, bars, and clothing stores frequented by visiting celebrities. The column, right above my headshot, is called Schmooze-fest 2001. My writing is lazy, and often sarcastic, but not so mean that I could get fired before the paper is sold. It’s a delicate dance I’m doing these days: I need to come off as just crazy enough that I’ll be one of the first people on the To Go list when the new owners clean house, but not so crazy that it happens before the new owners sign the papers. This matters because if I’m too lazy, too mean, too awful – all the things I’ve been trying to be, without much effort, the past month or so – and I get fired by The Cheese, I’ll get two weeks severance pay. But if I’m excess, if BFD Television sees me as just another piece of redundant, downsizeable flesh, that’s the lottery. Then I get a month’s salary for every year I’ve worked at
The Daily
, which is six months of pay. Six months is enough time and
money in which to … to what? I get stuck here. Make a movie? Lie in my bedroom? Scenarios float through my head as I sit in my cubicle, wrist tendons hurting from typing.

At night when I collapse under my covers, I miss Theo’s cold bed as if I had slept there half my life.

And now the festival is ending, and I am outside BFD-TV headquarters, huddled in the cold with the other smokers, making a quick call before a TV appearance for a film festival roundup. Theo picks up immediately.

“Quick, tell me a joke,” I say.

Theo doesn’t hesitate. “How do you get two hundred Canadians out of a pool?”

“How?”

“ ‘Okay, everybody out.’ ”

“I’ve heard that before, only they were Belgian,” I tell him.

“It’s the only joke I know,” he says. “I’ve had it at the ready for twelve years.” For a bit he lets me complain about the film festival, and then he gets quiet.

“What’s going on?” I ask him, and I run through a mental list of possibilities: flesh-eating toxins; terrorist threats; the blonde in the field.

“There’s a possibility that a university in England might be interested in what I’m working on,” Theo says. Then, quickly: “But it’s unlikely.”

My pulse quickens. All that skittish, flirty energy between us evaporates. I get it: Theo is trying to warn me. “When are you leaving?” I ask.

“Max,” he says, almost exasperated. He anticipated that I would think the worst. He knows me that well already. “It’s
a long shot. I only mention it because I got a call today.”

“Congratulations,” I tell him, and I mean it – he impresses me – but it sounds sarcastic even to me. I see him waving goodbye from a train. Dr. Zhivago.

Then details: the project, post-doctorate research in London, a position of some repute. I nod and try to sound supportive. Really, what claim do I have on Theo McArdle? My God, how desperate am I to attach my suckers to him at this early stage? I disgust myself.

“What time is it?” I ask him. I am late. Theo says things, calm things, comforting things, and warns me that he is going to be busy again these next days, nothing personal. I hang up and head into the rainbow-coloured lobby of BFD fuzzy-headed and achy, like I haven’t slept in weeks.

BFD-TV is a national broadcaster with a do-it-yourself aesthetic. Their Toronto headquarters, in the heart of downtown, are built of glass so passersby can watch plumber-butted cameramen and VJs with noserings doing their jobs through the windows like those live mannequins department stores sometimes hire. When celebrities come to town, BFD closes off the street, encouraging teenage mobs to weep on the sidewalk. Television interns stand on a platform above the crowd raising their arms in the air, signaling when to scream. This scene occurs several times during the film festival, blocking traffic, and though everyone complains – “Fucking BFD. Fucking tourists” – we are secretly a little proud, not only that the celebrities have bothered to come, but that this clenched city can undo itself, get hysterical and unfettered, even if it only lasts a minute or two.

For this, their morning chat show, guests sit on bright couches covered with animal-print pillows. I’m sinking into a green couch while across from me on a red one, our host, Trish, is encouraging us panellists to speak our minds, to really say what we want to say about how great the film festival is, to not hold back just because the network is one of the festival’s sponsors.

Mr. Happiness, the champagne philosopher, has been invited too, nestled in between me and Allissa Allan, gripping a hardcover copy of his self-help guide to better living through philosophy. Happiness’s soul patch quivers under the studio lights.

He says, “Trish, I would like to reiterate that I’m an academic. I saw one film at the festival and it was in Swahili.”

Trish flashes a twinkle smile and pats his hand. “Reelaaax,” she says, closing her eyes, breathing in an exaggerated, yogic fashion. “We’re just going to have a good conversation about the film festival.” She exhales through her mouth – “Oooh” – opens her eyes and pats Happiness’s hand. “You just tell us what you think and voila! It’s fun!”

I usually like to smoke a big bowl before occasions like this, but this morning, I woke up feeling queasy, like I needed a few dozen saltines to absorb the bile in my stomach. I should warn her.

“I’m with Happiness over here, I’m not feeling –”

Trish waves her hands in front of her face, abracadabra style. “Please, please, PLEASE. We’re live in two minutes.” She leans in toward her whining, bobbing, too-talking heads, her blond hair stiffened into corgi curls, and she’s not
so chipper any more. In a wicked stepmother voice: “Don’t forget: This is
fan.”

And five, four, three, two –

“Welcome to my esteemed panel,” she says. “So is it just me, or was this year’s festival better than ever?”

Allissa Allan lets loose a party-girl whoop and says, “The parties were fabulous. I mean, let’s face it, it’s all about the parties!”

Happiness attempts to go deeper: “I do wonder if we don’t project our cultural malaise onto such events, Trish. Perhaps the festival functions as a Bakhtinian carnival wherein participants are released from their everyday roles, freed to engage in the world as the taboo Other, if only for a few days, becostumed for the Bacchanalian festival! But alas” – I really think this guy just said “becostumed”; I really think he said “alas,” but you’ll have to rewind to make sure –“only for fourteen days. Far, far too short a time before returning to their workaday lives.”

Trish swings around. “Maxime?” she says. I swallow hard, a sour ball in my throat.

“Trish, I fell asleep at several of the screenings I saw this year,” I say, and then I just go off. “Otherwise, I attended a lot of mainstream crap that will get released in theatres anyway, festival or no festival. I went to a couple of parties where I was held back from the actual celebrities by a rope, which was probably a good thing since I was so drunk, something very embarrassing might have taken place had I been allowed to mingle.”

AA and Happiness laugh overly boisterous television laughs. Fired up, I continue: “In between, I saw one or two decent films that will never get distribution. There might have been gems, Trish, but with more than two thousand movies showing, how could I possibly be expected to find them, or talk authoritatively at all on this or any other issue?”

Silence ribbons the couch, joining us together probably for only a second or two but television has its own physical laws and it feels more like ten, fifteen, twenty days. Then Happiness peeps, “Here, here!” outdoing his “becostumed,” and AA giggles, and finally, Trish leans forward and says, “Maxime, that’s why we love you! Cheeky girl!”

A
WEEK AFTER THE FILM FESTIVAL CARNIES PACK UP
their tents and roll out of town, I am walking through Yorkville on my way to a screening, one without festival lights. I pass paper stores selling hand-pressed gift cards, boutiques of Italian designers selling sequined and silk maternity wear. The hotels have dropped the extra security they felt they required during the festival, leaving their roundabout entrances looking vulnerable, barely guarded by men in top hats who chat with each other, a little defensive as they hold the door open, aware of their ridiculousness.

The day is icy, as if the weather, too, feels it has nothing to prove now that the celebrities have gone. Limousines are parked in garages, the restaurants and bars are open to the city again, the dull, Protestant city.

I’m hungover, looking for a coffee. I decide to cut through one of the big hotels to save myself a minute and a half of cold air. As I’m leaving through a back exit, I’m halted by a row of black garbage bags open at the top sitting just inside the door. They are stiff at the sides, as if containing boxes. I am, for some reason, compelled to peek through the openings, goaded to do so by all the wealth that visits these rose-coloured halls. What if a socialite has seen fit to throw out boxes of extra clothing, or the hotel is upgrading their electronic goods and these are bags of computers or stereos? I know what I’m hoping will be in the garbage even as I glance around the empty hall (it is not so becoming to paw through garbage) and lean in: I am hoping for things that are not adequate for the rich, but perfectly fine for me.

My dig disappoints. The bags only contain paper. In one, hundreds of press notes for movies that held their junkets in this hotel. In the next, photos from the movies, stacks and stacks of black-and-white and colour stills of actors weeping and jumping off bridges, waving their fists in courtrooms, kissing. And then, in the next few bags, newspapers.
Dailies
, in fact, distributed in all hotel rooms to inflate circulation numbers. Industrial-sized garbage bags full of unwanted
Dailies
. I pick up the top issue.
WEEK FIVE IN TORONTO TENT CITY STANDOFF. BIG BOX RETAILER VERSUS ANGRY
HOMELESS
. Editorial, page A7:
Sorry, street people: Our city backs business
.

And below the colour photo of a squatter, there’s me, with my hair shorter because the picture is three years old. I am just barely smiling. My final report from the streets has the hed:
FILM FESTIVAL BEST EVER
.

Oh,
The Daily
and its predictable hectoring, its endless bad judgment in pursuit of being different. I feel a sudden pang of sadness for the paper where I work, the way you do when naïveté comes off as brute force; a child smashing a ladybug. But then, there’s my face, my words, my body in ink. A wave of illness. The photo shouldering my headshot is of a young man in a torn sweater that looks hand-knitted. He is angry-eyed and certain, sitting in the rubble of Tent City, planting himself there like a flag.

T
HE WEEKS PASS, MOVING US TOWARD SPRING, AND MY
patterns change. I sleep at Theo’s house two or three times a week, and we see daylight together. One morning we walk through Chinatown and another we take the ferry across to Ward’s Island looking at the ducks freezing in the pond. The city is still new to him and it looks weightier to me now, older through his eyes. Often I sleep in his bed while he stays up late at his kitchen table, trying to advance his research so the university in London will take him. I wake up fitfully,
needing his body, and hating to need him, turning my back when he gets in bed, keeping just a few secrets from him.

I take a cab from Theo’s apartment to find one of the
Daily
boardrooms converted into a makeup room: we are making a commercial, a plea with the public to remember us. Beneath an oil portrait of Baby Baron, gazing into the distance like a teenage widow out to sea, the cherry-wood table can barely be seen through jars of colour and triangular sponges.

“Honey, I have to ask, Is there something wrong with your skin? Are you …” the makeup lady arches her hands in front of her stomach over and over, like she’s caressing a basketball.

“Fat?” I ask.

She mouths it, dirty-word style: “Pregnant.”

I take the hand mirror she’s offering. My forehead is covered in tiny white bumps, cheeks dotted with pixels, and, to the right of my nose, a big, honking zit looks like it’s trying to escape by digging out from the inside.

“I don’t think so. I’m just stressed,” I offer, because it’s the thing to say to anyone – the Editor, Elaine, Mohsen – who asks that small, loaded question: How are you?

The makeup lady is excited to have a challenge. She’s right up in my face, breathing synthetic fruit gum breath, spackling over my hideousness.

One time on the compound a bat flew into my hair and stuck, wings flapping until my dad cut it out with safety scissors, leaving a bald patch at my temple. It feels like the bat has returned, pulling at my skull. A man’s distressed voice is attached to the brushes and clips, “Hmm … What can we do about this?” “This” means me.

As they gloss me over and smooth me out, hair guy and makeup lady have a conversation about the foreign correspondent who sat in the chair before me.

“I’m like, honey, if you know you’re going to be in a nationally televised commercial, at least have a little squeeze session the night before and try to get rid of those blackheads!”

Hair guy shrieks with laughter, deleting a chunk of my scalp with his brush.

“Voila,” says makeup lady.

“Not bad,” hair guy agrees and they stand back, looking at my skin, my hair, my strategically covered ears.

Marvin pokes his head in the door.

“Ohmygod!” he says. “You look great!”

I stare as the rest of Marvin enters. “What are you wearing?” Marvin is sporting some kind of giant orange nylon snowboarding outfit. Massive rectangular pockets drip off his chest, hips, and thighs; the whole thing gathers, balloonlike, at the ankles. “You don’t like?” he asks, a touch irritated.

“I don’t not like, I just don’t get it.” And I mean that, truly.

“The pockets are for water bottles, so you never have to leave the dance floor.”

“Is that a burning issue for you?”

A man enters the boardroom. A middle-aged belly hangs over the edge of his expensive black belt, and I wonder if there was more fat before and he’s proudly showing off how little there is now, or if it’s a new belly that he hasn’t acknowledged yet. The people he passes scatter and lower their voices.