How Happy to Be (7 page)

The elevator and the hallway inside the hotel have been sprayed with a scent that’s either florid or dental. Outside room 1215, the Ethan Hawke publicist paces. She sees me and freezes, extends a palm in a halt gesture.

“Are you with
The Daily?
” she asks suspiciously, as if all day she’s been warding off civilians enacting their own personal Monkees episode, dressing up as chambermaids and waiters, smuggling each other past security by curling up on dessert carts, anything to get close to Mr. Hawke, who hasn’t had a hit movie in ten years.

“Wait five minutes. He’s finishing up,” she tells me, and I lean against a wall next to an anxious, mouth-breathing young man from the
Halifax Bugle
or whatever. A few faux-Edwardian chairs might be meant for us to sit on, but they’re covered with shiny stacks of slides, CD-ROMs, and press notes that outline the plot of the film, scene by scene, moment by moment. It’s all designed to require as little of us as is possible.
Hence,
The Examiner
has been known to sleep through entire films and others don’t even show up for screenings, writing their reviews from studio-penned plot summaries plumped up by the occasional “superbly observed” and “challengingly cast.”

American publicists have an enviable don’t-give-a-shit quality when they visit Canada. They must have done something really, really bad to get this gig, throwing bones to twenty-five Canadian journalists – “I’m sorry, did you just say RAGINA?” – ten minutes each with Mr. Once Was Famous, knowing we’ll all write the same article about the first big star to hit town. American publicists in Canada carry with them the anger of a very recent breakup, of a really terrible morning, a missed-the-alarm, stepped-in-dog-shit, got-mugged, bled-all-over-myself morning that just ended five minutes ago. Your presence is only going to agitate that huge gaping wound that is her life. You’re going to bother her with your pesky requests and refusal to wrap it up after she’s given you the very clear finger-winding-it’s-over signal. You’re going to rub the star the wrong way with some mindless question about art or truth or, more likely, dating status, and then she’ll have to spend the whole morning cleaning up your mess, calming him down, fulfilling requests for tranks or personal trainers or organic fruit, until she can finally stuff him onto an airplane and slam the door – her own personal, unique creative gifts overlooked one more long, unjust day.

The door opens and a beaming young reporter backs out, clutching her tape recorder to her chest. She’s got the sticky coating of a chocolate-dipped ice-cream cone; this interaction has bettered her.

Ethan Hawke appears. He’s just a little taller than the door handle. First thought upon seeing a celebrity in the flesh: if he’s male, he looks like a wizened, less attractive, shorter version of the character he plays on screen, like the guy at Substop who serves you your daily six-inch Turkey Lurky about whom everyone back at the office goes: “He looks like Ethan Hawke, am I right?” If it’s a woman, you think, I can’t even find her under the Impressionist brush strokes of foundation. And also the shorter thing.

Wiping the (carefully placed) sleep from his eyes, tugging his (perfectly wrinkled) thrift-store old-man shirt (Paul Smith, U.S.$1,675) that rises above his prominent belly (what, no personal trainer? – you’re right. He can’t win), Ethan Hawke gives a little wave to the smitten journalist who’s hovering in the hallway, unable to move. An intake of breath from
Halifax Bugle
.

Publicist #1, Curly, scampers over to the star on her tiny feet and is all: “What can I get you what do you need how did it go?”

I’ve got Ethan Hawke’s number. He’s a down-with-the-people celeb. He just wants a Diet Coke, no problem, man, whenever you can get to it. He gets the scene. He knows the deal. He’s one of
those
.

“Who’s next?” he smiles, and
Bugle
swoons a little, holding the wall to keep steady.

“She is,” says the publicist, pointing at me with her chin.

Then Hawke does it, he turns and full stops at my eyes, lets loose a little, crinkly just-for-me smile. It works, I
confess. I am not immune, and most of them have it, these actor types (except – and this is weird – Harrison Ford). That’s the only difference between them and us. When I smile, I just smile. Two lips, a touch of tooth, a gum now and then on a really glorious day. It’s a friendly but neutral act. With them, a smile is a declaration, a flag planted in your heart. Which is pretty nice, and it’s been a while since someone bothered to send the troops my way, so I blush, remembering, out of nowhere, Theo McArdle’s smile, and how young he looked laughing.

Hawke runs his hand through his bed-head, then offers a greasy handshake. We’re ushered in, the publicist flutters, making an exaggerated NASA-worthy gesture with her fingers – ten minutes countdown! – then backs out of the room, turning the doorknob with nursery-room caution so as not to disturb the artist.

“Nice to meet you,” says Ethan Hawke. “Can I get you anything?”

This question, this gesture to the stuffed food cart – fruit, bottled water, bowl of chocolate bars – gets me, I have to admit. I’m a call girl who’s just encountered a charming trick, and I giggle: I’m fine, I’m fine, I have no needs, I’m
Canadian
.

Ethan Hawke’s new movie is an arty little number about Swiss banks harbouring Nazi money, which means a lot of courtroom scenes and snow-capped candy mountains. He’s okay in it too, especially when he takes a bullet and gets to do some testifying with a nasty head injury. Lolling his vowels and twitching and Nazis – I smell an Oscar!

Interview begins.

With this guy, the first, winningest question has to be the Serious Artist question. He has, after all, written a novel.

As Ethan Hawke is yammering, there’s suddenly a cellphone ring in the room with us. Not a small, understated cellphone ring, mind you, but a robust one with a Wagnerian thrust. I look at Ethan Hawke. He stops talking.

“Is that you?” I ask.

A new, cooler Ethan Hawke emerges: “I don’t believe in cellphones.”

I’m diving into my bag, full body like a
Gong Show
contestant into a glass of water – Sunera’s idea of a joke to program my ring like this – I locate the phone and it glows at me: MCARDLE. It’s Wednesday. Four days after entering each other. I’m a touch irritated, really, wondering if I should pick up.

There’s Ethan Hawke, one eyebrow raised, sipping his Diet Coke through a straw, and I think, Here’s a man who probably hasn’t had to wait for anyone in years, a man for whom the regular laws of daily life – the lineups, the wait-here-I’ll-be-back-in-a-second, the moments of forced reflection in an idling car – have been bent so drastically and for so long, replaced with “Can I get you something?” And “May I take that, sir?” How odd it must be for him to be here with me, a lowly journalist, demanding of him something like understanding.

So fuck Ethan Hawke, I lust this guy.

“I’ll just be one second,” I offer in a shrill voice that I hope contains a note of normalizing reassurance, as if this happens all the time, and he has no reason to object, a voice that pretends we are equals. Then I swivel my hips, knocking the coffee table and the tape recorder, and hiss-whisper into the phone, “Hello?”

“Max? Hi, it’s Theo McArdle.”

“Mmm?”

“Is this a bad time?”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“I’ll be quick, then. You didn’t enter your number right. I kept calling Moviephone.”

Oh no. I do that sometimes, with less desirables. I can’t really explain with Ethan Hawke eyeballing me above his straw. “Really? How weird.”

“Unless that’s a rather obvious way to tell me not to call you,” says Theo. Then, with a little nervousness: “Was that the point?”

To give Ethan Hawke an impression that I am having an incredibly professional conversation with a superior, I thunder,
“Absolutely not.”

Theo says, “Uh, okay.”

“And the reason for your call?” I say.

“Oh. Well, do you want to do something tomorrow night?”

Something, something, what could that be? And I’m lit up then just because he called. That’s enough for me, that’s a touch of joy right there. I want to skip the movie or the dinner or the drinks and get right to those hands.

“Absolutely.”
I spit out my address and press
End
, and swivel back to Ethan Hawke, who suddenly looks small, all by himself on the big brocade couch.

“So –” I say brightly. “Fatherhood!”

“Is everything okay?” asks Ethan Hawke. That’s the weirdest thing about these ten minutes in a hotel room; it’s so much like therapy, so quiet and intimate and meaningless. What comfort would he offer me if I started to cry right here, right now?

“I’m fine, thanks.”

I have to get the Uma crap, which is what the Editor wants, so I give him a little spiel about how hard it must be
to have kids in the city, and my deliberately gender-neutral “partner” and I (he strikes me as someone who might open up to a lesbian) don’t know how to do it in this corporate Nintendo McDonald’s universe and how do he and Uma and baby Maya keep it real?

Oh, he likes this, it’s kind of great. He’s over the cellphone thing. Ethan Hawke is springing up out of his chair, talking about the dangers of globalization, pacing around the hotel room, on and on with some great tidbit about Uma’s parents out in the garden planting flowers and how people abuse Buddhist philosophy to justify their passive existences and his fear that his kid will end up in a Batman T-shirt and this will symbolize some great loss of character.

I start to kind of like the guy and I feel a bit bad for lying to him about my imaginary lesbian lover’s desire for an uncorrupted unborn child. There’s an innocence celebrities possess, like they’ve been raised in wire cages by agents and studio daddies and when they’re out there in the world, face to face with something resembling real people, they blink like albino squirrels in sunlight and you feel you could just crush them with a truthful comment. Ethan Hawke is almost worse because he genuinely thinks he can function normally in the world, ride the subway, make digital movies of his friends (who are all stars), and as he rambles I picture his and Uma’s beautiful baby with her wooden, non-toxic blocks and I feel a little twinge of sadness. It will be difficult for her to reconcile the safety of her flowered Connecticut farm with the flashbulbs at the airport and the one-way windows on the limousines.

So I feel like confessing to Ethan Hawke, and maybe having a real conversation with him, but I don’t want to interrupt his moment (this is great shit; the Editor will be pleased), and just as he’s going on about the razor’s edge of Buddhism, attached and detached, there’s a knock at the door. Ethan Hawke sits down and shouts, “Sorry, no one’s home.” Curly Hair peeks in anyway.

“Time’s up,” she says as if she says it a lot.

“Well, that got a little heavy, huh?” Ethan Hawke, flushed and exhilarated, smiling at me, and I do it, I’ll just say it right now, I swoon a little before I’m forcibly removed.

S
UNERA WANTS TO TALK. SHE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT TO
do about Stewey. Stewey’s on the phone, Stewey’s sending e-mails, Stewey’s on the doorstep like a baby in a basket. Stewey’s got it bad. This borderline-stalker thing might be okay from certain guys except Sunera has decided that Stewey’s problem is – Sunera always finds one thing – that his teeth are too small for his mouth. Even as I’m talking her down, telling her that in some cultures small teeth are a sign of financial prudence, suddenly I picture Stewey and all I can
see are the bright white mouse teeth of his namesake, Stuart Little, and I know it’s doomed.

Sunera is telling me this in the cafeteria of
The Daily
. “Half-day,” she declares, as she often does, explaining why she’s in a suburban area code at three o’clock on a Wednesday, four hours from date time. I’m happy to take the break, having spent the morning under headphones transcribing the Ethan Hawke tape, rewinding my favourite part several times:
And the reason for your call? Absolutely
.

Sunera’s theory of reduced labour is this: when entering or exiting the office, walk quickly, even jog, if you must. Press
Ring
on your cellphone when in the elevator, then turn to your co-riders and sigh, “No time to pick up. Meeting. Relentless, isn’t it?” Come in before everyone else one day, then don’t turn up until 5:30 the next. Skip most Fridays, but run in every weekend and send out e-mails on Sunday during the ten minutes you’re in the office, the electronic equivalent of urinating in the corner.

Sunera does these things because the actual work – the assigning, the editing, the final proofing – occupies her for about four hours a week. In part, this is because Sunera is a genius with an off-the-charts IQ. Her parents still keep her law-school acceptance letters stuck to the refrigerator with magnets shaped like tropical fruits. There are others with whom Sunera works who could fulfill their job requirements in six, eight, or ten hours a week, but they show up for fifty, eyelids purple from late nights, loudly martyring themselves at the printer. (I remember a brief blip, a moment of about six weeks a few years ago, when government ads
suddenly appeared on buses and billboards:
WORK SMART, NOT LONG
, and people in the city took note. In the mornings, the underground tunnels that run below downtown, linking office tower to mall to office tower, loomed empty until five to nine; a yodel could really fly. The subways cleared by 6:00 p.m., Pilates became popular, and children turned to their parents and said, “Where’s Nanny?” and “Who are you?”