Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “Ignore him,” said Harvey. “He’s drunk again.”

  “One minute,” I said. “You know that Bishinsky you own?”

  “You’ve never been invited to our apartment,” said Harvey, “and you never will be. Forget it.”

  “I thought you’d be delighted to know that I worked on it too. Let fly with a wet mop Leo handed me one day.”

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard,” said Becky.

  “Ten to one you’ve never even met Bishinsky,” said Harvey, brushing past me.

  We also boast a gaggle of divorcées of a certain age in The Lord Byng Manor. My favourite, an anorexic with a helmet of lacquered hair dyed blonde, breasts once as flat as yesterday’s flapjacks, and legs as thin as pipe cleaners, hasn’t spoken to me since we ran into each other after she had returned from a second-chance clinic in Toronto, where she had gone for a face-lift and a boob refill. I had greeted her in the lobby with a kiss on the cheek.

  “What are you staring at?” she demanded.

  “I’m waiting to see if the dent remains in place.”

  “Bastard.”

  I no longer really have to go into my production office, where I am considered a spent force. I could live anywhere. In London with Mike and Caroline. In New York with Saul and whoever is his latest squeeze. Or in Toronto with Kate. Kate’s my darling. But in Toronto I’d be bound to run into Miriam and Blair Hopper né Hauptman, Herr Doktor Professor of Nostrums.

  CBC Radio, overjoyed to have Miriam back in Toronto, immediately found a niche for her. Reverting to her maiden name, Greenberg, by which she first came to national attention as an arts reporter, she now presides over a morning classical-music program called “By Special Request.” It enables listeners to ask for any recording they fancy, treating us to the insufferably cute stories behind their selection. I tape these shows, tracking the tunes most popular with Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch. They are, in no special order, “The William Tell Overture,” “The Moonlight Sonata,” “The Warsaw Concerto,” “The Four Seasons,” “The 1812 Overture.” I play these tapes back at night, seated in the dark, a Macallan in hand, savouring the voice of my one true love, pretending she is not on the radio but in our bathroom, going about her nightly ablutions, preparing for bed, where she will curl into me, warming my old bones, and I will cup her breasts until I fall asleep. Riding sufficient Macallan, my pretence will go so far as to even allow me to call out to her, “I know you’re worried about my smoking, darling, so I’m putting out my cigar right now and coming straight to bed.”

  Poor Miriam. Her program’s a clunker. Between playing records, she is obliged to read her listeners’ letters aloud; once — to my everlasting glee — a letter that purported to come from a Mrs. Doreen Willis of Vancouver Island:

  Dear Miriam,

  I hope you don’t mind my being so familiar, but out here on Vancouver Island we tend to think of you as family. So here goes. Blush blush blush. Forty years ago today I was on the “yellow brick road” to Banff with Donald on our honeymoon. We drove a Plymouth Compact. It was blue, my favourite colour. I also like ochre, silver, and lilac. I don’t mind canary yellow on some people, if you know what I mean. But I simply can’t stand maroon. It was raining cats and coyotes. And then, what? A flat tire. I was fit to be tied. Donald, then in the early stages of multiple sclerosis, although we hardly suspected it at the time (I thought he was just too clumsy), wasn’t able to fix it. And little me? Well I wasn’t going to risk getting axle grease on my brand new two-piece polka-dot suit with semifitted top ending just below the waist. It was turquoise. Then along came a Good Samaritan in the nick of time to save our bacon. Whoops. I’m sure you don’t eat it with your name, but no offence, eh? We were exhausted by the time we arrived at the Banff Springs Hotel. All the same, Donald insisted that we celebrate our safe arrival with a couple of Singapore Slings. The bartender had his radio on and Jan Peerce was singing “The Bluebird of Happiness.” I tell you it gave me goose-pimples. It fit our mood to a T. Today is our fortieth wedding anniversary and Donald, who has been confined to a wheelchair for years, is feeling blue (my favourite colour, natch). But I want you to know he still retains his sense of humour. I call him Shaky, which makes him giggle so hard, I then have to wipe his chin and blow his nose. Oh well, for better or for worse, isn’t that what we pledged, although some wives I could name don’t honour it.

  Please play Jan Peerce’s recording of “The Bluebird of Happiness” for Donald, as I know it will lift his spirits. Many thanks from a faithful listener.

  Yours,

  DOREEN WILLIS

  Gotcha, I thought, pouring myself a big one, slipping into a soft-shoe shuffle. Then I sat down and began to scribble notes for another letter.

  In my declining years, I continue to linger in Montreal, risking icy streets in winter in spite of my increasingly brittle bones. It suits me to be rooted in a city that, like me, is diminishing day by day. Only yesterday, it seems, the separatists officially launched their referendum campaign with a show performed before a thousand true believers in Quebec City’s Grand Théâtre. Their prolix, if decidedly premature, Declaration of Sovereignty, recited by a spotlit duo, owed more to Hallmark Cards than to Thomas Jefferson.

  “We, the people of Quebec, declare we are free to choose our future.

  “We know the winter in our souls. We know its blustery days, its solitude, its false eternity, and its apparent deaths. We know what it is to be bitten by the winter cold.”

  We are dealing with a two-headed beast: our provincial premier, a.k.a. The Weasel, and his minions in Quebec City, and Dollard Redux, the fulminating leader of the Bloc Québécois in Ottawa. Dollard Redux has lit a fire here. Soon the only English-speaking people left in Montreal will be the old, the infirm, and the poor. All that’s flourishing now are FOR SALE/à VENDRE signs, sprouting up every day like out-of-season daffodils on front lawns, and there are stores with TO LET/à LOUER signs everywhere on once fashionable streets. In the watering-hole I favour, on Crescent Street, there is a wake at least once a month for the latest regular who has had his fill of tribalism and is moving to Toronto or Vancouver. Or, God help them, Saskatoon, “a good place to bring up children.”

  Dink’s is the name of the bar I repair to for lunch just about every day, and again at five in the afternoon, an hour when the place is thick with sour old farts. That adorable gamine who is my personal assistant at Totally Unnecessary Productions, the indispensable Chantal Renault, is familiar with my routine. Ignoring the men, who are always stirred by her presence, she tends to come and go with cheques that have to be signed and more exasperating problems. Happily Arnie Rosenbaum is no longer with us. Arnie, who was in my class at Fletcher’s Field High, is the nebbish I once foolishly hired to run the Montreal office of my cheese-importing business. Prompted by guilt, I kept him on when I prematurely went into TV production back in 1959, finding a place for him in accounts. Those days. Christ Almighty. One step ahead of creditors, I used to delay settling lab, film-stock, and camera-rental bills until the last possible moment. Then there was Arnie to cope with. Teeth-grinding Arnie, who was suffering from halitosis, asthma, ulcers, and flatulence, his maladies exacerbated by the torments he was subjected to by his boss, Hugh Ryan, our resident chartered accountant. One day Arnie would come in to find an entry that wasn’t his own in one of his ledgers, obliging him to waste hours in futile calculations. Another day, popping what he took to be one of his pills, he would, before the morning was out, be struck with a sudden attack of diarrhoea. Then there was the afternoon Arnie caught up with me at Dink’s and thrust his raincoat onto the bar. “I’m just coming from the cleaners,” he said. “Look what they found in my pockets.” Condoms. A vibrator. A torn pair of tiny black panties. “What if it had been Abigail who had emptied my pockets?”

  I also loathed Hugh, but didn’t dare fire him. He was the nephew of our federal minister of finance and a frequent dinner guest in the homes of the presidents of the Bank of Montreal
and the Royal. Without his assurances, my line of desperately needed credit would be severed. “Arnie, if you only learned to ignore him, he would stop bugging you. But I’ll speak to him.”

  “One day, so help me, I’ll pick up a knife and ram it between his shoulder blades. Fire him, Barney, I could do his job.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “That’s exactly what I expected. Thanks for nothing,” he said.

  Among the regulars at Dink’s these days there are a few divorcées, a number of journalists, including the Gazette columnist Zack Keeler, a couple of bores to be avoided, some lawyers, a marooned New Zealander, and a likeable gay hairdresser. Our star turn and my best friend there is a lawyer, who usually claims his bar stool at noon and doesn’t surrender it until seven, when we yield Dink’s to ear-splitting rock music and the young, there to make out.

  John Hughes-McNoughton, born into Westmount affluence, misplaced his moral compass years ago. His thin hair dyed brown, he is a tall, scrawny, stoop-shouldered man, his blue eyes radiating scorn. John was a brilliant criminal lawyer until he was undone by two costly alimony settlements and a deadly mixture of booze and irreverence. Defending a notorious swindler–cum–lounge lizard some years back, a man charged with sexual assault on a woman he had picked up in the Esquire Show Bar, John made the mistake of going out to a long liquid lunch at Delmo’s before returning to the courtroom to deliver his summing up. Floating into the well of the court, slurring his words, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is now my duty to make an impassioned speech in defence of my client. Then you will benefit from the judge’s unbiased summary of the evidence you have heard here. And following that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you, in your wisdom, will pronounce on whether you find my client innocent or guilty. But, honouring Juvenal, who once wrote probitas lau-datur et alget, which I won’t insult you by translating, let me admit that I am far too drunk to make a speech. In all my years in court, I have yet to come across an unbiased judge. And you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, are incapable of deciding whether my client is innocent or not.” Then he sat down.

  In 1989, John addressed public meetings in support of a quirky new Anglophone protest party that would elect four members to our so-called National Assembly in Quebec City. He also published corrosive op-ed pieces here and there ridiculing the province’s loopy language laws, which ordained, among other foolish things, that henceforth English, or even bilingual, commercial signs would be verboten, an affront to the visage linguistique of la belle province. In those contentious days even Dink’s suffered a visit from an inspector (or tongue trooper, as we called them) from the Commission de Protection de la Langue Française. This latter-day, pot-bellied patriote in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts was saddened to discover a banner suspended from the bar that read:

  ALLONS-Y EXPOS

  GO FOR IT, EXPOS

  His manner beyond reproach, the inspector allowed that the sentiment was admirable but, unfortunately, the sign was illegal, because the English lettering was the same size as the French, whereas the law clearly stated that the French must be twice the size of the English. It was past three p.m. when the inspector pronounced and a well-oiled John was already into his shouting mode. “When you can send in an inspector who is twice the size of us Anglophones,” he hollered, “we’ll take down the sign. Until then, it remains in place.”

  “Are you le patron?”

  “Fiche le camp. Espèce d’imbécile.”

  Six months later John was in the news. He had failed to pay his provincial income tax for the past six years. An oversight. So he summoned reporters to Dink’s. “I am being persecuted,” he said, “because I am an Anglophone, a spokesman for my people who have been denied their constitutional rights. Rest assured I will not be intimidated or silenced. And I will survive. For, as Terence put it, fortis fortuna adiuvat. That’s spelt T, E, R, E, N, C, E, gentlemen.”

  “But have you paid your taxes or not?” asked a reporter from Le Devoir.

  “I refuse to countenance hostile questions put to me by politically motivated reporters from the Francophone press.”

  Riding a surfeit of vodka and cranberry juice, his preferred tipple, John could be truly obnoxious, his favourite foil the harmless gay hairdresser he shouts at, denouncing him as a bowel-troweller or worse, infuriating Betty, our incomparable barmaid, as well as everybody else in the bar. Betty, born to her job, sees to it that nobody who is not a certified member of our group is ever seated at our end of the horseshoe-shaped bar. She fields unwanted phone calls with panache. If, for instance, Nate Gold’s wife calls, she will look directly at Nate for a sign, even as she calls out, “Is Nate Gold here?” She cashes cheques for Zack Keeler, among others, and hides them until she is assured they will not be returned NSF. When drink has rendered John too much to bear, she will take him gently by the arm, and say, “Your taxi is here.”

  “But I didn’t order a …”

  “Yes, you did. Didn’t he, Zack?”

  John is certainly a scoundrel, but he is also an intelligent man and an original, a species this city is short of. Furthermore, I am permanently in his debt. Even though I’m sure he suspected I was guilty, he defended me with wizardry in court. He was there for me when only Miriam’s visits to the prison in St-Jérôme stood between me and a breakdown.

  “Of course I believe you,” she had said then, “but I think you haven’t told me everything.”

  To this day when the officer who was in charge of the investigation, Detective-Sergeant Sean O’Hearne, puts in an appearance at Dink’s, John does his utmost to humiliate him. “If you must impose yourself on the quality here, O’Hearne, you’re going to have to pay for your own drinks, now that you’ve retired.”

  “If I were you, Maître Hughes hyphen McNoughton, I would mind my own business.”

  “Ite, missa est, you viper. So do not trouble my client here. You can still be charged with harassment, you know.”

  Raskolnikov has nothing on me. Or, put another way, to each suspect his own Inspector of Police Porfiry. O’Hearne continues to keep tabs on me, hoping for a deathbed confession.

  Poor O’Hearne.

  All of us who frequent Dink’s in the afternoon have suffered time’s depredations, but the years have been especially unkind to O’Hearne, now in his early seventies. Once he had been built square as a boxer, a stranger to flab, Warner Brothers tough, with a weakness for Borsalinos, kipper ties, and bespoke tailoring acquired on the arm. In days gone by, his mere presence in Dink’s, or any other Crescent Street watering-hole, was sufficient to empty the place of dealers in drugs, stolen goods, or call-girls, none of whom wanted him to see them spending lavishly. But nowadays O’Hearne, his residue of snowy white hair still parted down the middle or spine, stray strands slicked down either side like bleached salmon ribs, was not so much corpulent as beer-bloated, his blubber seemingly without substance. Prick him with a fork, I thought, and he would spurt fat like sausage in a pan. Jowly he was, sweaty, his double chin wobbly, his belly immense. He no longer chain-smoked Player’s Mild, but he was left with, and often overcome by, such a wet, bronchial cough as to make the rest of us resolve to reread our wills when we got home. The last time he stopped by to check me out, heaving himself into the bar stool beside me, wheezing, he said, “You know what worries me most? Cancer of the rectum. Having to shit into a Glad Bag attached to my hip. Like poor old Armand Lemieux. Remember him?”

  Lemieux was the one who’d put the cuffs on me.

  “I sit in the crapper every morning now,” he said, “and an hour passes before I’m done. It comes out in angry little bits.”

  “That’s very interesting, your excreta. Why don’t you go in for a check-up?”

  “You eat Japanese?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “I tried that new place on Bishop, The Lotus Blossom, or whatever the hell they call it, and they brought me raw cold fish and hot wine. Listen here, I said to the waitress, I li
ke hot food and cold wine. Take it away and try again, eh? Hey, I get a lot of reading done these days.”

  “Sitting on the crapper?”

  “Lemieux remembers you like yesterday. The way you handled it, he says, you had to be a genius.”

  “I’m touched.”

  “Lemieux’s got himself a nice bit of stuff for an old cop. An Italian widow, with boobs out to here, who runs a dépanneur in the North End. But what can it be like for her, eh? I mean he’s in the sack with her, woosh woosh woosh, and she takes a peek and that fucken Glad bag is filling up. Am I boring you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, after all these years The Second Mrs. Panofsky, as you insist on calling her, still has me around for the occasional dinner.”

  “You’re lucky. Of all my wives so far, she was the best cook. I don’t mind you telling her that,” I said, hoping my calumny would be reported to Miriam.

  “I don’t think she’d appreciate the compliment coming from you.”

  “She still accepts my monthly cheques.”

  “Let’s be serious for a moment. It’s like her life stopped right there and then. She’s got the trial transcripts bound in morocco, and she goes over it again and again, making notes, looking for loopholes. Hey, tell me the difference between Christopher Reeve and O.J.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “O.J. will walk,” he said, guffawing.

  “You’re such an oaf, Sean.”

  “Don’t you get it? Reeve is that actor, he played Superman, who had this riding accident and is paralysed for life. O.J. is guilty as hell, you know. Just like you. Ah, come on. Lighten up. That’s all water over the dam. In your position, I might have done the same thing. Nobody blames you.”