Easy to Like

by Edward Riche

  “I have it on good authority,” Hazel said, pounding back the remainder of her drink, “that 501 will be favourably reviewed in the Post and Leader. And I know the view that Reason is the best thing on television this year is held by every significant television critic in the country.”

  “Do we have those?” asked Elliot, getting a laugh from Rainblatt.

  “I only wish I could watch the shows,” said Rainblatt. “But this damn thing with my balance. I’m sure it’s going to be a great season.”

  “Thanks to Hazel,” Elliot offered.

  “Top managers always take the blame and always assign the credit.”

  Hazel openly rolled her eyes.

  “Nothing so noble, Victor. It really was Hazel’s season. ”

  “Then I suppose you’ll have to share this with her. Bartender?” Rainblatt pointed to something below the bar.

  The bartender produced a bottle of Isabelle d’Orange.

  Were Elliot’s face and neck reddening like a boy’s? Of course: it all made sense. Rainblatt’s reminding him of his unexplained absence from the dinner party was the bait, and then that line of inquiry about the smoking; now, like a trial lawyer, he was entering the incriminating exhibit into evidence. Of course Rainblatt had noticed Elliot studying the bottles, of course he noticed when one of two rare articles went missing. A pair was a pattern.

  “I thought I had two of these in the cellar, but when I went to fetch it there was only the one. I must have drunk the other one without knowing, though Pat Cahill says that’s unlikely.”

  “Cahill?” said Elliot, unable to take his eyes off the bottle.

  “He said I would have remembered it. I asked him what would be a good bottle to give you, and he said this one.”

  Elliot noticed tightness in his chest and let it go with a breath. “Thank you very much, Victor.” Rainblatt hadn’t a clue that the first bottle had been nicked and subsequently chugged. It was only some old wine in his basement. “I really do appreciate it.”

  “It’s hardly much of a gift for me, though, is it?” said Hazel polishing off her bourbon. “I don’t drink.”

  Rainblatt laughed, thinking Hazel was cracking a joke. “Stella tells me you’re off to California?” said Rainblatt to Elliot.

  “Yes, flight early tomorrow morning. Just for a couple of days. Things seem under control here.”

  “Business?”

  “Pleasure, actually. My winery.”

  “At least you won’t be in L.A. with those nutty Faranistas.”

  “Faranists. What about them?”

  “They arrested one on Barry Hart’s property, he was carrying a large bread knife and had a list of big Hollywood names. Don’t worry, Elliot, I didn’t see yours there.”

  “Any screenwriters at all?”

  Rainblatt seemed not to have heard him. “Sure seem to be a lot of crazies out there.”

  “California’s the last hope before you’d have to drown yourself in the Pacific,” said Elliot. “A diet, a religion, a high concept . . . people out there are predisposed to believe.”

  “Come out to the balcony,” said Rainblatt. “It’s time for a toast.”

  “On the balcony?” said Hazel, and then rattled her empty glass at the bartender.

  From up there Toronto looked the perfect place. The concrete and steel of the city seemed borne on a sylvan cloud, a metropolis in the high canopy. A turboprop plane approached the airport on the near island in the lake. It was a Miyazaki movie. Elliot reflected that he hadn’t really ended up in such a bad spot. He would come back here and visit after his permanent return to California.

  Elliot was sure Mike was overstating the danger in his going back to the States, but as a precaution, he’d had Bonnie book him a flight through San Francisco. Nobody from Los Angeles would see him. What harm could come of a few days among his vines?

  Rainblatt was crowded to the balcony’s edge by his audience. Elliot looked back over his shoulder and saw that Hazel was nerving it, her back pressed to the stone wall nearest the passage back into the bar, readied for a quick escape.

  “Please, everyone,” said Rainblatt. “Don’t worry, I will be brief.” The chuffed murmur of the free-boozed diffused in the hope that Rainblatt meant it.

  “Such an evening befits the launch of our new television season,” said Rainblatt. “Blue skies — the sort we’ve been talking about for a long time — above. I don’t mind admitting that things were b-b-bad — I doubt that if Elliot Jonson had known how bad they were he ever would have accepted his position. Thank goodness he did.”

  There was a ripple of applause, faint and fake enough to tell Elliot that, for those attending, he was mostly unknown or disliked.

  “The change in leadership brought bold changes in direction. We should all be thankful that Elliot Jonson chose to come home. I want to —”

  “Can’t hear back here!” called Hazel.

  “Sorry,” said Rainblatt. He pulled a chair from a nearby table and stood on it. “I want to, to toast . . .” Rainblatt raised his glass — which Elliot recognized, in retrospect, as the fatal miscalculation. “Ell —”

  Elliot believed that he had started for Rainblatt, that he had made to save him. And there were others, too, who saw their Head in Chief teetering and reached out to help. But the accident, as accidents always do, transpired in an instant. It was over before any of them could lower their raised glasses. And yet it was experienced — at least by Elliot — frame by frame.

  Rainblatt’s screwy semicircular canals must have corrected his momentum in the wrong direction, for as he started to list, to tip, he seemed to push off from the chair, kicking it aside, as if it were part of some acrobatic party trick. He actually cleared the parapet cleanly, his feet flying high. He fell backward, his arms windmilling a desperate backstroke, twisting as he dropped. His head went first, facing the street so that his last sight would be the ROM Crystal he so despised, surely looking to Rainblatt like a baby barn rocketing to the heavens.

  “—iooooooooooooooot . . .”

  It was, Elliot thought, peculiar to feel the need to see “news” of an event at which one had been present not ninety minutes earlier. Was nothing reality until it was on TV? And yet here he was, back at his condo, searching his television for coverage of Rainblatt’s plunge.

  During his perfunctory interrogation by the Toronto police, Elliot had noticed a sizable contingent of CBC newsies at the scene. Both the national and local teams were there, and a drunk from the radio service. But the story was not flagged in the billboard at the top of the national broadcast. Elliot clicked over to Pulse 24 in time to see a shot of someone hosing down the sidewalk outside the hotel but heard only, “For Pulse 24, I’m Peter Warne.” He switched back to CBC and muted the volume; perhaps they would have an item together by the end of broadcast. He heard a cork pop in the kitchen. Hazel.

  She’d poured herself a mug of the Isabelle d’Orange. “Poor bastard. To go like that. For a while there, when Victor caught wind of the plan to sell parts of the service to the Chinese, I worried that the Prime Minister’s Office or CSIS might have his brakes fixed, but . . .”

  “How’s the wine?” Elliot asked, reaching for his best stemware.

  “Oh, that’s right, this is the bottle Victor gave you. If I hadn’t seen it myself I would have assumed he’d been pushed.”

  Examining the bottle, Elliot saw that Hazel had poured a good quarter of its contents into her mug. He filled his glass to one-third its capacity. The wine had lost all colour at its edge; where the liquid met the glass was as clear as water. Then there came a wider region of amber or brickish orange. Only at the very centre of the sample, with a salmon aura, was there true red: glossy and sanguine like the heart of a small animal. Elliot sniffed it.

  “I’ve never seen anyone die before,” said Hazel, walking from the kitchen to the couch in the living room. “Wait, that’s not true, I saw my father die. Never seen . . . a fatal accident, I guess.”

&nb
sp; “Are you okay?” asked Elliot.

  He didn’t hear Hazel’s response; he was mesmerized by the aroma of the wine. That this was made from fruit was now difficult to detect: it was the scent of a world and a time. And it was transitory. There was something capric at the start, not at all pleasant, which was soon overwhelmed by truffle nail polish and sweetened coffee . . . Vietnamese iced coffee. These notes did not endure. Everything about it was fleeting. Was that curry? Not the genuine article, but the supermarket powder in his mother’s spice rack? No, it was cinnamon . . . no, fresh gingerbread, and then . . . sun-baked earth, horses, roses wilting in the sun, a woman’s neck.

  “Did you say something, Hazel?”

  “Helga! Who called Helga?”

  “I got Troy to do it. He was great there tonight, poised. He kept it together, showed . . .” Elliot was distracted by the fumes from the glass. “I don’t know, what? Grace under pressure? Never would have expected that.”

  “Helga. Poor woman.”

  “Yes, it’s going to be . . . for her, difficult, I guess . . .”

  Tentatively, Elliot took a sip. There were berries, or an extract, raspberries and blackberries squished between your fingers, there was unmistakably toffee and tamari, there was pan juice of roasted game, partridge or hare, and something from a hunting trip he’d taken with his father and his Uncle Bert, in the fall of the year, near Baie d’Espoir in Newfoundland, the decaying vegetation beneath the trees . . . and it was gone. The bottle was so old, its contents so delicate, that the oxygen in the air of the room was burning it up.

  “How do you like the wine, Hazel?” Elliot thought he would try again.

  “The wine?”

  “Yes, the wine Rainblatt gave me.”

  Hazel sniffed at her cup and then gulped. “It doesn’t have much of a taste, does it? It’s . . . God! It reminds me of something . . . When I was a kid, we spent part of the summer in the family cottage in Muskoka and there was a smell of the woods . . . or no, that’s not it.” She inhaled again. “My grandmother, she was this wild woman. Is it her perfume, or the smell of her perfume fading on her clothes? When I was fourteen years old, she took me on a shopping trip to Paris. Or that’s what she told my parents. We weren’t there two days before we went on to Italy, to Siena. She had a rendezvous with a lover there. We stayed at his estate out in the country and in the morning, among the trees . . . I loved her, my Gran. She’s the one who insisted I be called Hazel.”

  “After her?”

  “No, everyone called her Mitzy. It was because I was born at the height of a hurricane, Hurricane Hazel.”

  “Wine with notes of ‘love affair in the country.’ I got them too. It’s high praise for a drink.”

  “More like ‘fading, questionable memory of love affair in the country.’”

  “Higher still. And it is a very old bottle.”

  “And here I thought one drank to forget.”

  “With a good wine, never.”

  Elliot looked back at the silent tube but the news was over. On instead was the premiere of Benny Tries Again. Benny was in a tussle with his first guest, was out from behind Elwood Glover’s old desk and wrestling with Barry Hart. Scoring Barry was a coup Elliot had organized, asking a favour of their mutual agent Mike. Bennie was tugging at Barry’s jacket. He ripped off a sleeve. Elliot reached for the remote.

  “I have to sleep here,” said Hazel.

  “Of course,” said Elliot, laying the remote back on the coffee table.

  “I don’t feel I can go home. I’ll sleep on your couch.”

  “No, no, I’ll take the couch.”

  “It’s no trouble? You’ve slept on the couch before?”

  “Not often.”

  “Okay, there’s going to be all this awkward and needless back-and-forth now and . . . having seen poor Victor go over the edge like that . . . I don’t have the patience for ‘We’ll sleep in the bed together, no hanky-panky’ and then a comforting hug and next I’m feeling you all hot and hard against my back and we don’t sleep until after we’ve had a fuck but by then it’s four thirty in the morning. You know what I saying, Elliot.”

  “I hope so.”

  Hazel held out the mug. Perhaps stress, the sight of her boss falling off a building, had aggravated her arthritis, for her hand was knotted cordage.

  “Give me another glass of that wine, will you?” she said. Elliot was retrieving the bottle from the kitchen when Hazel called from the living room, “Benny’s show! He’s got some woman on.”

  “That’s his second guest,” said Elliot. “I forget her name. She’s the oldest gal on the LPGA tour. She’s from Victoria.”

  “CanCon, anyway,” said Hazel. “Is Barry Hart coming on later?”

  “I believe he was the first guest,” said Elliot, returning with the wine. “Cheers.”

  Three

  WESLEY JOHNSTON was being truthful when he informed the Customs official that his trip to the United States was for pleasure. He was beaming in anticipation when Walt picked him up at San Francisco Airport. He’d called Walt two days earlier to ask for the lift. No sense confusing matters at a car rental agency with a Wes Johnston Canadian passport and an Elliot Jonson California driver’s licence. Jihadists had seen to it there was less habeas corpus than there once was in the Republic, and one wanted to act judiciously. Walt was happy to oblige, saying he and Elliot had at least three hours of vineyard and cellar issues to discuss.

  The fifth floor of the parkade, where Walt had left his truck, was open to the elements, and the blast of air that met Elliot there was cooler and moister than that he’d last breathed in Toronto.

  Walt took the 280 to the 101 just south of San Jose. It got warmer and drier as they went. At Gilroy you could tell you were heading south. At Salinas you could finally feel the heat they used for California’s Chia Pet agribiz, the land a dead, porous medium into which seeds and their feed could be injected. He was watching dust devils dancing on the broiling flats when his cellphone rang. It was Hazel.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m driving through a place called Gonzales.”

  “You went to California?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should have woken me when you left,” she said. “Your cleaning lady arrived just as I was leaving.”

  “I envy that kind of sleep. I’d never mess with it.”

  “I haven’t been that out of it in years. I was like a teenager, I didn’t open an eye until ten o’clock.”

  “It’s a reaction to the stress, to the shock.”

  “Thinking about it this morning I was almost sick. I assumed, Elliot, that you would have changed your travel plans.”

  “Anything in the papers?”

  “Morbid fascination with how he died is overshadowing his accomplishments.”

  “Anybody call you about it?”

  “Nobody yet. It’s a local story about a guy falling off a building. The entire executive of the CBC could drown in Lake Ontario and nobody would notice. Is it beautiful where you are?”

  “It’s featureless. I can see a McDonald’s.”

  “If there are questions, can I give out your cell number?”

  “I would prefer if you could field stuff. You can call, but don’t give them my number. I’m gonna be busy.” Walter nodded at Elliot’s assessment.

  “People are going to be shocked you didn’t cancel your trip, that you’re not going to be here for the funeral.”

  “I can’t choose when the grapes ripen.”

  “Your immediate superior fell to his death in a freak accident, the national public broadcaster is without a president, and you are taking a vacation at your hobby farm?”

  “It’s not a hobby, it’s a business concern into which I have sunk considerable resources. Take the opportunity to mention the new season when you’re speaking to the press.”

  “You are kidding me.”

  “Nothing crass, just slip it in. Let’s not forget he was at the event to cele
brate the new schedule. Mentioning that isn’t a lie.”

  “Wow.”

  “Promoting the new season is the best way to honour Victor’s life.”

  The cellphone reception seemed to break up; Elliot could hear nothing.

  “Hello?”

  “Eat a grape for me.”

  “I will.”

  Walter took Elliot’s closing up the phone as his cue to start talking business. Various plots of the different varieties were becoming ripe at different times. There was much to calculate. He confessed to having been deeply pessimistic at the beginning of the year. The plants had flowered adequately but it never seemed to get warm enough, and he’d feared that some of the grapes would never ripen. He’d abandoned all hope for the heat-craving Mourvèdre.

  “But it was dry,” he continued, “dry enough to worry, except that this year it seemed the fog always made it just as far as our vines at night. Because of the dry farming — and I give you credit for it, Elliot — that’s all it took to keep them going. Maybe this year was the first time some of the vines you planted had roots deep enough to cope with water stress, I dunno. And with the wind, you got away without spraying.”

  Heat had arrived only in August: temperatures constant and fierce. When the ripening commenced, the vines were still yielding little fruit, owing to the drought — but they were fully mature, with complex flavours from the skins to the pips.

  “Miguel started a team picking the first Syrah this morning, you know in that amphitheatre we call ‘the dip’?”

  Elliot did know it, a shallow southwest-facing bowl in the side of a hillock, a location, Elliot thought in retrospect, better suited to Mourvèdre.

  “I’d say we can finish all the Syrah within the week, just in time for the Grenache,” Walt continued. “Counoise is well ahead so it won’t be long after. There might be a week or even two to wait for the Mourvèdre. It’s all had enough hang time — you can tell by the feel and look of the berries. There is more acid than most people would be happy with, but considering what I think you are going for . . . As long as it doesn’t rain.”

  “I caught part of a news conference where the mayor of Los Angeles and the governor were praying for rain. I mean literally, with their heads bowed as some ding-dong spoke to God on California’s behalf. Jesus.”