The love is, I hope, obvious to you, dear reader, despite the row I just described. There really aren’t adequate words in the English language to relay the kind of passion that consumes Grace and me, the unspoken timbre we share when even the longest, most tiring day is done. I often think it’s the passion that causes us to have such intense squabbles. Fire can, after all, burn in all sorts of directions. Which made her dig at my inconsistencies in the boudoir so out of left field. I mean — come on. Why would she say something so heinous to me?
But let’s talk about the hate — the hate that gets me going every day. A term that, I admit, seems overly harsh coming from a self-described deontologist and centrist thinker. But it’s true: I often frame myself as the lone katechon against what Canada has become in recent years: a hotbed of anti-intellectualism, religious extremism, neo-conservativism and privatization. It’s why I dedicated nearly a third of Corporate Canada Today to profiling ODS Financial Group, and agreed to share my thoughts on the firm’s collapse with the CBC. I was prepared to express my indignation over how its C-suite had made off like bandits — golden handshakes for all! — and I relished the chance to lock horns with my fellow pundit, the grotesquely conservative Cheryl Sneed. Despite holding a mere B.A. in basket weaving earned in 1972, Cheryl has been a top columnist for the Toronto Times for nearly thirty-five years now, writing about politics, economics, religion, literature, gender issues, and various other topics she knows nothing about. She ran afoul of me after unfavourably reviewing two of my books — Capitalism and Other Pathologies (University of Guelph Press, 2005) and the short, scathing Stephen Harper: A Biography (Tuxedo House, 2010) — and we’d been exchanging barbs in the media ever since. Until Friday afternoon, she had been a kind of inverse Chicken Little about the ODS situation, and I looked forward to exposing her various blind spots and hypocrisies. And though there was a wholesale lack of depth to her intellect, she was cagey, often bringing a homespun folksiness to her right-wing arguments. And I had to be mindful of that.
Of course, I wasn’t thinking of any of this during the ride downtown. Instead I was thinking: What the fuck are we doing on Sunday? Grace had put the bug in my brain and I just couldn’t shake it. I knew it was something we had discussed, planned, maybe bickered over a little. But it was now hidden in the fog of my mind. What was it? What. Was. It?
The Beck deposited me at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre — the CBC’s imposing Front Street edifice with its blue pillars and red-framed windows and larger-than-life photos of network personalities — and I marched through the doors and made my way to the atrium’s front desk. The receptionist paged Power Today’s producer, and within moments she came hustling out of the elevators toward me. I expected the first words out of her mouth to be, You’re late! but instead she said:
“You’re not wearing a poppy.”
“I know. It must have fallen off on my way over. I —”
“I sent, like, four emails about it.”
“I know, I’m sorry. Look, is there anywhere I can —”
“No, there isn’t. And there’s no time, anyway.”
She signed me in and then the elevator whisked us to the upper floors. I’d been on the show before but hadn’t met this particular producer. Her name was Lori, a whip-smart twentysomething with a look that balanced sporty with haggard: dark hair pulled into a tight ponytail; bags under her eyes from doing what would have been three people’s jobs twenty years ago; nice bum. We came out of the elevators and started Sorkining down a busy hallway as she explained the lineup to me.
“You guys are up first. The ODS story is just too big not to lead with. We’re doing two eighters —”
“Meaning?”
“Two eight-minute segments. There’ll be a commercial break in between if you need to collect your thoughts.”
“I won’t. Can’t speak for Cheryl, though.”
“Sal was going to walk you through his intro and outro but there’s no time.”
“How is Sal, anyway?”
“There is. No. Time. Once we get you in the chair, I need you to —”
“Philip Sharpe, you whiskey-swilling so-and-so!” I heard someone yell to me. I turned to see my friend Raj approach us through a nest of cubicles and camera stands. “You carpetbagging Maritimer! You salt-stained scallywag! How the hell are ya?” Raj was a freelance videographer, clearly on one of his intermittent contracts with the CBC. I had met him years ago, and would occasionally run into him while doing press chores for my books. Though roughly my age — fifty this year, gawd — Raj always struck me as younger, more vital, more unmoored. He was just as likely to be hanging off a cliff-face in Borneo with a camera on his shoulder as he was to be filming downtown Toronto biz-knobs with their jayus senses of humour for a corporate video. He and I weren’t particularly close. Yet in that moment, I was deeply relieved to spot his familiar face, and I hugged him clumsily when he came over.
“It’s so good to see you,” I said.
“Likewise — it’s been like, two years. I heard you were in the hot seat this afternoon.”
“I am. They need an expert opinion on this ODS situation, plus Cheryl Sneed’s.”
He laughed. “I hear that. You know, Rick Mercer was asking about you the other day.”
“I know, I owe Rick an email. Do you know if he’s —”
“Dr. Sharpe,” said Lori, “I really need you to come with me.”
“You better do what she says,” Raj smirked, and whacked me on the shoulder. “We’ll talk later. Go eat ’em up. I’ll watch you from the booth.”
Within minutes I was prepped for the stage: Lori clipped a microphone to my shirt like a prosthesis, then tucked its battery into the ass of my pants with completely non-sexual efficiency. Someone came by to give my brow and cheekbones a light dusting of powder. When finished, Lori shoved me out to the Power Today set.
I staggered onto the rise, and there she was: stout, unsmiling Cheryl Sneed, already seated at the large glass table under the klieg lights. She wore a very blousy blouse, but had done something different — and dare I say appealing? — with her hair since I’d last seen her: a certain sensual swirl to her grey-blond locks, a truly noble attempt at attractiveness for a woman of her vintage. Above her left breast sat a pristinely fastened poppy.
“Hello, Cheryl,” I said, sitting down in the chair a stagehand steered me into.
“Philip.”
“Good to see you.”
Her eyes flashed to my tweed. “You not get the emails about the poppy?”
“I lost mine on the way over.”
“Understandable,” she said. “The things are engineered to fall off. It’s how the veterans make their money.”
We were soon joined by Sal Porter, the impossibly handsome host of Power Today, who also wore a poppy. He shook my hand and took his seat at the end. “Running late today, Philip? We all missed you in the green room.”
“Sorry, I was waylaid by …” What to say? An annoyed wife. Domestic trifles. A yearning vagina. A lapse in memory. What were we doing on Sunday, goddamn it? “… stuff at home,” I said. Yes, yes. Stuff at home. By now Simone would’ve gotten in the door from school, and Grace would be asking about her day, verifying homework assignments and partaking in other bits of motherwork before dinner. Wait, what had she wanted me to do with Simone on Wednesday night? Oh shit, I’d already forgotten. What was it? What was it?
The final preparatory rituals for live TV unfurled around us — countdowns and cameramen call-outs and such. Lori popped by with a small metallic claw and pried the empty staples out of my lapel without bothering to ask how they’d gotten there. It seemed an overly finicky act, considering