Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “What?”

  “ … my hotel …”

  I managed to get him to his feet and we started to walk, his teeth chattering, his legs rubbery. We had only gone a block when he began to shake. No, vibrate. He sank to his knees and I held his head, as he vomited again and again. Somehow or other, we made it back to his room on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts. I got him into bed, and when he started to tremble again, I piled whatever clothes I could find on top of his blankets. “It’s the flu,” he said. “I’m not upset. This has nothing to do with my reading. You’re not saying anything.”

  “What should I say?”

  “There’s no doubting my talent. My work will last. I know that.”

  “Yes.”

  Then his teeth began to chatter at such a rate I feared for his tongue. “Please don’t go yet.”

  I lit a Gauloise and passed it to him, but he couldn’t handle it.

  “My father can hardly wait for me to fail and to join him in misery.”

  He began to weep again. I grabbed the wastepaper basket and held his head, but for all his heaving he could bring up nothing but a string of green slime. As soon as the retching stopped, I brought him a glass of water. “It’s the flu,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “No.”

  “If you tell any of the others you saw me like this, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “I won’t say a word to anybody.”

  “Swear it.”

  I swore it, and sat with him until his body stopped jerking, and he fell into a troubled sleep. But I had been a witness to his cracking and that, dear reader, is how you make enemies.

  9

  I’m determined to be fair. A reliable witness. The truth is, Terry McIver’s novels, including The Money Man, in which I fill the large role of the acquisitive Benjy Perlman, are untainted by imagination. His novels are uniformly pedestrian, earnest, as appetizing as health food, and, it goes without saying, devoid of humour. The characters in these novels are so wooden they could be used for kindling. It is only in Terry’s journals that fantasy comes into play. Certainly the Paris pages are full of invention. A sicko’s inventions. Mary McCarthy once observed that everything Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, including “and” and “but.” The same can be said of Terry’s journals.

  Following, a sampler. Some pages from the journals of Terry McIver (Officer of the Order of Canada, Governor General’s Award winner), as they will soon appear in his autobiography, Of Time and Fevers, published by the group, Toronto, which gratefully acknowledges the assistance of mediocrity’s holy trinity: the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Toronto Arts Council.

  Paris. Sept. 22, 1951. Couldn’t get anywhere with Céline’s Mort à Crédit this morning. It was recommended to me by the touchingly insecure P——, which is not surprising, considering that he is burdened with his own inchoate rage against the world. I have the most tenuous of relationships with P——, imposed on me as we are both Montrealers, which hardly amounts to propinquity.

  P —— turned up in Paris one day last spring, furnished with my address by my father. He knew nobody here, and, consequently, sought me out daily. He would interrupt me at work, inviting me out to lunch and demanding, in return, that I provide him with the names of the cafés he should frequent, and pleading for introductions. Within a week, he had mastered the fashionable Negro idiom, swallowing it whole. Once, memorably, he came upon me on the terrace of the Mabillon, where I was reading Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.

  “Is it a drag, or is it any good, man?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Would I dig it?”

  Eventually I succeeded in unloading him onto a clatch of frivolous Americans, whose company I did my utmost to avoid. To begin with they were far from grateful, but soon they discovered that P——, determined to ingratiate himself, could be hit easily for money. Leo Bishinsky borrowed from him to buy canvases and paints, and the others sponged off him, each according to his need. In passing, I once said to Boogie, “I see you’ve got yourself a new friend.”

  “Everybody is entitled to his own Man Friday, don’t you think?”

  Boogie, enduring a long losing streak at the gaming tables, and threatened with eviction from his hotel, got P —— to settle his rent.

  In common with other autodidacts, P —— feels compelled to brandish whatever he is reading, his conversation burnished with quotes from their work. Since he sprung from the ghetto’s mean streets vulgarity comes naturally to him, but he is also inclined to both drunkenness and fisticuffs, which is surprising, considering his Jewish origins. A denial? Possibly.

  Born in Montreal, raised in an English-speaking home, P —— still tends to invert many of his sentences, as if they were translated from the Yiddish, as in, “He was a hateful bastard, Clara’s doctor,” or, after the fact, “Had I known it would have been different, my behaviour.” I must remember to use this peculiar syntax when writing a Jew’s dialogue.

  P——’s countenance is not unpleasant. Black curly hair hard as steel wool. Shrewd tradesman’s eyes. Satyr’s mouth. Tall, shambly, and given to strutting. He still seems adrift here, out of his league, but now an acolyte of one of the quartier’s most obnoxious poseurs whom he trails after as if he were his catamite, his Ganymede, which is not the case. Neither of them is queer.

  Wrote 600 words today and then tore them up. Inadequate. Mediocre. Like me?

  Paris. Oct. 3, 1951. S——’s husband is in Frankfurt on business, and so she sent me a pneumatique this morning, inviting me to dinner in our oubliette, a bistro on the rue Scribe, where neither of us was likely to encounter anybody we knew. A prudent bourgeoise, fearful of wagging tongues (“Elle entretient un gigolo. Tiens donc.”), S —— reached for my hand under the table and slipped me sufficient francs to settle the bill.

  I have served as S——’s dutiful lover for three months now. She picked me up one summer night on the terrace of the Café de Flore. Seated alone at the table next to mine, she smiled, indicated the book I was reading, and said, “Not many Americans are capable of reading Robbe-Grillet in French. I must confess even I find him difficult.”

  She admits to being forty, but I suspect she’s somewhat older, as witness her stretch marks. S——, now my self-appointed houri, is in no immediate danger of being confused with Aphrodite, but she is pleasingly pretty, slim. She begins to imbibe in the morning (“Gin and eet, comme la reine anglaise”), and she consumed most of the wine at dinner tonight, prodding me to indicate that her legs are spread apart under the table, an invitation for me to remove a shoe and sock and then massage her with my toes.

  Later we repair to my disgusting little hotel room, which she affects to adore, because it gratifies her nostalgie de la boue, as well as her concept of what’s appropriate to a struggling young artist. We copulate twice, once fore, and once aft, and then I refuse her cunnilingus. This makes her sulk. She does brighten, however, when, on her insistence, I read to her from my work-in-progress. She pronounces it merveilleux, vraiment incroyable.

  S —— dreams of being celebrated in my pages, and has picked the name of Héloise for herself. In spite of the driving rain and my fatigue I walk her back to her Austin-Healey, parked at a discreet distance, assuring her of my high esteem for her beauty, wit, intelligence. Back in my room, I immediately sit down to write 500 words, describing, while it is still fresh in my mind, how orgasm makes her shudder.

  Wakened with a sneezing fit at 2 a.m. Reached for my thermometer and discovered I had a temperature of 99.2. My pulse was fast. Joints ached. I knew I shouldn’t have gone out in the rain.

  Paris. Oct. 9, 1951. A letter from my father has been lying on my table for ten days, and this morning I finally risk opening the depressingly thick envelope.

  I can visualize my father writing this letter in his cramped handwriting, seated at his oak roll-top desk in the rear of the bookshop. He would be smoking an Export A, a
toothpick piercing the butt to keep it going until it threatened to scorch his lips. The desk’s surface would include a spike thick with unpaid bills, and a cigar box for the collection of paper-clips, elastics, and postage stamps from foreign countries for the French-Canadian postman he is proselytizing. There would also be the remnants of his lunch. The remains of his dry hard-boiled egg, which he never finishes, or a leaky sardine sandwich. An apple core. Sucking his yellow teeth, he writes with an old-fashioned cork-handled pen, even as he still shaves with a straight razor and shines his cracked wingtip shoes every morning.

  His letter, as usual, begins with a litany of political bile. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have naturally been found guilty and sentenced to death. The H-Bomb has been tested in the Pacific, a provocation to the Soviet Union and other People’s Democracies. Twenty-one Communist leaders have been arrested in the U.S., charged with conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government. Then he gets down to the nitty-gritty. Mother is no better. She cannot be left alone at home, so he wheels her to the bookshop every morning, and soon there will be ice and snow, and how will he manage, his arthritis is so bad? She snoozes or reads in the rear of the bookshop until he is ready to lower the shutters and wheel her home. Home, where he will bathe her, soothing her with rubbing alcohol, and then heat her a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup followed by diced carrots and corn niblets, everything out of cans. Or fry her a couple of eggs in stale bacon grease, the edges burnt lacy brown. He will read to her at night in his smoker’s voice, overcome by coughing fits, bringing up phlegm into a filthy handkerchief: Howard Fast, Gorky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Aragon, Brecht. In the absence of a crucifix, a framed copy of Mao’s tribute to Comrade Norman Bethune hangs over their bed, which now requires a rubber undersheet for her sake. Some nights he will brush out her knotted grey hair, even as he sings her to sleep:

  Join the Union fellow workers

  Men and women side by side

  We will crush the greedy shirkers

  Like a sweeping surging tide

  For united we are standing

  But divided we will fall

  Let this be our understanding

  All for One and One for All.

  My father writes that he now finds it all but impossible to cope. If I come home, he will forgive me my sins of omission and commission. I could have the back bedroom, with the radiator that sizzles and knocks through the night. With the window that offers the inspiring view of other people’s Penman’s long underwear flapping on the backyard clotheslines, and sheets frozen rock-hard in winter. I could write in the mornings, looking in on Mother from time to time, emptying the slop basin of her wheelchair, a spur to my appetite for lunch. Then I could relieve him in the afternoons, tending to the bookshop, peddling Marxist nostrums to comrades. Dealing with the occasional innocent who wanders in to inquire, “Would you have a copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking?” Or, perhaps, Gayelord Hauser’s Look Younger, Live Longer? He would pay me twenty-five dollars a week.

  “I am not getting any younger, and neither is your devoted mother, and we require your help, as our lives draw to a close.”

  And what about my life, I wonder? Why should I sacrifice it for their sake? I would rather slit my wrists, as poor Clara22 did (Clara, whose prodigious talent I was one of the first to recognize), than return to that bleak house. That so-called home to which I could never bring my friends after school lest they be lectured on the history of the Winnipeg general strike, and be laden with pamphlets to take to their parents.

  Rereading my father’s missive, I take up a pencil and correct his grammar and punctuation. I also note, typically, that in all of its seven pages there is no inquiry as to my state of mind. Not an iota of interest in my work-in-progress.

  Inevitably, this filial summons brings on a migraine. Working proves impossible. I stroll through the Jardin du Luxembourg, emerging on the rue Vavin, then on to Montparnasse. This was foolish of me, for all that exercise whets my appetite, and I have no money for lunch. Passing the Dôme, I espy P——, conspiring with the hustler now said to be one of his intimates. He is a rue des Rosiers money-changer.

  A wasted day, fallow, not a word written.

  Paris, Oct. 20, 1951. UNESCO cheque, long overdue, has still not arrived. Story returned from The New Yorker with a printed rejection slip. Irwin Shaw’s effusions are more to their taste. I should have known better.

  S —— is always beautifully dressed by Dior or Chanel. I could survive for months on the cost of just one of those outfits. That pearl necklace with the diamond clasp. Those rings. The Patek Philippe wristwatch. Her husband is a Crédit Lyonnais executive. He hasn’t made love to her for more than a year. She has decided he is a tante, but that he can, sans brio, go “à voile et à vapeur,” as she once said.

  S —— has been shopping on the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré again. On my return from the market on the rue de Seine, the concierge presents me with a small package, tied with a ribbon, that has been delivered by hand. It is from Roger et Gallet. A bottle of scent for men. Three bars of perfumed soap. Oh, the arrogance of the rich.

  Then, just as I have settled in at my table, she arrives out of breath, unaccustomed as she is to climbing five flights of stairs. “I only have an hour,” she says, her kiss reeking of her garlicky lunch.

  “But I’m in the middle of work.”

  She has brought a chilled bottle of Roederer Crystal, and is already undressing. “Hurry,” she says.

  300 words today. That’s all.

  Paris. Oct. 22, 1951. The patronizing P —— invited me to lunch today in that cheap restaurant on the rue de Dragon, and of course he expects gratitude in return. He has come into some money, he says, as a consequence of a dubious deal with his money-changer accomplice. Oozing concern, he offers to lend me some. My need is exigent, but I turn him down as he is not the sort I wish to be indebted to. P —— is only ostensibly caring. He is blatantly insecure and tenders favours in the hope of binding his betters to him.

  Later we stroll as far as Jeu de Paume together, where he is much taken by the Seurats.

  “Seurat is credited with invention, a new style,” I say, “but he, as well as some of the Impressionists, were probably short-sighted and painted things as they actually saw them.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he says.

  Paris. Oct. 29, 1951. The clatch gathered at a table in the Mabillon. Leo Bishinsky, Cedric Richardson, a couple whose names I can’t remember, a girl new to me with glistening hairy armpits, and of course P——, accompanied by both his Svengali and his Clara. Responding to their faux-friendly greetings, I stop briefly at their table, refusing to be provoked by Boogie’s taunts. They are all high on hashish, which renders them even more boring than usual.

  For my own jollification, I have tried to come up with a cognomation that would be appropriate for that bunch. The Yahoos? The Sluggards? I finally settle on The Motley Crew.

  They have come over not to absorb French culture but to meet each other. Not one of them has bothered to read Butor, Sarraute, or Simon. On an evening when I can afford to take in the latest Ionesco, or a Louis Jouvet performance, they can be found cheering Sidney Bechet at the Vieux Colombier. Gathered at their table at one café or another, they will argue endlessly about the merits of Ted Williams vs. Joe DiMaggio or, if P —— is in one of his tiresome hockey moods, Gordie Howe vs. Maurice Richard. Or they will challenge each other to recall the lyrics to an Andrews Sisters song. Or lines spoken in the film of Casablanca. They will congratulate each other and troop off together if they discover a cinema showing an old Bud Abbott and Lou Costello comedy, or an Esther Williams musical, and afterwards they will repair to The Old Navy or the Mabillon, to guffaw for hours on end.

  Paris. Nov. 8, 1951. George Whitman has insisted that I read at his bookshop. I suppose James Baldwin wasn’t available.

  Forty-five people are there when I begin, including P —— and his chums, who have obviously come to
mock me. Then a bunch of Letterists, sent for by Boogie no doubt, turn up to demonstrate. But they are sadly mistaken if they think they can intimidate me. I carry on in spite of their braying, for the sake of those who have come to listen.

  P——, clearly delighted to have seen me attacked, invites me out afterwards for drinks and an opportunity to gloat. Solicitous beyond belief, he offers to lend me money again. Possibly, he suggests, I should return to Montreal and take a teaching job. “You, with your McGill scholarship and Arts Medal,” he says with ill-concealed envy.

  “Those who can’t, preach,” I tell him.

  Insulted, he attempts to sneak off without settling the bill. I insist that I had only come to the café at his invitation. Caught out, seething, he hoists me out of my chair, and punches me in the nose, bloodying it. Then he flees into the night, leaving me to pay the bill.

  It is not the first time P —— has tried to settle a contretemps with his fists. Nor, I suspect, will it be the last. He is a violent man. Capable of murder one day, I fear.23

  10

  Hello, hello. Reb Leo Bishinsky is in the news again. MOMA is mounting a retrospective, which will next travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario, world-class at last. Leo’s photograph in The Globe and Mail reveals that he now wears a rug — made out of his collection of the pubic-hairs-of-celebrated-models, from the look of it. He is bare-chested, beaming, embraced by his twenty-two-year-old mistress, a veritable Barbie doll, her arms entwined round his huge, hairy, pastrami-barrel belly. I miss Leo. I really do. “Before I start work in the morning,” Leo confided to the Globe’s reporter, “I venture out into the surrounding woods and listen to the trees.”

  The Globe’s page three yields even richer ore.

  Forget Abelard and Héloïse. Never mind Romeo and Juliet. Or Chuck and Di. Or Michael Jackson and the Beverly Hills orthodontist’s number-one son. This morning’s Globe offers an all-Ontario twisteroo on such poignant tales of romance. A guy named Walton Sue got married yesterday, thereby, according to the Globe’s reporter, “adding another act to the almost Shakespearean tale of love, money, and family feuding in which he and his wife have been cast as unlikely protagonists.” Walton Sue, who has been physically and mentally disabled since he was hit by a car fifteen years ago, has now married wheelchair-bound Ms. Maria DeSousa, who suffers from cerebral palsy. They were wed in a “secret” ceremony in Toronto’s Old City Hall courthouse attended by more media than family, wrote the Globe reporter.