Easy to Like (14 page)

The smile went from Hazel's face and
much of the colour in her skin with it. Just out of the car, fresh from a
restorative and brief break, just the other side of a surprising and, Elliot saw
too late, welcome kiss, and he pushed her nose into her work. He showed her who
was boss.

“Some of it was bold,” Hazel said. “I
was getting the impression that you were . . . Well, we will
have to talk about it, won't we. And it was wrong of me not to have anticipated
your needing time in advance of the meeting. Let me put my bags in my
office.”

Rainblatt's diminutive stature
was exaggerated by the stance his condition forced him to adopt. He explained to
everyone that he'd been instructed by his doctors and therapists to always lean
on something. As his semicircular canals no longer gave him any sense of where
he was in space, the medical team was attempting to retrain his brain to gather
the information it required from touch. Standing to talk, Rainblatt leaned
against a wall. Sitting in his chair, he pushed himself up against one arm. He
joked that he tried to favour the right, lest the president of the CBC be
accused of being “left-leaning.”

Rainblatt was tic-ridden — constantly
bringing his hands together, knitting invisible threads, blinking and
stammering. Aggravating his unfortunate circumstances were arms too short for
his body. Elliot thought that if he spread them for balance he might only spin
like a top.

The time until coffee was occupied
entirely by some opening banter and the introduction of the nine vice presidents
and the fart catchers they'd brought along. The next interval, until lunch, was
taken up with narcotic presentations from the VP and Chief Financial Officer —
despite some one-time money from the sale of real estate assets, they were still
broke — and the VP Strategy and Business Development — sales of CBC shows and
formats in other territories were (there being none) behind projections.
However, the plan to sell off many of the transmission towers owned by the
Corporation to cellular telephone outfits held promise. She ended her submission
by saying, incomprehensibly, “Go Leafs, go!”

A light lunch of sandwiches, woody
fruit, and weak coffee was served in a lounge next door. Elliot spoke in person
with some of his fellow VPs for the first time since taking the job. They all
expressed hope for the new season he was supposedly engineering and took the
opportunity to cautiously diminish his predecessor Heydrich, by noting that the
man didn't have the requisite experience in the production end of the business
to make good programming decisions. Elliot gave them all a funny Hollywood
anecdote (he was now recycling the few he had) and they were happy. Only the VP
for Radio, Caroline Bonham, seemed immune to his charms. Elliot worried that
perhaps Ms. Bonham was on to him.

Elliot made his way to Rainblatt, who
was wedged in a corner, munching an egg salad sandwich with a tilted head.

“Elliot, good to um um see you in the
f-flesh.”

“You too, Victor.”

“It's um-an-nah a good meeting today,
no question.”

“Yes.” Elliot supposed that when
meetings were your life you became a connoisseur.

“We've scheduled you to speak last,
you're the um um h-headliner, no question.” The pitch of Rainblatt's voice rose
until reaching a girlish laugh.

Elliot was beginning to gather that
Rainblatt's view of his billing was not an overstatement. The assembled would be
disappointed, for he had not studied the pitches with anything like the
attention demanded to make a call. In all honesty, he didn't have a clue what
next season, his season, might look like.

Maybe this meeting was the time to
announce his departure. Rainblatt pushed himself off the wall and grabbed
Elliot's arm, now using him as his anchor.

“Don't give too much away. Keep them,
um nah, guessing. You want some drama at the rollout, no question.” There was
something paternal in Rainblatt's manner; Elliot didn't like it. Rainblatt
dropped his voice. “Keep next Friday evening open, having a dinner thing at
home.”

“I will.”

“Do you need to go anywhere?” Rainblatt
held a pinched thumb and forefinger to his lips.

Was Rainblatt suggesting that Elliot
and he go outside for a toke? They prescribed marijuana for nausea, it was
plausible the dizzy old dude was on the weed.

“Maybe later,” Elliot said.

Immediately after the break it was
Bonham's turn to speak. Hers was a substantial and focused presentation.
Canadians apparently cared as much about the CBC's radio service as they did not
about its television service. She confessed to continuing failure in the
two-to-four-p.m. slot but could speak with pride about other parts of the
schedule. There was also a problem with the demographics of the radio audience:
they were even older than the TV audience and were, quite literally, dying off.
There had been some new shows that attracted younger listeners, but these tended
to alienate the geezer core. Perhaps it was the soporific effects of lunch,
perhaps it was the unaccountable disdain for the radio service, but scarcely
anyone around the table seemed to care.

After tepid applause Bonham gave the
floor to the VP and Chief Technology Officer, who then passed it to the VP
Communications, after which followed the Executive VP French Services, the
General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, and the VP Human Resources. On and on
they went with meaningless palaver about mission and branding pyramids and new
platforms and new Canadians and five- and ten-year plans. Nothing of substance
was put forward, but it was all said in the ornate poetry of management
nonspeak. The very air in room became shit mist.

Elliot could think only that here, in
essence, was the reason for the decline of the West: its leadership class
excelled only in its ability to obfuscate and occlude, to appear to take
responsibility while never doing anything for which there was a risk of being
held to account. Accomplishment was less important than the running of things:
the primary objective was the continuation or advance of one's position in the
bureaucracy. The world, in short, was being managed out of existence. Product
was insignificant; process was all.

It was soon Elliot's turn to speak.
What could he say to get these people on his side? Elliot had been in the
company of some powerful figures in Hollywood; there was a science to their
influence. They suggested sociopathic cruelty, that they would use their clout
brutally. But they were bullies in whose company you were safe, not ever their
friend or equal but, as long as you agreed with them, not numbered among the
enemy. Lucky Silverman was one of those men, respected because they were
feared.

But who was the enemy in this
circumstance? The production community? The writers? The private broadcasters?
The audience? Elliot scarcely knew which his “side” was. He thought of his most
recent pitches back in Los Angeles: abject failures. He hadn't told those
listening what they wanted to hear. That, in the end, was the secret, wasn't it?
That's what he needed to do. Jesus, Rainblatt was wrapping up his introduction,
they were applauding. Elliot got to his feet.

“Thank you. Everybody has made me feel
welcome, made me feel at home. After all, this is, as most of you know, a
homecoming. I've spent my entire professional life in the entertainment industry
in the United States.” He watched Hazel move to an empty seat closer to him.

“I've had a lot of success down there,”
Elliot lied. “My experience should have prepared me for this position at the
CBC. But even in my first weeks here I saw that we faced a unique challenge.
There is one master in America: the market. The situation in this country is
more complex. The CBC has a mandate that is almost impossible to meet. We have a
viewing public that is also a shareholder, and one that is vocal about its stake
in the operation. We have to be mindful of regional representation; our programs
have to reflect the diversity of the new Canada; we have to entertain but also,
in some ways, to educate. If we provide programs that are too populist, we are
accused of dumbing things down. If we do shows that are sophisticated but appeal
to too small an audience, we are accused of being elitist.” Hazel was smiling —
was she buying this? Encouraged, he went on.

“We are accused of having a liberal
bias and of being too accommodating to the right as a way of countering this
criticism. We are asked to be all things to all people. How can we possibly do
this? As much as the television business in the United States is driven by stars
and money, by glitter and ambition, the business of public television here is
driven by the very lack of those things. This is a broadcaster whose mandate is
dictated by an act of Parliament. That is why, unlike a private broadcaster or a
studio, it has to be led not with bluff and bravado by risk-seekers but with
caution by professional managers.” Now Hazel's eyes popped, sparkling, and he
saw her suppress a bark of laughter. Poor gal was the smartest person in the
room, but not smart enough to realize that no one else got the joke. Elliot
guessed she'd suffered thus her whole life, in school, in love, in work.

“It is too easy to overstate, to
romanticize, the role of creators in this process. Decisions regarding content
cannot be impulsive, but have to be weighed. And the people making those
decisions have to be conscious of all the mitigating factors. I'm happy to say
that I feel I am in the company of just those people.”

Elliot saw that a couple of women
opposite were about to applaud. He gestured, pontifically, that they should
wait.

“As I put together the coming season I
am going to be in a process of continual consultation with all the knowledge in
this room. I am going to prevail upon you to take more meetings than you might
usually, there might be more analysis than you've been used to in the past,
there's going to be thorough planning in advance of any action. It's going to be
all hands to the bridge. There are a couple of executive decisions I'm going to
have to make, mostly obvious things like putting better-looking people on the
screen, only because there isn't time to gather input. But otherwise I'm
counting on you.”

Now Elliot let them rise to their feet
and clap. How much time had he wasted in Los Angeles trying to get his point
across, trying to convince, trying to make the producers see things his way? All
this time he should have been telling people what they already believed.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Bank

45 large was less than they said was min
so I am amazed they aren't calling it. You owe Loschem 17 for spray.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re. Bank

I can forward another 17 in two weeks.

WHEN HAZEL HAD GIVEN
Elliot her address in Forest Hill, he'd understood it was a tony quartier. But
the Edwardian brick edifice in front of which he pulled his car was a mansion.
It was surrounded by an iron fence, on top of which rested light snow like a
line of piping on a cake. He was curious and about to get out of his car and
make for the front door when, by remote control, a gate barring a long, wide
driveway opened. Hazel, pulling on gloves, was high-heeling it from the rear of
the main building, or perhaps from a smaller carriage house he only now noticed
hidden among trees in the back.

Hazel was from money?

Climbing into the passenger seat, Hazel
had only to glance at Elliot to divine what was going on behind his eyes.

“It's in the family.”

“The house?”

“Yes. And other things.”

Driving to Rainblatt's Rosedale home,
Hazel told Elliot what she knew of the president's set. The guest of honour was
Thorsten Marshall, former editor of the magazine
Toronto,
Toronto, Toronto
, now the director of the Toronto Symphony. Hazel
once saw him at a Halloween party at the end of a dog's lead held by his much
younger boyfriend. The leather collar had looked shiny from wear — new dog, old
tricks. Hazel said Marshall was a wine snob and a bore and would therefore
probably latch on to Elliot. This meal was a public rapprochement between
Marshall and Rainblatt. They were both on the board of the Royal Ontario Museum
and they'd feuded over the design of an extension. Rainblatt felt that Thorsten
had hoodwinked the board, promising them a design that looked nothing like the
exploded baby barn that was finally rammed into the structure. Rainblatt never
ceased telling anyone who'd listen about how much he loathed the look of the
addition, saying it had “more wonky corners than the cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

There would also likely be in
attendance, Hazel continued, one Joanne Johanson, a theatre actress and
director, now a leading culturecrat at the Canada Council. After a few drinks
Johanson could not be stopped from tallying the leading men she'd bedded.
Johanson was a friend of Rainblatt's wife, Helga. Helga was a permanent fixture
on the board of the Textile Museum (was “positively mad for textiles,” said
Hazel) and always invited along a prominent Canadian textile artist who never
lent anything to the conversation. The financier Delmore Reitman was a regular,
as was Patrick Cahill. Cahill was a defrocked Catholic priest who, many years
earlier, when television was an altogether different beast, produced a CBC
program about faith and spiritual issues called
Glory
Be
. In St. John's, when Elliot was a kid, people joked that, in the
case of the local station, CBC stood for Catholic Boys Club. Hazel said that
Cahill held a Rasputin-like influence over Rainblatt, a Jew, that nobody could
understand. She herself found Cahill disagreeable; he stood too close and held
too tightly to outmoded ideas about telly. As well as these usual suspects,
there would always be two senior partners and their spouses, one each from a
leading Tory and Liberal law firm. There would be a few new faces, people with
some profile in Toronto, and there would be “an exotic,” someone visiting the
country or from the far-flung colonies.

“And from the CBC?”

“Rarely anybody. It would poison the
atmosphere. I haven't been myself in many years.”

Turning off Yonge Street into the maze
of luxe Rosedale, Elliot wondered if his bringing Hazel as his date was a faux
pas.

It didn't seem so as Helga and Victor
greeted them as the door. The zaftig Helga even gave Hazel a hug once the maid
had taken her overcoat. Again Victor shifted from the wall to Elliot for
support. Elliot found himself tensing at Rainblatt's grip and forced himself to
relax. He was grateful for the clamour and chatter of a large group inside. He
could hide among them.

The Rainblatts' dwelling, two storeys
at the end of a crescent, would have felt spacious if it were not so cluttered
with furnishings, many of which were collectible antiques. They were serious
pieces all, but too many. Moving up the hallway to join the other guests, one
navigated two intruding benches, one simple, the other backed. The former was so
plain Elliot guessed it was a genuine Shaker piece. Hazel's brief on Rainblatt
said he was from modest Montreal beginnings. Before his term at the CBC he'd
managed the equity fund of a family fortune from his hometown and achieved
notoriety for being one of the few to lose big in the bull market of the 1990s.
The worn maple Shaker bench was the sort of object acquired by the most
well-to-do, which Rainblatt was not. Helga, then, was the dough. Perhaps that
was how she knew Hazel.

Farther into the house could be seen a
similar taste in pictures, uninteresting work by names. There was a murky Tom
Thomson that looked to have been painted through a veil of blackflies. There was
even a small Bonnard, a supine nude on a bed that conveyed not indolence but
somnolence. It was the collection of someone with the means but not the taste.
Perhaps Helga gravitated to textiles because she could at least feel what she
could not see. Elliot resented not her affluence, or her profligacy, but the
fact that her bad eye made him think, as he was trying never to do these days,
of art.

There were fifteen or sixteen guests in
all, an ambitious party. An extra table was set and ran into the living room.
This pushed the Champagne-sipping guests tightly together and gave a sense of
boho fun to the fete. Elliot sniffed his bubbly — it was a brand, Veuve
Clicquot, he thought.

Hazel had the guest list right.
Rainblatt introduced Elliot to a circle containing Thorsten Marshall and Joanne
Johanson. And while Reitman, the financier — a potential investor in Locura
Canyon and so the one person Elliot looked forward to meeting — was not in
attendance, the former cleric, Cahill, could be heard sermonizing from the other
side of the room. Here also were the “exotics”: a young playwright called Steven
Harris and his girlfriend, Abby Amstoy, who, by their dress at least, looked to
live much farther south and west in the city. Johanson reacted as if Elliot's
introduction was an ill-mannered interruption of her hungry study of the young
dramatist.

“Vice president English television?”
She wondered aloud. “I used to listen to the radio until it
became . . . what? Thorsten?”

“I'd say ‘common' if not for the risk
of being called a snob or an elitist.”

Everyone chuckled but the young
playwright and his girl.

“There was a day,” Johanson said,
addressing Elliot by way of young Harris, “when a play such as your little thing
at Tarragon — satire, historical themes — might have ended up on the CBC.”

“I'm sure,” Elliot said to Johanson,
“you are too young to remember when we broadcast stage plays.”

“You flatter me,” she said. “It wasn't
that long ago.”

“Opera. Experimental film. Theatre,”
said Thorsten. “Time was you could find it all on the CBC.”

“Did you, um um, ever really, um, watch
any of that stuff, Thorsten?” Rainblatt asked. He was standing back from the
group, against the nearest wall, and so needed to raise his voice.

“Rarely.”

“But still you um a-ad-advocate for
it.”

“I can see more value in it than in
some dire situation comedy or cop show that tries to ape the American
equivalent.” Thorsten was one of those snobs who dismissed television without
ever watching it. Elliot was one of those snobs who defended television without
ever watching it.

“So it's um um, important what's on,
even if you're not, um-nah, seeing it.”

“Absolutely. It's a public
institution.”

Johanson still hadn't taken her eyes
off the playwright. He was a rail, over six feet tall with a mass of carefully
uncombed blackest hair. He was wearing an elaborate western shirt, with
pearl-buttoned pockets and florid embroidery.

“What sort of television do you like
not to watch, Mr. Harris?” Johanson asked.

“I don't own a television.”

“What a surprise,” said Hazel. She must
have escaped Helga and silently sidled up to Elliot. She held in her swollen
hands a glass of bubbling mineral water, lemon floating atop. It was Elliot's
first good look at Hazel since she'd taken off her coat. She was wearing a mod
kilt-like skirt of an unusual emerald-coloured material, scaly like the skin of
a snake, fastened by a punkish, easily weaponized, raw metal pin. Her ivory
blouse was tightly tapered and flirted with transparency. Hazel had buttoned the
shirt so that the ochre and orange stones hanging from her long neck played
support to her décolletage. It was almost audacious, but by richness of fabric
and precision of cut stayed just within the line of respectability.

“Like a television
set
, I mean. I watch a lot of shows, on my computer,” said
Harris.

“We usually bring the laptop to bed and
download a torrent,” said Abby.

“There's an old show that I find really
funny,” Harris added. “It's called
Get Smart
. Have
you heard of it?”

“Elliot is more than a, um,
t-television executive, you know,” Rainblatt said, mercifully changing the
subject. Shop talk was a bore, and if the shop was the CBC then all the more so.
“He has his own vineyard back in, ahhhh, California.”

Johanson raised her glass to this
news.

“What's it called?” she asked.

“Locura Canyon.”

“Can't say that I've heard of it,” said
Thorsten Marshall.

“It's not available in Canada.
Production is modest, a thousand cases a year.”

“A hobby, then,” said Marshall.

“No,” said Elliot. “It's a
business.”

“I like some Ridge and Caymus wines but
must confess to having gone off New World lately,” said Marshall.

“Ridge and Caymus are good. There are
others. You're missing out.”

“There is something unsurprising about
California wine,” Marshall said. “Do you think it's because it's grown by
graduates of agricultural colleges rather than by farmers?”

Was there anything more humbling, more
poisonously and profoundly humbling, than hearing oneself in an idiot? How else
to respond than to protest too much?

“Slagging UC Davis was fashionable
once,” said Elliot. “I see a lot of science in the fields of France these days
too; even the most dogmatic
biodynamie
freaks are
mindful of it. And I have never met a race so convinced of the healing powers of
the latest potion, whether it's an antifungal from big pharma or an ox horn
filled with dung from some witch doctor, as the French. There aren't so many
hunched old vignerons out pruning the vines as people like to think.”

“Those California Cabernet Sauvignons,
they all taste the same.”

“Yes, but the left-bank wines in
Bordeaux are now trying to taste like the ones they make on the right,
so . . .”

“I don't follow you.”

“Those California Cabs taste that way
deliberately,” said Elliot, warming to the task of giving smug Marshall a
lecture. “They made those wines to ape what they loved in French Bordeaux.
Something plummy, something like black currants, something like licorice
allsorts, smell of a cigar box . . . They got land in
California that was close enough climatically to grow the same grapes they grew
in Bordeaux, and they made wines. They made wines that hoped to mimic the famous
Frenchies: the Latours, the Lafites, the Moutons.”

“Yes, and?” said Thorsten.

“But those winemakers realized that the
one thing they could not taste in the French wines they were trying to make in
California was France.”

“The terroir thing, yes, and you're
making my point.”

“Let me finish. By the time they'd
realized this, their fat, fruity, juicy wines, made from grapes that were too
ripe, had found success in the market. The wines they made were easy to like.”
Was the young playwright rolling his eyes for his girlfriend? “They could not
very well go back and change the taste of the consumers, a taste they had
fostered. So now the Bordelais, the garagistes, and even some of the classed
growths have started to make their wines taste more like those of California.
The imitated now imitate their imitators' imitations.”

Elliot could tell he'd bored both
Marshall and Johanson. The only person who'd been paying him close attention was
the playwright's date, the tiny Miss Amstoy.

“You can't ask that people learn how to
like a wine,” she said now. “People like what they like.”

“Not even if knowing more means they
will get more out of it?” Elliot said, no longer wanting to talk about it. “I'm
just saying . . . I don't know . . . you
can chase taste all you want, you'll never catch it.”

“I know there's a corollary in there
somewhere,” Hazel said, “for television.”

“You own one of these Napa wineries, I
take it?” asked Amstoy.

“No,” said Elliot, “I'm doing something
slightly different, much less successfully, somewhere else.”

“You don't seem to enjoy it much.”

“Don't I? I've given the wrong
impression, because I miss being there every day.”

He turned to look at Hazel and found
she was already looking to him, wanting to meet his eye. Elliot wanted to tell
her that she had made too big a leap in conflating two different sorts of taste;
that one could not simply substitute television for wine in his argument because
television was always, by definition, in the broadest taste. However, Rainblatt,
choosing this moment to launch himself from the wall, tackled him.