Easy to Like

by Edward Riche

  Walt spun on his heels, his heavy boots kicking up dust. He could not look at Elliot.

  “That’s crazy talk, Elliot. It’s wishful thinking. You’ve got all your hopes wrapped up in a grape people stopped growing fifty years ago. After a certain point you gotta get realistic about this.”

  “We have to strive, Walter, and if you’re going to say that, there also comes a point when you accept that this is the best you can do . . . We’re not there yet.” Elliot reached down and picked a grape that looked to be ripe from the bunch.

  “I’m saying that there comes a point when you learn that what you were chasing was never there in the first place. Imagine if you actually found some Matou stock. Your false hope could end your best excuse.”

  Elliot forgot what Walter said as soon as he bit into the grape. “Fuck sake!” It tasted like Sweet’N Low.

  “It’s been so goddamn hot that some of the grapes already have all the sugar we need, and some others, because of the uneven véraison, are weeks from being ripe. We’ll have to pick before they’ve developed and there will never be enough acidity.” Walter paused. “We could make a nice sweet Zinfandel, butterscotched up with American oak, zebra on the label, that lots of people could enjoy. ‘Zebra Zin.’”

  Elliot looked past his vines, over rolling country, land that begged to be covered on horseback, out to the other wineries that had sprouted in the area. Most of them, heeding the desires of the consumer, were going from strength to strength. Elliot, making decisions impulsively, half aping his French heroes, ignoring California viticultural orthodoxy and the public taste, was going from bad to worse.

  But Elliot couldn’t shake his conviction that giving consumers what they “wanted” was to fail to respect them. To his mind it was limiting their possibilities, diminishing their capacity to grow and change, and so holding them in contempt. There would come a time, he supposed, when all the other winemakers would realize they’d made a terrible mistake. But, like Haldeman Labs with their uniform green rows, their drip irrigation, their approved clones, and their marketing, they hadn’t yet come around.

  As for Elliot, he would sooner have his winery go down in flames than produce one fucking bottle of “Zebra Zin.” Feeling the heat of just such a blaze, Elliot’s reflex was to run.

  Four

  PACKING FOR FRANCE back in Los Angeles, Elliot didn’t even fill his carry-on. He thought this was a sign either of his essential freedom or of something sad that he could not understand because it was about himself. He had one stop before the airport. Lucy’s place in West Adams was out of his way, but the cheque was late. The books said he didn’t owe her anything. She was doing better than him. He was just too proud to admit it.

  Lucy’s was now the only Arts and Crafts house on Victoria Park Drive that hadn’t been restored. She didn’t seem to care.

  “I’m moving anyway.”

  “Where?”

  “Ascencion and I are going to get a place in Pico-Union. It’s close and it’s like half the price.”

  “The Peoples Temple — why not?”

  “It’s not far from there, actually.”

  When they were by for drinks last Christmas, Connie read the situation perfectly, but Elliot would not be convinced that his ex-wife was having an affair with her Salvadoran housecleaner. When he saw it was true, Elliot assumed Lucy was, with her acute liberal guilt, confusing pussy and politics. But moving in with Ascencion made it more than a dalliance.

  Hefty, hirsute Ascencion was glowering at Elliot now from an exquisite chair he’d given Lucy years ago. He’d found it in a small antique shop in Marseille. It was at a time when he was actively trying to rekindle the romance. He thought giving her a beautiful thing from France would make Lucy recall their time together there. But Lucy had only ever seen it as a chair, a gift from Elliot that was actually for himself.

  Elliot believed, because of its measured use of Art Nouveau ornament, that the piece might be by Édouard Colonna. He couldn’t see it in a place in Pico. Lucy didn’t know its worth. Would it be inappropriate to ask for it back? Put it along the lines of relieving her of the burden of moving it.

  “I have a cheque for you.” Elliot held up an envelope. Seeing no one coming for it, he laid it on the coffee table.

  “Gig?” asked Lucy.

  “No. Wine sales, actually.”

  Ascencion scoffed at Elliot’s lie. What did she know about wine or his business?

  “Wow,” said Lucy. “I never would have thought . . .”

  “You? Any work?” Elliot punished Lucy for her lover’s presumptuousness. Of course there was no work: Lucy was selling the house. She was grey-listed in town. Her last two features were modestly budgeted, justifiably lauded by the critics, and still lost money. And she was deducted points for being a woman and over forty. Lucy said she was abandoning “entertainment” and focusing on a couple of documentary projects. Elliot knew they would pose surprising questions, be filmically inventive, and connect, in a profound way, with a tiny audience. She was as whip-smart and original as when he’d first met her, when they made that film together, discovered France, sought their fortune. He still loved her.

  “You don’t really want to know about me, Elliot. So I will tell you that, yes, I saw Mark last week, and there’s been a positive development.”

  “Really?”

  “They’ve determined, the corrections people, that he is functionally illiterate.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Yes. And if you think about it, that explains a lot.”

  “No. He had a full-time tutor on Family Planning, what was his name? Kenneth.”

  “Did you ever know Mark to read?”

  “I . . . thought so. He played a lot of video games, so . . .”

  “And it was Kenneth, I believe, who introduced Mark to narcotics.”

  “I thought it was Harvey, the best boy.”

  “In any event, he’s taking a literacy program they offer there. The Muslims are encouraging him.”

  “Muslims?”

  “He’s converted to Islam.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am.”

  “I don’t think that’s good.”

  “They’ve got him reading.”

  “What? The Quran? In Arabic?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t convert if you’re not anything to begin with. We raised him with no beliefs.”

  “Nunca queria salir en television,” said Ascencion. “Nunca queria que todo el mundo le miraba!”

  What was she saying? Elliot’s Spanish was hopeless. Mark never wanted to be on television? Sure he did.

  “I want to do a doc,” said Lucy, “about the social cost of draconian drug laws in America.”

  “Not been done?”

  “Name one.”

  Elliot couldn’t.

  “Not a polemic, use Mark’s story as a thread.”

  “Mark won’t talk to me because I got him a job on a television show and now you want to make a movie about him. Didn’t you just hear your girlfriend say —”

  “I think he will see a difference between network television and an independent documentary. And he was a boy then, you don’t ‘get a job’ for a little boy. He’s a man now.”

  “Maybe. Listen, Lucy, when you’re speaking to him, please put in a good word. I’d like to talk.”

  “I tell him every time I visit.”

  “Thank you. That cheque is dated for next week. Some stuff has to clear.”

  The quickest route to the South of France was swift indeed and via, of all places, Toronto, Canada. Everything direct out of LAX or San Francisco or via Atlanta or New York was booked for the next several days. Elliot thought this was impossible, believing it a lie that was part of some sort of price-fixing conspiracy, the mechanics of which he couldn’t yet comprehend. He explained to Bonnie that many of the seats offered online were mere phantoms, posted to give consumers an illusion of choice. You could search and clic
k and call until your head fell off, but you would never get that cheap fare. Besides, on a long flight, anything over three hours, Elliot clung to a demand, stated in a rider in the nether regions of his contracts, that he travel in the front of the bus.

  He was on Air Canada to Toronto with a change to another Air Canada flight on to Paris and then a quick regional flyer to Nîmes. One way. It was a rush to make it, but at least it was with a top-drawer airline. It had been years since Elliot had flown his native country’s national carrier, but he remembered it as having excellent service.

  At the gate at LAX an Air Canada representative informed Elliot that there had been some mistake, that although he had purchased a business-class ticket, he was seated in row 23.

  “Is business class oversold?” Elliot asked.

  But the ticket agent looked past Elliot as though he were no longer there. Elliot asked again.

  “Sir, please, there are other customers in line.” The agent was a woman in her late forties, early fifties, mannish. Her hair was up in a bun, drawn masochistically tight.

  “I don’t care,” said Elliot. “You haven’t finished serving me.”

  “Yes, I have.” She was almost a baritone.

  “But I’ve booked and paid for a business-class ticket. I want to know why I am being assigned another seat.”

  “Then I recommend you call 1-888-247-2262.”

  “What? Now?”

  “Whenever you like. If you try now, though, you will miss your flight. You have to turn off the cellphone once you board.”

  “Why should I call an 888 number when you are standing right in front of me? There’s a computer terminal right there. You’re perfectly situated to sort this out.”

  “You’re not a terrorist, by any chance, are you, sir? I’m not going to have to call security, am I?”

  The whole point of taking this flight was how soon it was leaving Los Angeles. Vowing he would write a letter, to which no one would pay any heed, Elliot stomped off to the plane.

  Business class was almost empty. There were a couple of sleepy-looking Air Canada pilots in one row and a nattily dressed black man of at least seven feet in another — that was it.

  The plane was old. The shape of the cabin, the particular curve of the tubular enclosure, was familiar, but in distant memory. Seat 23B was threadbare and stained — with coffee, Elliot hoped. When he sat, his knees were against the seat in front of him. He would shortly explain the mix-up to a flight attendant and move forward to where he belonged. He searched the seatback pocket for one of the illustrated escape manuals to determine in what model of — jet? surely it was a jet — he was to be riding. The pouch hadn’t been cleaned since the inbound flight and contained several plastic wrappers, a couple of sections of the previous day’s Toronto Post and Leader — a paper Elliot remembered as a vaguely right-wing daily business rag — and crumbs. The edges of the three-way emergency escape foldout were getting furry, and there were ridges and blisters in the lamination. Elliot read that he was on a 737-300. He saw the problem: the aircraft scheduled for the flight must have been unavailable for some reason. That explained the trouble with his seat assignment and the antique flying machine. As long as it got him to his Toronto connection.

  A flight attendant now passed, looking with disgust into Elliot’s lap and counting under her breath. Judging from her age and disposition, this woman evidently came with the plane. An occasional visit to the barber, hot towels and the fixings, might cheer her up, thought Elliot. He thought he would wait for another stewardess with whom he might bring up his problem.

  The other woman patrolling the aisles in Elliot’s section of the plane looked grumpier than the first. She sighed loudly and closed the overhead storage bins with projected violence. Elliot was too frightened of her to even ask for a glass of water.

  Only after they were airborne and the seatbelt sign had been switched off did Elliot go looking for the attendant responsible for the business-class compartment. He found a man in his forties with baby blue contacts and a carotene complexion.

  Elliot explained his situation. The man looked at Elliot’s ticket, nodding as though he were agreeing, and then shrugged.

  “What a company, hey?” the steward offered. “Piece of shit outfit.”

  “They told me —”

  “— to call an 888 number. Yes, I know. Don’t bother, you’ll be on hold to Mumbai longer than the charge in your cellphone.”

  “I don’t want to make a fuss about it. I would like my seat in business class.”

  “You can try in Toronto.”

  “But then I will have already flown.”

  “I would really like to help you,” he said, “but I think that’s what they want me to do. They are trying, you know, to make us take on the responsibility of the ticketing agents. Once they do that, they’ll start laying them off. I was supposed to groom the aircraft today because the service in LAX didn’t show — they haven’t been paid in over a hundred and twenty days. I’m sure you can see my point.”

  Elliot shuffled back to 23B.

  If the blood-pooling confines of his seat weren’t bad enough, an hour into the flight miniature screens dropped from the ceiling and the in-flight entertainment commenced. The 737-300 did not provide a choice for viewers: you got a package of Canadian news and a movie.

  Some bald guy hosted the newscast. (You would never see that in the States.) Life in Canada didn’t seem to have changed all that much. The RCMP were reported to be turning into a bunch of bumbling crooks. Quebec separatism was back, having briefly waned, so the federal government was announcing more spending in La Belle Province. The disgruntled premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, wielding evidence of yet further Canadian colonial malfeasance, was either righteous or insane. A woman in British Columbia had fended off an attacking grizzly with her guitar. The hockey playoffs, featuring two teams Elliot had never heard of, were, inexplicably, still going, even though it was nearly fall — there was a danger they would overlap with the beginning of the next season. That was Canada this day. There followed some short travel features, an episode of Happy Days, which Elliot couldn’t remember as having been this terrible, and then, one hour into his five of mile-high confinement, the feature.

  Though he had never before seen a frame of the finished film, the first few seconds of image sent a chill of recognition down his spine. A poison began to transit from his optic nerves to his sphincter. Here was young megastar Barry Hart, his face flattered by applied hypoallergenic stage filth, eyes gleaming against the half minstrel, making his way, solo, through the overgrown hills of Laos, somewhere in Mexico (near Oaxaca, Elliot remembered). Elliot’s Vietnam script was — he’d thought — a transparent satire about the blood-soaked debacle in Iraq. But Marv Hinks over at Warner read the whole third draft, enthusiastically, straight. He saw it immediately as an action vehicle for Barry. So did Barry’s agent, Herb Devine. Elliot was only looking out for Marv’s and Herb’s feelings by not correcting this misinterpretation. Why insult the guys? And hadn’t Mike strongly advised him against writing it in the first place, quoting, for like the hundredth time, the George S. Kaufman chestnut “Satire is what closes on Saturday night”? Elliot would, it was understood, reshape the piece into the drama Marv thought it to be on the next pass. But Marv did not like Elliot’s next draft, in fact thought it “a step backward,” thought it had lost most of what he enjoyed about the previous draft.

  In Hollywood, a producer’s waning enthusiasm meant a new writer. After Elliot was shown from the project, seven more screenwriters were put on the case. Elliot ran into the last of these scribblers not long after shooting commenced on the picture, and felt it safe to reveal that the original premise had been misunderstood. This was a lapse in judgement, for when the movie was eventually eviscerated by the critics and tanked at the box, the credited writers, among whom Elliot was not, knew whom to blame. (Unjustly, thought Elliot now: the first couple of lines to emerge, haltingly, from Barry’s exquisite lips
bore no resemblance to anything Elliot had ever typed.) Jesus, was it bad! Elliot pulled off his headset and turned from the screen.

  How long to Toronto? In his haste to get on the flight, Elliot had neglected to bring his book or to score some Bromazepam with which to knock himself out. He fished around again in the seat pocket. There was the in-flight magazine, dedicated, as fate would have it, to the Napa Valley. Elliot flipped through the pictures. Napa looked better than it drank. It was a vile example of how the rich got richer, how dabblers, in concert with some mercenaries out of UC Davis, managed to charge suckers over a hundred dollars a bottle for their syrup. Three parts water to one each of vodka and Ribena: voilà Napa Cab. The only thing worse was those bubblegum Pinots out of Santa Barbara — Elliot could taste nothing but banana in those. In the year after the movie Sideways came out, that was all anybody served. Elliot despised obvious wines.

  Coming to a feature article on Fred Hanover and his Cab ranch, Elliot put the magazine back in its place and pulled out instead the rumpled newspaper.

  Elliot deduced he was looking at a Central Canadian edition, for there seemed few stories from Canada’s fringes. The economy was fucked, but less so than in the USA. This was cause for several columns of smug self-congratulation.

  There was a wine piece, actually having the temerity to recommend Canadian plonk. (Though maybe, with global warming, Elliot reasoned, it was becoming possible to grow grapes to ripeness in the north. It was certainly getting too hot in California.) There had not been any serious Canadian wine when Elliot was growing up. There were concoctions that were made in Canada — pinkish products full of bubbles, called things like Baby Duck — though whether of grapes, it could not be said. These drinks were considered a step below even the brand wines from Europe, the Black Towers and Mateuses, though, in truth, they were probably not that much worse.

  All the new Canadian wines discussed in the article were still named, like the Ducks, after animals of the boreal forest: foxes and owls and wolves. Elliot’s own label featured no tasteful line drawings, no watercolours of the rows of vines on the estate, no portraits, no critters, no elaborate wordmark, none of the branding that he had been told was essential to success in today’s marketplace. Elliot even insisted on employing a bland sans serif typeface. Someone once wondered aloud whether the bottle contained medicine. No matter, thought Elliot: his bottles wouldn’t require “packaging” because the content would speak for itself. And it did, but in a plaintive voice. Or, as in the case of vintages 1997 and 1998, in the banshee scream of a crack whore fighting off the police. Even 2002’s early whisper had become an agonized moan once the wine was in the bottle. The admixture wasn’t right. A touch, a seasoning, two rows’ worth of Matou de Gethsemane in the blend, for tension on the palate: that was the answer. Then Elliot’s wine would sing.