Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “What about your children?”

  “There are exceptions to every rule. Take Boogie, for instance. He was at Harvard.”

  “I doubt they’ve put a plaque in place to commemorate that.”

  We could never agree about Boogie and I didn’t share Miriam’s reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven’t mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school graduation certificate, lit from above. Miriam has reproached me for it. “Take it down, darling,” she once pleaded. But it still hangs there.

  The day after my ill-advised anti-academic rant, I found the McGill syllabus in our kitchen garbage pail. “Miriam,” I said, “I feel terrible. Go back to McGill if that’s what you want. Why not?”

  “Never mind. It was just a passing whim.”

  One day we were a newly married couple, joy unconfined, and the next, it seemed, we had two grandchildren in London. Miriam could never bring herself to throw out the clothes Mike, Saul, and Kate had worn when they were kids. Neither would she let me get rid of our library of torn and crayoned Dr. Seuss books. But as she was assigned an increasing number of radio jobs she was less often depressed, more like her old self. Unfortunately, as the years passed, I dealt ineptly with her infrequent dark periods, arriving at Dink’s earlier in the day and staying on later than usual. I would come home to one of Miriam’s elaborately prepared dinners, a feast for two, and then boorishly fall into a drunken sleep on the living-room sofa, shaken gently awake by Miriam in time for bed. “Solange invited me to go with her to the Théâtre de Nouveau Monde tonight, but I said no. I didn’t want you to be alone.”

  “I’m so sorry. Honestly, darling.”

  One afternoon I was seated on my usual stool at Dink’s, gabbing away to a couple of young women Zack had brought in, when Betty gave me the eye. “Miriam just came in.”

  “Where?”

  “She came in, turned around, and left.”

  “Didn’t she see I was here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tempus edax rerum,” said Hughes-McNoughton.

  “John, you’re a horse’s ass.”

  I hurried home to find Miriam in a state. “I got into a dress you favour and went to Dink’s to surprise you, thinking it would give you pleasure if I had a drink with you there for once, and then the two of us could go out to dinner. Then I saw you chatting up those two women, young enough to be your daughters. I wasn’t jealous. I was just sad.”

  “You don’t understand. Zack brought them in. I was just being polite.”

  “I’m soon going to be sixty. Maybe you’d like me to get a face-lift.”

  “Miriam, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Should I start dyeing my hair? What do I have to do to please my husband, the lounge lizard?”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

  “Am I?”

  And then, not for the first or the last time, she lapsed into a denunciation of her father. The philanderer. The cheater. The murderer of her mother. After all these years, her father’s promiscuity remained an obsession of Miriam’s. The first betrayal she had known, perhaps. I had learned to tolerate her outbursts. I didn’t think it mattered. Certainly not to us. Shmuck.

  I had to slip out of bed early the next morning to catch a flight to Toronto and when I got back that night Miriam wasn’t there. She had left a note on the dining-room table:

  Darling,

  I’m flying to London tonight to visit Mike and Caroline and the kids. I apologize for being hysterical last night, so please don’t misunderstand. It’s just that I can do with a break and so can you. If you come home early enough you are not to go to Mirabel to fetch me. Please, darling. I won’t be away for more than a week. I love you.

  MIRIAM

  P.S. You are not to go to Schwartz’s to eat smoked meat and fries every night. It’s bad for you. I’ve left some things in the fridge.

  I opened the fridge to find a pot of spaghetti meat sauce, a pot of leek and potato soup, a roast chicken, a meat loaf, a bowl of potato salad, and a cheese pie. Feeling sorry for myself, I ate in front of the TV set and went to bed early. Miriam phoned at seven a.m. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine. I feel like a little girl playing hooky. I should do things like this more often.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes. Caroline is taking me to Daphne’s for lunch, so I’ve got to get ready now. Will you be home this evening?”

  “Of course. I had the spaghetti for breakfast and I think I’ll have the roast chicken and the cheese pie for dinner.”

  “I’ll phone you later. Kiss kiss. Goodbye for now.”

  I don’t want to talk about what happened that night. It wasn’t my fault. I was drunk. It meant nothing to me. Damn damn damn. The one evening I would give a year of my life to take back, I lingered at Dink’s past the old farts’ hour into the time when the raunchy singles begin to trickle in. Zack, who had once worked for, you know, that newspaper about money. Not The Wall Street Journal. The Canadian one. The Financial Report or Post. Whichever.76 Spaghetti is strained with a … Hell, I got it right before. The Seven Dwarfs are called Doc, Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, Grouchy, and the other two. Lillian Hellman did not write The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit. Or Shirt. Fuck it.

  Zack, who had once worked for a money newspaper, was telling me about his first encounter with Duddy Kravitz: “I was sent out to interview new young Montreal millionaires for a feature we were doing. One rich white-bread WASP after another protested that they were certainly not millionaires, even on paper, and anyone who suggested as much was slandering them. They told me about their mortgages and bank loans and the problems they had coming up with school fees. The French-Canadian brokers I spoke to were no more forthcoming. Anglophone bankers discriminated against them. The big investors wouldn’t trust their portfolios to anybody named Bissonette or Turgeon. They think we’re stupid. It’s a struggle, they said. They couldn’t sleep because of the money they owed. Then I went to interview Kravitz, reconciled to even louder protests of penury. Instead, Kravitz beamed at me. ‘Boy, am I ever a millionaire. Maybe three times over. You think I’m bragging? Let me show you some documents. Hey, did you bring a photographer?’ I’ve had time for him ever since, no matter what other people say. Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “Come on. One for the road.”

  “Okay. But just one.”

  That’s when she sashayed into Dink’s, the bimbo who ruined my life, snuggling onto the bar stool next to Zack, who immediately began to chat her up. I can’t even remember her name any more, but she was a bleached blonde, wearing a tight sweater and a mini-skirt. Reeking of perfume, maybe thirty years old, if that. Obliging Zack to tilt backwards on his stool, her own head bobbing forward, she said, “Aren’t you Barney Panofsky?”

  I nodded.

  “I had a part in a McIver episode a couple of months ago. I played the investigating reporter from the Toronto Globe. Do you remember?”

  “Sure.”

  “They said it might be a continuing role, but I haven’t heard from your people since.”

  That’s when I should have left Dink’s. Or when I should have had myself tied to the mast like Ulysses, not that she had anything on Circe or the Sirens, whichever it was.77 But when Zack got up to pee, she slid onto the stool next to me, and the street boy in me was roused. Hotcha hotcha. Zack may be fifteen years younger than me, and better-looking, but I’ll show him I’ve still got the moves. Not that I was interested. Or intended to take it any further. I know I had a good deal more to drink, and so did she, but I still don’t remember how come I got to her apartment, wherever it was, or how we ended up in bed. But I do recall I never meant for it to happen. I merely wanted to outshine Zack. Honestly.

  It must have been three o’clock, possibly later, when I got home, filled with self-disgust, undressed, and staggered into the shower.

  Miriam wakened me
at eight. “Thank God you’re there,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know what got into me, but I was up at five a.m. here, worried sick about you, I don’t know why, and I rang and I rang and I rang and there was no answer.”

  “I was out late drinking with Zack.”

  “You don’t sound right, darling. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Hung over, that’s all.”

  “You’re not keeping anything from me? You haven’t been in a fight at your age? There hasn’t been an accident.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Something’s wrong, Barney. I can tell.”

  “There is nothing wrong.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you.”

  “Come home, Miriam.”

  “Thursday.”

  “Come home tomorrow. Please, Miriam.”

  “I’m going to the theatre with Virginia tomorrow night. The new Pinter. But I’m glad that you’re missing me. I miss you too. I keep edging over to your side of the bed and you’re not there.”

  That afternoon, having showered twice more, I started out for Dink’s, as was my habit, and then stopped short. What if that bimbo was lying in wait for me there? What if she thought we were into something more than a drunken one-night stand? I made a U-turn and stopped at the Ritz for a drink instead. Shedding years, I sat once again on the terrace of the Colombe d’Or with Boogie and Hymie, the sun sinking behind those olive-green hills, seemingly setting them alight. A donkey-drawn wagon, led by a grizzly old geezer wearing a blue smock, passed clippity-clop below the terrace’s stone retaining wall, and we caught the scent of its cargo of roses on the evening breeze. The roses were bound for the perfumeries in Grasse. A fat baker’s boy puffed past our table, one of those huge wicker baskets of freshly baked baguettes strapped to his back, and we could smell that too. Then one of those truly obnoxious Frenchmen, obviously past it, his belly sunken, pranced onto the terrace to claim the woman young enough to be his daughter who sat two tables to our left. Madame Bovary, c’est moi, that Frenchman who had the parrot78 once wrote, and I had become that odious Frenchman of unblessed memory. Feeling tears of self-pity coming on, I called for my bill and was about to go home when I stopped short again, troubled by second thoughts. I headed for Dink’s, entering cautiously. The bimbo wasn’t there. I pulled Zack into a quiet corner. “You are never, never, never to joke with me, or anybody else, about that girl last night, or we are no longer friends. Do you understand?”

  “Easy does it, Barney.”

  Then Betty said, “Somebody called Lorraine phoned for you.” And handing me a piece of paper, she added, “She left her phone number.”

  “If she ever calls again, I’m not here. What do you know about her?”

  “I think she’s a model or an actress. She did that sexy bank commercial that used to be on TV. You know, the Canadiens take a penalty, Dick Irwin says we’ll be right back after these messages, and there she is dancing all alone on a moonlit beach in Bermuda. Wearing a sarong. Jiggle, jiggle. ‘I got my vacation loan from the Bank of Montreal.’ The guys at the bar used to howl.”

  I couldn’t sleep Wednesday night. In the morning, I cut myself shaving and spilled my coffee. Then I bought Miriam a long string of pearls at Birk’s and went to pick her up at Mirabel. We no sooner got through the front door when she said, “Something’s wrong.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did anything happen to Saul while I was away?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Kate?”

  “Honestly.”

  “You’re keeping something from me.”

  “I am not,” I said, cracking open a bottle of Dom Perignon to welcome her home. It didn’t help.

  “Is it the office? Have you had bad news?”

  “There is absolutely nothing wrong, darling.”

  Like hell there wasn’t. Miriam had been home for two days and we still hadn’t made love, which baffled her, but I knew about that bar in the Hôtel de la Montagne, and what if I had contracted herpes, a dose, or, God help us, that thing that queers and druggies get? You know, that disease that sounds like a fund-raiser. AIDS, that’s it.

  I beat Miriam to the phone whenever it rang and lingered at home in the morning long enough to collect the mail, just in case. Returning from Dink’s in time for dinner, my stomach churning, I was ready with a lie in case that bitch had phoned in my absence.

  Years ago, luxuriating in my undeserved happiness with Miriam and the kids, I feared for the anger of the gods. I was convinced something dreadful lay in wait for me. An avenging monster who would rise out of the bathroom drain like an invention of Stephen King’s. Now I knew. The monster was me. I was the destroyer of my loving refuge from “the world of telegrams and anger.”

  In those days I was still obliged to simulate enthusiasm for the dreck that enriched me, suffering mediocre, functionally illiterate actors, hack writers, no-talent directors, and TV executives at lunches in New York or L.A. It was degrading. A sewer. But until I cheated, I was blessed with a sanctuary. Miriam. Our children. Our home. Where I was never required to be deceitful. But it was with apprehension that I now turned my key in the front-door lock, dreading discovery. So I took preventive measures at the office, calling in Gabe Orlansky and Serge Lacroix for a meeting. “Remember that girl who played the investigative reporter from the Globe in a recent McIver episode? I think her name was Lorraine Peabody, but I could be wrong.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I want her written into a couple more episodes.”

  “She can’t act.”

  “You can’t write and you can’t direct. Do as I say.”

  Chantal lingered behind. “What is it?” I asked.

  “Whoever would have thought —”

  “Thought what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s better.”

  “I was mistaken about you. You’re no different than the others here. You don’t deserve a woman of Miriam’s quality. A dirty old man is what you are.”

  “Get out.”

  My heart hammering, I arranged to meet Lorraine for lunch at one of those quaintsy, tourist-trap restaurants in Old Montreal, where nobody knew me. “Look here,” I said, “what happened the other night was an aberration. You are not to write to me, phone, or ever attempt to contact me again.”

  “Hey, it was no big deal. Relax. We shared a fuck, that’s all.”

  “I assume our casting people have been in touch with you.”

  “Yes, but if you think that’s why I —”

  “Of course not. However, there is something you must do for me in return.”

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to contact —”

  “As soon as we leave here, I’m driving you to Dr. Mortimer Herscovitch’s office, where you are going to have a blood test.”

  “You’re kidding me, tiger.”

  “You do as I say and there will be more work for you. If not, not.”

  Guilt-ridden, I swung wildly between remorse and aggression. When bolstered by too much to drink, I concluded that I hadn’t behaved that badly and it was Miriam who was at fault. How dare she suspect I would be without blemish. Impervious to temptation. Guys weren’t like that. Guys tended to stray on occasion and I was a guy too. I deserved a medal, not obloquy, for having cheated only once in thirty-one years. Besides, it meant nothing to me. I still don’t remember how I got from Dink’s to her apartment. I was giving her a lift home, that’s all. I didn’t want to be invited in for a nightcap. I was helplessly drunk and didn’t ask that bitch to come on to me in the first place. Young women have no business tempting respectable old family men by dressing like hookers. I’d been taken advantage of and now I was not going to wear a hair shirt or go in for self-flagellation. Considering the behaviour of the other guys at Dink’s, I was the very apogee of rectitude. Miriam was lucky to have a husband like me. Tender. Loving. A wonderful provider. In that mood, I would stumble home from
Dink’s and start quarrels over picayune matters. “Must we eat chicken again tonight?”

  “You won’t eat fish, and red meat is bad for you.”

  “So’s white wine. It killed James Joyce.”

  “Then open a bottle of red, if you prefer.”

  “There’s no need to snap at me.”

  “But you’re the one who’s …”

  “Yeah, sure. It’s always me.”

  Saul phoned me at the office. “I want to know why Mummy was crying this afternoon.”

  “It was nothing, Saul. Honestly.”

  “That’s not what she seems to think.”

  I was losing it. My wife. My children.

  “Barney, I want to know why you’re turning up here drunk every night.”

  “Am I now obliged to account for how many drinks I’ve had before dinner?”

  “You’re not going to like this, but I’m afraid that at your age you can no longer handle it the way you used to. You come home in such an unspeakable mood that to tell you the truth I’d rather eat alone,” she said.

  Miriam turned away from me in bed that night and wept quietly. I wanted to die. The next morning I seriously considered charging across Sherbrooke Street against a red light. I would be hit by a car and rushed to the Montreal General in an ambulance. Miriam would sit by my side in intensive care, holding my hand, forgiving me everything. But I chickened out. I waited for the light to turn green.

  Correction. These meandering memoirs do have a point after all. Over the wasting years I have levered free of many a tight spot leaning on a fulcrum of lies large, small, or medium-sized. Never tell the truth. Caught out, lie like a trooper. The first time I told the truth led to my being charged with murder. The second time cost me my happiness. What happened is that Miriam, as achingly beautiful as I had ever known her, came into my study on a Saturday afternoon, carrying a tray with a pot of coffee and two cups and saucers. She set the tray on my desk and sat down on the leather armchair opposite, and said, “I want to know what happened while I was in London.”