Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “Morty Herscovitch checks me out once a year. I’m shrinking, he says. If I live to be ninety, you’ll be able to carry me around in your handbag.”

  “Chantal and I have talked it over, and should your health deteriorate you can always move in with us. We’ll close off a section of the apartment with a steel mesh fence, the way people do for pet dogs they carry in the back of their station wagons. And we’ll throw you the occasional latke.”

  “I’ll move in with Kate first.”

  “Don’t you dare even think of that, you bastard. She’s had her troubles and now she’s happily married. The last thing in the world she needs is you.”

  “It would be foolish of you to vote Yes. I don’t want you to do it.”

  “You don’t want me to? How dare you! What would you do if you were young and French Canadian?”

  “Why, I’d vote Yes, of course. But neither of us is young and stupid any more.”

  When I dropped her off at her apartment on Côte-des-Neiges, Solange lingered at the car door. “Please don’t carry on drinking now. Go straight home to bed.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “Oh, sure, and you’re willing to swear to it on the heads of your grandchildren.”

  “Honestly, Solange.”

  But, unable to face my empty apartment, my bed without Miriam, I drove on to Jumbo’s, hoping to run into Maître John Hughes-McNoughton, or Zack. Instead, I was lumbered with Sean O’Hearne, who settled heavily on to the bar stool next to mine, his eyes bright with drunken malice. “Bring Mr. P. a drink,” he said, between wheezes.

  “You know something, Sean? I’ve been looking for you. Got something that might interest you.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah.”

  “Your guys dug up my garden, you sent divers down into the lake again and again, you took samples of everything in the cottage, looking for traces of blood, just like you’d seen cops do on TV. But, dimwit that you are, you never asked how come my chainsaw was missing.”

  “Bullshit. You never had one, Mr. P. Because if there was any hard labour to be done on your estate, you hired goys like me to do it. That’s how it’s always been with your lot.”

  “Then how come there was an empty hook on my garage wall?”

  “Empty hook, my ass. You can’t take the piss out of me, Mr. P.”

  “What if I told you I went through a trunk of old tax papers in the cottage last weekend and found a bill for one chainsaw, dated July 4, 1959?”

  “I’d say you were a fucken liar.”

  The others in the bar were watching the late news on TV. The daily referendum round-up. They guffawed when The Weasel filled the screen, indulging in death-rattle jokes that were now the common lot of Anglophones.

  “So where is that chainsaw now?”

  “Where I dropped it. Four hundred feet deep somewhere, rusting, and of no use to you after all these years.”

  “You trying to tell me you had the guts to cut him up?”

  “Sean, now that you’re so thick with The Second Mrs. Panofsky, why don’t you marry her? I’ll continue the alimony payments. I’m even willing to provide a dowry.”

  “No way a guy like you could butcher a man. And there was no blood anywhere. So stop fucking with me, asshole.”

  “Sure there was no blood, because I could have butchered him far out in the woods. Don’t forget I had a day alone at the cottage before you pricks had the good sense to charge me.”

  “You’ve got a sick sense of humour, you know that, Mr. P.? Hey, look, there he is. Their fucken saviour.”

  It was a seething Dollard Redux who was filling the screen now. Don’t be intimidated by threats, he said. No matter what they say today, after a Yes vote the rest of Canada will come to the table on bended knees.

  “I suppose,” said O’Hearne, “that you and the rest of your tribe will be moving to Toronto the day after. But what about guys like me? Stuck here.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m now thinking of voting Yes myself.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah.”

  “For more than a hundred years this country has been held back trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Are you prepared for another century of adolescent bickering, or should we settle the matter once and for all?”

  I still wasn’t ready to contend with my bed without Miriam, so I left my car where it was, turned my coat collar up against the punishing wind, a harbinger of the six months of winter to come, and began to wander the once-vibrant downtown streets of the dying city I still cherished. Past boarded up stores. Signs in foundering Crescent Street boutiques that read CLOSING DOWN SALE or EVERYTHING MUST GO. Squatters had appropriated the crumbling building that had once been the art-deco York Theatre. Some lout had spray-painted FUCK YOU, ENGLISH on the window of a second-hand bookshop. Every lamp-post on St. Catherine Street was adorned with both OUI and NON placards. Scruffy, shivering teenagers with sleeping-bags were camped outside the Forum, where the tickets would go on sale in the morning for a Bon Jovi concert. A greasy, bearded old man, wild-eyed, muttering to himself, and wheeling a supermarket cart before him, was rummaging through a wastebin, searching for empty cans that could be redeemed. A plump rat skittered out of the lane behind an Indian restaurant.

  MacBarney hath murdered sleep.

  Back in my bed, I tried one remedy after another, unavailingly. Tonight when I reached for Mrs. Ogilvy, sliding my hands under her sweater, attempting to unhook her filigreed bra, she whacked me a good one across the face. “How dare you,” she said.

  “Then why did you rub your tits against my back in the kitchen?”

  “Why, I never. Do you think I’m so frustrated, a ravishing woman like me — getting it every afternoon in the gym from Mr. Stuart, Mr. Kent, and Mr. Abercorn, though not necessarily in that order — that I’d stoop to seducing a little Jeanne Mance jewboy wanker with dirty fingernails?”

  “You left your bedroom door open.”

  “Yes. And you couldn’t control your bladder even then. Had to make peepee. Only fourteen years old and already suffering from prostate problems. Probably cancer.”

  And still sleep wouldn’t come. So I set the spool of my life on rewind, editing out embarrassments, reshooting them in my mind’s eye … and that Monday afternoon in 1952 as I entered my hotel on the rue de Nesle, the concierge rapped on her cubicle window, slid open the glass, and sang out: “Il y a un pneumatique pour vous, Monsieur Panofsky.”

  Clara was expecting me for dinner. Well, why not? I stopped at the nearest Nicolas and bought a bottle of St. Émilion, a favourite of hers. Discovering her in a deep sleep on our bed, an empty bottle of sleeping-pills on the floor, I immediately propped her upright, supporting her, walking her up and down, until the ambulance came. After they had pumped out her stomach, I sat by her bedside, stroking her hand. “You saved my life,” she said.

  “Your hero.”

  “Yes.”

  Then her putrefying corpse floated up at me, the eye sockets empty, worms feeding on her bosom, and Cantor Charnofsky pounded on my door again. “You going to piss in bed at your age?” he asked.

  Roused, I recognized it was time for one of my pinch-it-trickle-and-shake-it pees, and then padded back to bed.

  Four-thirty a.m. Sinking, my eyes lit with joy at the sight of Boogie looming large before me. “I knew you’d turn up eventually,” I said, “but where have you been all these years?”

  “Petra. New Delhi. Samarra. Babylon. Papua. Alexandria. Transylvania.”

  “I can’t begin to tell you the trouble you’ve caused me. Never mind. Miriam, the Boogieman is here. Would you set another place at the table, please?”

  “How can I? I don’t live here any more. I left you.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “You’re spoiling my dream.”

  Then I made a bad turn. And The Second Mrs. Panofsky intruded. Running for her Honda again, tears flying, shrieking, “What are you goi
ng to do?”

  “I’m going to kill him is what I’m going to do.”

  O Lord, I have so much to answer for, but not yet. Please, pretty please.

  Which is when the phone began to ring. Ring and ring and ring. Something bad has happened. Miriam. The kids. But it was a tearful Solange. “Serge has been beaten up by a bunch of goddamn gaybashers.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “He was cruising in Parc Lafontaine. He needs stitches. I think his arm is broken.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Here.”

  “Why isn’t Peter looking after him?”

  Peter, a talented set designer, was Serge Lacroix’s companion. They shared a converted loft in Old Montreal, and I joined them there for dinner on occasion. Walls painted purple. Mirrors everywhere. I don’t know how many Persian cats on the prowl.

  “If Peter had been here, this never would have happened. He’s on a film location in British Columbia.”

  “I’m coming right over.” I hung up and dialled Morty Herscovitch’s home number. “Morty, I’m sorry to waken you, but my ace director has been hurt in an accident. I’m going to take him to the General, but I don’t want him waiting in emergency for two hours, only to be finally looked at by some intern who hasn’t been to sleep for the last thirty-six hours.”

  “Not the General. I’ll meet you at the Queen Elizabeth in half an hour.”

  Rather than drive, I took a taxi to Solange’s apartment. Serge’s scalp was torn, his swollen left eye was all but closed, and he was cradling a clearly broken wrist.

  “What were you doing whoring in that park at your age? You know how dangerous it is.”

  “I thought you came here to be helpful,” said Solange.

  Morty, who was waiting for us at the Queen Elizabeth, sewed eighteen stitches into his scalp, had him X-rayed, and attended to his wrist cast. Then he took me aside. “I want him to have a blood test while he’s here, but he says no.”

  “Leave it to me.”

  Later I took Solange and Serge back to my apartment. I put Serge to bed in my spare bedroom. “Now are you going to be a good boy or do I have to lock my bedroom door before I go to sleep?”

  He smiled and squeezed my hand, and I retreated to the kitchen and cracked open a bottle of champagne for Solange. “I want you to stop fooling around with Chantal,” she said.

  “You’re imagining things.”

  “She doesn’t understand what a hooligan you are. And she is easily hurt.”

  I opened the fridge. “We have a choice. There’s a tub of chopped liver. I could heat up some kasha knishes. Or I could grudgingly share this tin of caviar with you.”

  2

  Shades of Mrs. Ogilvy.

  Story in this morning’s Gazette about a pretty music teacher in Manchester, now forty-one years old, who has been charged, twelve years after the fact, with seducing boys, aged thirteen to fifteen, in a youth orchestra. An alleged victim, whose memory was enhanced after attending a two-day child-abuse workshop, told the judge how he had been taken advantage of after a violin lesson, when he was a mere fourteen years old. “Penelope lay down on her bed and pulled me down beside her. She unbuttoned her blouse and invited me to fondle her breasts. I undid her jeans. She was wearing red satin knickers. She put her hand inside my trousers. I had oral sex with her for twenty minutes. Afterward she served me tea, with chocolate digestives, and told me, ‘You are a naughty boy.’ ”

  In a separate incident, following a Christmas drinks party, another allegedly abused boy said, “Penelope took off her knickers at the edge of the bed. She lay back, undid her shirt, closed her eyes, and there was a free-for-all.”

  The judge ruled that it would be unfair to proceed with a trial, because the alleged incidents had taken place so long ago, and it would be difficult to trace witnesses and evidence that would back up the teacher’s denial of the charges. He ordained that it was clear that the boys had not suffered psychological damage but had been willing participants and had “thoroughly enjoyed the activities.” However, he stopped short of noting that, on balance, Penelope had surely done more than Yehudi Menuhin to encourage musical appreciation among the young. Penelope lost interest in the boys once they reached the age of fifteen. Unfortunately this also proved to be the case with Mrs. Ogilvy. That cruel blow was only somewhat mollified by my new relationship with Dorothy Horowitz. Dorothy, who was my age, would never allow me to venture beyond groping on the family’s plastic-covered sofa, or on a bench in Outremont Park, and even this activity was blighted by forcibly proscribed zoning laws. Dorothy would withdraw her hand, as if touched by fire, when I directed it to the pulsating root of my ardour, considerately unbuttoned, and popping like Punch out of its box.

  Nineteen forty-three that was. Field Marshal von Paulus’s army had already been decimated at Stalingrad, the Americans had taken Guadalcanal, and I had that pin-up of Chili Williams in a two-piece polka-dot bathing suit tacked to my bedroom wall. My mother had begun to mail jokes to Bob Hope and Jack Benny, as well as one-liners to Walter Winchell, and my father was already a uniformed member of Montreal’s finest. Izzy Panofsky, the only Jew on the police force. The pride of Jeanne Mance Street.

  In the here and now in my apartment in The Lord Byng Manor I zipped through breakfast, and decided to take advantage of the fact that the family living in the apartment immediately downstairs from me, the McKays, were at their weekend cottage on Lake Memphremagog. I rolled back my living-room carpet and pulled the curtain that hid my embarrassing but necessary full-length mirror. Next I donned my top hat, tails, and trusty Capezio taps, and shoved Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “Bye Bye Blackbird” into my CD player. Remembering to tip my topper to the good folks in the balcony, resting my cane on my shoulder, I loosened up with a Round-the-Clock Shuffle, eased into a satisfying Brush, followed by a really swell Cahito, before I risked a Shim Sham and collapsed in the nearest chair, panting.

  Hello, shmuck, I thought. And I resolved yet again to cut back on Montecristos, medium-fats on rye, single malts, that delicious beef-marrow35 hors d’oeuvre they serve at L’Express, XO cognac, marbled rib steaks at Moishe’s, caffeine, and everything else that was bad for me now that I could afford it.

  Where was I? Nineteen fifty-six. Long back from Paris. Clara dead but not yet an icon; Terry McIver’s first novel published, when literature would have been better served had he been interrupted in mid-flight by a gentleman from Porlock; and Boogie, high on horse more often than not, writing to me whenever his need was dire. I didn’t begrudge him the money, but it was a hardship, as I had just begun to test the polluted waters of TV production, struggling, never settling a bill until Final Notice. Compounding my troubles at the time, I had stupidly resumed my affair with Abigail, and oh my God she was now hinting at leaving Arnie for me, maybe bringing their two kids along with her.

  Hold the phone. Somewhere in my Noter’s Write Book I’ve got something very apropos to that time and the problem I fumbled so badly. It was written by Dr. Johnson in 1772, when he was sixty-three years old: “My mind is unsettled and my memory confused. I have of late turned my thoughts with very useless earnestness upon past incidents. I have yet got no command over my thoughts; an unpleasing incident is almost certain to hinder my rest.”

  What follows is an unpleasing incident, and how it began. One day, my accountant, the vile, ineffable Hugh Ryan, sent Arnie to the head office of the Bank of Montreal with a sealed envelope that he said contained a certified cheque for fifty thousand dollars. But when the bank manager opened the envelope, he found photographs of naked boys and an invitation to a candlelit dinner at Arnie’s place. A distraught Arnie came to see me at Dink’s. “There’s something you don’t know. Every morning before I report for work I stop at the men’s room to vomit. I’m suffering from shingles now. Abigail and I are watching Bonanza on TV and suddenly I begin to sob. It’s nothing, I say. Yeah. Some nothing. Barney, I’m your friend, and he isn’t. We go way back, you and me. When you c
ouldn’t do your trigonometry exam, who passed you the answers? I was a whiz at math even then. I’ve been jiggling numbers for you for how many years now? I could go to prison for it, do I mind? Fire the son of a bitch. I could do his job with one hand tied behind my back.”

  “Arnie, I don’t doubt your abilities. But do you go salmon fishing on the Restigouche with Mackenzie of the Bank of Montreal?”

  “I could never put a worm on a hook, it disgusts me.”

  “Do you know how much I’ve got at risk in development deals? I could go under just like that. Arnie, I’ve got to hold onto him for another year. Max.”

  “I shout at my kids. The phone rings, I jump like somebody was shooting a gun at me. I wake up at three o’clock in the morning from imaginary quarrels with that Jew-baiter. I’m so restless in bed poor Abigail can’t get any sleep, so one night a week she has to catch up. Wednesdays she cooks up a storm and takes it with her to a girlfriend’s house in Ville St. Laurent. She spends the night with Rifka Ornstein. I don’t blame her. She comes home refreshed.”

  “How much do I pay you, Arnie?”

  “Twenty-five thousand.”

  “Starting next week I’m going to make it thirty.”

  When Abigail arrived promptly at eight Wednesday night, I delivered my rehearsed speech. “Of course it was never like this for me before, but we must sacrifice ourselves for the sake of Arnie and the children. I couldn’t live with myself knowing that I had hurt them and neither could a woman of your rare beauty and intelligence and integrity. We will always have our memories. You know, like Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter.”

  “I never go to British movies. It’s their funny accents. Who can understand how they speak English?”

  “Nobody can take away the magic we shared, but we must be brave.”

  “You know something? If my hands were free, I’d clap. But I made you braised brisket and kasha. Here,” she said, shoving it at me. “Choke on it.”

  Once she had gone, slamming the door, I heated up the brisket, which was wonderfully moist if a tad too salty. But the kasha was perfect. What, I wondered, if we cut out the fucking and she continued to cook for me? Naw. She wouldn’t buy that.