by Edward Riche
“I think issues related to the bid to continue hockey.”
“Issues regarding the Brier.”
“Lot of issues that require immediate attention.”
Yes, though Elliot, a trap. Setting traps was the foundation of British North America, was it not? In gratitude, Canada had gone so far as to put a beaver on its currency. The Brier? Curling, wasn’t it? It was. The men’s, no? And the ladies held the Tournament of Hearts. Yep, that was it. Every minute, more of Canada was coming back to him.
“I understand the urgency but . . .” Elliot said. He heard all three, Cuffs, Pipe, and Sandra, the chick from Barnaby Vesco, draw in and hold their breath.
“. . . but I will have to come up to speed, familiarize myself with the files before . . .”
Pipe and Cuffs laughed. Sandra allowed herself to exhale. Elliot could not fathom what was funny.
“Don’t worry,” said Cuffs.
“You’ll have Hazel,” said Pipe. “No worries.”
“Hazel?” wondered Elliot.
“Hazel Osler,” Cuffs and Pipe both said at once.
“She’s your second,” Cuffs detailed, “though that seems an unjust diminutive. I believe her title is . . .”
“Executive in Charge of Production?” guessed Pipe.
“Something like that. She’s been at the CBC for years and years. She’s a genius.”
“A genius,” agreed Pipe. “Polymath, mind like a steel trap.”
Trap?
“She’s the institutional memory.”
“Started here as a tot. Fresh out of U of T . . . at nineteen years of age!”
“Production assistant on the later years of The Friendly Giant.”
“And she took his advice.”
They were talking about a CBC show that Elliot knew, a children’s show from his youth.
“She looked waaaaay up?” ventured Elliot, quoting from the show’s opening sequence.
“Exactly,” said Pipe.
“She sounds like the ideal candidate for this job.” Elliot might as well have farted.
“Yes, that . . .” said Cuffs.
“Auditor General, I’m afraid,” said Pipe. “Gender imbalance, you see. Air on the seventh floor rather thick with estrogen. Entire executive with the exception of the president himself and Leo Karek in News are women.”
“And an even higher percentage of middle management,” said Cuffs. “At the same time our technical staff is overwhelmingly male. It’s a climate thing, there is this sense these days that boys are being left behind. So . . . to be politically correct . . .”
“Hazel, being the progressive type, felt, in the light of the AG’s report, she couldn’t put herself forward.” Pipe was obviously saddened by this. “Awful, this equity business.”
“I sure hope the windows open over there,” Sandra said, organizing her papers.
“Sorry?” said Elliot.
“When they all start going through menopause at the same time the place is going to be bedlam under a broiler.”
The three men stood mute.
“Sorry.” Sandra now looked at them, face flushed in full mortification. “That was inappropriate. Going through it now with my mother and . . . Please, I wish I’d never said it.”
The silence continued until, trying to crack a joke, Pipe turned to Cuffs and said, “You get Jerome.”
“And I’ll call Rusty,” answered Cuffs. “Expect to hear something official in a week or so, Mr. Jonson.”
Sandra was smiling at Elliot. It was a professional gesture, something practised in a mirror and devoid of real meaning. Her whites were indeed pearly, though her central incisors, her “two front teet,” seemed, somehow, oversized.
Two
THE CBC HEADQUARTERS was a featureless block in Toronto’s downtown Anywhere. It could have been the Frankfurt offices of a Swiss underwriter: there was a (likely inadvertent) pattern of red crosses, like those of the Knights Templar, repeated in each of the windows. In the parts of France Elliot frequented, people would have spotted the religious symbol. But Canadians were not reflexively on the lookout for marauders back from the Crusades . . . yet.
Hazel Osler was there to greet Elliot on his first day in the building. She was a tall woman, in her slight heels just inching out Elliot. Her hair was silver and black, with a Susan Sontag skunk stripe of white. Wearing it back and up, as she did, one could not help but think, after a time, of the Bride of Frankenstein. She wore a smart woollen dress to the knees, with a fine belt to show off her waist. It wasn’t a female executive’s power suit: the earth-and-green weave made it too English-country-living for that. She wore tortoiseshell specs that vamped with restraint on a cat’s eye. She did her best to confine and thus deflect attention from her breasts. She was all business. Elliot guessed she was a few years older than he, but he could not be certain. He put out his hand and she, with a hesitation Elliot noticed, put out hers.
She was doubtless self-conscious, for they were crooked, swollen, the knuckles raw.
“They are making you a temporary pass,” she said.
“Not being given a long tenure, am I?”
Hazel laughed.
“Until we get your picture. I will take you to the security office at the John Street entrance later.”
A security guard appeared with a plastic identity tag. Elliot’s name was spelled “Johnson.” Not for the first time: CBC’s communications department got it wrong in the press release announcing his appointment. They also somehow managed to confuse a number of the details from his CV, giving him more profile and influence in Hollywood than he held. Hazel apologized for the mistakes over the phone, offering that the communications department of the CBC was a sort of internal exile, a gulag of incompetence for employees who might have been overwhelmed by more onerous responsibilities in other departments.
Elliot’s new passport was similarly in error, issued in his birth name, “Wesley Elliot Johnston.” Elliot called the office and explained that it had been legally changed. The response was that while that might be the case, the change was made before the “centralization of services.” A computer program refused to associate Elliot’s social insurance number with any other name. Remedy, the gent on the other end of the line assured him, was available in the form of yet more forms and affidavits from consular officials in Los Angeles, a justice of the peace, and a clergyman.
Scant coverage was given to the CBC in the press. What little there was, Hazel warned Elliot, tended, for reasons just and otherwise, to be negative. Elliot recalled the article he’d fallen asleep reading on the plane from Los Angeles. But Elliot’s appointment was being heralded as a positive one, in that he was the first VP in memory to possess any experience in film or television before taking on the job. The scribblers in the trade rags and the back pages of the papers would grant him a brief honeymoon. A couple of blogs pointed out that Elliot’s oeuvre was hardly one to inspire confidence, but they were read mostly by their own authors.
Elliot lifted his valise so that he could pass through a locking turnstile. “The security seems . . .”
“Since 9/11, and then the Mississauga 13 . . . or however many there actually were in the end,” said Hazel, beckoning Elliot forward.
“I wouldn’t have thought the CBC would be a target of . . .” Elliot hesitated; he had never heard of the Mississauga 13. “. . . jihadists. I wouldn’t have thought it — we — would be on their radar.”
“I doubt we are,” said Hazel. A natural toe-to-heel gait gave her a bounce, recalling for Elliot coyotes retreating between the rows of vines. Her bum was lovely. “That said, we have a fair number of disgruntled former employees as well as a few hundred nuts that hate the CBC.”
“What are their reasons?”
“Most of them perceive us as having a liberal bias and an agenda to match.” Hazel looked back over her shoulder at Elliot. She kept a step ahead of him.
“Some truth to that, I suppose,” said Elliot.
“Not
at all,” Hazel laughed. “Maybe at one time but not anymore. And then . . .” They were walking into an atrium that rose the entire height of the building. “There are people who hate some of our shows so much . . .”
“I hate a lot of shows,” said Elliot. “I change the channel.” In truth, Elliot’s last changing of the channel had been absolute. In a fit of rage over the paucity of watchable programming, he had yanked the cable from the wall of his Los Feliz home and, in the process, shredded several feet of (as yet unrepaired) drywall.
“Yes, I’m afraid most people do reach for the remote,” she said, pushing a button for the elevator. Elliot saw she wore no rings, perhaps because of the condition of her hands. Elliot guessed she suffered from severe arthritis.
So as not to stare at Hazel’s bent joints, Elliot looked up, measuring his new place of work. The lofty interior hall was clearly supposed to make the building soar, to buoy it, but the dimensions diminished its inhabitants. High above, the employees trudging the balconies trimming the void went unsmiling. It begged, as though it were some Incan shrine, ritual sacrifice, bodies tossed off the precipice and into the cavern, into the pit; but it was modern, in the Stalinist sense of the word.
On the seventh floor, Hazel stuck to the wall as she walked. Elliot couldn’t resist the rail overlooking the atrium. Even if it was only for a brief interregnum, this was now his domain. He was a tourist who might as well enjoy taking it in.
“I’m sorry,” said Hazel, “but I can’t stand to look down there. Vertigo.”
“Right.”
“First, your new office, and then it’s almost an entire day of reviewing the troops.”
Elliot was disappointed with his new digs. They were spacious enough, a corner suite with room for a couch, chairs, and a coffee table and a sturdy-looking empty bookcase. There was a tiny private bathroom, and four television monitors hung from the ceiling to be viewed from the desk; a floor model serviced the casual nook. Still, it was not as luxurious as something befitting a vice president. And there was a distinctly acrid note to the air. Hazel must have seen his hound-nose twitch.
“There was a . . .” She had not hesitated in speech until now. It underlined how fluent and easy a conversationalist she normally was. “ . . . an accident. A few years ago there was a long strike — actually, a lockout.”
“Yes, I knew about that.”
“And . . . the vice president at the time, Bernard Hunt, he was putting a videotape in the player . . .” Hazel pointed to the television on the floor. “There was something wrong with the wiring and he was electrocuted.”
“You’re not saying that the smell . . .?”
“Some of the carpet was burned.”
“Oh.”
“The carpet was replaced. The room has been repainted. The furnishings are new. It’s just . . . the building is sealed, you see. There are no opening windows. You get used to the smell. I hardly notice it anymore.”
This was the public sector, Elliot reminded himself.
“Seems incredible . . . a VCR,” was all Elliot said. “You never know what it’s going to be.”
“There was a thorough police investigation. They ruled out tampering, or there wasn’t sufficient data to make that determination. I never believed the story that was floating around. It would have taken a lot of ingenuity and enterprise to booby-trap the thing. And poor Mr. Hunt, because of the terms of the contracts in that era, wasn’t allowed to put a tape in a machine himself, he was obliged to ask a technician to do it for him, so he probably never really learned how it was done.”
“I’m allowed to pop in a DVD now, though?”
“Absolutely. I think it’s generally perceived that management won.” Hazel needlessly lowered her voice. “Leadership at the union . . . not of the highest standard. But, strictly off the record, I’m of the view that this was one of those instances where everyone managed to lose.”
“Hardly a personal triumph for Bernie?”
“No. And he was one of the best we’ve had.” She shrugged. Another woman entered, portly, in a deliberately drab grey skirt-and-jacket combo. Hazel seemed to be expecting her. “This is Stella Neary, your personal secretary. Best in the building, so you will want to keep her.”
“Ms. Neary.”
“Mrs. Neary. And please, ‘Stella.’”
“And you can call me Elliot.”
“No, I’ll stick with Mr. Jonson, if it’s all right with you.”
“As you wish.”
“There have been a number of letters for you, Mr. Jonson, mostly congratulatory notes and welcomes. This one was more personal,” Stella said, handing Elliot an envelope that had been opened with a blade. “Should I vet correspondence in the future?”
“Please, would you?”
“I’ll give you ten minutes or so,” said Hazel. “Then we can meet some of the managers who report directly to you.”
Hazel escorted Stella out. Elliot sat at his desk. His first? He surely must have used a proper secretaire, of polished wood, with drawers, sometime in his professional life — but if he had, he could not remember when. He worked on a computer on a wide table in his home in Los Angeles. What was supposed to have been his desk at the vineyard office, a utilitarian metal thing, had been taken over by Bonnie before he’d put so much as a bottle of cognac in the bottom drawer. There was a laptop on a bench in the winery, in the room with the fermentation tanks, which he used while standing. No, he supposed he’d never ridden a desk.
He opened his valise and took out the contents: a blank pad of legal paper and a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and some dental floss. He had no idea what he was supposed to do. He remembered the envelope and withdrew from it a single sheet of paper. Had he seen a handwritten letter in a decade? The author’s hand appeared tremulous.
Elliot,
Was sure it couldn’t be you when I read that an Elliot “Johnson” got that gig at CBC but they named a few pictures and shows I knew you worked on. Never figured they’d have the sense.
Let’s get together soonest. I’ve got a play opening at the Theatre Passe Muraille backspace end of the month. I’ll have a pair of comps in your name at the box. Drinks!
Lloyd Purcell
The return address was Delaware Avenue. Somewhere just left, in every respect, of the city’s soft centre. It only made sense that old Lloyd had landed in Toronto. It would be good to see him.
Hazel had been correct: his entire day was taken up with meeting those directly beneath him in the corporate hierarchy. Elliot met fifteen of nineteen “Creative Heads.” He did not comprehend why there should be three people with the title “Creative Head, Variety” when the broadcaster carried no programs in the genre: “variety” had been pronounced dead twenty years earlier. Yet all three claimed to be terrifically busy — taxed, in fact — mostly with shooting down pitches from producers who hadn’t read the obit.
But for one lippy chick stinking of booze, cigarette smoke, and failure who took their first meeting as an opportunity to quit, each Creative Head greeted Elliot with an apologetic sycophancy. They forced smiles, laughed uncomfortably in the wrong places, and visibly braced themselves for a dressing down. It appeared his predecessor was a tyrant; Elliot’s comparative disengagement would be welcome. Probably, over time and in spite of himself, Elliot would become a better exemplar of the dickhead they expected. By their nature, most bosses were bullies and assholes. (There were so few full-time employees back at the vineyard that Elliot had been afforded only the opportunity to be a part-time blowhard. The Mexicans brought in to pick the grapes got away with pretending not to understand him.)
Elliot signalled his waning interest in the meetings by looking over the Heads and up to the four muted monitors hanging from the ceiling; this did nothing to stop them from talking about all the projects that were coming down the pipe. He decided he should take comfort in their blather. So what if he was responsible for programming the upcoming television season, an enterprise for which he was unq
ualified? He commanded an army to do it for him. As the last appointment of the day — the acting Creative Head, Commissioned Unscripted and New Media Initiatives Regions (Content Planning) — backed out the door, Elliot felt more at ease in his role.
Elliot thought there might be time to scan some of the show proposals and scripts the Heads had stacked on his desk. But Hazel was back.
“I will be candid if you can be discreet,” she said, closing the office door behind her and walking to his desk.
“Of course,” said Elliot. “Please speak freely.” He was relying on her doing so.
“I liked Bernard Hunt. He was not a brilliant man and he made mistakes. I believed his heart was in the right place. His intentions were good. He believed in public broadcasting —” Hazel stopped for a moment. She splayed her fingertips on the desk so that her hands, with their swollen joints, looked like scorpions. She rocked, her heel probably up out of one of her shoes. “But I held a different view of Stanford Heydrich. I was on the verge of resigning when he was forced out by his indiscretions. I’m speaking in strict confidence.”
“Yes.”
“And I volunteer this only as a necessary preface for the explanation as to why there are so many Creative Heads.”
Could Hazel read his mind? They’d only spoken on the phone a few times before meeting today.
“I wondered,” said Elliot.
“Appointing senior managers was Stanford’s way of deflecting and shifting blame, as well as a kind of displacement activity.”
“Displacement activity?”
“Übersprungbewegung. When animals are put under stress, they perform certain actions out of context. When you steal an egg from gull’s nest, it will start pulling out grass with its beak.”
“Scratching your head.”
“Exactly. Whenever there was problem — ratings, mandate, labour relations — mostly ratings — Stanford would make an appointment, create a new position. All to say . . . you will have to filter some of the noise.”
“Could we not cut their numbers significantly? Terminate the contracts of the least useful half?”