Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “Barney, control your temper.”

  “I beg your pardon. Saul’s the one with the hot temper, not me.”

  “Saul’s your spitting image and that’s why you’re so rough on him.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah.”

  “Blair doesn’t want you reminding anybody that he once wrote for The American Exile in Canada.”

  “Then why is he hiding behind your skirts? He could have phoned me himself.”

  “He doesn’t know I’m making this call, and the real point of it, honestly, Barney, is that I’m worried about you and want you to see a doctor.”

  “Give Blair a message for me. Another biography of Keats. Christ. Tell him I said there is absolutely no need for more books like artificially ripened tomatoes,” I said, hanging up before I could embarrass myself further.

  I did not hear directly from Blair, but, soon enough, there came one of those WITHOUT PREJUDICE registered letters from his lawyers in Toronto. Their client, Professor Blair Hopper, Ph.D., had learned, through an application made to the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act, that, in 1994, an anonymous letter had been sent to the principal of Victoria College, University of Toronto, stating that the aforementioned Professor Hopper, a known sexual deviant, had been sent to Canada by the FBI in 1969 to spy and report on the activities of American draft-dodgers. If this slander, totally without substance, were to be repeated in a forthcoming memoir, by Barney Panofsky, Professor Hopper reserved the right to sue the author and publisher. Enlisting the aid of Hughes-McNoughton, I wrote back, WITH PREJUDICE, to say I would never stoop to writing an anonymous letter, and if this vile accusation were repeated in public, I reserved the right to take legal action myself. I went out to register the letter and then had second thoughts. I took a taxi down to Notre Dame Street, bought a new typewriter, redid the letter, and registered it. Then I threw out my old machine, and the new one as well. I am not the son of a detective-inspector for nothing.

  3

  I’ve got a neighbour on the lake, one of an increasingly large number of TV pirates, who has installed a pizza-sized satellite dish that is against the law here because it picks up a hundred American channels not licensed in Canada. He manages to unscramble these channels by forking out thirty dollars for a decoder. I mention this only because, in my present state of decline, I suffer long nights when I receive a veritable jumble of pictures out of my past, but lack the means to unscramble them. I have wakened more than once recently no longer certain of what really happened that day on the lake. Wondering if I had corrected the events of that day even as I have embellished other incidents in my life, enabling me to appear in a more favourable light. To come to the point, what if O’Hearne was right? What if, just as that bastard suspects, I did shoot Boogie through the heart? I need to think I am incapable of such brutality, but what if I were in fact a murderer?

  One night last week I surfaced, badly shaken from a nightmare in which I shot Boogie and stood over him as he convulsed, blood pumping out of his chest. Freeing myself from sweat-drenched sheets, I dressed and drove out to my cottage, arriving at dawn. I wandered through the woods, hoping that the site would jog my memory, leading me to the scene of my alleged crime, in spite of how much growth there had been since Boogie had disappeared some thirty-something years ago. I got lost. I panicked. All at once, I didn’t know where these woods were or what I was doing there. I must have sat on a fallen log for hours, pulling on a Montecristo, and then I heard music, far from celestial, coming from somewhere. I walked toward it until I found myself on my cottage lawn, where Benoît O’Neil had set up a ghetto-blaster to keep him company as he raked leaves.

  Hello, shmuck.

  Arguably the days my memory functions perfectly are heavier to bear than those when it fails me. Or, put another way, as I continue to tour the labyrinth of my past there are some episodes I recall all too clearly. Take Blair, for instance.

  Blair Hopper né Hauptman had entered my life, like an unwanted polyp, in the summer of 1969. He turned up at our cottage in the Laurentians (where Miriam, that bleeding heart, welcomed troubled kids, abused wives, and other flotsam) on a rainy evening, having found our address in the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada:

  Even though circumstances, and not choice made Canada your haven, we are happy to welcome you. Those of us providing service to the Anti-Draft Programme assume that your opposition to the war in Vietnam stems from principle and therefore you are likely to become outstanding citizens.

  (Oh, I should mention here that under the exigent terms of my liberation from The Second Mrs. Panofsky, she got the house with the conversation pit in Hampstead, but I was able to retain the property in the Laurentians. My first instinct had been to get rid of the scene of my alleged crime, but on reflection this seemed to me as good as a confession of guilt. So, instead, before moving in with Miriam, I had the cottage torn apart, knocking down walls, putting in French doors and skylights, adding rooms for children and studios for both me and Miriam.)

  Enter Blair. I would like to report that Max, our usually prescient German shepherd who gave the children so much pleasure, had greeted that interloper with a growl, his teeth bared, but the truth is that treacherous hound loped right up to him, wagging his tail. Honour compels me to admit that Blair Hopper né Hauptman was a handsome young man in those days. No doubt about it. Closer to Miriam’s age than mine, which is to say, some ten years my junior. He was tall, straw-haired, blue-eyed, and broad-shouldered. He would have looked nifty in an SS uniform. But in fact he was wearing a shirt, tie, seersucker suit, and loafers. He arrived bearing gifts: a tub of unpasteurized honey (made by a commune in Vermont, his first stop on the latter-day underground railway) and, hubba hubba, a pair of Indian bead moccasins. I was sipping a Macallan at the time and invited him to join me.

  “I’d be grateful for some mineral water,” he said, “but only if you have a bottle that is already opened.”

  We were fresh out. So Miriam fixed him a herbal tea. Rosehip I think it was. “Did you have any trouble at the border?” she asked.

  “I came in as a tourist. Passing for a country-club Republican in my seersucker suit. And I was able to show the pigs plenty of travellers’ cheques.”

  “I should warn you,” I said, doing my icy polite bit, “that my father is a retired police officer. So we don’t go in for that epithet in this house.”

  “I’m sure things are different in this country, sir,” he said, his cheeks reddening, “and that the police here behave admirably.”

  “Well now, I don’t know about that.” And, as I was about to launch into an anecdote about the shenanigans of Detective-Inspector Izzy Panofsky, Miriam cut me off.

  “How about a peanut-butter sandwich?” she asked.

  Blair had arrived on a Friday, and was with us for only ten days, but that first weekend he was already making himself useful, insisting on doing the washing-up, and mending the front gate that I had promised to get round to one of these days. When a hornet got into our kitchen, and I reached for a fly-swatter, he called out, “Don’t, please,” and managed to release it through the screen door. Why, that devious bastard could open a child-proof, press-and-turn bottle of aspirins just like that, without struggling and muttering, “Shit. Shit. Shit.” Something else. I didn’t care for the way he had big eyes for Miriam and how she seemed to be amused by his attentions.

  Sunday evening Miriam asked, “Must you drive back to town tonight?”

  “Aw, I thought I’d take the week off,” I said, as casually as I could manage.

  “What about your Wednesday-night poker game?”

  “They can do without me for once. And if anybody needs me at the office, they can phone me here.”

  Miriam, so naturally graceful, was adorably unaware of her spellbinding presence. I could have happily spent the rest of my life watching her, amazed at such beauty in my presence, not that I ever told her as much. And now, closing my eyes, fighting back tears of remorse, I can remember her
nursing Saul, her eyes lowered, one hand cupping that throbbing vulnerable head. I can see her teaching Mike how to read, making a game of it, the two of them giggling. I can summon up a picture of her and Kate splashing each other in the bath. I can visualize her busy in the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon, listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on the radio. Or asleep in our bed. Or seated in an armchair, reading, her long legs crossed just so. In our halcyon days if she was to meet me in the Ritz bar, the two of us bound for an evening out, I would choose to wait for her at a table all but hidden in a far corner, so that I could watch her drifting into the room, elegantly dressed, serene, commanding everybody’s eye, and then blessing me with a tender smile and a kiss. Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire.

  Miriam was a demure dresser, indifferent to prevailing swank. She, who had no need to advertise, would never be seen in a miniskirt, or a dress with a plunging neckline. But in our summer cottage on the lake she went native. Her long charcoal black hair caught in a bauble, she eschewed even minimal make-up, and favoured loose T-shirts embossed with caricatures of Mozart or Proust, cut-off jeans, and bare feet, which was okay with me as long as we weren’t entertaining a horny young draft-dodger with whom she had things in common. Neither of them, for instance, was old enough to remember the Second World War, and on Monday night, sparked by a newspaper story about Bomber Harris of British Bomber Command, they got into condemning the saturation bombing of German cities, the needless slaughter of innocent civilians. Naturally this put me in mind of the young Hymie Mintzbaum flying over the Ruhr. “One minute,” I said, “what about Coventry?”

  “I do understand,” said Blair, “that it is different for your generation, but how can you justify the fire-bombing of Dresden?”

  Later that night I caught Blair eyeing Miriam as she stooped to gather up the children’s toys from the living-room floor. Tuesday afternoon, I woke from my snooze to find the cottage empty. No wife. No kids. No Übersturmführer Blair Hopper né Hauptman. They were all in the vegetable garden. Blair, wearing a T-shirt with a Picasso dove emblazoned on it, was helping Miriam turn over the compost heap, another chore I had scheduled to attend to in the far future. From my vantage point, on our wraparound balcony, I saw Blair peeking down her loose T-shirt as she leaned over her spade. Bastard. Sauntering down to the vegetable garden, I asked, “Can I help?”

  “Oh, go read a book,” said Miriam. “Or pour yourself a drink, darling. You’ll only be in the way.”

  But before leaving the vegetable garden, I pulled my wife to me, clasping her bottom with both hands, and kissed her hard. “Oh, my,” she said, blushing.

  Later that afternoon I caught up with that Peeping Tom in the garage, where he was sharpening our lawn-mower blades. I had brought along a couple of beers and handed him one. “Care for a cigar as well?” I asked.

  “No, thank you, sir.”

  “But you don’t mind if I light up?” I asked, sitting down on an overturned rain barrel.

  “Certainly not, sir.”

  “Drop the ‘sir,’ will you, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Blair, I worry about you. Maybe you made a mistake running away to Canada. Why didn’t you simply tell your draft board that you were queer?”

  “But I’m not.”

  “Exactly what I told Miriam.”

  “You mean to say she thinks —”

  “Of course not. Even I wasn’t suggesting for a minute that you were. I guess it’s just the way you walk.”

  “What’s the matter with the way I walk?”

  “Look here, the last thing I want to do is make you self-conscious. There’s nothing in it. Forget it. But you could have pretended to be queer. Now that you’ve come here, you’ll never be able to go home again.”

  “My father wouldn’t want me back in any event. He campaigned for Nixon last year.”

  “What will you do here?”

  “I hope to complete my post-grad studies in Toronto and then teach.”

  “Were you at Columbia?”

  “Princeton.”

  “I want you to know if I were your age, and American, I would have been out there last year, Clean for Gene. I believe James Baldwin was right on when he called your country ‘The Fourth Reich.’ But one thing about the student occupation of Columbia bothered me. I read somewhere that a student shat in the top drawer of a dean’s desk. Now don’t get me wrong. I realize he was making an anti-fascist statement. But all the same, you know …”

  “They sent in the p—the cops, lots of them in plainclothes, and beat the hell out of those students. More than a hundred ended up in the hospital.”

  Mr. Mary Poppins ingratiated himself with our kids, teaching them goyishe stunts, like how to tie different sailors’ knots, how to coax a chipmunk to pluck a nut out of the palm of your hand, and how to tend to a flooded outboard motor, which I coped with by cursing and yanking the cord until it came off in my hands. Late one afternoon, rising from my nap, looking to pour myself a drink downstairs and maybe horse around with Mike and Saul (Kate wasn’t born yet), I discovered yet again that they were nowhere to be seen. “Blair took them strawberry picking,” said Miriam.

  “You shouldn’t have allowed him to take them out unchaperoned. He could be a paedophile.”

  “Barney, did you suggest to Blair that I thought he was gay?”

  “On the contrary. I assured him you thought no such thing. He tends to distort matters.”

  “You’re not jealous, are you?”

  “Of that drip-dry lefty? Certainly not. Besides, I trust you implicitly.”

  “Then if I were you, I’d stop baiting him. He’s far more intelligent than you think, but he’s too polite to be rude to you.”

  “I feel invaded.”

  “Because he’s so kind?”

  “Intrusively so.”

  Blair was contaminating my Yasnaya Polyana. Our ten lakeside acres. After crazy Clara, following the crap I went through with The Second Mrs. Panofsky, my trial and subsequent disgrace, the dipshit TV business I hated but that continued to earn me big bucks, Miriam was my winning lottery ticket. My redeemer. My MVP award. Imagine, if you can, the Boston Red Sox actually winning a World Series, or Danielle Steele taking the Nobel Prize, and you’ll have some idea of how I felt when Miriam agreed, against all odds, to marry me. But my epiphany was tainted by fear. Surely the gods on Olympus had taken down my number for remedial action.

  — Get Panofsky. Crash his next Air Canada flight.

  — Hmmm.

  — Or what would you say to testicular cancer. Snip, snip. Off with his balls.

  Having avoided Morty Herscovitch for years, I now went for annual check-ups, lest I be blindsided by lesions in my lungs. Hoping to placate a vengeful Jehovah, I became a big contributor to charities, tempted to wave my receipts heavenwards whenever we were threatened by thunder or lightning. I started to secretly fast on Yom Kippur. I expected my children to be born deaf and dumb, with no arms, or Down’s syndrome, and when this turned out not to be the case, it only served to heighten my forebodings. Something creepy-crawly was waiting for me out there. I knew it. I counted on it. Unknown to Miriam, I had five thousand dollars in cash socked away in a locked drawer. Money I would use to pay off drug-crazed burglars who could break into our place any night of the week.

  Once school was out, I packed Miriam and the kids off to our cottage on the lake, and I would join them on weekends and sleep over on Tuesday nights. Driving out however late on a Tuesday or Friday night, I knew all the cottage lights would be blazing. Miriam would be waiting on the balcony, Saul snoozing in her arms and Mike playing with his Lego at her feet. They would all come running as I opened the car door, Miriam to be embraced and the kids to be flung into the air, squealing, caught just in the nick of time.

  Mornings when I was in attendance, Miriam was free to plunge into the lake before breakfast and swim to the far shore of the bay. I would sit on the balcony with the kids, sipping bl
ack coffee, delighted at how proficient she was at the crawl, watching her swim back toward me, coming home. I would meet her on the shore with a towel, rubbing her dry, lingering in places permissible only to Barney Panofsky, Esq. But now Blair, an even more expert swimmer, joined her. Once on the far shore, he would scramble to the crest of the highest projecting rock to dive back into the lake, not doing a belly flop à la Panofsky, but barely raising a ripple.

  Wednesday night I took an urgent call from Serge Lacroix, that Cahiers du Cinéma aficionado who was directing a McIver of the RCMP episode for me. Serge’s notion of art was to cross-cut from our bare-chested male lead sinking to a polar bear rug with his lady love … to a close shot of a tumescent jackhammer breaking concrete … or, God help us … to a gasoline pump ejaculating into a car’s tank. Watching his rushes made me heave with laughter, but his call meant I would have to spend Thursday in town.

  Now when I started on this true story of my wasted life, I resolved to tell even those things that were still deeply embarrassing to me so many years later, so here goes. I contrived to set a trap for my ostensibly faithful, but possibly smitten, wife and her handsome SS admirer. Wednesday night I announced that I was going to take the kids with me to Montreal, assuring a dubious Miriam that they would not be a nuisance but would have fun hanging out with me on the set. Then, early Thursday morning, as Miriam and Blair Hopper né Hauptman, surely related to war criminals, were enjoying their morning swim, I grabbed Miriam’s delicate kitchen scale off a counter, scooted upstairs, fished her tube of vaginal jelly out of our bathroom cupboard, set it on the scale, and noted its exact weight. Still in my James Bond mode, I plucked a hair out of my head and laid it on the container that held her diaphragm. At the breakfast table downstairs, I sang out: “I’m not sure what time I’ll get back tonight, but I promise to phone just before I leave town in case you need anything.”

  Sent for by an hysterical Serge to pronounce on budgetary dilemmas, and to settle down a troubled cast, I was so ill-tempered that I only exacerbated the problems. Our soi-disant male lead did not take kindly to my telling him in front of the crew, which was unforgivable, that unless he stopped camping on camera he would be replaced. Then I told that no-talent bimbo who was our female lead that there was more to acting, even in such a piece of shit, than jiggling her tits, and she fled the set in tears.