“Besides, his sister’s married to a cousin of the prime minister.”
“Yeah, and that’s not the only sweetheart deal around. Your boss makes big demands on outside producers before she’ll let them do a pilot. Talk about kickbacks!”
“But that’s normal in Entertainment. Life is short there. You have to make your bundle before the axe falls.”
“That’s right, but in the meantime she has lots of money to spend outside the network. That’s why there are so many Moss-watchers.”
“Have you met David Simbrow? The Moss-boss? Vice-president of Programming? He’s so stupid he couldn’t get work selling raffle tickets. But his father’s in the provincial cabinet.”
“And Ted Thornhill, the CEO, doesn’t know what to do about it. How can he reorganize Entertainment without booting Simbrow out?”
“Did you know that we’re doing more ‘sustained’ programs than ever before?”
“What are they?”
“When you can’t get the advertising, you underwrite them and hope nobody notices. It’s only a step away from lowering the advertising rates.”
“Have you met Philip Rankin yet?” I said that I’d had the pleasure. “Proper gentleman, isn’t he? Well, he couldn’t produce fleas in a zoo. Jesse and Ross and lots of us used to save his bacon regularly. That was a long time before Bob Foley came along.”
I tried to get them to continue talking about Bob Foley, but all attempts died on the vine.
“You see, Benny, Bob was never really one of us. We got tired of his stories about the Great Man. You know, Dermot Keogh. Bob talked as if we never worked with headliners more than once, twice a year. The brutal fact is that between us we know just about everybody. Hell! I’ve stuck a mike up Anne Murray’s shirt more times than … you know? That stuff doesn’t mean anything. We do it all the time. How many times have you arranged the lights for the Queen, Ron? See what I mean? I had coffee with the prime minister one time, killing time between appointments. So why would we suddenly get excited about Bob becoming Dermot Keogh’s gofer?”
“He had us up to a summer place in Muskoka one time. He was trying to lord it over us like he invented the place.”
“Yeah,” agreed Ross. “Remember how he treated that Paki lawyer? I just wanted to fade into the woods.”
“That’s right. And he’d tear up and down the roads on that borrowed chopper.”
“Didn’t mind that so much. I like choppers.”
“The Moss tried to call the Provincial Police on him.”
“Jesse, is Vanessa Moss doing her job?”
He thought about it, pulling at his earlobe and watching the flickering images on the TV set high above the bar. “Is she doing her job? Hell, Mr. Cooperman, nobody can do that job. It’d be like trying to agree on guidelines for an orgy.”
“That’s the truth,” Ross Totton offered. “She’ll last another season, then they’ll find someone else. That’s the way of the beast.”
I figured that besides enjoying the beer I’d had, I’d been given a backgrounder to the network I couldn’t have found elsewhere. In the end, I thanked the boys and tried not to trip over my feet on my way out of the Rex.
* * *
At 5:30 P.M., I sat in the bar at the Hilton hotel, a few short blocks from NTC. It was a generous bar of dark mahogany, with gleaming brass in all the right places. The crowd was hard to figure. The customers were welldressed frequenters of steakhouses, dapper account executives buttering up clients from Calgary or Edmonton with a taste of the real Toronto, before heading off to the hockey game and who knows what else.
Sally Jackson came in wearing her high-heeled walking-out shoes, which made her just an inch taller than me. “Sorry I kept you,” she said, finding her centre of gravity on the tall bar stool.
“What can I get you?” I tried to read her mood. Why had she decided to join me?
“Is the season well enough advanced to order gin and tonic?”
“Sure.” I passed the order along and sipped at my rye and water. The ice had melted. For five minutes or so, until her drink came, I tried to make small talk. I discovered that she knew little about the Blue Jays’ recent performances at the SkyDome and less about the delayed Stanley Cup playoffs. In general, her eye was more often on the door or the mirror over the bar than it was on me. Even the bartender gave her a look that, in my reading of it, said, “This dame ain’t gonna run a long tab.” I tried to think of how I could make things easier for Sally.
“You seem a little nervous, Sally. If this wasn’t a good idea, just say the word.”
“To tell you the truth, Benny-may I call you that? — this is the first time I’ve been out with a man since I left Gordon.” She was fiddling with the plastic wrapping from a pack of Benson amp; Hedges. She stopped short of taking one out and lighting it.
“Life can’t stand still,” I suggested. “When we can’t go back, we have to move on.”
“You don’t understand, Benny. I left Gordon for my good friend Crystal Schild. I’ve been living with her for three months now.”
“Oh,” I said, clearing my throat and swallowing hard.
“Does that shock you?”
“Me? Of course not. There’s a lot of it going … Some of my best …”
“There, I did embarrass you. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting that you come from Grantham. Here in Toronto-”
“Look, dear Sally, Grantham’s not that backward. We’ve got the railroad; the bus service is going fine; we’ve got cable TV and even the World Wide Web has come along to show us what we’re missing. There’s not much going on in the world that could shock somebody on St. Andrew Street in Grantham today.”
“What about you? You look a little pink around the ears.”
“Well, I’ll admit, it was a little unexpected. I was unprepared. I mean it hadn’t entered my mind.” Part of my mind, the most primitive and least defensible part, was pondering whether this constituted getting a drink under false pretenses.
“Well, now you know. And now you know why I have to be so careful around that place.”
“Who else knows, and why is it such a big secret? And why are you telling me? Why, only this morning I thought that the sight of my bleeding corpse wouldn’t spoil your day. Now you volunteer this. How come?”
“I don’t know. You’ve got a good face. I hate the way Vanessa orders you around. Maybe it was the sweet way you tried to make peace this afternoon. I don’t know.”
I still wasn’t sure I trusted her, but, at least, she’d put up an unusual defence against the moves I had been plotting for later in the evening. She reminded me of my basically predatory nature, which I try to control, and of Anna, whose absence I was feeling in my bones.
“I assume that Vanessa knows nothing of this?” I asked.
“As far as she’s concerned, I don’t exist except as a source of coffee and treachery. I don’t think she worries much about people’s sexuality. She uses her own charms to manoeuvre men-she’s a past-master at that, as you may know-but apart from that, she’s not very observant about people and where they’re coming from. She divides the world into two groups: those who can help her and those who want help from her.”
“Is there anyone at NTC who knows?”
“Nate, Nate Green knew I was going through hell living with Gordon. He was a dear, sympathetic man, even when his own health started to preoccupy him. Unless he told somebody, then you’re the only one, apart from one or two of the women there that I trust.”
“Why don’t you want it to get out? I can think of several reasons but what are yours?”
“Benny, I just want to get on with my job. From where you sit, it might not look like much, but it’s all I’ve got right now, except Crystal. I don’t need complications.”
“But they can’t fire you for what isn’t any of their business, can they?”
“No, not any more, but it wouldn’t endear me to some of them either. Three years ago, a man got shunted around because it was thought there were too many gays in his department. Because of some idiot’s idea that a ‘quota system’ was needed in Audience Relations, he was sent back to writing local news and weather.” She paused long enough for me to register her point, and then took the first sip of her drink.