Easy to Like

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This edition published in 2011 by
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA
CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Riche, Edward
Easy to like /
Edward Riche.
eISBN 978-1-77089-043-5
I. Title.
PS8585.I198E27
2011         C813'.54         C2011-902174-9

Cover design: Daniel Cullen
Text design
and typesetting: Alysia Shewchuk

We acknowledge for their
financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts,
the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada
Book Fund.

“This Champagne didn't come from France.”

— Orson Welles

“IN THE MOUTH,”
Elliot said. “Feel it. Its weight, its heat.”

“When are we going to drink some
American wine?” Robin asked.

Elliot had first heard Robin described,
by Veronica, as “my extremist gal pal.” Doubtful that one of the many Islamists
reported crowding the shadows would attend a wine tasting in Bel Air, Elliot
assumed Robin to be a former dabbler in, or groupie-come-concubine of, the
Weather Underground or the Panthers or the Symbionese Liberation Army or the
like. (You met those people in Los Angeles, hostages and their takers together
again on the same talk show.) On further learning that Robin “just one hundred
and ten percent had to come to the tasting,” Elliot gathered that Veronica meant
that Robin was her “
extreme-est
gal pal.”

The friends were eerily similar in
appearance, like fraternal twins, though they probably shared a trainer or a
surgeon rather than a womb. They were both a hay blond, with thrust pneumatic
boobs. Their eyes were differing blues, Veronica's Aegean, Robin's a colder,
deeper sea, each equally improbable. Repeated injections of botulism made their
faces taut but leathery and shiny, like the hide on a well-played drum. They
were such stalwart defenders of a certain cliché of Southern Californian
womanhood that they surpassed it, attained something higher, were masters of
their practice, priestesses. These were not the post-age-of-irony
spending-for-democracy porn-positive Barbies one saw nowadays; they were purer,
and, like their hometown, of irony they simply knew not.

“If we did this again I could take you
through some better examples of what California's self-styled ‘Rhone Rangers'
have on offer,” Elliot answered.

“Good,” said Robin. “Cabernet
Sauvignon, I like that.” She was proud of this knowledge, however erroneous.

“Well, actually, no,” said Elliot,
“they don't use any Cab, that's more of a Napa and Sonoma thing, these vintners
—”

“Fred Hanover has the most beautiful
ranchy thing in Napa Valley, not far from St. Helena,” Robin cut in.

“He has this barbecue,” said Veronica,
“every year. There are always a lot of celebrities there, A-list people too. I
hate it when it's B-list. I get depressed by ‘B.' And ‘C,' Jerry keeps telling
me, is for ‘cancelled.' Fred's is fun. It's for a charity . . .
can't remember which one. Is it a childhood cancer?”

“I think it's for animals. Animals in
Africa, I think. Can animals be displaced by a conflict? Something was
displaced, anyway,” said Robin. “Janice Everston was there last year
and . . . who is that guy on
Murder
Squad
?”

“Kevin Stewart,” said Veronica.

“Do you know about Fred's barbecue?”
Robin asked, remembering that Elliot was sitting across from her.

“I was there last year.”

“You WERE?” Veronica warmed to Elliot
for the first time that afternoon.

“Yes.”

“Did you see Janice Everston?” asked
Robin.

“No. Though I wrote something she was
in, years ago, for television.” It was a pilot for a
Mannix
remake that never went. This was before Janice Everston was
on any list, “A” or otherwise.

“So, you know her?” asked Veronica.

“We've never met. Now, this Chianti
—”

“Who else was there?” asked Robin.
“That we would know.”

When Elliot agreed to direct this
tasting, as a favour for Jerry Borstein, he never imagined it would prove such a
trial. Veronica was Jerry's trophy wife, one of such high shine as to require
constant polishing. She was, Jerry told Elliot, trying to improve her skills as
a hostess and learning all she could, which was very little, about food and
wine. There was a new (and to be short-lived, Elliot prayed) fashion in
Hollywood for seriously themed dinner parties in honour of an invited guest, a
thinker or humanitarian, who could expound on his or her area of expertise over
a (typically catered) gourmet meal. Jerry had hosted one such soiree for Yuri
Smeltlotov, a Russian scholar who was to speak about the crisis in the Caucasus,
real estate from which Jerry's ancestors were long ago chased. Elliot supplied
the wines, starting with a freakish sparkler from Georgia and finishing with an
intensely sweet Tocay Yuzhnoberezhny from the Massandra Collection in the
Crimea. It was a wine, made for a czar, that survived the Nazi occupation of
Yalta by being shipped to Tbilisi, a singular and treasured wine that seemed to
impress nobody but Elliot himself.

That fete exposed Veronica's need for
tutelage. Near the end of the evening, with regard to the situation in Georgia,
she'd given the Yellow Jackets even odds for the Gator Bowl.

She posed another question. “That's a
winery, right, Fred's place in Napa? I think he served his own wine at the
barbecue.”

“Yes. He produces a Cabernet
Sauvignon–based wine there. It's a large, extracted wine, excellent with, or as,
barbecue sauce.”

“Lot of fruit?” Veronica parroted
something she'd once heard said about wines.

“Very much so. ‘Fruit bombs' they used
to call them. They're easy to enjoy.”

“I thought so,” said Veronica. “I
remember loving the label.”

“Yes,” said Elliot, “Fred produces one
of the better labels in California. Features a horse, if I'm not mistaken?”

“I think it does, you're right. It was
very
western.”

Elliot had not been able to refuse
Jerry Borstein this favour. Jerry regularly hired Elliot to rewrite or “beat”
scripts and to give his more nebulous ideas some semblance of order on the page
in the form of an outline or a treatment. An outline penned by Elliot, for
Goldie's Piece
, was part of insider Hollywood lore for
being only five words in length: “Guy with the biggest gun.” A treatment
credited to Jerry but of Elliot's hand went on to become
The Nevada Girl
, another success, and Elliot knew for a fact that
his
The Invader
was the source for
Total Conquest
— on which Jerry'd made more than a few
shekels. As a rule, Elliot never brought up his part in these authorships. He
knew that Jerry knew that he knew, and that some adjustments would be made. Let
Jerry have the glory. (Sure enough, in the end, Jerry gave him one of six
producer credits on
Conquest
— a nice gesture, as it
came with fees.)

Most critically, Jerry was a silent
(
mute
was a better word) partner in Elliot's
vineyard and winery. Though she obviously didn't know it, Veronica's extreme-est
friend Robin also had a piece of the action. Her husband, Lucas “Lucky”
Silverman, with whom Elliot had spoken on the phone but had never met in person,
was also, on Jerry's recommendation, a major investor. Silverman was
big-going-on-huge in the business, producing hit after swollen mega-hit, never
stumbling. If Elliot could write just one of those sorts of pictures, he could
easily pocket enough dough to sort out the mounting problems in the vineyard.
Elliot's plan was to meet Silverman by bringing him a couple of cases of his
wine — their wine — but the early vintages weren't showing yet, and Elliot
thought it prudent to wait until he could deliver something delicious.

“He's using ‘easy' as a pejorative.”
This was the first thing Eva said. She was the third invitee. A new neighbour of
Jerry and Veronica's, she looked nothing like the other two women. Her hair was
a sick-making cobalt, more Goth girl than the middle-aged woman she was. Broad
in the hips, shrink-wrapped in lustrous black, she resembled an eggplant. Eva
had followed her husband, some big cheese in digital animation, from New York to
Los Angeles. Elliot gathered she'd been asked along out of a sense of obligation
on Veronica's part, a one-time-only gesture, but with Elliot and Robin sharing
in the awkward socials.

Eva was sitting with her arms crossed,
gathering up the too-long arms of her black sweater into her fists. The garment
was unnecessary — the vast solarium in which they were gathered was warm, and
the air-conditioned interior only slightly less so. It was August in Los
Angeles, for heaven's sake. At least being overdressed seemed — thus far — to
induce a lethargy in Eva that diminished her will to complain.

“Not entirely,” said Elliot. “Nothing
wrong with a wine that makes a lot of people happy.” He did not believe this.
“Back to these two wines. Chianti Rufina is just outside Florence. Galletti is a
modest producer. The wines are made in a traditional manner on the estate. You
don't have the degree of technological intervention we see in some larger
operations. As a result we are getting a much less mediated experience, we taste
the soil and the weather in the grapes. On the left is the 2002
Ascella . . . Please, a sniff and then a taste, remember
what we said about it in your mouth.”

Was Robin making eyes at him over her
wineglass? Elliot never knew whether women were being flirtatious or fidgety.
The last woman he thought was coming on to him had only been itchy. Like Eva,
who sniffled and scratched as though generally allergic. She nosed her glass
wetly.

“It was not a good year in Tuscany,”
said Elliot, “and the wines are rather thin and dried out.”

“Dried out?” wondered Veronica.

“Let's say instead they aren't
generous . . . ‘generous'?”

“For sure.”

“Sangiovese, the principal grape being
used here, has a restrained and enigmatic aroma at the best of times, it —”

“‘Enigmatic'?” said Eva.

“We smell some dried cherry or
cranberries, violets, and leather in the best examples, but it is hard to nail
it down.” It was a maddening aspect of wine tasting, this search for taste and
smell equivalencies. There wasn't a risk of sounding pretentious; there was a
certainty. And the reporting of various fruits seemed to have induced some
winemakers to chase the taste of raspberries or plums. If you wanted
strawberries, thought Elliot, go to the Santa Monica Farmers' Market and buy a
basket.

“Could say it smells like Sangiovese
grapes,” Eva pressed.

“Indeed, but then very few people would
know what we meant. Besides, when a wine tastes of the grape variety from which
it's made, it's failed. It's too . . . literal.”

No one seemed to grasp this. Elliot
elaborated.

“Good winemaking uses the grapes to
express a place at a certain time. The best winemaking is none at all.”

Still no help.

“We don't want to taste the hand of the
maker, we want the wine in the bottle to be an expression of the plant growing
up through those stones in that field in that year. The wine is made in the
vineyard, not the cellar.”

Blank stares.

“The point is that the 2002 is not
expressive, it lacks
fruit
.” Elliot said the word
anyway, the sooner to get it over with. “This enables us to better appreciate
the mineral profile of the wine.” Elliot sniffed his glass. “There are some
old-world spices there too — clove and cinnamon, but muted.”

He sniffed again. For a fleeting moment
he detected the note that he most relished in wine, that of forest floor —
sous bois
, said the French — wild herbs and fungal
growth amidst the fallen needles of a conifer and, atop all that, more faintly,
the musk and scat of passing animals. It was a scent he rarely detected in
wines. Once, having passed out face down on a mat of leaves in the woods near
the Tuscan hill village of Trequanda, and waking in the dawn to the sight of a
boar scenting a cypress stump, Elliot had experienced it, unmediated and in
situ.

“You like this wine?” Robin asked.

“
Like
isn't
a word I ever use. To make my point, now try the 2003. Look at it first.”

“It's darker,” said Veronica.

“Good.”

“Yeah, it is definitely much darker,”
said Eva, seeming, to Elliot's surprise, interested. “You say this is the same
wine?”

“Same wine. I don't know if you
remember, but 2003 was the year of that incredible heatwave in Europe.”

“Remember?” said Veronica. “I'll never
forget it. We had this fantastic trip planned. Jerry had rented a yacht and we
and Linda and Kent and Linda and Bernard were going to sail from Antibes to
Capri . . . well, it was too hot. We spent like a day aboard
this boat and then we said, like, totally forget this. We rented this castle in
Scotland instead, which was nice except the boys played golf a lot cuz, like,
this castle had its own nine-hole course.”

“Right. This wine was made during that
heatwave. I think if you smell and taste, you will get that. This wine is
baked.”

“I like it much better than the 2002,”
said Robin.

“For sure,” said Veronica.

“It's a bit much,” said Eva.

“My view exactly. I find it's too
alcoholic — hot, it's high in sugars, low in acid. It's big but flabby. There's
a raisiny character that I find offputting. Will it come around with bottle age,
or will it crash? It's puffed up, but there is no structural support for the
Medicean architecture.”

Elliot measured two beats of
silence.

“I like the sweetness,” said Veronica.
“Californian wines are sweeter than Italian wines.”

“The Italians, to their great credit” —
Elliot thought how much he would like to be, at that moment, in Italy —
“appreciate bitterness in food and wine.”

“It's also a question of patriotism,”
said Robin. “I mean, especially since 9/11, should we be drinking Italian
wine?”