Cocksure

by Mordecai Richler

  “We have a visitor this afternoon, class,” Miss Tanner began sweetly. “Mr. Mortimer Griffin of Oriole Press.”

  Curly-haired heads, gorgeous pigtailed heads, whipped around, everybody giggly.

  “Now all together, class …”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Griffin.”

  Mortimer waved, unaccountably elated.

  “Settle down now,” Miss Tanner demanded, rapping her ruler against the desk. “Settle down, I said.”

  The class came to order.

  “Now, this play that we are going to perform for the Christmas concert was written by … class?”

  “A marquis!”

  “Bang on!” Miss Tanner smiled, flushed with old-fashioned pride in her charges, and then she pointed her ruler at a rosy-cheeked boy. “What’s a marquis, Tony?”

  “What hangs outside the Royal Court Theatre.”

  “No, no, darling.”

  There were titters all around. Mortimer laughed himself, covering his mouth with his hand.

  “That’s a marquee. This is a marquis. A –”

  A little girl bobbed up, waving her arms. Golden head, red ribbons. “A French nobleman!”

  “Righty-ho! And what do we know about him … class?”

  A boy began to jump up and down. Miss Tanner pointed her ruler at him.

  “They put him in prison.”

  “Yes. Anybody know why?”

  Everybody began to call out at once.

  “Order! Order!” Miss Tanner demanded. “What ever will Mr. Griffin think of us?”

  Giggles again.

  “You have a go, Harriet. Why was the marquis put in prison?”

  “Because he was absolutely super.”

  “Mmnn …”

  “And such a truth-teller.”

  “Yes. Any other reasons … Gerald?”

  “Because the Puritans were scared of him.”

  “Correct. And what else do we know about the marquis?”

  “Me, me!”

  “No, me, miss. Please!”

  “Eeny-meeny-miny-mo,” Miss Tanner said, waving her ruler. “Catch a bigot by the toe … Frances!”

  “That he was the freest spirit what ever lived.”

  “Who ever lived. Who, dear. And who said that?”

  “Apollinaire.”

  “Jolly good. Anything else … Doug?”

  “Um, he cut through the banality of everyday life.”

  “Indeed he did. And who said that?”

  “Jean Genet.”

  “No.”

  “Hugh Hefner,” another voice cried.

  “Dear me, that’s not even warm.”

  “Simone de Beauvoir.”

  “Right. And who is she?”

  “A writer.”

  “Good. Very good. Anybody know anything else about the marquis?”

  “He was in the Bastille and then in another place called Charenton.”

  “Yes. All together, class … Charenton.”

  “Charenton.”

  “Anything else?”

  Frances jumped up a again. “I know. Please, Miss Tanner. Please, me.”

  “Go ahead, darling.”

  “He had a very, very, very big member.”

  “Yes indeed. And –”

  But now Frances’s elder brother, Jimmy, leaped to his feet, interrupting. “Like Mummy’s new friend,” he said.

  Shrieks. Laughter. Miss Tanner’s face reddened. For the first time she stamped her foot. “Now I don’t like that, Jimmy. I don’t like that one bit.”

  “Sorry, Miss Tanner.”

  “That’s tittle-tattle, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Miss Tanner.”

  “We mustn’t tittle-tattle on one another here.”

  “Sorry …”

  “And now,” Miss Tanner said, stepping up to the blackboard, “can anyone give me another word for member?”

  “Cock,” came a little girl’s shout; and Miss Tanner wrote it down.

  “Beezer.”

  “Pwick.”

  “Male organ.”

  “Penis.”

  “Hard-on.”

  Miss Tanner looked dubious. She frowned. “Not always,” she said, and she didn’t write it down.

  “Fucking-machine.”

  “Putz.”

  “You’re being sectarian again, Monty,” Miss Tanner said, somewhat irritated. “Joy stick.” A pause.

  “Anybody else?” Miss Tanner asked.

  “Hot rod.”

  “Mmn. Dodgy,” Miss Tanner said, but she wrote it down on the blackboard, adding a question mark. “Anybody else?”

  “Yes,” a squeaky voice cried, now that her back was turned. “Tea-kettle.”

  Miss Tanner whirled around, outraged. “Who said that?” she demanded.

  Silence.

  “Well, I never. I want to know who said that. Immediately.”

  No answer.

  “Very well, then. No rehearsal,” she said, sitting down and tapping her foot. “We are simply going to sit here and sit here and sit here until who ever said that owns up.”

  Nothing.

  “I’m sorry about this fuck-up, Mr. Griffin. It’s most embarrassing.”

  Mortimer shrugged.

  “I’m waiting, class.”

  Finally a fat squinting boy came tearfully to his feet. “It was me, Miss Tanner,” he said in a small voice. “I said tea-kettle.”

  “Would you be good enough to tell us why, Reggie?”

  “When my nanny … I mean my little brother’s nanny, um, takes us, ah, out …”

  “Speak up, please.”

  “When my nanny takes me, um, us … to Fortnum’s for tea, well, before I sit down she always asks us do we, do” – Reggie’s head hung low; he paused, swallowing his tears – “do I have to water my tea-kettle.”

  “Well. Well, well. I see,” Miss Tanner said severely. “Class, can anyone tell me what Reggie’s nanny is?”

  “A prude!”

  “Repressed!”

  “Victorian!”

  “All together now.”

  “Reggie’s nanny is a dry cunt!”

  “She is against … class?”

  “Life force.”

  “And?”

  “Pleasure!”

  “Right. And truth-sayers. Remember that. Because it’s sexually repressed bitches like Reggie’s nanny who put truth-sayers like the marquis in prison.”

  The class was enormously impressed.

  “May I sit down now?” Reggie asked.

  “Sit down, what?”

  “Sit down, please, Miss Tanner?”

  “Yes, Reggie. You may sit down.”

  At which point Mortimer slipped out of the rear exit of the auditorium, without waiting to see a run-through of the play. Without even finding out what play they were doing.

  5

  “SELF-EXPRESSION BE DAMNED,” MORTIMER SHOUTED. “This is his last term at that mockery of a school. I’m taking him out.”

  “You’re taking him out? Doug is my child.”

  “Ours.”

  “I carried him. This is the twentieth century, darling, not the nineteenth. Any decision as to Doug’s education will be made jointly.”

  “All right, then, jointly. But –”

  “You’d better hurry or you’ll be late.”

  Naturally Joyce had begged off. She wouldn’t miss Insult, the new BBC-2 interview program. So Mortimer had to lie to Miss Ryerson. He said they couldn’t get a baby-sitter.

  “I am sorry,” Miss Ryerson said.

  Too late Mortimer discovered that the farce he and Miss Ryerson had settled on for Tuesday night starred the West End’s most talked-about leading lady, the incomparable Mr. Danny La Rue.

  Afterwards Mortimer acquiesced to Agnes Laura Ryerson’s high-spirited request for a pub crawl. Mortimer took her to Dirty Dick’s. She was enthralled with The Prospect of Whitby. But, alas, they ended up at a pub in Victoria, where burly six-foot Guardsmen habitually came to take m
ore shillings, serving other queens. Mortimer devoutly hoped that Agnes Laura Ryerson was too innocent to comprehend the nature of the transactions going on around them, between Household Troopers and the flushed, affluent men who were buying them drinks. Miss Ryerson generously stood two of Her Majesty’s Guards to a round herself. “Here’s to the thin red line,” she said, raising her glass.

  This made one of the Guardsmen chuckle. “Oh, my dear,” he said to his beribboned comrade, “did you hear that?”

  Enough is enough, Mortimer told Joyce when he finally got home. “My only hope,” he added wearily, “is that Miss Ryerson returns to Canada with at least one of her illusions intact.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” Joyce said, irritated.

  “Well now,” Mortimer asked in his nastiest voice, “how was Insult? Groovy?”

  “Mn. Not bad.”

  Joyce was absolutely in touch, thoroughly with it. Unlike me, Mortimer thought. Unlike me.

  His missing Insult tonight was typical; for he gathered from her self-satisfied expression that it was going to be the rage. A thingee. Like TW3. Keeping up exhausted and baffled Mortimer. He wasn’t totally uninformed, but his timing was badly off. Not that Joyce helped. Oh, no. The bitch let him go on reading Bernard Levin long after he had gone out of fashion. Then there was the case of Kenneth Tynan. He remembered very well how she had used to quote his theater reviews. Well, how was he supposed to know that you were not to read his film reviews? Mortimer quoted one of his film reviews at a party once and Joyce gave him that special look of hers. “Tynan is fifties,” she said. Like her favorite coffee bar of that decade, The Partisan.

  “Would you care for a drink?” Joyce asked.

  “I’m going to have a bath first.”

  Mortimer, forty-two years old now, was still slender. He suffered no protruding belly and his hair had not yet begun to gray or recede. His features were regular. Yes, he had to admit, considering himself in the bathroom mirror, yes, yes, the sour truth is I’m tall and handsome. Conventionally handsome, as Joyce said again and again with unconcealed repugnance. Like the old-style movie stars. Gable, Taylor, Tyrone Power. An unused face, he had once heard Ziggy Spicehandler say. Clean-cut, he might have added, unmistakably WASP, like the smiling, sincere husband in the unit trust advertisements on whose forehead ran the slogan: “Investor at 35, capitalist at 60.”

  Shit. Look at you. Just look at you, Griffin.

  Ziggy Spicehandler, to whom he owed so much, had been the first to make him realize how truly repulsive he was. “Man,” he had said affectionately, tauntingly, pinching his cheek, “you look like one of those male models. You know, getting out of a sports car in the Esquire ads.”

  Ziggy himself was short, hirsute, barrel-chested. His hooky nose had been twice broken and he had a thick neck and waxy tangled hairs protruded from his jug ears. His fingernails were black, there were warts on his broad square hands, and you could tell, just looking at him, that in other people’s houses he filled his pockets with cigarettes and peed without lifting the seat. Women found Ziggy Spicehandler exciting. Wherever he went, even at the most modish parties, they turned to look at him. Me, Mortimer thought, I can stand alone at a party for hours, nobody turns to look at me.

  No. Once a sexy young girl had come up to him, “Well hullo there,” she had said a little drunkenly.

  “Hello yourself.”

  Swaying, she said, “You must be in advertising.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Well, you should be. You’ve got the face.”

  Suburban, she meant. Ziggy, on the other hand, had an anti-suburban face.

  The last time Ziggy had come to stay with them, Doug had been three. Ziggy, to Joyce’s amazement, seemed to adore the child, and offered to baby-sit time and again. He played ball with Doug on the Heath. Twice weekly he also took him to Regent’s Park Zoo, unfortunately timing these visits to coincide with feeding time in the reptile house, a matter of fascination to Ziggy. Doug was just learning how to talk then and Ziggy took him happily in hand.

  “Apeman,” he would say, pointing out a priest to him; and he instructed him to say “kiss my ass,” fortunately coming out “kis’mas,” for “thank you.” To begin with, Joyce was baffled by Doug’s choice of words, but actually the boy was even more confused, for what Joyce taught him to call “nun” in the afternoon, Ziggy insisted was “baggy tits” in the evening.

  Inevitably Joyce discovered that far from being retarded, Doug was being perversely misled by Ziggy, and this led to a scorching quarrel with Mortimer. A volte-face sort of quarrel, Mortimer, rather than Joyce, finding himself unwillingly defending the new. While Ziggy, he admitted, was behaving irresponsibly, she must understand that he was not sadistic. He truly believed that our parents had raised us on nothing but lies and to be untaught, so to speak, was the only way of liberating a child. Thereby leading him, as Ziggy would put it, toward a state of grace. Even so, Mortimer had to agree that it was off-putting and he regretfully prepared to tell Ziggy he must leave the house.

  It never came to that. One day Joyce sent Ziggy to Dr. Schneider to pick up a prescription for her. Schneider, an overworked man, was in the habit of leaving prescriptions to be called for in a box on his outside steps. This, Ziggy discovered, was a fairly common labor-saving practice among National Health doctors. On a good day, riffling through prescriptions left outside here, there, and everywhere, he was able to accumulate a very nice supply of pills with an appreciable morphine or opiate content. This was immensely gratifying to Ziggy, who was not getting sufficient stuff from his own doctor, a sour Puritan; it also enabled him to acquire much-needed cash by selling his surplus pills to others in need. Eventually the police cottoned on to the traffic and began to keep a watch on Hampstead surgeries. Ziggy left for Paris.

  Coming out of the bathroom, Mortimer asked Joyce, “Why do women find Ziggy Spicehandler so attractive?”

  “I don’t.”

  Liar.

  “But,” she continued, “I’d say it’s that he has the face of a man who has visited the darker regions of hell and come back again.”

  Mortimer grunted and flicked on the TV set to catch the late news. He was in time for the last item. The Star Maker, the newscaster said, would not comment on recent rumors that he was about to transfer his headquarters from Las Vegas to London. But earlier today he had made a successful take-over bid for a London publishing house, Oriole Press. In some quarters, especially in the City, the newscaster went on to say, this was taken as an indicator of future intentions. Then the Star Maker’s emblem was flashed briefly on the screen.

  Two snakes coupling.

  6

  THE AGELESS, UNDYING STAR MAKER, ABOUT WHOM almost nothing was known, almost everything was rumor, vile rumor. Whose very sex had recently become a hotly debated issue. Some said he was a man, others insisted he was turning into a woman; a few, astoundingly enough, whispered that something even more sinister was in the offing. The Star Maker. Imagine, Mortimer thought, Oriole Press passing into such obscene hands.

  Naturally the publishing scene, like everything else, had changed considerably since Mortimer had first come to London fifteen years ago. There had been failures, regroupings, and, above all, a plethora of American takeovers. But Mortimer had believed that Oriole Press, with its unequaled traditions, inadequate gas fires, antique filing system and tea rings, was inviolate. Now, without warning, the saintly Lord Woodcock had surrendered control, obviously to avoid death duties, Mortimer reflected, and overnight Oriole Press had become possibly the most insignificant unit in the Star Maker’s international business empire.

  Horrifying. But on second thought Mortimer wondered if this was not another typically shrewd ploy by Lord Woodcock. The Star Maker, his interests global, swooped out of the sky one day to settle a strike on a Malayan opium farm and the next day flew on to Rome, perhaps, to fire the director on one of his multimillion-dollar film productions. His interests were so vast and all-embracing
, taking in film and TV production companies, airlines, newspapers, diamond mines, oil refineries and gambling casinos, that he was bound to take no notice of Oriole Press. We’re no more than a bauble, Mortimer thought, feeling considerably better, a prestigious trinket. Our turnover is too pathetically small to interest such a Goliath.

  Only an hour later the first of the Star Maker’s legendary idea men arrived. A team of efficiency experts had flown in from Frankfurt and Lord Woodcock, making one of his rare appearances at Oriole House, came round to introduce them. There was Herr Dr. Manheim and his three secretaries. Two of them were laconic men, obsessive note-takers who wore black leather coats. The third, Fräulein Ringler, was a rather comely young lady, even taking the dueling scar on her cheek into account.

  Unfortunately the very first meeting with the efficiency team got off to a bad start.

  Mortimer’s secretary, shy, unobtrusive Miss Fishman, who had worked at Oriole ever since shortly after the war when she came to England out of a displaced-persons camp, suddenly seized a letter opener and fell on Fräulein Ringler, scratching, biting, and stabbing. It took Mortimer and Hy to pull her off Fräulein Ringler and drag her into another office.

  “Dear, dear,” Lord Woodcock said.

  Lord Woodcock, Mortimer could see, was dismayed. Obviously. The saintly old man’s credo was “We must love one another or die”; and he lived by it. Soon after the war Mr. Woodcock, as he was then, had collected case histories and compiled a book, elegantly produced if necessarily slender, about all the charitable little acts done by Germans to Jews during the Nazi era. Here a simple but good-hearted sergeant offering spoonfuls of marmalade to Jewish children before they were led off to the gas chambers, somewhere else a fabled general refusing to drink with Eichmann or a professor quoting Heine right to a Nazi’s face.

  “What is it, child?” Lord Woodcock asked,

  “The necklace she’s wearing,” Miss Fishman said, still panting. “It’s my mother’s. Before that it belonged to my grandmother.”

  Miss Fishman’s mother, who had been roasted in the ovens of Treblinka, as had every other member of her family, was not merely another dry Jewish statistic, altogether too horrific, as they say, for the ordinary imagination to cope with. Miss Fishman’s mother was in fact the one-millionth Jew to be burned, not counting half or quarter Jews or babies who weighed under nine pounds before being flung into the ovens. This made for a very, very special occasion, and in honor of it Miss Fishman’s mother was accorded treatment quite out of the ordinary. For her burning the furnace chambers of Treblinka were festooned with flowers and gaily colored Chinese lanterns. Just as today’s presidents and prime ministers will sign historical documents with as many as thirty pens, passing them out as souvenirs, so Mrs. Fishman’s gold fillings and other valuables were divided among extermination quota leaders from various concentration camps, who had been invited to Treblinka for the day. Thus, the burning of the one-millionth was one of the most ring-a-ding nights in the history of the Third Reich and to this day – the Star Maker himself assured Mortimer, once he got to know him – it is commemorated by survivors of that sentimental barbecue wherever they may be.