From the moment I’d read the article in the New York Times, I’d suspected Evan MacLeish was the wrong man for Jill. Now I was dead certain, and time was running out.
In our house, the dinner table had always been the place where people came to learn things. That night, as we gathered in the candlelight, I was desperate to learn something that would penetrate Jill’s wilful blindness about the man she was about to marry. Discovering who among my guests had the silver bullet would be problem enough. Convincing myself that I had the right to use it would be even more difficult. Jill was an intelligent woman who had assessed a complex situation and made a decision. It was going to be a stretch coming up with a rationale for interfering in her life.
I was glad Felix Schiff had sorted out the luggage problems and joined the party. He was an appealing guest, affable and fine-tuned to nuance. Like many men who work in media, Felix had adopted the man-boy costume of leather jacket and blue jeans, and the combination worked well for him. Looking at his unruly shock of chestnut hair and anxious grey eyes, it was easy to see the tightly wound child he had been. Industry colleagues knew Felix to be one tough cookie, but that night his sensitivity was apparent. He prided himself on being, in a phrase from his native Germany, ein prakiter Mensch. Faced with a party ripped by tension, the practical man ratcheted up the charm. Radiating the innocent shine of a Norman Rockwell schoolboy with a frog in his pocket, he surveyed the table.
“And to think, none of us would be here tonight if it weren’t for a water-skiing squirrel,” he said, eyeing his fellow guests to see if he’d hooked his audience. He had, and as people leaned forward with expectant half-smiles, eager to follow the anecdote, I felt my nerves unknot.
Noticing that a tiny frown was crimping Bryn’s forehead, Felix whispered confidingly, “You’ll have to forgive Jill for holding out on you. I’m sure she simply wanted to protect you from the knowledge that she’s anti- squirrel.”
“Hang on,” Jill said. “This is my party, and I’ll tell my own story. And in my version, I behave valiantly. Here’s what really happened, Bryn. Felix and I were working on a show called ‘Canada Tonight.’ He was the executive producer in Toronto, and I was the network producer here in Regina. Everything was cool, including the ratings, so, of course, NationTV decided it needed a saviour.”
“A twenty-seven-year-old saviour,” Felix said. “Still paying off his student loans, and they put him in charge of the network’s news division. A wunderkind, they said. Some wunderkind. We’d been hearing the same mantra for ten years. Appeal to a new demographic: younger, edgier, more urban, more buzz.”
Jill rolled her eyes. “… shorter segments, less analysis, more happy talk…”
“And,” Felix intoned gravely, “more squirrels.”
“Right,” Jill sipped her wine. “More squirrels. Somehow our young genius in Toronto got wind of the fact that a cottager out here had taught a squirrel to water-ski. Now clearly the cottager was a baguette short of a picnic, but the wunderkind was enchanted. He ordered me to replace two minutes of our political panel with squirrel footage, and I refused.”
“Squirrel against woman,” Angus said.
“Right,” Jill said. “And no possibility of rapprochement. The squirrel was out on Echo Lake slapping the waves with his little custom-made skiis, and I was here in Regina clinging to my standards.”
“And you lost,” Taylor said.
Jill nodded in agreement. “And our twenty-seven-year-old genius meted out the worst punishment he could think of…”
“He banished you to Toronto!” Angus said.
“Precisely,” Jill said. “With the kind of task evil fairies hand out in fairy tales. He gave me six weeks to create a cheap, ethnically diverse, spiritually neutral show that would get a 7.8 share on Sunday mornings.”
“Absolutely impossible,” Felix said. “It was a matter of principle. Jill quit, and so did I.”
Jill dipped her index finger into the water in her glass and passed it through the flame of the candle in front of her. “Luckily, Felix and I are not risk-averse. And we were both dying to show that little snot-nose what talent and experience could do.”
“Thus, after only a dozen or so false starts, ‘Comforts of the Sun’ came into being.” Felix bowed his head modestly. “A simple premise but brilliantly executed.”
We all laughed, but the truth of the matter was the premise behind “Comforts of the Sun” was simple: Jill and a small film crew followed ordinary people as they revelled in the pleasures of their Sunday morning. The show cast its net broadly: an all-girl skateboarders’ club in Sault Ste. Marie; a rafter-rattling gospel choir in Halifax; the owners of a trendy lesbian eatery called Tomboy who opened their doors on Sunday mornings to the homeless of Winnipeg; a Tai Chi group who, for three generations, had been harmonizing their minds and bodies in a Vancouver park; an octogenarian Anglican minister who, accompanied by his bulldog Balthazar, drove up and down the Sunshine Coast delivering thumping good sermons to anyone who was of a mind to sit still and listen.
As we passed the wild rice, we talked about why the show had struck a chord with so many people. “I’ll bet most people are like me,” I said. “We watch ‘Comforts of the Sun’ because it makes us feel good.”
Felix furrowed his brow. “Feel good is yesterday, Jo. When I was pitching the show in NYC, I talked about urban alienation, fragmentation, and the human need for connection and affirmation.”
Claudia snapped her fingers at an imaginary waiter. “Another order of bullshit for the gent here at table three,” she said, and her laughter was full-bodied and infectious.
Felix was serene. “Manure has its uses,” he said.
“You bet it does,” Jill said. “Thanks to Felix’s judicious spreading, our little family will be in Times Square New Year’s Eve.” She hugged herself. “This show has made so many things possible. It’s an uphill battle not to get cynical in hard news. You’re always trying to get past what people want to reveal so you can shed a little light on what they’re trying to conceal. But ‘Comforts of the Sun’ makes watching the human comedy fun again. Everybody we talk to is pleased as punch to reveal everything.”
Throughout dinner, Bryn and Angus had been so tenderly absorbed in one another that it seemed the rest of us were just a backdrop, but Jill’s words caught Bryn’s attention.
Achingly beautiful, she leaned across the table. “But those people chose to let you in, Jill. It’s different when the camera invades your life.”
Evan shifted in his chair. “A camera doesn’t ‘invade’ your life, Bryn,” he said. “It’s just there.”
“A camera is not ‘just there,’ ” Bryn’s eyes bored into her father. “There’s a person behind it, changing the lens, making sure the shot’s in focus, deciding how far to go.”
Evan speared a morsel of venison. “People who step in front of the camera aren’t victims. They’re willing accomplices. They can always walk away.”
“Not if they trust the person behind the camera,” his daughter said. Her skin had the pale lustre of the white tulips in the centrepiece.
Jill reached across the flowers and took Bryn’s hand. “We have so much to look forward to,” she said. “Sometimes it’s best just to forgive and forget.”
“Great advice, stepmum-to-be.” Tracy’s voice was jagged. “Except where do you draw the line after you pardon scavengers who pick the flesh from other people’s bones?”
Ever the conciliator, Felix jumped in. “Aren’t you being a little unfair, Tracy? We’re not talking about ‘Jerry Springer.’ We’re talking about our show, and we have nothing to be ashamed of. As Jill said, people who step in front of our cameras want to reveal themselves. We give them a legacy – something they can slip into their VCRS to prove their lives have meaning.”
Tracy’s blue eyes glittered with unshed tears. “And that’s why they count on you not to lie, not to distort, not to seduce them into giving up things that are sacred.” She turned miserably to her brother-in-law. “Some of us counted on you for that too, Evan.”
Taylor had stopped eating. She loved venison and she was, as a rule, a trencherwoman, but the sight of the Broken Wand Fairy having a tantrum obviously knocked her off game.
“Counted on me for what?” Evan asked. “Tracy, the scenes you’re part of in Black Spikes and Slow Waves show you at a time when you were more alive than you’ll ever be again. No matter what happens to you, that woman will still exist. What else could you ask?”
“To be treated as a human being,” Tracy snapped.
Evan shrugged. “It’s an old argument: what matters more, art or life? Thomas Mann said that as he
