Barney's Version Read online

  “Why do you keep coming in here, Sean?”

  “I enjoy your company. Really I do. Would you do something for me? Leave me a letter, saying what you did with it.”

  “The body?”

  He nodded.

  “But you’re bound to go first, Sean. With the weight you’re carrying around these days you’re just begging for a heart attack.”

  “I’ll see you out, Panofsky. Guaranteed. You leave me that letter. I promise to read it and destroy it. I’m curious, is all.”

  8

  Irv Nussbaum was on the phone again this morning before I even had my coffee. “Terrific news,” he said. “Turn on CJAD. Quick. Kids painted a swastika on the walls of a Talmud Torah school last night. Broke windows. Bye now.”

  And a compelling item out of Orange County, California, in today’s Globe and Mail. A seventy-year-old woman, taking care of her cancer-ridden husband — changing his diapers, feeding him, sleeping only a few hours a night because of his incessant TV watching — just about snapped. She splashed her significant other of thirty-five years with rubbing alcohol and set him on fire when she discovered that he had eaten her chocolate bar. “I’d gone out for a minute to the mailbox and when I came back, it was gone. I knew there was nobody else there, so it must have been him,” she said. “He gets candy, too, every day. But he took mine. So I fetched a teaspoonful of rubbing alcohol and threw it at him. I had matches in my pocket. It just went up. I really didn’t mean to do it. I was just scaring him.”

  I had a one o’clock appointment, and set out in a foul mood, but in good time. Unlike Miriam, I took pride in being punctual. Then, suddenly, I stopped. All at once I couldn’t remember what I was doing on … the sign on the corner said Sherbrooke Street. I had no idea where I was going. Or why. Overcome by dizziness, sliding in sweat in spite of the cold, I shuffled over to the nearest bus stop and collapsed on a bench. A young man waiting for the bus, his baseball cap worn back to front, leaned over me and said, “Are you okay, pops?”

  “Shettup,” I said. Then I began to mutter what is becoming my mantra. Spaghetti is strained with the device I have hanging on my kitchen wall. Mary McCarthy wrote The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit. Or Shirt. Whichever. I am once a widower and twice divorced. I have three children — Michael, Kate, and the other boy. My favourite dish is braised brisket with horseradish and latkes. Miriam is my heart’s desire. I live on Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal. The street number doesn’t matter, I’d know the building anywhere.

  My heart thudding, threatening to fly free of my chest, I groped for a Montecristo, and managed to light and then pull on it. Smiling weakly at the concerned young man who still hovered over me, I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude to you.”

  “I could call an ambulance.”

  “I don’t know what came over me. But I’m fine now. Honestly.”

  He seemed dubious.

  “I’m going to meet Stu Henderson at Dink’s. It’s a bar on Crescent Street. I turn left at the next block and there it is.”

  Stu Henderson, a struggling free-lance TV producer, who used to be with the National Film Board, was waiting for me at the bar. John, already rooted on his customary stool, sat beside him, seemingly lost in a reverie. Back in 1960, Stu had already made a prize-winning but boring documentary about the Canadair CL-215, a water bomber, then still being tested on various Laurentian lakes, that could scoop up 1,200 gallons of water without coming to a full stop, and drop it on the nearest forest fire. And now he had come to pitch a project to me. He was looking for seed money for an independently produced documentary about Stephen Leacock. “That’s very intriguing,” I said, “but I’m afraid I’m not into cultural projects.”

  “Considering all the money you’ve made producing shlock, I —”

  A glassy-eyed John intruded, “Non semper erit aestas, Henderson. Or, in the vernacular, no soap.”

  I suffer from a wonky system of values, acquired in my Paris salad days and still with me. Boogie’s standard, whereby anybody who wrote an article for Reader’s Digest, or committed a best-seller, or acquired a Ph.D., was beyond the pale. But churning out a pornographic novel for Girodias was ring-a-ding. Similarly, writing for the movies was contemptible, unless it was a Tarzan flick, which would be a real hoot. So coining it in with the idiotic McIver of the RCMP was strictly kosher, but financing a serious documentary about Leacock would be infra dignitatem, as John would be the first to point out.

  Terry McIver, of course, did not subscribe to Boogie’s value system. As far as he was concerned, we were an unforgivably flippant bunch. Louche. Our shared political stance, nourished by the New Statesman, resolutely left-wing, struck him as pathetically naïve. And Paris was a political circus in those days, animal acts to the fore. One night the rabidly anti-Communist goons of Paix et Liberté pasted up posters everywhere that showed the Hammer and Sickle flying from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the caption underneath reading, HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE THIS? Early the next morning Communist toughs went from poster to poster, gluing the Stars and Stripes over the Soviet flag.

  Clara, Boogie, Cedric, Leo, and I sat on the terrace of the Mabillon, drunkenly accumulating beer coasters on the day General Ridg-way, fresh out of the Korean War, drove into Paris, replacing Eisenhower at SHAPE. Only a thin, bored crowd of the curious had turned out to look over the general, yet the gendarmes were everywhere, and the boulevard Saint-Germain was black with Gardes Mobiles, their polished helmets catching the sun. All at once, the Place de l’Odéon was clotted with Communist demonstrators, men, women, and boys squirting out of the side streets, whipping out broomsticks from inside their shapeless jackets and hoisting anti-American posters on them. Clara began to moan. Her hands trembled.

  “RIDGWAY,” the men hollered.

  “À la porte,” the women responded in a piercing shriek.

  Instantly the gendarmes penetrated the demonstration, fanning out, swinging those charming blue capes featured in just about every French tourist poster I’ve ever seen, capes that were actually weighted with lead pipe in the lining. Smashing noses. Cracking heads. The once-disciplined cry of Ridgway à la porte faltered, then broke. Demonstrators retreated, scattered, clutching their bleeding heads. And I ran off in pursuit of a fleeing Clara.

  Another day a German general came to Paris, summoned by NATO, and French Jews and socialists paraded in sombre silence down the Champs-Élysées, wearing concentration-camp uniforms. Among them was Yossel Pinsky, the rue des Rosiers money-changer who would soon become my partner. “Misht zikh nisht arayn,” he said. Don’t mix in here. The Algerian troubles had begun. Gendarmes began to raid Left Bank hotels one by one, looking for Arabs without papers. Five o’clock one morning they pounded on our door and demanded to see passports. I produced mine, even as Clara, hitching the blankets to her chin, cowered in bed, whimpering. Her feet protruded, each toenail painted a different colour. A veritable rainbow. “Show them your passport, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I can’t. I’m naked.”

  “Tell me where it is.”

  “No. You mustn’t.”

  “Goddamn it, Clara.”

  “Shit. Fuck.” Gathering her blanket round her as best she could, still whimpering, even as the gendarmes grinned at each other, she fished her passport out of the bottom of a suitcase, showed it to them, and locked the suitcase again.

  “They saw my coozy, those filthy bastards. They were staring at it.”

  I ran into Terry that afternoon at the Café Bonaparte, where I had gone to play the pinball-machine. My initial bond with Terry stemmed from the fact that we were both Montrealers. Me, off Jeanne Mance Street in the city’s old working-class Jewish quarter, and Terry out of the marginally better-off, WASPy Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood, where his father had scraped together a mean living out of a second-hand bookshop that specialized in Marxist texts. His mother had taught in an elementary school until parents protested they didn’t want their children watching documentaries a
bout life on a communal farm in Ukraine, rather than Bugs Bunny cartoons.

  If most of us were broke, Terry was destitute. Or so it seemed. There were days when his diet was limited to a baguette and a café au lait. He wore drip-dry shirts, which he rinsed in his hand basin and hung out to dry overnight. A girl he knew, who was lodged at the cité universitaire, used to cut his hair for him. Terry survived by writing six-hundred-word articles for UNESCO that were distributed free to newspapers round the world. For thirty-five dollars he would churn out an erudite piece commemorating the centennial of a famous writer’s birth, or the fiftieth anniversary of Marconi’s first wireless message across the Channel, or Major Walter Reed’s discovery that yellow fever was carried by mosquitoes. He was barely tolerated by our bunch, as I may have mentioned earlier, so if there was a party anywhere, the word that bounced from café to café was “For God’s sake, don’t tell Terry.” Terry, the pariah. But I grew perversely fond of him and took him out to dinner once a week in a restaurant I favoured on the rue de Dragon. Clara never joined us. “He’s the most dégoûtant person I have ever laid eyes on,” she said, “totally déraciné, a frondeur. And, furthermore, he has a bad aura and is constantly directing elementals at me.” But then she didn’t care for Yossel either. “He gives me the chills. He stinks of all the world’s evil.”

  Terry intrigued me. The rest of us, blithely unselfconscious, didn’t brood over whatever our ages were at the time: twenty-three, or twenty-seven, or whatever. We didn’t think in terms of life spans. Or, put another way, shells had not yet begun to land close to the trench. Terry, however, was aware that he was young and experiencing his “Paris period.” His life was not his to enjoy and spend recklessly, like Onan’s seed. It was a responsibility. A trust. Like a black-and-white drawing in a child’s colouring book that was his to crayon, filling it in with the utmost autobiographical care, mindful of future criticism. So he appeared to relish rather than endure penury, a rite of his literary passage. Dr. Johnson had known worse. So had Mozart. Everything he did and heard was fodder for his journals, the entries twisted, as I discovered too late.

  Terry, who mocked his parents’ politics, nevertheless inherited some of their prejudices, inveighing against all things American. He despaired of Coca-Cola culture. The New Rome. “Remember the night,” he said, “Cedric took us out to celebrate his signing a contract for his novel, being so damned ostentatious about his new affluence. I didn’t want to rain on his fanfaronade, the clash of those Nubian cymbals, so I was mute at the time, which you, no doubt, ascribed to envy. But the truth is Scribner’s had just sent back the first three chapters of my novel-in-progress with a flattering letter and a caveat. Alas, there was negligible interest in matters Canadian. Would you consider resetting your novel in Chicago? Hugh MacLennan, whom I hold in no high regard, was right in this instance: ‘Boy meets girl in Winnipeg. Who cares?’ And how are things going with the unpredictable Clara these days?”

  “She would have joined us for dinner, but she wasn’t feeling well.”

  “You needn’t prevaricate with me. I don’t suffer from your compulsion to be approved of, surely an appurtenance of your Jeanne Mance Street heritage. But what I don’t fathom is why you persist in trailing after Boogie like a poodle.”

  “You’re such a prick, Terry.”

  “Come now. You worship that mountebank. You have even acquired some of his gestures.” Terry — having scored, he felt — leaned back and regarded me with a condescending smile.

  Terry’s initial publication was in Merlin, one of the little magazines current in Paris at the time. “Paradiso” was insufferably poetic, Joycean, written, and sent us chortling to our dictionaries to look up words: didynamia, mataeology, chaude-mellé, sforzato.

  I am now a collector of sorts of Canadiana, my special interest the journals of early travellers to Lower Canada, and dealers regularly send me catalogues. I recently espied the following entry in one of them:

  Exceedingly Rare and in Fine Condition

  McIver, Terry. The author’s first publication, “Paradiso,” a short story. An early but seminal pointer to the future obsessions of one of our master novelists. Merlin, Paris. 1952.

  See Lande, 78; Sabin, 1052.

  C $300.

  One night an exuberant Terry caught up with me at the Café Royal St-Germain. “George Whitman read my story,” he said, “and has asked me to read at his bookshop.”

  “Why, that’s terrific,” I said, feigning enthusiasm. But I was in a foul mood for the rest of the day.

  Boogie insisted on accompanying Clara and me to the bookshop opposite Notre-Dame Cathedral. “Unmissable,” said Boogie, obviously stoned. “Why, in years to come people will ask, where were you the night Terry McIver read from his chef-d’oeuvre? Less fortunate men will be bound to say, I was cashing in my winning Irish Sweepstakes ticket, or I was screwing Ava Gardner. Or Barney will be able to boast he was there the night his beloved Canadiens won yet another Stanley Cup. But I will be able to claim I was present on the night literary history was being made.”

  “You’re not coming with us. Forget it.”

  “I shall be humble. I will gasp at his metaphors and applaud each use of le mot juste.”

  “Boogie, I want your word that you’re not going to heckle him.”

  “Oh, stop being such a kvetch,” said Clara. “You’re not Terry’s mother.”

  Folding chairs had been provided for forty, but there were only nine people there when Terry began to read, a half-hour late.

  “I believe Edith Piaf is opening somewhere on the Right Bank tonight,” said Boogie, sotto voce, “otherwise there would surely have been a better turnout.”

  Terry was in mid-flight when a bunch of Letterists barged into the bookshop. They were supporters of Ur, Cahiers pour un dictat culturel, which was edited by Jean-Isador Isou. The redoubtable Isou was also the author of A Reply to Karl Marx, a slender riposte that was peddled to tourists by pretty girls on the rue de Rivoli and outside American Express — tourists under the tantalizing illusion that they were buying the hot stuff. The Letterists believed that all the arts were dead and could be resurrected only through a synthesis of their collective absurdities. Their own poems, which they usually recited in a café on the Place St-Michel, consisted of grunts and cries, incoherent arrangements of letters, set to an antimusical background and, for a time, I was one of their fans. And now, as Terry continued to read in a monotone, they played harmonicas, blew whistles, pumped the rubber bulb of a klaxon, and, hands cupped under armpits, made farting noises.

  Deep down, I’m a homer. I root for the Montreal Canadiens and, when they were still playing ball in Delormier Downs, our Triple-A Royals. So I instinctively sprang to Terry’s defence. “Allez vous faire foutre! Tapettes! Salauds! Petits merdeurs! Putes!” But this only served to spur on the rowdies.

  A flushed Terry read on. And on. And on. Seemingly in a trance, his fixed smile chilling to behold. I felt sick. Hold the phone. Yes, I was truly concerned for him, but, bastard that I am, I was equally relieved that he hadn’t drawn a crowd. Or won acclaim. Afterwards, I told Boogie and Clara I would catch up with them at The Old Navy, but first I was taking Terry out for a drink. Before we parted, Boogie startled me by saying, “I’ve heard worse, you know.”

  Terry and I met at a café on the boulevard St-Michel, and sat on the terrace, the only people there, a couple of Canucks who didn’t mind the cold. “Terry,” I said, “those clowns were out for blood and wouldn’t have behaved any differently had Faulkner been reading there tonight.”

  “Faulkner is overestimated. He won’t endure.”

  “All the same, I’m sorry for what happened. It was brutal.”

  “Brutal? It was absolutely wonderful,” said Terry. “Don’t you know that the first performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro was booed in Vienna and that when the Impressionists first showed their work they were laughed at?”

  “Yeah, sure. But —”

  “ ‘ …
you ought to know,’ ” he said, obviously quoting somebody, “ ‘that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.’ ”

  “And just who said that, may I ask?”

  “William Blake wrote that in a letter to the Reverend John Trusler, who had commissioned some watercolours from him and then criticized the results. But what did you think, not that it matters?”

  “Who could hear in all that racket?”

  “Don’t be evasive with me, please.”

  Sufficiently irritated by now to want to crack his carapace of arrogance, I knocked back my cognac and said, “All right, then. Many are called, but few are chosen.”

  “You’re pathetic, Barney.”

  “Right. And you?”

  “I’m surrounded by a confederacy of dunces.”

  That prompted a laugh from me.

  “Now why don’t you just settle the bill, because after all it was you who invited me, and move on to wherever you’re meeting your oafish Trilby and foul-mouthed Paphian?”

  “My foul-mouthed what?”

  “Harlot.”

  The Second Mrs. Panofsky once observed that in the absence of heart there was a knot of anger swirling inside me. And now, my blood surging, I leapt up, lifted Terry out of his chair, and smashed him hard in the face, his chair toppling over. Then I stood over him, crazed, fists ready to fly. Murder in my heart. But Terry wouldn’t fight back. Instead he sat on the pavement, smirking, nursing his bleeding nose with a handkerchief. “Good night,” I said.

  “The bill. I haven’t got enough money on me. Settle the bill, damn you.”

  I threw some franc notes at him, and was just about to flee when he began to tremble and sob brokenly. “Help me,” he said.