St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  Click.

  “Yes. Hold it.”

  And the next man.

  “Give me a filthy look. Stronger. As if I’ve suggested something absolutely unspeakable. Lovely, dear. Lovely.”

  Harry’s turn at last.

  “Last two chaps didn’t have any film in their cameras.”

  Which earned a knowing giggle from Angela, who then extended her hands for Harry to slip on the cuffs, and shook her blue negligée off her shoulders, letting it float to the floor. “Shall I look scared, luv?”

  “Absolutely terrified, because,” and Harry leaned forward to whisper in her ear, demonstrating just one of his special privileges, “it’s bleeding Neville Heath coming after you. It’s Ian Brady come calling.”

  “Oooo,” she sang out, shuddering.

  15

  JAKE HAD WAITED FOREVER, IT SEEMED, FOR THE opportunity to make a film, and so long as he had actually been immersed in its production, agonizing over the script with the writer, casting, shooting, and, most enjoyable, editing, he had been able to believe his labors had point, but once the film was finished and it had opened, he could see all too clearly that what he had brought forth was neither splendid nor odious, but merely good. Another interesting film for the circuit. The energy he and others had expended, the one million two hundred thousand dollars they had consumed, could have been used much more beneficially providing shelter for the homeless, food for the hungry. So much for honor, so much for grace.

  Beginning work on his second film, a thriller, in 1966, Jake grasped that he was thirty-six and being young was something past and done with. He was thirty-six and a professional; no more. For the first time in his life, it seemed, susceptible to germs. His teeth had begun to loosen and slide. His bowels burned, cherry-size hemorrhoids blocking the passage.

  1 Family in 22

  in Britain today

  is affected by Heart Disease

  THE HEART

  What makes it tick

  How 60,000 miles

  of arterial plumbing

  can go wrong.

  It was winter, a season Jake abhorred, especially in London, where there was neither sun nor snow, only lowering gray skies. Once winter had been something to endure and spring could not come quickly enough for him. Now he yearned for time to pass at a less febrile pace. Spring was no longer a celebration so much as another season to be counted. Something to be consumed and not to be had again. Something to be filed with a year number and entered in a ledger. “In spring 1967, as my father lay dying, I …” Proust put off for so many seasons would now have to be read or discarded. If he did not see Athens this year, next he might be too busy. Or ill.

  Lying in bed with Nancy, their bodies entwined, his hands clasping her breasts, had once filled him with such content that he had taken it for a fuller expression of their love than the passion of other nights, so quickly spent. Now death muzzled him here as everywhere else. Lying together, he could think only of the obtruding bones beneath the wasting flesh. When she turned to kiss him, heavy with sleep, he sometimes caught a whiff of sour breath. The rot eating into the walls of her stomach and, most assuredly, his. DEATH, SIGNS OF. Hippocratic countenance, discoloration of the skin, failure of ligature, Hypostasis, loss of heat, rigidity. “Putrefaction is a certain sign, and begins in two or three days, as a greenish tint over the abdomen.”

  For Nancy. For Sammy, for Molly. The baby to come. For me too.

  What compounded Jake’s sense of oppression was an inner conviction that it was all so unspeakably banal; after all, fear of aging and death was something he shared with all men approaching middle age inexorably. Even so, there was at least one extraordinary circumstance. He was happily married. Oh, he sometimes thought, if only his union with Nancy was oppressive, stale, charged with resentments and acrimony, he could then, like most of his film acquaintances, seek solace with vacuous girls, indulging in sex without love, punishing himself, as it were. Like Myer Gross.

  “Listen here, Jake, you think I enjoy deceiving Sylvia? I like her. I’m genuinely fond of her. Every time I have it off with a new secretary it’s anguish for me. I’m so guilt-ridden, I suffer palpitations, and that’s not good for me, you know.”

  “And so, Myer, why do you …?”

  “Well, once it was every night, even twice a night, but now we make it, let’s say, once a week, going at it like dray horses, it’s an effort for me to keep it up and I don’t even think she comes any more. It’s only the sound effects now. But if you could see me in the sack with an enthusiastic new puppy. Young. Firm. I’m a youngster again. A bull … Maybe I’m doing the wrong thing. But if that’s the case, Jake, I’m the one who will pay for it in the end.”

  Dr. O’Brien pumped Myer Gross’s rump full of hormones, Bob Cohen swore by an evil-smelling concoction he mashed into a glass each morning, and C. Bernard Farber mainlined a Hungarian recipe, made of crushed bumblebees. Ziggy Alter was irrigated regularly at Forest Mere. With me, Monty Talman confessed to Jake, it isn’t a question of sex. “To tell you the truth, I’m a bigger talker than a doer. If I’m unfaithful, it’s fundamentally because I know I bore her. Shit, we’ve been together eighteen years, there isn’t a story of mine she doesn’t know and couldn’t tell better than me. Picture this. We’ve got new people coming to dinner, I start to tell a story and right off I can see her eyes glaze over. Or, if she’s really in a rotten mood, out she comes with the punch line. Jake, I never drove women crazy with my sexual prowess, but I like to make them laugh. It gives me a real charge to make their eyes light up, and when I walk into the White Elephant I like to be seen with a chick that makes the others burn with envy. My God, you don’t know what a pleasure it is to take a girl out now, a stranger, and to have her hang on my stories, exploding when I reach the climax. The truth is there’s a flaw in my makeup. I like to impress people. It’s my Achilles’ Heel. But how could I impress Zelda any more. I fart in bed. I start into an anecdote and buzz, buzz, I hear her thoughts cutting me down like a saw. Liar, she’s thinking, exaggerator, bullshit artist. O.K., it’s true, all of it, but I’m making good money, the years are flying, did I need someone in the house to remind me of it day in and day out?”

  Jake’s trouble was that more than any other woman, he wanted Nancy. After ten years, she still excited him in bed. Worse news. He enjoyed talking to her. Fortunately, the others were tolerant. They grasped that if Jake didn’t philander it wasn’t because he was a miser, like the legendary Otto Gelber, a producer who had married a tiny woman only because it meant fewer skins for the mink coat and, hiring a secretary, didn’t demand sexiness above all but sought a girl who cut her nails short and could actually type. Rather than trade his wife in after her menopause, Gelber wasn’t ashamed to drive the same model year in and year out. Instead of keeping a mistress, he jerked off in his office every afternoon. “Using a paperback,” C. Bernard Farber swore.

  Lou Caplan, Al Levine, Talman, and the rest of the film crowd Jake played baseball and poker with were mostly ten years older than he was; he agreed with Nancy that they were corrupt, their wives hard, and understood when she preferred to read in bed rather than endure another of their parties. But Jake forgave them everything for their wit, their appetite, and their ability to rub hope together with chutzpah to evoke a film. And from time to time he was touched, as when he discovered the usually ebullient Fiedler drinking alone at Tiberio’s at one in the morning, disconsolate, gray in the face and chewing pills. “I can’t take these parties any more. They’re killing me.”

  “Why did you go, then?”

  “But I left early,” he protested. “Here I am. What am I doing here? Dropped in for a nightcap. I should be home in bed.”

  “Go, then.”

  “If I hadn’t gone to the party, I’d feel I was missing something. Or there are bastards who’d say I haven’t been invited. Like I didn’t count any more. I have to put in an appearance, you know.” He shrugged. “Wherever I go, Jake, I feel I’m missing someth
ing. Other guys are having a better time somewhere else and, shit, if I go there, it still seems like the wrong place. It’s only the next morning I discover the action was somewhere else altogether. I’m under pressure. My pulse rate makes the doctor turn pale. How about that?”

  “Go home, Harry. Get some sleep.”

  “Yeah. You’re right,” and he gulped down his drink. “Hey, wait. Come with me to Annabel’s. There are going to be a couple of girls there.”

  As usual, Jake declined. Which is not to say he wasn’t tempted from time to time, that after a bad day he couldn’t have coped very nicely with a little something on the side. A dalliance, a diversion. Like Cy Levi, who approached all women with ardor, dizzy with desire at parties and in restaurants.

  “You see that one over there? No, at the next table. She’s got just the kind of ears you like to pull when she’s going down on you, don’t you think?”

  Cy had grieved, he had pulled his hair, he had wept and switched to a Reichian lay analyst before he had been able to divorce his wife. All because of their eleven-year-old boy, whom he adored.

  “You tell him, she kept saying. It’s your decision. You tell him. So finally, you know, I took him into the living room and shut the door. Biting back the tears, I said, Mark, there are some things you are too young to understand. Brace yourself, boy. And taking his hand in mine, stroking it, I said, I’m leaving your mother, but this does not mean I don’t love you. I adore you. I will see you every weekend. Saturday and Sunday, yours. I make no other plans. I am at your service. Now, your mother is a splendid woman. But adults, well, they’re difficult, and to be honest we don’t get along any more. It’s not her fault, it’s not mine. We decided it would be best for you if we parted and you were not raised in a bad atmosphere, like I was, for my parents, God bless them, abominated each other and made my childhood miserable. They weren’t honest, as I’m trying to be with you. So I’m leaving, son. I will take care of your mother and you. I don’t expect you to understand now, but I beg of you not to judge. Love me, Mark, as I love you. Later, understanding will come … And blowing my nose, searching his baby-blues for reaction – emotion – anything – I said, that’s it, kid. Now what do you say? You know what he said? He said is it all right if I stay up to watch Bonanza tonight?”

  Jake was sufficiently tolerant of himself to understand it wouldn’t mean anything if he strayed, but given the opportunity he simply liked Nancy too much to humiliate her. He could not abide the idea of her being introduced to another woman at a party, his afternoon’s vagary, the other woman throbbing with secret knowledge. He lacked the reckless style of Manny Gordon, for instance, who exulted in watching his wife and mistress of the moment trade niceties at a dinner table, only to nab Jake afterwards, “Oh, am I ever a bastard! But, you know, I live with it now. That’s where analysis pays off.”

  Jake also lacked the subtlety, not to say the rich background, of Moey Hanover.

  Years and years ago, reading the Gemara with his zeyda, sharing a glass bowl of pistachios, pinging shells together into a saucer, Moey had learned that if a man holds a sword out of a third-floor window and flying past comes another man, and he stabs him, is the man guilty of murder? Not so simple, says Reb Gamaliel. Was the flying man, for example, going to his death anyhow? Did he jump, asked Rabbi Eleazar, son of Azariah, or was he pushed? Were they related, inquired the sagacious Raschi?

  Seemingly, this was a futile exercise in arcane law, with no possible future applications, but it had in fact enabled Moey to grasp at an early age that truth was a many-splendored thing; it had its nuances. So when his wife charged that he had been seen leaving the Paramount Hotel at four in the afternoon, arm in arm with an obvious tart, he had been able to swear to Lilian, hand over his boy’s head, that, appearances notwithstanding, he had not been unfaithful to her.

  For, he argued with himself, to be unfaithful is to commit adultery, it is to have carnal knowledge of another woman, but to lie on a bed in the afternoon in the Paramount Hotel and have your toes sucked one by one is no such thing, even if he did moan with pleasure, for, as Reb Gamaliel would be the first to ask, could his big toe ejaculate? No. Could his little toe, even nibbled to distraction, impregnate another woman? No. Could it bring home the clap, as Rabbi Azariah might ask? No. These were not even his private parts.

  Verily, he argued, even to allow his cock to be licked clean as a lollipop stick was not to be unfaithful, for this, as Raschi would perceive, was oral and not vaginal knowledge of another man’s woman and, oh bliss, required no exertion on his part, and therefore, he made a mental footnote, did not even violate the sabbath.

  There was also a sneaky side to Jake’s constancy. He felt that as long as he was true to Nancy, she could not be unfaithful to him. But – but – if only she could be made to appreciate how onerous it sometimes was, what a burden of responsibility it could be, to enjoy, as they did, a singularly happy marriage. The serious books they read, the films and plays they sat through, all celebrated delicious angst. Empty sex in the afternoon with strangers. Existential couplings in parked cars. ‘Now’ people lonely even at the most crowded orgies. Only the bores and the baddies, the dopes, the characters given all the bad lines, continued to stay together.

  Furthermore, to love your wife was to be denied a reprobate’s license. Nancy, everybody agreed, was no yenta but a rare pearl. For Jake, fortunate Jake, to have strayed would have been to raise disapproving eyebrows. Meanwhile, his film friends, happily unhappy, were permitted everything.

  One by one their abandoned wives trooped into Jake’s living room to bewail their condition. The children, the children. Betty Levi wept at the dining room table. “Suddenly he’s a bed-wetter. He has nightmares. He’s doing nothing at school.”

  Crap, Cy assured them. “The kid’s thriving. If only she would stop poisoning his mind against us. Would you believe she put him up to asking me, how come they have to do with a black-and-white and we get color on our set?”

  Television rang changes unsuspected by McLuhan on at least two lapsed marriages. Every Thursday evening, Leah Demaine had friends in to watch the girl Frankie was living with sing on her own show. “Have you ever seen such a fat cow?” But Bobby Fiedler had to miss six weeks of Dr. Who because Daddy’s whore was playing in it.

  Frankie Demaine, whose children were grown up, felt that to his own self he could now be true. “Oh, sure, to outsiders it appeared we were happy. Eighteen years I suffered. Why? Because I hate scenes. There were the kids to consider. But what was she to me all that time. My mother. Why, they even have the same name. Rebecca. Oh, I know what people are saying. Don’t worry. When he was sick she took excellent care of him. Never a complaint. But the truth is she enjoyed my being ill, it made her feel indispensable. Since I began a new life with Sandra I haven’t had a day’s trouble with my back. It was psychosomatic all these years.”

  One evening Jake came home to find Ida Roberts weeping in the living room.

  “I don’t mind his leaving me. It’s his life, after all. But it’s the indignity of it that makes me hate him. To think that all the time he was pretending to be such an attentive father, driving off to Brighton at the drop of a hat, my own daughter was letting him use her flat.”

  Alfie Roberts had been bewitched by a student at the University of Sussex, his daughter’s roomie.

  “Did I tell you he smokes pot now? You should see him, the fool, he even wants me to take it up. He says it’s easier on the liver than gin. Oh, no. This time, I’m not taking him back. You know he always leaves his hi-fi equipment behind, and when the girl he runs off with discovers that what she took for a young ram is really an old billy goat, he’s suddenly coming around to borrow records or to take some cigars from his humidor. Well this time I threw him out with the hi-fi equipment and the cigars after him, and I warned him, hey, swinger, travelin’ man, don’t forget your hormone injections. Or it will be very embarrassing for you, won’t it?”

  C. Bernard Farber, his fou
lard, his suede vest and trousers from Mr. Fish, the pendant bouncing on his belly made for him by one of his girl friends, and his Aston-Martin suddenly blooming with flower decals, insisted Jake make the scene at his newly acquired pad, a mews flat in Belgravia, the Rolling Stones blaring from speakers everywhere. “You don’t know what a blessing it is just not to have her sitting behind me in the projection room any more. Print that one, I’d say, and she sighs. Oy. What’s wrong, I’d say, you prefer a different take? It’s your picture, she says. I’m a new man. I wake up in the morning, I bounce out of bed singing. Letting the sunshine in. I simply can’t believe my luck she’s no longer lying beside me. Moaning, bellyaching. Any morning you ask it’s either after her period. Or before her period. Or it is her period. I think she’s better off too, you know. We never related. We made bad vibrations. The kids have the right idea, Jake, you’ve got to go with the flow.”

  Yes, yes, possibly, but Cy Levi soon began to find dieting a severe punishment. Lou Caplan was suddenly embarrassed that he snored and slept with his mouth open. Farber was ashamed of being seen in his truss yet frightened of going without it. Undressing, Bob Cohen hastily stuffed his underwear into his trouser pocket, just in case there was a brown stain, which would offend a young girl. Al Levine, ever mindful to take a digitalis pill before, pretended he was popping something groovy. Myer Gross confessed, “It’s embarrassing at my age to get up in the morning and lock the bathroom door before I rinse my dental plate. But I don’t dare let her see me without my teeth.”

  All agreed they envied Jake.

  “What have you done to deserve Nancy? What a girl!”

  But, gradually, their fulsomely declared envy was overtaken by disapprobation, even sneers. “You know, Jake’s a bore,” Talman said. Lou Caplan pronounced him square. And C. Bernard Farber, putting him beyond the pale, declared to the poker table that he gave off bad vibes.

  And what, Jake thought, if they have a point?