Easy to Like

by Edward Riche

  He turned the newspaper’s wrinkled page. “Leadership Vacuum at Pubcaster,” said a headline above many column inches of print and a small, mysterious photograph of a densely treed gorge. It looked good as a sleeping pill.

  “On Tuesday, CBC chairman Jean Bousquet cut short a trip to France, where he had been attending the Cannes Film Festival, to address the widening crisis affecting the public broadcaster’s English-language television service.”

  Cannes ended months ago, thought Elliot: must have been the TV market, MIPCOM. He continued to read.

  “In a hastily called news conference, Bousquet announced that he had, yesterday, accepted the resignation of Executive Vice President of English Television Stanford Heydrich. ‘Stanford Heydrich came to the CBC with a vision of renewal,’ said Bousquet. ‘I accept his resignation with great regret.’” Heydrich, apparently, had become embroiled in a scandal stemming from the creation and scheduling of a new daytime chat program on CBC television, Afternoons with Mac, slated to be hosted by CBC employee Jill MacDonald — to whom Heydrich was romantically linked. Ms. MacDonald was described as a sometime on-air personality who occasionally provided weekend national weather forecasts for CBC NewsWorld.

  “Mr. Heydrich,” read Elliot, “has stated that he plans to return to the private sector. According to Mr. Bousquet, an executive search for a replacement has already commenced. No interim VP will be appointed.”

  Heydrich’s resignation had come at a crucial time for the CBC, just as the fall season was set to begin. Moreover, a gleeful sidebar explained, it was not the first such woe to befall the CBC that year. In March, the highly touted, and reputedly costly, late-night talk effort The Benny Malka Show was cancelled due to abysmal ratings. The eponymous host of the program disappeared soon after the announcement. “Toronto Police investigated numerous sightings of Malka in area parks and green spaces,” explained the caption below the photograph, “but were unable to conclude whether he was even still in the GTA.” Reports that Malka was living as a sort of wild man in the ravines near the Don Valley were dismissed as urban mythology.

  Elliot had grown up watching the CBC, simply because it was one of only two stations available in his hometown. It had never been much to get excited about but did possess a certain charm in its inability to be slick. The CBC could do adequate, vaguely liberal but cautious news and information, but its frequent forays into entertainment were cringe-making. The CBC, maybe Canada in general, was too self-conscious. The grown-ups couldn’t pretend in a way that was second nature to Americans. With his years in the screen trade, Elliot now believed that the best film actors did nothing other than be utterly convinced by their own lies. The best performances came from actors who merely thought they were, at the moment, the character they were playing. They were dissociative psychopaths. They weren’t method actors; rather, they were method humans.

  The CBC programs Elliot best remembered, and then only fuzzily, were about nature; typically, documentaries about the people and fauna of the north. Most memorable were the “Hinterland Who’s Who” public service announcements, produced by the National Film Board of Canada for the Canadian Wildlife Service and dropped into plentiful unsold advertising slots. Elliot could hum the forlorn flute part that signalled the beginning of each one, and still knew that the muskox formed a circle to defend against wolves (a strategy that a proved a failure against the rifle), that the beaver’s teeth were yellow and never stopped growing, and that the moose was the largest member of the deer family.

  It was quaint, really, that a vice president of the CBC could be forced to resign for having fucked the weathergirl and then given her a show as a reward. In the Darwinian world of television in the States, it wouldn’t have mattered until the ratings came in.

  There were other stories in the newspaper about sundry goings-on in Canada, stories of too small or too regional an interest to have attracted attention outside the country. At least the disgraced former VP of English Television had some excitement in his life. It was a shame the CBC turfed him; he was the kind of leader Canada needed.

  The paper had done the work of a couple of Lectopa. Elliot dozed off.

  Five

  “BIENVENUE À TORONTO said the voice over speakers the moment the plane’s wheels finished bouncing on the runway at Pearson. But it was only after waiting another hour and a half on the tarmac, waiting to be assigned a gate, that Elliot set foot on his native soil, or at least its flooring, for the first time in more than a decade.

  His scheduled connection was tight. He jogged to his departure gate. Studying the ticket for the next leg, to Paris, he saw that he was again assigned to the back of the bus. This time he took it up with the ticketing agent at the gate.

  “There was even room in business class,” he complained of the last flight.

  “Can I see your ticket, sir, and your passport.”

  She was the youngest Air Canada employee Elliot had met that day, but she looked tired. She picked up the phone and said something Elliot could not make out. This was Canada. Elliot felt himself relax, his shoulders dropping. Action was finally being taken. Business class. To France.

  “So you’ve managed to sort it out? I’d prefer an aisle seat.”

  “I’m afraid not, sir,” she said.

  “But it’s —”

  “The issue is not with your ticket, sir. It’s your passport.”

  “What about it?”

  “It expires in six days.”

  Elliot snatched the document back from her hands. It was true. In the photo, taken but five years earlier, Elliot looked a decade to the good, less drawn, eyes reflective. Those were happier days; the first bottlings of Locura Canyon were nearing early maturity and would, Elliot mistakenly believed, soon to be ready to show. Lucky Silverman’s EA was telling him that the coverage on one of his scripts — none other than The Feinting Spell — was positive. Lloyd Purcell had a thing that was sure to go with HBO and had guaranteed Elliot a couple of episodes. Patricia Franchini from Warner was asking whether he had time to take on an adaptation of a hot chicklit property. None of it would ever happen.

  “I’ve called Border Services,” said the ticketing agent. “Someone will be here in a moment. If you wish to re-book the flight, please call 1-888-247-2262.”

  His Border Services escorts fancied themselves cops but were, in the main, too fat for a beat. Elliot dared not make a crack; he could tell from the way they carried themselves, and from the number of African and South Asian women sitting around the office weeping, that they were drunk with power. For an interrogator Elliot drew a blockhead — once of Newfoundland, judging from his accent. The fellow typed some details from Elliot’s dated papers into a computer. The profile the machine produced must have been particularly dull, for the bulky official yawned, an effort that pulled his lips above his gums and aired his tonsils. He made no effort to cover his mouth.

  “Why would you change your name from Johnston to Jonson?” he opened.

  “Lot of Johnstons out there, my name is my business. I’m my own brand.”

  “And you go by your second given name, Elliot?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Pierre Elliott Trudeau?”

  “He wasn’t yet a public figure in English Canada when I was born, he was still just another anonymous Jesuit Franco-ist, catholic in his sexuality.”

  “What?”

  “Or perhaps by then he was a socialist playboy. I went to university in Montreal, and my Québécois friends, they kept changing the story.”

  Mr. Border Services took a moment to simply stare at Elliot and scowl before returning his gaze to the computer screen.

  “What’s a bayman like yourself doing down there in Tinseltown?”

  “I’m sorry?” Elliot said, though he well understood the question.

  “What’s wrong with Canada? You have a problem with Canada?” He was leaning back in his chair and pushing his gut toward the roof. Was he displaying the great mound in an att
empt to somehow intimidate Elliot? Maybe he was doing some sort of exercise to try to reduce the thing. He remembered his agent pushing his belly into his desk. Maybe it was a new exercise craze.

  “No, not at all. Why would you even suggest such a thing?” Elliot said.

  “You’ve been living down there for years. Is there some reason you left Canada?”

  “Yes, there is. I’m in the film and television business. There wasn’t a whole lot going on here. I got a green card in the lottery, went from there.”

  “I know someone who works in the Canadian television business.”

  “Lucky them,” said Elliot.

  “You know a program called The Littlest Hobo?”

  “I have a vague recollection.”

  “My cousin . . .” He thought for a second. “My second cousin, actually, he moved up here from Leading Tickles in Notre Dame Bay. Up to Guelph it was. His daughter is — was — married . . . they divorced . . . was married to the fellow who owned the dogs that starred in that show.”

  “Dogs?”

  “They had two or three that looked alike, pack of Hobos.”

  “I remember now. Alsatians, right?”

  “German shepherds. Good show.”

  A dog barked. Elliot convulsed. The border guard tensed and congealed. In a moment he relaxed and grinned. He slapped his wooden desk with an open palm.

  “Fuck me,” the guard said. “Talking about dogs!”

  The dog barked again. The sound came from a room beyond, might have passed a couple of walls, but travelled easily on account of its deep pitch. Sourced from a bigger breed of cur, Elliot reasoned. The heavy official came forward, leaning over his desk. “That’s bad news for someone trying to bring a souvenir back from down south. You should see ’em, the expression on their face when there is this dog barking at their bag. And then they realize they’re caught. I’ve seen fellas shit themselves.”

  “I can see how they might,” said Elliot.

  The agent moved back and straightened in his chair. Perhaps he had completed his full set of gut thrusts.

  “By comparison, your problems are small,” he said. “You have to get a new passport.”

  “Can you issue me something temporary?”

  The man laughed. “It’s not a hall pass.”

  “But I have a ticket to Paris,” said Elliot. The man now stood and turned around to a stack of filing cabinets; on the top of these was a levered press into which he slid Elliot’s passport. He grabbed the lever and pulled it down with swift force. The passport was Swiss-cheesed. He put the punctured booklet in a small plastic bag and then into his desk drawer.

  “The French would turn you back.”

  “But —”

  “Where will you be staying?”

  Staying? Jesus, this could not be happening.

  “I’ll wait at the airport.”

  “Mr. Jonson, this is going to take days, if not weeks.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. This is your fault. All you had to do was read the expiry date.”

  “I’ve gotten a new passport from the consulate in Los Angeles. It didn’t take more than a week, and that was in another country.”

  “You’ve obviously been away a while.”

  Elliot put his head in his hands. The tile floor was speckled with something that Elliot’s shuffling feet had streaked.

  “If it’s going to take that long I might as well go back to Los Angeles.”

  “Mr. Jonson, you’re not grasping what’s happening. You aren’t going anywhere.”

  Elliot sat up.

  “No?”

  “You can travel within Canada. That’s it. You could go back to the Rock for a visit. Back to Newfie?”

  Elliot grasped it now.

  “Fuck that. I’ll stay here. I’ll stay here in . . .” Elliot had to think for a moment. “. . . Toronto.”

  “Have you been in Toronto before?”

  “Of course. Years ago.”

  “So. Where do you think you will be staying?”

  “In a hotel. Downtown, I guess.”

  “Okay. There’s a passport office on Victoria Street. You won’t make it today.”

  Elliot looked at his watch. It was true.

  A Sikh chauffeur took him from Pearson Airport to his hotel, the Four Seasons in Yorkville, via the Gardiner Expressway, a downtown feeder. Everywhere repairs were being undertaken. The asphalt was like a rope binding the city and coming unbraided under strain. This eight-lane strip was as clogged with smoking vehicles as anything in Los Angeles. It conveyed Elliot alongside the shore of an Ovaltine lake and presented, from its elevation, a vista of the city’s downtown. The place had surely doubled in size since Elliot last saw it: the spire of the CN Tower now seemed to rise out of an actual metropolis and its exhalations, rather than look down upon a little city north of Cleveland. When the landmark came into view, his driver sighed loudly. When Elliot said nothing, he did it again, more theatrically.

  “What is it?” Elliot asked.

  “The Tower is no longer the tallest free-standing structure in the world.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Now what do we have? Ontario was capable of greatness, sir. But with the manufacturing jobs going to China, we have become a have-not province. Imagine our shame at this. We are like Newfies now. How many are needed to pick peaches? I will end up back in the Punjab.”

  To signal his disinterest Elliot opened his window. He sniffed. He was possessed of a natural gift for smell that he had refined in the cellars of Locura Canyon: making wine required, more than anything, olfactory acuity. When he travelled he could place himself with his nose. He guessed he could identify blindfolded Aix’s telltale lavender and Gauloises or Firenze’s distinctive diesel and cooked fungi. The town of his birth, St. John’s, was easily known by the brackish and fecal hum of its harbour. Eucalyptus and ominous woodsmoke told him Los Angeles’s ground-level ozone was about to be cut by the Red Winds.

  Could he, similarly, recognize Toronto by its tang? The atmosphere outside the airport terminal had been indistinct, the fumes and hurried breath of transit everywhere. He’d hoped that, once en route, he’d be able to sense something familiar from the open limousine window. But the noxious billows of the road were in such concentration as to mask anything natural. The air quality was as bad as in Los Angeles. Toronto had come a long way, and, from the stink of it, it had come by car.

  Having checked in and dumped his bags, Elliot hit the street. He was in need of a glass of wine. He headed for College Street, which he remembered as being the spine of a Little Italy. When he was last in Toronto, the strip had housed a few serviceable restaurants, and he hoped he could find a place that might offer the modest plate of antipasti he desired.

  The neighbourhood, while still ostensibly Italian, had been buffed and deodorized by colonizing scene-seekers. Where once were boisterous families of Calabrese and the occasional artist or student, there were now throngs of poseurs. There was preening and posturing and, most hopelessly, searching sideways glances to see whether anyone noticed. Everyone was awaiting someone else’s arrival, only they didn’t know who that person might be.

  To be fair, you could see the temptation. The scale and situation of the street were perfect for staging urban adventure. The Los Angeles hipsters searching for parking on the wider avenues of Silver Lake would covet such a prospect.

  The couple of workingmen’s bars seemed more Portuguese than Italian now, but finally Elliot came upon a joint with a promising menu and aroma and, owing to the stark lighting of the interior, an absence of wannabe boulevardier. The coffee-with-cream beauty who took his order explained that while there were no antipasti on the menu she was sure something could be put together. The wine list was not as accommodating, so Elliot settled on a tolerable, if internationally styled, bottle of Tuscan table wine.

  Out the window, Toronto appeared to be internationally styled as well, a condition its inhabitants undoubtedly mistook fo
r being cosmopolitan. Still, things had visibly improved since the ’70s and ’80s. The diversity of the population, and the ease with which these hues and shapes and manners mixed on the street, was something of a marvel. In Los Angeles, people had drawn back behind their respective mud walls. Toronto, this segment at least, wore its prosperity well, seeming not to have unconditionally surrendered to the consumerism of New York or L.A. Livable, if unexciting. But with excitement came trouble — and Elliot had quite enough of that.

  Elliot knew he wasn’t being as generous as he might, that he held every émigré’s conflicted contempt and nostalgia for the home country. One had to adopt a sort of chauvinism to justify or rationalize the decision to have moved on and, one hoped, up. Truthfully, the food now before him was as good as any back in Los Angeles. The two salamis on his plate were of the highest order, tasted to have been made by hand and dried in the air in the authentic fashion disallowed by North American health inspectors. The preserved red pepper, blistered sweet, was obviously homemade. The olives were surely sourced from North Africa, a better choice in a pinch than some mass-produced shite from Italy. The bread was excellent, a touch of salt improving on its Tuscan model, and the cloudy oil was the kind of fruit juice you found on the ground in Umbria. It was pleasant enough, the food even giving the ordinary wine a lift. Elliot was content until, after twenty minutes or so, he got the definite sense that the Norse thug tending the bar and the register was squinting at him, sizing him up. It was making Elliot uncomfortable enough that he called for his bill with a few glasses remaining in the bottle.