How Happy to Be Read Free

listened to from a low seat at the far end of the table, so as not to shame the family) find a forum in Canada? These thoughts, some of his first, coincided with a minor scandal involving a porn star and the unusual use of a very expensive bottle of port, and Daddy Baron gently suggested he take an extended holiday somewhere very, very remote. So Baby Baron bought a mansion in Toronto and an estate in cottage country, north of the city. He liked it there so much – “Loons,” he said often in interviews, referring to the birds, one hoped – that he purchased the whole lake and, oh yes, a dying city broadsheet that he turned into
The Daily
.
    And so, for a young man who will inherit distilleries and shipping lines, we are a hobby. If he were a middle-aged woman in a small town, we would be his knitting circle, something occasionally tended, a diversion. When he makes the trip up to see us in the suburbs, it is an event of sorts, a reminder that we are wanted, noted, like when the Queen visits Saskatchewan.
    Marvin is obsessed with Baby Baron’s personal assistant, a handsome, scowling reed of a man who towers over the junior mogul, accompanying him everywhere. There ismuch inter-office speculation that the assistant is the paper’s real publisher, concocting story ideas and e-mailing editors late-night directives from Baby Baron’s account.
What about bigger headlines? Shorter stories? Shorter headlines? More society gossip. More anti-union rants. Less use of the colour orange!
He has passwords and enters all data into his boss’s BlackBerry himself because though Baby Baron is a man of strict views, he is not accustomed to interrupting his amusements to direct the help. Baby’s only other job was a brief stint in the British military, another of his father’s failed plans to drill some sense into him, and so he knows absolutely nothing about running a newspaper except that it is very expensive.
    At parties, the assistant becomes a manservant, bitterly keeping his boss’s glass filled, eyes rolling, wandering back and forth to the buffet at a cripple’s hobbling pace to load Baby Baron’s plate with angry, heaping helpings. The assistant shakes his head, lips envelope thin, when he feels his boss has imbibed enough, and Baby Baron shrugs and grins, never showing any embarrassment that his every move is reported back to daddy in London. He appears to enjoy the assistant’s disapproval like a naughty schoolboy in love with his ruler-happy headmaster. Sometimes Marvin sends me his haunting, half-erotic dreams about Baby Baron and the mysterious manservant, and the e-mails are some of his most lovingly crafted writing.
    Marvin has the courtesy to reconstruct my jacket-fort after he slithers out and I’m about to let that sweet sleep lubricate my dry corpse when I hear a fakey throat-clearing sound and there they are, pointy little high heels in thevisible crack between my jacket and the polyester-blend beige carpet, right near my sticky face.
    “Maxime?” quoth the heels.
    “Yes?” I answer politely, if a little muffled by locale.
    “Maxime? I’m Heather from marketing?” Heather is an up-talker. “I left you a message? In a few weeks, we’re going to be filming the ad for the new television campaign? We really want you to be part of it? Can we count on your participation?”
    “We can?” I ask back.
    “We can?”
    “We can?”
    Heather’s shoes are very still.
    “Okay, then I’ll send you the details?”
    “Okay? Thanks?”
    My paper is “at war” with the other national paper –
The Other Daily
. It’s about two hundred years old and operates out of a twenty-storey art deco building in the heart of downtown that resembles a stack of birthday presents in descending sizes. The war is mostly polite and Canadian: sometimes
The Daily
gives out free copies at the subway and
The Other Daily
complains about inflated circulation numbers, and then
The Other Daily
starts popping up, unrequested, on