The Ravine (13 page)

Let me restate that. I mean that there is no discernible trigger for Veronica’s anger, no misdeed or hurtful incident. I don’t suppose
that’s the same as having no reason for anger. Although last evening I executed my duties successfully—I took Ellis to her Scottish dancing lesson, I drove Currer to the mall and helped her buy a slide rule (did you know we still used slide rules or did you, like me, think that we’d abandoned the mysterious things as ancient technology?) and then I picked up Ellis and delivered everybody home—I did all this in a state of muted annoyance. Ronnie asked, “Everything okay at work?” and I shrugged. That wasn’t fair, in retrospect; it’s one thing to give a surly non-verbal response, it’s another to give one that doesn’t convey
anything.
Ronnie then tried to detail her day, which was informed by activity for the sake of activity, at least, that’s the dismissive view I took of it, because why didn’t Ronnie care about the hellish day
I’d
had?

You’re beginning to get a dim notion of the dynamics between my wife and me. Not very healthy, oh no. We really should have been in counselling for a long time, probably since, I don’t know, right after she laughed at the chee-chee joke. But after a few years our relationship was so twisted and gnarled that it gave the illusion of functionality; at least we both knew how each day would proceed, so we lied to ourselves and believed that everything was all right.

But, as you may gather from the vigour with which I crush the message slip, such is not the case.

I take a deep breath of air and stab in the numbers that connect me with Carla Dowbiggin. Carla is a housewife and mother of four from Aurora, Ontario, who, through some twist of fate, is in charge of fully one-half of the network’s production slate. She’s a nice enough woman, I guess, but she has no grasp of dramatic structure, no feel for characterization or dialogue, despite which, these are the things she criticizes on a daily basis. I am phoning for the non-stop note-giving, in which Carla addresses what she calls “network concerns.” Some of these concerns are grandly pitched—“The network
is concerned that Padre’s decision is ethically fishy”—and some are aimed low—“The network is concerned about the usage of the word
crap.”

“But Padre’s just stepped in some.”

“Some what?”

“Crap.”

“Oh …” I hear the riffling of paper as Carla checks her script. “Oh. Yes, he’s just stepped in some, I see, but maybe it could just be a take. You know. See his expression. He needn’t say
crap.”

“Okay, let me just make a note of that. Doesn’t … need … to … say …” I, of course, am making no note. I never do. For the most part I merely allow Carla to ramble on, mumbling haltingly to give the impression that it is all being recorded. Occasionally I’ll argue, and quite vociferously, just to keep her happy. “Carla, I can’t change that!”

“Phil, the network is very concerned—”

“It’s integral to the script. I can’t, I
won’t
, change it.”

At this point I may not have any idea what it is I won’t change, but if I don’t put my foot down every now and again it becomes difficult to do so when it’s absolutely necessary. Because sometimes Carla will convey a network concern of such numbing stupidity that it takes me a long moment to react.

“
What?
”

“It gives the impression that she’s actually sleeping with this man.”

“But but but… she’s a prostitute.”

“She’s a
dance-hall queen.
That’s the name of the episode, after all.”

“But
dance-hall queen
is not
her job
, Carla. Of course she’s a prostitute, and she has to be, I mean, that’s why the people of Boone City want to throw her out of town.”

“Couldn’t she be, um, you know, a strong-minded independent woman who has more than one steady boyfriend?”

“I suppose so. As long as she has sex with them and charges them money.”

This practice of moronic note-giving has been part of the industry since the very beginning. A story that I sometimes tell at workshops and seminars (I
was
a gun in Canadian television, which, I’ll grant you, would be a gun of very low calibre, maybe even just an air pistol) has to do with a wonderful episode of
The Twilight Zone
called “The Last Night of a Jockey,” starring Mickey Rooney, the great (I think perhaps the greatest) American actor. In it, the Mick plays a disgraced jockey who, drunk and alone in his seedy hotel room, wishes only that he were a “big man.” He wakes up and discovers his head hits the ceiling—he’s eight feet tall, way too tall to sit on a horse. Anyway, Serling employed the word “dwarf” when scripting one of the jockey’s drunken, self-pitying diatribes. Carla Dowbiggin—at least, her spiritual forebear—insisted that he use a less offensive term, like (and I quote) “shrimp” or “half-pint.”

After I get Carla off the phone, I power up my computer and get to work. I have to put out the pinks of 606. In the television business, successive drafts change colour, pink to blue to green, etc. It is possible to run through all the available hues and end up with a script printed on white paper, although, in the logic-defying parlance of the industry, this is referred to as “double white.”

And as I do so, I imagine myself in a garret somewhere, writing a big novel bulging with thematic concerns, a tome that is problematic structurally, but so vast in scope that it must be thus. That was the plan, wasn’t it? I was going to write a novel. My mother could take it to the sofa, recline, press her cheek against folded knuckles and read the day away.

Instead I am writing an hour-long television show and talking on
the telephone to people who are all, to one degree or another, angry with me.

It is with this thought in my mind that, two hours later, I dash out to the makeup trailer.

Edward Milligan is in there, two hours before his first scheduled appearance before the camera. People often imagine that television stars lead fabulously glamorous lives, pausing only occasionally to work, to smile and emote on the sound stage, but Milligan has no other existence, really. He sometimes shows up at shopping malls or charity events, but only to get his photograph taken. And there is some weird corner of the night that Milligan inhabits from time to time (in the bars and down in the decadent rumpus room) which is informed by drug use and jaded sexual acts, as in,
I’m going to suspend you from the ceiling and lash you with licorice twists, not because it turns me on but because I’ve never done it before and it might for a few moments dull my boredom.
I know this because, as Executive Producer, I have received some letters:

But for the most part Edward Milligan is on-set, where all of his basic needs can be met. There is food there, for example, and a jesus-big trailer equipped with a state-of-the-art entertainment system and a
bed. Milligan can also sate his most basic need on-set, that for adoration. The crew stop short of actually kowtowing, but they exhibit a more muted sign of veneration, lifting their hands at his approach, palms outward, the universal sign of meekness and surrender in the face of power. The studio also supplies a steady stream of bed-mates, and although I have occasionally tried to intervene (“You know, sleeping with Milligan might not be the best move, career-wise”), these affairs are usually over days, sometimes only hours, after their onset.

Milligan also spends hours in the makeup trailer, fine-tuning his appearance. He is the Aryan ideal to such an extent that I think Hitler himself would have balked—“Oh, come on, let’s not get carried avay!” Milligan’s looks are so perfect that they don’t really require any attention, but Edward likes to sit in the chair and have Bellamy work on them, dividing his attention between the mirror in front of him and the stack of magazines on his lap, which he flips through like an automaton, his eyes scanning for images of himself.

When I enter on this day, Milligan says, “This week’s script sucks.”

“Mm-hmm,” I hum as I climb into the chair next to him, after passing a hand lightly across Bellamy’s backside.

“I liked it well enough,” says Bellamy, whose diction can be a little odd. She comes from a small town in Manitoba, and I sometimes imagine a tiny hamlet inhabited by chinstrapped farmers and weeds-wearing women, the people hailing each other with phrases like “How goeth it with thou?”

“Padre is being too passive.”

This
passivity
thing is Milligan’s constant bugbear, something he must have picked up at, say, the Banff Television Festival. (He would have been dragged, sleepless and buzzing with pharmaceuticals, into an onstage panel, the area of discussion something like
The Arc:
Narrative in Long Form.
He would have spent his time gazing at the audience, searching for likely fuck-friends. But someone, a writer or producer or someone, must have addressed passivity, at which point Milligan’s ears would have sharpened like a Doberman’s. He has many physical skills that he feels are underutilized. Besides the gun-handling artistry that I told you about, he can also do some fancy lariat twirling and work a bullwhip. He resents the fact that he too rarely gets to demonstrate these things, that Padre spends a lot of time simply standing in front of the congregation.)

“How about,” says Milligan, “when that guy, the bad fuck, comes into the church, here’s what I was thinking, I stop the sermon about the good samma-ritten and I jump, you know, leap, you know, dive, across people, which I can do, we won’t need a stunt double, and I take him down, grab his gun, you know, do a little flashy spin and then stick the barrel down his throat and say, um,
Now laugh, asshole.
Or whatever they said for
asshole
in the olden days.”

There are many things wrong with this idea, but I should tell you that Padre’s clearly psychopathic behaviour is not at the top of the list. Gabe Quinton does this sort of thing quite a bit. In season one, he was studious, more sedate, but over the years—in part due to Milligan’s campaigning, in part due to the network’s interventions—he has become alarmingly vigorous. More to the point, none of Milligan’s suggestions would serve the story, only the moment. This is a truth about actors, I think; they are doglike in terms of their conception of time—they exist only in the here and now. But none of this can I explain to Edward Milligan, so, being petulant and argumentative, I demand, “What the hell is a
samma-ritten?”

“Someone from St. Moritz?” suggests Bellamy, who has quite a good sense of humour, although I only allow myself to appreciate it in the dark belly of the night.

“I don’t know,” says Milligan. “It’s in the fucking script.”

I reach into my pocket and pull out the sides, unfold them. The actual text for the day’s shooting is at the back of a little booklet detailing the military logistics. It is set in very tiny type, demonstrating just how much weight it carries. I search for Padre’s sermon and locate the source of confusion. “Oh. Samaritan.”

“Whatever,” says Milligan. “Samma-ritten.”

“No, Ed …” (I call him
Ed when
I want to press a point.) “You have to say
Samaritan.”

“What the fuck is a
Samaritan?”

“Someone from Samaria.”

“And Samaria is exactly where?”

“Well, uh, I don’t think it exists any more.”

“So who the fuck cares? I’ll say what I want. It’s not like we’ll get letters from insulted samma-rittens.”

“But if you say
samma-ritten
, no one will know what you’re talking about.”

Bellamy has opened one of the drawers beneath the makeup mirror, is bending over and rooting about for some unguent. I stare at her ass, which is one of the things I like most about her, the perfect, unblemished rear end.

“No one’s going to know what I’m talking about anyway. No one’s ever heard of a Samaritan.”

“Wrong-o, Edward. It’s a famous story. The reason you haven’t heard of it is, it’s in the Bible.”

“Oh, fuck. Not that again. Bible this, Bible that. Why is Padre always going on about stuff in the fucking Bible?”

You see what I have (what I had) to deal with?

“You do know, don’t you, what the Bible is?”

“Yes, I know what the Bible is, there’s no reason to get all, all…” Milligan is at a loss for words, which is understandable; I estimate his expressive vocabulary at about eight hundred words.

“Shirty?”
suggests Bellamy.

“Yeah. No reason to get all shirty.” Milligan doesn’t know the expression, but is willing to defer to Bellamy. He trusts her, perhaps more than he trusts any other human being; she does, after all, tend to his appearance.

People tend to trust Bellamy, anyway. I guess I should describe her, being as she is the woman with whom I had an affair. You probably picked that up, I sure hope you did, I wouldn’t want you to think that I grope and leer at every woman who happens across my path. I suppose there was some leering done at Amy, the waitress at Birds of a Feather, and, to be truthful, there has been a little gropage here and there, which I discount as largely the result of overdrinking.

Bellamy is a small woman but substantial, nowhere near fat but, well, there is some meat on her bones. In the imaginary Manitoban town there were dairies and immense cattle farms, and Bellamy was raised on a diet of healthy but fatty foods. Her skin radiates whole-someness, even though Bellamy has been citified to the extent that her clothes are often tight-fitting and revealing. Her hair is light brown and rambunctious, and she contains it with a variety of twists, sticks, pins, even the occasional bow. She has grass-green eyes and blindingly white teeth and she is young, there’s no getting around that. She is only twenty-eight years of age, and I will be fifty in two years (or—another way of putting that, given the pace at which I’m composing—sometime near the end of this book). She is cute, rather than beautiful. (Veronica is beautiful.) She is almost always smiling, and only isn’t when listening to another’s problems, when offering solace. Many people turn to Bellamy with their trials and tribulations; she possesses good sense abounding, and receiving a hug from her is a great treat. In bed she is athletic and playful, and that last adjective is important, at least in terms of understanding my infidelity.