St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  “One does try,” he allowed, and he asked if she had ever competed in a car rally.

  Alas, no.

  Could she read maps, then?

  No.

  A pity, that, because he had hoped they might compete together.

  Somehow or other, mostly by encouraging him to tell her about his military service in Nigeria, they struggled through dinner without too many embarrassing silences, but she was hard put to conceal her boredom, and would certainly not have invited him into her flat for a drink had she not espied a familiar car parked across the road, the lights out.

  Fortunately, Derek was easily managed and when, breathing quickly, his cheeks flushed, he did lunge at her, squeezing her breasts like klaxons, murmuring all the while that she was super, a smashing girl, the phone began to ring. Ring and ring.

  “Shouldn’t one answer it?” he asked.

  “Would you mind taking it, please?”

  He did. Listened, blanched. And hung up.

  “Don’t let it worry you,” Nancy said. “It’s a local pervert. He usually gives me a tinkle at this hour.”

  Which was when he began to pull insistently at her dress, his expectations seemingly fired by the phone call, and, pleading fatigue, she handed him his umbrella and saw him out. Once he had driven off, she crossed the street, swinging her hips, and stopped in front of Jake’s car to hike her dress and adjust her garter.

  Sliding out of the car, he shrugged, shame-faced.

  “Ooo,” Nancy exclaimed, “I never dreamed it would be you. I was hoping to turn over a quick flyer.”

  “All right,” he said. “All right,” and he trailed after her into the flat, contemplating the dents in the sofa.

  “Come,” she said, opening the bedroom door, “don’t you want to see if the sheets are mussed?”

  “O.K.,” he protested, “O.K.,” but he did peer into the bedroom.

  “Bastard. What did you say to him on the phone?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, fleeing into the bathroom, and emerging to demand, “Have fun?”

  “Super fun. Would you care for a drink?”

  But he was already pouring himself one.

  “I have been invited for a weekend in the country,” she announced, curtsying. “With the Burtons. The Berks. Burtons, don’t you know?”

  “Well now, I never suspected you of social climbing.”

  “And can you give me one good reason, Jacob Hersh, why I shouldn’t go?”

  “Go,” he said.

  “Oh. Oh. Go to hell! And what if we were to marry and I was to bore you after ten years. What then? Would you trade me in for a younger model, like your fine friends?” His film friends.

  “I love you. You could never bore me.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Oh, Nancy, please!”

  “You can’t know. How can you know? And maybe you’d bore me after ten years?”

  “I’ve got it. Let’s get a divorce right now.”

  She had to laugh.

  “Look here, if we continue to anticipate, we can suck all the pleasure out of it.”

  “Yes. I know. May I have a drink too, please?”

  Instead, he kissed her and, undoing her buttons, led her to the bed, where suddenly she didn’t respond, explaining she couldn’t, not tonight, because her equipment had mysteriously disappeared.

  “How could that be?” Jake asked, his voice quivering.

  “You tell me.”

  “Maybe if you looked again …”

  “Oh, Jake. Darling Jake. I suppose I will have to marry you.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow, if you like.”

  “Christ Almighty!”

  6

  OSCAR HOFFMAN CONSIDERED THE TANGLED AND confused carton of accounts, receipts, and statements Jake had brought him, and then a bony little man, a bantam with steel-rimmed glasses, gathered them together, his smile servile, and retreated from Hoffman’s office as unobtrusively as he had entered.

  Returning to his cell. The tiny cell where he consumed his days, increasingly busy and acrimonious days, vengeful days, sipping luke-warm milky tea with his chocolate digestives. The cell where he squinted over the fanciful expense accounts of film types (producers, directors, writers, and the very stars themselves), ostensibly the most nondescript and obsequious underling in the offices of Oscar Hoffman & Co., Accountants.

  Harry Stein, he mused, easily the most servile of bookkeepers, a treasure, a fiddler ne plus ultra, even more effusive than the embarrassing Sister Pinsky, ready with his autograph book whenever one of the anointed was paraded down the hall to Father Hoffman’s sanctuary, to cogitate over the virtues of a company in the Isle of Man as opposed to selling ten years’ future earnings to Galaxy, taking shares in the Trust in lieu of salary. Or founding something new on the rock of the Bahamas. Or Luxembourg. Obliging Harry, first to offer a star a magazine or a cuppa, a clean ashtray, perhaps, if she had to wait in her (deductible) furs and obligatory dark glasses before being ushered into Father Hoffman’s confessional, petulantly settling her lubricant cunt into an unaccustomed hard chair, squeezing her clever little accountant between an assignation and a visit with her osteopath. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Oscar. I simply don’t understand anything about money.”

  Harry instantly at the star’s side to chirp, “I must take this opportunity to tell you how marvelous you were in …,” picking out the picture the critics had damned.

  “Why, thank you,” she’d say, not even bothering to look at him, a blatant nonentity. His praise after all as inevitable as rain.

  Particularly enjoyable to Harry were the left-wingers, those staunch heroes of the Hampstead barricades, who signed letters to the Times protesting the latest American obloquy. Who refused to hold shares in Dow Chemical. Who defied the “establishment” on television interviews and were unfailingly on first-name terms with their chauffeurs. And yet – and yet – had need of Father Hoffman’s intercession with the Almighty to save them from surtax on earth and the avarice everlasting of used wives.

  “I must say,” Harry would enthuse, “I am looking forward to your latest …”

  “Why, that’s very good of you, Mr.…?”

  “Stein.”

  “Yes. Say there, Stein, how would you like to come to the opening?”

  “Ooooo …”

  Two tickets to the first night of the latest epiphany, albeit in the second balcony, where the grips and electricians squatted with their wives, old cows tricked out in garish finery, who arrived earliest and lingered longest in the lobby, craning their seamed necks, oohing, aaahing, at a glimpse of the fabled as they emerged from big black cars, the men in evening dress trailing starlets who rivaled each other in cleavage, bitches acknowledging the roped off but bedazzled plebs with a teensy wave, pausing, tits outthrust for the bothersome photographers from the Mail and the Express. Harry delighted in treating one of the models from the Graphic Arts Academy to such displays, saying, “Not to worry, dear,” as she swelled to a legendary presence, “she’s as much of a whore as you are.”

  In his ill-ventilated cell, heated by two electricity bars and hatred, it was Harry’s special chore to sift through a client’s bills, a year’s debaucheries, and calculate expenses, inventing here, fabricating there, any one restaurant bill, from the Mirabelle or Les Ambassadeurs, possibly exceeding his own weekly salary. Indispensable he was. Father Hoffman’s most cherished novitiate … but lately an ominous cloud had gathered over the once blessed spires of Oscar Hoffman & Co., Accountants. Increasingly the angel fallen from Inland Revenue contemplated the sacrifices on the altar and pronounced them lacking in sufficient faith, for his Chancellor was a jealous one and would tolerate no other havens before him. Where hitherto the anointed and the fabled had passed out of Father Hoffman’s sanctuary, overcome with beatitude and astonishment, for his prayers were always heard, some of them now barged in red-faced and even in tears, voices wer
e raised, threats made, and they strode out in obvious fear and trembling of the angel fallen from Inland Revenue and the judgment to come.

  Father Hoffman looked poorly. He shook his head, he pulled his hair. Come noon, he forswore The White E. to partake of cottage cheese salad and yogurt at his desk, nodding over his ledgers. Consulting the books of law as they had been handed down.

  “There’s a serpent in our midst, Harry. Keep your eyes open, will you?”

  There were afternoons now when Father Hoffman paused by the water cooler, contemplating his flock, counting the blessings he had showered on them, loans and luncheon vouchers, bonuses, paid holidays, pension schemes, and the annual party; afternoons when he wondered who had denied him more than thrice. Which was Iscariot?

  Once Harry remained in his cell for lunch, unknown to Hoffman, and came out to find him scurrying hither and thither, stooping over wastepaper baskets, riffling through briefcases and rummaging through desk drawers. “Harry, people come to us with their confidences. We are trusted. There’s a sewer rat in this office, a bastard without equal, and when I find him I’m going to break his bones.”

  Sprung from his office for the day now, Harry Stein, the amateur photographer, footloose in Soho, did the bookshops, not reduced to perusing the cellophane-wrapped magazines hanging on bulldog clips from the walls or comparison-shopping the strip films, but immediately beckoned into the back room to sift through the boxes on the trestle table. Bondage, Unusual Positions, Rubber Garments, Flagellation. Then, with an hour still to kill before classes, he took a pint at the Yorkminster and then, for a lark, put in a ’umble ’arry appearance at the Trattoria Terrazza, asking the haughty girl at the desk for a table for eight at nine p.m.

  Impossible, she replied sniffily, and Harry, perplexed and stammering, produced a piece of notepaper and asked if this was the Trattoria Terrazza.

  Yes, certainly.

  Mr. Sean Connery sent me. I’m his driver.

  Ah, well, then …

  Still feigning to read from his notepaper, he added, garbling his French, that he wanted four bottles of Château Margaux opened to breathe at eight forty-five and a gâteau, yes, with thirty-eight candles. Would that be too much trouble?

  Then Harry patiently sought out a functioning call box, extracted his little black book and selected the ex-directory number of a star who had sent him out of the office and into the rain earlier in the day –

  “Aren’t you a sweetie?”

  – to fetch a pair of theater tickets while she waited, long shaven legs crossed, for an audience with His Holiness Father Hoffman. “Hullo, my little darlin’.”

  “I’m so glad to hear from you again.” Icily delivered this, but fearful. “The police are intercepting all my calls now, you see.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you why I called then. How would you like me to pop over right now and lick it for you? I mean lick it like it’s never been licked before. Lick it bone dry.”

  “I’m not hanging up. You just go ahead. They’re listening to every filthy word.”

  “That is to say, if you’re up to it. After the abortion, like. Because I wouldn’t want to be spitting out stitches, would I now?” and laughing, he slammed down the receiver.

  For it was time for night school and, gathering together his photographic equipment, Harry proceeded to the basement studios of the Graphic Arts Society, of which he was a longstanding associate fellow.

  7

  SAMMY.

  Jake imagined once the doctor had pronounced her pregnant beyond doubt, anointing her, so to speak, she would become ethereal, a stranger to lust, and he, attentive, solicitous, not to say self-sacrificing –

  “Don’t worry, darling. It will go down by itself.”

  – would demonstrate the magnitude of his love by approaching her with tenderness in lieu of passion, taking her as an object of adoration rather than a love vessel.

  Fat chance.

  Instead of maternal content, Nancy’s swelling belly unleashed the wanton in her. Not so much the Holy Mother as Our Lady of the Orifices. A sexual acrobat. So, heedless of her condition, even as her rock-hard breasts began to yield a sugary substance, making him an even more recalcitrant lover, she, abandoned to pleasure, came clawing after him nightly. With teasing fingers. Breasts that brushed him erect. A tongue that licked him alive. And self-denying Jake, roused beyond any possible concern for the unborn, rode her to a climax, a shared and soaring release, anxious only afterwards for the creature swimming within her.

  Some introduction to my son, he’d think, lighting up, asking if she was all right, if he hadn’t been too brutish. Some how-do-you-do, ramming him like a crazed billygoat. He was tormented by a vision of the boy, his kaddish, born with a depression in his skull, bearing into manhood the imprint of Jake’s cockshead in his scalp. An unanswerable reproach. In another nightmare, even as he stooped to lick her nether lips, teasing, biting – lo and behold, a nose protrudes. Hello, hello. Or a tiny, unspeakably delicate hand reaches out to stick him in the eye. Hello, hello. Or the waters break, drowning him. Deservedly, you satyr. Or trembling, quaking to a climax, she actually expels the baby, squirting him across the bedroom in a sea of placenta and blood. And me, he thought, I wouldn’t even know how to tie the cord. I’d fail her, fainting.

  Nancy did nothing to alleviate his anxiety when, her passion spent, she would suddenly say, “Give me your hand! ”

  “What now?”

  “Can you feel the movement?”

  Yes, he’d say, snatching it away, scorched.

  “He’s some kicker, isn’t he?”

  Kicker? The poor bastard is choking on my semen. “Maybe we should lay off, well, until afterwards …”

  Nancy was well into her eighth month when Jenny and Doug passed through London on their way to an international conference in Tangiers: Television and the Developing Countries.

  “We haven’t seen you since Duddy staged your play in Toronto,” Jake said. “I’m sorry about that. I do think it deserved better notices.”

  “I wasn’t the least bit surprised. After all, nothing offends like gravitas. But I will say this for Kravitz, he resisted every commercial pressure, the director’s, Marlene, he wouldn’t let them change a word.”

  “He respected your integrity as a writer.”

  Doug nodded. Jenny, eager to change the subject, asked Jake if he remembered Jane Watson, a Toronto actress.

  “Yes.”

  “She had a boy. It was a normal birth –”

  “You see,” Jake said to Nancy.

  “- and three months later she developed this growth in her womb. When they removed it they found it was a tumor with teeth and a little beard.”

  “Charming. And how come,” Jake charged, surfacing nasty, “you’ve never been pregnant, Jenny? Do you take the pill?”

  “I don’t take Doug,” she said.

  Eventually, Jake was able to have a word alone with Jenny. He told her how he had been mistaken for Joey twice. On arrival in London and when a registered letter from Canada House had come to him in error. “I wonder where he is now?”

  “Israel maybe. Or Germany.”

  “Germany?”

  “Hanna gets postcards from time to time.”

  Hanna, who had still to take up Luke’s invitation and come to London.

  “What’s the last address you have for him?”

  “Joey never sends addresses. But he was in Israel in forty-eight. During the so-called War of Independence. Hanna still gets letters from a woman there who claims to be his wife.”

  “What does she say?”

  “She asks for money, what do you think? She claims Joey deserted her.”

  The next morning Jake read in the Times,

  TIRED MEN WITH LIVES

  IN THEIR HANDS

  Surgeons on duty for 48 hours

  Because of shortages of staff, surgeons in some hospitals are carrying out emergency operations, including brain surgery, after being on duty for up to 48
hours, often with as little as two or three hours’ snatched sleep.

  Oh, Nancy. Nancy, my darling.

  Nancy’s water broke at three a.m., on a Thursday morning, and the baby was delivered without mishap. Sammy had no dent in his head and appeared, on first count, to have the prescribed number of everything. Reassuringly, he wore a bracelet with his name on it, but all the same Jake committed distinguishing features to memory. After all, this was his kaddish.

  Luke, in spite of everything, was invited to become Sammy’s godfather. “Why, if you hadn’t leaped at the chance of getting me to pay for your dinners at Chez Luba, Nancy and I might never have gotten together in the first place.”

  “What do you think of her now?” Luke asked.

  “Not much. You?”

  Once having married, letting herself go, such was Nancy’s bliss, her pleasure in Jake, the baby, looking for a house, that she could not understand why she had hesitated. But she soon grasped that her husband was not all of a piece, as she had hoped. On the contrary. Jake was charged with contradictions. Ostensibly consumed by overweening ambition, he was, on black days, filled with self-hatred and debilitating doubts, largely because he took himself to be an impostor and his work, given its fragile nature, a con. She began to wonder why he had chosen to become a director in the first place and feared, in agonizingly lucid moments, that if he did not rise as far as he hoped, he might yet diminish into bitterness.