Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  Alfred Kazin once wrote of Saul Bellow that, even when he was still young and unknown, he already had the aura about him of a man destined for greatness. I felt the same about Boogie, who was uncommonly generous at the time to other young writers, it being understood that he was superior to any of them.

  In one of his manic moods Boogie would throw up lots of smoke, deflecting questions about his work by clowning. “Look at me,” he once said, “I’ve got all the faults of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Hemingway rolled into one. I will fuck just about any peasant girl who will have me. I’m an obsessive gambler. A drunk. Hey, just like Freddy D., I’m even an anti-Semite, but maybe that doesn’t count in my case as I’m Jewish myself. So far, all that’s lacking in the equation is my very own Yasnaya Polyana, a recognition of my prodigious talent, and money for tonight’s dinner, unless you’re inviting me? God bless you, Barney.”

  Five years older than I was, Boogie had scrambled up Omaha Beach on D-Day, and survived the Battle of the Bulge. He was in Paris on the GI Bill, which provided him with one hundred dollars monthly, a stipend supplemented by an allowance from home, which he usually invested, with sporadic luck, on the chemin de fer tables at the Aviation Club.

  Well now, never mind the malicious gossip, most recently revived by the lying McIver, that will pursue me to the end of my days. The truth is, Boogie was the most cherished friend I ever had. I adored him. And over many a shared toke, or bottle of vin ordinaire, I was able to piece together something of his background. Boogie’s grandfather Moishe Lev Moscovitch, born in Bialystok, sailed steerage to America from Hamburg, and rose by dint of hard work and parsimony from pushcart chicken peddler to sole proprietor of a kosher butcher shop on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. His first-born son, Mendel, parlayed that butcher shop into Peerless Gourmet Packers, suppliers of K-rations to the U.S. Army during the Second World War. Peerless emerged afterward as purveyors of Virginia Plantation packaged ham, Olde English sausages, Mandarin spare ribs, and Granny’s Gobblers (frozen, oven-ready turkeys) to supermarkets in New York State and New England. En route, Mendel, his name laundered to Matthew Morrow, acquired a fourteen-room apartment on Park Avenue, serviced by a maid, a cook, a butler-cum-chauffeur, and an English governess off the Old Kent Road for his first-born son, Boogie, who later had to take elocution lessons to get rid of his cockney accent. In lieu of a violin teacher and a Hebrew melamed, Boogie, who was counted on to infiltrate the family deep into the WASP hive, was sent to a military summer camp in Maine. “I was expected to learn how to ride, shoot, sail, play tennis, and turn the other cheek,” he said. Registering for camp, Boogie, as instructed by his mother, filled out “atheist” under “Religious Denomination.” The camp commander winked, crossed it out, and wrote “Jewish.” Boogie endured the camp, and Andover, but dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year, in 1941, and joined the army as a rifleman, reverting to the name Moscovitch.

  Once, responding to persistent inquiries from an earnest Terry McIver, Boogie allowed that in the opening chapter of his discombobulating novel-in-progress, set in 1912, his protagonist disembarks from the Titanic, which has just completed its maiden voyage, docking safely in New York, only to be accosted by a reporter. “What was the trip like?” she asks.

  “Boring.”

  Improvising, I’m sure, Boogie went on to say that, two years later, his protagonist, riding in a carriage with Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria–Hungary and his missus, drops his opera glasses as they bounce over a bump in the road. The archduke, big on noblesse oblige, stoops to retrieve them, thereby avoiding an assassination attempt by a Serb nutter. A couple of months later, however, the Germans invade Belgium all the same. Then, in 1917, Boogie’s protagonist, shooting the breeze with Lenin in a Zurich café, asks for an explanation of surplus value, and Lenin, warming to the subject, lingers too long over his millefeuille and café au lait, and misses his train, the sealed car arriving in the Finland Station without him.

  “Isn’t that just like that fucking Ilyich?” says the leader of the delegation come to greet him on the platform. “Now what is to be done?”

  “Maybe Leon would get up and say a few words?”

  “A few words? Leon? We’ll be standing here for hours.”

  Boogie told Terry he was fulfilling the artist’s primary function — making order out of chaos.

  “I should have known better than to ask you a serious question,” said Terry, retreating from our café table.

  In the ensuing silence, Boogie, by way of apology, turned to me and explained that he had inherited, from Heinrich Heine, le droit de moribondage.

  Boogie could yank that sort of conversation-stopper out of the back pocket of his mind, propelling me to a library, educating me.

  I loved Boogie and miss him something awful. I would give up my fortune (say half) to have that enigma, that six-foot-two scarecrow, lope through my door again, pulling on a Romeo y Julieta, his smile charged with ambiguity, demanding, “Have you read Thomas Bernhard yet?” or “What do you make of Chomsky?”

  God knows he had his dark side, disappearing for weeks on end — some said to a yeshiva in Mea Shearim and others swore to a monastery in Tuscany — but nobody really knew where. Then one day he would appear — no, materialize — without explanation at one of the cafés we favoured, accompanied by a gorgeous Spanish duchess or an Italian contessa.

  On his bad days Boogie wouldn’t answer my knock on his hotel-room door or, if he did, would say no more than “Go away. Let me be,” and I knew that he was lying on his bed, high on horse, or that he was seated at his table, compiling lists of the names of those young men who had fought alongside him and were already dead.

  It was Boogie who introduced me to Goncharov, Huysmans, Céline, and Nathanael West. He was taking language lessons from a White Russian watchmaker whom he had befriended. “How can anybody go through life,” he asked, “not being able to read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov in the original?” Fluent in German and Hebrew, Boogie studied the Zohar, the holy book of the Cabbala, once a week with a rabbi in a synagogue on rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, an address that delighted him.

  Then, years ago, I collected all eight of Boogie’s cryptic short stories that had been published in Merlin, Zero, and The Paris Review, with the intention of bringing them out in a limited edition, each volume numbered, elegantly printed, no expense spared. The story of his that I’ve read again and again, for obvious reasons, is a variation on a far-from-original theme, but brilliantly realized, like everything he wrote. “Margolis” is about a man who walks out to buy a package of cigarettes and never returns to his wife and child, assuming a new identity elsewhere.

  I wrote to Boogie’s son in Santa Fe offering him an advance of ten thousand dollars, as well as a hundred free copies and all profits that might accrue from the enterprise. His response came in the form of a registered letter that expressed amazement that I, of all people, could even contemplate such a venture, and warning me that he would not hesitate to take legal action if I dared to do such a thing. So that was that.

  Hold the phone. I’m stuck. I’m trying to remember the name of the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Or was it The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt? No, that was written by the fibber. Lillian what’s-her-name? Come on. I know it. Like the mayonnaise. Lillian Kraft? No. Hellman. Lillian Hellman. The name of the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit doesn’t matter. It’s of no importance. But now that it’s started I won’t sleep tonight. These increasingly frequent bouts of memory loss are driving me crazy.

  Last night, sailing off to sleep at last, I couldn’t remember the name of the thing you use to strain spaghetti. Imagine that. I’ve used it thousands of times. I could visualize it. But I couldn’t remember what the bloody thing was called. And I didn’t want to get out of bed to search through cookbooks Miriam had left behind, because it would only remind me that it was my fault she was gone, and I would have to get out of bed at three o’clock anyway to piss.
Not the swift bubbly torrent of my Left Bank days, nosirree. Now it was dribble, dribble, dribble, and no matter how hard I shook it, a belated trickle down my pyjama leg.

  Lying in the dark, fulminating, I recited aloud the number I was to call if I had a heart attack.

  “You have reached the Montreal General Hospital. If you have a touch-tone phone, and you know the extension you want, please press that number now. If not, press number seventeen for service in the language of les maudits anglais, or number twelve for service en français, the glorious language of our oppressed collectivity.”

  Twenty-one for emergency ambulance service.

  “You have reached the emergency ambulance service. Please hold and an operator will come to your assistance as soon as our strip-poker game is over. Have a nice day.”

  While I waited, the automatic tape would play Mozart’s Requiem.

  I groped to make sure my digitalis pills, reading glasses, and dentures were within easy reach on the bedside table. I switched on a lamp briefly and scooped up my boxer shorts to check them out for skid marks, because if I died during the night I didn’t want strangers to think I was dirty. Then I tried the usual gambit. Think of something else, something soothing, and the name of the spaghetti thingamabob will come to you unsummoned. So I imagined Terry McIver bleeding profusely in a shark-infested sea, feeling another tug at what’s left of his legs just as a rescuing helicopter is attempting to winch him out of the water. Finally what remains of the lying, self-regarding author of Of Time and Fevers, a dripping torso, is raised above the surface, bobbing like bait in the churning waters, sharks lunging at it.

  Next I made myself a scruffy fourteen-year-old again, and unhooked, for that first whoopee time, the filigreed bra of the teacher I shall call Mrs. Ogilvy, even as one of those nonsense songs was playing on the radio in her living room:

  Mair-zy Doats and Do-zy Doats and lid-dle lam-zy div-ey

  A kid-dle-y div-ey too, would-n’t you?

  To my astonishment, she didn’t resist. Instead, terrifying me, she kicked off her shoes and began to wriggle out of her tartan skirt. “I don’t know what’s got into me,” said the teacher who had awarded me an A+ for my essay on A Tale of Two Cities, which I had cribbed, paraphrasing here and there, from a book by Granville Hicks. “I’m robbing the cradle.” Then, in my mind’s eye, she spoiled everything, adding, with a certain classroom asperity, “But shouldn’t we strain the spaghetti first?”

  “Yeah. Sure. But using what thingamajig?”

  “I fancy it al dente,” she said.

  And now, giving Mrs. Ogilvy a second chance, hoping for a better return this time, I travelled back through memory lane again and tumbled onto the sofa with her, incidentally hoping for at least a semi-demi-erection in my decrepit here and now.

  “Oh, you’re so impatient,” she said. “Wait. Not yet. En français, s’il vous plaît.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, dear. Such manners. We mean ‘I beg your pardon,’ don’t we? Now then, let’s have ‘not yet’ in French, please.”

  “Pas encore.”

  “Jolly good,” she said, sliding open a side-table drawer. “Now I don’t want you to think me a bossy boots, but please be a considerate lad and roll this on to your pretty little willy first.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Ogilvy.”

  “Give me your hand. Oh, have you ever seen such filthy fingernails? There. Like that! Gently does it. Oh yes, please. Wait!”

  “What have I done wrong now?”

  “I just thought you’d like to know it wasn’t Lillian Hellman who wrote The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt. It was Mary McCarthy.”

  Damn damn damn. I got out of bed, slipped into the threadbare dressing-gown I couldn’t part with because it was a gift from Miriam, and padded into the kitchen. Rummaging through drawers, I yanked out utensils and named them one-two-three: soup ladle, egg-timer, tongs, pie slicer, vegetable peeler, tea strainer, measuring cups, can opener, spatula … and hanging on a wall hook, there it was, the thingamabob used to strain spaghetti, but what was it called?

  I’ve survived scarlet fever, mumps, two muggings, crabs, the extraction of all my teeth, a hip-socket replacement, a murder charge, and three wives. The first one is dead and The Second Mrs. Panofsky, hearing my voice, would holler, even after all these years, “Murderer, what have you done with his body?” before slamming down the receiver. But Miriam would talk to me. She might even laugh at my dilemma. Oh, to have this apartment resonate with her laughter. Her scent. Her love. The trouble is, Blair would probably be the one to answer the phone, and I had already blotted my copybook with that pretentious bastard the last time I called. “I would like to speak to my wife,” I said.

  “She is no longer your wife, Barney, and you are obviously inebriated.”

  He would say “inebriated.”

  “Of course I’m drunk. It’s four o’clock in the morning.”

  “And Miriam’s asleep.”

  “But it’s you I wanted to talk to. I was cleaning out my desk drawers here and I found some stunning nude photographs of her when she was with me, and I was wondering if you would like to have them, if only to know what she looked like in her prime.”

  “You’re disgusting,” he said, hanging up.

  True enough. But, all the same, I danced round the living room, doing my take on the great Ralph Brown’s Shim Sham Shimmy, a tumbler of Cardhu in hand.

  There are some people out there who take Blair to be a fine fellow. A scholar of distinction. Even my sons defend him. We appreciate how you feel, they say, but he is an intelligent and caring man, devoted to Miriam. Bullshit. A drudge on tenure, Blair came to Canada from Boston in the sixties, a draft-dodger, like Dan Quayle and Bill Clinton, and, consequently, a hero to his students. As for me, I’m dumbfounded that anybody would prefer Toronto to Saigon. Anyway, I’ve got his faculty group fax number and, thinking of how Boogie would have taken advantage of that, I sit down and wing one to Blair occasionally.

  Fax to Herr Doktor Blair Hopper né Hauptman From Sexorama Novelties

  ACHTUNG

  PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

  Dear Herr Doktor Hopper,

  Pursuant to your inquiry of January 26, we welcome your idea of introducing to Victoria College the old Ivy League practice of requiring selected coeds to pose naked for posture photographs, front, profile, and back. Your notion of introducing garter belts and other accessories is inspired. The project has, as you put it, great commercial potential. However, we will have to assess the actual photographs before we can take up your suggestion to market a new set of playing cards.

  Sincerely,

  DWAYNE CONNORS

  Sexorama Novelties.

  P.S. We acknowledge your return of our 1995 TOY BOYS calendar, but cannot send you a refund due to the many stains, and the fact that the August and September pages are stuck together.

  Twelve forty-five a.m. Now I held the spaghetti thingamajig in my liver-spotted hand, wrinkled as a lizard’s back, but I still couldn’t put a name to it. Flinging it aside, I poured myself a couple of inches of Macallan, picked up the phone, and dialled my eldest son in London. “Hiya, Mike. This is your six a.m. wake-up call. Time for your morning jog.”

  “As a matter of fact, it’s five forty-six here.”

  For breakfast my punctilious son would munch crunchy granola and yogurt, washed down with a glass of lemon water. People today.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, and his concern just about brought tears to my eyes.

  “In the pink. But I’ve got a problem. What do you call the thingee you strain spaghetti with?”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Didn’t Dr. Herscovitch warn you that if you started up again it would kill you?”

  “I swear on the heads of my grandchildren, I haven’t had a drop in weeks. I no longer even order coq au vin in restaurants. Now will you answer my question, please?”

  “I’m going to take the phone
in the living room, hang up here, and then we can talk.”

  Mustn’t wake Lady Health Fascist.

  “Hi, I’m back. Do you mean a colander?”

  “Of course I mean a colander. It was on the tip of my tongue. I was just going to say it.”

  “Are you taking your pills?”

  “Sure I am. Have you heard from your mother lately?” I blurted out compulsively, having sworn I’d never ask about her again.

  “She and Blair stopped over here for three days on October fourth, on their way to a conference in Glasgow.”7

  “I don’t give a damn about her any more. You don’t know what a pleasure it is not to be reprimanded because I forgot to lift the seat again. But, speaking as a disinterested observer, I think she deserved better.”

  “You mean you?”

  “Tell Caroline,” I said, lashing out, “that I read somewhere that lettuce bleeds when you chop it up and carrots suffer traumas when you pluck them out of the ground.”

  “Dad, I hate to think of you all alone in that big empty apartment.”

  “As it happens, I have what I think they now call ‘a resource person,’ or is it ‘a sex worker,’ staying with me tonight. What boors like me used to call ‘a skirt’. Tell your mother. I don’t mind.”