Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  Once, in 1964, Hymie and I actually got to exchange words.

  “So Miriam didn’t take my advice,” he said. “She finally married you.”

  “We happen to be very happy together.”

  “Does it ever start unhappily?”

  And that night, twenty-five years later, there he was again. He nodded. I nodded. Hymie had obviously endured a face-lift since I had last seen him. He now dyed his hair black and wore a bomber jacket, designer jeans, and Adidas. As luck would have it, we all but collided in the men’s room. “You damn fool,” he said, “when we’re dead it will be for a long time and it won’t matter that the film we did in London was from Boogie’s original story.”

  “It mattered to me.”

  “Because you were consumed with guilt?”

  “After all these years, the way I look at it is Boogie was the one who betrayed me.”

  “That’s not the way most people see it.”

  “He should have turned up at my trial.”

  “Rising from the grave?”

  “Flying in from wherever.”

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  “Am I?”

  “Prick. You know what I’m doing now? A film-of-the-week for ABC-TV. But it’s a very exciting script and could lead to big things. I’m with a Freudian analyst these days. We’re working on a sensational script together and I’m fucking her, which is more than I ever got from any of the others.”

  Back at my table, one of the young executives, his smile reeking of condescension, said, “You know old Mintzbaum, do you?”

  The other one, shaking his head, said, “For Christ’s sake, don’t encourage him to come to our table, or he’ll start to pitch.”

  “Old Mintzbaum,” I said, “was risking his life in the Eighth Army Air Force before you were born, you smug, insufferably boring little cretin. As for you, you cliché-mongering little shit,” I added, turning to the other one, “I’ll bet you pay a personal trainer to time your laps in your goddamn swimming-pool every morning. Neither of you is fit to shine old Mintzbaum’s shoes. Fuck off, both of you.”

  Nineteen eighty-nine that was. I’m jumping all over the place. I know, I know. But seated at my desk these endgame days, my bladder plugged by an enlarged prostate, my sciatica a frequent curse, wondering when I will be due for another hip socket, anticipating emphysema, pulling on a Montecristo Number Two, a bottle of Macallan by my side, I try to retrieve some sense out of my life, unscrambling it. Recalling those blissful days in Paris, in the early fifties, when we were young and crazy, I raise my glass to absent friends: Mason Hoffenberg, David Burnett, Alfred Chester, and Terry Southern, all dead now. I wonder whatever became of the girl who was never seen on the boulevard Saint-Germain without that chirping chimpanzee riding her shoulder. Did she go home to Houston and marry a dentist? Is she a grandmother now and an admirer of Newt? Or did she die of an overdose like the exquisite Marie-Claire, who could trace her lineage back to Roland?

  I dunno. I just dunno. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, as E. M. Forster10 once wrote. Anyway, those, those were the days. We had not so much arrived in the City of Light as escaped the constraints of our dim provincial origins, in my case the only country that declared Queen Victoria’s birthday a national holiday. Our lives were unstructured. Totally. We ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired, and screwed whoever was available whenever it was possible, surviving on three dollars a day. Except for the always elegantly dressed Cedric, a black American who was the beneficiary of a secret source of funds about which the rest of us speculated endlessly. Certainly it wasn’t family money. Or the pathetic sums he earned for stories published in the London Magazine or Kenyon Review. And I dismissed as a canard the rumour rife among some other Left Bank black Americans that, in those days of crazed anti-communism, Cedric received a monthly stipend from the FBI, or CIA, to inform on their activities. Whatever, Cedric wasn’t hunkered down in a cheap hotel room but ensconced in a comfortable apartment on the rue Bonaparte. His Yiddish, which he had acquired in Brighton Beach, where his father worked as an apartment-building janitor, was good enough for him to banter with Boogie, who addressed him as the shayner Reb Cedric, the shvartzer gaon of Brooklyn. Ostensibly without racial hang-ups, and fun to be with, he went along with Boogie’s jest that he was actually a pushy Yemenite trying to pass as black because it made him irresistible to young white women who had come to Paris to be liberated, albeit on a monthly allowance from their uptight parents. He also responded with a mixture of warmth and deference whenever Boogie, our acknowledged master, praised his latest short story. But I suspected his pleasure was simulated. With hindsight, I fear that he and Boogie, constantly jousting, actually disliked each other.

  Make no mistake. Cedric was truly talented, and so, inevitably, one day a New York publisher sent him a contract for his first novel, offering him a $2,500 advance against royalties. Cedric invited Leo, Boogie, Clara, and me to dinner at La Coupole to celebrate. And we did whoop it up, happy to be together, going through one bottle of wine after another. The publisher and his wife, said Cedric, would be in Paris the following week. “From his letter,” said Cedric, “I gather he thinks I’m one dirt-poor spade, living in a garret, who will jump at his invitation to dinner.”

  This led us into jokes about whether Cedric could order chitlins at Lapérouse, or turn up barefoot for drinks at Les Deux Magots. And then I made my gaffe. Hoping to impress Boogie, who could usually be counted on for the invention of our most outlandish pranks, I suggested that Cedric invite his publisher and his wife to dinner at his apartment, where the four of us would pretend to be his hired help. Clara and I would cook, and Boogie and Leo, wearing white shirts and black bow-ties, would serve at table. “I love it,” said Clara, clapping hands, but Boogie wouldn’t have it.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I fear our friend Cedric here would enjoy it too much.”

  An ill wind passed over our table. Cedric, feigning fatigue, called for the bill, and we dispersed separately into the night, each one troubled by his own dark thoughts. But, within days, the episode was forgotten. Once again we took to gathering in Cedric’s apartment late at night, after the jazz clubs had closed, digging into his stash of hashish.

  Those days not only Sidney Bechet, but also Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were playing in small boîtes de nuit which we frequented. Lazy spring afternoons we would pick up our mail and some gossip at Gaït Frogé’s English Bookshop on the rue de Seine, or saunter over to the Père Lachaise cemetery to gawk at the graves of Oscar Wilde and Heinrich Heine, among other immortals. But dying, a blight common to earlier generations, did not enter into our scheme of things. It wasn’t on our dance cards.

  Each age gets the arts patrons it deserves. My bunch’s benefactor was Maurice Girodias né Kahane, sole prop. of Olympia Press, publishers of the hot stuff in the Traveller’s Companion Series. I can remember waiting for Boogie more than once on the corner of the rue Dauphine as he ventured into Girodias’s office on the rue de Nesle, lugging last night’s twenty-odd pages of porn, and, if he were lucky, coming away with maybe five thousand sustaining francs, an advance against a stroke-book to be delivered as soon as possible. Once, to his amusement, he collided with the vice squad, the men in trenchcoats from La Brigade Mondaine (The Worldly Brigade), who had barged in to seize copies of Who Pushed Paulo, The Whip Angels, Helen and Desire, and Count Palmiro Vicarion’s Book of Limericks:

  When Titian was mixing rose madder,

  His model was poised on a ladder.

  “Your position,” said Titian,

  “Inspires coition.”

  So he nipped up the ladder and ’ad ’er.

  On a whim, or just because a motorcycle ride was suddenly available, we would take off for a few days in Venice, or bum a ride to the feria in Valencia, where we could catch Litri and Aparicio and the young Dominguín in the Plaza de los Toros. One summer afternoon, in 1952, Boogie announ
ced that we were going to Cannes to work as film extras, and that’s how I first met Hymie Mintzbaum.

  Hymie, built like a linebacker, big-featured, with black hair curly as a terrier’s, brown eyes charged with appetite, big floppy ears, prominent nose misshapen, twice-broken, had served with the American Army Air Force 281st Bomber Group, based in Ridgewell, not far from Cambridge, in 1943; a twenty-nine-year-old major, pilot of a B-17. His gravelly voice mesmerizing, he told Boogie and me — the three of us seated on the terrace of the Colombe d’Or in St–Paul-de-Vence, that summer of ’52, into our second bottle of Dom Perignon, every flute laced with Courvoisier XO, Hymie’s treat — that his squadron’s brief had been daylight precision bombing. He had been in on the second raid on the Schweinfurt ball-bearings factory in which the Eighth Air Force had lost 60 out of the 320 bombers that had set out from East Anglia. “Flying at twenty-five thousand feet, the temperature fifty below zero, even with heated flying suits,” he said, “we had to worry about frostbite, never mind Goering’s personal squadron of ME-109s and FW-190s, circling, waiting to pick off stragglers. Do either of you young geniuses,” he asked, the designation “geniuses” delivered in italics, “happen to know the young woman seated in the shade there, second table to our left?”

  Young geniuses. Boogie, that most perspicacious of men, couldn’t handle liquor, it made him sloppy, so he didn’t grasp that we were being patronized. Obviously Hymie, who was pushing forty at the time, felt threatened by the young. Clearly my manhood, if not Boogie’s, was in question, as I had never been bloodied in combat. Neither was I old enough to have suffered sufficiently through the Great Depression. I hadn’t cavorted in Paris in the good old days, immediately after its liberation, knocking back martinis with Papa Hemingway at the Ritz. I hadn’t seen Joe Louis floor Max Schmeling in the first round and couldn’t understand what that meant to a yid coming of age in the Bronx. Or caught Gypsy Rose Lee stripping at the World’s Fair. Hymie suffered from that sour old man’s delusion that anybody who had come after him was born too late. He was, in our parlance, a bit of a drag. “No,” I said. “I have no idea who she is.”

  “Too bad,” said Hymie.

  Hymie, blacklisted at the time, was shooting a French film noir under a pseudonym in Monte Carlo, an Eddie Constantine flick, Boogie and I working as extras. He called for another Dom Perignon, instructed the waiter to leave the Courvoisier XO bottle on the table, and asked for olives, almonds, fresh figs, a plate of crevettes, some pâté with truffles, bread, butter, smoked salmon, and anything else you’ve got for nibbles there.

  The sun, which had been warming us, began to sink behind the olive-green hills, seemingly setting them alight. A donkey-drawn wagon, led by a grizzly old geezer wearing a blue smock, passed clip-pity-clop below the terrace’s stone retaining wall, and we caught the scent of its cargo of roses on the evening breeze. The roses were bound for the perfumeries in Grasse. Then a fat baker’s boy puffed by our table, one of those huge wicker baskets of freshly baked baguettes strapped to his back, and we could smell that too. “If she’s waiting for somebody,” said Hymie, “he’s shamefully late.”

  The woman with the gleaming hair seated alone two tables to our left appeared to be in her late twenties. Somebody’s gift package. Her fine arms bare, her linen shift elegant, long bare legs crossed. She was sipping white wine and smoking a Gitanes, and when she caught us sneaking glances at her, she lowered her eyes, pouted, and reached for the book in her straw shoulder bag, Bonjour tristesse,11 by Françoise Sagan, and began to read.

  “Do you want me to invite her over to join us?” asked Boogie.

  Hymie scratched his purply jaw. He made a face, wrinkling his forehead. “Naw. I think not. If she joined us, it could spoil everything. Gotta make a phone call. Back in a couple of minutes.”

  “He’s beginning to bug me,” I said to Boogie. “As soon as he gets back, I think we ought to split, man.”

  “No.”

  Hymie, back soon enough, began to drop names, a failing I cannot tolerate. Hollywood manna. John Huston, his buddy. Dorothy Parker, big trouble. The time he had worked on a screenplay with that stool-pigeon Clifford Odets. His two-day drunk with Bogie. Then he told us how his commanding officer had summoned all the air crews to a briefing in a Nissen hut before they took off on their first mission. “I don’t want any of you girls faking mechanical trouble three hundred miles short of the target area, dropping your bombs on the nearest cow patch, and dashing for home. Gosh darn it. Holy smoke. You would be failing Rosie the Riveter, not to mention all those 4-F hymies raking it in on the black market stateside and fucking the girls you left behind. Better shit yourselves than try that story on me.” Then he added, “Three months from now, two thirds of you will be dead. Any stupid questions?”

  But Hymie survived, demobilized with some fifteen thousand dollars in the bank, most of it won at the poker table. He made straight for Paris, moving into the Ritz, he said, and not drawing a sober breath for six months. Then, down to his last three thousand dollars, he booked passage on the Île de France, and lit out for California. Starting as a third-assistant director, he bullied his way up the ladder, intimidating studio executives, who had served with honour in the War Bond drives on the home front, by wearing his flight jacket to dinner parties. Hymie churned out a Blondie, a couple of Tim Holt westerns, and one of Tom Conway’s The Falcon series, before he was allowed to direct a comedy featuring Eddie Bracken and Betty what’s-her-name? You know, like the stock-market brokers. Betty Merrill Lynch? No. Betty Lehman Brothers? Come off it. Betty like in those ads. When la-de-da speaks, everybody listens. Hutton. Betty Hutton. He was once nominated for an Academy Award, was three times divorced, and then the House Un-American Activities Committee caught up with him. “This sleaze-bag Anderson, my comrade,” he said, “a five-hundred-dollar-a-week screenwriter, was sworn in by the committee and told them he used to come to my house in Benedict Canyon to collect weekly Party dues. How was I to know he was an FBI agent?”

  Surveying our table, Hymie said, “There’s something missing. Garçon, apportez-nous des cigares, s’il vous plaît.”

  Then a Frenchman, obviously past it, well into his fifties, pranced onto the terrace. He was sporting a yachting cap, his navy-blue blazer with the brass buttons tossed over his shoulder like a cape: he had come to claim the young woman who sat two tables to our left. She rose to greet him, a butterfly disturbed, with a flutter of delight.

  “Comme tu es belle,” he cooed.

  “Merci, chéri.”

  “Je t’adore,” he said, stroking her cheek with his hand. Then he called peremptorily for the waiter, le roi le veut, flashed a roll of francs bound with a gold clasp, and settled the bill. The two of them drifted toward our table, where she obliged him to stop, indicating the remnants of our feast with a dismissive wave of her hand, saying, “Les Américains. Dégueulasse. Comme d’habitude.”

  “We don’t like Ike,” said the Frenchman, tittering.

  “Fiche-moi la paix,” said Hymie.

  “Toi et ta fille,” I said.

  Stung, they moved on, arms around each other’s waist, and strolled toward his Aston-Martin, the old man’s hand caressing her bottom. He opened the car door for her, settled in behind the wheel, slipped on his racing driver’s gloves, made an obscene gesture at us, and drove off.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Hymie.

  Piling into Hymie’s Citroën, we sped to Hauts-de-Cagnes, Hymie and Boogie belting out synagogue songs they remembered as we charged up the all-but-perpendicular hill to Jimmy’s Bar on the crest, and that’s when my mood began to curdle. Wintry is my soul’s season. And that evening, perfect but for my fulminating presence, my heart was laden with envy. For Hymie’s war experiences. His charm. His bankroll. For the effortless manner in which Boogie had been able to establish rapport with him, their joshing now often excluding me.

  Years later, shortly after the murder charges against me had been dismissed, and Hymie was home aga
in, now that the blacklist was a nightmare past, he insisted that I recuperate at the beach house he had rented for the summer in the Hamptons. “I know you don’t want to see anyone, in your mood. But this is just what the doctor ordered. Peace and quiet. Sea. Sand. Pastrami. Divorcées on the make. Wait till you taste my kasha. And nobody will know anything about your troubles.”

  Peace and quiet. Hymie. I should have known better. The most generous of hosts, he furnished his beach house with wall-to-wall guests almost every night, most of them young and all of whom he set out to seduce. He would regale them with stories of the great and near-great he claimed to have known. Dashiell Hammett, a prince. Bette Davis, misunderstood. Peter Lorre, his kind of guy. Ditto Spence. Passing from guest to guest, he would illuminate them like a lamp-lighter. He would whisper into the ear of each young woman that she was the most gorgeous and intelligent on Long Island, and confide in each of the men that he was uniquely gifted. He wouldn’t allow me to brood in a corner, but literally thrust me on one woman after another. “She’s wildly attracted to you.” Going on to introduce me, saying, “This is my old friend Barney Panofsky and he’s dying to meet you. He doesn’t look it, I know, but he just got away with the perfect crime. Tell her about it, kid.”

  I took Hymie aside. “I know you mean well, Hymie, but the truth is I’m committed to a woman in Toronto.”

  “Of course you are. You think I don’t hear you coming on like a pimply teenager on the phone after I’ve gone to bed?”

  “Are you listening in on the extension in your bedroom?”

  “Look, kid, Miriam’s there, and you’re here. Enjoy.”

  “You don’t understand.”