Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  Oh, yeah? Well, just maybe I’m the one who has the right to feel wounded. How could Cedric, once one of our band of brothers, take to the college pulpits, chastising me and my kind for our religion and skin colour? Why did such a talented young man eschew literature for the vulgar political stage? Hell, given his gifts, I’d be scribbling day and night.

  I’d like Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Cedric et al. to get off my back. Yes, Miriam. I know, Miriam. I’m sorry, Miriam. Had I endured what they and their kind had in America, I, too, would be prepared to believe that Adam and Eve were black, but Cain turned white with shock when God condemned him for murdering Abel. All the same, it ain’t right.

  Anyway, back in our Left Bank days, Cedric was seldom seen without a white girl on his arm. Clara, simulating jealousy, usually greeted him with, “How long before I get my ticket punched?”

  She took a different tack with Terry. “For you, honey-child, I’d be willing to dress as a boy.”

  “But I much prefer you as you are, Clara. Always tricked out like a harlequin.”

  Or, an avid Virginia Woolf reader, Clara would pretend to espy a tell-tale stain on his trousers. “You could go blind, Terry. Or haven’t they heard about that in Canada yet?”

  Clara not only did troubled non-figurative paintings, but also frightening ink drawings, crowded with menacing gargoyles, prancing little devils, and slavering satyrs, attacking nubile women from all sides. She committed poetry as well, inscrutable to me, but published in both Merlin and Zero, earning her a request from James Laughlin of New Directions Press to see more. Clara shoplifted. Sliding things under her voluminous shawls. Tins of sardines, bottles of shampoo, books, corkscrews, postcards, spools of ribbon. Fauchon was a favourite haunt, until she was denied entry. Inevitably, she was once caught snatching a pair of nylon stockings at the MonoPrix, but got off, she said, by allowing the fat, greasy flic to drive her to the Bois de Boulogne and come between her breasts. “Just like my dear uncle Horace did when I was only twelve years old. Only he didn’t boot me out of a moving car, laughing as I tumbled head over heels, calling me filthy names, but presented me with a twenty-dollar bill each time to keep our secret.”

  Our room, in the Hôtel de la Cité, on the Île de la Cité, was perpetually dark, its one small window looking out on an interior courtyard as narrow as an elevator shaft. There was a tiny washbasin in the room, but the communal toilet was down a long hallway. It was a squatter, no more than a hole in the floor, with elevated grips for your shoes, and a clasp fixed to the wall offering paper squares scissored out of the politically relevant L’Humanité or Libération. I bought a Bunsen burner and a small pot, so that we could hard-boil eggs to eat in baguette sandwiches for lunch. But the crumbs attracted mice, and she wakened screaming when one skittered over her face during the night. Another time she opened a dresser drawer to retrieve a shawl and stumbled on three newly born mice nesting there, and began to shriek. So we gave up eating in our room.

  We languished in bed a good deal of the time, not making love but in search of warmth, dozing, reading (me into Jacques Prévert’s Paroles, which she scorned), comparing difficult childhoods and congratulating each other on our amazing survivals. In the privacy of our refuge, far from the café tables where she felt compelled to shock or, anticipating criticism, to pick at the scabs of other people’s weaknesses, she was a wonderful storyteller, my very own Scheherazade. I, in turn, entertained her with tales of the exploits of Detective-Inspector Izzy Panofsky.

  Clara abhorred her mother. In a previous life, she said, Mrs. Chambers must have been an ayah. Or, in another spin of the reincarnation wheel, Chinese, her feet bound in childhood, taking little mincing steps in The Forbidden City during the days of the Ming Dynasty. She was the ultimate wifey. “Très mignonne. Hardly a virago,” said Clara. Her husband’s philandering she took to be a blessing, as it meant she no longer had to suffer him between the sheets. “It is astonishing to what lengths a man will go,” she once said to Clara, “to achieve thirty seconds of friction.” Having provided Mr. Chambers with a son, Clara’s younger brother, she felt that her duty was done, and was delighted to move into her own bedroom. But she continued to thrive as an exemplary chatelaine, managing their Gramercy Park brownstone and Newport mansion with panache. Mrs. Chambers was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company board. Giuseppe di Stefano had sung at one of her soirées. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was a frequent dinner guest. Mrs. Chambers had made a point of taking Kirsten Flagstad to lunch at Le Pavillon after the Jews had taken against her. “My mother would suffer a stroke if she knew I was living with a Jew,” said Clara, tickling my nose with one of her ostrich boas. “She thinks you’re the poison contaminating America’s bloodstream. What have you got to say to that?”

  Her father, she once told me, was a senior partner in John Foster Dulles’s old law firm. He kept Arabian horses and once a year flew over to Scotland to fly-fish for salmon on the Spey. But another time I heard her say that he was a Wall Street broker and a cultivator of rare orchids, and when I asked her about that, once we were alone together, she countered, “Oh, you’re so fucking literal. What does it matter?” and she ran off, disappearing round a corner of the rue de Seine, and didn’t return to our room that night. “As a matter of interest,” I asked, when she showed up at the Pergola the next evening, “where did you stay last night?”

  “You don’t own me, you know. My pussy’s my own.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “It just so happens my aunt Honor is staying at the Crillon. She put me up. We ate at Lapérouse.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Look,” she said, and digging into her skirts, she produced a wad of one-thousand-franc notes, and threw them at me. “Take whatever I owe you for room and board. I’m sure you’ve been keeping track.”

  “Is it all right if I charge interest?”

  “I’m taking the train to Venice with my aunt tonight. We’re staying with Peggy Guggenheim.”

  Shortly after one o’clock in the morning a week later, Clara returned to our room, undressed, and slid into bed with me. “We drank endless Bellinis at Harry’s Bar with Tennessee Williams. Peggy took us to Torcello for lunch one day. For your sake, I visited the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo. Had you lived there back then you wouldn’t have been allowed out after ten o’clock at night. I was going to send you a postcard from the Rialto,” she said, “to say there’s no news to report, but I forgot.”

  In the morning, I couldn’t help noticing the angry scratches running down her back. A veritable trail. “Peggy keeps Russian greyhounds,” said Clara. “They got overexcited when I wrestled with them on the rug.”

  “Nude?”

  “We should try everything. Isn’t that what your mentor said?”

  “Boogie’s not my mentor.”

  “Look at you. Raging inside. You want to kick me out, but you won’t. Because you enjoy showing me off, your crazy, upper-middle-class shiksa.”

  “It would help if you bathed occasionally.”

  “You’re not an artist, like the rest of us here. You’re a voyeur. And when you go home to make money, which is inevitable, given your character, and you’ve married a nice Jewish girl, somebody who shops, you’ll be able to entertain the guys at the United Jewish Appeal dinner with stories about the days you lived with the outrageous Clara Chambers.”

  “Before she became famous.”

  “If you don’t enjoy me now, you will in retrospect. Because what you’re doing here is loading up your memory bank. Terry McIver has got you down pat.”

  “Oh yeah? What does that creep have to say about me?”

  “If you want to know what Boogie was thinking yesterday, listen to Barney today. He calls you Barney like the player piano. Always playing somebody else’s music because you have none of your own.”

  Stung, I belted her one, hard enough to bang her head against the wall. And when she came at me with her fists, I knocked her to the bed. “Were you with a g
uy called Carnofsky?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m told somebody by that name has been showing a photograph of you here and there, making inquiries.”

  “I know no such person. I swear to God, Barney.”

  “Have you been shoplifting again?”

  “No.”

  “Passing bad cheques? Anything I should know about?”

  “Oh, wait. Now I’ve got it,” she said, her eyes filled with guile. “I had an art teacher in New York called Charnofsky. A real sicko. He used to follow me to my loft in the Village and stand outside and watch the window. There were obscene phone calls. Once he exposed himself to me in Union Square.”

  “I thought you didn’t know anybody called Carnofsky.”

  “I just remembered, but it was Charnofsky. It has to be him, that pervert. He mustn’t find me, Barney.”

  A week passed before she would leave our hotel room again, and even then she was furtive, her face obscured by shawls, and avoiding our usual haunts. I knew she was lying about Carnofsky, or Charnofsky, but I didn’t twig to what was going on. Had I understood, I might have been able to save her. Mea culpa yet again. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  6

  “Saul, it’s me.”

  “Who else would phone me this early in the morning?”

  “It’s ten-thirty, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I was up reading until four. I can feel the flu coming on. I had a very soft bowel movement yesterday.”

  Once, when he was only eighteen, a raging Saul opened the front door of our house, dropping his books, and exclaiming, in that disgusting manner of his, “Shit. Shit. Shit,” before barging into the living room, where I sat with Miriam. “This has been a godawful day,” he said. “I got into an argument with that cretin on tenure who is my philosophy professor. I stupidly ate lunch at Ben’s and my stomach’s been upset ever since. I’ve probably got food poisoning. I just about punched out a damn fool librarian and I don’t know what I’ve done with my English 240 notes, not that it’s worth writing down anything that babbling idiot says. I had to wait forty minutes for my bus. I quarrelled with Linda. I’ve got another fierce headache. I hope we’re not eating pasta for dinner again.” Only then did he notice that Miriam’s leg, propped up on a hassock, was in a cast. “Oh,” he said, “what happened?”

  “Your mother fractured her ankle this morning, but you mustn’t let that worry you.”

  Now I said, “Remember I once took you and the others to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? There was Sneezy, Sleepy, Doc, Grouchy, and —”

  “Grouchy? You mean Grumpy, don’t you?”

  “That’s what I said. The other three, please.”

  “Happy.”

  “I know that. And?”

  “I can’t remember the other two offhand.”

  “Think.”

  “Damn it, Daddy. I haven’t even brushed my teeth yet.”

  “I hope I didn’t waken Sally.”

  “Sally’s toast. You mean Dorothy. Naw, she’s already left for work. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “What’s wrong now?”

  “She didn’t leave the Times on my bed and I can see she forgot to take my laundry with her. Look, I’m going to try to get back to sleep now, if you don’t mind?”

  He’s brilliant, my Saul, far more intelligent than I am, but charged with discontent. Sour. Abrasive. Cursed with a ferocious temper, which I take to be a most unattractive quality. But he is also blessed with something of Miriam’s beauty. Her grace. Her originality. I adore him. Before graduating magna cum laude from McGill, he condescended to sit for a Rhodes scholarship competition, and, having won one, declined it in his own incomparable style. “Cecil Rhodes,” he told the committee, “was a vicious imperialist and his scholarship fund would be more honourably used making restitution to the blacks he exploited. I don’t want anything to do with his blood money.” Eschewing Oxford, Saul went on to do his postgraduate work at Harvard. But, naturally, my boy did not accept his degree, which in those days he considered a bourgeois stigma.

  My sons short-circuited somewhere. Crossed wires. Mike, a militant socialist, is sinfully rich and married to an aristo. But Saul, born again a neo-conservative, is dirt-poor and lives in squalor in New York, in an East Village loft, where the infatuated girls come and go, cooking and sewing and boiling his underwear. Saul ekes out a living of sorts writing polemics for the right-wing trades: The American Spectator, The Washington Times, Commentary, and National Review. A volume of his essays has been published by The Free Press, and I never pass an out-of-town bookshop without slapping three expensive art books down on the counter and asking, “Would you happen to have a copy of Saul Panofsky’s brilliant Minority Report?” If they answer no, I say, “Well, in that case, I won’t be needing any of these.”

  Saul’s a raver. His right-wing diatribes, inarguably well written, are offensive, homophobic, totally without compassion for the poor, but they also amuse me no end, because back in 1980, when he was a mere seventeen-year-old, Saul was a Marxist firebrand. He was a passionate supporter of Quebec’s independence, which he pronounced a rite of passage, necessarily brief, that would yield to North America’s first workers’ state, after his bunch had marched on Quebec City’s Winter Palace, though not before eleven a.m. He also spoke at thinly attended meetings denouncing Israel as a racist state and demanding justice for the Palestinians. “If God bequeathed Canaan to the descendants of Abraham, then that also included Ishmael’s progeny.”

  In those days Saul was no longer living at home, in the house I had acquired in Westmount after Michael was born, but was rooted in a commune, largely composed of middle-class Jewish kids, in a cold-water flat on St. Urbain Street, right in my old neighbourhood. I wander down there occasionally in unavailing quest of familiar faces and old landmarks. But, like me, the boys I grew up with moved on long ago: those who prospered to Westmount, or Hampstead, and the ones who are still struggling to the nondescript suburbs of Côte St-Luc, Snowdon, or Ville St-Laurent. These streets now teem with Italian, Greek, or Portuguese kids, their parents as out of breath as ours once were, juggling overdue household bills. Signs of the times. The shoeshine parlour where I used to take my father’s fedoras to be blocked has been displaced by a unisex hair stylist. The Regent Theatre, where I could once catch a double feature for thirty-five cents, and enjoy three hours of uninterrupted necking with the notorious Goldie Hirschorn, is boarded up. The lending library where I took out books (Forever Amber; Farewell, My Lovely; King’s Row; The Razor’s Edge) for three cents a day no longer exists. Mr. Katz’s Supreme Kosher Meat Mart has yielded to a video-rental outlet: ADULT MOVIES OUR SPECIALTY. My old neighbourhood now also boasts a New Age bookstore, a vegetarian restaurant, a shop that deals in holistic medicines, and a Buddhist temple of sorts, all of which cater to the needs of Saul and his bunch and others like them.

  Some bunch that was that Saul was involved with. Posters of the usual suspects hung on the walls. Lenin. Fidel. Che. Rosa Luxemburg. Louis Riel. Dr. Norman Bethune. FUCK PIERRE TRUDEAU was spray-painted on one wall and VIVE LE QUéBEC LIBRE on another. The flat reeked of dirty socks and stale farts and pot. Half-eaten pizzas were abandoned here and there. I used to visit occasionally. Once Saul emerged grudgingly from a bedroom to greet me, his long brown hair tumbling to his shoulders, a Cree headband hugging his forehead like a slipped halo, a book about the Chinese revolution in hand. He promptly began to lecture me, in the admiring presence of his comrades, about the rigours of the Long March.

  “Long March, baloney,” I said, lighting a Montecristo. “That was a hike, kid. A Sunday picnic. I’ll tell you a long march. Forty years, trudging through the desert, without egg rolls or Peking duck, your ancestors and mine —”

  “You think everything’s a joke. The pigs are filming all our rallies.”

  “Saul, my boy, abi gezunt.”

  The lanky black girl in bra and panties curled up on a mattress on the floor
began to stir. “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “It’s a saying of our forefathers. You know, the slumlords of Canaan. It means ‘so long as you’re groovy.’ ”

  “Oh, why don’t you just fuck off,” she said, rising, and slouching out of the room.

  “What an enchanting young lady. Why don’t you bring her home to dinner one night?”

  Another girl — dumpy, sleepy-eyed, nude — blundered in from a room and drifted into the kitchen, wiggling her ass at me. “May I ask, which one of these delectable creatures is your girlfriend?”

  “We don’t go in for property rights here.”

  Another young revolutionary, his greasy hair caught in a ponytail, sailed in from the kitchen, sipping coffee out of a jam jar. “Who’s the old prick?” he asked.

  “Don’t talk to my father like that,” said Saul. Then, pulling me aside, he whispered, “I don’t want you or Mum to worry, but they might come for me.”

  “The health department?”

  “The RCMP. My activities are not unknown.”

  He had a point. A year earlier Saul, putting in a catch-up term at Wellington College, had discovered that it had investments in American branch plants, one of which manufactured spark plugs used in Israeli tanks. Outraged, Saul’s bunch had risen as one and barricaded themselves in the faculty club. They immediately alienated certain professors who, although disposed to be of the New Left, suddenly found themselves cut off from booze on credit. The manifesto of The 18th of November Fifteen was dropped out of a faculty-club window and broadcast between helicopter traffic reports on Pepper Logan’s CYAD morning call-in talk show. It set out the following demands:

  That Wellington divest itself of investments in companies that serve fascist or racist states.