by Edward Riche
Copyright © 2011 Edward Riche
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Riche, Edward
Easy to like / Edward Riche.
eISBN 978-1-77089-043-5
I. Title.
PS8585.I198E27 2011 C813’.54 C2011-902174-9
Cover design: Daniel Cullen
Text design and typesetting: Alysia Shewchuk
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
for Frances
PART ONE
“This Champagne didn’t come from France.”
— Orson Welles
One
“IN THE MOUTH,” Elliot said. “Feel it. Its weight, its heat.”
“When are we going to drink some American wine?” Robin asked.
Elliot had first heard Robin described, by Veronica, as “my extremist gal pal.” Doubtful that one of the many Islamists reported crowding the shadows would attend a wine tasting in Bel Air, Elliot assumed Robin to be a former dabbler in, or groupie-come-concubine of, the Weather Underground or the Panthers or the Symbionese Liberation Army or the like. (You met those people in Los Angeles, hostages and their takers together again on the same talk show.) On further learning that Robin “just one hundred and ten percent had to come to the tasting,” Elliot gathered that Veronica meant that Robin was her “extreme-est gal pal.”
The friends were eerily similar in appearance, like fraternal twins, though they probably shared a trainer or a surgeon rather than a womb. They were both a hay blond, with thrust pneumatic boobs. Their eyes were differing blues, Veronica’s Aegean, Robin’s a colder, deeper sea, each equally improbable. Repeated injections of botulism made their faces taut but leathery and shiny, like the hide on a well-played drum. They were such stalwart defenders of a certain cliché of Southern Californian womanhood that they surpassed it, attained something higher, were masters of their practice, priestesses. These were not the post-age-of-irony spending-for-democracy porn-positive Barbies one saw nowadays; they were purer, and, like their hometown, of irony they simply knew not.
“If we did this again I could take you through some better examples of what California’s self-styled ‘Rhone Rangers’ have on offer,” Elliot answered.
“Good,” said Robin. “Cabernet Sauvignon, I like that.” She was proud of this knowledge, however erroneous.
“Well, actually, no,” said Elliot, “they don’t use any Cab, that’s more of a Napa and Sonoma thing, these vintners —”
“Fred Hanover has the most beautiful ranchy thing in Napa Valley, not far from St. Helena,” Robin cut in.
“He has this barbecue,” said Veronica, “every year. There are always a lot of celebrities there, A-list people too. I hate it when it’s B-list. I get depressed by ‘B.’ And ‘C,’ Jerry keeps telling me, is for ‘cancelled.’ Fred’s is fun. It’s for a charity . . . can’t remember which one. Is it a childhood cancer?”
“I think it’s for animals. Animals in Africa, I think. Can animals be displaced by a conflict? Something was displaced, anyway,” said Robin. “Janice Everston was there last year and . . . who is that guy on Murder Squad?”
“Kevin Stewart,” said Veronica.
“Do you know about Fred’s barbecue?” Robin asked, remembering that Elliot was sitting across from her.
“I was there last year.”
“You WERE?” Veronica warmed to Elliot for the first time that afternoon.
“Yes.”
“Did you see Janice Everston?” asked Robin.
“No. Though I wrote something she was in, years ago, for television.” It was a pilot for a Mannix remake that never went. This was before Janice Everston was on any list, “A” or otherwise.
“So, you know her?” asked Veronica.
“We’ve never met. Now, this Chianti —”
“Who else was there?” asked Robin. “That we would know.”
When Elliot agreed to direct this tasting, as a favour for Jerry Borstein, he never imagined it would prove such a trial. Veronica was Jerry’s trophy wife, one of such high shine as to require constant polishing. She was, Jerry told Elliot, trying to improve her skills as a hostess and learning all she could, which was very little, about food and wine. There was a new (and to be short-lived, Elliot prayed) fashion in Hollywood for seriously themed dinner parties in honour of an invited guest, a thinker or humanitarian, who could expound on his or her area of expertise over a (typically catered) gourmet meal. Jerry had hosted one such soiree for Yuri Smeltlotov, a Russian scholar who was to speak about the crisis in the Caucasus, real estate from which Jerry’s ancestors were long ago chased. Elliot supplied the wines, starting with a freakish sparkler from Georgia and finishing with an intensely sweet Tocay Yuzhnoberezhny from the Massandra Collection in the Crimea. It was a wine, made for a czar, that survived the Nazi occupation of Yalta by being shipped to Tbilisi, a singular and treasured wine that seemed to impress nobody but Elliot himself.
That fete exposed Veronica’s need for tutelage. Near the end of the evening, with regard to the situation in Georgia, she’d given the Yellow Jackets even odds for the Gator Bowl.
She posed another question. “That’s a winery, right, Fred’s place in Napa? I think he served his own wine at the barbecue.”
“Yes. He produces a Cabernet Sauvignon–based wine there. It’s a large, extracted wine, excellent with, or as, barbecue sauce.”
“Lot of fruit?” Veronica parroted something she’d once heard said about wines.
“Very much so. ‘Fruit bombs’ they used to call them. They’re easy to enjoy.”
“I thought so,” said Veronica. “I remember loving the label.”
“Yes,” said Elliot, “Fred produces one of the better labels in California. Features a horse, if I’m not mistaken?”
“I think it does, you’re right. It was very western.”
Elliot had not been able to refuse Jerry Borstein this favour. Jerry regularly hired Elliot to rewrite or “beat” scripts and to give his more nebulous ideas some semblance of order on the page in the form of an outline or a treatment. An outline penned by Elliot, for Goldie’s Piece, was part of insider Hollywood lore for being only five words in length: “Guy with the biggest gun.” A treatment credited to Jerry but of Elliot’s hand went on to become The Nevada Girl, another success, and Elliot knew for a fact that his The Invader was the source for Total Conquest — on which Jerry’d made more than a few shekels. As a rule, Elliot never brought up his part in these authorships. He knew that Jerry knew that he knew, and that some adjustments would be made. Let Jerry have the glory. (Sure enough, in the end, Jerry gave him one of six producer credits on Conquest — a nice gesture, as it came with fees.)
Most critically, Jerry was a silent (mute was a better word) partner in Elliot’s vineyard and winery. Though she obviously didn�
��t know it, Veronica’s extreme-est friend Robin also had a piece of the action. Her husband, Lucas “Lucky” Silverman, with whom Elliot had spoken on the phone but had never met in person, was also, on Jerry’s recommendation, a major investor. Silverman was big-going-on-huge in the business, producing hit after swollen mega-hit, never stumbling. If Elliot could write just one of those sorts of pictures, he could easily pocket enough dough to sort out the mounting problems in the vineyard. Elliot’s plan was to meet Silverman by bringing him a couple of cases of his wine — their wine — but the early vintages weren’t showing yet, and Elliot thought it prudent to wait until he could deliver something delicious.
“He’s using ‘easy’ as a pejorative.” This was the first thing Eva said. She was the third invitee. A new neighbour of Jerry and Veronica’s, she looked nothing like the other two women. Her hair was a sick-making cobalt, more Goth girl than the middle-aged woman she was. Broad in the hips, shrink-wrapped in lustrous black, she resembled an eggplant. Eva had followed her husband, some big cheese in digital animation, from New York to Los Angeles. Elliot gathered she’d been asked along out of a sense of obligation on Veronica’s part, a one-time-only gesture, but with Elliot and Robin sharing in the awkward socials.
Eva was sitting with her arms crossed, gathering up the too-long arms of her black sweater into her fists. The garment was unnecessary — the vast solarium in which they were gathered was warm, and the air-conditioned interior only slightly less so. It was August in Los Angeles, for heaven’s sake. At least being overdressed seemed — thus far — to induce a lethargy in Eva that diminished her will to complain.
“Not entirely,” said Elliot. “Nothing wrong with a wine that makes a lot of people happy.” He did not believe this. “Back to these two wines. Chianti Rufina is just outside Florence. Galletti is a modest producer. The wines are made in a traditional manner on the estate. You don’t have the degree of technological intervention we see in some larger operations. As a result we are getting a much less mediated experience, we taste the soil and the weather in the grapes. On the left is the 2002 Ascella . . . Please, a sniff and then a taste, remember what we said about it in your mouth.”
Was Robin making eyes at him over her wineglass? Elliot never knew whether women were being flirtatious or fidgety. The last woman he thought was coming on to him had only been itchy. Like Eva, who sniffled and scratched as though generally allergic. She nosed her glass wetly.
“It was not a good year in Tuscany,” said Elliot, “and the wines are rather thin and dried out.”
“Dried out?” wondered Veronica.
“Let’s say instead they aren’t generous . . . ‘generous’?”
“For sure.”
“Sangiovese, the principal grape being used here, has a restrained and enigmatic aroma at the best of times, it —”
“‘Enigmatic’?” said Eva.
“We smell some dried cherry or cranberries, violets, and leather in the best examples, but it is hard to nail it down.” It was a maddening aspect of wine tasting, this search for taste and smell equivalencies. There wasn’t a risk of sounding pretentious; there was a certainty. And the reporting of various fruits seemed to have induced some winemakers to chase the taste of raspberries or plums. If you wanted strawberries, thought Elliot, go to the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market and buy a basket.
“Could say it smells like Sangiovese grapes,” Eva pressed.
“Indeed, but then very few people would know what we meant. Besides, when a wine tastes of the grape variety from which it’s made, it’s failed. It’s too . . . literal.”
No one seemed to grasp this. Elliot elaborated.
“Good winemaking uses the grapes to express a place at a certain time. The best winemaking is none at all.”
Still no help.
“We don’t want to taste the hand of the maker, we want the wine in the bottle to be an expression of the plant growing up through those stones in that field in that year. The wine is made in the vineyard, not the cellar.”
Blank stares.
“The point is that the 2002 is not expressive, it lacks fruit.” Elliot said the word anyway, the sooner to get it over with. “This enables us to better appreciate the mineral profile of the wine.” Elliot sniffed his glass. “There are some old-world spices there too — clove and cinnamon, but muted.”
He sniffed again. For a fleeting moment he detected the note that he most relished in wine, that of forest floor — sous bois, said the French — wild herbs and fungal growth amidst the fallen needles of a conifer and, atop all that, more faintly, the musk and scat of passing animals. It was a scent he rarely detected in wines. Once, having passed out face down on a mat of leaves in the woods near the Tuscan hill village of Trequanda, and waking in the dawn to the sight of a boar scenting a cypress stump, Elliot had experienced it, unmediated and in situ.
“You like this wine?” Robin asked.
“Like isn’t a word I ever use. To make my point, now try the 2003. Look at it first.”
“It’s darker,” said Veronica.
“Good.”
“Yeah, it is definitely much darker,” said Eva, seeming, to Elliot’s surprise, interested. “You say this is the same wine?”
“Same wine. I don’t know if you remember, but 2003 was the year of that incredible heatwave in Europe.”
“Remember?” said Veronica. “I’ll never forget it. We had this fantastic trip planned. Jerry had rented a yacht and we and Linda and Kent and Linda and Bernard were going to sail from Antibes to Capri . . . well, it was too hot. We spent like a day aboard this boat and then we said, like, totally forget this. We rented this castle in Scotland instead, which was nice except the boys played golf a lot cuz, like, this castle had its own nine-hole course.”
“Right. This wine was made during that heatwave. I think if you smell and taste, you will get that. This wine is baked.”
“I like it much better than the 2002,” said Robin.
“For sure,” said Veronica.
“It’s a bit much,” said Eva.
“My view exactly. I find it’s too alcoholic — hot, it’s high in sugars, low in acid. It’s big but flabby. There’s a raisiny character that I find offputting. Will it come around with bottle age, or will it crash? It’s puffed up, but there is no structural support for the Medicean architecture.”
Elliot measured two beats of silence.
“I like the sweetness,” said Veronica. “Californian wines are sweeter than Italian wines.”
“The Italians, to their great credit” — Elliot thought how much he would like to be, at that moment, in Italy — “appreciate bitterness in food and wine.”
“It’s also a question of patriotism,” said Robin. “I mean, especially since 9/11, should we be drinking Italian wine?”
“Italians didn’t crash those planes into the buildings, Saudis did,” said Eva.
“All the same, when we have perfectly good wine grown right here in California,” said Veronica.
“Rather too much of it,” said Elliot. “And as for ‘perfectly’ . . .”
“What about your wine?” asked Veronica. She turned to Eva and Robin. “Elliot has his own vineyard. Is it in Napa?”
“Paso Robles region, place called Enredo,” said Elliot.
“Will we taste your wine?” asked Eva. “If only for America.”
“I hadn’t planned on it. Most of our vines are only eleven years old, our fifth vintage in the bottle, none of it is really drinking.”
“It’s not ready?” asked Robin.
“No. It’s made to age, a vin de garde. Now if we can return to Fattoria Galletti, do you . . . ?”
“Which of the two is your favourite?” asked Robin.
“Both are utter failures. While I find the 2002 the more interesting, it is impossible to drink.”
“Why are we drinking wines that are failures?” Robin was confused.
“Let’s drink some successes,” Veronica said, clapping her han
ds. She was rocking slightly as if trying to hold her pee.
“The point here is to . . . There comes a time, if you’re being analytical, when failures are more intriguing than successes.”
“But,” Eva cut him off, “I thought wine was all about pleasure. I’m sure you said that.”
“And getting a buzz,” added Veronica. What wine she’d consumed had lowered her already limited inhibitions, for with these words she, without a care, manually hoisted one of her boobs into a more comfortable position. Surgically altered or not, thought Elliot, they were great tits.
“People draw pleasure from different things. I, for one, don’t like a wine that gives too much of itself, I —”
“So there is no Cab in the wine you make,” Robin concluded.
“Correct,” said Elliot, to make life easier.
“Is it like a Chardonnay?”
“No. It’s a red table wine. It’s made from many different grapes, nine different varieties, none of them Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon.”
“What do you call it?” Veronica said, and laughed inexplicably.
“It’s called 303 Locura Canyon Road.”
“Why?” wondered Eva.
“Because that’s where it comes from and what it should taste like.”
“Why so many grapes?” asked Robin.
“It’s . . . I don’t like to say ‘emulate’ but — well, it’s in the tradition of a Châteauneuf-du-Pape.”
“I think I’ve heard of that,” said Veronica.
“The most intriguing wine I ever tasted was a Châteauneuf,” said Elliot. “We don’t want to mimic it, it would be impossible, but Châteauneuf is our inspiration.” Elliot saw that he was losing Robin and Veronica. “Châteauneuf-du-Pape is a wine they make in the hot part of France from a bunch of different grapes, some of which we also grow here in California.” Yeah, he was only talking to Eva now. “We also use a bit of the old-vine black mix, mostly Zin and Carignan and Cinsault, that was on the estate when we bought it.” (This presence of the Zinfandel in his wine was bothering Elliot of late. Tiny portion though it was — probably less than one percent — he felt it might be imparting a note that he could identify only as “aluminum syrup.”) “People mistakenly think, because it’s a blend of grapes, that it’s some sort of concoction, but you grow different grapes on different sites to best represent the land and the conditions. It’s a meadow, not a lawn.”
