Easy to Like

by Edward Riche

  “I would have thought television had all the reality it could handle by now.”

  “It’s not for television, Elliot. It’s a new platform. This is a hand-held show.”

  “Hand-held?”

  “Not as in hand-held camera; as in hand-held devices. It’s for smart phones and various micro and mini . . . portable . . . thingies. I saw a test on my watch.”

  “How was it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Picture quality an issue?”

  “Quality is overrated.”

  “‘Quality’ means rated.”

  “These are lo-fi times, Elliot. The most important part of any program is that it is on somewhere. With hand-held the shows are not only on, they are literally on the audience. Increases the odds they’ll watch.” Mike looked out the window, his visage turning grave. “People have to scramble, client-o’-mine. The Internet is destroying this town.”

  “You sent the one-pager for Nailed to Fred over at Litehouse . . . right?” Elliot wanted to change the subject.

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “They passed.”

  “Not even going to take a meeting?”

  “No, they are not.”

  “Did they give a reason?”

  “They don’t think Brokeback meets Passion of the Christ has an audience. They don’t buy the whole gay Jesus thing.”

  “Come off it, it is so obvious. In the new draft Judas betrays him because he’s insanely jealous of this thing Jesus has with Mary Magdalene —”

  “You’ve told me already.”

  This was impossible, as Elliot had only then made it up. There was no new draft.

  “They think,” Mike continued, “and they have a point, that it doesn’t bring the Christian or gay audiences to the picture, it manages to alienate both. And there was a question whether you were the guy to write it.”

  “Why?”

  Mike wheeled his chair too far forward, pressing his torso, about where the diaphragm sat, against the desk. He was hurting himself. “You’re not Christian, Elliot. You’re not gay.”

  “I can be gay for a studio green light. I mean, what does it take?”

  “There’s also the issue of your age.”

  “My age? I’m forty-nine.”

  “Shhhhh,” Mike waved his hands urgently. “Increasingly difficult to pitch a twentieth-century writer.”

  “What do I have to do to earn my twenty-first-century cred, Mike?” Elliot was fucking around, but Mike looked to be giving the question serious consideration.

  “Become younger and more attractive? Move to Laurel Canyon? Bring your dog to work?”

  “Hilarious.”

  “There comes a time after which plastic surgery makes things worse.”

  “Fuck Litehouse. Let’s take the thing to some hot young indie outfit.”

  “Specifically . . . which hot young indie outfit?”

  “What about Benny and Tara?”

  “They’re not indie. They sold out years ago. Indie is just a step to . . . what’s the opposite of indie?”

  “Dependent?”

  “Then Tara is very dependent. She’s an executive in charge of production at Paramount now.”

  “How many executives in charge of production do you think there are in Los Angeles?”

  “How many will take your call is a better question. If there were ten thousand execs-in-charge, how many would take your call, Elliot? You’re becoming disconnected from the trade. You’ve got to get out there more. People forget you fast in this town. Have you considered joining . . .” Mike hesitated. “You know what is popular now?”

  “Surely the bloom is off Dianetecs.”

  “Have you heard of Farinism?”

  “The bread people? Tell me that’s a joke, Mike.”

  “You’re not networking enough, Elliot. Not schmoozing. A lot of people are getting into this Farinist thing, you know. Faranist writers are being attached to projects with Faranist stars and Faranist directors. Priscilla was just in here with a bracelet that looked an awful lot like a bagel to me. I’m just saying. They’re into wheat, how scary can it be?”

  Elliot thought back to the loaf-soled freak from the way over. Chaff? Elliot was “chaff”? That sounded anything but harmless to him. Los Angeles would always have its Manson Families, its Jim Joneses. Elliot needed a breather.

  “The winery has taken all my time,” Elliot said.

  “Well, it can’t take any more of mine.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that I represent screenwriters, not winemakers. It means, unless something happens soon, I don’t think there is any point in us continuing. I don’t represent hobbyists.”

  “The winemaking isn’t a hobby.”

  “I was talking about your screenwriting.”

  “You’re kidding, right? What does it cost you to represent me? Nothing. It’s all take, no give.”

  “There are office costs.”

  “Paper clips and photocopying?”

  “My take of your give doesn’t cover those.”

  Though he wished to tell Mike to go fuck himself, he said instead, “Give me a couple of weeks.”

  “I’m beginning to think you prefer not working.”

  Elliot looked at his watch. He had another appointment to keep, at home.

  Elliot had acquired the matrimonial house, on Amesbury Road, fifteen years earlier. (Most of his scribe-tribe fellows lived in Sherman Oaks, the other side of the hills. Elliot was thankful, every day, that none of his neighbours were in show business.) He’d bought the place outright with his fee from A New Arrangement, a picture for which there had been great hopes. There was enough money left over for the patch of old Zinfandel up in Enredo (only five grand an acre back then), where he would plant his vines. It seemed then that things could or would only get better. Contrary to common wisdom, no one appreciated, from the top of the mountain, the height they had scaled. You only got it later, looking back from among the bones in the stillness and heat of the valley floor. Hadn’t Nixon said something like that when he resigned?

  Paying cash for the house was wise. As its value continued to madly increase, it became a critical asset in Elliot’s continual refinancing of the winery. Now it was mortgaged to its rafters — with the Los Angeles market tanking, for more than it was worth. The last thing the bank wanted to do was call it. Elliot was too bad to fail.

  There was living and working room enough for Elliot and, for a brief, happy time, Lucy (to whom he had promised a cheque) and their son, Mark, and then, for a shorter time, Lisa, followed by fickle Meryl and then, for a mere six months, Connie. It was a grand spot to entertain, though Elliot couldn’t think of the last time anyone was over for dinner. The door to Mark’s room was closed, and inside was as he had left it.

  Elliot had furnished the place in the same way he’d purchased it, with cash on the barrelhead. The dining room was airy, with a view over a tangled garden (horticulture becoming a diversion for Elliot as he learned his viticulture), and so a good setting for his treasured Charles Rennie Mackintosh chairs and tables. It was the liquidation of these which he was now negotiating.

  The asthmatic lug the dealer sent could barely squeeze through the front door. Perspiration caused his glasses to slip down his nose. To better survey the furniture he pushed the specs back up with a fat finger, whereupon they would steam up and again begin to slide.

  “To provenance,” he wheezed.

  “Right out of Glasgow, same period as the Willow Tea Rooms.”

  “I can see that! I mean before you. Where did you acquire them?”

  “Oh. From another writer, a countryman of mine, Lloyd Purcell. Writer’s writer, classic storyteller . . . so naturally he sort of . . . ran out of luck down here. Also there was a criminal matter, vice related. No one much harmed but he lost his green card and had to sell everything quickly. Now that I think about it, Lloyd came to acquire the set in much the
same way . . . another writer fallen on hard times.”

  “Like yourself?”

  “Me? No. I’m doing well, professionally. It’s my winery . . . The wine we make is proving a touch tougher than we expected, needs more bottle age than anticipated. Besides, the furniture has some bad associations for me.”

  “No one died on it or anything?”

  “No. Relationships. Failed ones.”

  “Oh,” he said with unmasked disgust, as if Elliot had spilled seed on them. He circled the table, reaching out to finger the oak of the high-backed chairs. “There is obvious wear.”

  “They’re going on a hundred years of age.”

  “I mean, recent.”

  “I believe furniture is meant to be used. It wasn’t purchased as an investment.”

  “Feel the same way about wine?” The intruder now lifted one of the chairs and studied the underside of the seat.

  “Yes. Meant to be drunk,” said Elliot. This caused his bulky guest to laugh, derisively, as though Elliot had that wrong too.

  “Our house auctioned the contents of Barry Hart’s cellar. There were bottles once owned by Bing Crosby, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre. Let me tell you, there’s money in keeping it.”

  “Barry in financial difficulties?”

  “No. Converting his cellar into a panic room.”

  “A room hardly seems enough; I would have thought an actor of Barry’s standing would want a full-blown panic suite.”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything. The table would be an exceptional piece” — he laid the chair down and pointed with his chin — “if it hadn’t been repaired.”

  “That was done before I got it.”

  “Regardless,” he said, taking a showy breath. “What were you imagining it might fetch?”

  “I thought a few hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Heavens, no!”

  “I’ve kept up with prices on the Web,” said Elliot.

  “This set is not . . . pristine, nor, I suspect, complete.”

  Elliot was worried this might arise.

  “Perhaps not. Though no one knew of any more than the four chairs.”

  “Had six originally.”

  “Definitely?”

  “Absolutely certain,” He looked past Elliot and proceeded, unbidden, into the adjoining living room. “What about these?” he asked.

  He was hovering over one of a pair of snooker-room chairs, also Mackintosh, also from the Purcell sale. They had low, curved backs, the line and ornament of which seemed to anticipate the modern. The wood was unblemished. They were still upholstered in their original white calico.

  “I wasn’t going to sell those.”

  “They are much the more interesting pieces.”

  “At auction?”

  “Look, I’ve seen dining sets fail to meet the reserve. These . . . Are they snooker chairs?”

  “Yes,” answered Elliot.

  “These will sell.”

  “Take them and the dining-room set as a package then. I won’t break up the lot.”

  The assayer was still looking at the chairs covetously. He pulled a cellphone out of his pocket and held it up between them. “Will I call for a truck to pick it up?”

  “What’s your offer?”

  “With these included, two hundred and twenty thousand, tops. I’ll be honest with you, if you want to wait, get the word out to the collecting community in the U.K., then more, but right now . . .”

  “No. I haven’t the time to wait,” Elliot said, even though it wasn’t nearly enough. “Let’s have on with it.”

  The fat man placed the call.

  Elliot meant what he’d said: wine was to be drunk. It should be kept until maturity but never “collected,” never thought of as an asset to appreciate. Nor should it be accompanied by too much palaver — he was beginning to doubt that tastings, such as the fiasco he’d led earlier in Bel Air, did much to increase most people’s enjoyment. It was great fun for the fanatics and geeks but a bore to everyone else. Attaching too much importance or ceremony to wine’s service killed its magical agency to spur conviviality. And above all, wine was culinary, to be taken with food. He loathed the practice, common in his professional community, of serving heavy red or white table wines at receptions or post-screening parties. He might allow for a more frivolous Champagne — better, the lightest Mosel Kabinett — but never anything built to wash down roasted joints of meat or game birds. Feeling so strongly about the matter of food’s symbiotic relationship with wine was now the only thing that made Elliot eat at all. He had lost his appetite. (If he did not consciously force himself to take sustenance, he would waste. Lucy worried that he was looking thin.)

  And so, if he was to have wine, he would have food. This night he sat at the cedar table in his yard with a plate on which were some thick shavings of a hard pecorino cheese, a few slices of beef tongue and salami, a small piece of bread, and some olives. To drink he opened a tart Barbera d’Alba. He would drink it all, tonight. He would fight and maybe lose to the desire to open a second. To drink by oneself was to be contemplative. Or depressed, depending how you saw it. Or lonely — definitely lonely.

  A consequence of Elliot’s rudimentary learning in viticulture was some knowledge of “dry” farming. (He was among those who held that drip irrigation made for lazy vines, while thirsty plants produced more intense fruit, fruit with an urgent need to preserve its threatened DNA.) Elliot had put this wisdom to use when he planted the rear of his yard with natives and other desert plants. A chapparal with yucca and laurel sumac, prickly pear and white sage. It was once a retreat, a place where Elliot got his best thinking done. Now he worried there.

  Until Mike stated it so starkly, Elliot had been able to avoid confronting the fact that he hadn’t worked as a screenwriter for many months. Even then his most recent paying gigs had been “polishes,” passes at dreadful scripts in a last-ditch attempt to save them — unsuccessfully, it turned out. His heart wasn’t in it. The screenplays were too poor to inspire interest or hope, and Elliot’s changes were forced and arbitrary, changes made for their own sake, nothing that bettered the original.

  The strictures of the pictures, the heroic leads, the love interests, the reliance on gun violence to up the dramatic stakes, the damned “inciting incidents,” the three or four or nine (depending on the current operating theory) prescribed acts, their value as star vehicles, beginningmiddleend — none of it had anything to do, as far as Elliot was concerned, with telling stories with moving pictures. The cinema was to have freed the story, abandoned linearity, cut loose the nineteenth-century novel.

  He put his final disillusionment down to being asked of his screenplay The Feinting Spell (blue-balled teen pretends to be vampire to get girls), twice, at different pitches on the same day: “This is a comedy, right?” But then, what did Elliot’s feelings on the condition of the contemporary film narrative have to do with anything? His job was to provide a service, and he did not. He’d seen this problem coming but assumed that by now he would have left Los Angeles and the entertainment industry for his idyll. There, looking out over his rolling rows of vines, combed over the contour of his land, he supposed he would continue to write. Never again screenplays or scripts for television. Prose, he supposed, maybe something for the theatre. But maybe, just maybe, nothing at all.

  The sun drowned in the Pacific. The sky was Fleurie. The bottle of Barbera was empty. Elliot went to fetch another.

  Three

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to beat the traffic. Ever. Traffic had won a decisive victory and held Los Angeles pinned in a triumphant chokehold. The 1, with its views north along the coast, was less congested than Highway 5 but added an extra hour to Paso Robles. Those times he’d gone farther, up to the prison in Soledad in a futile attempt to visit Mark (who continued to refuse to see him), he’d taken Highway 5 up and, to try to soothe but finally only numb his broken heart, the coastal highway back.

  Elliot found that keeping a fleet pace on the ro
ad, particularly with stirring music played at an injudicious volume, cleared the head. A sluggish advance had quite the opposite agency and induced black rumination. He saw the line of cars ahead slowing and gathering.

  Mark’s trial was the end of Elliot and Lucy. The excruciating bureaucracy of the proceeding, the dull, grinding inevitability of the thing, gave them time to consider nothing so much as the space between them, to notice that even after all these years neither could be fully and freely themselves with the other. Neither Lucy nor Elliot could let themselves howl in despair at what was happening to their son and expect complete and utter forgiveness from the other. They loved one another. But not enough for that.

  There wasn’t any courtroom drama. Everybody knew the ending. It was the slow agony of dying not by a knife but by a cudgel. When it was said and done, the shocking sentence passed, Mark was led away and Elliot called to him, “I’ll come and see you as soon as I can.” And Mark turned and said, “Don’t bother.”

  It was the most horrible thing he could recall. The memory was so unendurably painful that Elliot felt no shame in running and hiding from it.

  The traffic inched up the coast. One started seeing the occasional vineyard from the highway a few miles south of Montecito.

  They’d been at it in California from the time of the Spanish missions, planting vines so they could make wine. Perhaps it was because of that term, “winemaking,” that people imagined the enterprise was by man’s hand, that the drink was created from a recipe. But at its best wine was an expression of the place, not the ingredients. One wanted to taste the oyster shells in which the Chardonnay of Chablis grew, the lime in Alsatian Riesling. There was sometimes tinkering, in Bordeaux — softening a Cabernet-based wine with chocolatey Merlot, seasoning it with small admixtures of Petit Verdot or Malbec, co-fermenting Syrah with a dash of floral Viognier in Côte-Rôtie — but it was essentially, when done right, farming, not cooking. Châteauneuf-du-Pape was unique among serious wines in being made from so many grapes, but even so, its alchemy was as much in the agriculture as in the mix.