Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  McIver never married. “I already serve the most exacting of mistresses,” he once told a Gazette reporter, “literature.” But in his declining years he did enjoy the favours of rich women: culture-vultures. I’m told he maintained scrapbooks of his reviews, each page protected by cellophane. The last years of Montreal’s very own GOM82 were rich in rewards. His study was filled with wall-to-wall honorary degrees. The Harbourfront Festival of Authors, in Toronto, paid tribute. He served on the board of the Canada Council and was a governor of McGill University. There were rumours that he was in line for an appointment to the Senate, where he would have been able to exchange ideas with the esteemed tenant of our penthouse apartment, Harvey Schwartz. The former Gursky consiglière is also in the news these days. He is founder and principal financier of the Pan-Canadian Society. “I am determined to dedicate the rest of my life to saving this country, which has been so good to me,” said that inside trader, currency speculator, property-flipper, hostile-takeover-bidder-cum-asset-stripper, tax evader, millions hidden in the Schwartz Family Foundation.

  I’m in two minds about funerals. At my age, staring down into one of those six-foot-deep pits gives me the chills, but there is some satisfaction to be squeezed out of witnessing the burial of somebody else. Anybody else, save for Miriam or any of our children. But, to my astonishment, I wept hot tears at McIver’s funeral. We had once been young and footloose together in Paris, roistering provincials, and, looking back, I regret that we never became friends.

  Digression, but a pertinent one. I recently flew down to New York to see Saul, and to catch Gregory Hines and that young prodigy, Savion Glover, in Jelly’s Last Jam. I think Glover is the most gifted tap-dancer I have ever seen, and I was back to watch him again the following night. The next afternoon I met Leo Bishinsky for drinks at the Algonquin. “I’m sixty-eight fucking years old now,” he said. “I don’t get it. It had to happen while I wasn’t looking. I’m sixty-eight years old, married and divorced four times, and worth forty-eight million dollars, even after my handlers have stolen all they can. I’ve been on the cover of Vanity Fair. People has done me I don’t know how many times. I’m quoted in Liz Smith’s columns. I used to do Johnny Carson and now it’s Leno or Letterman. I’ve had a retrospective at MOMA. I’m famous. My father would have been amazed to learn that paint brushes can pay better than mix-and-match ladies’ wear. My mother would be proud. But that Aussie shit-face Robert Hughes does me in Time, it’s a carve-up. The guys I used to shmooze with at Le Coupole, or is it La, who cares, or the Sélect or the Mabillon, all hate me now. I go to one of their vernissa?es and they either cut me dead or say, wow, we’ve got a star here, you slumming, Leo? Goddamn it, we used to sit together in those cafés, cracking up, waiting for Walter Chrysler, Jr., to come over and look at our stuff, and maybe buy something. We were friends for life, I thought. Going through the fire together. The hell with them. These days I’m invited to A-list dinners on Park Avenue or in the Hamptons. Hey, show some respect, you’re looking at a guy who’s had a nosh at the White House. I’m invited to these dinners and my esteemed host is either an arbitrage guru or a former junk-bond shark with a gabby trophy wife, and there could be one of my chatchkas hanging on the wall, it cost the prick maybe two million, and I want to carry it away with me, because sitting with any of them for more than five minutes drives me crazy. I’m sitting there, I’m so ashamed, and I ask myself did I do all this for you? When I was eating one meal a day, was it their approval I was striving for? I’ve got six different kids from four wives and I can’t stand any of them, or the thought that they’re going to be so rich when I croak. One of them is a producer of hip-hop records. From Mozart to rap, or hip-hop, is some trip. Who am I to talk? From Goya to me is also a stretch. They did a biopsy on my prostate yesterday and I’m waiting for the bad news. Meanwhile everybody envies me my bimbos, but I get into bed with one of them and I’m terrified of being limp and laughed at. Shit, Barney, we used to have so much fun. I don’t understand where it went and how come it was so quick.”

  McIver, to give him his due, persevered against long odds. He rode a small, unnecessary talent to recognition in his own country, which is more than I ever did, or dared. I should not have been so cruel to him. Following McIver’s burial, I repaired to Dink’s and read the Gazette’s obit, which was headed: TERRY MCIVER DUG DEEP INTO HIS OWN PSYCHE FOR INSPIRATION. Oh dear. But, all the same, that night I wrote a letter of tribute that was published in the Gazette three days later.

  I’m not giving up on this scribbling, just because McIver has let me down. Instead I’m rededicating these all-but-finished confessions anew. They are now for my loved ones: Miriam, Mike, Saul, and Kate. Solange and Chantal. But not Caroline.

  On my last visit to Mike and Caroline in London, I can remember being served a vegetarian dinner one evening: artichoke, followed by ratatouille, assorted cheeses, and organically grown fruit. When Caroline came round with the decaffeinated coffee, I pulled out my cigar case, lit a Montecristo, and offered one to Mike. “Sorry it isn’t a Cohiba this time,” I said, testing.

  As Mike lit up, Caroline slid out of her chair, ever so discreetly, to open a window.

  “But I’m sure you enjoyed that box of cigars, didn’t you?”

  “Damn right I did.”

  Provoked, I went on to say, “Let’s get into the cognac now, you and me, and tell sad tales about when we were still a family, carnivores born and bred, and your kid brother, that naughty boy, was dealing in pot at Selwyn House.”

  “Mike can’t tolerate cognac,” said Caroline.

  “Oh, just a little one, an ounce,” said Mike, who tended to measure out drinks precisely with a little chrome cup, “if only to keep Dad company.”

  “And then you’ll be up at four in the morning, your heart hammering, and I won’t get any sleep either.”

  The next morning, long after Mike had left the house at exactly 8:06, as was his habit, for the twenty-four-minute drive to his office, I sneaked downstairs, hung over, treading tippytoe, determined to grab a taxi that would take me to Bloom’s for some salt beef and latkes, when Caroline waylaid me. She had missed out on her yoga class to prepare a beneficial brunch for the old reprobate: freshly squeezed carrot juice, steamed broccoli, and a tossed green salad. “It’s rich in iron,” she said.

  Trapped but defiant, I spiked my carrot juice with a couple of fingers of vodka. This earned me one of Caroline’s patented reproachful looks. “Isn’t it a bit early, Barney?” she asked, the “even for you” left unstated, but dangling in the hostile air between us.

  “It’s fucking eleven o’clock,” I said.

  I’m not a total boor. I never say “fucking” to proper young women. But I liked to make her wince and maybe register that for all her pur sang heritage and aristo connections and la-de-da education she had married into a coven of jumped-up Jews. The non-U descendants of the fusgeyers, hooligans who hiked out of their shtetls singing:

  Geyt, yidelech, in der vayter velt;

  in kanada, vet ir ferdinen gelt.

  Go, little Jews, into the wider world;

  in Canada, you will earn a living.

  It was perverse on my part. Churlish. I know, I know. Especially when you consider that Caroline is such an intelligent woman, attractive, a faithful wife so far as I can make out, and a good mother. She adores Mike. But what irked me was that like some women who knew my story, she would rather not be left alone with her father-in-law, in case what they whispered about me was true. So that morning I taunted her with it. “Caroline, my dear, now that we know each other so well, why don’t you come right out with it and ask me if I did it?”

  She rose abruptly from the table, collecting dishes, putting the kitchen counter between us, and beginning to sponge imaginary stains. “All right, then. Did you?”

  “No.”

  “There we are, then.”

  “But I would say that, wouldn’t I?”

  Later, I heard Mike and Caroline quarrelling.
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  “Is he so pathetically naïve,” she asked, “that he thinks he can shock me by saying ‘fuck’?”

  “Couldn’t we discuss this tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow. Next week. He’s a tyrant.” Then she told him about our little contretemps in the kitchen. “He brought it up. I didn’t. He said it wasn’t true, but then he added, with that teasing smile of his, ‘But I would say that, wouldn’t I?’ ”

  “Only he knows for sure.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “It was before I was born. I simply don’t know.”

  “Or you don’t want to know. Which?”

  “Leave it alone, Caroline. It hardly matters any more.”

  “I have no idea how your mother put up with him for all those years.”

  “He wasn’t always so bitter. Or afraid of dying. Now let’s get some sleep.”

  “You didn’t have to smoke that cigar last night. You could have told him you’d given up smoking.”

  “But I wanted to please him for once. He’s such a lonely old man now.”

  “You’re afraid of him.”

  “Caroline, you never should have given away those Cohibas without asking me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they were a gift from my father.”

  “But it was you I was thinking of. You had so much trouble giving it up. I didn’t want you to be tempted.”

  “All the same …”

  Shit shit shit. Mike, I apologize. I’m sorry. I’ve misjudged you yet again. But I thought it better not to say anything. Typical of me, that.

  I want all my loved ones to know the truth. I need them to understand that when Hughes-McNoughton pulled that dumb trick, counting to five, and suggesting Boogie might now stride through those courtroom doors, I also turned to look. I thought, wouldn’t it be just like my perverse old buddy to appear in time to save my skin. I did not murder Boogie and bury him in the woods. I’m an innocent man. Of course this late in my own endgame, and given that Boogie was some five years older than I am, he could now be dead of natural causes. Not that The Second Mrs. Panofsky would ever believe that.

  Whoops. I forgot to mention something. My mountain-sized second wife turned up at McIver’s funeral, if only to glare at me, and she later responded to my maudlin letter in the Gazette with a one-worder delivered by courier: HYPOCRITE!!! She had struggled up the hill to McIver’s graveside, supported on two canes, her breath coming in whistles, draped in a tent of a caftan. Her head was bound in a turban, and sneaking peeks at her, I could not make out a single wisp of protruding hair. So I concluded that the poor thing was on chemotherapy and that she too might precede me into one of those six-foot-deep pits. This would save me something like thirteen thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars a month. Following my trial, our divorce was sanctioned by a private member’s bill in the Senate, Resolution 67, March 15, 1961. She was awarded alimony of two thousand monthly, big money at the time, to be adjusted for inflation, and the house in Hampstead. Even so, I never wished cancer on that demented harridan.

  Unable to sleep, still troubled by my attendance at McIver’s graveside, I thought it might be useful to renew my animus against him by dipping into his autobiography again. Flipping it open anywhere. As it turned out, the book opened on his charming account of my wedding to The Second Mrs. Panofsky:

  Montreal. April 29, 1959. Since my return to Montreal, ensconced in my basement apartment on Tupper Street, I’ve managed to avoid running into P——, although I have heard news of his exploits. Predictably, he’d gone seriously into trade on his return to Montreal, peddling everything from scrap metal to Egyptian artifacts, rumoured to have been stolen. Today my luck ran out. We all but collided in the rain on Sherbrooke Street,83 and P——, devious as ever, feigning pleasure at our fortuitous encounter, insisted that we repair to the Ritz for a drink. It had to be the Ritz,84 à coup sûr, if only to taunt me with his new affluence. He bragged that he was now a TV producer, contemplating film production, but I knew the truth was he was actually a vendor of odious TV commercials and industrial films. Then, as is his wont, he reached for his switchblade. “I’m sorry your first novel didn’t get better reviews,” he said. “I certainly enjoyed it.”

  And how was I managing, he wanted to know, bleeding empathy, asking direct questions comme d’habitude.

  I told him I was hard at work on a new novel, surviving on a grant from the newly formed Canada Council, and teaching creative writing one night a week at Wellington College.

  He said he was developing a television series about a private eye, and had the effrontery to ask if I would be interested in trying my hand at some script work, which made me laugh.

  Realizing that he had gone too far, P —— then insisted that I come to his wedding, if only for old-times’ sake. Boogie would be there, he said, as if that were an added incentive. My first instinct was to respond with an emphatic no, but honouring my writerly bounden, the unending quest for grist for the mill, I acquiesced. After all, I had never witnessed Jewish nuptials before, so I elected to suffer it in the name of ontology. As might be expected, there was no lack of comestibles or usquebaugh. But given that even in Paris P —— would seek out restaurants in the Jewish quartier that served gefilte fish, and chicken soup with matzoh balls, globules of fat floating on the surface, I was surprised that the culinary fare was not of ethnic origin, but, instead, nondescript. As I anticipated, there was hardly a Burbank with a Baedeker to be seen, but many a Bleistein with a Cigar.

  Snatches of conversazioni from my notebook:

  “Oh, you’re a writer. How interesting. Should I know your name?”

  “What do you think of Sholem Aleichem? Mind you, I expect you don’t understand Yiddish. Such an expressive language.”

  “You ought to read my daughter’s letters from camp. Laugh, you could die.”

  “Have you ever appeared on the best-seller list?”

  “The story of my life. That would make some book, but I haven’t got the time to sit down to it.”

  I caught sight of the bride at the dessert table, where melon balls and berries spilled out of the maw of a sculptured ice dragon. She heaped her plate impossibly high and then balanced a chocolate éclair on top of the fruit. I was immediately put in mind of how “Rachel née Rabinovitch tears at the grapes with murderous paws.”

  Small wonder the groom seemed so melancholy, imbibing endlessly, and in constant pursuit of an attractive young woman, who was doing her best to avoid him. In later years, however, she would become his third wife, rather, I’m told, than abort his child.85 But that evening, not yet entrapped, she said she was an unqualified admirer of my first novel. “Had I known you were going to be here,” she said, “I would have brought along my copy for you to inscribe.”

  We took to the dance floor, where P —— (his betrothed in his arms, licking chocolatey fingers clean) contrived to bump against me twice, his elbows to the fore. Ironically, this only thrust me closer to my partner, and, interpreting her body language, it appeared she found this far from displeasing.

  11

  The hard-fought referendum of October 30, 1995, did not disgrace la belle province’s time-honoured election traditions. I watched the proceedings on TV with the rest of the gang at Dink’s. It was a squeaker all right: NO to independence, 50.57: YES, 49.43. But within days we learned that it wasn’t quite so close. The scrutineers, all of them appointed by our separatist government, had rejected something like 80,000 ballots, just about all of them from strongly federalist ridings. The ballots were adjudged unacceptable because the X was too dark, or too faint or crooked, or exceeded the perimeters of the square.

  When I was in seventh grade Mrs. Ogilvy once turned her dynamite bum to our class and wrote on the blackboard:

  CANADA IS ——

  a dictatorship

  a post-colonial democracy of limited culture

  a theocracy.

  None of the above answers apply. The truth is Canada is a cloud-
cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule. Buoyed by this thought, I hurried home, and had just poured myself a nightcap when the phone began to ring. It was Serge Lacroix. He had to see me urgently.86

  Something like six months earlier, after sitting through a McIver of the RCMP episode that Serge had directed, I had turned to Chantal and said, “I don’t believe this. We’ve got to dump him. Would you fire him this afternoon, please?”

  “Do it yourself.”

  But coward that I am, I couldn’t, not after all those years he had been with me. So I procrastinated, even as his work deteriorated further. But now that he had insisted on a twelve o’clock meeting in my office, surely to plead for more money, making things easier for me, I decided to act, with Chantal as my witness. “Sit down, Serge. What can I do for you?”

  “I’ll come right to the point. Your friend Dr. Herscovitch established that I was HIV-positive after my little adventure in Parc Lafontaine. And now I have been diagnosed as suffering from full-blown AIDS.”

  “Oh, shit, Serge, I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m still capable, but I would understand if you wanted to be released from our contract.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Chantal, “Barney asked me to rewrite your contract only yesterday. He wants you to be cut in for a percentage of the syndication gravy.”

  “Retroactively?” I heard myself ask, glaring at Chantal and wishing that I had bitten my tongue instead.

  “Yes. As you like,” she said.

  “I need some advice, Barney.”

  So the three of us went to lunch at Le Mas.