Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  From the beginning, Seymour had been incredibly adroit at avoiding discovery. A Machiavelli among adulterers, Joshua readily agreed, once Seymour had told him about his first run-in with his wife. He had only been married to Molly for two years when he had come home from the office one night, ashen-faced, grim, not saying a word all through dinner.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Is it something I’ve done?”

  “Ha,” he barked, thrusting the letter at her. Anonymous. Printed. YOUR WIFE HAS A LOVER.

  “Oh my,” Molly exclaimed, a hand held to her cheek.

  “How could you do such a thing to me?”

  “Do what? You crazy fool. Who sent you this?”

  “How in the hell would I know?”

  “But you take their word over mine?”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Oh boy, could you ever teach Senator McCarthy lessons!”

  “If I’m inadequate, tell me,” he raged, simulating tears.

  “Oh, Seymour, my poor darling. There’s not a word of truth in it.”

  “There have been phone calls too. At the office. They say, ‘Your wife is being banged black-and-blue on Tuesday afternoons,’ and they hang up. Or ‘Molly sucks,’ and they hang up.”

  “But I’d never do such a thing. Feh!”

  “Not at home, you mean. Not for your husband.”

  “We’re not going through that again. Please, Seymour. And on Tuesday afternoons, as it so happens, I go to my social psychiatry class.”

  “And afterwards,” he said, “you blow the instructor in some cheap motel. For me, you wouldn’t even wear that lingerie I bought you.”

  “It’s filth, it’s for a whore. I swear, Seymour, you are the only man who has ever touched me.”

  “Who is it? Somebody who laughs behind my back at parties?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Bobby Gross!”

  She began to cry. “I swear on Larry’s head I’ve never been unfaithful to you.”

  But, her tears notwithstanding, he slept on the living room sofa that night, and the next, although she came to visit him, appearing in her flannel nightie. “I tried to get into those undies, but they’re too small, the seam split. Look, baby!”

  She was wearing the garters, pinching into her plump quivering red flesh just above the knees, as high as she could force them to fit.

  “Hotcha hotcha,” he said.

  Only then did he notice that she had brought a basin of hot water with her, as well as a bar of soap and a towel. “What are you going to do?” he asked, alarmed.

  “I’ll do it for you if it’s so important, but I’m going to give it a good scrubbing first and you’ve got to promise to pull it out before you’re ready to shoot.”

  Seymour began to giggle.

  “Look, mister, I’m not swallowing any of it. I’d only be sick.”

  Roaring, Seymour buried his head in his pillow.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Are you really having an affair?”

  “No. I swear,” she said. And pale, resolute, she added, “Tell me when you’re tumescent and I’ll start.”

  “Listen,” he said, feeling himself shrivel down there as he sat up, “I’m hungry. Why don’t we have an omelet instead? With lox and onions.”

  And the next morning, when the registered letter came for her from Miss O’Hara, just as that bitch had threatened, he hid behind his Gazette as she read it, her cheeks burning red.

  “Bad news?” he asked, finally.

  “Maybe I’m not the only one playing around,” she sang out.

  “What are you talking about?” he charged, outraged.

  “You ought to read this, Mr. Playboy subscriber. I’ve never read such shmutz.”

  He grabbed it. “Holy shit! Do you know her?” he asked, struggling with the signature. “Sally O’Hare?”

  “O’Hara. And do you know her, is more important.”

  “I’ve never heard of her in my life. You’ve got to believe me, Molly.”

  “I believe you.”

  He stared at her, stumped.

  “And I didn’t jump down your throat, did I?”

  “No, dear.”

  “I didn’t insult you with accusations based on no evidence but the word of a total stranger?”

  “No, dear.”

  “Give it here,” she said, crumpling it into a ball and throwing it in the garbage. Where it belonged, she said.

  “It’s incredible,” Seymour ventured. “Some sex nut has obviously got it in for both of us.”

  She seemed pensive.

  “Some psychotic,” he continued. “Who knows? Maybe one of those squinty-eyed types in your social psychiatry class has the hots for you, and he’s trying to stir up trouble between us.”

  “Wasn’t there a Sally O’Hara on your switchboard?”

  “Oh, you are sadly mistaken. Never,” he said. “And, listen darling, I’ve been holding back. I’ve been getting more obscene phone calls about you. Right here. Where the kids could pick up the phone. So I’ve arranged to have our number changed. Temporarily, we’re going to be unlisted.”

  “Isn’t that a bit drastic?”

  “The kids, Molly.”

  But this time Seymour had been caught with his pants down. Literally. By Engel’s father-in-law, who had a key to the front door and had come to surprise his daughter with a sack of oranges he had coddled all the way from Miami, only to find her naked and moaning on the living room deep-pile wall-to-wall carpet, Seymour humping away, her legs straining heavenwards. The grizzled old man had cried out and begun to pelt Seymour’s bare ass with the oranges, the sack tearing, fruit flying everywhere. The tale had carried. From Côte St. Luc through Ville St. Laurent to Westmount. And Molly was unforgiving.

  Throughout dinner at Max Birenbaum’s she glared at him, her eyes red and swollen, interrupting his stories with deprecating remarks. “Spain yet. Sure.”

  Seymour, not so much contrite as seething, arranged for Joshua to meet him for lunch at Moishe’s the following afternoon.

  “Shit,” he said, joining him late, “you know what happened to me this morning?”

  Joshua ordered another Bloody Mary.

  “Larry came round to the office, he wanted to talk.”

  Larry, Seymour’s eighteen-year-old son, lived in a cold-water flat on Jeanne-Mance Street. He was with an acid rock group.

  “ ‘Dad,’ he said to me, ‘I’ve been having an affair with an older woman.’ ‘How old?’ I asked. ‘Twenty-five,’ he said. Holy shit, you know what’s wrong with today’s young? They advertise. They ram it into your face every chance they get. We didn’t taunt our elders with our marvelous young bodies.”

  “We were honeys.”

  “My grandmother,” Seymour said, “used to say, ‘The years fly past, but the days are long.’ ”

  Seymour was becoming heavy, morose, awash in self-pity.

  “Molly giving you a rough time?” Joshua asked.

  “Aw, that’s going to be O.K.,” and, in his most earnest voice, he added, “I’ve promised to stop fucking around.”

  “And how are you going to manage that?”

  “Don’t you start in on me, old buddy.”

  “Seymour, you don’t understand. I’m a fan.”

  “Well, that’s over. Finito. You are looking at a man who has developed a foolproof system for fidelity.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “Come.” And he led him right into the men’s room. “Lock the door.”

  “What for?”

  “Lock the fucking door.”

  As soon as Joshua locked it, a beaming Seymour dropped his trousers. He was wearing black satin panties with a delicate lace trim.

  “Wow,” Joshua said, whistling.

  “You can look, but you mustn’t touch.” Seymour wiggled his bum. “What do y
ou think?”

  “Think? Who can think? I’m trying to control myself.”

  “Seriously now, you’d think I was a faggot,” he pleaded, “wouldn’t you?”

  Joshua refused to commit himself.

  “Sure you would,” he insisted. “Anybody would. Don’t you see, you prick?”

  “See what?”

  “No matter how horny I get, or who I pick up wherever, I’d never pull down my pants so long as I was wearing these. Why, they’re ridiculous. I’d be a laughingstock. It’s my chastity belt,” he said. “Absolutely foolproof.”

  One double cognac followed another, it was 3:30, and still they sat in the restaurant, reminiscing.

  “Hey,” Seymour asked, grinning, “whatever happened to Monique?”

  In a foolish, drunken moment, Joshua had once been sufficiently indiscreet to tell Seymour something about Monique, and how a portrait of her in the nude had once turned up in London. Pauline and Joshua had been invited to a vernissage and there it was, hanging on the wall. Monique nude, circa 1953. Lying on his sofa in Tourrettes-sur-Loup. Reconstructing the room beyond the painting’s perimeters, Joshua recalled his library, his battered Royal portable, and that the painting had been done only months after he had been obliged to flee Spain.

  “If I had been you,” Seymour said, “I would have bought the painting on the spot and hung it over my living room fireplace.”

  “That’s because you’re such a pig, Seymour.”

  “Yeah. Right. Have you read that La Pasionaria may be allowed back into Spain?”

  “Yes. Imagine. After all these years.”

  “Vale más morir de pies que vivir de rodillas.”

  “Si, chaver.”

  Ibiza, Joshua thought, strolling down the Main.

  Two recurring nightmares bit into his sleep in those days. In one of them, Pauline was leaving him for a Golden Goy. Captain Cleancut. “Now that I’ve found out what you’re really like,” she said. “Intellectually bankrupt. A political fraud. Peddling yourself on TV. Unable to even turn out a column any more without leaning on your thesaurus. Telling the same tired old stories at dinner parties again and again. Jewy to a fault, overtipping wherever we go. No hell in bed. An inadequate father. I’m leaving you.”

  “Wait. Hold it. Why did you marry me in the first place? Didn’t you love me even then?”

  “Prick. I didn’t know at the time that you’d behaved like a coward on Ibiza. The truth is, I married you only to shock my father.”

  Right right.

  In the other, he was twenty-one again. Confronting Dr. Dr. Mueller.

  “If you think you can rob me of my manhood, you’re out of your mind. I’m not running, Mueller. Neither will I allow you to screw the Freibergs. Because in the years ahead I’m going to fall in love with Pauline. We’re going to have three children. I will not be ashamed. I’m a man, not a mouse. Understand?”

  Ibiza, Ibiza.

  6

  WHEN JOSHUA DECIDED TO MOVE OUT OF THE WATERFRONT hotel in Ibiza to the sleepy village of San Antonio Abad on the opposite shore, Juanito found him a villa there.

  The most compelling man in San Antonio was Victorio, a carpenter who hunted for fish in the evening, armed only with a net, lead weights tied to its corners. Victorio, a sinewy little man, usually turned up at the waterfront at seven, and the professional fishermen seated on the terrace of the Café Joaquin would pick up their drinks and stroll down to the waterside to watch him. Indifferent to his admirers, he would roll up his trousers and slip stealthily into the sea, hardly disturbing the waters around him. Crouching, peering, as he slid deeper into the water, watching for bubbles. And then suddenly, silently, he would twirl his net overhead like a sling and cast it. Once retrieved, the water around him began to foam and the net itself held a flopping fish of considerable size. Victorio would fling it onto the bank before he continued his hunt. Only after he had netted sufficient fish to feed his large family would he acknowledge his admirers with a shy nod, and then bundle his catch into his net and start out for his house somewhere in the surrounding hills.

  There were, Joshua discovered, two Germans living in San Antonio: Frau Weiss, an emaciated retired civil servant, her glittering little eyes charged with ill will, and Dr. Dr. Mueller, the man whom he had seen disembark at Ibiza attended by such ceremony. Tall, lugubrious, with grieving blue eyes, a prominent broken nose that hadn’t been mended just right, and a long thin mouth pulled downward at the sides, Dr. Dr. Mueller favored a white linen suit, the jacket slung over his shoulders continental-style. He hiked through the village each afternoon, hands clasped behind his back, slit of a mouth biting angrily on that ivory cigarette holder, and wherever he drifted he commanded a deference that infuriated Joshua. If, for instance, Joshua thrust his way to the counter of the crowded, fly-ridden butcher shop, he fully expected to have to compete with the clamoring women for service, but Dr. Dr. Mueller had only to slip through the beaded door for everybody to step back from the counter, it being understood that his needs took precedence. Officers saluted him on the road and peasants stepped aside to make his passage easier. Joshua and Dr. Dr. Mueller nodded to each other at the Café Formentor and in the post office, and then one night in Don Pedro’s Bodega, Dr. Dr. Mueller invited him to his table. He stood Joshua to a poron of white wine and a dish of almonds, and asked him when he had last seen Paris. Joshua told him. “And you?” he asked.

  “Ah, well,” he replied, amused, “not as recently as you, young man. I understand that you are a Canadian.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sam Steele,” he mused. “Gabriel Dumont. Dumont was a very good shot.”

  Baffled, Joshua asked what he was doing on Ibiza.

  “I am writing my souvenirs,” he said.

  “About the war?” Joshua asked, fishing.

  “The war doesn’t interest me any more.”

  “Where did you serve?”

  “I served on the front. And you?”

  “I was too young.”

  “Your father, then?”

  “He was too old.”

  “Of course,” he said, and then, staggering a little, his smile lapsing, he added, “I want to relate something to you. It’s all over for me, a closed book. Shawnee, Sioux, Creek, chew, nigger, it’s all the same to me. I respect a man for what he is.”

  “Why are you called Dr. Dr. Mueller?”

  “Obviously because I have two doctorates. Both awarded in Vienna. It is the custom there to use both titles. And where, may I ask, were you educated?”

  “Oh, me? McGill, the Sorbonne, King’s College, Cambridge.”

  Dr. Dr. Mueller was staying in a small hotel while the villa he had bought was being refurbished. An accomplished horseman, he was sometimes seen galloping in the hills, and it was rumored that he could camp out there for three days at a time, sleeping in the open. Drunk, they said. Come nightfall, he could usually be found drinking with the army officers at Don Pedro’s. When Joshua entered they nodded cordially to him and immediately turned their backs, closing their circle at the bar. Fascists, Nazis. Then one night Dr. Dr. Mueller, obviously in the mood for some sport, did not so much invite Joshua over as summon him to report. “I am told,” he said, “that the real reason you are here is to avoid doing military service in Korea.”

  “Yes,” Joshua said.

  Dr. Dr. Mueller frowned and slicked back his thin, nicotine-colored hair. “And your father,” he asked, “who was too old to serve in the war, what does he do now?”

  “He’s a money-lender,” Joshua shot right back, glaring at the officers. “And what, may I ask, does your father do?”

  “My family comes from Dresden.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The boy doesn’t understand.”

  “The truth is, my father was a boxer.”

  “America,” Dr. Dr. Mueller said, “has never produced a great boxer.”

  “What about Joe Louis?” Joshua countered tightly.

  “A
h, but Joe Louis was an African man. He was not an American.”

  “He was good enough to take out Max Schmeling. June twenty-second, nineteen thirty-eight. Round one, Yankee Stadium. Art Donovan, referee.”

  Dr. Dr. Mueller reached for the cup of lie dice on the bar and thrust it at Joshua. “Are you a man or a mouse?” he asked.

  So they rolled dice for who would pay for the next poron of wine, Joshua losing.

  “Skoal,” Dr. Dr. Mueller said, preparing to drink from the poron.

  “L’chayim,” Joshua replied.

  Only a couple of weeks later a newly constructed hotel, its size modest, opened on the bay outside of San Antonio, presaging a tourist boom that was but two years away. The Casa del Sol, built on a golden beach fringed with palm trees, was owned by a tiny, bright-eyed Jewish couple, the aging Freibergs, who had been sufficiently prescient to quit Hamburg following Kristallnacht, abandoning everything, borrowing to open a brasserie in Paris, fleeing before the surging Wehrmacht once more, this time to Vichy, from there to Arles, then over the wintry Pyrenees on bleeding feet to Irun, skittering on to Burgos, then Barcelona and the black market, another stake accumulated, and now wagering everything on the future of a small hotel in the tranquil Baleares.

  Among those invited to the opening-day fiesta at the Casa del Sol were the mayor and his black-suited entourage, bank functionaries, and the army officers. Joshua had just started into his first drink when he was surprised to see Dr. Dr. Mueller, Frau Weiss, and Mariano of the secret police saunter onto the terrace, taking the table adjoining his. Immediately, Freiberg summoned his wife and they conferred heatedly. He’s going to refuse to serve him, Joshua thought, delighted. He’s going to ask the bastard to leave. Instead, Freiberg, his manner obsequious, fetched a chilled bottle of Riesling for Dr. Dr. Mueller’s table and called urgently for the tapas tray to be wheeled over. Incensed, Joshua got up to leave.

  “One moment,” Dr. Dr. Mueller called after him.

  “Yes?”

  “My villa is ready. I’m having people in for cocktails tomorrow. All types, you know. Perhaps you would come too?”

  “I’d love to, Dr. Dr., but tomorrow is Shabus. The Jewish day of rest.”