Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  As they drove off, wheels spinning on ice and blue salt, the driver continued to watch Joshua intently in his rear-view mirror. “My father, you know, he watches you on TV, he says all you do is shit on people.”

  The taxi reeked of Joy. Somebody had left behind a Hermès cowhide tote bag. Joshua zipped it open: A tube of vaginal jelly. A plunger in a white rubber case. A tiny flask of vaginal cologne. Obviously, before rushing off to her assignation, the lady had sprayed herself down there. His father would have approved.

  “Where did you drop your last fare?”

  “The Ritz.”

  “She forgot this,” Joshua said, holding up the tote bag, “and I have a feeling she’d be most grateful if you hurried right back with it.”

  His column delivered, Joshua stopped for a drink at The King’s Arms, and continued on to the Ritz, having decided that a half-bottle of Chablis and a mushroom omelet would not be self-indulgence, but his just reward. Considering the inclement weather, he was not surprised to find the Maritime Bar all but empty. Only two of the tables were occupied. And a lady, elegantly dressed, long-legged, her black hair streaked with just a hint of gray, sat at the bar. A cowhide tote bag rested on the stool to the left of her. The stool on the other side was occupied by a tall man with thin sandy hair and a reddening neck. He was pleading with her, while she swished the olive round in her martini, shaking her head haughtily. He whispered something, and reached for her hand on the bar, which she promptly withdrew. The color rising in his cheeks, he slid irresolutely off his stool. Now she turned to him, her voice steely, and said, “Yes, right here. Do it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Do it.”

  The people at the other two tables were caught up in their conversation, and Joshua pretended to be absorbed by his Gazette. The man, obviously intimidated, gave the pack of cigarettes that rested on the bar an intentional shove, dropping it to the floor, and then stooped to retrieve it. As he managed that, his face bleeding red, he shakily grasped her swinging foot by the ankle and brushed the toe of her shoe with his lips. Simultaneously, she emptied her martini glass over his sandy-haired head.

  As the man fled the bar, wiping his face with a handkerchief, his eyes appalled, she already had her back to the room. It was all over so quickly that Joshua immediately doubted that it had ever happened. But then Jane turned on her bar stool and said, “Why, hello there.”

  “Hello,” Joshua said.

  “I’m Jane Trimble, remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” he said, leaping up. “Um, would you care to join me for a drink?”

  “And what would Pauline say to that?” she asked, her eyes taunting.

  “I’ll phone her,” he replied in a rush. “Possibly she can join us.”

  “But isn’t she in Ottawa?”

  “Yes,” Joshua allowed in a faltering voice. “So she is.”

  “I’d love to join you, honestly, but I only came in out of the cold for a quickie. I’m supposed to meet Prissie Hooper here. We’re going to Holt’s.” She paused. “I don’t think it would be a good idea for her to see us together.”

  Why the hell not, he thought.

  “I’ll catch her upstairs,” she said, touching his hand lightly “Oh, and Happy Holiday.”

  Holiday?

  “Isn’t it Chanuka this week?”

  She pronounced it like the western wind, the chinook, with an “a” added.

  “Yes. I suppose it is.”

  “Well then,” she said, and gathering up her cowhide tote bag she was gone, leaving him with a stirring in the groin, torn between anger and admiration, wondering how she had managed to twist things so that it seemed as if he had tried to pick her up and failed.

  Dark clouds were scudding across the lake, obscuring the surrounding mountaintops, as they set out in the boat for the Trimbles’, docking just as a wall of heavy rain began to blow across the water, catching them on the lawn. “Now repeat after me,” Joshua said. “Jane Trimble is a first-class bitch, but she can do nothing to upset me.”

  “Yes, certainly,” Pauline said, already churning.

  The first thing that Joshua noticed, as he and an equally drenched Pauline came tumbling through the French doors into the living room, was that Kevin – wearing a blazer with a Royal Bermuda Yacht Club crest, canvas ducks and sandals – was confidently ensconced in what Joshua knew was Jack Trimble’s favorite wing chair.

  My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,

  I am a most superior person;

  My face is pink, my hair is sleek,

  I dine at Blenheim twice a week.

  Joshua smiled sympathetically at Trimble, but his host, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, refused to acknowledge it. Something had happened. The air was crackling. Trimble, those dreadful tartan Bermuda shorts cutting into his ballooning belly, ending just shy of his apple-pie knees, seemed to be in good spirits, which was rare that summer, a season Joshua would always remember as the one where he, incredibly dense, failed to pick up the signals that might have saved everybody.

  The season had begun as usual, with Trimble plunging into the still shatteringly cold lake long before anybody else. Compared to the water at Blackpool, where he claimed his father used to take him on Bank Holiday, “this,” he was fond of saying, “is a bloody sauna bath.” He entertained the old bunch as often on his sun deck, but with a distracted air, not even remembering to proffer his forced smile. Once their needs had been attended to, he would either retreat into the house, leaving them to amuse themselves, or stay on to drink more than was his habit. Not Guinness, either, but Canadian Club with ice and ginger ale, a colonial concoction he usually affected to despise. And Trimble, not the most engaging of men sober, proved even more unapproachable drunk. He stared blankly at people. Or surprised the men with lewd suggestions about the ladies present.

  Joshua and Pauline, who sometimes took to their boat at midnight, sipping Scotch together as they drifted over the still, silent water – totting up impending school fees against a free-lance income he never projected correctly, speculating about his wandering mother’s present whereabouts, Susy’s problems with Teddy, and what to do about Alex – noticed something else. Something passingly odd. Often there would be a light burning in Trimble’s study as late as 2 a.m. And, voices carrying as they did across the water at that hour, they might hear him shouting into the phone. Only then did it occur to them that this summer he seemed to be perpetually flying off to Zurich or London, and that he was also spending a good deal of time closeted in board rooms in New York. They weren’t the only ones to notice these things, but as there wasn’t a soul on the lake who really cared that much for Trimble, nobody sought him out to ask if anything was wrong or if he could be of any help. Like Joshua and Pauline, they shrugged and got on with more important matters. Repairing boathouses. Painting rings around birch trees. Cutting and stacking wood for the winter.

  But tonight, Joshua noticed, Trimble seemed positively jolly, and Jane, demurely dressed, was uncharacteristically affectionate with him, stroking the back of his pleated neck or touching his knee. Kevin, also charged with high spirits, set out to captivate Joshua with anecdotes, one more self-deprecating than another, about the days when he had tried to win a card for the PGA tour. He also revealed that somebody had once left behind a collection of Isaac Babel’s short stories on his boat in Bermuda, and that he had thereafter become an addict.

  “Every winter,” Trimble lamented, “I tell Jane that this year it’s going to be Bermuda, she used to love it out there, but then there’s never time. Isn’t that so, Mother?”

  Once more Joshua had to admire Jane’s poise. Ladling soup into bowls, she didn’t miss a beat.

  “Mn. Marvelous,” Kevin moaned.

  Joshua tried a spoonful and blanched. Holy shit, it was a variation of Pauline’s very own fish soup, a delicious brew she had developed herself, but only after years of trial and error. She would never have given the recipe to Jane.

  “Would you m
ind terribly,” Pauline asked, “if I asked for the pepper mill?”

  Trimble leaped up and fetched the pepper mill and once Pauline had literally blackened the surface of her soup, she thrust the mill at Joshua, her smile menacing, and sang out, “Darling?”

  Grabbing the pepper mill and grinding away, Joshua thought: I’m giving up women. I’m going to become a monk.

  Then Charlie was standing at the dining room door, eyes lowered, his manner tentative. “S-s-sorry to interrupt, b-b-but everybody’s meeting at the p-p-pub in Knowlton tonight.”

  Without even bothering to look up, Jane replied, “Everybody, as you put it, meets at the pub in Knowlton every night. We have guests, Charlie.”

  “Can I take the V-v-volvo?”

  Jane’s nod was perfunctory.

  “Hold it, son,” Trimble said, and digging into his pocket, he came up with a twenty-dollar bill. Startled, Charlie reached for it and prepared to flee.

  “Good night, everybody,” Jane admonished him.

  “G-g-good night,” he said, hurrying out of the dining room.

  “You’re spoiling him,” Jane said.

  “What do you think, Pauline?” Jack asked. “Wait till you get to know her children, Kevin.”

  “If he can find the time,” Pauline put in.

  “They are simply the brightest and best-behaved bunch on the lake. Well, Pauline, do you think I’m spoiling Charlie?”

  “I think it’s none of my affair.”

  “Spoken like a real lady, wouldn’t you say, darling?”

  Jane began to collect the soup bowls.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Yes. Certainly. Like a real lady.”

  The soup was followed by Brome Lake ducklings, a little bouncy to the fork. Pauline waited until it was clear that everybody else was struggling and then she said, “This is good. Usually, you know, people tend to overcook duck. It’s such a mistake.”

  But she left half of her portion on the plate, and Joshua followed suit.

  “Joshua,” Jane said, “you’re hardly eating a thing.”

  “Nobody’s eating,” Trimble said, pouncing.

  Jane reached over for Joshua to light her cigarette, holding his hand longer than was strictly necessary.

  “Everybody thinks the duck’s too tough, but they’re too well brought up to mention it.”

  Kevin leaped in to joke ingratiatingly about his initial encounter with Joshua on the tennis court and asked, if it wasn’t presuming too much, would he care for a lesson or two while he was on the lake?

  Before Joshua could answer, Trimble said, “And maybe you could help me with my table manners as well.”

  “Please, darling.”

  Pauline turned to Kevin. “And now, perhaps, you might tell me what you are still doing here, if you were only planning to stop overnight?”

  “Why do we all love Trout?” Kevin asked rhetorically. “Because she has always been so direct. Just like our father,” he added, his eyes searching.

  “I haven’t told him that you’re back.”

  “Now I understand why he hasn’t rushed down from Ottawa to embrace me.”

  “Will you please tell me what happened to your big deal with the Argos people in Georgian Bay?”

  “Other matters more appealing,” he replied, his chin dimpling, “have obliged me to put that on the back burner for the moment.”

  “And quite right too,” Trimble pitched in, winking.

  “What matters?”

  “Please, darling,” Jane said, indicating that the wineglasses ought to be refilled.

  But Trimble didn’t leap up. “You know, Joshua,” he said thickly, “there is a difference between us and them. In a snazzy restaurant, for instance, it never bothers any of them to tip a maître d’ much older than they are.”

  Jane indicated the wineglasses again, but Trimble didn’t budge. Instead he said, “You’re quite capable of filling the glasses yourself. The wine is right behind you on the sideboard. It is open. Breathing, as you say.”

  Jane smiled tightly and refilled the wineglasses and the next thing Joshua knew, an impassioned Trimble exploded, rising to the defense of Richard Nixon, whose name had not once come up at the table.

  “The poor bastard never did anything that Kennedy or Roosevelt didn’t do before him, but he was not a patrician, he lacked their style. FDR could try to stack the Supreme Court. So what? Kennedy’s father was a bootlegger. His brother Bobby worked for Joe McCarthy. Forget it. Kennedy himself was fucking actresses and plain ordinary tarts black and blue in the White House. How risqué! What a devil! But if Tricky Dick had so much as peeked down a lady’s cleavage, you would all have been moaning, ‘How utterly coarse.’ Oh, what a sordid little man! You didn’t hate Nixon for what he stood for, but for what he came from. He came out of nowhere and everything he got he scratched and scrambled for. Unforgivable! Remember Alger Hiss? What a proper gent! Right schools. Right ideas. How dare that sewer rat call him a lying Communist bastard! But the sewer rat was telling the truth and the gentleman was lying through his fucking teeth and you’ve never forgiven Nixon that. After all, Dick didn’t invite Casals to the White House to play. No, he had Bob Hope instead. How terribly lower-class. What bad taste! Then there were the tapes. Scandalous. Nixon was actually caught out saying, ‘I don’t give a fuck about the Italian lira.’ Oh dear, weren’t we horrified. But if Kennedy had said the same, how very droll, how clever. Good old Jack,” he said, trailing off, panting, his eyes big, shocked by the resounding silence round the table. Trimble turned chalky. “Excuse me,” he said, fleeing.

  Jane asked Pauline if she knew of a good carpenter.

  “No,” she replied, her voice small.

  Talk turned to tree-pruning and the difficulty of finding decent help on the lake these days. Finally, Jane announced, “We’re going to have dessert in the sun room.”

  Trimble was already there, smiling. “I’m sorry. I apologize, Pauline. I don’t know what got into me.”

  A glowing Mrs. Jack Trimble, of Westmount and Georgeville, doled raspberries out of an enormous crystal bowl. Trimble struggled with the cork of a champagne bottle. Dom Perignon.

  “Give it here,” Kevin said.

  “Is this a celebration of some sort?” Pauline asked.

  “Kevin is joining my firm.”

  “He’s what?”

  “But aren’t you pleased?” Trimble asked, baffled.

  “Now, now, darling. You’re a big boy now. You don’t need Pauline’s blessing for everything you do.”

  “But I was sure,” he said, looking at Jane with a hint of reproach, “that you’d be ever so pleased.”

  “Of course I am. Cheers,” Pauline said, raising her glass.

  “He’s going to run an investment fund for me –”

  “Trout doesn’t think I’m up to it.”

  “– something new, and if Joshua is smart, he’ll buy in on day one.”

  “He’s smart, Jack, smarter than any of us, except when it comes to horses, but he’s also broke.” And looking directly at Kevin, she asked, “Does this mean you’ll be staying on in Montreal for the winter?”

  “If not,” a revived Trimble said, “he’ll jolly well have me to answer to.”

  A playful Kevin leaped out of his chair to salute Trimble smartly. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “Stand easy, Hornby,” Trimble said, and sweeping up the fireplace poker, he was all in a fever again. Using the poker as a swagger stick, he began to strut around the towering Kevin, making deprecating remarks about the length of his styled hair, the lack of polish on his blazer buttons, and his sandals. “You’re a sodding disgrace!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “You’re not a man, you’re a fucking disaster!”

  “Sir!”

  He dug the poker under his chin, lifting it. “You’re a lump of shit.”

  “Sir!”

  “Say it. ‘I’m a lump of shit.’ ”

  The blood was sucked
out of Pauline’s cheeks. Her eyes were moist.

  “That’s enough,” Joshua called out, snatching the poker away from Trimble.

  “What’s that?”

  “Joshua thinks you’ve gone too far,” Jane said, “and so do I.”

  Recalled from a plateau all his own, Trimble grinned. He laughed, his eyes sly “It was all in fun. Old army guff. Sorry, everybody, this just isn’t my night. What would you all say to another bottle of the bubbly?”

  “We’re going home now,” Joshua said. “I’m whacked. So is Pauline.”

  Fortunately, though the racing clouds had yet to clear, the rain had stopped. They ducked under the wings of the little seaplane to climb into the boat, Pauline bailing. Once they were well out onto the lake, Joshua cut the engine. “Well, I think that dinner party will do me for a while. Jesus.”

  “I thought I was going to be sick. I actually felt dizzy.”

  “I don’t quite understand what’s going on there. The other night Jack wanted me to crack Kevin’s nuts for him, and now …”

  “Will you be going to Spain?”

  “Possibly,” he replied, surprised.

  “Then you’re off on a fool’s errand,” she said with surprising sharpness. Joshua stared at her, astonished.

  “I don’t want to be left alone,” she said. “I hear every creak in the house. I dream I’m in my coffin.”

  “But if I go, I want you to come with me.”

  “Oh, Josh, how could I?”