Barney's Version Page 16

  Late one afternoon when Kate was in her last year at Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s, she came home to discover a harassed Miriam, one eye on the kitchen clock, preparing two ducks for the oven. Perfectionist that Miriam was, she was plucking the last, barely visible, feather needles with an eyebrow tweezer. There were pots steaming on every gas jet. Bread waiting to be baked. Wine glasses, just out of the dishwasher, were lined up to be inspected against the light and to be washed again if necessary. A mound of strawberries in a glass bowl had yet to be hulled. A sullen Kate went directly to the fridge, pulled out a yogurt, cleared a space for herself at the counter, and sat down to read Middlemarch where she had left off the day before.

  “Kate, you could be a good goose and remove the stalks from those berries for me and then plump up the cushions in the living room.”

  No answer.

  “Kate, we’ve got six people coming for dinner at seven-thirty and I haven’t even showered or changed yet.”

  “Why can’t the boys help?”

  “They’re not here.”

  “When I grow up, I’m not going to end up a housewife. Like you.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll bet they’re not even your friends coming, but his.”

  “Are you going to do those berries for me, or not?”

  “When I finish this chapter,” she said, quitting the kitchen.

  As luck would have it, when Miriam swept into our bedroom, I was holding out the arm of my clean shirt helplessly. “I don’t know how many times I’ve asked you to switch laundries. Don’t say it. I know. Mr. Hejaz has seven children. But he mashed one of my buttons again. Could you sew it on for me, please?”

  “Do it yourself.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  I attempted to take her in my arms, but she braced herself against me, sniffing. “Shit,” she exclaimed, “my bread.” And she raced into the kitchen, me trailing after.

  “It’s ruined,” she said, tears sliding down her cheeks.

  “No, it isn’t. It’s just well baked,” I said, picking up a knife, prepared to start scraping.

  “I’m certainly not serving it like this.”

  “I’ll send Kate to the Bagel Factory.”

  “You’ll find your daughter in her bedroom reading Middlemarch,” she said, her manner abrasive.

  “Boy, are you ever in a mood. Would you rather she was reading Cosmopolitan?”

  “You are not to send her out on an errand. She dislikes me enough already.”

  “How could you even think such a thing?”

  “Oh, Barney, you understand nothing about your own children. Mike’s sick with worry because his girlfriend is three weeks late, and Saul’s dealing in drugs.”

  “Miriam, we can’t discuss this right now. It’s ten after seven and you haven’t even changed yet.”

  Once Miriam had retreated back into our bedroom, I went to see Kate and found out what had happened. “Look here, Kate, your mother gave up a serious career in broadcasting to marry me and I honestly don’t know what I would have done had she turned me down. She has made I can’t say how many sacrifices for you and the boys. Furthermore, housewife or not, she is the most intelligent person I know. So you are to go into our bedroom at once and apologize.”

  “You know what the kids feel? We’re always in the wrong, no matter what, because you’re always sticking up for each other.”

  “You heard me,” I said, taking her book from her.

  “It makes me sick the way she’s always catering to you.”

  “I like to think we cater to each other.”

  “She’s been cooking up a storm since early this morning and when your friends get here they’ll drink themselves stupid before they even sit down to the table, and then they’ll zip through dinner the quicker to get into the cognac and cigars, and all her effort will have been for nothing.”

  “You are to go and apologize right now.”

  She did, but Miriam wasn’t grateful for my intervention. “You have a remarkable gift for making matters worse, Barney. Did you take her book away from her?”

  “No. Yes. I forget.”

  But it was still in my hands.

  “Return it to her right now, please.”

  “Shit. Shit. Shit. There goes the doorbell.”

  Anticipating a disaster, given Miriam’s state, I drank heavily before dinner, but once more she amazed me. Instead of graciously accommodating the most boring person at the table, as she usually did, simulating fascination with their banalities, Miriam was in one of her rare take-no-prisoners moods. Nate Gold’s wife was the first to be stung, but she brought it on herself. She shouldn’t have thrust her roast duck away from her, reached into the saddle bag slung over her chair, and fished out a bunch of green grapes from a cellophane bag. “The duck looks very tasty,” she sang out, turning her portion over with a fork, probing it for fat, “but I’m on a diet.” Nate, filling the silence that ensued, allowed that he had been to lunch with his esteemed friend, the secretary of state responsible for culture, in Ottawa earlier in the week. “And you know what,” said Nate, “he has never read a book by Northrop Frye.”

  “But neither have I,” said Nate’s wife, adding to the mound of green-grape seeds on her dinner plate.

  “No pictures,” said Miriam.

  Poor, vulnerable Zack Keeler was the next to be chastised. He was uncharacteristically morose to begin with, because he had been to Al Mackie’s funeral that afternoon. Mackie, a sports writer of our acquaintance, had usually staggered on from Jumbo’s or Friday’s, both of which closed at two a.m., to the Press Club, which remained open until four. Zack was distressed because Al’s widow, he said, seemed disconcertingly composed as her husband’s coffin was lowered into its grave.

  “That should come as no surprise,” said Miriam. “It must be the first time in twenty years she knew exactly where her husband could be found after ten at night.”

  To do him credit, Zack’s spirits revived at once. “You’re too good for him,” he said, kissing Miriam’s hand.

  12

  The morning I brought Clara home from the hospital, we had to pause on each of the five landings, enabling her to catch her breath. Clara immediately stripped down to her bulky, red-stained panties, and complicated arrangement of belts. “Your guarantee of chastity,” she said. She arranged her collection of medicine bottles on the bedside table, popped a sleeping-pill into her mouth, got right into bed, turned her face to the wall, and went to sleep. I settled into the kitchen with a bottle of vodka and a sense of descending gloom. Hours later I heard her stirring and brought her a tray with tea and toast. “So,” she said, “what happens now?”

  “You’ve got to get better before we can talk.”

  Shuffling off to the toilet, slippers slapping, she peered into the tiny room that was to have been the nursery. “Poor little Sambo,” she said, and then she saw that I had made up a bed for myself out of the sofa pillows. “Why don’t you send out for a red-hot brand,” she asked, “and burn an A into the flesh between my leaky tits?”

  “I bought some veal chops for dinner. Will you want to eat in bed or in the kitchen with me?”

  “I suppose you won’t know what to do about me until Boogie gets back from Amsterdam and gives you your marching orders.”

  But a stoned Boogie was no help. I brought him up to date and then asked, “What were you doing in Amsterdam?”

  “Shopping.”

  Yossel said, “Every time I see you you’re drunk. I’ve got a lawyer for you. A landsman. Somebody who won’t overcharge. Maître Moishe Tannenbaum.”

  “Not yet.”

  “You think it will be easier a month from now?”

  Swimming in vodka starting at breakfast, necessarily brain-dead, I don’t remember too much about the following week, but I do recall that we were given to exchanging niceties. Barbed niceties.

  “Feeling better, Clara?”

  “Why would you
care, Dr. Prudestein?” Another time, “I’ve been a neglectful wifey. I suppose I should ask how are things in the cheese business? Is Camembert moving better than Bresse bleu?”

  “Charming.”

  “Poor Barney. His wifey a whore and his best friend a junkie. Oy vey. Such a sad fate for a nicely brought up Jewish boy.”

  One evening Clara, chain-smoking, pacing up and down our living room while I was reading on the sofa, ostentatiously ignoring her, suddenly whirled about and snatched my book from my hands. It was Austryn Wainhouse’s translation of Beckett’s Molloy.30 “How can you read such boring shit?” she demanded.

  This enabled me to put her down, quoting one of her favourite poets back at her. “William Blake once wrote a letter to a guy who had commissioned four watercolours from him, but deplored the result. ‘ … that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak Men,’ he wrote. Or women, he might have added. ‘That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.’ So just possibly it’s not Beckett but you who is inadequate.”

  She began to stay up late again, writing in her notebooks, drawing. Or she would sit for hours before her mirror, trying on different shocking shades of lipstick and nail polish, eye shadow with built-in sparkles. Then she would pop a sleeping-pill or two, and not stir again until late the next day. One afternoon she disappeared, only to return three hours later with her hair dyed purple and streaked with orange. “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “Oh, my honey,” she said, eyelashes fluttering, a hand held to her heart, “you noticed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I suppose you preferred it shit-coloured?”

  Other days she would quit the apartment early in the afternoon and not return until midnight or later.

  “Did you manage to get laid while you were out?”

  “Even a clochard wouldn’t want me like I am now.”

  “If you’re still bleeding badly, I should take you to see a doctor.”

  She blew me a kiss. “I’m ready to talk now. What about you, Prince Charmingbaum?”

  “Sure. If not now, when?”

  “Happy Hannukah. Merry Passover. You can have a divorce, if you want it.”

  “I do.”

  “But I should tell you that I’ve been to see a lawyer and she says if you divorce me I’m entitled to something like half of your income for the rest of your life. Thank God you’re so healthy.”

  “Clara, you amaze me. I never suspected you had such a practical streak.”

  “One thing you can say about Jewish husbands. They’re excellent providers. I learnt that at my mother’s knee.”

  “I’m going home. Back to Canada,” I said, surprised at myself, because I made that decision right there and then.

  “I thought I was the crazy one here. What will you do in Canada?”

  “Snow-shoe. Hunt beaver. Boil maple syrup in the spring.”

  “I’m not a pig, in spite of what you think. I’ll settle for a year’s rent on this dump and an allowance of fifty dollars a week. Oh, look at you, the colour’s back in your cheeks.”

  “I’ll move out tomorrow morning.”

  “You do that. And then I’m going to have the locks changed. I don’t want you barging in when I could be enjoying a proper fuck. Now you get the hell out of here, please,” she shrieked, tears flying. “Leave me alone, you righteous bastard.” Her hollering pursued me down the stairs. “Why couldn’t we start over again? Answer me that.”

  On Monday I found a room in a hotel on the rue de Nesle, and the next afternoon, while she was out, I filled a suitcase with essentials, and packed my books and records into cardboard cartons to be claimed later. But when I returned for them on Thursday, the apartment-door locks not yet changed, I found the kitchen table set for a candelight dinner for two. Maybe she’s cooking up some soul food for Cedric, I thought. Certainly the apartment smelled vile, which I first attributed to the smoking gas stove and the charred chicken in the oven. Mouldy deposits had formed in the bowl of grated potatoes on the counter. Who in the hell was she intending to make latkes for? Something she would never do for me, pronouncing it greasy jewfood. By candlelight yet. I switched off the gas and whacked the kitchen window open. But the stench emanated from the bedroom, where I discovered Clara stone-cold dead, an empty bottle of sleeping-pills on the bedside table.

  Obviously some hanky-panky had been anticipated, because my bride died wearing her most alluring, all-but-diaphanous, black chiffon nightgown, a gift from me. There was no note. I poured myself a huge vodka, gulped it down straight, and then called the police and the American embassy. Clara’s body was removed to be stored in the morgue until Mr. and Mrs. Chambers of Gramercy Park and Newport could fly over to take possession.

  On my return to the Hôtel de Nesle, the concierge rapped on the window of her tiny cubicle and slid open the slot. “Ah, Monsieur Panofsky.”

  “Oui.”

  A thousand apologies. A pneumatique had come for me on Wednesday, but she had forgotten to tell me. It was from Clara, insisting that I come to dinner. It was important that we “talk.” I sat down on the stairs and wept.

  Finally practical considerations intruded. Could a suicide, even an unintended one, be buried in a Protestant cemetery? I had no idea.

  Damn damn damn.

  Then I remembered the story, possibly apocryphal, that Boogie had told me about Heine. Even as he lay on his deathbed, wasted, in a morphine-induced trance, a friend urged him to make his peace with God. Heine is supposed to have replied, “Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son métier.”

  But I didn’t count on it in my case. Still don’t.

  13

  Tossing and turning in bed last night, I was finally able to conjure up the luscious Mrs. Ogilvy of cherished memory, in a stimulating fantasy of my own invention.

  Here’s how it goes:

  An outraged Mrs. O. rebukes me in front of the class, clipping me on the head with a rolled copy of The Illustrated London News. “You will report to me in the medical room immediately after classes.”

  A visit to the dreaded, tiny medical room, equipped with a cot, usually means a strapping. Ten of the best on each hand. I turn up promptly at 3:35 p.m. and a seemingly irate Mrs. Ogilvy locks the door behind me. “What have you got to say for yourself?” she demands.

  “I don’t know why I’m here. Honestly.”

  She slashes the cellophane wrapper off a package of Player’s Mild with a flick of a long red fingernail, pulls out a cigarette, and lights up. She exhales. She rids her lips of a tobacco particle with a slow movement of her wet tongue, and then glares at me. “I sat down on my desk top and began to read aloud the opening pages of Tom Brown’s School Days, and that’s when you dropped your pencil on the floor, accidentally on purpose, so that you could peek up my skirt.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Then, as if that weren’t sufficiently disgusting on your part, you began to rub your roger right in the middle of my Highroads to Reading class.”

  “I did not, Mrs. Ogilvy.”

  “I swear,” she says, flinging her cigarette to the floor and rubbing her heel into it, “I shall never grow accustomed to how they persist in overheating rooms in the dominions.” She unbuttons her blouse and sheds it. She is wearing a filigreed black bra. “Come here, boy.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Ogilvy.”

  “And you’re absolutely bursting with filthy thoughts right this very minute.”

  “I am not.”

  “Oh, yes you are, young man. The proof’s in the pudding.” And she undoes the buttons of my fly and reaches inside for me with incredibly cool fingers. “Just look at your roger now. Obviously you have no respect for your social superiors. Are you ashamed, Barney?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Ogilvy.”

  She continues to rake me with those long red fingernails and I start to leak just a little.

  “Now if this were a lolly,” she says, “I might be tempted to give it a darling little lick. Oh well, waste not, want no
t.” She clears the crown with a flick of her tongue, and immediately another little blob bubbles out. “Oh dear,” says Mrs. Ogilvy, regarding me severely, “we don’t want the train to leave the station prematurely, do we?” Then she steps out of her skirt and panties. “I want you to now rub that against me right down here. Mais, attendez un instant, s’il vous plaît. The motion should not be from side to side, but up and down, actually.”

  I attempt to oblige.

  “You haven’t got it quite right yet, damn you. Like you were having trouble striking a match. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly she begins to shudder. And then, grabbing me by the back of the head, she lowers both of us on to the cot. “Now you can pop it inside me, like a good boy, and up and down you ride. Like a piston. Ready! Steady! Go!”

  Actually these three pages represent my first and only attempt at writing fiction, my brief creative flowering prompted by Boogie, who was convinced I was capable of churning out what our bunch used to call a DB31 for the Traveller’s Companion Series. Boogie wheeled me into Maurice Girodias’s office on the rue de Nesle one afternoon. “You are looking at the next Marcus Van Heller,” he said. “He’s got two terrific ideas. One is called Teacher’s Pet,” he said, improvising, “and the other The Rabbi’s Daughter.”

  Girodias was intrigued. “I’ll have to see twenty pages before I can commission you,” he said. But I never got beyond page three.

  I lingered late in bed this morning until I was wakened by the postman.

  Registered letter.

  I can count on hearing from The Second Mrs. Panofsky by registered mail at least twice a year: once, on the anniversary of Boogie’s disappearance, and again, today, on the anniversary of my discharge by the court, adjudged innocent, but guilty as hell in her mind. This morning’s missive was admirably succinct for a change. It read in its entirety: