St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

So big, skinny, straw-haired Luke, fumbling with his glasses, was able to quit the flat not churning with guilt, as he had entered it, but bracingly angry, for he had already begun to convince himself that the play had been Jake’s for the asking, only he didn’t want to do it. He was sad, he was incensed, but he was also immensely relieved. He believed he had a better shot at success with a British director, his new and risky venture unencumbered by a cherished friend who even so was merely another Canadian and therefore a reminder of his picayune beginnings. Even so, anger failed to sustain Luke all the way home. He crawled into bed feeling lousy, dismayed by his own cunning.

  Jake continued to drink alone, hurt and indignant, for his best friend had judged his talent and found it wanting, and yet – and yet – he grudgingly had to admit, in some dark and secret place, that he was astonished the Royal Court had considered a Canadian play, even one of Luke’s, good enough to be produced. He was also relieved that his own first effort on the British stage would not be a Canadian play. He assumed, based on his education and sour experience, that nothing Canadian was quite good enough. His conjecture was poor old Luke’s play wouldn’t fail, but neither would it succeed. It would open to end-of-the-column notices, uniformly solicitous, play to half-filled houses for six weeks and then fade into the middle distance, condemned as a promising first effort.

  Within the Canadian colony, there was more skepticism than envy when Luke revealed his play had been sent to Timothy Nash, a young director only two years down from Cambridge but already a fabled name.

  “Don’t count on anything,” another writer cautioned him with appetite. Somebody else ventured, “It’s very encouraging. Even if your play isn’t ready and Nash is overrated …”

  Nash, to Luke’s amazement, read the play within a fortnight and summoned him to a meeting. The only friend Luke wanted to consult beforehand was Jake, but he knew that would be improper, especially considering his own unbridled enthusiasm. So Luke spent the evening alone, unfortunately re-reading his play. It struck him as windy, adolescent, and embarrassing, as if he were not sufficiently fearful of tomorrow’s meeting with Nash.

  “Your p-p-play’s a swinger, m-m-man. I d-d-dig it. I haven’t been so h-h-hung up on anything for years.”

  Grab your play and run now, Luke thought – go – but he didn’t. He couldn’t. He was far too bedazzled by Timothy and Lady Samantha, and more than somewhat grateful for Jake’s absence, which enabled him to flatter the Nashes with impunity.

  But if not then, Luke thought, he certainly should have broken it off once Nash pranced into rehearsal and it became sickeningly clear that his reputation was unearned. He was a fraud, albeit a delightful one. But Luke was astute enough to grasp that Nash’s presence festooned his play with glitter. What might have been merely another opening was acquiring the dimensions of an event. Nash not only attracted classy actors, otherwise prohibitively expensive, but with a wave of his wand he drew Fleet Street columnists out of El Vino’s and the promise of the most desirable West End theater, should the play transfer.

  Transfer? Luke, increasingly depressed by the shape of rehearsals, soon wished his play would never open. He took his fears to Jake, as well as implied remorse, and, without ever asking him directly, cajoled him into coming to a rehearsal, slumping in the back row with him, as in Toronto days. Jake made copious notes, he sat up all night with Luke, raking through the script again and again, and he was back the following night and the next. Then Luke bundled Nash into his sheepskin-lined suede coat, took him to Étoile for lunch, inflating him with extravagant flatteries before he punctured him with some hard points. His hammer, Jake’s nails.

  Opening night, Jake went to the Royal Court to commiserate, armed with rehearsed responses of singular generosity, but was obliged to stay on to celebrate Luke’s unmistakable success. Sullen and envy-ridden, but simulating pleasure, he stood well apart from Luke backstage, unwilling to claim him like other old associates, callow TV types, discontented Canadians, equally flattering in Luke’s presence, but once expelled to skitter on the periphery, inclined to carp.

  “Derivative, don’t you think?”

  “Tynan will like it, because it’s left-wing. Otherwise …”

  Flushed and chain-smoking, noticeably swaying, but in fine form for all that, Luke was hemmed in by the sort of people who, on being introduced to either of them at parties hitherto, immediately began to formulate apologies, retreating, excusing themselves to serve whatever celebrities were holding forth that night. Producers and agents, journalists, and breathless, silken girls. Graciously Luke broke free, abandoning everybody to seek out Jake.

  “You’re coming to the party. Right?”

  “Sure.”

  The play’s producer bore down on Luke and began to tug at his arm. “Wait for me,” Luke called back.

  But Jake left immediately and was in fact the first to arrive at the Nashes’ place.

  The address in Fulham, he figured, retracing his steps to peer at the street sign again, must be wrong. This had to be a joke. The grubby, flaking row of sinking terrace houses, a slippered old crone drifting down the street, a MacFisheries, an ABC, a butcher shop, its window choked with Argentine beef, bespoke poverty practiced for generations. In each garden, a centerpiece of grit-encrusted hydrangeas. And through the smog held at the bottom of the hill, the rising gas works.

  But it was a willowy, toreador-trousered girl, her big feet bare, who opened the door. “You must be Jacob Hersh,” she said, her accent grindingly South Ken.

  One living room wall was lined in dark-brown cork and another was dominated by an enormous John Bratby painting of a fat woman squatting on a toilet bowl. A kitchen-sink school epiphany.

  “Would you care for a drink?”

  “Thank you, Lady Samantha.”

  “Sam, if you please.”

  Elegant leather pouffes, white here, black there, drifted on islands of Tibetan lamb rugs. Within minutes the house was overflowing with well-wishers and Timothy Nash, a slender slip of a chorus boy, descended on Jake. A lick of black hair curled over Nash’s forehead. He wore a T-shirt under his corduroy jacket, faded jeans, and canvas sneakers, but the attaché case he sent sliding across the floor was a Gucci. “Luke goes on and on about you,” Nash said. “I’m m-m-meshgugga for the things you’ve done on the telly.”

  “Meshugga,” Jake said.

  Ultimately, a car was dispatched to Fleet Street to fetch batches of the morning newspapers. The reviews were resoundingly good. “O.K., we can cut now,” Luke said, seemingly satiated.

  So they quit Lady Samantha’s flat, armed with bottles of champagne and smoked salmon sandwiches liberated from her kitchen. Five a.m. and still dark, the wintry air tingling. Crocus sprouts poking through the frost here and there. An articulated lorry, its muzzled headlights glowing, trundled down the Fulham Road. Outside a butcher shop, a man in a bloody white smock bent under the burden of a side of beef. Inside the news agent’s shop next door, a fat lady, squinting against the cigarette burning between her lips, was sorting out the morning newspapers. Luke’s head began to bob, drifting lower. Jake nudged him, passing the bottle. They were rounding Hyde Park Corner now and the water trucks were out, washing down the black streets.

  “In summer,” Jake said, “when we were kids in Montreal, we used to run after them, leaping in the spray.”

  “Montreal, P.Q. That stood for Piss Quick in Toronto.”

  “What’s P.L.P. stand for?”

  “Public Leaning Post. And what about W.H.D.?”

  “Wandering Hand Disease.”

  “Oh Gertie McCormick, of the cotton panties, where are you now?”

  Finally, they reached Luke’s flat in Swiss Cottage, lighting all the gas heaters and rubbing their hands.

  “What are we doing in this ridiculous country?” Luke asked.

  “Acquiring culture.”

  “Quite so, Hersh.”

  “Bang on, Scott. Now be a good chap and let’s have some more champers, what
?”

  Luke read the reviews again, aloud this time, savoring each recalled Toronto insult he had endured, not forgetting his most cherished enemies in London, imagining them one by one, as they wakened to the same newspapers, their day irretrievably soured.

  “You’re going to be a thingee now,” Jake said.

  “It’s m-m-meshgg-g-gugga. Damn it. I’m going to bring Hanna over. I’m going to fly her in to London.”

  “Why, that’s a great idea,” Jake said, seething inwardly. For that was his dream. He was going to bring Hanna over on the day of his triumph.

  Jake sat on the window sill. Outside, an ill-tempered mother passed, dragging a sniveling five-year-old boy after her. The boy tumbled to the pavement and she reprimanded him loudly. He began to wail. Impulsively, Jake whacked open the window. “Leave him alone,” he hollered.

  The mother looked up, startled.

  “Let him be,” Jake said, lowering the window. Then he turned to Luke, “You know, I’m going to be thirty soon. In two months I’m going to be thirty years old.”

  They sat down to breakfast. Luke added vodka to Jake’s orange juice, stirring it with a fork handle before handing it to him.

  “Not all the candidates pass,” Jake said.

  “What?”

  “Auden.”

  When the phone rang it was Tanfield’s Diary. The Daily Mail. “Yes,” Luke said. “I see.”

  He glanced at Jake, all at once a crumpled, disconsolate figure, and, for old time’s sake, he decided to pay the toll once more, reverting to what had once been their iconoclastic rule. Their shared boyish hatred of phonies. “I usually write wearing my Hardy Amies dressing gown,” he told Tanfield’s Diary. “Eccentricities? Oh, I adore walking in the rain. I’m also mad keen to drive in my bare feet.”

  Jake sensed Luke was trying to please him, but he could also see his friend’s glee was simulated. No sooner had he hung up than he was regretting his gesture, which was impractical. When the phone rang again, the Evening Standard this time, Jake suggested that Luke take it in the other room.

  Next it was the Canadian Press, which hardly mattered. “Just one moment, please,” Luke said, and before passing the phone to Jake, he added, “It’s for you, Mr. Scott.”

  “No,” Jake said. “I don’t feel like playing.”

  Jake’s head pounded, his throat was raw. Luke’s eyes burned, he itched everywhere.

  “Do you realize,” Luke said, “the hockey season’s almost half done and we haven’t made our bets yet?”

  “Maybe we’ll skip it this year.”

  Luke’s agent phoned to say he had arranged a meeting with a firm of accountants for tomorrow morning and then called again to say they were having lunch at the Mirabelle on Tuesday, with Columbia, and that there was a book United Artists wanted him to read immediately.

  On Wednesday, Luke flew to New York, first class, all expenses paid, to enter into negotiations for a Broadway production of his play and to deal with other offers.

  Alone, Jake sobered up. There were scripts he had to read, appointments to be kept, but instead he slept in late each morning, made lists, read magazines.

  The reviews of the play in the posh Sundays unsettled him even more. He was prepared for Luke’s accolade, but not for the praise that was accorded Timothy Nash’s production. Nash, of whom one critic wrote, that with this play he had taken a big leap forward, a sometimes showy talent soaring with inner confidence for the first time. On wings of Hersh, Jake thought.

  In a way it was gratifying, very gratifying, this necessarily surreptitious triumph of Jake’s, especially considering Luke’s initial lack of confidence in him, but he could not make the rounds, an ancient mariner, protesting the best touches were his, not Nash’s. Jake had always abominated those seedy retailers of inside tales who were endemic to the trade. The unknown myopic film editor who had saved the name director’s picture; the publisher’s reader, laboring through the night in his Camden Town bed-sitter, who had stitched together the best seller from an unjustly celebrated author’s endless, inchoate manuscript; the talented but naïve young collaborator who had been swindled out of his screen credit. The real makers, if only the truth were known. The industrious little Clem Attlees behind all your swaggering Churchills.

  Not for the first time, Jake recalled the rumpled sports writer he was so fond of drinking with at the Montreal Men’s Press Club; the man who told him about a former Montreal Royals pitcher, a farmhand of rare promise, who, once granted his major league shot with the Brooklyn Dodgers, had failed, through no fault of his own, to work his way into the starting rotation. Unaccountably, the team couldn’t knock in runs for him. When he was on the mound they tripped over themselves on the field. The pitcher, returned to the Royals, refused to yield to bitterness. “In this game,” he told the sports writer, “either you do or you don’t.”

  Yes, Jake thought. Yes, indeed. Or a farmhand you remaineth forever.

  After an absence of eight days, Luke returned from New York, bedazzled.

  “You’ve got to hear this, Jake. It’s crazy. They sent a limo to meet me at the airport, a black cad with a phone inside. All I could think of is I’ve got to make a call, but who would believe me if I said I was phoning from a car crawling down Madison Avenue. They booked me into the Essex, a suite overlooking the park, and before I’ve even got time to pee the place is filled with guys from the agency. Flick my cigarette and there’s a Yaley under me with an ashtray. Hold out a hand and Miss Colgate shoves a martini into it. Everybody’s talking cockamamy –”

  “Talking what?” Jake interrupted meanly, for in fact the word was familiar to him. He had heard it from a Hollywood agent.

  Luke explained, then continued: “Anyway, my very first night in town he sets up this lavish dinner party. He lives in one of those East Side co-ops, naturally. Truman Capote’s in it, and a clutch of Kennedys. It’s choked with antiques, pieces of Chinese jade, and first editions, the bastard doesn’t read anything but synopses. There’s a Chagall hanging in the living room and a Giacometti piece standing by the window. I no sooner step in the door than he whispers in my ear, you see that girl over there? Do I see her? Man, she’s the first thing I do see. Undulating on the arm of the sofa. Well, he says, she’s here for you to fuck. Bloody crude, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Jake agreed, bitten with envy.

  “And me, I’m dead beat. Anyway, all through dinner he’s trying to get me to say yes to writing an original screenplay for –” and here he named the star the producer had under contract. “He’s bulldozing me, honestly, but with everybody there. We’re eight at the table. Look, I said, I don’t write for actresses. I’m not that kind of writer. If I do something and it happens to fit, well, lucky me, but I can’t start with the actress. Are you crazy, he says, and all through dinner he keeps drumming away at me. Finally, come the brandies, everybody still at the table, he says what do you want? You want me to double the fee, I’ll double it. That’s not the point, I say feebly. Wouldn’t you like to dance in the White House on Kennedy’s inauguration night, he says?”

  You bastard, Jake thought.

  “Not particularly. It’s a game now. I keep saying no, and trying to change the subject, and he keeps sweetening the offer. Finally, I say I’m going, I’ve simply got to get some sleep and, wham, the girl pops up, can you drop me off, she asks? The producer gives me the big nudge. WeIl, I think, poor kid, she’ll only get into trouble if I don’t drop her off. Maybe there’s a big part at stake for her. So I say, O.K., the taxi stops, and I’m too tired to get out. Won’t you come in for a nightcap, she says.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What do you think? The flesh is weak. Jake, they’ve seen your TV work and like it. If you want, I’ll write the script. We can do the picture together.”

  “If you want to do it, why use me as an excuse?”

  “A week in New York, Jake, and you’ll wonder what you’re doing in this city. In the end, we’re Americans
you know. You wouldn’t feel like a foreigner there.”

  “I can’t get into the States, remember?”

  “The climate’s changed. I’m sure you can clear it up with the proper lawyers.” Luke paused. “I’ll lend you the money.”

  “You’ll what?”

  “I said I’ll lend you the money.”

  But Jake said no, and they parted abruptly outside Chez Luba, walking to their cars, Luke suddenly hollering back, “I’m having some people in on Tuesday night. Can you make it?”

  “I think so. Sure, why not? Poker?”

  “Nancy Croft’s coming.”

  “Who?”

  “Didn’t you meet her in Toronto? Naw, if you had, you’d remember. She’s gorgeous. Oh Christ, hold on a second. Almost forgot. I’ve got a registered letter for you. It arrived at my flat yesterday.”

  Jake ripped open the envelope in his car.

  The letter, from Canada House, wasn’t even for him, it was for Cousin Joey, signed by an official in the Consular Section. The detailed voucher attached was for “financial assistance rendered to you by the Canadian Embassy in Madrid, Spain.”

  Dear Mr. Hersh,

  We have just been requested by our Department to send you the enclosed Account Receivable Voucher, 248c, dated Jan 27, 1959, in the amount of 132.67 (£47.2.6) We would be grateful if you would pay this sum at your early convenience.

  You should return to us as soon as possible the emergency certificate issued to you by the Canadian Embassy in Madrid.

  Mistaken for the Horseman again.

  4

  JAKE WAS WAKENED BY THE PHONE BEFORE NINE THE next morning.

  “So, shmock, your big friend finally gets a play on in London, why don’t you direct it?”

  “Who in the hell is this?”

  “Can you use a smoked brisket? Direct from Levitt’s.”

  “Duddy, what are you doing in London?”

  “Launching a star. I’ve got to speak to you.”

  “All right, then. What are you doing right now?”

  “Masturbating. And you?”